Theologia Cambrensis

Without doubt this book by D. Densil Morgan aptly fills a gap in the historiography of Welsh religion and theology. It may, as the endorsement on the cover claims, address the fact that Welsh theology is ‘almost unknown outside Wales’; but more certainly it brings into one place a summary of the central ideas of Protestant writers, down to the mid-eighteenth century, which together embody a canon of influential Welsh thinking on religion. The author’s method is to provide biographical sketches of his subjects and then summarise the essence of their writings, so that the book is a valuable survey for anyone wishing to discover the principal ideas of a given Protestant author, preacher or polemicist during the period under review. The biographical and theological summaries are never less than concise and judicious, and the volume deserves to become a standard text for Welsh historians and theologians alike. As a survey volume, it is thoroughly inflected with a strongly whiggish sense of Protestant progress: David Hempton is quoted to describe the period as a transition from ‘the confessional age of the magisterial Reformation’ to ‘the second stage of the history of Protestantism’. The second volume promises ‘Protestantism’s triumph ... to the first signs of its ominous decline’, and one senses that for the author it is indeed the decline that was ominous, rather than the first signs

Physics · Protestantism · Theology · Volume (thermodynamics · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies · Religious Studies