Peter Toon was a priest and theologian and an international advocate of traditional Anglicanism.
Early life and education
Toon was born to Thomas Arthur and Hilda Toon in Yorkshire, England, in 1939. His younger siblings were Paul, David and Christine. He attended and graduated from the following schools and colleges:
After an earlier career as a college lecturer in religious studies, Toon was ordained deacon in 1973 and priest in 1974 in the Diocese of Liverpool. He served a short title curacy in Skelmersdale, before taking a post in Oxford as Librarian of Latimer House, the headquarters and library of a conservative evangelical pressure group during which time he also served as curate of St Ebbe's, a central Oxford evangelical parish church. In 1976 he became a tutor at Oak Hill Theological College in London, training ordinands, and then from 1982 Director of Post-Ordination Training in the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich in East Anglia. He returned briefly to parish ministry before moving to the United States of America in 1991. In the last decade of his working life, he served as President and CEO of the Prayer Book Society of the USA, and his life and work were centred in America, although he did return briefly to England, and was for four years the priest-in-charge of the villages of Biddulph Moor and Brown Edge in Staffordshire. Toon wrote over 25 books, together with numerous booklets, essays and articles. He also engaged in internet authorship and discussion, contributing to these topical online discussions until his death.
Style and beliefs
Toon's work repeatedly stressed the importance of the "Historic Formularies" of the Anglican tradition, defined in the Preface to the Declaration of Assent as "the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordering of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons". His work was marked by clarity of presentation and strength of persuasion, attracting praise from supporters and critical attention from antagonists. He often wrote and spoke about the controversies in the Anglican Communion concerning issues of liturgical reform and the ordination of women, on both of which issues he took a strongly conservative line. With the widespread adoption of the new liturgies in the Church of England and similar liturgical resources in other provinces, Toon became a notable spokesman and theological advocate for the strong minority lobby favouring traditionalist views, and the retention of the seventeenth-century liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer. Although Toon is remembered, particularly in later life, for his association with these controversies, and with the Continuing Anglican movement which arose, particularly in America, out of opposition to reforms, he was also a gifted theologian and biblical commentator, whose work was of a general nature, not associated with controversy, and widely employed by students of biblical analysis.
