scholarly journals William Talbot and Church Parties 1688–1730

2007 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM GIBSON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity

It has been assumed by historians that the High and Low Church parties in the early eighteenth-century Church of England were exclusive and homogenous groups. However the life and career of Bishop William Talbot, as with a number of other clergy, raises questions about these assumptions. Though Talbot was ostensibly a Latitudinarian Whig, he embraced some clear High Church principles, including those on the Trinity and on the sacerdotal nature of the priesthood. Talbot also repeatedly opposed the idea of a split between High and Low Churchmen, which had its origin in political abuse rather than theological principle. This study of Talbot's thought suggests that churchmen were able to embrace both High and Low Church principles and thus demands a reconceptualisation of the presumption of exclusivity in the two parties. Historians therefore need to revise their views of the Church parties of the early eighteenth century and to recognise that they existed as overlapping and complementary tendencies around Anglican core values rather than as exclusive and opposing bi-polar structures.

Georgian Churchmanship Reconsidered: Some Variations in Anglican Public Worship 1714–1830

1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. C. Mather
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Good Works ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Public Worship

Current evaluation of the Church of England under the first four Georges follows in the main the assessment made by Norman Sykes in his monumental Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1934. According to that view the Church, which was lastingly cleared of the universal slackness previously imputed to it, exhibited a pervasive Latitudinarianism sympathetically portrayed by Sykes as ‘practical Christianity’, an emphasis on cdnduct and good works to the neglect of ‘organised churchmanship’ and the ‘mystical element’ in religion. R. W. Greaves detected similar features in the concept of ‘moderation’: suspicion of popery and friendship towards dissenters, a cult of plainness in theological explanation and a very general contempt of whatever was medieval. Historians have been willing to acknowledge as exceptions to this ‘mild’ quality of Anglican churchmanship the early Methodists and ‘small Evangelical and High Church minorities’, but only the two former have been taken seriously. Piety of a more traditional kind - rubrical, sacramental, Catholic - has been identified, only to be discounted. The Establishment has been seen in the light of the judgement recently summarised by Dr Anthony Russell: ‘Certainly the temper of the eighteenth century which favoured reason above all else, and was deeply suspicious of mysticism and the emotions, was against any form of sacramentalism.’

THE OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY CONTROVERSY, MODERATION, AND THE ANGLICAN CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY, 1700–1714

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRENT S. SIROTA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Unique Characteristic ◽  
Short Term ◽  
English Society ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
High Church ◽  
Early English ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Revolution

ABSTRACTThe occasional conformity controversy during the reign of Queen Anne has traditionally been understood as a straightforward symptom of the early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’. For all the pious rhetoric concerning toleration and the church in danger, the controversy is considered a partisan squabble for short-term political gain. This traditional interpretation has, however, never been able to account for two features of the controversy: first, the focus on ‘moderation’ as a unique characteristic of post-Revolutionary English society; and second, the prominence of the Anglican nonjurors in the debate. This article revisits the occasional conformity controversy with an eye toward explaining these two related features. In doing so, it will argue that the occasional conformity controversy comprised a referendum on the Revolution settlement in church and state. Nonjurors lit upon the practice of occasional conformity as emblematic of the broader malady of moderation afflicting post-Revolutionary England. From their opposition to occasional conformity, the nonjurors, and soon the broader Anglican high-church movement, developed a comprehensive critique of religious modernity that would inform the entire framework of debate in the early English Enlightenment.

The Career of John Abernethy (1680–1740) Father of Nonsubscription in Ireland and Defender of Religious Liberty

1985 ◽  
Vol 78 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity

The British theological world was stirred at the beginning of the eighteenth century by what the learned and staunchly orthodox Presbyterian historian James Seaton Reid has called “latitudinarian notions on the inferiority of dogmatic belief and the nature of religious liberty.” In the 1690s John Locke had published his Reasonableness of Christianity and Letters on Toleration, followed by John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious. In 1710 “Honest Will” Whitson, Sir Isaac Newton's successor as Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, was expelled from the University for embracing Arian views. His departure was accompanied by rumors—long since substantiated—about his great predecessor's heterodox theology. Traditional theologians were shocked next by the appearance of Dr. Samuel Clark's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity which resulted in the author's arraignment before Convocation of the Church of England in 1714. The very same year John Simson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow, was first tried before the General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church for teaching Arian and Pelagian errors. In 1729, after three more trials, Simson was suspended from his professorship for denying the numerical oneness of the Trinity. Fierce doctrinal contentions also began to occupy English Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, erupting during the famous Salters’ Hall meeting early in 1719.

Anglican Evangelicalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth Atkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Provincial Society ◽  
The Church

This chapter traces the emergence and development of Anglican Evangelicalism from the early eighteenth century onwards. It argues that while Evangelicals have always harked back to the first, formative generations of their movement, this has tended to obscure the theological diversity, practical pragmatism, and fluid organization that characterized the new piety. What follows, then, examines the beginnings of an enduring movement, but it also outlines a distinct phase in its existence. The first section considers the gradual emergence of Evangelicalism as a distinct identity in the Church of England; the second, its ramification in clerical associations and among groups of prosperous laypeople; the third, its infiltration of metropolitan officialdom and provincial society via organized philanthropy and patronage. As well as mapping the networks that spread Evangelical influence, it explores the lasting tensions thus generated: above all, what did it mean to be both Anglican and Evangelical?

Robert Nelson's Festivals and Fasts and the Problem of the Sacred in Early Eighteenth-Century England

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 556-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent S. Sirota
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Religious Transformation ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
Early English ◽  
The Church

The pious layman Robert Nelson's 1704 tract A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England was arguably the most popular and important Anglican devotional work of the eighteenth century. Ostensibly a simple guidebook to the Anglican liturgical calendar, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was, in fact, a précis of Anglican theology and ecclesiology. What has been less clearly recognized, however, was the extent to which Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was also a sharply polemical work. This article considers Nelson's tract as a defense of “the sacred” as demarcating a socially and cognitively distinct sphere of life. Nelson's work takes great pains to maintain the spaces, offices, festivals and personnel of the church as “set apart” from the commerce of everyday life; and nearly every page exudes a fear of encroachment on the sacred. Nelson's conception of the sacred, and the manifold threats to its differentiation, provokes a reconsideration of the prevalent narratives of religious transformation in the early English enlightenment. Most importantly, it underscores the serious limitations of the current debate over secularization in this period.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

scholarly journals Christian Antiquity and the Anglican Reception of John Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, 1707–1730

Locke Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Jacob Donald Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Primary Motivation ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theological Thought

The study of John Locke’s theological thought has yet to be combined with emerging historical research, pioneered by Jean-Louis Quantin, into the apologetic uses of Christian antiquity in the Restoration Church of England. This article will address this historiographical lacuna by making two related arguments. First, I will contend that Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1705–1707) marked a definitive shift in his critique of the appeal to Christian antiquity. Prior to 1700, Locke had largely contested these references to the precedent of the early Christian Church by making a narrowly philosophical case against arguments from authority in general. However, the controversial reception of Locke’s theological writings in the 1690s, compelled him to develop historical and methodological arguments in the Paraphrase against the witness of Christian antiquity. Secondly, I will argue that Locke’s repudiation of the witness of Christian antiquity was the primary motivation for the diverse responses to the Paraphrase by early eighteenth-century Anglican writers, such as Robert Jenkin, Daniel Whitby, William Whiston, Winch Holdsworth and Catharine Cockburn.  

Edmund Burke, Dissent and Church and State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church ◽  
At Home

This chapter examines Edmund Burke’s attitude towards Protestant dissenters, particularly the more radical or rational ones who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards the Church of England and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke’s attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. The catalyst for Burke’s emergence as leader of those who feared that revolution abroad might become a distemper at home was Richard Price’s Discourse on Love of Our Country. The chapter analyses how Burke moved from advocating toleration for Dissenters to become a staunch defender of establishment as to have ‘un-Whigged’ himself. It also considers the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as well as Burke’s attitude towards Church–state relations.

Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

This chapter examines the interactions between politics inside and outside of the British Parliament as well as the issue of Church reform. Attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century. During the intervening period, Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches along with various acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The chapter establishes the complex route by which challenges to and changes within the Church of England translated into a concern to act among parliamentary elites.

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