Broad Church Anglicanism: A Liberal Faith

The broad Church constituency of the Victorian Anglican Church affirmed a modern outlook by welcoming into the Church external forms of scholarly knowledge. Victor Shea and William Whitla characterize it as "a loose affiliation of liberals" who sought doctrinal changes and institutional reform based upon "advances in new fields … including in modern biblical hermeneutics" (7). The wide-ranging nature of these advances can make it hard to get a richly textured sense of the movement. Noting the importance of Essays and Reviews, an influential 1860 collection of essays that included church history, modern science, and Biblical interpretation, Shea and Whitla note:

To question the literal interpretation of the Bible was to reject the grounds on which the Establishment was founded, namely, the Anglican Formularies. In their challenging of dominant methods of biblical interpretation, the Essayists [of Essays and Reviews] were accused of shaking the very foundations of society.

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In what follows, I discuss the Essays and Reviews controversy and (more briefly) the defence of John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal, as representative of a Broad Church perspective. I explore Anthony Trollope's representative depiction of a Broad Church clergyman in his non-fiction collection Clergymen of the Church of England (1866) before touching upon his Barchester novels to examine the look and feel of ecclesiastical tension.

As the essays in this forum by Timothy Larsen and Elizabeth Ludlow relate, W.J. Conybeare added "Broad Church" to his account of church parties after Low Church and High. In the preface to the sixth edition (1878) of his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Cardinal John Henry Newman likewise writes of the "High, Low and Broad branches of the Church of England" (5). The conventional placement of "Broad" not between but after "High" and "Low" is worth exploring. It suggests that the Broad Church occupied a social but not a clear doctrinal or ecclesiastical space.¹ Unlike the High and Low Church movements, the Broad Church was not notable for reforming activities, for alternative liturgies, for new ecclesiastical structures, nor even for new organs of communication and education. Nor did it advocate for new ways of using church land and church buildings. It was never even a self-identified or self-organized collective; there is no Broad Church corollary to the (High Church) Oxford Movement or to evangelical religion. Rather, the Broad Church marks new attitudes toward theological, moral, and social questions.

Essays and Reviews, for instance, calls for the Church to re-examine its relationship to history (including its own history) and other branches of knowledge and science. Developments in theology, almost every branch of science, mathematics, logic, political philosophy and economy, philosophy, and philology had raised questions about the nature of the faith. In the first of the essays, for instance, Frederick Temple seems to call for a dynamic, changeable Church to align with a dynamic, changeable world. He writes, "In fact, no knowledge can be without its effect on religious convictions; for if not capable of throwing direct light on some spiritual questions, yet in its acquisition knowledge invariably throws light on the process by which it is to be, or has been acquired, and thus affects all other knowledge of every kind" (164).

As Joseph Altholz notes, Essays and Reviews was not especially cutting-edge and it followed roughly in the line of Coleridgean theology from earlier in the century. It created such a stir because six of the seven essayists (Temple, Rowland Williams, Baden Powell, Henry Bristow Wilson, Benjamin Jowett, and Mark Pattison) were clergymen in the Anglican Church. The essays varied widely in style and purpose, but collectively they were seen to present a cohesive (and, to some, heretical) party. The essays also drew from the German Higher Criticism and contemporary science, and Pattison's contribution critiques what he calls "rationalist" evidentiary arguments for Christianity such as those of Joseph Butler in his Analogy of Religion (1736) and William Paley's Evidences of Christianity (1794). These older theological arguments were still in broad circulation at the time, however (Altholz 188–92). Essays and Reviews went through a...