The work of Oliver Chase Quick (1885–1944) may be unfamiliar to some readers of this journal, or he may be just a name. Quick’s most substantial books – Doctrines of the Creed (1938) and The Christian Sacraments (1927) – were once standard works, and still repay study, but they are unlikely to be on ‘Recommended Reading’ lists today. Quick is forgotten. In this monograph Alex Hughes sets out to remedy the neglect into which Quick has fallen and does so with learning, clarity and insight. Hughes provides the first full-length critical exposition and evaluation of Quick’s corpus, though J.K. Mozley and D.M. MacKinnon had recognized Quick’s importance in short studies. What Hughes tells us about Quick the man and the priest is minimal; that is not his purpose. But if we want to get a sense of the stature of Oliver Quick, as a man, a priest and a thinker, we should get hold of his last book The Gospel of the New World, published posthumously in the year of his death, 1944, and read the ‘Prefatory Memoir’ by William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury. This must have been one of the last things that Temple himself wrote, as he died in the same year. Thus the Church of England and the Christian world lost two leaders in Christian thought in the twentieth century at about the same time. The post-war world opened up without them. Temple points to the two ‘chief features’ of Quick’s theological work: the capacity for ‘clean-cut distinctions’ and for ‘subtle analysis’. One striking comment from Temple’s brief memoir is to the effect that Quick had no ‘religious experiences’, because the whole of his experience was religious. Quick was suspicious of any claims of experience that were not subject to rational analysis, as in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. God was in Quick’s every thought. His whole life was consecrated.
Quick contributed to a wide range of theological areas: Christian doctrine, philosophical theology, apologetics and Anglican theology. He belonged to no party or school of Anglicanism, but ploughed his own furrow. Quick’s mind was shaped by the study of the Classics at Harrow School and at Oxford. On this foundation he was formed intellectually by Thomas Aquinas (Aristotelian) and by modern Idealist philosophy (Platonic), as well as by the Scriptures and the Book of Common Prayer (1662). He was, above all, a philosophical theologian, lured by the prospect of a ‘Christian philosophy’ and a ‘christocentric metaphysic’. He strove to ‘think together God and the world’, seeking a unified synthesis of revelation and reason. He believed that the relation of nature and grace in Catholic Christianity (in which he included Anglicanism, of course) rendered it inherently metaphysical and gave it its drive towards synthesis. Quick was not swayed by the upsurge of logical positivism and linguistic analysis in the early twentieth century. Neither was he deflected by the strident cries of neo-orthodoxy and he gave the early Karl Barth short shrift – ‘rationally and morally intolerable’ was his verdict (p. 60).
Quick was more of a theologian than Temple was – and I suspect that Temple was substantially indebted to Quick for the theological ballast in his own work, even for the notions of a ‘christocentric metaphysic’ and the vision of a ‘sacramental universe’ in which Temple’s Gifford Lectures, Nature, Man and God, culminate. Quick and Temple had interacted all their adult lives. I think that Quick may have been, in effect, Temple’s theological mentor. Although Quick could handle theology, his approach was definitely from the philosophical end and his biblical repertoire was limited. Hughes points out that Quick was not methodologically self-conscious and that this was fairly typical of Anglican theology in that period (p. 11). Quick worked with ideas and ideals. His mind was not historical in bent; historical theology was not his field. His method was not to ask, in the first instance, as we tend to do today, ‘How did we get to where we are now?’
Nevertheless, Quick’s thought was neither smooth nor bland. It was a crucible in which conflicting traditions contended together: Hebraic and Hellenic modes of thought; within the Hellenic legacy, Aristotelianism and Platonism; in Christian spirituality, transcendence and immanence; in positive theology, revelation as the breaking in of what could not be imagined or contained and revelation as continuous with the highest expressions of beauty, goodness and rationality in human culture. On the one hand he insisted that we cannot but recognize the claims of beauty, goodness and rationality; on the other, he upheld the absoluteness and uniqueness of the revelation in Jesus Christ. One of his projects was to try to unravel the dialectic of orthodoxy and liberalism in the theological enterprise. Unlike the English Modernists, such as Henry Major and William Sanday, with their complacent endorsement of modernity, Quick was not comfortable or at home in early twentieth-century culture. He believed that it was sceptical at heart and tended to nihilism. It was alien to him.
The dynamic and energy of Quick’s theological task derived from the attempt to reconcile the Hellenic and Hebraic traditions. If, as Alfred North Whitehead famously said, Christianity is a religion in search of a metaphysic, Quick confessed that it had not yet found one. He himself was not seeking the Philosopher’s Stone, but a modus vivendi between biblically informed theology, rooted in the Old Testament prophetic witness, and the undeniable truths of philosophy that had nurtured his intellectual and aesthetic life from a child. He was not a slave of Idealist philosophy and was committed to the view that theology bursts the constraints of philosophy. The essence of Christianity was not to be found in a metaphysic but in a person, Jesus Christ (p. 94). For Quick – and MacKinnon used to endorse this too – the touchstone of orthodox theology was the phrase from the Creed, ‘He came down from heaven and was made man.’ Quick ceaselessly tried to reconcile ‘the gospel of divine action’ and of divine intervention with an affirmation of the basic goodness and worth of all that is human. The figure of Jesus Christ supremely embodies our ideals of beauty, goodness and rationality. He could not rest without a rational grasp of the whole of reality. For Quick, Christian belief implied a worldview, a framework of knowledge and understanding. Truth is a unity. Quick was the opposite of a fideist. Like Wolfhart Pannenberg, Quick saw Christian doctrines as statements about reality. Unlike Pannenberg, however, Quick had no grounding in the philosophy of physical science or the human sciences and seems unaware of how our perceptions of the world are inevitably distorted by context, culture and ideology. For Pannenberg, doctrines are hypotheses that are tested in exploring reality and human experience. But Quick is an unreconstructed realist, lacking a working concept of critical or symbolic realism. He repeatedly separates and contrasts fact and interpretation in a naive way, speaking of the outright authority of ‘empirical data’, even that of Scripture.
Quick had half-digested the revolution in New Testament interpretation signalled by the eschatological theories of Weiss, Loisy, Tyrrell and Schweitzer. Quick seems to have accepted the ‘imminent expectation’ aspect, but to have retained a realized (‘proleptic’) element, not so much in the public inbreaking of the kingdom of God in the mission of Jesus Christ and the Church, as in the individual human soul, regarding this as the ‘essence’ of Jesus’ eschatological message. So he was essentially with Ritschl rather than Weiss. Though not uncritical in his handling of the Bible, he was basically still with Lightfoot, Westcott and Hort; he was not abreast of the Form Criticism that had emerged in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Hughes points to Quick’s ‘persistent attempts to systematize, synthesize and universalize theological categories’ (p. 208). Hughes seems impatient with Quick’s obsession with explanation. He asks whether Quick was interested in true belief or saving belief. He concludes his masterly exposition with the judgement that Quick did not ultimately manage to escape from an all-embracing immanentism (p. 170). I would agree that the struggle in Quick’s mind remained unresolved, but is not that where Quick’s greatness and fascination lies – in his heroic wrestling with truths in tension? He was actually less in thrall to Platonism than Temple was, but Temple’s stature is undiminished. In the late 1930s, Quick, like Temple (as we read, for instance, in his ‘Chairman’s Introduction’ to the 1938 report of the Archbishops’ Doctrine Commission, on which Quick had also served throughout, Doctrine in the Church of England), Quick began to have second thoughts about his metaphysical ambitions. There was a growing awareness that the reality of sin and evil needed to be taken more seriously. The note of judgement and of hope needs to be sounded more clearly. Hence Quick’s last work was on the theology of atonement and was entitled The Gospel of the New World.
Alex Hughes has made a significant contribution to the study of Anglican thought and modern theology. He must be one of the best theologically qualified archdeacons in the Church of England. There are mistakes, in both the text and the bibliography, with regard to A.M. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple (1960), which is sometimes given as From Coleridge to Gore, the title of a study by Bernard M.G. Reardon (1971); and D.M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology (1968), which is repeatedly cited as Borderlines. These are the only flaws of detail that I spotted in this generally careful, scholarly work.
