Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Stephen Hampton
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
The Church

This Introduction opens with an account of the consecration of Exeter College Chapel in 1624 and explains why the ceremony cannot accurately be described as either ‘Laudian’ or ‘Puritan,’ since it reflects theological emphases associated with both groups. It goes on to establish that the historiography of the Early Stuart period has generally acknowledged the presence of English clergy who were committed to both an orthodox Reformed understanding of grace and the established polity of the Church, although no dedicated analysis of their religious tradition has been undertaken before the present study. The ten significant Reformed Conformist theologians who will be the focus of the study are then introduced, and the personal links between them set out.

ARMINIANISM, CATHOLICISM, AND PURITANISM IN ENGLAND DURING THE 1630S

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL QUESTIER
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The relationship between Arminianism and Roman Catholicism in the early Stuart period has long been a source of historiographical controversy. Many contemporaries were in no doubt that such an affinity did exist and that it was politically significant. This article will consider how far there was ideological sympathy and even rhetorical collaboration between Caroline Catholics and those members of the Church of England whom both contemporaries and modern scholars have tended to describe as Arminians and Laudians. It will suggest that certain members of the English Catholic community actively tried to use the changes which they claimed to observe in the government of the Church of England in order to establish a rapport with the Caroline regime. In particular they enthused about what they perceived as a strongly anti-puritan trend in royal policy. Some of them argued that a similar style of governance should be exercised by a bishop over Catholics in England. This was something which they believed would correct the factional divisions within their community and align it more effectively with the Stuart dynasty.

Being Done: Why People Leave the Church, But Not Their Faith

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Packard ◽  
Todd W. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religious Congregations ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Iron Cage ◽  
Meaningful Relationships ◽  
Push And Pull ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
The Church ◽  
Unique Dataset

Institutionally organized religious life in the United State is undergoing a dramatic transformation. While individual beliefs and practices remain relatively stable, institutional affiliation and participation has declined dramatically. In this article, we explore the religious “Dones”—those who have disaffiliated with their religious congregations but, unlike the Nones, continue to associate with a religious tradition. Drawing on a unique dataset of 100 in-depth interviews with self-identified Christians, we explain the “push” and “pull” factors that lead a person to intentionally leave their congregations. We find that a bureaucratic structure and a narrow focus on certain moral proscriptions can drive people away, while the prospect of forming more meaningful relationships and the opportunities to actively participate in social justice issues draw people out. From these factors, we show that an “iron cage of congregations” exists that is ill-suited to respond to a world where religious life is increasingly permeable as people enact their spirituality outside traditional religious organizations. We conclude by questioning whether the spiritual lives of the Dones are ultimately sustainable without institutional support.

LICENSING, CENSORSHIP, AND RELIGIOUS ORTHODOXY IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 625-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTHONY MILTON
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
Important Means ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Government ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

This article engages with recent work on the nature of religious censorship in the early Stuart period that has emphasized that the government possessed neither the power nor the will to control systematically what was written. It is argued here, instead, that there is evidence of attempts to control the presses' output of religious materials during the Laudian period and earlier, by all parties within the Church of England. Nevertheless, the intention here is not to revive a simplistic view of government ‘control’, but rather to study the means by which licensers could exert an influence over what would be printed with an aura of mainstream legitimacy. Texts were often interfered with by official licensers with a variety of motives. Interference might sometimes be essentially ‘benign’, conferring legitimacy on marginal works by massaging their contents, or texts might be modified in order to make their authors appear to endorse the views of their opponents. The issue of whether it was practically possible to publish work clandestinely is here seen to be something of a red herring, since by publishing in this illicit fashion authors were effectively resigning their right to be considered as spokesmen of the orthodox mainstream. It is the control and manipulation of the licensing process which emerges as one important means by which the religious middle ground was defined and controlled in the early Stuart period.

scholarly journals "The Prevention of That Abominable Mixture and Spurious Issue": Continuity in the Prosecution of Miscegenation in Virginian Laws and Court Decisions, 1630-1691

1969 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Lilley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Sexual Relations ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Interracial Sex ◽  
The Church

In the historical debate over the legitimation of Virginian black slavery in the seventeenth century, some historians argue that the legal prosecution of interracial sexual relations was a calculated effort to institute slavery. Conversely, others assert that lawmakers and law enforcers did not actively discourage interracial sex until they enacted legislation that explicitly forbade miscegenation in the 1660s and again in the 1690s. However, an examination of Virginian laws and court decisions regarding fornication from 1630 to 1691 reveals a different story. Colonial authorities inherited a revulsion towards miscegenation from the English intellectual and religious tradition, and they used three different legal methods to prevent sex between blacks and whites. Before they introduced legislation that explicitly sought to punish whites for miscegenation in the 1660s and 1690s, the secular authorities of the 1630s and 1640s resorted to enforcing moral laws originally meant for the Church courts, and they then introduced general laws against fornication that were disproportionately applied to cases of pre-marital sexual intercourse involving blacks. While the methods of sexually segregating white and black colonists changed over the course of the seventeenth century, the desire to prevent miscegenation was always present in the minds of colonial officials in this era.

Religious Coping Among Rural Clergy: Measuring Ways in Which Rural Clergy Draw on Coping Strategies Informed by Their Theological Beliefs

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Christine Brewster
Keyword(s):  
Coping Strategies ◽  
Religious Coping ◽  
Psychological Health ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Gain Control ◽  
Rural Churches ◽  
Images Of God ◽  
Work Related ◽  
The Church

Following the recent decline in stipendiary clergy numbers in the Church of England and the consequent amalgamation of numerous rural benefices, enormous demands have been placed on many rural clergy. Potential stressors include ‘overextension’ and ‘inadequate resources’, which can cause poor work-related psychological health. Folkman and Lazarus (1988), whose work is firmly rooted in the ‘secular’ psychological tradition, contend that in order to survive in times of stress, people need to employ coping practices whereby they can ‘manage’ the personal and/or environmental stressors which ‘tax’ or ‘exceed’ their personal resources. Pargament (1997), however, believes that religious beliefs and religious experience are also important, and he suggests that the psychology of religion and coping ‘bridges a deep psychological tradition of helping people take care of what they can in times of stress with a rich religious tradition of helping people accept their limitations and look beyond themselves for assistance in troubling times’ (p. 9). The present study examines the coping strategies of a sample of 722 Church of England rural clergy who are responsible for three or more rural churches, following their completion of the ‘RCOPE Measure of Religious Coping’ (Pargament, Koenig and Perez, 2000). The data produced suggest that the religious coping strategies most frequently used by rural clergy in multi-church benefices, are ‘benevolent religious reappraisal’ (to find ‘meaning’), ‘collaborative religious coping’ and ‘active religious surrender’ (to gain ‘control’), ‘religious purification/forgiveness’, ‘spiritual connection’ and ‘marking religious boundaries’ (to gain comfort and closeness to God) and ‘seeking support from clergy and church members’ and ‘religious helping’ (to gain ‘intimacy with others and closeness to God’). The data demonstrate that rural clergy certainly draw on images of God that may promote healthy responses to significant stressors, but that they also employ those that may be detrimental to effective coping, and it is suggested that the provision by the church, of educational programmes focusing on religious coping strategies, might lead to the enhancement of work-related psychological health among rural clergy.

The Realignment of Mormon Religious Authority

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
Jana Riess
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
Traditional Institutions ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines how young adult Mormons regard ecclesiastical authority differently than older Mormons do. Mormons stand apart from many other faiths because they believe their leaders are the only men authorized by Jesus Christ himself to exercise all the authority of the holy priesthood. Given this belief—that Mormonism's uniqueness stretches from its ecclesiastical authority in the form of prophets and apostles—it is not surprising that the religion strongly emphasizes obeying the teachings of those leaders. Indeed, millennial Mormons have grown up in a religious tradition that places a premium on obeying the leaders of the Church and have inherited modern Mormonism's expanded view of the role of the prophet. On the other hand, they're also embedded within a generation that takes a dim view of many traditional institutions, including religious ones, and has tended to qualify claims to exclusive truth. The chapter then considers how young adult Mormons reconcile these tensions within themselves.

The pagan holy man in late antique society

1982 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 33-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garth Fowden
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Indefinite Future ◽  
Holy Man ◽  
The Church

A Love and desire, to sequester a Mans Selfe, for a Higher Conversation … is found, to have been falsely and fainedly, in some of the Heathen; As Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana; And truly and really, in divers of the Ancient Hermits, and Holy Fathers of the Church.F. Bacon, Of friendshipThe holy men of Greco-Roman paganism will never inspire either the reverence or the fascinated horror that the ascetics and monks of early Christianity have commanded ever since they first impinged on the common mind in the time of Antony and Athanasios. Writing for a Christian audience, Francis Bacon could dismiss the semi-mythical Epimenides and Numa, and notorious exhibitionists like Empedokles and Apollonios, as self-evident imposters; while in our own less devout times the abundance of the hagiographical literature ensures that the Christian saint will preoccupy scholars for the indefinite future, if only as the unwitting patron of a mass of historical and sociological data that is only just beginning to be analysed. Yet this is poor excuse for neglecting the pagan holy man, who came in the later Roman empire to play a conspicuous part in his own religious tradition, and also affords instructive points of comparison with his Christian competitors. This paper offers a first orientation towards such wider perspectives, by investigating the social and historical consequences entailed by the distinctive pagan concept of personal holiness. It will be suggested that a tendency to associate holiness with philosophical learning (Section I) determined the essentially urban (II) and privileged (III) background of the pagan holy man, and also encouraged his gradual drift to the periphery of society (IV).

The Worship of Jesus in Apocalyptic Christianity

1981 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bauckham
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Road ◽  
Significant Phenomenon ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The One ◽  
Exclusive Right ◽  
The Church

In the development of Christology in the primitive church, the emergence of the worship of Jesus is a significant phenomenon. In the exclusive monotheism of the Jewish religious tradition, as distinct from some other kinds of monotheism, it was worship which was the real test of monotheistic faith in religious practice. In the world-views of the early centuries A.D. the gap between God and man might be peopled by all kinds of intermediary beings – angels, divine men, hypostatized divine attributes, the Logos – and the early church's attempt to understand the mediatorial role of Jesus naturally made use of these possibilities. In the last resort, however, Jewish monotheism could not tolerate a mere spectrum between God and man; somewhere a firm line had to be drawn between God and creatures, and in religious practice it was worship which signalled the distinction between God and every creature, however exalted. God must be worshipped; no creature may be worshipped. For Jewish monotheism, this insistence on the one God's exclusive right to religious worship was far more important than metaphysical notions of the unity of the divine nature. Since the early church remained – or at least professed to remain – faithful to Jewish monotheism, the acknowledgement of Jesus as worthy of worship is a remarkable development. Either it should have been rejected as idolatry – and a halt called to the upward trend of christological development – or else its acceptance may be seen with hindsight to have set the church already on the road to Nicene theology.

Ancestral Veneration and the Possiblity of its Incorporation into the Christian Faith

Exchange ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Jebadu
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Faith Traditions ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

AbstractIn Nostra Aetate – one of the 16 documents of the Second Vatican Council – the Catholic Church firmly declares: 'The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in other religions⃜ The Church, therefore, urges all her sons and daughters to enter with prudence and charity into discussions and collaboration with members of other religious faith traditions…; (cf. NA. 2). The so-called 'other religions' as stated by Nostra Aetate includes traditional religion in the form of ancestral veneration. It is still widely and popularly practiced by Christians of various ethnic groups in Asia and Africa as well as in other parts of the world – Latin America, Melanesia and Australia (the Aborigines). Despite the suppression and expulsion done in the past, this religious tradition is still able to survive and continue to demonstrate its vital force in the lives of many Asians and Africans, including those who have embraced the Christian faith. In this article we argue that ancestral veneration does not contradict the Christian faith. It has a place in the Christian faith and should be incorporated into, at least, in Catholic Christian devotion.

Continuity in Change: Bishops of London and Religious Dissent in Early Stuart England

1978 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ogbu U. Kalu
Keyword(s):  
Scene Analysis ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
Religious Policy ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
Ecclesiastical Administration ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Phoenix

A significant aspect of the religious scene in the early Stuart period was the survival of vibrant religious nonconformity in spite of Bancroft's “reconstruction of the English Church.” Historians have recently concentrated on the periods of excited religious politics under Elizabeth and the latter part of Charles I's reign and have tended to accept Hacket's Restoration apology that there was no serious opposition to official religious policy in the intervening years. But attempts to explain the phoenix-like rise of Puritanism in Caroline England by reference to socio-economic disequilibrium are not fully satisfactory.Decades ago, Roland G. Usher, who did much to highlight Bancroft's reconstruction, explained the origins of the resurgent Puritanism of the Laudian period by pointing to the mid-Jacobean period. W. H. Clark concurred: lax ecclesiastical administration under Abbot made it possible for Puritans to re-group, starting from about 1614. Both men assumed that there had been effective enforcement of the new Canons of 1604, and of the official policy enunciated at the Hampton Court Conference, until Abbot came on the scene. Analysis of the Church court records indicates that this was simply not so. The number of Puritans continued to rise while vigorous enforcement was spasmodic.Ironically, the years to which Usher and Clark attributed the origins of Caroline Puritanism were in fact the period when enforcement was possible. First, the Pamphlet War aroused by the new settlement had died down. Second, only two bishops, John King and George Mountain, held the See of London between 1611 and 1628.

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