1. Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003Google Scholar). I shall cite page numbers to Harp's book parenthetically in my own text. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this essay, which enlarges upon my review of Harp's book in Fides et Historia 38.1 (2006), pp. 195–98Google Scholar.

2. ‘The Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’, Anglican and Episcopal History 74 (2005), pp. 180–203Google Scholar.

3. Mt 13.24–30; cf. 25.31–46. Augustine of Hippo, On Baptism 5.28.38 (CSEL 51.293–97), in Wiles, Maurice and Santer, Mark (eds.), Documents in Early Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, likened the Church and her members — ‘the fixed number of the saints predestined before the foundation of the world’ —to a lily amidst thorns, according to the Song of Songs (2.2).‘The multitude of the thorns,’ therefore, ‘whether their separation be concealed or open, lies outside, beyond this number’(p. 163).

4. I have here listed the four, ‘crucial’ and‘defining commitments of a catholic and evangelical theology’ enumerated by Lutheran Michael Root in his essay ‘Catholic and Evangelical Theology’, published in the ecumenical journal Pro Ecclesia 15.1 (2006), pp. 9–16; here, pp. 10–12.

5. See Wells, Christopher, ‘Wounded in Common Mission, Called to Common Conversion: The Spiritual Basis of Communion’, Anglican Theological Review 90.1 (2008), pp. 23–46Google Scholar.

6. Williams, Rowan, ‘The Fate of Liberal Anglicanism’, in Anglican Identities (Cambridge: Cowley, 2003), p. 84Google Scholar.

7. O'Donovan, Oliver, ‘The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm’(July 2006)Google Scholar, on the website of Fulcrum (http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2006/20060703 odonovan1.cfm?doc=122#_ednref5).

8. A project continued in ‘The Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’.

9. Quoted again in ‘The Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’, p. 185 n. Guelzo's, comment was made in his essay ‘Ritual, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Disappearance of the Evangelical Episcopalians, 1853–1873’, Anglican and Episcopal History 62 (1993), pp. 551–77 (554)Google Scholar.

10. Harp claims that Hodge was basic to the curriculum at VTS in Brooks’day (p. 33), but Woolverton notes that George Christian Knapp was—specifically, his Lectures on Christian Theology (1831) (see Woolverton, , The Education of Phillips Brooks [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995], p. 75)Google Scholar. See similarly Prichard, Robert W., The Nature of Salvation: Theological Consensus in the Episcopal Church, 1801–73 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), who also indicates that Gilbert Burnet's commentary on the Articles (1804) and John Pearson on the creed (1659) were fundamental at VTS (pp. 50, 53,82,122).Google Scholar

11. Seepp. 90–91,172. Harp notes that low-church Evangelicalism flowered in the American Episcopal Church after the War of 1812 (p. 13). Cf. more fully Harp, ‘Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’.

12. In the critical assessment of cultural critic and Harvard Professor Eliot Norton upon Brooks ’death:‘ His mind was not of an order to trouble him with speculative doubts… He was quite sincere, for religion was a matter of sentiment not of intelligence with him’ (quoted by Harp, pp. 1–2). Likewise, Harp notes that Brooks' ‘developing position’ around the time he finished seminary, however troublingly disinterested in ‘orthodoxy’, was nonetheless ‘significantly’ not ‘rooted… in the historicism of Higher Criticism or evolutionary theory’(p. 37; cf. pp. 95–96). On the considerable intellectual rigor, however, of classically modern historical-theological research, at once deeply speculative and sceptical of traditional authorities, see Frei, Hans W., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

13. See all of ch. 1 on Brooks' formation. Harp disagrees here with Woolverton about the degree to which Brooks subscribed to evangelical doctrine at the point that he graduated from VTS (p. 7 n. 14).

14. See here the radical Protestantism—freeing the individual conscience from all constraints of churchly authority—in Brooks', 1884 essay, ‘Authority and Conscience’, in Essays and Addresses: Religious, Literary and Social (New York, 1894)Google Scholar, read at the Ninth Congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Detroit, MI. Wrote Brooks:‘Let the whole idea of Church authority save as the contribution of material which is to be freely criticized and used by the conscience and intelligence of men be swept away and disappear, and think what vast gain of vigor and reality and so of light must come!’ (p. 108). And again, baldly: ‘A Church bound to the doctrine of authority cannot be a comprehensive Church’(p. 109)—this in the context of a polemic against ‘the search for a seat of infallibility’(p. 108). By infallibility Brooks meant not only papal infallibility (cf. p. 107) but ‘the dogma of authority’ itself (p. 109). Thus the argument tackles head-on the Vincentian Canon of ‘universality, antiquity, consent’ (that which has been believed always, everywhere, by all: Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus), which, Brooks reports, for all its eloquence and cleverness,‘is most of all noteworthy for the magnificent unconsciousness and constancy with which it travels in a circle and with which it begs the question’ of whether one simply ‘wants to be confirmed in his comfortable faith’, or rather have something ‘to say to a critical and unbelieving world’, some word of ‘assurance to an honest and perplexed inquirer’ (pp. 109–10). To the end of the latter, Brooks commends ‘Individualism’(p. 111), by which he meant ‘private judgment’ (p. 112); or, finally:‘in the conscience, not in authority, must be the final warrant of all Christian truth’ (p. 117). Only with this last point in view is it correct, thought Brooks, to affirm that the Church is ‘living, still receiving messages and inspirations from, nay, rather still feeling within itself, the moving Spirit of its Master,… still able to distinguish truth from error…by its present conscience judging each present problem in the brightest and purest light it can command’ (pp. 117–18). Harp especially uses this essay in his fifth chapter.

15. See, e.g., with reference to current intra-Anglican disputes, Radner, Ephraim, ‘Conciliarity and the American Evasion of Communion’, in Radner, and Turner, Philip, The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), esp. pp. 229–33Google Scholar, responding to Robert Hughes, a theology professor at the School of Theology at the University of the South (Sewanee, TN).

16. Notwithstanding Harp's admission that ‘it was a sometimes subtle matter of relative emphasis; Brooks never ignored the atonement and comfortably spoke of Christ's death being a sacrifice for sin’(p. 176).

17. Cf. further along these lines pp. 161 and 210. An exception to the pattern may be at pp. 165–66, where Harp even-handedly situates Brooks'revisions vis-à-vis a wider spectrum of traditional Christian opinion, from Roman Catholicism to Presbyterianism; it is unclear to whom Harp is referring with reference to Brooks' ‘orthodox opponents’ on p. 165.

18. Thus, as Brooks wrote, the ideal preacher ought not declare to his congregation ‘his belief about the method of the atonement with the same authority with which he bids them repent of sin, and warns them without holiness no man shall see the Lord’ (p. 119; cf. pp. 176–77).

19. Americans Episcopalians took a two-step approach to doctrine, adopting a statement of conformity to ‘doctrine’ in the 1780s and later explicating the doctrine by adopting the Articles of Religion (1801) and a standard List of Ecclesiastical Studies for clergy that included only Burnet's commentary on the Articles. That most Episcopal seminaries used Burnet's commentary until the 1850s provided a basic coherence to Episcopalian theological discourse. The church began a gradual retreat from the Course of Ecclesiastical Studies, however, that culminated in a General Convention resolution in 1889 supplementing the course of studies with a massive list of alternative texts. See Prichard, , The Nature of Salvation, pp. 13–18Google Scholar.

20. See, e.g., Louth, Andrew, ‘Unity and Diversity in the Church of the Fourth Century’, in Swanson, R.N. (ed.), Unity and Diversity in the Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)Google Scholar; Williams, Rowan, ‘Defining Heresy’, in Kreider, Alan (ed.), The Origins of Christendom in the West (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001)Google Scholar; Pelikan, Jaroslav, ‘Who Do You Say That I Am—Not? The Power of Negative Thinking in the Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils', in Cavadini, John C. and Holt, Laura (eds.), Who Do You Say That I Am? Confessing the Mystery of Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

21. See Lindbeck, George A., The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), pp. 92–96Google Scholar and passim, and Marshall, Bruce D., Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, chs. 2,7, and passim; the effects of which may most recently be seen in the evangelical Vanhoozer's, Kevin J.The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

22. Radner, , ‘Doctrine, Destiny, and the Figure of History’, in Radner, and Sumner, George R. (eds.), Reclaiming Faith: Essays on Orthodoxy in the Episcopal Church and the Baltimore Declaration (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 48–49Google Scholar.

23. Radner, , ‘Doctrine, Destiny’, p. 49Google Scholar, italics added. Cf. similarly Kavanagh, Aidan, Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (New York: Pueblo, 1982), p. 42Google Scholar.

24. Radner, Ephraim, ‘Apprehending the Truth: Anglican Conservatism and Common Discernment’, in The Fate of Communion, p. 62.Google Scholar

25. See Williams, ‘Defining Heresy’, p. 335: ‘a challenge of extreme delicacy and difficulty…is how the articulation of the Christian gospel holds together scepticism and confidence in a way faithful to its foundational history, how it speaks adequately of both terror and gratitude, both silence and praise’.

26. ‘The Christian Church’, p. 180.

27. ‘Authority and Conscience’, p. 115; italics in original. Harp negotiates Brooks' ecclesiology in an intriguing but all too brief comparison with Roman Catholicism at p. 167, and more directly, in four paragraphs, at pp. 185–86.

28. Reno, R.R., ‘Theology in the Ruins of the Church’, Pro Ecclesia 12.1 (2003), pp. 15–36Google Scholar (here, p. 19), quoting in the first sentence Marshall, Trinity and Truth, p. 3. One could draw atonement doctrine into the picture as well, as Lindbeck, George does in ‘Atonement and the Hermeneutics of Intratextual Social Embodiment’, in Phillips, Timothy R. and Okholm, Dennis L. (eds.), The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

29. One thinks, analogously, of nineteenth-century Roman Catholic manualist scholasticism, churning out less and less inspired schematizations and regurgitations of the master. See McCool, Gerald A., Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

30. So Whitsunday, Brooks' sermon in The Consolations of God: Great Sermons of Phillips Brooks (ed. Wilbur, Ellen; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 69Google Scholar. See further along this line of interpretation of Brooks Joseph Britton,‘The Breadth of Orthodoxy: On Phillips Brooks,’in Marsha L. Dutton and Patrick Terrell Gray (eds.), One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism: Studies in Christian Ecclesiality and Ecumenism in Honor of J. Robert Wright(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). Britton is more sanguine generally about Brooks than I am able to be, though I appreciate his generosity of spirit. Similarly generous toward Brooks in the end, though appreciative of the depth of Harp's critical accomplishment, is R.R. Reno in his intelligent review of Harp in First Things 145 (2004), pp. 63–69.

31. Brooks, , ‘The Christian Church’, in The Light of the World and Other Sermons (New York, 1890), p. 178Google Scholar. See also The Consolations of God, pp. 139–40,124–25. Cf. 2 Cor. 4.10, Phil. 1.20, Col. 1.24.

32. Jn 17.23–25, following 13.34–35,14.21–31,15.9–17,16.27. On the inextricability of unity and charity, see again Augustine, On Baptism, book 5, pertinent fragments of which may be found in Daniel J. Sheerin (ed.), Message of the Fathers of the Church. VII. 77K Eucharist (Wilmington, DL: Michael Glazier, 1986), pp. 272–73, and in Documents in Early Christian Thought, pp. 163–66. Wells

33. Cf. again Harp, ‘Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’, p. 185, for the same phrase from Guelzo.

34. Here borrowing a page from Radner, Ephraim, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 8Google Scholar; quoted by Healy, Nicholas M., Church, World, and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 162CrossRefGoogle Scholar, amid a larger argument for what Healy calls the writing of non-‘agnostic’ or ‘theological’ church history, even of a ‘penitential’ variety (pp. 156–66).

35. Radner, , ‘Doctrine, Destiny’, p. 51Google Scholar.

36. Harp's book appeared just as the current crisis was unfolding, so he could not have commented on any of the details pertaining to it. Archbishop Rowan Williams' reflection of 27 June 2006, ‘The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today’, lays out a scenario for how Anglicans may have to deal with the inevitability of‘separation’ —potentially, he suggests, between ‘constituent’ and ‘associated’ elements within the Communion (http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/640).

37. See Braaten, Carl E. and Jenson, Robert W. (eds.), In One Body through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)Google Scholar, §§11–18 for a pertinent, brief history of the ecumenical movement with these problems in view; Kinnamon, Michael, The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement and How It Has Been Impoverished by Its Friends (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Cf. Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal (now Benedict XVI), ‘The Progress of Ecumenism’, in Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology (Slough: St Paul Publications, 1988)Google Scholar.

38. An excellent theological engagement and summary of the strenuous accomplishments of the ecumenical movement may be found in Jenson, Robert W., Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992)Google Scholar, the third part of which should be read in light of George Lindbeck's review essay in Pro Ecclesia 3.2 (1994), pp. 232–38.

39. Radner, , End of the Church, p. 351.Google Scholar

40. All from In One Body through the Cross,§§41–42. Harp bumps into the problem at one point but does not draw the consequence for his own procedure. As he puts it: ‘In the American denominational marketplace, competing churches defined themselves in relation to their neighbors; what set them apart doctrinally was very important’ (p. 155). A useful supplement to the Princeton Proposal is Radner, Ephraim, Hope among the Fragments: The Broken Church and Its Engagement of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004Google Scholar), esp. chs. 3 and 6: ‘The Peace of the Church and the Providence of God’ and ‘The Figure of Truth and Unity’.

41. See especially 1999's Joint Declaration on Justification, signed as official doctrine between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, and commentary in Rusch, William G. (ed.), Justification and the Future of the Ecumenical Movement: The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003Google Scholar).

42. See Rupert, Josef Geiselmann's modern classic, Meaning of Tradition (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966)Google Scholar.

43. Harp, , ‘Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’, pp. 201 and 203Google Scholar.

44. All from Harp, , ‘Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’, p. 200Google Scholar.

45. See Summa Theologiae III question 60 proem and following, esp. article 6.

46. Harp, , ‘Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’, p. 200Google Scholar.

47. See more fully Augustine, , De doctrina christiana, book I (e.g., as Teaching Christianity [trans. Edmund Hill; New York: New City Press, 1996]CrossRefGoogle Scholar), alongside City of God, book 10, chs. 4–6 (trans. Bettenson; London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 376–80; and Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John (trans. James A. Weisheipl; Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1980). Harp's occasional references to Brooks’historical-theological knowledge remain tantalizing in their formalism, as markers duly set up but unengaged. For instance, Harp reports that, in Brooks’seminary notebooks,‘there are lengthy quotations from the Church Fathers…, especially Tertullian. But there is little from the Reformers and almost nothing from the eighteenth-century fathers of Evangelicalism—a startling omission for someone attending Virginia Seminary in this period’(p. 36). The point is well taken and interesting, but one longs to know more. Particularly, in a Western context: did Brooks ever quote Augustine? If so, from which works? Augustine only receives passing mention by Harp, however (two of which are noted in the Index: pp. 121,168,178), itself a startling omission by one concerned to monitor Brooks’relationship to, and rejection of, Calvinist orthodoxy. Calvin also remains silent in Harp's text.

48. See n. 34, above. The point has become a commonplace in ecumenical literature, but is argued vigorously, with bibliography, by the Groupe des Dombes in For the Conversion of the Churches(trans. James Greig; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1993). A current, American instance of at least analogous work from the Protestant side might be that of Reformed evangelical Mark Noll, including Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicismwith Carolyn Nystrom (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).

49. Cited by Harp,‘Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism’, p. 185 n. 16.

50. A handful of essays that attempt to do this, in concert with critical interrogations of self-justifying denominationalism, may be found in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds.), THE Ecumenical Future: Background Papers forIn One Body through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), esp. the essays by Yeago, Reno, Wood, Erickson and Guroian. It would be interesting to test Ephraim Radner's thesis about visible church divisions— that they invariably beget decline, and even death, as an act of divine judgment—in the case of the‘strange death of evangelical Episcopalianism’, which Harp notes occurred around the time of‘the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) in 1873’('Strange Death of Evangelical Episcopalianism', p. 184; cf. pp. 195,197–98, and Harp's note at p. 188 that ‘those who bolted to the REC’ represented ‘only a very small fraction’ of the evangelical party). Radner minted his thesis in his dissertation, eventually published as Spirit and Nature: The Saint-Médard Miracles in 18th-Century Jansenism(New York: Herder & Herder, 2002); see esp. ch. 11 and the conclusion. He developed the argument ecumenically in THE End of the Church.For an application of Wells the argument to the Episcopalian context, see Radner's intriguing exchange with the retired, evangelical bishop of South Carolina, C. FitzSimons Allison (several of whose ooks are cited by Harp), following Radner's‘What Are We to Do? The Humiliation of Anglicanism’(January 2004; now reprinted in Radner and Turner, THE Fate of Communion).Insofar as Harp presumes that the evangelicals were culpably marginalized by others, in no way marginalizing themselves, or that the REC schism simply was justified, the Radnerian regimen would be stiff indeed. Cf. Radner,‘The Theological Accoutrements of Anti-Pluralism: The Confused Fate of American Episcopalianism’, JAS 2.1 (2004), pp. 22–39.

51. Taft, Robert F., ‘Response to the Berakah Award: Anamnesis’, in Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding (2nd rev. and enlarged edn; Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1997), p.287Google Scholar.

52. Brooks'feast day is 23 January on the Episcopal calendar. An older collect for the day maintained an unstinting theological orientation:‘Almighty and everlasting God…. who inspired your servant Phillips Brooks to do what is right and to preach what is true: Grant that all ministers and stewards of your mysteries may afford to your faithful people, by word and example, the instruction which is of your grace’ (The Calendar and the Collects, Psalms, and Lessons for the Lesser Feasts and Fasts [rev. edn; New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1973], p. 42). The present collect, by contrast, sounds Pelagian (‘Grant that all whom you call to preach the Gospel may steep themselves in your Word, and conform their lives to your will’), and the more elaborate biography states flatly that he ‘was conservative and orthodox in his theology’ (Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2003[New York: Church Publishing, 2003], pp. 138–39).