To Build Christ's Kingdom

Book excerpt: Frank Dennison Maurice (1805-72) was arguably the most significant Anglican thinker of the modern age, with an 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 he established the formula of 'Scripture, creeds, sacrament and episopacy' which has guided Anglican approaches to inter-church relations for a century. This reader draws on sermons, pamphlets as well as his classic texts. An introductory essay explores the man and his remarkable legacy.