This is a study of the ways in which Victorian thinkers historicized the Christian past in an attempt to authenticate the ecclesial present and anticipate an intumescent future. Eschewing a vision of history as the repository of static and normative theological precepts, the individuals in Bennett's study instead perceived the historical process itself as generative of Christian truth and thus aimed “to convert history into a new source of religious knowledge” (54). Bennett argues that this phenomenon also affected religious thinkers across the denominational and theological spectrum.
Bennett positions his work as a contribution to Victorian intellectual history, rather than the history of religious thought or theology. In this era, he contends, church history “shed its internal or narrowly ecclesiastical character” and participated in the broad swirl of debates about the meaning of societal development (2). He admits that the optimistic timbre of these thinkers ultimately ran aground in 1914, but nevertheless insists that the “mutual permeation of religious and historical thought” contributed to a fundamental shift in how Victorians “imagined the origins, texture, and prospects of the world they inhabited” (6).
The study proceeds by way of an examination of the Victorian engagement with four major eras of church history: the early church, Latin Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, and the era of “modernity.” In each chapter, Bennett attempts to revise common historiographical approaches that assume particular Victorian church parties or religious thinkers primarily engaged with history in search of precepts which could validate their own theological presumptions. Rather, he suggests, it was historical dynamism and mutability that invigorated many Victorian religionists. They wanted not to quarry the past for proof-texts but harness its kinetic energy for ecclesial and societal renewal.
One of the underlying perspectives that linked the diverse religious thinkers discussed in the study was the conviction that Christian truth could be discerned, tested, and validated through unfolding experience and consciousness. Here an important dimension of Bennett's argument is that the historicist conviction did not issue in a singular theological conclusion; indeed, it could be used to buttress very divergent theological viewpoints, from High Church to Evangelical. Thus, Catholic John Henry Newman understood that doctrine “grew in the mind of the church over time,” liberal Anglican Henry Hart Milman “located the progressiveness of Christianity in its healthful social and political effects,” while F. D. Maurice understood the development of doctrine distilling “the historical growth of the Christian consciousness” (59). Meanwhile Evangelicals such as Henry Wace used pietist idioms of “feeling” and “experience” to describe how doctrinal expression sprang from the church's common religious life (81, 91).
The test of Bennett's thesis is whether he sufficiently demonstrates that individuals whose churchmanship would naturally incline them to either valorize or denigrate a particular period of church history were able to nuance their viewpoints. Could conservative Protestants incorporate Latin Christianity into a paradigm that posited the middle ages as developmental rather than apostate? Could Tractarians avoid a narrative arc that plotted the present as a declension from a golden age? While there is certainly evidence of discernable modifications of viewpoints—the Tractarian Richard William Church who wished to see medieval Christianity as the source of modern civilization, or several Evangelicals who began to argue that vital piety still glimmered under the Papal penumbra—readers may nevertheless feel that Bennett does not adduce sufficient numbers of people from across the denominational and theological spectrum to prove that the tendency to celebrate or reject an ossified past had been entirely overcome in all parts of the church. By focusing on self-consciously moderating and liberalizing figures he downplays the ongoing purchase of historically-driven religious sectarianism in Victorian Britain.
This problem is repeated in regard to Bennett's chapter on approaches to the Protestant Reformation. Bennett shows that liberal Anglicans and Presbyterians found it relatively easy to extract the essence of Protestantism from its confessional husk in order to conclude that the principles of Protestantism were “worth more than the use their pioneers had made of them” (189). Bennett suggests that Evangelicals like R. W. Dale and Henry Wace were able to stress the Reformation as testimony to vital religious experience, not an exercise in scholastic formulation, although it could be observed that this line of argumentation owed less to nineteenth-century progressivism and more to a strand of evangelical pietism that stretched back to the seventeenth century. However Bennett is unable to produce substantial evidence of Tractarian views on the progressive nature of the birth of Protestantism. Rather, for High Church thinkers, historicism generated a more predictable historicist lesson: doctrine created in certain historical circumstances can be grossly in error.
The final chapter turns to those thinkers who suggested that the human mind itself may be the loci of divine revelation. Here the authors surveyed represent less their particular theological or denominational factions and more the spirit which wished to discern “a core of rational religion that lay beneath denominational divisions” (221). Theologians such as John Tulloch aspired to rescue rationalism from “mechanical reasoning” and view it instead as part of a “continuous story of religious purification” which would lead ineluctably to a universal religious philosophy. Here, and in the work of John Hunt, was perhaps the most concentrated form of Victorian optimism: the desire to formulate a “theology of the future” in which the church participated in “the education of the human race” (223–224). Yet, again, it is not clear that this attitude was truly cross-denominational. As Bennett himself admits, this vision of an ecumenical, rational Christianity threaded through church history was “really a form of broad church prescription” (224).
This is an important and stimulating study, valuable for its attempt to collapse theological boundaries and for its insistence that Victorian religious thought was part of broader intellectual traditions. The study will be provocative rather than definitive in regard to its claim that historicist approaches to doctrine, or the idea of history as a source of theological and religious knowledge, was regnant beyond the major liberal and broad church sectors of the church. Moreover, despite Bennett's initial promise that the study would explore the “porous boundaries between scholarly and more popular discourse,” there is little discussion of how Christian historicism was expressed among “popular preachers and jobbing journalists” as much as it was among the “sequestered dons and comfortable clergy” (3) who are the main objects of study.
