George Reginald Balleine: Historian of Anglican Evangelicalism

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-111
Author(s):  
Andrew Atherstone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Parish Ministry ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
The Church

AbstractA History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England(1908) by G.R. Balleine (1873–1966) is the classic narrative history of the Anglican evangelical movement, still enduringly popular more than a century after its publication. It has long outlived its author but is usually read without reference to him. This paper examines Balleine's approach to historical research and demonstrates how his personal theological priorities shaped hisHistory. In particular, it highlights his concerns in his parish ministry in Bermondsey, south London, for innovative evangelism, political activism and loyal Anglican churchmanship; his disinterest in doctrinal definitions and his abhorrence of ecclesiastical controversy. The paper argues that Balleine's lively account of Anglican evangelicalism's past in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was also an apologia and mandate for the future direction of the movement as it entered the twentieth century. It concludes by pointing to the sharp irony that while theHistoryhas gained a reputation for impeccable evangelical credentials, the historian was on a divergent trajectory away from his evangelical roots.

Debating the Legal Status of the Ornaments Rubric: Ritualism and Royal Commissions in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 434-454
Author(s):  
Dan D. Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Parliamentary Oversight ◽  
The Church

This article uses the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to explore the emergence of claims to self-governance within the Church of England in this period and the attempts by parliament to examine how independent the legal system of the church was from the secular state. First, it gives an overview of the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer and the Acts of Uniformity, presenting the legal uncertainty left by centuries of Prayer Book revision. It then explores how the Royal Commission into Ritualism (1867–70) and the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) attempted to control Ritualist interpretations of the Ornaments Rubric through secular courts. Examining the failure of these attempts, it looks towards the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1904–6). Through the evidence given to the commission, it shows how the previous royal commission and the work of parliament and the courts had failed to stop the continuation of Ritualist belief in the church's independence from secular courts. Using the report of the royal commission, it shows how the commissioners attempted to build a via media between strict spiritual independence and complete parliamentary oversight.

A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan

1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Collinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Time Span ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
James I ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Life ◽  
The Church

With Professor Christianson, one can only deplore the paucity of books dealing with the history of the Church of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. With the exception of histories covering a somewhat longer time span, there has been no attempt at synthesis since Bishop W. H. Frere's The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904), which was part of a series answering to a semi-popular and general interest in the Church of England ‘as a factor in the development of national life and character’. It is remarkable and even scandalous that the greatly altered perspectives of twentieth-century historians are not reflected in a more recent and adequate account of the post-Reformation and pre-revolutionary Church. The Jacobean epoch is a particularly neglected subject, to which even Frere devoted no more than 100 of his 400 pages, giving it no particular shape or significance. Jacobean bishops of the calibre of Toby Matthew, James Montague and Thomas Morton were not even mentioned. Today that singular and exemplary figure, Arthur Lake, Laud's predecessor as bishop of Bath and Wells, is totally forgotten. The reason for our myopia is not very flattering to modern historiography. Unlike the Reformation of the Church of England, or the Elizabethan Church, the Jacobean Church was not a subject for Gilbert Burnet or for John Strype, and consequently (or so it seems) it is not a subject for us.

Twentieth-Century Revision of Canon Law in the Church of England

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (26) ◽  
pp. 353-368
Author(s):  
Canon Peter Boulton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

This study describes and evaluates the Church of England's revision of its canon law in the twentieth century, concentrating on the period from 1939 to 1969. By way of introduction it should be said that this assessment is but part of a larger study which proceeds on two planes of comparison. In the larger study, revision by the Church of England is laid horizontally alongside another Anglican revision carried out as a result of disestablishment of the Church in Wales in 1920, and also the two revisions of Roman Catholic canon law leading to the promulgation of the Codex luris Canonici in 1917 and 1983. Vertically, the history of the revision of English canon law over the previous four hundred years gives some idea of what needed revision, and the difficulties in carrying it out under the constraints of being an established church. In this article, however, only the process of revision by the Church of England in the twentieth century is discussed.

Church Planting and the Parish in Durham Diocese, 1970–1990: Church Growth Controversies in Recent Historical Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-127
Author(s):  
Philip Lockley
Keyword(s):  
Church Growth ◽  
Church Planting ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Other ◽  
Parish Ministry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Reverse Tendency

AbstractThis article unearths the forgotten history of the first modern church planting scheme in the Church of England: an attempt to restructure parish ministry in Chester-le-Street, near Durham, in the 1970s and 1980s. This story of rapid growth followed by decline, and of an evangelical church’s strained relations with their liberal bishop, David Jenkins, has pertinence for contemporary Anglican antagonisms over ‘fresh expressions’ and other church planting programmes. A culture of mistrust is arguably apparent both then and now, between liberals and conservatives in ecclesiology, even as the same line divides those of the reverse tendency in broader, doctrinal theology: conservatives from liberals. Developments, decisions and, indeed, debacles in the story of Chester-le-Street parish point to the urgent need for liberals and conservatives in Anglican ecclesiology and theology to overcome their mistrust of each other by recognizing the other as valuable for the mutual strengthening and renewal of the Church.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

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.

Principal Booksellers and Publishing Outlets

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
The Church

This chapter covers the publishing history of some of the main authors discussed in the book, the Congregationalists Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, and Elizabeth Rowe, the Methodists John Wesley and George Whitefield, and the Church of England evangelicals James Hervey, John Newton, and William Cowper; the publications of the major London dissenting booksellers, Edward and Charles Dilly, and Joseph Johnson; the printers and sellers for the smaller denominations, the Quakers and the Moravians; and some important provincial printers and sellers of religious books, Joshua Eddowes, Samuel Hazard, Thomas and Mary Luckman, Robert Spence, William Phorson, and John Fawcett.

Apprenticeship

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
English History ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Moral Leader ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Town ◽  
The Church

In 1634 Fuller became the minister of the parish at Broadwindsor, in Dorset. This provided him the opportunity to know John White, the minister in nearby Dorchester. White, the spiritual and moral leader of the town became a pastoral model for Fuller. In this setting, Fuller wrote The Historie of the Holy Warre, the first English history of the Crusades. His use of medieval sources was extensive, and his analysis of the motives and tactics of western leaders is shrewd and persuasive. Elected to the clerical Convocation that met in 1640, during sessions of the first Parliament to be called in eleven years, Fuller dissented from the leadership of Archbishop William Laud, who sought to impose more stringent rules or canons on the Church of England. This Convocation, continuing to meet after Parliament was dissolved, passed canons whose legality was contested. War with the Scots ensued over religious issues, forcing the king to call what came to be known as the Long Parliament.

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.

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