Roger T. Beckwith (1929-2023) – A Tribute
by Andrew Atherstone, Latimer Trust:
Roger Beckwith’s many decades of theological industry on behalf of the evangelical cause in the Church of England are interwoven with the story of Latimer House, the forerunner of Latimer Trust.
[…] Latimer House’s warden from 1962 was an up-and-coming evangelical theologian, James I. Packer. His deputy from 1963 as Latimer House librarian was Roger Beckwith, a young church historian and liturgist. An Oxford graduate, Beckwith had served his first curacy at St Peter’s, Harold Wood, in east London, a parish with a long evangelical history, followed by four years as tutor at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, an evangelical theological college founded by the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society. Together, Packer and Beckwith made an impressive team, helping to put Latimer House on the map with an energetic programme of theological activity, speaking, advising, consulting, writing, and rallying the evangelical troops.
Beckwith produced a steady output, especially tracts and essays, for the Latimer House imprint and for journals such as The Churchman (now renamed The Global Anglican). He contributed to numerous evangelical working parties and symposia, and published clarion calls on the hot issues of the day, such as Time for Secession? (1964), which urged evangelicals to stay in the Church of England and not abandon ship for nonconformity. His first major book – and the first ‘Latimer monograph’ from Marcham Manor Press – was Priesthood and Sacraments (1964), critiquing the theological confusion at the heart of the proposals for an ecumenical merger between the Church of England and the Methodist Church. Beckwith was much in demand as a speaker at Diocesan Evangelical Fellowships and served on the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) as one of its key theologians. At the invitation of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, he was also a Church of England representative on the Anglican–Orthodox ecumenical dialogue from 1968. His greatest love, however, was liturgy and he invested considerable energies in promoting the Book of Common Prayer as one of the theological treasures of Anglicanism, then in danger of being eclipsed by a flood of anaemic ‘alternative’ services. When a new principal was appointed at Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall in 1970, with a mandate to restore the college’s evangelical heritage after some bleak years of liberal decline, Beckwith was soon recruited as a part-time liturgy lecturer.
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