Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (December 13, 1815 - July 18, 1881), was an English churchman, dean of Westminster.

Legacy

Stanley was the leading liberal theologian of his time in England. His writings reveal a distinctive genius and extraordinary gifts, but also his special views, aims and aspirations. He regarded the age in which he lived as a period of transition, to be followed either by an "eclipse of faith" or by a "revival of Christianity in a wider aspect," a "catholic, comprehensive, all-embracing Christianity" that "might yet overcome the world.? He was never tired of asserting his belief ?that the Christian Church had not yet presented its final or its most perfect aspect to the world"; that "the belief of each successive age of Christendom had as a matter of fact varied enormously from the belief of its predecessor"; that "all confessions and similar documents are, if taken as final expressions of absolute truth, misleading"; and that "there still remained, behind all the controversies of the past, a higher Christianity which neither assailants nor defenders had fully exhausted." "The first duty of a modern theologian" he held to be "to study the Bible, not for the sake of making or defending systems out of it, but for the sake of discovering what it actually contains." To this study he looked for the best hope of such a progressive development of Christian theology as should avert the danger arising from "the apparently increasing divergence between the intelligence and the faith of our time." He enforced the duty "of placing in the background whatever was accidental, temporary or secondary, and of bringing into due prominence what was primary and essential." In the former group Stanley would, without doubt or hesitation, have placed all questions connected with Episcopal or Presbyterian orders, or that deal only with the outward forms or ceremonies of religion, or with the authorship or age of the books of the Old Testament. Even to the question of miraculous and external evidence he would have been inclined to assign a secondary place.

Related Topics:
Episcopal - Presbyterian - Old Testament

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The foremost and highest place, that of the "essential and supernatural" elements of religion, he would have reserved for its moral and spiritual truths, "its chief evidence and chief essence," the truths to be drawn from the teaching and from the life of Christ, "in whose character he did not hesitate to recognize ?the greatest of all miracles."

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With such views it was not to be wondered at that, from first to last, as has already been indicated, he never lost an opportunity of supporting a policy of width, toleration and comprehension in the Church of England. So again he was always eager to insist on the essential points of union between various denominations of Christians. He was throughout his life an unflinching advocate of the connection between Church and State. By this he understood: (1) "the recognition and support on the part of the state of the religious expression of the faith of the community," and (2) "that this religious expression of the faith of the community on the most sacred and most vital of all its interests should be controlled and guided by the whole community through the supremacy of law." At the same time he was in favour of making the creed of the Church as wide as possible—"not narrower than that which is even now the test of its membership, the Apostles' Creed"—and of throwing down all barriers which could be wisely dispensed with to admission to its ministry. As an immediate step he even advocated the admission under due restrictions of English Nonconformists and Scottish Presbyterians, to preach in Anglican pulpits.

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Apart from the great impulse which he gave to the study alike of the Bible and Church history, his influence may be said in a very true sense to colour the writings of many of those who most differ from him. The subjects to which he looked as, the most essential of all—the universality of the divine love, the supreme importance of the moral and spiritual elements of religion, the supremacy of conscience, the sense of the central citadel of Christianity as being contained in the character, the history, the spirit of its divine Founder—have impressed themselves more and more on the teaching and the preaching of every class of clergy in the Church.

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This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

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