Sunday, June 14, 2026

Anglican Theologians

It has been a very long time since I have done an internet quiz, so here is one I saw recently that was actually interesting food for thought: What Anglican Theologian Are You?



My broader 'constellation', according to the quiz consists of, besides Andrewes, Charles Gore, Joseph Butler, Dorothy Sayers, and William Laud. That makes a lot of sense; given the list of Anglican theologians used by the site, if asked what my favorites were, Butler and Sayers both would certainly have been in the top five. I would have also placed Richard Hooker in the top five, but, as it happens, he's number six here. I actually don't particularly like Gore, but it also makes sense -- just as a matter of abstract description, Gore reads as the sort of theologian I would like (I just don't think he does it very well). 

Laud is a bit of a surprise, but, of course, in real-life rather than just internet quizzes I am more High Church than even Laud, because I am actually Catholic and not just Catholic-ish. I suppose it also ties to why the Anglican theologians I am least like are all liberal Anglicans of various kind, which is not that I dislike liberal Anglican theology as such, but that I consider it to have an irritatingly defective ecclesiology. Liberal Anglicans and Latitutidinarians  tend to treat the Church on earth as a sort of clubby association, a Jesus fandom, the sort of ecclesiology that most grates on my nerves, but I tend to think of the Church on earth as more like a rough frontier town of a divine civilization. Thus it makes sense again why Gore would be the liberal Anglican, and Butler the latitudinarian, that score most highly for me.

Of course, it's purely a matter of questions selected and how they assign the answers, but Anglican theologians I would have expected to be higher on the list than they ended up here: Coleridge, Wesley, Farrer, Keble, Herbert, especially Farrer and Keble.