Patrick Streiff

To most present day Methodists John William Fletcher is no more than a name - if even that! Yet this unassuming Swiss born Anglican clergyman was an outstanding thinker and a doughty protagonist in the theological controversies of the second half of the eighteenth century. In the eyes of many he was a truly saintly figure and John Wesley long entertained the hope that Fletcher would succeed him as leader of the Methodist movement. In this new, meticulously researched biography Dr Patrick Streiff, himself a Swiss theologian, traces Fletcher's development as a Christian a pastor and a theologian, and gives a perceptive account of the inward and outward conflicts which marked his ministry.

Though he was known, loved and read by nineteenth-century Methodists, no new edition of his works appeared in the twentieth-century, and not much was published about him. This book seeks to redress the balance, and throw new light on the life and work of this leading figure in the Methodist movement in England in the eighteenth-century.

The present book is an abbreviated and revised version of the author's Dissertation on John William Fletcher, which was published in German in 1984.… (meer)