<i>Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism</i>, by Gary Dorrien

This is a big book, not just in its length but in its ambition and complexity. Professor Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Neibuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. In this, his most recent book, he is writing for the first time as an Anglican about his own religious adherence. He seeks to delineate the history and enduring characteristics of Anglican theology from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century English Reformation to the 1980s, attentive to its “royal absolutism, racism, and imperialism” (xii). He finds its characteristics to be a particular emphasis on God’s Word (Logos) incarnate in Jesus Christ, an imperially based racist orientation to whiteness, and, at odds with that, an inherent “ecumenism.” Professor Dorrien does not seem to define what he means by using this anachronism of “ecumenism” for the earlier centuries of Anglicanism, but he does refer to tracking “Anglican thinkers . . . who fashioned theologies of Logos reason and shared [Richard] Hooker’s radically inclusive concept of the church” (3). However, the ecumenical label would have seemed very ironic to persecuted and legally disadvantaged Elizabethan Roman Catholics and Separatists, seventeenth-century Dissenters, and eighteenth-century Nonconformists. However, the attention of Professor Dorrien is not so much on the messiness of Anglicanism on the ground but in the idealism of Logos theology in its various exponents in the Church of England over its five centuries.What the author does give us is a very readable book in its narrative of Anglican theology; more particularly, in its liberal traditions from the eighteenth century. He helpfully defines this liberalism as “espousing the right to intellectual freedom, navigating a third way between orthodox over-belief and theistic disbelief, accepting biblical criticism, allowing science to explain the physical world, looking beyond the church for answers, and seeking to be relevant to the modern world” (5). It is sometimes difficult to see the wood for the trees for readers (like the present reviewer) with limited philosophical background, who may find themselves possibly getting lost amidst the thickets of philosophical and theological intricacies. Yet these intricacies are lucidly explained, often to establish the connections of Anglican theology to wider European intellectual movements. Consequently, the book can be used as a survey of Western intellectual developments as they impacted upon English Christian and philosophical thought.However, the title of the book is somewhat misleading. Notwithstanding its broad title of “Anglican Identities” the book has a more qualified subject, being largely confined to Anglican theological identities, and those almost entirely within the history of the Church of England, though in that regard it is lucid and helpful. But are Church of England clerical and academic theologies too narrow as an embrace of “Anglican Identities”? Aside from attention to the United States in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Social Gospel Anglicanism, Ireland, Scotland, and, earlier, the United States were forming Anglican identities and theologies that were different to the prominent national ecclesiastical emphasis of the Church of England that the author so correctly traces as an enduring aspect of English Anglicanism.Readers of a journal dedicated to global Christian history may find the book disappointing, given its broad title. There is no consideration of the increasingly self-critical theologies of Western missionaries from the later nineteenth century, nor little from the wider colonial world of progressively independent Anglican Churches, except insofar as they impacted upon the Church of England, such as Bishop Colenso of Natal. In addition, no attention is paid to non-Caucasian Anglican theologies prior to African theologians of the late twentieth century. Yet there were earlier such theologians in South Asian Anglicanism such as Nehemiah Goreh or Bishop Azariah. Also, can a work that is about “Anglican Identity” afford not to give some attention to influential Anglican writers and theologians on what is known today as “spirituality,” such as William Law or Evelyn Underhill? Notwithstanding the incorrect labelling of C. S. Lewis as an “Anglo-Catholic,” some exploration of his work was surely called for as being the one modern writer who did very much escape the confines of the university or cathedral to contribute to many Anglicans’ identities as Christians. The narrative can sometimes seem to be tracing the interchanges of a collective of small intellectual elites without much attention to how their work was more widely appropriated by Anglicans beyond these rarified confines.Occasionally, the book is marred by moralistic generalities that beg the question of evidence and the diversities of historical context, particularly around the themes of racism and imperialism. Beyond the abstracted theological mentalities of the theologians was the messy, pluralistic world of the British Empire. That imperialism is unequivocally condemned as one-way “imperial whiteness”; but a leading historian of British imperialism has drawn attention to the hybridity of British imperialism between British and local powers and cultures. Ambiguous British imperial history cannot easily be reduced to simple binaries of good and evil, a powerful British center and a disempowered colonial periphery (John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain [Bloomsbury, 2012]). Racism is sheeted home to either Western culture or the history of Britain as an unequalled historical depravity. While the savagery and dehumanising trajectories of British-controlled African slavery is undoubted, epithets such as “the racist sickness of Western civilization” (2); “the racist evil that the British Empire perpetrated across the globe, which plagued every generation of Anglican theology” (4); or, “by 1640 England was the most vicious and extensive slave-trading power on earth” (7) not only overlook slavery in other, non-Western, empires, they reduce the moral complexities of imperialism that another moral theologian has recently raised (Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning [William Collins, 2023]).In a book of this length, there are inevitably some historical errors, but these are few and minor, including labeling Hooker as the “first orthodoxy to make reason an authority in theology” (91), which rather puts paid to Aquinas and the medieval Scholastics; John Dudley was not Duke of Warwick (67) but successively Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland; and Thomas Cromwell was Earl, not Duke, of Essex (66). There are some infrequent lapses when the liberal position of the author characterizes other Anglican positions with cavalier reductionism, as when he epitomises the Oxford Movement as “taking refuge in authoritarian dogmatism” (248), which rather underestimates the complexities of the Tractarian theology of dogma.Nevertheless, for all the issues this review has raised, this is undoubtedly an important book within its own confines. Often books on Anglicanism are rather parochial in their focus, but here readers will encounter several intellectual influences from Europe and, in the last chapter, from African theology, which influenced Anglican theologians and interacted with them. For the author, the seminal figure in Anglican theology from the mid-nineteenth century was F. D. Maurice (1805–72) whose idealized Anglicanism birthed trajectories in both socialist and catholic Anglicanism, and whose ecumenical dimensions flowered most particularly in the writings of Archbishop Michael Ramsay, the last exponent of the “England-centric Anglicanism” (519) that the book concentrates on. The African theologies of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and John Mbiti are singled out as exemplars of a postcolonial Anglicanism since the 1960s that has flourished in different and divergent theologies in the Global South. These postcolonial theologians, and their earlier predecessors in English Anglicanism, had an increasing global influence thanks to Anglicanism’s awkward new manifestation as “the Anglican Communion,” which was still, until the 1970s, predominantly led by English Anglican theological thinking.In addition to his positive purposes, pursued cogently in tracing the development and influence of English Anglican theologies, Professor Dorrien clearly has a negative one in facing up to some of the morally questionable dimensions of this Christian strand of theology, so that the book is intended to act as a corrective to Anglican/British triumphalism. Its author puts it thus: “This book registers my disbelief that moral theology can be credibly separated from political theology, a strategy that walls off an idealized “Anglicanism” from its White supremacist history” (4).While laudable, perhaps it might be asked if this might be a “straw man” after recent decades of Anglican division and insecurity about the value of their past inheritance? Newman’s question about the reality of a something called “Anglicanism” (263) has only got more acute in the contemporary world, not least because of the postcolonial intellectual outlook that this book argues from. That critical project has brought its benefits, but it has also acutely furthered Stephen Sykes’s question about the existence and honesty of “Anglicanism”; an issue explored by Professor Dorrien that hangs over his final chapter entitled “Beyond Colonial Anglicanism.” Perhaps a question mark for this chapter title would be appropriate?