Four Philosophical Anglicans

Alan Sell has published 25 books, mostly on philosophico-theological relations, two of them with Ashgate: Mill on God, and Testimony and Tradition. He was General Editor and Co-ordinating Editor of Vol. 2 of the series, Protestant Nonconformist Texts. He has held academic posts in England, Canada and Wales, ecclesiastical posts in England and Geneva, and continues to work full-time as researcher/author/editor, and as a Visiting Professor at home and abroad.

'Alan Sell has earned our warmest thanks for showing us the rich resources of Christian philosophy in these recent thinkers who were too early to be beholden to our current apologetic fashions. Anglicans should be proud of them'. Terence Penelhum, University of Calgary, Canada We should be grateful to Alan Sell for this thoroughgoing and detailed discussion of four largely unread twentieth-century philosophical theologians. This book, which is at once erudite and entertaining, reads like the account of a seminar in which the author is a sympathetic outsider who wants to understand what makes people think the way they do about God and the world - and then to see whether this can still inform the task of Christian theology and apologetics today. Mark D. Chapman, Ripon College Cuddesdon and University of Oxford, UK '... the arguments are presented clearly and critically, and even when the particular views of the four philosophical Anglicans seem dated, the issues such as the value of scientific reasoning and the metaphysical basis of doctrine are abiding concerns of Christian thought.' Anglican & Episcopal History '[This book] is a tightly argued, thought provoking critique of four Church of England clerics whose scholarship and erudition were substantial and alas not that widely known. Sell in my view successfully redresses this imbalance. De Burgh, Matthews, Quick and Hodges should indeed be recognised as ’prophets not without honour’, both in their home country and beyond.' The Expository Times

• Contents: Preface; Introduction; William George de Burgh (1866-1943): reason, morality and religion; Walter Robert Matthews (1881-1973): experience, rationality and revelation; Oliver Chase Quick (1885-1944): philosophy, theology, ecumenism; Herbert Arthur Hodges (1905-1976): Christian philosopher, believing sceptic; Comparisons, contrasts and assessment; Bibliography; Indexes.