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An English Systematic Theology?1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
Early in his career Edward Bouverie Pusey paid visits to Germany, as a result of which he wrote a book, revealing the influence of both Hegel and Schleiermacher, on the development of German theology. Then came some form of personal crisis, as a result of which he repudiated the book, seeking out second hand copies in order to destroy them, and in his will requiring that it never be republished. The event was tragic not merely for Pusey's personal life, but because it can be taken as symbolic of the fate of English theology since then. As one commentator remarks, it was an attempt to answer modernism by ignoring it. ‘If modernism could not be defeated by intellect, it must be defeated by piety.’ As Stephen Sykes has pointed out, for nationalistic reasons – for it is the nationalist tendency of some tractarianism which is here the point – a breach between the different European traditions was opened and has meant that English systematic theology, never very strong, has suffered injuries from which it has not yet recovered.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1993
References
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19 There is something else, too. As was pointed out to me by Christoph Schwoebel when this lecture was given there is a long tradition in England of the communal preparation of books – Lux Mundi, Essays and Reviews and the like – which has saved this tradition from the excesses of individualism to which some continental and American theologians have succumbed.