TEMPLE, Frederick, and others.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Essays and Reviews. First edition of this groundbreaking collection of theological essays, the first assault on Biblical literalism from within the ranks of British theologians. The edifice of literalism had been crumbling for several decades, under assault from the science of Lyell and Darwin and the new Biblical criticism of Baur and Strauss at the University of Tübingen. "But all these were outside the Church of England, and it was thus with a double force that Essays and Reviews, when it generally became known, struck clergy and laity. Not only did the book subscribe to the modern non-literal concept of the Bible text, but, far worse, the authors were with one exception beneficed clergy, and the majority came from the sanctuary of Oxford" (PMM). Two of the contributors, Rowland Williams and Henry Bristow Wilson, were found guilty by the Court of Arches, though the verdict was overturned by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and in the long-term the Church came to accept much of what the essayists advocated.

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