A Crisis in the Church of England

1914 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Special Function ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Church

The construction and working of ecclesiastical machinery has always been allowed to be the special function of High Churchmen of every description. For there are High Churchmen not only in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in America, but in every church. The division of churchmen into High, Low, and Broad is founded on the different attitudes of the human mind—legal, emotional, intellectual. All Christians reverence the Church, the Bible, and the conscience. But in presence of a problem one man will ask what is the teaching of the Church? Another will turn to consider what the Bible has to say about it. A third will endeavor to trace it to its basis in the necessities of thought and life. Religion is, for the High Churchman, devotion to an institution; for the Low Churchman, to a person; for the Broad Churchman, to abstract truth. Such sturdy guardians of the different important ways by which the soul approaches God are fortunately found in every church. And so the man who stands pre-eminently for the special tenets of the fathers, whether Calvin, Wesley, Swedenborg, or Channing, is as truly a High Churchman as he whose fathers are Ante- or Post-Nicene. And if the faith is regarded as having been delivered to the saints once and for all, the construction of machinery for its preservation will be not only the duty but the delight of the loyal ecclesiast.

Eucharistic Ecclesiology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Handschy
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Constitutional Reforms ◽  
The Church

As the constitutional reforms of the 1820s and 1830s called into question the nature of the establishment of the Church of England, leaders of the Oxford Movement looked to the American Episcopal Church as an example of a Church not dependent on state establishment. Bishops Samuel Seabury and John Henry Hobart had constructed a constitution for the American Episcopal Church based on a ‘purely spiritual’ episcopacy and a doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice. Their example influenced Hugh James Rose, John Henry Newman, E. B. Pusey, and John Keble in the course of the Oxford Movement, and this in turn influenced the course of the Ritualist movement within the American Episcopal Church.

The Evangelical Discovery of History

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 330-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bebbington
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Churches Of Christ ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Church

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.

General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (01) ◽  
pp. 80-84
Author(s):  
John F Stuart
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Church ◽  
National Borders

The General Synod met at St Paul's and St George's Church in Edinburgh from 9 to 11 June 2016. In his charge to Synod, the Primus, the Most Revd David Chillingworth, reflected on the injunction of St Paul to ‘please God, who tests our hearts’. As the Synod prepared to consider canonical change in relation to marriage, he asked how the Church was to continue to express the love and unity to which it was called by God. During the preceding year, deep pain in relationships had been experienced both in the Anglican Communion and with the Church of Scotland and Church of England – and there was a need to explore whether the Scottish Episcopal Church itself might have contributed to that distress and to shape a response that ‘pleased God, who tests our hearts'. In the light of the (then) forthcoming referendum on the European Union, the Primus suggested that it was not the wish of many in Scotland to use national borders to protect economic privilege. If the referendum took the UK out of the European Union, it could have profound effects on the unfolding story of the new Scotland and of the UK as a whole.

The Bishops and the Brethren: Anglican Attitudes to the Moravians in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 622-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. Podmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
New Churches ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
New Situation ◽  
The Church

Most Anglican crises, including recent ones, seem to boil down in the end to two linked questions — those of identity and authority. Is the Church of England pre-eminently a national or a catholic Church, a Protestant Church (and if so, of what kind?) or Anglican and sui generis? With which of these types of Church should it align itself? Where lies the famed via media, and which are the extremes to be avoided? And who has the authority to decide: as a national Church, parliament, the government, the monarch personally; as an episcopal Church, the bishops? Or should the clergy in convocations (or, latterly, the General Synod, including representatives of the pious laity) take decisions? Anglican crises have always raised these twin problems of identity and authority. In the mid-eighteenth century — from the end of the 1730s and particularly in the 1740s — the Church of England faced another crisis. The Anglican bishops had to come to terms with the movement known as the ‘evangelical revival’. Principles had to be applied to a new situation. The bishops had to decide how to categorise the new societies (or would they become new churches?) which were springing up all over England.

The Growth of the Layman's Power in the Episcopal Church

1912 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 63-77
Author(s):  
Daniel Dulany Addison
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Governing Body ◽  
Fundamental Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church

The layman's power in the Episcopal Church is equal to that of the clergy and the bishops. Not only in the management of the parish, as a member or a vestryman, but in the legislation of the Diocese, in the Diocesan Convention, and in the legislation of the Church as a whole, in the General Convention, all action must be taken with his consent. There must be a concurrence between the clerical and lay vote. In the Diocesan Convention each parish is represented by the clergyman and the lay delegates; and in the General Convention, each diocese is represented by four clergymen and four laymen and the bishop. This procedure is such a radical departure from the law of the Church of England, which planted the Church in the Colonies that an inquiry into its development and growth may be of value in analyzing American conditions and tendencies. Dr. S. D. McConnell in his history says: “The provision in its fundamental law for the admission of the laity into the Church's governing body as an independent estate is an arrangement which had not been in operation for fifteen centuries. It was a return to a practice of the most primitive period, and had no contemporary illustration.”

Choice and Action: William Ames's Concept of the Mind's Operation in Moral Decisions

1987 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Courter Boughton
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Moral Decisions ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Educational Authority ◽  
The Church ◽  
Will Of God

When William Ames (1576–1633) chose not to wear a surplice while preaching at a Cambridge University chapel, he embodied the Reformation spirit of defiance toward the symbols of ecclesiastical and educational authority. This action and subsequent signs of dissent within the Church of England earned Ames a life of exile in the Netherlands. Yet in serving as a professor at the Universities of Leiden and Franeker, the Puritan scholar perfected methods of instruction that would establish him as an authority among those similarly committed to learning the revealed will of God and investigating the structure and operation of the human mind.

1998 Belief, openness and religious commitment

Theology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
pp. 271-277
Author(s):  
Maurice Wiles
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Commitment ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Moral Basis ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Spiritual Tradition ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Mystery Of God ◽  
The Church

Canon Professor Maurice Wiles (1923–2005) wrote this article in retirement. At the outset of his career he was an Evangelical (as his review of Barth, also reproduced in this centenary issue, indicates), but by the 1970s he had moved to, and continued in, a distinctly more liberal direction. A gradual realization of the ‘complexity of the issues involved’ in theology (and, not least, within the Bible) spurred this move, as this article suggests. His aim finally is to search for ‘an intellectual and moral basis for sharing conscientiously and wholeheartedly in the rich spiritual tradition of Christian worship, belief and practice, without blinding oneself to its faults’. As a young man Wiles was recruited to work on code breaking at Bletchley Park during the war. In maturity he held the Regius Chair of Divinity at Oxford from 1970 until 1991. He also chaired the Church of England doctrine commission that produced the liberal report Christian Believing (1976) and contributed to the controversial book The Myth of God Incarnate the following year. Among his own books were The Making of Christian Doctrine (1967), The Remaking of Christian Doctrine (1974), Faith and the Mystery of God (1982) and, using his patristic skills, his late study of Arianism, Archetypal Heresy (1996). Editor.

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