Hampden, Renn Dickson

(1793–1868)

   Bishop and Theologian.

   Hampden was educated at the University of Oxford and became a fellow of Oriel College. He was the Bampton Lecturer of 1832 and he recommended a Christianity in which dogma played a relatively minor part. As a Broad Churchman, he was bitterly opposed by John Henry newman and his followers and the mistrust was fully reciprocated. The High Church party tried to prevent his appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity in 1837 and, ten years later, they campaigned against his consecration as Bishop of Hereford. In the event he proved to be a popular and conscientious Bishop. Hampden’s own writings are no longer read, but he is remembered as typical of the liberal churchmen against whom the adherents of the Oxford Movement fulminated.

   C. Dawson, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (1933);

   H. Hampden, Some Memorials of Renn Dickson Hampden (1871);

   H. Swanston, Ideas of Order: Anglicans and the Renewal of Theological Method in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (1974).