Book Review: The Making of Modern English Theology: God and the Academy at Oxford, 1833–1945:

The Making of Modern English Theology: God and the Academy at Oxford, 1833-1945. By Daniel Inman. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2014. xii + 334 pp. $34.00 (paper).Of the many High Church Anglicans associated with the University of Oxford during the period covered by this excellent book, the two best-known groups wrote the Tracts for the Times (1833-1841) and Lux Mundi (1889). In a book developed from his Oxford doctoral dissertation, Daniel Inman paints a fascinating contrast between the two groups' impact on the institutional approach to theology at Oxford.Here John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Bouverie Pusey are depicted as the forces of Oxford conservatism. Above all, Pusey's longevity as Regius Professor of Hebrew (fifty-four years, more or less the period covered in the book's first two chapters) was a brake on internal reform at the university. Pusey also became the chief spokesman against the external reforms made by the government. The Tractarians held that the university was a seminary of the Church of England, so all undergraduates should be required to learn the rudiments of religion in order to attain a BA and tutors should guide their students in the practical appropriation of the Christian faith. The academic study of theology, by contrast, should be left to those in holy orders pursuing the higher degrees of BD and DD. To make theology the stuff of competitive examination at an undergraduate level was, according to Pusey, to degrade the holiness of the subject matter. Even when Pusey was forced to introduce a School of Theology in 1869, to go alongside the other schools such as Modem History in providing curricula and competitive exams for undergraduate study, he ensured a conservative curriculum and exams. Historical study, for instance, was to end with the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and the Bible was not to be treated historically. When the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, William Bright, proposed adding a course on the Reformation, Pusey rather hyperbolically said the "work of my whole life" was "here undone" (p. 148). Inman perhaps understates the age-old story of a younger generation at odds with an older generation, which explains both Newman's fervor in the 1830s for a new model of tutorship (for the practice of which he was fired as tutor by his mentor, Edward Hawkins) and Pusey's resistance to change in the 1870s from his mentee, Bright.Inman shows that, in spite of many twists and turns along the way (such as Essays and Reviews and the reforms of other British universities), until the First World War a succession of High Church professors and the votes of clergy alumni in the university's Convocation preserved the state of affairs at Oxford that Pusey promoted. The postmortem influence of Pusey seems so great, in fact, that as late as 1913 the clergy alumni in Convocation conclusively rejected the proposals for reform made by the High Church successors of Pusey. For more than twenty years after Lux Mundi, its editor Charles Gore was Bishop of Oxford and its contributor Henry Scott Holland was Regius Professor of Divinity at the university. The Lux Mundi group (discussed in chapter 3) decided that the reform of university theology must come from the High Church professors themselves if it was to appeal to the clergy alumni. The proposals that were rejected sought to ease denominational restrictions on studying theology at Oxford, and to promote the study of all the "religious phenomena of humanity," even non-Christian religions (p. …