462 - Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America

Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America
Robert Bruce Mullin
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986. 247 pp. $20.00.

Mullin chronicles an ecclesiastical and theological tradition that self-consciously stood over against the wave of evangelicalism that overran the American Christian community in the early nineteenth century. He explains how the Episcopal Church's identification with Great Britain during the American Revolution forced its adherents to advocate a stricter separation of church and state, and, at the same time, highlight its distinctively high church roots after that political upheaval. The theology of Bishop John Henry Hobart represented this trend, and Mullin provides an excellent analysis of the ecclesiastical and social implications of Hobart's views as well as their decline under the new pressures of pre-Civil War America. Unlike many works of this type, Mullin also manages to encapsulate the views of the evangelical community in such a fair and succinct manner that the book is worth reading if only for the summary treatments of the majority perspective.

Million J. Coalter, Jr.
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Louisville, Ky.