William Warburton established the Warburton Lectures in 1768, with those invited charged with providing ‘A lecture in the form of a sermon to prove the truth of revealed religion in general and of the Christian in particular from the completion of those prophecies in the Old and New Testament which relate to the Christian Church especially to the apostasy of papal Rome’. There is clearly much to interrogate in this job description, and it is perhaps not to be regretted that none of the lectures included in this volume fully meet the original aims of the trustees. On my reading, the apostasy of Rome is entirely absent from the eleven lectures collected in this volume and, while many are broadly apologetic in tenor, none seeks to show the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. The decision of lecturers not to follow the letter of the charge results in a diverse set of offerings, joined more strongly by their place in the lecture series than by any common theme.
In his 1995 lecture, Thomas Torrance argued that scientific laws are misunderstood as fixed and immutable and, once it is appreciated that they are necessarily incomplete and open-structured, the similarity with moral laws is clear. He claimed that science has an inescapably moral status, and the ‘scientific conscience’, like the moral conscience, is grounded in the nature of ultimate reality. WB Norman, lecturing in 1996, offered a brief theology of other religions along the lines of Alan Race's inclusivist, exclusivist and pluralistic typology and opts for a version of inclusivism. John Habgood, in 1997, asked whether it matters that Warburton was wrong about so many things, considering the examples of Casaubon in George Elliot's Middlemarch and Hitler's architect, Albert Speer. He concluded that it does matter because reality is not of our making and there is a difference between a wasted and a fruitful life, but that it does not matter very much, because being wrong is part of life and God leads us through error to truth.
Alan Webster, lecturing in 1998, gave an account of three servants of St Paul's: Ralph Inge, Richard Church and Sydney Smith. He quotes the latter as quipping, ‘I never read a book before reviewing it — it prejudices a man so’ (p 58): advice that would have been more helpful to reviewers earlier in the book. In 1999, Daniel Hardy argued for a distinctively English view of history, distinct from German systematisation and US individualism, and characterised by faith that goodness is being realised in history. William Rees-Mogg used his 2000 lecture to defend eighteenth-century religion against its detractors, maintaining that ‘the Church of England in the eighteenth century was [as] energetic, idealist and passionate about its faith, spiritual and full of life, as it had been in the seventeenth, or was to be in the nineteenth century’ (p 91). In his 2001 lecture, David Stancliffe reflected that the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law is arguably the most significant change for British citizens since Queen Elizabeth I's revised Act of Supremacy in 1559 and argued that to decide between conflicts of liberties requires the discerment of God's pattern, for which we need the religions of the world to join in a common witness to the doctrine of creation. Geoffrey Rowell celebrated, in 2002, the via media that John Henry Newman set out for the church, keeping to an Aristotelian mean between all manner of competing forces.
Lecturing in 2003, Tom Bingham asked whether rights are endowed by the Creator, by-products of religious faith, or are a set of human principles devised by humans. He took the middle view: ‘mainstream religion has no more than an indirect concern with human rights’ (p 127), though he conceded that respecting human rights is consonant with love of one's neighbour.Footnote 1 Stephen Platten explored, in his 2004 lecture, the question of why it is that human beings behave altruistically so much of the time, in engaging dialogue with Thomas Hardy, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene and Edwin Muir. Finally, in 2005, Nigel McCulloch gave an account of the shifts in Christian understanding of the last judgement, including William Gladstone's concern that the decreasing emphasis on alarming people by the power of God should be reversed.
There is a decidedly dated feel to the expression, theological concerns and dialogue partners in the majority of the lectures. Tom Bingham, for example, takes it to be uncontentious to begin from the assertion that ‘the primary focus of religion is on the relationship between God and Man’ (p 124), which is archaic not only in capitalisation but also in relation to gender and an appreciation of the theological significance of God's creative endeavour beyond the merely human. Norman's aside that Mohammed might have been a good Christian teacher if he had met better Christians exhibits a similar distant naïveté. Much of the discussions about rights and other religions operates without apparent appreciation of recent theological contributions in these areas.
One striking theme that several of the lectures do have in common is their brutal honesty regarding the founder of the lecture series: most of the contributions seem to have a bad word to say about William Warburton, who is variously characterised as making serious doctrinal misjudgements, unimaginative, unspiritual, careerist, quarrelsome, lacking in insight and possessed of ‘an angry and pretentious bluster reminiscent of Giant Despair in Pilgrim's Progress’(Gordon Rupp, quoted by Geoffrey Rowell, p 107). Those considering endowing such a series would do well to note that it is by no means a guaranteed path to a generous remembering of one's legacy.
