Book Review: The Heritage of Anglican Theology (2021)
[Trivia: Which 2 rivers determine the non-straight-line borders between Louisiana and Mississippi?]
I really did not like this book.
J.I. Packer, in his 90’s, put together an overview of the theology of the Church of England and traced its largest movements and phases, from the English Reformation down to present-day concerns. But the book fails when scrutinized against a particular standard.
It isn’t especially a work of history. If history encompasses the whole spectrum from being a raconteur who grippingly repeats stories he’s heard to methodically reviewing primary-source documents and other evidence to suss out What Really Happened, this book leans heavily toward the former. The historical narratives sketched out are mostly broad, the characterizations and posited cause and effect relationships subjective, and the specific related happenings are typically unsourced.
To zero in on one especially disappointing example, Packer presents verbatim conversations that took place in the incipient days of England’s Reformation at the White Horse Inn—the meeting-place of Thomas Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and many others Packer names. But the English historian Diarmaid MacCulloch1 (of The Reformation: A History and Thomas Cranmer: A Life) noted back in the 1990’s,
It was natural that his [Cranmer's] Protestant admirers should later give him respectable evangelical credentials for the 1520s, and that they should provide him with retrospective honorary membership of the famous White Horse Tavern...However we need to treat such well-meaning efforts with scepticism. Thirty years ago Professor C. C. Butterworth pointed out that all subsequent talk of the White Horse circle has been built up from a single reference in Foxe's Book of Martyrs; moreover, Foxe is quite specific about which colleges provided regulars for the group, and Jesus [Cranmer's college] is not among them (neither, for that matter, is Gardiner's Trinity Hall).
And if the work isn’t striving to be an especially meticulous work of history, neither does it excel at being a work of theology. For one thing, many topics left me with more questions than clarity; for instance, I remain pretty hazy on why Methodism broke off from the established church. On the one hand, they were presented as revivalists for whom relationship with God is of prime importance—but also, they were energetic organizers whose “infrastructure of societies” was called a “vital structure” and a “parachurch.” Why were they such passionate administrators? Or if they were, what did they find hopeless about the existing church?
More of an issue, this book is shot through with opinionating that is not merely subjective but altogether personal. Returning to the idea of a spectrum, if academic writing avoids the first person to an unnatural fault, then this book falls into the opposite error of using it constantly. It frequently has the tenor of a blog post or a lecture—some context where there’s more of a presumption that you already value the speaker’s opinion, and less that he has to win you over by proving each plank of the argument.
This circles back to the question of what standard should be applied to this book. It could be of value to print an introduction to the broadest historical developments, figures, and publications of Anglicanism—especially in the early Tudor days of the Reformation, when the goings-on of the Crown loomed large but in ways that Americans don’t know much about and there are large blanks. But such a book should have been actually short (this one is 352 pages). And we’ve discussed that it’s not trying to do rigorous history. The impression is that it is a kind of authorized version—an approved retelling of causes and events, an index of characterizations to all the niche terminology. “Broad churchmen? Oh, the forerunners of the ‘COEXIST’ crowd.” That probably does serve a function; maybe an opinionated crash course in the convoluted history of a branch of the Church, written for someone who knows they’re small-o orthodox, by someone who is known to be small-o-orthodox, is handy. But it’s a pretty narrow function.
So if you are already a Packer fan,2 being along for this ride could be fun and even edifying. But “for fans only” is the probably necessary disclaimer that this book should have come with.
Read more positive reviews of two other J.I. Packer books here:
https://lakemichiganbookshelf.substack.com/p/book-review-keeping-the-10-commandments
https://lakemichiganbookshelf.substack.com/p/book-review-affirming-the-apostles
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Answer: the Mississippi and the Pearl.
Not the American historian who wrote the John Adams biography, David McCullough.
I believe they’re called “Cheeseheads.”