laudable Practice

Another example of Richard Warner - in the first volume of his Old Church of England Principles Opposed to "New Light" - critiquing in Hookerian fashion excessively radical accounts of Original Sin and expressing the characteristically Anglican affirmation of and gratitude for signs of goodness and virtue in common life: I purpose, my brethren, to shew you, in the remaining part of my discourse, that all such notions as these are contrary to common sense and common experience, to the principles of the Established Church, and to the gospel of Jesus Christ; and, consequently, that all who teach them are neither reasonable, nor orthodox, nor scriptural preachers. These notions are, first, contrary to common sense and common experience. If mankind were nothing but a mass of corruption and wickedness, and had no other inclinations but such as are malignant and devilish, what would become of human society? or how could human beings exist all together? In that case, the hand of eve...

In the third volume of his 1818 collection of sermons - Old Church of England Principles Opposed to "New Light" -  Richard Warner refutes, in Hookerian fashion, excessively radical accounts of Original Sin which denied the place of reason, natural law, and virtue in the ordering of common life, the natural knowledge of God, the moral obligation to obey the Commandments, and the call of the Christian to co-operate with grace.  This Hookerian vision - rooted in the classical affirmation that Grace does not destroy Nature - is in many ways the foundation of the Anglican experience's routine and consistent rejection of sectarianism, and underpins the modesty, caution, and patience of its pastoral approach . They "prophesy falsely", then, who describe human nature, and every branch and faculty of it, as utterly and entirely corrupted by the transgression of Adam; as an unleavened mass of malignity and sin, incapable of any good thought, amiable feeling, virtuous aff...

In his excellent Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (2019), Andrew Davison states:  Our reason is a likeness to the divine Logos; similarly, what we come to know gets it being and intelligibility from its participation in God.  Since reason is a participation in divine truth in this twofold way, reason is already a sort of revelation (p.318). In a footnote, Davison points to Kathryn Tanner's equally excellent Christ the Key (2010) providing "illustrative examples on this theme" from the Cambridge Platonists, noting that the agreement with his Thomist account "is striking". Tanner, quoting from the Cambridge Platonists, says that they were "bucking Enlightenment trends in the understanding of divine agency, God's working ... not identified here with exceptional, occasional interventions that interrupt the ordinary operations of natural processes" (p.279).  She quotes Whichcote twice: reason is always the means of ...