Outlines of the History of the Theological Literature of the Church of England, from the Reformation to the Close of the Eighteenth Century. The Bishop Paddock Lectures, 1896-7. John Dowden

1898 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 656-657
Author(s):  
Alfred Cave
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Writing the History of the English Bible in the Early Eighteenth Century

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 268-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Mandelbrote
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Rule Of Faith ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

The letter of Scripture suffering various Interpretations, it is plain that Error may pretend to Scripture; the antient Fathers being likewise dead, and not able to vindicate themselves, their writings may be wrested, and Error may make use of them to back itself; Reason too being bypassed by Interest, Education, Passion, Society, &c…. Tradition only rests secure.The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.

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.

The Origins of the Fuging Tune

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Temperley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
English Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Church

The fuging psalm or hymn tune is a form whose existence one would hardly suspect from any history of English music. Yet is was a product of the Church of England, and there are more than six hundred and fifty specimens in English eighteenth-century printed sources alone. Its neglect is readily explained by the fact that it lies on the borderline of art music: the musicians who developed it were obscure country singers without professional training; but at the same time it does not fall within the definition of ‘folk music’ that we have inherited from the Cecil Sharp era, for it is written music designed for rehearsed performance. We may or may not wish to hear or sing these tunes today. But our understanding of eighteenth-century English musical life must be incomplete if it does not take into account a form that was so distinctive and so widely appreciated at the time.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Modern State ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

The conclusion explains why the English Reformation ended in the late eighteenth century. It discounts a secular and secularizing Enlightenment as an explanation. Rather, it offers three other reasons for the Reformation’s ending. Firstly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century enough time had passed to make the seventeenth-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. Secondly, the Reformation issues with which the eighteenth-century English dealt got supplanted by other, more urgent ones, often having to do with England’s expanding empire. Finally, and importantly, the Reformation ended because the polemical divines who are the subject of this book failed fully in their tasks of defining truth and of defending the autonomy of the established Church of England. In the end, the modern state took on the role as truth’s arbiter and made the Church a subordinate, dependent institution.

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.

Confessional History and the Authority of Erudition

2019 ◽  
pp. 264-300
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Main Text ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Genuine Effort

In his History of the variations of the Protestant Churches, his major work of confessional controversy, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) made a genuine effort to use various primary sources. In the case of England, however, he chose to rely on a single authority, Gilbert Burnet’s (1643-1715) History of the Reformation of the Church of England, which was available to him in a recent French translation. This reflected Bossuet’s tactical determination to employ only authors whom his Protestant adversaries could not object to, but also his paradoxical affinities with Burnet, whose very political reading of the English Reformation fitted well with his own interpretation. Burnet, however, had included in his History a rich collection of records, which Bossuet studied and occasionally used to challenge Burnet’s main text. Although Bossuet’s interests remained those of a polemical divine, he spoke the language of historical erudition to assert his trustworthiness.

A Reconsideration of Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/9

1969 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. D. J. Cargill Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church History ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Novel Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Considerable Length ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Church

Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/9 owes its fame to the fact that it has traditionally been associated with the first appearance in Anglican theology of the jure divino theory of episcopacy. So far as I have been able to discover, this tradition appears to derive its origin from the account of the Sermon given by John Strype in the eighteenth century, although the germ of the idea is considerably older, since it can be traced back to the attacks made at the time by Bancroft's puritan opponents, most notably Sir Francis Knollys, who accused him, along with archbishop Whitgift and others, of seeking to undermine the Royal Supremacy by preaching that bishops owed their ‘superiority’ over the lower clergy to God rather than to the queen. Until the eighteenth century, however, this interpretation of Bancroft's teaching is only to be found in puritan writers. Seventeenth-century Anglican church historians in general do not appear to have attached any doctrinal significance to the Sermon. Peter Heylyn, for example, in his Aërius Redivivus (1670) refers to it as ‘a most excellent and judicious Sermon’ and proceeds to give a lengthy summary of its contents without at any point suggesting that Bancroft was putting forward a novel theory of episcopacy, while Thomas Fuller makes no reference to it at all either in his Church History of Britain (1655) or in his account of Bancroft in The Worthies of England (1662). At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sermon enjoyed a modest vogue among the Non-Jurors, who admired it for its vigorous defence of the Church of England against the attacks of the puritans; but neither Henry Gandy, who reprinted it at the instigation of Dr. George Hickes in the first volume of the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1709), nor Jeremy Collier, who discussed it at considerable length in his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1709-14), drew any explicit connexion between the Sermon and the emergence of the jure divino theory of episcopacy.

Catholic Revival in the Eighteenth Century

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
American Scholar ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.

Music and Hymnody

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Orford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Hymn Singing ◽  
The Church

Although hymn singing has always been a feature of Christian worship, it was largely lost in the Church of England after the Reformation. It experienced a revival in the eighteenth century among Dissenters and Wesleyans, though the Church of England was slow to grasp the opportunity that hymns offered. The Tractarians understood the devotional and didactic value of hymns and they worked to restore hymns within Anglicanism. A number of Tractarians made original contributions in words and music, bringing to their verses an intellectual rigour that discouraged mere emotionalism. Above all, in the publication of Hymns Ancient & Modern they changed permanently the face of Anglican worship.

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