Newman Studies Journal

Alexander Knox (1757–1831), a lay theologian of the Church of Ireland, is known mainly to specialists in Anglican studies.¹ David McCready's new study provides a detailed account of Knox's manifold theological contributions that will appeal to historians and theologians studying Anglo-Irish Christianity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the subtitle certainly hints at the broader relevance of this little-known figure, it actually references only a part of the rich web of interconnected themes, persons, and issues illuminated by this study. McCready has delivered an incredibly rich and widely relevant monograph that merits engagement not only by those interested in English-speaking theology's appropriation of Platonism, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. The book is also a deep dive into the eclectic, unique, and innovative thought of a man who helped construct "Anglican" identity itself, engaged Methodists and Roman Catholics in a sincere proto-ecumenical outlook, and was, in certain intriguing aspects, a forerunner of the Oxford Movement.

The first chapter sketches Knox's life as a lay theologian, and one who demands attention for his connection to John Wesley and his influence on, among others, Hannah More, William Wilberforce, Gladstone, and Newman. McCready's second chapter is an important analysis of Knox as "a theoretician of Anglicanism" (37–39). In addition to tilling the soil that made the Tractarians possible, the story of the construction of a distinctively "Anglican" identity—Knox was one of the first to popularize the term itself—in the early nineteenth century sheds light not only on dynamics internal to the Church of England/Ireland, but to the broader context of a national church that found itself within a modernizing and expanding empire marked by a plurality of confessions. Knox's unapologetic Erastianism was tempered by an equally sincere commitment to toleration and friendship [End Page 79] across confessional lines, for example with the Evangelical Hannah More. The via media he advocated—familiar to students of Newman's career and of the Oxford Movement—looked to the church fathers instead of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers for inspiration. In a letter to his confidant John Jebb, a Church of Ireland bishop who is also regarded as a forerunner of the Oxford Movement, Knox bemoaned, with his typical verve, "the nick-name of Protestant" as "a perverse influence" on Anglican identity. Knox's vision for Anglicanism was a middle path "equidistant from puritanism on the one hand, and from popery on the other" (38). McCready rightly notes such a statement as an anticipation of Newman's Anglicanism, which was emphatically "not Protestant" but "merely reformed," in Newman's words (39). While Knox should be honored for his commitment to extending friendship and toleration both to Catholics and to Dissenting Protestant sects, he was not afraid to criticize doctrines that were absolutely central to their self-understanding—"literal transubstantiation" (a theologically dubious phrase) in the case of the former, and sola scriptura for the latter. Knox even referred to this key commitment of the Reformation as a Scylla to the Charybdis of Popery (specifically to its unhappy accretions).

Knox's connections to Wesley, whom he highly esteemed, are explored in chapter three. Like Wesley, Knox had serious ecclesial and sacramental commitments, but was in tune with the phenomenon of "heart religion," defined as "a form of piety in which primacy is given to the affective and the experiential" (263). The next three chapters sketch the context of Knox's theology and influences on it by examining Platonism (and Knox's love of the Greek fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria and John Chrysostom), the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. McCready does a good job of showing the complex interplay of these phenomena—Enlightenment and Romanticism are not airtight paradigms, but rather constellations of intellectual, and in this case, spiritual phenomena that dynamically intersect and are...