Twenty-first-century evangelical Protestants are far more indebted to the Anglican evangelical tradition than they know. Every reader of Themelios has some familiarity with a recent line of scholar-preachers which (moving from present to past) might include Tom Wright, Alister McGrath, Gerald Bray, John Webster, Alec Motyer, Leon Morris, J. I. Packer, and John Stott. But these are all names that came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. We have much less to say about the previous half-century. What of G. T. Manley (d. 1961), the polymath who compiled The New Bible Handbook (1947)? There was, we recall, W. H. Griffith Thomas (d. 1924), the preacher-theologian highly admired on both sides of the Atlantic. Will anyone mention scholar-bishop Handley Moule (d. 1920)? By the time we have reached the better-known bishop J. C. Ryle (d. 1900), we have nearly reached our limit in identifying stalwart evangelical leaders within the Church of England.

But such a perspective is short-sighted. Crawford Stevener’s study of mid-Victorian preacher-theologian William Goode (1801–1868) draws deserved attention to the career and significance of the man who did more, from a literary and polemical point of view, to preserve a place of theological integrity for evangelicalism within the Church of England than any man of his generation. Faced with the multiple challenges posed by Irvingism (the 1830s claim that the charismata had been restored) and the Oxford Movement (an 1830s movement led by John Henry Newman which claimed that the Church of England had always been intended to more fully align with Rome), Goode took note and then wrote. When the Cambridge Camden Society sought to promote the building of Gothic revival churches and the renovating of others to conform to that idea, and when an obstreperous bishop obstructed the installation of a minister who would not affirm baptismal regeneration, Church of England evangelicals looked to William Goode for literary and theological leadership. American evangelical Episcopalians were also paying close attention (pp. 20, 57).

Goode did not disappoint. He regularly produced weighty tomes (too weighty in the judgment of many readers!), rich with patristic and Reformation learning. He is remembered especially for The Divine Rule of Faith and Practice (1842), Altars Prohibited by the Church of England (1844), and The Doctrine of the Church of England on the Two Doctrines of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (1864). Goode churned out these authoritative volumes while a functioning minister and in the same years when his personal life was thrown into confusion by a house fire (which destroyed a manuscript near completion), the death of two sons, and the loss of his wife. In recognition of his titanic labors, he was appointed to important London pastorates and eventually made the dean of Ripon Cathedral.

The reviewer maintains that it is unwise for today’s evangelicals (especially Anglicans, but others also) to be ignorant of Goode and others like him. He agrees with the author, Stevener, that the scant attention given to Goode by more recent authors Peter Toon (Evangelical Theology 1833–1856: A Response to Tractarianism, New Foundations Theological Library [London: Westminster John Knox, 1979]) and Elizabeth Jay, ed. (The Evangelical and Oxford Movements [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979]) has scarcely done justice to the man. Why is this ignorance unwise? Evangelical distinctives such as the supreme authority of Holy Scripture in all matters of faith, the finality of the priesthood of Christ (such that we have no priests any longer), the absolute necessity of personal faith in Christ, the irreducible role of faith in the profitable reception of both baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and gospel simplicity in the interior furnishing of churches—these are convictions which have been preserved down to our time because Goode, with associates, labored so hard to articulate them in the Victorian period. Like a spreading virus, these same issues would eventually vex many denominations beyond Anglicanism before the Victorian age ended. Goode must be recognized as in the vanguard, championing distinctives of the whole evangelical family.

Some readers of this review might respond to these assertions by insisting instead that the battles Goode waged were battles that arose precisely because it was theologically comprehensive churches (like the Church of England) which were content to be elastic, permitting a range of views beyond what was biblically defensible. More strictly bounded churches ought to have been free of such tugs of war. But this is not how the past century and a half have in fact unfolded. Today’s evangelical churches (free, they think, of the ambiguities which kept Goode’s pen so busy) are increasingly dabbling in the kinds of practices which agitated Goode and his peers. The keeping of Lent and associated “holy” days, an openness (by some) to think of pastors in priestly terms, a growing interest in clerical garb, and a surging interest in printed liturgies suggest a creeping “Anglicanization” within branches of evangelical Protestantism. These trends, in America at least, are traceable to the career of the late Robert E. Webber (d. 2007) and, still earlier, Thomas Howard (d. 2020). This reviewer considers himself deeply indebted to Anglican evangelicalism; what troubles him is evidence of undiscerning dabbling in the Anglican and Anglo-Catholic tradition as if no road maps existed to guide this enterprise. Men like Goode have already traveled these roads.

Crawford Stevener, having gained the Manchester PhD for the research underlying William Goode: 1801–1868, is now Senior Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church East Side in Manhattan. He has put us all in his debt with this timely study, the contemporary applications of which are many.