The Church of England and the Anglican Communion: a timely engagement with the national church tradition?

2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Lockwood O'Donovan

The following is a critical appreciation of the Reformation theological foundations of English church establishment which seeks to demonstrate their importance not only for the Church of England in the current political and legal climate, but also for non-established Anglican churches and for the Anglican Communion. It identifies as their central structure the dialectic of church and nation, theologically articulated as the dialectic of proclamation and jurisdiction. The enduring achievement of this dialectic, the paper argues, is to hold in fruitful tension the two unifying authorities of sinful and redeemed human society: the authority of God's word of judgement and grace and the authority of the community of human judgement under God's word. The historical analysis traces the evolving ecclesiastical and civil poles of the dialectic through their Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan formulations, from William Tyndale and the early Cranmer to John Whitgift and Richard Hooker, clarifying the decisive late medieval and contemporary continental influences, and the key schematic contribution made by the humanist Thomas Starkey. A continuous concern of the exposition is with the paradigmatic place occupied by interpretations of monarchical Israel in the shifting constructions of both civil and ecclesiastical polity, with the attendant dangers from a relatively undialectical relation between the ‘old Israel’ and the ‘new Israel’. The concluding evaluation and application focuses on the contemporary need for a theological construction of the nation and the church that grasps the complexities of the dialectic of proclamation and jurisdiction, especially as they bear on the unity and discontinuity of ecclesiastical and secular law at the national and international levels.

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-196
Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller

Perkins’s work has been shown to stand at the intersection of the strongly traditionary and catholic defense of the Church of England against Roman polemics with the early Reformed orthodox appropriations of scholastic argumentation. Early orthodox Reformed theology, in the works of William Perkins and his contemporaries, developed a highly nuanced understanding of human free choice and divine grace, distinguished according to the four states of human nature. His resolution of the issue of divine grace and human freedom drew eclectically on arguments from the Thomist tradition and from patterns in late medieval voluntarism. At the same time, it reinforced and refined the heritage of the Reformation on the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. The Reformed orthodoxy represented by Perkins and his contemporaries insists that God guarantees the free choice of free creatures, who always must act according to their natures.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller

This study of William Perkins’ thought on grace and free choice places his thought in the variegated tradition of the Reformation as established by writers like Calvin, Vermigli, Bullinger, and Musculus. More specifically, his thought can be placed in the version of that tradition exemplified in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and in the Elizabethan Settlement. Closer examination of Perkins’ thought in its context yields a window on the more technical understanding of the relationship of divine grace to human knowing and willing, which demonstrates its eclectic reception of late medieval scholasticism, its elaboration of the work of the Reformers, and its distance from modern theories of compatibilist and libertarian freedom. This work traces Perkins’ views on the nature of free will both as created and in the fallen and regenerate states of humanity, correlating them with the views of Reformed contemporaries, and lining out the issues that they sought to address.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-187
Author(s):  
Rupert Bursell

Following the Reformation, uniformity was a key principle undergirding worship in the Church of England. The Crown claimed the prerogative to order the use of, and to alter, Church services in spite of the provisions of any Act of Uniformity, the Canons or any Declaration of Assent. This caused confusion among the clergy and others as to who had ‘lawful authority’ to permit such usages or changes. This confusion was exacerbated by episcopal claims to a jus liturgicum. Statute and case law, as well as the wording of the Declaration, also ensured rigidity in doctrinal adhesion. Since the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure 1974 and recent amendments to the Canons and the Declaration of Assent, this rigidity has been relaxed and clarity provided as to who may authorise services or permit departure from otherwise authorised forms of service.


1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Elliott

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.


2010 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 33-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana T. Marsh

This study focuses on the ritual ‘conservatism’ of Henry VIII's Reformation through a new look at biblical exegeses of the period dealing with sacred music. Accordingly, it reconsiders the one extant passage of rhetoric to come from the Henrician regime in support of traditional church polyphony, as found in A Book of Ceremonies to be Used in the Church of England, c.1540. Examining the document's genesis, editorial history and ultimate suppression by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it is shown that Bishop Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal (1522–40), was responsible for the original drafting of the musical paragraph. Beginning with Sampson's printed commentaries on the Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul, the literary precedents and historical continuities upon which Sampson's topos in Ceremonies was founded are traced in detail. Identified through recurring patterns of scriptural and patristic citation, and understood via transhistorical shifts in the meaning of certain key words (e.g. iubilare), this new perspective clarifies important origins of the English church's musical ‘traditionalism’ on the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, it reveals a precise species of exegetical method – anagogy – as the literary vehicle through which influential clergy were able to justify expansions and elaborations of musical practice in the Western Church from the high Middle Ages to the Reformation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-42
Author(s):  
Oktavia Kristika Sari

When the Church recognizes the quantity of books as part of God's Word, it uses various standards for book collection. The Tewahedo Orthodox Church, which has 81 books, is one of the churches that got so many. The question of why this Church accepts so many books in its canon and how this Church interprets these books adds to the intricacy of the problem of the number of books in the Tewahedo Orthodox Church tradition. This research employs a content analysis to conduct a literature review. This research demonstrates the Tewahedo Orthodox Church's devotion to the works in its canon. Both in terms of apostles' and Church Fathers' traditions, the lengthy history of Social Culture, Councils and Synods, and the impact of ancient literature in Ethiopia.Although it is well known that writings outside the Hebrew protocanon are employed for ceremonial theology and people's education rather than construction, the Orthodox Tewahedo also believes these works to be vital as books worth reading and historical bridges. Abstrak indonesia  Standar pengumpulan kitab yang digunakan oleh Gereja ketika menerima jumlah kitab-kitab sebagai bagian dari Alkitab yang dipegang menggunakan standar yang berbeda-beda. Salah satu gereja yang menerima begitu banyak kitab adalah Gereja Tewahedo Orthodox yang memiliki 81 kitab. Kompleksnya masalah jumlah kitab di dalam tradisi Gereja Tewahedo Orthodox ini, menjadi pertanyaan apa yang menyebabkan Gereja ini menerima begitu banyak kitab dalam kanonnya dan bagaimana Gereja ini memandang kitab-kitab tersebut. Penelitian ini menggunakan Kajian Kepustakaan berupa kajian isi. Dalam penelitian ini menunjukkan kompleksitas penerimaan Gereja Tewahedo Orthodox terhadap kitab-kitab dalam kanonnya. Baik karena pengaruh tradisi rasul-rasul dan Bapa Gereja, sejarah panjang dalam Social Budaya dan Konsili serta Sinode, maupun juga pengaruh dari Literatur kuno di Ethiopia. Dan diketahui bahwa kitab-kitab diluar protokanon Ibrani tidak digunakan dalam membangun doktrin namun digunakan untuk ritual-ritual dan pengajaran umat, Tewahedo Orthodox juga meganggap penting kitab-kitab ini sebagai kitab-kitab yang layak dibaca dan digunakan sebagai jembatan sejarah.


Author(s):  
Andrew Atherstone

Protestantism was a major rallying cry during the Tractarian controversies. It was anathematized by some Oxford Movement radicals as a ‘heresy’, and held tenaciously by evangelical campaigners as ‘the pure Gospel of Christ’. Protestant polemicists decried Tractarianism as a revival of Roman Catholicism in an Anglican disguise and called their brothers-in-arms to fight the theological battles of the Reformation over again. Focusing on the events in Oxford itself between 1838 and 1846, this chapter surveys the rhetoric which surrounded three overlapping themes—Protestant Reformers, Protestant Formularies, and Protestant Truth. It shows how these loomed large in the speeches and writings of those who wanted to defend the Protestant hegemony of the Church of England and the University of Oxford.


1975 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-351
Author(s):  
Toivo Harjunpaa

The Reformation of the sixteenth century dealt a heavy blow to the historic episcopal government of the church. Only two of the national churches which embraced the Protestant Reformation succeeded in retaining their old primatical sees and episcopal polity: the Church of England and the Church of Sweden-Finland. For centuries before the Reformation, the Finnish church had been ecclesiastically part of the province of Uppsala (an archbishopric since 1164) just as Finland itself was politically part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Thus there was no need to establish a Finnish archdiocese while union with Sweden continued. But with Napoleon's concurrence (the Tilsit pact of 1807), the Russians invaded Finland in 1808 and met with such success that all Finland was ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809.


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