E. B. Pusey and Holy Scripture

Abstract

E. B. Pusey was so strongly identified with the Tractarian movement that it was often referred to as 'Puseyism' and he became the unrivalled leader of Anglo-Catholicism. Although low-church Protestants in the Victorian age often asserted that Anglo-Catholics did not have a strong commitment to the authority and centrality of Scripture, this assumption is not borne out by a study of Pusey's life and thought. This article seeks to recover Pusey as a Bible man. In particular, it explores the nature and impact of his biblical commentaries. Pusey himself saw commenting on Holy Scripture as at the core of his life's work and Christian ministry. Nevertheless, his biblical commentaries have been ignored by scholars, who have instead maintained a consistent preoccupation with his youthful volume on German theology. Pusey's Daniel the Prophet was actually an extremely thorough and formidable piece of scholarship. Indeed, even English critics unsympathetic to his defence of a traditional date for the book of Daniel uniformly found its substantive arguments unanswerable. Pusey's commentary on the Minor Prophets was part of a larger plan he had for providing a new, popular commentary on the Bible, a project which he saw as his primary response to the challenges of the modern age.