Foundation for Revival: Anthony Horneck, The Religious Societies, and the Construction of an Anglican Pietism

Anthony Horneck (1641-1697) is a key figure for the migration of the continental Pietist sensibilities into Restoration Anglicanism and ultimately into Methodism. Horneck was educated at Heidelberg and Leiden and then immigrated to England during the year of the Restoration. In England he became a committed Anglican, but his life and ministry demonstrated the influences of developing continental Pietism. He preached salvation. He avoided disputes over non-essentials. Most significantly, he organized religious societies of awakened souls beginning in 1678. The rules Horneck drew up for the guidance of these societies bear many marks of continental Pietism and laid the foundation for philanthropic and revivalist movements in England. At Horneck's death there were a number of these religious societies in and around London. In the next twenty years they expanded in London and throughout the counties, profoundly impacting Anglican piety. By the 1720s their network provided the matrix of relationships through which Moravians (a Continental Pietist group) and Oxford Methodists met in what became the Anglo-evangelical revival. In the 1730s and 40s they enabled Methodism's rapid spread and were united into a new movement. Foundation for Revival provides insight into the complex religious world of Restoration piety—blurring some of the rigid distinctions between Puritans and Anglicans. As a combination of Restoration high church piety and Pietist sensibilities concerning personal regeneration, Horneck provides a theological emancipation from the usual categories defining evangelical Christianity. Horneck's life also reveals an early, and generally overlooked, link between continental versions of Pietism and English evangelicalism, on which both the development of mission/philanthropic institutions in England and the rise of Methodism, Reformed and Wesleyan, depend. Finally, as a forerunner of Methodism, Horneck helps to clarify many of the "contradictions" in the piety of the young John Wesley, giving Wesley