High Church revival in the Age of Reason and Revolution

Walked then immediately to the Cathedral, and heard a very good sermon preached by a Dr. Cobb, Rector of Carleton St Peter, very severe on Dr. Priestly the Apostate if properly named - from the diary of Parson Woodforde, entry for 7th July 1791.

This is one of the joys of The Diary of a Country Parson.  Alongside the grace of the ordinary which fills the diary, and the Wendell Berry-like sense of place, each page of the diary also provides some detail which gives insight into the life of late 18th century Anglicanism.

This particular entry is an example of a reoccurring theme throughout the 'long eighteenth century': a robust affirmation of the Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy of the Formularies, a commitment shared by both High Church and Reformed/Evangelical traditions within Anglicanism (on this, see Stephen Hampton's Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I). 

"Dr. Priestly the Apostate" was the infamous author of  the anti-Trinitarian The History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782).  As J.C.D. Clark showed in his now classic English Society 1688-1832, both the Socinianism of Priestly and his rejection of the "Anglican doctrine of the State" called forth a "formidable scholarly defence of doctrinal Orthodoxy", led by the High Church tradition. 

Clark particularly emphasises the significance of Samuel Horsley (made Bishop of Rochester in 1793) in this revival of the High Church tradition, with Latitudinarianism theologically exhausted and unconvincing in the face of theological and political challenges to the Anglican order.  F.C. Mather's study of Horsley - High Church Prophet - notes that his rebuttal of Priestly's Socinianism (in an extended debate from 1783 to 1790) led "to the revival of a positive High Church theology", with the result that "the doctrine of the Trinity became the touchstone of the teaching authority of the Anglican Church and of its standing in the community".

And so we come with Parson Wooforde to Norwich Cathedral in July 1791, gathering with other clergy from his deanery for an episcopal visitation.  There they heard the sermon by another parson refuting Priestly, an expression of that revived High Church tradition and its commitment to the patristic orthodoxy of the Anglican Formularies.

This, of course, was not meant to be happening in the Age of Reason.  As Mather states, the defence of Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy which had been seen in Waterland and the High Church tradition of the early 18th century, had been "progressively undermined by the eighteenth-century retreat from the appeal to antiquity, as Scripture interpreted by reason alone was not considered a sufficient proof of the Athanasian construction".  Added to this, the Revolutions in the American colonies and France gave rise to a sense of a new political and social order in which, it seemed, orthodox, Trinitarian Christianity would, at best, be irrelevant, an unwanted relic of past dark ages.

The sermon heard by Parson Woodforde, however, witnesses to a widespread High Church revival of Trinitarian orthodoxy and Anglican political theology in a theological, cultural and political context in which many assumed this could not occur.  Not only did it occur, but it produced a compelling account of ecclesial and civic being and identity.  Just weeks before the sermon in Norwich Cathedral against "the Apostate", Priestly wrote to a correspondent that the "majority" of English people sympathised with the "High Church Party" (quoted in Clark, p.344).