The Development of Anglican Moral Theology is the second of two volumes charting the development of a distinctively Anglican approach to ethical reflection. These erudite works can be situated in something of a mini renaissance in attempts to articulate an Anglican moral theology. Alongside Sedgwick’s two volumes, there is Gary Dorrien’s recent Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism (2024) and Kwok Pui Lan’s The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective (2023). I would also add Stephen Long’s On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics (2024), which has an in-depth engagement with the work of F. D. Maurice – someone Sedgwick devotes a whole chapter to as well.

Given that Anglicanism was born and developed within the Atlantic world and against an imperial backdrop, Dorrien and Pui Lan’s books rightly contend that reflection on Anglican moral theology must be situated in this context. In contrast to these works, Sedgwick focuses exclusively on the Church of England in England.

Drawing on the work of Timothy Sedgwick (no relation), a key distinctive of the book is its excavation of what Sedgwick calls the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’ (10; 128–129; 371). Sedgwick argues that virtue ethics is the connective tissue linking the disparate limbs of Anglican moral theology (in England) and the figures who contribute to its formation. Key interlocutors throughout this tradition are Augustine, Aquinas, Richard Hooker and the Caroline Divines.

In the Anglican exemplarist tradition, Jesus is the primary exemplar to be followed while the beatitudes and the fruits of the Spirit are the charter for what embodying a Christian character entail (352). Aligned with an account of Christian character, the Anglican exemplary tradition highlights the cultivation of prudence, following one’s conscience, and seeking wise counsel (or casuistry) as vital elements of the moral life. Sedgwick also draws out how central to this tradition is attention to the historical nature of the moral life and how this warrants an inductive rather than deductive approach to ethics. The moral life is not about following an ahistorical blueprint, legal code or set of abstract philosophical axioms (372). It is about living well in time and so what constitutes being moral is open to change as the truth of what it means to be human emerges in and through history. Moral deliberation involves knowing what and when to change with all the ambiguity that involves. This orientation is beautifully captured in the following quote Sedgwick gives from Coleridge: ‘Awakened by the cockcrow (a sermon, calamity, a sick bed or providential escape), the Christian pilgrim set outs in the morning twilight, while yet the truth is below the horizon’ (371). On Sedgwick’s account, what is required is to be so formed through sacramental worship, ascetic disciplines, practices of discernment and deliberation, and pastoral care that one is able to make moral judgements appropriate to the times.

The book falls into two parts. Part one covers the period 1680–1830. This section opens by situating Anglican moral theology in a wider set of intellectual debates that formed what Sedgwick calls the ‘English Enlightenment’. This period is a vital backdrop to the development of modern Anglican moral thought as narrated through the rest of the book, with the philosophical influence of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, the Cambridge Platonists and Lord Shaftesbury constituting primary points of reference. Part one then delves into the moral theology of Joseph Butler, William Law and Samual Taylor Coleridge with an interlude chapter that discusses the utilitarians John Gay and William Paley, as well as the rational enthusiast, John Wesley. The chapter on Coleridge is a masterful summary of his framework and rightly situates Coleridge as a pivotal theologian in Anglicanism.

The second part covers the period 1830–1950. Here the life and thought of John Henry Newman, F. D. Maurice, the Lux Mundi school (Charles Gore, Henry Scott Holland and R. C. Moberly), William Temple and Kenneth Kirk are the focus.

With the possible exception of Wesley, it is notable that no Evangelicals are included in the cast of those reflected on, which is a major omission. It is as if a large section of the Church of England, one that dominates its contemporary form and practice, made no contribution to Anglican moral theology. Another major absence are women. The Evangelical, Hannah More, who was a hugely influential moral teacher in the late 18th and early 19th Century, could have been discussed, as could the historian, philosopher and moralist, Catherine Macaulay. Similarly, given the centrality of virtue ethics to the account of moral theology the book unfolds, it is notable that Jane Austen is not included. I would contend she has a far wider and more enduring influence on cultivating the Anglican exemplarist tradition than any of the figures the book discusses.

In terms of style, I greatly appreciate the irenic way Sedgwick situates his expositions in dialogue with other commentators. This approach leaves open to the reader how they might judge the strengths and weaknesses of a particular position or interpretation. To my mind, the book thereby performs rhetorically a particularly Anglican sensibility where, at its best, what is sought is not a rigid uniformity of position, but a settlement in which different views are held in tension because the tensions represent a more holistic account of the truth. Of course, at its worst, this same sensibility collapses into polarization and back biting as is the case in contemporary debates over sexuality.

My primary critical reflection on the book centres on Sedgwick’s decision to focus solely on moral theology as if moral theology can be exposited separate from political theology. At the outset of the book, Sedgwick recognizes the central role that politics plays in forming Anglicanism as well as on how Anglicans reflect on moral matters. Drawing on the intellectual and social history of J. C. D. Clark and J. G. A. Pocock, Sedgwick notes that a ‘key to English history between 1660 and 1830 is the contested maintenance by the Church of England of its place as the religion of the state’ (15). And throughout the book, Sedgwick finds it necessary to address the political theology and political context shaping the work of different figures he discusses. But he consistently veers away from analysing how politics and morality inherently intersect and mutually refract each other. Moreover, he avoids how the figures he discusses understood this to be the case (for example, how F. D. Maurice and William Temple see Christian socialism as a direct outworking of their theological anthropology). Instead, Sedgwick tries to present an account of virtue and conscience divorced from questions of political economy, as if character and conscience can be understood and isolated from the material and social conditions through which they are formed. Yet his own cast of characters witnesses against the attempt to separate morality and politics. Unconsciously, Sedgwick’s compartmentalisation of the two reproduces a modern and deeply anti-theological orientation that holds ethics and politics at arm’s length from each other.

Overall, I learnt a great deal from this treasure trove of a book. For all its omissions, reading the book is itself an induction into an Anglican and English moral imagination. When Anglicans in England seem very confused about what it means to be Anglican and how to undertake moral deliberation together in the Church of England, this book could not be more timely or needed.