The Broad Church: a biography of a movement

Abstract

TOD E. JONES. The Broad Church: A Biography of a Movement. Lanham, Maryland.: Lexington Books, 2003. Pp. xi + 345, bibliography, index. $85.00. Tod Jones has produced an engaging and informative history of Broad Church Movement. As his title suggests, he has undertaken his subject as a form of biography. By doing so he has effectively drawn a complex set of intricate and interleaved portraits, many of them accounts of academic careers of most eminent of those scholars and theologians who shaped religious revival of Church of England during crisis years of its struggle against disestablishment and, perhaps more significantly, its efforts to counter parochial and spiritual disenchantment in an age of positivist improvement. What emerges is a deeply nuanced account of intellectual and spiritual revival of nineteenth-century church. While this is clearly a deeply personal study of Victorian Anglicanism, one grounded in author's own self-described passion, The Broad Church is far more than an exercise in Anglican hagiography, for it also considers emergence of a broader cultural and educational movement and tensions implicit in project of rationalizing religion. Jones's study offers reader an in-depth etymology for what some scholars have described as Anglican Liberalism. There are three important arguments in Jones's Biography. The first of these is a strong extension of arguments which Charles Sanders pioneered in late 1940s. Sanders traced Broad Church to Coleridge and Coleridgeans, most notably John Sterling and F. D. Maurice. Jones goes beyond Sanders's argument to assert that Coleridge was more than a mere influence on movement. Indeed, the Broad Church may be called Coleridgean movement and Coleridge is justly given paternal status of father of Broad Church Movement (43). The defining contribution of Coleridge to this new theology was his Platonism, which Jones describes as root of natural theology. But it was also Coleridge's introduction of German Learning into English thought via his popularizations of Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, Schelling, and Lessing which critically shaped theology of Broad Church Movement. The second important plank of Jones's account of Broad Church is his criticism of long-standing and false dichotomy between scholastic orthodoxy of Oxford and heterodox and radical inclinations of Cambridge. While there are certainly generalizations to be made to support this juxtaposition, Jones helpfully suggests that these have been so greatly overstated as to suggest a complete separation of these intellectual spheres. He instead points to cross-fertilization of Oxford and Cambridge scholarship (and scholars) with respect to what might be described as mixed parentage of Broad Church Movement. By doing so, Jones avoids old high/lowOxford/Cambridge characterizations of Broad Church and Oxford Movements. He traces first flowerings of Broad Church to common rooms of Oriel College and emergence of or intellectuals at Oxford in decade or so before emergence of Cambridge Apostles. The Apostles shared classicism and philo-Germanism of Noetics of Oxford. However, they were comprised of those evangelical undergraduates who initially gathered to converse at Trinity during closure of Cambridge Union between 1817 and 1820. …