In Saving the Church of England, Daniel Norman sheds new light on John Edwards (1637–1716), son of the notorious mid-seventeenth-century heresy hunter, Thomas Edwards (1599–1647), and a prolific writer and theologian in his own right. In so doing, Norman contributes to ongoing attempts by early modern scholars to refine and nuance our understanding of religious identity and ecclesiastical alignment within the late Stuart and early Hanoverian trans-Atlantic world. As recent work has challenged many of the longstanding categories through which historians have understood rival church factions, one happy result has been the rediscovery of figures who, though perhaps significant among their own contemporaries, have not always sat comfortably within existing historiographical taxonomies. John Edwards, whom Norman describes as a ‘dissenting conformist’, is one such figure and this appraisal of his theology and ecclesiology is thus most welcome. For despite the fact ‘that Edwards's influence in theological education and therefore the church both in England and her American colonies was fairly significant and continued long after he died’ (p. 42), he is ‘virtually unknown today except by a few scholars’ (p. 8) – a notable exception being the substantial chapter devoted entirely to Edwards in Dewey Wallace's influential book, Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714 (Oxford 2011).
Saving the Church of England is firmly focused on Edwards's thought rather than his life per se, Norman noting that a lack of source material means that some of the most ‘interesting questions’ about the man himself ‘cannot be answered’ (p. 23). After the introduction, chapter ii locates Edwards within his early modern milieu, offering a potted summary of theological development within the Church of England from the first stirrings of prominent anti-Calvinist sentiment at the end of the sixteenth century through to the post-Restoration development of Latitudinarianism. This then sets the stage for chapter iii, in which Norman sketches the main lines of his subject's life and posthumous reception. Here we learn that, in addition to exerting a strong influence on notable figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, Edwards's expositions of Calvinistic soteriology were highly prized by many on both sides of the Atlantic as guides for ministerial candidates, being used in this capacity by, for example, Increase Mather and his son Cotton.
Having thus contextualized Edwards and traced the contours of his life, Norman pivots towards thematic studies in chapters iv through vii. Here we find the heart of the book: four careful, thoroughly researched analyses of Edwards in relation to the main controversies with which he was preoccupied. Chapter iv, the longest of the thematic studies, examines Edwards's vigorous defence of historic Christianity against a rising tide of anti-Trinitarianism as promoted by thinkers like John Locke and Samuel Clarke. Whereas Edwards regarded such deviations from creedal orthodoxy as overturning the very foundations of the Christian faith, in chapter v we read of Edwards's theological jousting with a series of opponents coming from within the Church with whom, for the sake of ecclesiastical unity, he took a softer approach, even praising them at times. This group encompassed a range of individuals including Latitudinarians, Arminians and so-called ‘High Flyers’, a ‘precursor to the term “High Churchman,” referring to those with strict allegiance to the church and generally aligned with their Tory counterparts’ (p. 120). Chapter vi turns to Edwards's somewhat idiosyncratic ecclesiology, describing, among other things, the way in which Edwards held his own principled opposition to episcopalian church government in productive tension with his equally principled decision to remain within the decidedly episcopalian national Church. Finally, chapter vii delves further into Edwards's understanding of church unity and the limits of ecclesiastical charity. Throughout these chapters, and, indeed, the book as a whole, Norman labours to present his subject as a sympathetic, reasonable and sometimes unfairly maligned figure, one who managed to hold together a passion for orthodoxy as he understood it alongside a desire to preserve ecclesiastical unity wherever possible, even when doing so required that he subordinate his own preferred theological positions.
Saving the Church of England also includes four appendices, though it is not entirely clear why at least three out of the four were not integrated into the main text. The second appendix, for example, provides a brief, two-page review of relevant secondary literature on Edwards and would have seemingly been an easy and natural addition to the introductory chapter. The fourth appendix seems out of place due not to its brevity but rather on account of its substance and heft. At just under twenty pages, it is longer than some of the main chapters, and, conceptually, it treats interpretive questions that seem central to some of the main themes which Norman treats, viz. assessing the significance of Calvinistic theology generally and John Edwards specifically within the post-Restoration Church of England. In exploring this theme, Norman takes direct aim at Stephen Hampton's suggestion that the Reformed tradition was more influential among post-Restoration Anglicans than has been commonly assumed (Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: the Anglican Reformed tradition from Charles II to George I, Oxford 2008). Given that Norman's argument against Hampton is extended, strongly worded (for example, we read that Hampton's ‘thesis amounts to a response to a straw-man version of late twentieth century scholarship’, p. 230), and not at all peripheral to Norman's project, it seemed strange to find it relegated to an appendix. In connection with these interpretive disputes, it is also an unfortunate accident of timing that Norman's book went to press before the release of Jake Griesel's recent monograph on Edwards, Retaining the old episcopal divinity: John Edwards of Cambridge and Reformed orthodoxy in the later Stuart Church (Oxford 2022). Thus, apart from a brief mention indicating that Griesel ‘builds on the work of Stephen Hampton’ (p. 220), these two substantial recent studies of the heretofore neglected John Edwards appear to have passed one another by. But, this last point, while worth noting, is certainly no criticism of Norman's book as it stands and should not detract from the fact that Saving the Church of England enriches our understanding of the late-Stuart theological landscape by offering a detailed and well-researched study of a fascinating yet largely neglected figure.
