The Missionary Era · 1832-1901 · Britain
Catholic Apostolic Church (Irvingites)
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
In 1830 and 1831, people in the fashionable London congregation of the Scottish preacher Edward Irving began speaking in tongues and prophesying — something almost nobody in Britain had expected to see again. And Irving was deposed by his presbytery for his teaching and died in 1834, before the movement that bears his name had really taken shape. What emerged was a church built on the conviction that Christ was about to return and had restored the apostolate to prepare for it. Twelve men were called as apostles, and around them grew a fourfold ministry, church buildings on a near-cathedral scale, and one of the richest liturgies composed in the nineteenth century. Because the apostles were held to be irreplaceable, no successors were ordained. As they died, the church's ministry simply ran out, and when the last of them died in February 1901 its congregations entered what they called the time of silence. Continuing to worship, with nobody left who could ordain anyone.
Sources
- Edward Irving's writings, incl. the christological works, with the 1830 London and 1833 Annan trial records (primary) — Irving died in 1834 and was never himself one of the twelve apostles the church later restored - worth keeping distinct from the movement's founding narrative. The trial records are adversarial legal material, not the movement's own account.
- The prophetic origin record: the 1830-31 Scottish manifestations (Mary Campbell, Margaret Macdonald); the Newman Street prophesyings; Robert Baxter, Narrative of Facts (1833) (primary) — The women's voices at the movement's origin survive only as transmitted through others' accounts, a real filter. Baxter's Narrative of Facts is a former prophet's recantation, written after he left the movement and turned critic.
- The church's own liturgy and testimony: The Liturgy and Other Divine Offices (1842-); the Great Testimony (1837-38); Cardale, Readings upon the Liturgy (primary) — This liturgy is among the century's richest liturgical creations, and shows the church in its own most characteristic register.
- The institutional record: Gordon Square and Albury records, angel/elder/deacon registers, the sevenfold London churches; the post-1901 'time of silence' record (primary) — This documents a church continuing to record its own life even after the apostolic office that had defined it lapsed.
- Columba Graham Flegg, Gathered Under Apostles (OUP, 1992), with Tim Grass, Edward Irving: The Lord's Watchman (Paternoster, 2011) (secondary) — Flegg's is the standard study; he has his own connection to the tradition, which is worth noting.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8 (chapter assignment hedged): nearest Bebbington's voluntary-religion and Wolffe's UK-identities chapters (reference) — No chapter in this reference volume is dedicated to this movement; these are the nearest topical fits.