Abstract
Rarely has a book of more depth and erudition come across my desk. This book is properly understood as a tour de force. It is an exercise in genealogical exploration (in a MacIntyrian sense) of the Anglican moral tradition. It builds on Sedgwick’s first volume The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, which was published in 2018. This is an exercise in the careful exegesis of difficult and complex texts, which makes the case that there is a set of continuities within Anglican moral theology that can rightly be described as the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’ (p. 10) – a phrase taken from the American Christian ethicist Timothy Sedgwick (who is not a relative of the author).
The narrative is loosely chronological. So, the exploration starts with Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and the Moral Sense School. Their scepticism about Christian orthodoxy becomes a frame for Joseph Butler, who is followed by William Law, where concepts such as vocation, ascetism, literary style, celibacy and virginity become significant, within an ecclesial frame with a commitment to the place of reason. Then we have the theological utilitarianism of John Gay, Abraham Tucker and Edmund Law, which was followed by William Paley. This approach was an attempt to confront in a constructive way deistic tendencies. However, this approach founders because of the rise of evangelicalism in the Church of England and the rise of non-theistic justifications for morality. Next, we have John Wesley’s emphasis on holiness and sanctification, which taps back into the theology of Jeremy Taylor and William Law. The conversation shifts again with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the first major Anglican thinker to engage with a post-Kantian world, with a romantic sensibility (p. 162). So, ends Part 1.
The second part of the book – 1830–1950 – picks up the narrative with John Henry Newman. The treatment of Newman focuses on his pre-conversion to Rome; so, it is the Anglican Newman we meet. Many roads coincide in Newman – the Caroline divines, Butler and Coleridge. From Newman, we get the significance of the ‘affections’, conscience and holiness. Frederick Denison Maurice, another Coleridge admirer, also makes Butler’s view of conscience central. Yet Sedgwick is careful to document difficulties with Maurice’s theology, while admiring his ‘moral and spiritual vision’ (p. 266). Lux Mundi, published in 1889, is Sedgwick’s opportunity to touch on the influence of the idealists, and particularly Charles Gore.
Then we start on the home straight with William Temple and Kenneth Kirk. Kirk has a special place: here was a man who created ‘a moral theology for the Church of England’ (p. 344). Kirk is important because of his use of casuistry as a resource for moral reasoning, despite using such reasoning to arrive at very conservative positions on birth control and divorce. Casuistry is important as a mechanism to assist the individual in grappling with the modern world. And, perhaps more importantly, Kirk made his ‘vision of God’ (to allude to his Bampton Lectures) central, which places appropriate emphasis on worship.
On the key claim of the book, Sedgwick is completely persuasive. There is an ‘Anglican exemplarist tradition, [which sees] Jesus as the great exemplar, and founding a tradition which lives out the Beatitudes and the fruit of the Spirit’ (p. 352). This tradition has an emphasis on the ‘experience of the Christian faith’ (p. 371); it seeks to link the pastoral with appropriate moral rigour; it is grounded in ecclesiology and the centrality of the Eucharist; and it is intellectually demanding.
The book is a powerful antidote to the propensity in the academy to simplify the Anglican tradition under a postcolonial critique and therefore primarily as problematic; the tradition is much more complicated; and the four features – threads, perhaps, is a better word – are worth heeding. There are other voices in the tradition, which are not considered by Sedgwick, but are in continuity with these four features. V. A. Demant and the Christendom Group anticipate an ecological agenda (see Demant’s The Penumbra of Ethics), which would strengthen this argument.
But to ask for an even longer book is churlish. This is an exceptional achievement; it is a defining text for the Anglican tradition. It is elegantly written, deeply informed, and utterly compelling.