Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 48:192 (Oct 1891)
Article: The Broad Church Theology
Author: Henry C. Hitchcock

BSac 48:192 (Oct 1891) p. 630

The Broad Church Theology1

Rev. Henry C. Hitchcock

THERE is a form of theology to which, in Great Britain originally, and in this country also by a kind of inheritance, has been applied the somewhat vague title of “Broad Church;” a mode of thinking, however, by no means vague in purpose, but one which has revealed from the start a well-defined tendency, together with no little intensity of conviction and aggressive energy, and has now become one of the prominent elements to be reckoned with in any review of the current religious speculations of our time. As a distinctive mental movement, it is already of sufficient age in the world to have begun to be treated historically in recent years by such writers as Rigg, Pfleiderer, Hurst, Principal Tulloch, and others, who, though differing widely as to its value, have all agreed in tracing its primal impulse to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and especially to the views of that philosopher regarding the higher spiritual office of the reason, as distinct from the understanding, and his modifications of the theological theories of inspiration and the atonement. In his rejection of the long prevalent views of British thinkers on these subjects, and which were doubtless fairly open to the charge he brought against them of being too mechanical, Coleridge was followed by some of the brightest minds of England in the first half of the present century, including Whately and Mil man and Thurwall, Hampden, author of the noted Bampton lectures for 1833, the two brothers

BSac 48:192 (Oct 1891) p. 631

Hare, the two Wilberforces, and above all the famous Arnold of Rugby, who, by reason of his remarkably ethical spirit, as well as his commanding position as an educator, may be called the most influential of Coleridge’s immediate disciples. From these the stream descended to Temple, the successor of Arnold at Rugby; to Stanley, his biographer; to Martineau and Francis Newman; to Kingsley and Dean Trench; to Robertson of Brighton, to Tennyson the poet, Ruskin the artist, McDonald the novelist, and especially to Frederick Denison Maurice, who, by his strong faith in the religious intuitions of the mind, together with a personal character of singular devoutness, all finding expression in a very prolific and captivating pen, contributed, more than either of the others, perhaps more than all of them, to the diffusion of the new mental tendency. It will serve our convenience, therefore, as well as meet the demands of historic proportion, in contemplating some of the excellencies and defects of this mode of thinking, to let Maurice stand somewhat in the centre of this remarkable group of men, though not without reference it may be in passing to some of the minor rills of thought that flowe...