The Text as Sacrament: Victorian Broad Church Philology

Abstract

The description ‘Broad Church’ popularized by W.J. Conybeare in his famous article on ‘Church Parties’ in 1853, whilst claiming as distinctive the watchwords ‘Charity and Toleration’ and ‘the desire of comprehension’, made no specific reference to philology. Yet philology was not a minor fad for the Broad Church. Though its connections with theology are not obvious today, it provided a vital tool for those theologians who were seeking to defend the authority and integrity of the Bible in a context in which, as they saw it, the emergence of critical historical and scientific approaches to the natural world had the potential to undermine the sacred canon, and to relegate it to a position of relative importance only in the human story of religion. Their study of philology therefore merits renewed attention by historians, as a contribution to the reception of the Bible as book in the Victorian Church.