Bureaucracy and Church Reform: The Organizational Response of the Church of England to Social Change, 1800-1965. By Kenneth A. Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. 264 pp. $9.00

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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The Age of Athanasius

Church History and Religious Culture ◽

10.1163/18712428-09702018 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 97 (2) ◽

pp. 220-247 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

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.

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‘Standing in the old ways’: historical legitimation of Church reform in the Church of England, c. 1825–65

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/s0424208400013371 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 33 ◽

pp. 407-422

Author(s):

R. Arthur Burns

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Church Of England ◽

Church And State ◽

Industrial Society ◽

Church Reform ◽

Crucial Importance ◽

Institutional Reforms ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Church

During the early and mid-nineteenth century the Church of England underwent a wide-ranging series of institutional reforms. These were intended to meet the pastoral challenges of industrial society, acknowledge the changing relationship of Church and State, and answer the more pertinent criticisms of its radical and dissenting antagonists. Particularly during the 1830s, the constitutional adjustments of 1828–32, the accession of a Whig administration, and widening internal divisions appeared to place the Church in a newly perilous position. The reforms were consequently enacted in a highly charged and febrile atmosphere. Each measure was closely scrutinized by concerned and sometimes panic-stricken Anglicans,’ seeking to establish whether it would strengthen the Church or was in fact a manifestation of threatening forces. In such circumstances, the legitimation of reform assumed crucial importance. As ever, the prospective reformer required a legitimation which would appeal to the widest possible constituency. Among allies, it could serve to embolden waverers, doubters, and often the reformer himself. If possible, it should engage the sympathies of potential opponents. It was also essential that the legitimation would not so constrain the reformer that the initiative’s practical effectiveness was blunted.

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The Liturgical Dimension of the Oxford Tracts, 1833-1841

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/385554 ◽

1968 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 92-113 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lawrence F. Barmann

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Ad Hoc ◽

Population Distribution ◽

Church Of England ◽

Church Reform ◽

House Of Commons ◽

Oxford Movement ◽

National Institutions ◽

Parliamentary Reform ◽

The Church

R. W. Church began his classic work on The Oxford Movement with the remark that “What is called the Oxford or Tractarian movement began, without doubt, in a vigorous effort for the immediate defence of the Church against serious dangers, arising from the violent and threatening temper of the days of the Reform Bill.” Historians of the Oxford Movement who, unlike Church, were not participants in the events of which they write need continually to remind themselves that the Oxford Movement was not a premeditated and carefully planned theological campaign. Rather, it was an ad hoc measure to meet a definite and immediate problem.In the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, agitation for reform of all the national institutions swept across England, and included in these national institutions was the Church of England. In 1828 a resolution favoring the repeal of the Test Act was carried in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, and in 1829 the Relief Bill was carried, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and to hold offices under the crown. With the Reform Bill of 1832 the electoral structure for seating men in Parliament was brought into partial conformity with contemporary developments and population distribution. And with the success of parliamentary reform, English churchmen feared that church reform would soon be thrust upon them. The bishops as a group had been hostile to parliamentary reform and to reform in general, with the result that popular pamphlets against churchmen and demand for church reform reached alarming proportions.

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Tudor church reform. The Henrician canons of 1535 and the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum. Edited by Gerald Bray. (Church of England Record Society, 8.) Pp. clx+842. Woodbridge: Boydell Press (for the Church of England Record Society), 2000. £70. 0 85115 809 9; 1351 3087

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History ◽

10.1017/s0022046903357240 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 54 (2) ◽

pp. 319-389

Author(s):

CHRISTOPHER BROOKS

Keyword(s):

Church Of England ◽

Church Reform ◽

The Church

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The Lincoln Letters: A Study in Institutional Change

Ecclesial Practices ◽

10.1163/22144471-00601001 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 44-64 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Grace Davie ◽

Caroline Starkey

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Institutional Change ◽

Empirical Data ◽

Church Of England ◽

Tipping Points ◽

The Public ◽

The Guardian ◽

The Church

On Friday 2nd September 2016, The Guardian published an online article entitled ‘Bishop of Grantham first C of E bishop to declare he is in a gay relationship.’ In response, a large quantity of correspondence was sent to the Bishop from members of the public, the vast majority expressing support. In this paper, we set the empirical data contained in the letters themselves within a context of continuing change in both society and the Church of England. We consider the reactions of the Church at the ‘tipping points’ of social change as it seeks to balance its responsibilities as a guardian of ‘truth’ with the need to keep in touch with modern ways of living. A key concept underpinning our analysis will be the notion of ‘vicarious religion’, which deals with the subtle but continuing relationships between the actively faithful and a wider body of more loosely attached adherents.

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Whigs, bishops and America: the politics of church reform in mid-eighteenth-century England

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x00019269 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 36 (2) ◽

pp. 331-356 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Stephen Taylor

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Church Of England ◽

Structural Reform ◽

The Political ◽

Church Reform ◽

American Colonies ◽

The Church ◽

Do So

ABSTRACTThe eighteenth century is traditionally seen as an interlude between two vigorous movements of church reform. This article explores the problems and attitudes which underlay the absence of major structural reform of the Church in this period. To do so, it examines the failure of attempts, especially those of the 1740s and 1750s, to create an anglican episcopate in the American colonies. The leaders of the Church of England were agreed that the need for American bishops was pressing, on both pastoral and administrative grounds, and the 1740s and 1750s witnessed two proposals for their creation which were supported by virtually the whole bench of bishops. Both failed. The whig ministry resolutely opposed these initiatives, largely out of fear that any debate of church reform would revive the political divisions of Queen Anne's reign. The bishops, moreover, were prepared to submit to this ministerial veto, despite their belief in the necessity of reform, not through political subservience, but because they too feared renewed controversy about religion and the Church, believing that such controversy would revive both anti-clerical attacks from without and bitter divisions within.

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