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.

Maurice’s original writing is engaging and exciting, imaginative and passionate. This reader draws on sermons, pamphlets as well as his classic texts. A 10,000-word essay outlines his importance in Anglican spiritual theology.