David Ney's The Quest to Save the Old Testament is a welcome reassessment of an important group of eighteenth-century British theologians, the Hutchinsonians. (Their name derives from their ties to the self-taught natural philosopher and Hebraist, John Hutchinson, 1674–1737). Although they have been acknowledged as “precursors” of the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement, the Hutchinsonians have attracted the attention of historians primarily for having been on the losing side of major scientific and scholarly debates: for their anti-Newtonianism and their reactionary approach to Hebrew scholarship. As Ney puts it, they have often been portrayed as “counter-Enlightenment buffoons” (2). Ney aims to restore them to their rightful place in the history of anglophone Christianity.

The later Hutchinsonians distanced themselves from Hutchinson's original vehement opposition to Newton's physics and to Hebrew vowel points. They focused, instead, on defending the Christian doctrine of Trinity, the veracity and centrality of the Scriptures, and the authority of the established churches. They were an important influence on the High Church Hackney Phalanx, whose accomplishments included founding the National Society for Religious Education, the University of Durham, and the prominent High Church periodical the British Critic. As Peter Nockles has shown (The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 [1994]), these High Church efforts laid the groundwork for the Oxford Movement and the subsequent flowering of High Church Anglicanism, which was such a distinctive aspect of nineteenth-century British culture.

What was specifically Hutchinsonian, then, about the writers who helped to reinvigorate High Church Anglicanism? Ney's answer has a contemporary theological and pastoral valence, as the introduction and afterword by fellow theologians Ephraim Radner and Wesley Hill make clear. Yet despite current-day objectives, it is also a richly contextualizing contribution to eighteenth-century intellectual history. Ney argues that the key to understanding Hutchinson's views and the significance of Hutchinsonianism in the history of Anglican theology lies in a melding of the emblem tradition and what Ney calls Lockean “sensualist” (sensationalist) epistemology, mobilized by Hutchinson and his followers in defense of the veracity and relevance of the Old Testament.

The emblem was ubiquitous in early modern European literature and art. Paradigmatically, an emblem consisted of a stylized image meant to be interpreted symbolically (pictura), a brief motto (inscriptio), and a commentary (subscriptio). Emblematicism in the broader sense, as explained by Ney, was a manifestation of Renaissance esotericism and neo-Platonism that saw the material world as replete with symbols of spiritual realities. Ney astutely identifies Hutchinson's peculiar mode of Biblical exegesis as a form of emblematicism: Hutchinson treated each word of the Hebrew Bible as an emblem encoding God's revelation to man. Hutchinson's emblematicism also had what Ney, following other scholars of Hutchinsonianism, considers a Lockean epistemological underpinning: it presupposed that the human mind is capable of understanding spiritual truths only by analogy to things that it can grasp through the evidence of the senses. In Hutchinsonian scriptural emblematicism, the leap from sense data to spiritual truth requires Revelation: words—specifically, God's words in Biblical Hebrew—are the key to interpreting the material world, just as emblems require mottos and commentaries to be intelligible.

The Quest to Save the Old Testament is organized chronologically, with a chapter each on Newton, Samuel Clarke, Hutchinson, and three of Hutchinson's followers, George Watson, George Horne, and William Jones. Drawing effectively on recent Newton scholarship, Ney presents Newton as a deeply religious thinker, who tried to defend the Old Testament with mathematics. Hutchinson instead relied upon an emblematic reading of Hebrew consonants. Hutchinson claimed that this reading revealed a natural philosophy in which the fundamental structure of the created world testified to the Christian Trinity (thus radically unlike Newton's heretical anti-Trinitarian natural philosophy). Both approaches erred, according to Ney, because they located divine providence only in the natural world, not in human history; both dehistoricized and decontextualized the Old Testament. Newton's chronologies did not hold up, leaving his protégé Samuel Clarke with no grounds upon which to defend the Old Testament. Hutchinson's belief that Hebrew was the only language capable of preserving God's speech left the status of the New Testament uncertain.

Ney makes a strong case for Hutchinson's affinities with Newton, in spite of Hutchinson's self-proclaimed anti-Newtonianism. Less compelling is Ney's insistence that the failure of both Newton's and Hutchinson's defenses of the Old Testament can be attributed to the “devolutionary philosophy of history” they shared (135 et passim). This is Ney's term for the view that human history is the story of a fall from an original understanding of divine truth into ignorance and idolatry. However, this view was widely held in early modern and eighteenth-century European thought, and was considered compatible with belief in history as the unfolding of divine Providence. The contrast that Ney draws between “devolutionary” and “providentialist” views of history seems either artificial or anachronistic.

Regardless of Hutchinson's own shortcomings, Ney argues, he bequeathed to his followers the precious legacy of his scriptural emblematicism. In the hands of the later Hutchinsonians, unencumbered by the Newtonian–Hutchinsonian dread of the corrupting influence of history, scriptural emblematicism was transformed into a mode of exegesis that combined a providentialist understanding of history with a theophanic vision of the created world. As most fully articulated by William Jones (1726–1800), Hutchinsonian scriptural emblematicism offered a viable alternative to the “anemic natural-philosophic apologetic” of Newton and later of William Paley (260). It gave back to the Christian reader not only the Old and New Testaments, but also the Book of Nature. This, Ney suggests, is why Hutchinsonianism was a powerful force for Anglican revitalization in the early nineteenth century.

Presumably in order to make his work accessible to non-historians, Ney has relegated much substantive material to the footnotes, which take up on average half of each page, and carry on a lively discussion of their own. This, however, is a minor flaw in a very readable and perceptive study which finally accords the Hutchinsonians the recognition they deserve.