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Reconstructing the Reformation: F. D. Maurice, Luther, and Justification*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
I know well the double danger of giving a mere dry summary of events, or of going into endless disquisitions. … But I do think both may be avoided if we seriously believe that our business is to study our records earnestly and devoutly; because they have a meaning in them which we may be helped to draw out; not because we must put a meaning into them.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1997
Footnotes
*
I would like to record my thanks to Mr B. L. Home of King’s College, London, for his comments on a draft of this paper.
References
1 Maurice, F. D., Queen’s College, London: Its Objects and Method; a Lecture delivered in the Hanover Square Rooms (London, 1848), p. 25.Google Scholar
2 Young, David, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Oxford, 1992), p. 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Christensen, Torben, The Divine Order: A Study in F. D. Maurice’s Theology (Leiden, 1973), p. 296.Google Scholar
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9 Coleridge, S. T., Aids to Reflection (1884 edn), p. 67.Google Scholar
10 Mansel, H. L., The Limits of Religious Thought Examined (Oxford, 1858)Google Scholar. In What is Revelation? (London, 1859), Maurice attacked Mansel’s treatment of revelation; there is an adequate account of the ensuring controversy in B. M. G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age (London, 1980), pp. 237–42.
11 Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, 1, p. 90.
12 Maurice, F. D., Theological Essays (London, 1853), p. 137.Google Scholar
13 Ibid., p. 137: ‘Of a light speaking to his conscience … Luther knew as much as any Quaker could have told him’; idem, Kingdom of Christ, 1, p. 63.
14 Ibid., 1, p. 69; Ebeling, Gerhard, Luther: An Introduction to his Thought (London, 1970), p. 261.Google Scholar
15 Maurice, F. D., The Gospel of St. John. A Series of Discourses (London, 1857)Google Scholar; see especially ch. 2, ‘The Word the Light of Men’.
16 Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, 1, p. 88.
17 Ibid., 1, p. 76.
18 Maurice, Theological Essays, p. 198.
19 According to Young, it was Maurice’s Christocentricity which drew him away from Unitarian theology, and not the idea of the filial relation of humankind to God, which he shared with Unitarians and which asserted that ‘God is with and for man, not apart from and against him.’ Young, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism, p. 232.
20 Flesseman-Van Leer, Ellen, Grace Abounding: a Comparison of F. D. Maurice and Karl Barth (London, 1968).Google Scholar
21 ‘Unless a man has faith, he will never understand the true meaning of the cross, and its mystery will remain forever hidden from him. Equally, unless he has faith, the perceived significance of the cross cannot be appropriated, and translated into the real and redeeming presence of Christ within the believer’: A. E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford, 1985), pp. 174–5 [my emphasis].
22 Maurice, Theological Essays, p. 200.
23 Idem, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 4, p. 117.
24 Idem, Kingdom of Christ, 2, p. 175.
25 Idem, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 4, p. 118.
26 Douglas Powell, unpublished paper on ‘Reformation and Deviation in the Sixteenth Century’, p. 17.
27 Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, 1, p. 71.
28 None of the accounts of Maurice’s theology published in the last half-century or so give more than passing attention to his views on history. This is surely related to the almost complete neglect today of his Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, an enormous and far from readable survey of Western philosophy and theology from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century, which attempted to expound the leading ideas of each period and to draw them together into a synthetic unity.
29 Maurice, F., The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2 vols (London, 1884), 2, p. 264.Google Scholar
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31 F. Maurice, Life, 2, p. 615; ‘the character of the Reformation is interpreted by those [mental conflicts] which tormented the Monk of Wittenberg’: F. D. Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, 1, p. 62.
32 Hare, J. C. Vindication of Luther against his Recent English Assailants (Cambridge, 1855), p. 293.Google Scholar
33 Appreciative references to the ‘lion-hearted Luther’ (S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State [London, 1972], p. 117) are scattered throughout Coleridge’s writings; see especially Frappell, ‘Coleridge and the “Coleridgeans” on Luther’. For Carlyle’s view, see his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London, 1908), ch. 4, “The Hero as Priest’, pp. 346–88.
34 See the evaluation of J. H. Newman’s Lectures on Justification (London, 1837) by A. E. McGrath, lustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1986), 2, pp. 121–30.
35 Sykes, Stephen, The Integrity of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1978), p. 16.Google Scholar
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37 Maurice, F. D., Three Letters to the Rev. William Palmer, 2nd edn (London, 1842), p. 24.Google Scholar
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39 Maurice, Life, 1, p. 217.
40 Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, 2, p. 240–5.
41 See especially Maurice, F. D., Reasons for not Joining a Party in the Church (London, 1841)Google ScholarPubMed.
42 Idem, The Prayer-Book Considered Especially in Reference to the Romish System, 3rd edn (London, 1880), p. 12.
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45 Kenneth Cracknell has recently demonstrated another series of connections, previously unexplored, in Maurice’s influence on the study of comparative religion and on the theological formation of missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: see his Justice, Courtesy and Love: Theologians and Missionaries Encountering World Religions, 1846–1914 (London, 1995), ch. 2, ‘Five Theologians and World Religions’.
46 Sykes, Integrity of Anglicanism, passim; Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, ch. 16, ‘F. D. Maurice and the Shaking of the Seven Hills’.
47 Gilley, S., ‘Nationality and liberty, Protestant and Catholic: Robert Southey’s Book of the Church’, SCH, 18 (1982), pp. 409–32 Google Scholar; Shannon, R. T., ‘John Robert Seeley and the idea of a national Church’, in Robson, R., ed., Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London, 1967), pp. 236–52 Google Scholar; Phillips, P. T., ‘The concept of a national Church in late nineteenth-century England and America’, Journal of Religious History, 14 (1986), pp. 26–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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