David McCready's excellent new intellectual biography of Alexander Knox (1757–1831) introduces readers to a fascinating, and previously largely forgotten, Irish lay theologian. McCready rescues Knox from the oblivion of unread minor Anglican theologians by casting him as a significant bridge figure between the evangelicalism of John Wesley and the high church Tractarianism of John Henry Newman. While Knox's eclectic mix of heart religion and his stalwart commitment to the “pious antiquity” of the Church of England shines strongly in the book, McCready also positions Knox as a bridge between the enlightened rationalism of the eighteenth century and the burgeoning romanticism of the early ninteenth century (42). Individuals who bridge the divergent ideas of more well-known thinkers often end up mistrusted by those on either side of the bridge. Such is Knox's case; the Tractarians found him too evangelical, and the evangelicals found him too high church. A lay theologian without a pulpit, he enjoyed some recognition as a religious thinker in the nineteenth century but was soon forgotten by most Anglican theologians. Knox's relative anonymity in Anglican thought is especially ironic as he was among the first to regularly employ the term “Anglican” to describe his church.

This book is successful because David McCready brings his exhaustive knowledge of the patristics to his interpretation of Alexander Knox's thought. McCready astutely places Knox's commitment to deification, or “God-likeness,” an idea much associated with Wesley, within the larger context of the Christian Platonic tradition. Throughout the book, he connects Knox's belief in the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit to Clement of Alexandria, Pseudo-Macarius, John Chrysostom, and to the Anglican moderates, or Cambridge Platonists, who revived these ancient ideas in the seventeenth century. While Christian Platonism provides a clear link to John Wesley's affective religion of the heart, Knox's commitment to ancient sources made him a precursor of the Tractarians. In McCready's treatment, Knox's thought sparkles with a Wesleyan holiness firmly rooted in ancient sources.

McCready demonstrates that, unlike, later generations of Wesley's followers, Knox received his introduction to “heart religion” from Wesley himself. As a young man, Knox knew Wesley and carried on a long correspondence with him. Importantly, this personal connection to Wesley allows McCready to argue that Knox preserved some aspects of Wesleyan thought, including some high church commitments, which were lost on later generations of Wesleyan evangelicals.

McCready's greatest contribution is to distill Knox's well-known verbosity into a concrete theological system. As a testament to the opacity of Knox's prose, McCready writes that he left the only job he ever held because he was “unable to communicate when it came to ‘practical discourse with mankind’” (20). Ranging across Knox's voluminous correspondence and published works, McCready capably elucidates a practical theology that for all its Anglican orthodoxy sparkles with ingenuity. For example, Knox blended Wesleyan spiritual perfectionism with a view of justification that echoed Cranmer's “just and lively faith.” Similarly, his high view of the Eucharist, much applauded by Tractarians, had at its heart the Wesleyan desire for affective union with Christ. Knox did not, of course, bridge all theological divides. For example, while he embraced many aspects of Wesleyan thought, Knox was never comfortable with evangelical solfideism. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Knox's theology was his ecclesiology. Not surprisingly, given the eclectic nature of his thought, Knox embraced a broadly ecumenical vision. Although a staunch defender of Anglican orthodoxy and episcopal polity, he saw dissenting denominations, and even non-Christian religions, as providentially willed “sects” designed to “stir up religious revival” within the religious establishment (217).

Unlike Wesley who inspired him or the Tractarians who came after him, Alexander Knox did not leave a significant school of thought behind him when he died in 1831. Indeed, both evangelicals and members of the Oxford Movement looked on him with some suspicion. Nevertheless, McCready convincingly shows that Knox did influence the religious thinking of some in the mid-nineteenth century. Prime Minister William Gladstone, who embodied Knox's commitment to evangelical affectation and high church liturgy, was perhaps Knox's most famous disciple.

In a book that convincingly traces the intellectual lineage of Knox's thought to the Cambridge Platonists and, before them, to a host of Patristic authors, the work's only major flaw is its omission of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century latitudinarianism as a source of Knox's theology. Although the author acknowledges Knox's often ambivalent relationship with Enlightenment rationalism, Knox's understanding of happiness—which McCready carefully and capably describes—clearly owed a debt to Archbishop John Tillotson. Because they often viewed Tillotson and other latitudinarians negatively, Knox, and others similarly impacted by Wesley, would likely never have acknowledged this intellectual debt. However, the echoes of Tillotsonian conceptions of happiness found in Knox's work raise interesting questions about possible “bridges” to be explored between Knox and latitudinarians.

Notwithstanding this omission, David McCready's book presents a clear and compelling case for why we should remember Alexander Knox. As a bridge between the titanic theological forces of evangelicalism and Tractarianism, Alexander Knox translated Wesley's ideas into a lay vernacular that was deeply rooted in an understanding of the vitality and relevance of the Patristic tradition. In the process, Knox crafted his own via media between evangelicalism and the Oxford Movement. David McCready's excellent book is a welcome addition to the literature on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglicanism and Methodism and will be well used by historians and theologians alike.