This author’s second monograph on a tradition ‘complex, often polyphonic … and frequently lacking clarity’ (p. 5), brings the genealogy charted in Sedgwick’s The origins of Anglican moral theology (Leiden 2018) nearly up to date. Insulated from controversial entanglements by his ‘Anglican moral theology today’ (Anglican Theological Review ciii/4 [2021], 450–67), this study aims to enhance such debates through the elaboration of an historical thesis, whose narrative development, charitable hermeneutic and analytic depth will benefit two readerships especially. Historians will appreciate its limpid analysis of theological and philosophical debates, while readers who live and move within this ‘polyphonic, varied and disputatious tradition’ (p. 375) will find means of sharing, if not a common life, at least a common story shaped by common texts.

Sedgwick contends that Anglican moral theology is a living intellectual-practical tradition, whose continuity during the period 1680–1950 finds expression in four ‘hallmarks’: (1) adherence to the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’ – a concept borrowed from the American ethicist Timothy F. Sedgwick (no relation); (2) a pastoral and morally rigorous sensibility; (3) an ecclesial ethic, emphasising formation in Christian community and nourishment by the sacraments (ostensibly with more emphasis laid on the eucharist than baptism); and (4) conversance with contemporary moral philosophy. Sedgwick writes with sensitivity to the contested and frequently anachronistic nomenclature of ‘Anglicanism’. He identifies with what he takes to be Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of genealogy. This term refers broadly to that renunciation of cosmopolitanism whose rubrics of success hinge on out-narrating one’s interlocutors by telling the more comprehensive story. Unlike Nietzschean or Foucauldian genealogists, for whom history is contingency all the way down, Sedgwick frames genealogical enquiry as, at once, the study of a tradition’s origin and development, and of those ‘challenges’ or ‘powers’ that transform it (pp. 2–4).

The book falls in two parts. Part i begins with the rise of empiricism, against which Anglican moral theologians had to secure their position. The first turning-point in the narrative is Joseph Butler, whose reworking of Shaftesbury’s sentimentalism and Locke’s empiricism supplanted the (modified) Thomism integral to Sedgwick’s earlier volume with a ‘more inductive and intuitive moral theology’ that perdured until Kenneth Kirk. After a foray into William Law, Sedgwick’s main arc resumes in chapter v, where a division emerges between theological utilitarianism and Lockean epistemology, on the one hand, and, on the other, Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, who appear as champions of Anglican moral theology’s sacramental ethos and virtue-ethic. Meanwhile, a ‘pincer movement’ against the virtue-ethical tradition in Anglican moral theology is described (p. 160), with William Paley’s utilitarianism rivalling Butler for eighteenth-century evangelicals’ affections, and the scepticism of Hume and Bentham rendering theistic appeals themselves morally suspect. This is the backdrop for the second turning point, S. T. Coleridge, whose synthesis of Idealist, Platonic and extant English resources revivified the Anglican moral tradition. If Butler reformulated the moral sense and empiricist movements by developing a phenomenology of the moral actor, Coleridge provided an ‘antidote’ to empiricism (p. 166), evading the epistemological strictures of Locke and Kant by drawing on the Carolines (interestingly, Reformed figures to a man – Sanderson, Leighton, Ussher, Hall) to reconceive Kantian ethics along a path neither Schelling nor Fichte were to take (p. 177). Coleridge thus ‘re-establishes the Anglican [moral] tradition’ (p. 159). As such, he becomes a bridge between the Carolines and a young John Henry Newman.

Part ii begins in 1830, Newman playing a disruptive role not unlike Locke’s. For Sedgwick, the Anglican Newman – ‘just like Hooker before him’ (p. 222) – exemplifies the tension between Reformed and Catholic conceptions of moral life in Anglican theology (p. 214). Like Coleridge, he tackled Hume and Paley, though the two diverged on the point of conscience (p. 233). Newman and Coleridge now classed as separate reponses to the utilitarian-sceptical threat, F. D. Maurice and the Lux Mundi divines appear as more lineal shoots of the Coleridgean branch. Chapter x, on William Temple, reinforces the pluriformity of the Anglican moral tradition, which ‘consists of many different theologies woven together into an overarching unity’, where ‘one generation picks up the thought of an earlier one and adapts it to meet the challenges of both the surrounding culture and other religious traditions’; thus, Sedgwick laconically notes, ‘Anglicanism develops over time’ (p. 341). (This is perhaps the definition that most strains one’s sense of its continuity, whether synchronic or diachronic.) Finally, in Kenneth Kirk, who fashioned an Anglican neo-Thomism sensitive to virtue ethics and biblical theology, Sedgwick brings his narrative into a cultural milieu where moral compulsion has given way to moral prescription, and corporate assent to individual judgement (p. 370). Intriguingly, despite its variegation, even in Kirk the tradition retains a bias toward inductive moral reasoning, and thus a virtue- more than a rule-based ethic.

This reviewer’s copy is dog-eared to oblivion. Three themes, and one quibble, sum up its few strokes of red ink.

First, this book lacks an adequate treatment of Evangelicalism. Except for Wesley (by any account a peculiar figure), allusions to Evangelicals say little about their contributions to the Anglican moral tradition. They appear as philosophical archaists, notable for retaining defunct viewpoints; like William Wilberforce, J. B. Sumner favoured Paley long after his sell-by date, with Butler now apparently forgotten, except by the lesser known Clapham priest-poet, Thomas Gisborne. The pastoral irrelevancy of Sumner’s Paleian views drives the final nail into the coffin of Newman’s youthful ‘Calvinism’; yet Sedgwick had already documented Butler’s popularity among Evangelicals, so it is not quite adequate to say that ‘Butler is the key to Newman’s change of heart’ (p. 201). Evangelicalism may be the descant in this chorus, but one wonders why it isn’t better heard. Its omission could be remedied by attention to the political aspects of Anglican moral theology (scantly covered here), in the material, economic and industrial spheres where Evangelicals were often active. Perhaps Lord Shaftesbury belongs alongside Coleridge and Newman as an exemplar of Anglican engagement with Benthamite utilitarianism?

Second, the reader may require clarification of the term ‘genealogy’, when modified by appeals to MacIntyre. (I am aware of Sedgwick’s 2021 ATR article, which does not settle this question.) In recent years, theologians who deny that history is contingency all the way down, and thus claim to tell ‘deeper stories’, have employed genealogy to account for contingency and the unity of traditions across time. Sedgwick evidently works within this vein. One, though, might ask why he so clearly situates his study at one moment in MacIntyre’s third mode of enquiry (tradition), while at another seeming to elide MacIntyre’s distinction between genealogy and tradition. In an historical study, this concept needs careful parsing, especially when staking contemporary relevance. This is because genealogy is itself a contested concept, liable to be found resting (as indeed Thomas Pfau, inter alios, have claimed) on a strictly immanent, intra-historical epistemic footing, incompatible with Christian theologising. It is a pity, though understandable, that Sedgwick could not have engaged the special issue of Modern Theology (xxxix/4 [2023], 573–795) devoted to genealogical enquiry, as it was released less than three months before the publication of this volume.

Third, Sedgwick restricts himself to England, by necessity ignoring transatlantic or global horizons. Might this purview protect his genealogy from the stress test of cultural plurality? Were its genealogy ‘reshot’ through a wider lens, could it admit a greater degree of pluriformity, already a divisive reality in England by 1680? How might its fourth hallmark (engagement with contemporary moral philosophy) have operated differently in Algiers than in London, Mianyang, Capetown or Philadelphia? The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to women – Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Catharine Trotter (a Scot), Jane Austen – who might have been better integrated.

Finally, a quibble: Sedgwick claims (p. 51 n. 104) that ‘there can be no case now for seeing the Latitudinarians as unorthodox’. That depends on what is meant by unorthodox. The studies he adduces are not as conclusive as he suggests. The significance of Stillingfleet’s bouts with Locke – indeed of Stillingfleet’s later biography itself – requires nuancing; the scholarship of Ellen Charry and Ethan Shagan would be useful here.

Inkblots aside, few will leave this magisterial study unaffected by its breadth, rigor and clarity. It merits close attention in research on post-Reformation ‘Anglicanism’, and will likely succeed in resourcing (if not quite ameliorating) contemporary debates. Students of Anglican theology should consult it; the kernels of many a monograph lie buried in its notes. Those who teach moral theology in any tradition will find it an integral part of their curriculum. Together with his 2018 volume, Sedgwick has provided an ambitious genealogical enquiry in both senses: a history of the origins and development of the Anglican moral tradition, and an elaboration of its modes of engaging intellectual challenges, which may well illuminate paths toward a convivial future for the Anglican moral tradition.