Scotland

Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe

This chapter examines the transformations in the status and character of Scottish Episcopalianism from 1662 to 1829. Despite being re-established in the Church of Scotland in 1661–2, episcopacy was abolished in 1689. Thereafter Episcopalians were a Nonconformist group, and only the minority of congregations whose clergy were loyal to Queen Anne and her Hanoverian successors enjoyed legal protection. But while the intermittent prosecution of the Jacobite clergy contributed to a steep decline in the number of Scottish Episcopalians, disestablishment allowed the clergy to reassess episcopal authority, and to experiment with liturgical reforms. After transferring their allegiance to the Hanoverians in 1788, the Episcopalians drew closer to the Church of England, formally adopting the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1804. By the end of the period, the Episcopalians saw themselves as an independent, non-established Church, one of the branches of international Anglicanism.

Author(s):  
Mark Hill QC

This chapter focuses on the clergy of the Church of England. It first explains the process of selection and training for deacons and priests, along with their ordination, functions, and duties. It then considers the status and responsibilities of incumbents, patronage, and presentation of a cleric to a benefice, and suspension of presentation. It also examines the institution, collation, and induction of a presentee as well as unbeneficed clergy such as assistant curates and priests-in-charge of parishes, the authority of priests to officiate under the Extra-Parochial Ministry Measure, the right of priests to hold office under Common Tenure, and the role of visitations in maintaining the discipline of the Church. The chapter concludes with a discussion of clergy retirement and removal, employment status of clergy, vacation of benefices, group and team ministries, and other church appointments including rural or area deans, archdeacons, diocesan bishops, suffragan bishops, and archbishops.


1966 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Torben Christensen

In 1838 Frederick Denison Maurice introduced himself to the English public through his great work, The Kingdom of Christ; or, Hints on the Principles, Ordinances, and Constitution of the Catholic Church. In this book he attempted to show that all men’s searchings, yearnings, and longings would be satisfied in the Church of England, by its ordinances, worship, and doctrinal standards. The Established Church represented the solution to all the enigmas of human existence.In many ways The Kingdom of Christ was a difficult book to master. To all appearances there was an indistinctness in the argument and an obscurity of language. But it had the touch of originality. Above all, whether Maurice could be clearly understood or not, it was evident that he spoke with passion and authority, as a man entrusted with a message from God to the contemporary world. He was convinced that he had been given the task to call back to the truth the religious world, which had not grasped it.


Author(s):  
Joanna Innes

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.


Author(s):  
Whitney G. Gamble

In 1643, England’s Long Parliament called theologians from every county of England and Wales to Westminster Abbey to revise the Thirty-Nine Articles, the foundational documents of the Church of England. As the divines commenced their revisions, they encountered a theological movement which they believed represented the greatest threat to the cause of Reformation. Somewhat surprisingly, it was not Roman Catholicism or even Arminianism; it was antinomianism, a new and powerfully growing sect. Concern to combat antinomian tenets drove the assembly into complex theological debates for the first six weeks of its meetings. Parliament’s signing of the Solemn League and Covenant, however, brought an end to the assembly’s revisions. The Covenant instigated the writing of a statement of faith that would function as the confession for a theologically united Church of England, Scotland, and Wales. To supervise the execution of this plan, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland sent commissioners to the assembly to serve as consultative members. Although written in London primarily by English theologians, the Westminster Confession of Faith would be repudiated by Restoration officials. Its true impact came through its acceptance and implementation by the Church of Scotland.


2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (01) ◽  
pp. 80-84
Author(s):  
John F Stuart

The General Synod met at St Paul's and St George's Church in Edinburgh from 9 to 11 June 2016. In his charge to Synod, the Primus, the Most Revd David Chillingworth, reflected on the injunction of St Paul to ‘please God, who tests our hearts’. As the Synod prepared to consider canonical change in relation to marriage, he asked how the Church was to continue to express the love and unity to which it was called by God. During the preceding year, deep pain in relationships had been experienced both in the Anglican Communion and with the Church of Scotland and Church of England – and there was a need to explore whether the Scottish Episcopal Church itself might have contributed to that distress and to shape a response that ‘pleased God, who tests our hearts'. In the light of the (then) forthcoming referendum on the European Union, the Primus suggested that it was not the wish of many in Scotland to use national borders to protect economic privilege. If the referendum took the UK out of the European Union, it could have profound effects on the unfolding story of the new Scotland and of the UK as a whole.


2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (29) ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Frank Cranmer

In any discussion of church-state relations in the United Kingdom, it should be remembered that there are four national Churches: the Church of England, the (Reformed) Church of Scotland, the Church in Wales (disestablished in 1920 as a result of the Welsh Church Act 1914) and the Church of Ireland (disestablished by the Irish Church Act 1869). The result is that two Churches are established by law (the Church of England and the Church of Scotland) and enjoy a particular constitutional relationship with the state, while the other Churches and faith-communities (the Roman Catholics, the Free Churches, the Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others) have particular rights and privileges in particular circumstances.


2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN MUMM

This paper reflects on the uncomfortable relationship between gender, religion, authority and influence in the Victorian Church of England, using the example of the ecclesiastical response to the rise of Anglican religious communities for women in the second half of the nineteenth century. Anglican sisterhoods occupied equivocal and disputed space within the Victorian Church of England, proclaiming their loyalty to the Church but unfettered by any ecclesiastical legislation or tradition that would have compelled them to obey the bishops. In a society that assumed that obedience to lawful authority was a natural attribute of godly women, their ambiguous and improvised relationship with the church hierarchy created enormous tension as well as considerable hostility.


2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-170
Author(s):  
Liam J. Fraser

AbstractLike many Western churches, the Church of Scotland has been divided in recent years over the ordination of gay clergy in committed relationships, and, more generally, over the status of homosexuality for Christian ethics. Yet there has been no academic research undertaken which situates the debate within the wider context of Scottish theology. This failure has resulted in theological and ecclesial impasse, which this paper seeks to remedy through a diagnostic analysis of division over homosexuality, drawing upon the analytic tools developed by R. G. Collingwood. While this article has as its focus the Church of Scotland, its method and conclusions will be relevant to other Protestant denominations, especially Reformed churches such as the Presbyterian Church (USA).


2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 885-903 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN R. MACDONALD

Recent historiography has argued that the British ecclesiastical policies of James VI and I sought ‘congruity’ between the different churches in Scotland, England, and Ireland, rather than British ecclesiastical union or the anglicanization of all the churches. It is argued here that the asymmetry of the changes he sought in Scotland and England has been underplayed and that this has masked his choice of a fundamentally Anglican model for the British churches. Through allowing the archbishop of Canterbury to interfere in Scottish ecclesiastical affairs, undermining the presbyterian system, promoting episcopal power and liturgical reform, anglicanization of the Church of Scotland was the goal of James VI and I, and one which he pursued until his death. The motivation for King James's persistent desire for the fulfilment of this policy is to be found in his rapid assimilation to the Church of England after 1603 and, moreover, in his goal of the reunification of Christendom as a whole, on the Anglican model.


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