‘A Church without Discipline is No Church at All’: Discipline and Diversity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Anglicanism

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 399-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Knight
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
First Century ◽  
Current Position ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
The Church ◽  
Intense Debate

In the early years of the twenty-first century, ecclesiastical discipline in an Anglican context has been very much a hot topic. Internationally, there has been intense debate over the decision by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America to ordain Gene Robinson, a continent yet avowedly homosexual priest, as one of its bishops, and over the decision of the diocese of New Westminster in Canada to authorize liturgical services of blessing for same-sex couples. The Windsor Report of 2004 was commissioned in order to formulate a Communion-wide response to these developments,1 and although ‘discipline’ is a word which is very seldom in its pages, it is, in effect, a study of the disciplinary framework which its authors believe necessary in order for the Anglican Communion to hold together. At a local level, the Church of England’s clerical discipline procedures are being thoroughly overhauled, following the General Synod of the Church of England’s 1996 report on clergy discipline and the ecclesiastical courts. This paper seeks to explore the themes of discipline and diversity in both an international and an English context. It attempts to shed a little more light on how the Anglican Communion, particularly in the former British Empire, got itself into its current position, as a loosely-federated assembly of provincial synods, without a central framework for handling disciplinary matters. Secondly, it examines how the Church of England has handled discipline in relation to its clergy since the mid-nineteenth century.

The Early Years of the Jewish Presence at the University of Illinois

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245
Author(s):  
Winton U. Solberg
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Characteristic Form ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
Jewish Students ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church

For over two centuries, the College was the characteristic form of higher education in the United States, and the College was closely allied to the church in a predominantly Protestant land. The university became the characteristic form of American higher education starting in the late nineteenth Century, and universities long continued to reflect the nation's Protestant culture. By about 1900, however, Catholics and Jews began to enter universities in increasing numbers. What was the experience of Jewish students in these institutions, and how did authorities respond to their appearance? These questions will be addressed in this article by focusing on the Jewish presence at the University of Illinois in the early twentieth Century. Religion, like a red thread, is interwoven throughout the entire fabric of this story.

The Book of Common Prayer: A Guide

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Hefling
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Corporate Worship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.

Anglican Emigrant Chaplaincy in the British Empire and Beyond,c.1840–1900

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 314-327
Author(s):  
Rowan Strong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Involvement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

In the 1840s the Church of England, through the agency of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), established an official chaplaincy to emigrants leaving from British ports. The chaplaincy lasted throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. It was revitalized in the 1880s under the direction of the SPCK in response to a surge in emigration from Britain to the colonies. This article examines the imperial attitudes of Anglicans involved in this chaplaincy network, focusing on those of the 1880s and 1890s, the period of high imperialism in Britain. It compares these late nineteenth-century outlooks with those of Anglicans in the emigrant chaplaincy of the 1840s, in order to discern changes and continuities in Anglican imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain. It finds that, in contrast to the imperialist attitudes prevalent in Britain during the late nineteenth century, Anglicans in this chaplaincy network focused more on the ecclesiastical and pastoral dimensions of their work. Indeed, pro-imperial attitudes, though present, were remarkably scarce. It was the Church much more than the empire which mattered to these Anglicans, notwithstanding their direct involvement with the British empire.

The Death and Resurrection of “the Homosexual”

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-210
Author(s):  
Taylor G. Petrey
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
First Century ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
New Policies ◽  
The Church

This final chapter traces the intertwined theological, linguistic, psychological, and political transitions LDS leaders instituted in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Church leaders adopted new terms like “same-sex attraction,” and eventually returned to the terms “gay,” “lesbian,” and “homosexual” as acceptable. The Church also introduced new teachings about homosexuality in the afterlife and new policies for transgender folks. As same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, church leaders increasingly shifted away from “family values” to “religious freedom” to frame their opposition.

Conflicts Within the Anglican Communion

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The West ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Church

The churches of the Anglican Communion discussed issues of sex and gender throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Arguments about gender focused on the ordination of women to the diaconate, priesthood, and episcopate. Debates about sexuality covered polygamy, divorce and remarriage, and homosexuality. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, these debates became intensely focused on homosexuality and were particularly fierce as liberals and conservatives responded to openly gay bishops and the blessing and marriage of same-sex couples. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the sex and gender debates had become less acrimonious, the Anglican Communion had not split on these issues as some feared, but the ‘disconnect’ between society and the Church, at least in the West, on issues such as the Church of England’s prevarication on female bishops and opposition to gay marriage, had decreased the Church’s credibility for many.

The Age of Athanasius

2017 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Fourth Report ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Intense Debate

The publication of the Fourth Report of the Ritual Commission in 1870 occasioned intense debate over the position of the Athanasian Creed in the liturgy of the Church of England. This article reconstructs the course of that controversy, focusing particularly on the centrality of historical argument to the speeches, letters, and pamphlets in which critics and defenders of the formulary sought to stabilise Christian orthodoxy and define Anglican identity in a progressive environment. The episode draws attention, first, to the continuing and underestimated centrality of patristic scholarship to questions of church reform in Victorian England, whilst also pointing towards the eventual decline of the textual and antiquarian approach to apologetics that had characterised Anglicanism since the Reformation. Post-Reformation Anglican history, secondly, was itself integral to participants’ articulation of religious division, suggesting that conventional understandings of “church parties” in the Victorian Church of England should accordingly be revised.

scholarly journals The Church of England and Same-Sex Marriage: Beyond a Rights-Based Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Smith
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Institutional Response ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
The Church ◽  
Apparent Conflict ◽  
Do So

Some scholars, faced with the apparent conflict between the Church of England's teaching on marriage and the idea of equal marriage embraced by the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, have focused on the implications of that Act for the constitutional relationship between Church, State and nation. More frequently, noting the position of the Church of England under that Act, academics have critiqued the legislation as an exercise in balancing competing human rights. This article by contrast, leaving behind a tendency to treat religion as a monolithic ‘other’, and leaving behind the neat binaries of rights-based analyses, interrogates the internal agonies of the Church of England as it has striven to negotiate an institutional response to the secular legalisation of same-sex marriage. It explores the struggles of the Church to do so in a manner which holds in balance a wide array of doctrinal positions and the demands of mission, pastoral care and the continued apostolic identity of the Church of England.

Unity, Uniformity and Diversity: the Anglican Liturgy in England and the United States, 1900-1940

1996 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 465-475
Author(s):  
Martin Dudley
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

‘Uniformity’, declared Sir John Nicholl, one of the greatest of Anglican ecclesiastical lawyers, ‘is one of the leading and distinguishing principles of the Church of England - nothing is left to the discretion and fancy of the individual.’ At the Reformation the English Church was distinguished not by the decisions of councils, confessional statements, or the writings of particular leaders, but by one uniform liturgy. This liturgy, ‘containing nothing contrary to the Word of God, or to sound Doctrine’ and consonant with the practice of the early Church, was intended to ‘preserve Peace and Unity in the Church’ and to edify the people. It was also opposed to the ‘great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm’ and, abolishing the liturgical uses of Salisbury, Hereford, Bangor, York, and Lincoln, it established that ‘now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use’. This principle of liturgical uniformity was enshrined in the several Acts of Uniformity from that of the second year of King Edward VI to that of the fourteenth year of Charles II, amended, but not abolished, in the reign of Queen Victoria. It was a principle conveyed to the churches in the colonies so that, even if they revised or abandoned the Book of Common Prayer in use in England, as the Americans did in 1789, what was substituted was called ‘The Book of Common Prayer and declared to be ‘the Liturgy of this Church’ to be ‘received as such by all members of the same’. The principle of uniformity was modified during the Anglican Communion’s missionary expansion. The Lambeth Conference of 1920 considered that liturgical uniformity throughout the Churches of the Anglican Communion was not a necessity, but the 1930 Conference held that the Book of Common Prayer, as authorized in the several Churches of the Communion, was the place where faith and order were set forth, and so implied a degree of uniformity maintained by the use of a single book.

The Constitution of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia: A Model for Europe?

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-350
Author(s):  
Hanns Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Catholic Churches ◽  
The Church

It is a peculiarity of the European continent that there are four independent Anglican jurisdictions side by side: the Church of England with its Diocese in Europe, The Episcopal Church, based in the United States of America, with its Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, and the Lusitanian and Spanish Reformed Episcopal Churches which are extra-provincial dioceses in the Anglican Communion. Alongside these, there are the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht, with dioceses in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. All of them are in full communion with each other, but they lack a comprehensive jurisdictional structure; consequently, there are cities where two or three bishops exercise jurisdiction canonically totally separately.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document