J I Packer’s preface to Griffith Thomas’ Principles of Theology : Anglican Church League, Sydney, Australia

The unread book in Anglicanism at large.


J I Packer’s preface to Griffith Thomas’ Principles of Theology : Anglican Church League, Sydney, Australia

In 1977, Dr J I Packer wrote the Preface to an edition of W.H. Griffith Thomas’ The Principles of Theology.

“As in general terms Calvin’s 1559 Institutes rounded off the forty-year Reformation era in European theology, so in general terms The Principles of Theology may be said to have rounded off a four-hundred year era of Protestant Anglicanism, and in particular to have summed up a century of vigilant scholarship which, in face of what looked like Rome’s Trojan horse in the Church of England, had sought to vindicate historic Protestantism as authentically Anglican and as the only position with more than squatter’s rights within the Establishment.

This was the scholarship of such men as William Goode, George Cornelius Gorham, T. P. Boultbee, T. S. L. Vogan, Nathaniel Dimock, E. A. Litton, Henry Wace, Handley C. G. Moule, J. T. Tomlinson, W. Prescott Upton and Charles Sydney Carter – giants in the land in their own day, however little remembered now.”