From Butler to Thornton: A Typology of Conflicting Readings of the Two Books of Scripture and Nature in the Church of England from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
This dissertation studies the persistence within modern Anglicanism of (a) a classical "high view" of Scripture as the exemplar of creation, (b) the apologetic and phenomenological advantages of this view in the wake of Joseph Butler (1692-1752) due to (c) the kind of theodicy the Bible displays in contrast to more rationalistic proposals from deism to panentheism. (d) Finally, the view of theodicy and Scripture one takes will determine whether or not one reads the two books of Scripture and nature figurally. The "high view" was undercut by nineteenth-century sectarian polemics between Protestants and Tractarians. Yet a minority kept this tradition alive. Lionel Thornton (1884-1960) is important to this project because he escaped from Tractarian and Protestant dead ends. The dissertation lays out this broader Anglican story and then focuses on Thornton, for whose work I provide historical context and a detailed examination. I first analyze his early, philosophical-theological period where he defended an incarnational theodicy over against the panentheistic-monist alternative: the "soul-making" theodicy. Thornton's theodicy led him to take up a realist ("Platonist") metaphysic and phenomenology in order to resist the monist tendency to smooth over antinomies in Scripture and nature, especially the problem of evil. Next, I look at the theodical alternatives through the lens of Thornton and his mentor, John Neville Figgis (1866-1919). In contrast to the Modernist monism of Charles Raven and others, Figgis and Thornton resisted the temptation to offer an etiology of evil. They concluded that grace overcame evil by reordering the past. The last chapter, therefore, looks at Thornton’s view of the temporal and cosmic reach of Christ's reordering work of "recapitulation", and the hermeneutical consequences that follow: namely, that having reunited creation by rescuing it from the dispersive power of evil, every trivial detail of creation came to reflect Christ. I argue that this way of handling the Bible follows consistently from a biblical, non-monist, theodicy. Furthermore, I believe Thornton's project shared a family resemblance to Butler's, for, like the latter's, it indicated that the rejection of figural reading implied methodological atheism. This larger argument touches on contemporary hermeneutical debates within the Church.Doctor of Theology (ThD
