To Build Christs Kingdom

Frank Dennison Maurice (1805-72) was arguably the most significant Anglican thinker of the modern age, and the "Canterbury Spiritual Theology" series would be incomplete without a volume on this extraordinary figure and his immense influence on contemporary Anglican identity and understanding. Through a series of bruising encounters with his contemporaries, he pioneered a creative response to the critical challenges of modernity. Paying equal attention to contemporary criticism and orthodox Christian belief, he anticipated trends in later theology and set a pattern for reflection and negotiation that is familiar in Anglicanism today. In his work on the church's social witness, he founded Christian Socialism; in his writing on the doctrine of the church, he set out principles that remain central to Anglicanism today; he advocated a representative rather than a hierarchical theology of the ministry; and the established formula of 'Scripture, creeds, sacrament and episopacy' which has guided Anglican approaches to inter-church relations for a century is his work.Read less