Mike Higton's The Life of Doctrine is an extended dialogue with the late George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine. Writing with his own Church of England in view, Higton disagrees with Lindbeck's way of distinguishing between first-order discourse (preaching, singing, teaching, etc.) and second-order discourse (doctrine as generally conceived), which is talk about talk. Higton sees the latter as existing in a serene detachment, by contrast to the down-to-earth life of ordinary Christian communities. Thomas Aquinas once observed that a charwoman filled with charity knew more about God than he did; Higton would second this sentiment (as Lindbeck would have as well, since he described himself as a Thomist, among other things). This appreciation of ‘ordinary belief’ is the strong suit of the book. Higton is surely right that theologians, whether from the traditional or revisionist side of the aisle, have sometimes undervalued the faith and wisdom of the laity. At the same time, as discussion in North America of rampant ‘therapeutic, moralistic deism’ shows,Footnote ¹ the specific vocation of guidance and correction that ‘second-order’ theologians can offer is still required.

In this project of emendation, Higton employs an insight common in contemporary anthropology, namely that ethnography often valorises continuity and consensus, and so overlooks the fissures, conflicts and silences which are also part of culture. Insofar as Lindbeck's cultural-linguistic approach is analogous to ethnography, this is a legitimate point (for which I also imagine Lindbeck would also have had some sympathy). In league with this is Higton's critique from a post-colonial and liberationist perspective: one might wonder what a fusing of horizons of the cultural-linguistic and liberationist perspective looks like? For example, Kathryn Tanner, often quoted by Higton, showed in God and Creation in Christian Theology how the doctrine of divine sovereignty should be seen as the vantage point from which to critique the pretensions of earthly power.Footnote ²

While these are points at which the Lindbeckian view might be improved, there are also some internal problems with Higton's argument. While he sticks to critique on the level of method for the most part, he does employ a more systematic and normative mode in his proposal that all theology flows from the affirmation in Revelation 1 that Jesus risen is the one ‘who was and is and is to come’. But he does not develop this claim, and we are left to wonder how it squares with his more sceptical view of theological normativity in his chapter on doctrine and disagreement. As to the consciously Anglican context of his reflection, how can his hands-off approach to the fight between the orthodox and the gnostics in the second century square with the pervasive doctrinal matrix in which the Book of Common Prayer speaks? Isn't this essentially Stephen Sykes’ point in the most cogent Anglican book on doctrine in the past two generations, The Integrity of Anglicanism? Put another way, don't ‘essentially contested concepts’ (W. B. Gallie as deployed by Sykes and discussed by Higton) depend on such prior tacit agreements? This matrix of prior normative agreement may be the condition for the type of diverse experimentation Higton endorses.

Higton's typology of relationships of disagreement in chapter 8 is helpful, as is his approval of a principled disinclination to separation (cf. the work of Ephraim Radner). While Anglicanism's history seems hospitable to this vision of theology as diverse experimentation, doesn't Anglican doctrine in disagreement then require considerable patience with respect to official change, especially in a tradition without a central magisterium, and in our culture of the instantaneous? I need at this point to locate myself as a North American Anglican who is traditional on the marriage question: Higton's emphasis on tolerating an array of readings and practices in different ‘settlements’ of disciples is appealingly charitable, but it is also reminiscent of how revisionists in North America spoke in the era before they had the power to impose their new view. Maybe Higton isn't hermeneutically suspicious enough.

This is a book about doctrinal theology, but also about doctrinal theologians. Theologians are indeed a problem, but which problem? I am reminded of worries over clericalism and excessive power, which Higton shares. While this is true in some cases, arguably in the present moment a more pertinent concern is the clergy's marginality, their sense of a diminished role, and hence of a weaker sense of purpose. With respect to theologians, there maybe be a similar problem in a church carrying on blithely with no thought of them. Maybe the Church of England is different, but in the sibling church on this side of the Atlantic our churches hardly suffer from a surfeit of theology. By analogy to the last sentence of The Nature of Doctrine , Mike Higton would surely agree: may the tribe of theologians well versed in the historic second order, but with a heart for ministry at the ground-level first, flourish.