The history of the Victorian Church is largely told through its controversies, which makes for interesting reading, but gives a distorted sense of Christian life in that century. It would be easy to believe, for example, that the terrain of nineteenth-century biblical theology in England was solely volcanic: the Colenso Controversy, Essays and Reviews, The Origin of Species. That here was one way of reading the Bible that repeatedly came under attack through these one hundred years. Cole William Hartin’s excellent book, Anglican Biblical Interpretation in the Nineteenth Century, corrects this. It is a very readable 200 pages, looking at how Anglicans interpreted the scriptures in this period. Hartin examines how Evangelicals typically approached the bible through the lens of Charles Simeon; the Broad Church approach through Benjamin Jowett; the High Church approach through John Keble and Christina Rossetti (the latter presumably in order to include a female perspective); and the ‘Orthodox’ approach through Richard Chevenix Trench. He wisely goes beyond assessing by party, however, to include the hermeneutical approaches of J.B. Lightfoot, B.F. Westcott and F.D. Maurice. There is fascinating material here exploring theories of language and comparing his subjects’ approach to the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

To summarise Hartin’s work very crudely: Simeon and Jowett looked at the literal and historical meanings of texts, albeit for different purposes; Keble, Rossetti and Trench, meanwhile, included figurative and Christological interpretations, embracing patristic and medieval exegesis as part of their work. Lightfoot and Westcott offered more nuanced approaches along Simeon and Jowett’s lines; Maurice perhaps having more in common with Keble, Rossetti and Trench.

The hero of Hartin’s book is the little-studied Archbishop of Dublin Richard Chevenix Trench, a leader of what Hartin and some others have called the ‘Orthodox movement’ in nineteenth-century Anglicanism. It’s not clear how different he really is from pre-Tractarian High Churchmanship, those caricatured as ‘two-bottle orthodox’ by their detractors. Certainly, Hartin labours to draw a distinction between him and Keble; it’s not clear, for example, that there is a distinction between ‘the Oxford Movement’s enamoured use of the Latin Patristic Tradition’ and Trench drinking ‘deeply from Augustinian wells’. What Trench does reveal, however, is that broad and deep hinterland beyond the Tractarians which made up much of the Church of England in this period, who interpreted the scriptures as historically accurate and miraculous but also mysterious and complex.

The book would have benefitted from another proofread, if only to spare us from being told, in a sentence emphasising their importance, that ‘the influence of Lightfoot and Westcott on subsequent English biblical interpreters cannot be understated’. Occasionally the book’s origins in doctoral research show through, but one good impact of this is that we are always kept signposted, Hartin telling us what he is going to do, what he is doing and what he has done: it made for a good, clear read and kept the writer and keeps the reader on track. For those wanting a single volume introduction to how Anglicans read the bible in the nineteenth century, Hartin’s work is an excellent way in.