"For three decades, he flashed like a meteor across the theological horizon, and then vanished." So writes Alan P.F. Sell of Nels F.S. Ferre (1908-1971), a mid-twentieth-century theologian whose work is little remembered, despite his constructive and often provocative contributions to theological debates that endure today. While Professor Sell speculates upon the reasons for this inattention, his primary concern is to show that Ferre's works raise timeless questions about the relations between content and method in theology. How far do the personal convictions of theologians influence their...

This book is one of four substantial volumes designed to demonstrate the range of interests of the several Protestant Nonconformist traditions from the time of their Separatist harbingers to the end of the twentieth century. In this volume we are concerned with the eighteenth century. It was a period in which Old Dissent--the Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers--had to face challenges from Enlightenment thought on the one hand and Evangelical Revival enthusiasm on the other. Largely in their own words, though with introductions contributed by the editors, we enter into...

Alan Sell explores the lives and ideas of four unjustly neglected Anglican philosophers: W. G. De Burgh (1866-1943); W. R. Matthews (1881-1973); 0. C. Quick (1885-1944); H. A. Hodges (1905-1976). This study fills an important gap in the history of twentieth-century philosophical and theological thought. Sell argues that these writers covered a wide range of philosophical topics in an illuminating way, and that a comparison of their respective standpoints and methods is instructive from the point of view of the viability or otherwise of Christian philosophizing. He discusses the challenges...