The Life and Theology of Alexander Knox: Anglicanism in the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism by David Mccready (review)

Abstract

Alexander Knox (1757–1831), a lay theologian of the Church of Ireland, is known mainly to specialists in Anglican studies.1 David McCready’s new study provides a detailed account of Knox’s manifold theological contributions that will appeal to historians and theologians studying Anglo-Irish Christianity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the subtitle certainly hints at the broader relevance of this little-known figure, it actually references only a part of the rich web of interconnected themes, persons, and issues illuminated by this study. McCready has delivered an incredibly rich and widely relevant monograph that merits engagement not only by those interested in English-speaking theology’s appropriation of Platonism, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. The book is also a deep dive into the eclectic, unique, and innovative thought of a man who helped construct “Anglican” identity itself, engaged Methodists and Roman Catholics in a sincere proto-ecumenical outlook, and was, in certain intriguing aspects, a forerunner of the Oxford Movement. The first chapter sketches Knox’s life as a lay theologian, and one who demands attention for his connection to John Wesley and his influence on, among others, Hannah More, William Wilberforce, Gladstone, and Newman. McCready’s second chapter is an important analysis of Knox as “a theoretician of Anglicanism” (37–39). In addition to tilling the soil that made the Tractarians possible, the story of the construction of a distinctively “Anglican” identity—Knox was one of the first to popularize the term itself—in the early nineteenth century sheds light not only on dynamics internal to the Church of England/Ireland, but to the broader context of a national church that found itself within a modernizing and expanding empire marked by a plurality of confessions. Knox’s unapologetic Erastianism was tempered by an equally sincere commitment to toleration and friendship