Continuity and Development

This article compares the typological exegesis promoted by E. B. Pusey (1800–82) and his colleagues John Henry Newman and John Keble with that of their eighteenth-century Hutchinsonian predecessor William Jones of Nayland (1726–1800). Building on Peter Nockles’s argument that Jones’s emphasis on the figurative character of biblical language foreshadows the Tractarian application of the sacramental principle to exegesis, this article shows how this common approach differs from the more cautious one displayed by the High Church luminaries William Van Mildert and Herbert Marsh. At the same time, both Pusey’s criticism of the mainstream apologetics of his day and his more explicit application of the doctrine of the Incarnation to exegesis resulted in bolder interpretations and a greater emphasis on the necessity of figurative readings (of both the Bible and the natural world) than Jones generally proposed. A shared appreciation of the principle of reserve may explain both these differences and the Tractarian emphasis on a patristic, rather than a Hutchinsonian, inspiration for their approach.