As every schoolchild knows, the two premier Universities of England are Oxford and Cambridge, both of which can boast, since the Reformation, a continuous history of theological study albeit outside the embrace of the mother who bore them. It befits the journal of the English Dominicans, who are planted in their groves, to allow some assessment of what these Faculties have been about. In what concerns the crucial nineteenth century background to twentieth and early twenty-first century endeavour, far more is known about Oxford than Cambridge. So David Thompson, professor of modern Church history at Cambridge, rightly remarks in explanation for writing this expensive but well-produced book. Why do I call the nineteenth century background ‘crucial’? In institutions defined by traditions of learning, it was then that a frame was put in place for the epistemological issues raised by the secularization of the European mind. It was then, too, that fundamental decisions were made as to how to approach the emerging higher criticism of the Bible, theology's core text. Naturally, subsequent intellectual revolutions could not be ruled out. But when they occur they will generally be found to take their shape from accepting some features of an inheritance and abreacting – which is also a form of indebtedness – to others. A syndrome is constructed with which any doctor catholicae veritatis must reckon in this place and time.
Cambridge has known a continuous tradition of theological study – inevitably, since dons were clergymen and the University, until the late nineteenth century, was a part, in effect, of the Church of England. But a ‘Theological Tripos’ dates only from 1871, even if a ‘Voluntary Theological Examination’ was put in place thirty years earlier. Significantly, only the Lady Margaret chair, the creation of a major figure in the Catholic ‘Pre-Reform’, was well endowed. In what concerns systematic theology, as that discipline was known in Lutheran Germany, Calvinist Scotland, and Catholic Europe, Anglicanism was handicapped by an institutional deficit – not least at Cambridge. As Thompson shows, this had (among signal disadvantages) one manifest advantage. The opportunity was to hand for theological energy to be dedicated instead to the felt issues of the hour. In this case, those issues were chiefly the apologetic defence of Christian truth claims, and the need to take up some view on the new biblical scholarship coming across the German Ocean. Still, the pre-eminent Cambridge professors of the latter part of the century, J. B. Lightfoot, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, were, after all, in priest's orders, if not indeed, as the first two of that trio, eventually bishops. As Thompson shows, ecclesiality – the indispensable place of the ecclesia in doctrinal thinking, downplayed, except in a political sense, in the first half of the nineteenth century – certainly entered their thought.
It is good, though, that Thompson, himself a Disciple of Christ who accepted ordination in the United Reformed Church, has included in this survey the Protestant Nonconformists permitted to take up teaching posts from 1871 (though not to take degrees in Divinity till 1913). The star of his study, in my judgment, is the Congregationalist Peter Taylor Forsyth in whom the gift of constructive dogmatics was far more fully displayed than in any of the Anglican writers discussed. Perhaps I am influenced here by the deep respect in which Hans Urs von Balthasar held Forsyth's writings.
What should a Catholic reviewer make of this history, relayed as it is with an impressive panoply of reference to primary sources as well as a palpable mastery of secondary discussion? Thompson brings out the commitment, at least as old as Paley, to natural theology and apologetics, disciplines that have an honoured place in classical Catholic theology too. Paley's rejection, widely shared at Cambridge, of the ‘habit of presenting the doctrines of Christianity before any consideration of its proofs’ (p. 30) is a different matter. The organism of doctrine, in its beauty and power of illumination, is in itself, at the hands of successful dogmaticians, a suasion to faith. The primacy accorded by Cambridge to apologetics – including here the critical but believing study of the biblical text – helps to explain its lack of hospitality to systematics. The late twentieth century movement Radical Orthodoxy, which errs in the opposite direction, was Cambridge-born but cannot be said to have fared well at Cambridge hands.
In his epilogue Thompson remarks that the influential 1961 essay collection Soundings, by considering objections, philosophical or exegetical, to Christian belief, points to the twentieth century continuance of a recognisably Cantabrigian set of concerns. He also records the comment of its editor, Alec Vidler, that no theological synthesis lay behind it. In retrospect, it was a pity that Michael Ramsey, author of The Gospel and the Catholic Church as well as Christological studies open to the integration of exegesis with doctrine, did not stay long enough (1950–1952) at Cambridge to make his mark. Not that Ramsey could have furnished an epistemology fit for theology to live with. In that regard we might be inclined to regret more the evanescence of the influence of Coleridge – though Thompson's account thereof does not sound the depths once explored by Colin Gunton of King's College, London (not accidentally, perhaps, a fish from the same pond as Forsyth, if we allow the United Reformed Church to be English Congregationalism's legitimate successor). Of the two Roman Catholics who, in more recent years, have held an institutional chair in Cambridge Divinity (Nicholas Lash and Denys Turner), one was chiefly a methodologist and the other a (short-lived) philosopher of religion. Neither, unless I am mistaken, gave much of an impetus to dogmatics proper so called. Nor, with the flight to the Scottish Universities of such Oxford figures as John Webster and Oliver O’Donovan, can it be said that – despite the Tractarian imprint, and the subsequent Celtic visitations of John Macquarrie and Rowan Williams – doctrinal thought has currently a very favourable environment in the ‘other place’. Sympathetic readers of Theology in the Public Square (2005), by Gavin d’Costa of the University of Bristol, may find their prejudices confirmed by these indications of limits on scope in the premier league.
