Reformed and Dissenting Protestants

2020 ◽  
pp. 166-182
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Church Leaders ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Opinion ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Evangelical Movement ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
Industrial Revolutions ◽  
Over Time

The meaning and observance of Christmas has always been contested and perhaps those most associated with opposition are to be found amongst Reformed and Dissenting Protestants. In the aftermath of the Reformation, Puritans, Scottish Presbyterians, and their heirs in both the Old and New Worlds most vociferously opposed and effectively proscribed the religious and secular observance of Christmas. Yet taking a longer perspective demonstrates that they too wavered between protest and participation and had to adapt their principles to changing circumstances. Was Christmas a holy day, a holiday, or neither? How could church leaders and theologians transform popular opinion and practice? Complexity of attitudes and often-pragmatic accommodation were inescapable as marking the passage of time and involved a range of complex issues. Their attitudes were further complicated by Church–State relations and denominational differences in which the celebration of Christmas became a sign of difference. Most of the groups belonging to these traditions dissented from Episcopalian state churches and objected to liturgies that followed the Christian Year; even in Scotland, where Presbyterians became the state church, the religious non-observance of Christmas became a symbol of Scottish identity in contrast to their larger English neighbour. Opposition to Christmas was also tempered over time by the involvement of Reformed and Dissenting Protestants in the broader evangelical movement as well as the commercial and industrial revolutions of the period. Groups belonging to this tradition were both the cause and the victim of the secularization and commercialization of the season.

Old Pastor and Local Bureaucrats: Recasting Church-State Relations in Contemporary China

Modern China ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 564-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jifeng Liu ◽  
Chris White
Keyword(s):  
Church Leaders ◽  
The State ◽  
Local State ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Church Structure ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church ◽  
Local Levels

In examining the relationships between a state-recognized Protestant pastor and local bureaucrats, this article argues that church leaders in contemporary China are strategic in enhancing interactions with the local state as a way to produce greater space for religious activities. In contrast to the idea that the Three-Self church structure simply functions as a state-governing apparatus, this study suggests that closer connection to the state can, at times, result in less official oversight. State approval of Three-Self churches offers legitimacy to registered congregations and their leaders, but equally important is that by endorsing such groups, the state is encouraging dialogue, even negotiations between authorities and the church at local levels.

The Theocratic Leviathan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Olsthoorn
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
State Identity ◽  
Identity Thesis ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church ◽  
Over Time

Hobbes’s views on church–state relations go well beyond Erastianism. Rather than claiming that the state holds supremacy over the church, Hobbes argued that church and state are identical in Christian commonwealths. This chapter shows that Hobbes advanced two distinct arguments for the church–state identity thesis over time. Both arguments are of considerable interest. The argument found in De Cive explains how the sovereign unifies a multitude of Christians into one personified church—without, intriguingly, any appeal to representation. Leviathan’s argument is premised on the sovereign’s authorized representation of Christian subjects. Authorization explains why, from Leviathan onwards, full sacerdotal powers are ex officio attributed to the sovereign. In Hobbes’s mature theory, every clerical power, including baptism and consecration, derives from the sovereign—now labelled ‘the Supreme Pastor’. Developments in Hobbes’s account of church personation thus explain Leviathan’s theocratic turn.

Joseph II and the Jews: the Origins of the Toleration Patent of 1782

1968 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Paul P. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
Radical Ideas

That Austria's monolithic refusal to tolerate religious minorities within its borders in an age of increasingly general religious permissiveness would not for long outlive Empress Maria Theresa must have been apparent to all but the most obtuse contemporary observers. Throughout the period of his coregency (1765–1780), Joseph II had made it plain on more than one occasion that while, unlike Frederick the Great, he did not believe that all his subjects might attain their salvation in whatever way seemed best to them, he was, nevertheless, aware that many of them would persist in assuring their damnation in spite of the best efforts of Church and crown to save them. And he was unwilling to let the obduracy of a minority of his subjects cause the state to lose their wealth, their services, and their loyalty. Dominated by such radical ideas on the place of religious minorities in a state, Joseph, State Chancellor Prince Wenzel Kaunitz, and Franz Joseph Heinke, once Kaunitz's man but now independently charged with drawing up policy guidelines for a subsequent reorganization of Church-state relations, were as early as 1769 discussing not the advisability of tolerating non-Catholic religions but ways and means of implementing such toleration.

scholarly journals Law and the Protestant Reformation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Witte
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Legal Form ◽  
Marriage And Family ◽  
Ius Commune ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Power Property ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation revolutionized not only theology and the Church, but also law and the state. Though divided into Lutheran, Anabaptist, Anglican, and Calvinist branches, the Reformation collectively broke the international rule of the medieval Church and its canon law, and permanently splintered Western Christendom into competing nations and regions. The Reformation also triggered a massive shift of power, property, and prerogative from the Church to the state. Protestant states now assumed new jurisdiction over numerous subjects and persons, and they gave new legal form to Protestant teachings. But these new Protestant laws also drew heavily on the medieval ius commune as well as on earlier biblical and Roman jurisprudence. This chapter analyses the new Protestant legal syntheses, with attention to the new laws of Church–state relations, religious and civil freedom, marriage and family law, education law, social welfare law, and accompanying changes in legal and political philosophy.

scholarly journals Religious Situation in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s: Retrospection or Discourse of the Present?

2008 ◽  
pp. 99-104
Author(s):  
A.M. Kyrydon
Keyword(s):  
Social Processes ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church

The problem with the peculiar paradox of the sound makes some sense. First of all, it is not about identifying the processes in the sphere of church-state relations between two historically distant periods, but about studying the features of consonant processes, analyzing the causes of conflict situations or misunderstandings between the Churches in the 1920s and defining the nature of conflicts in the church environment. The realities of today's social progress of Ukraine require the maximum possible utilization of the constructive potential of the influence of religion on social processes, hence the need to understand the whole spectrum of processes directly ecclesiastical and inter-church environment with extrapolation to the state and society.

Popular Opinion Under Communist Regimes

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Opinion ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
Over Time

The totalitarian nature of communist states is generally understood to exclude the existence of a public sphere sufficiently independent of the state to allow the expression of a range of opinions. However, popular opinion, if not a public sphere, did exist and it was monitored extensively by these states, since leaders needed to know about popular responses to their policies and campaigns. This essay explores the limits on the expression of popular opinion in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe, and the ways in which those limits shifted—and were challenged—over time. If it may be argued that the transformation of popular opinion into a ‘public sphere’ followed the collapse of communism in Poland, and possibly Hungary, ‘civil society’ was relatively insignificant in the collapse elsewhere (or indeed its persistence in the case of China).

The Impact of Federalism on Mexican Church-State Relations, 1824-1835: The Case of the State of Mexico

1984 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-529
Author(s):  
Charles W. Macune
Keyword(s):  
Decisive Role ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

A number of first-rate scholarly studies in recent years have considerably enhanced our understanding of the troubled, sometimes tumultuous, relationship between the state and the Mexican Church in the century stretching from the reign of Charles III (1759-1788) to the era of Benito Juárez (1855-1876). Nancy Farriss, for example, has detailed the Bourbon drive to exert royal authority over the conduct and activities of the powerful and influential clergy and the latter's claim to exemption from that authority. Farriss, Karl Schmitt, and James Breedlove have demonstrated the connection between the state ecclesiastical reforms and the clergy's decisive role in the Mexican independence movement culminating in 1821. Ann Staples has ably ventured an overview of Church-state relations in the crucial but long-neglected early independence period of the first federal republic, 1824-1835. Michael Costeloe, Asunción Lavrin, Jan Bazant, Brian Hamnet, and Robert Knowlton have examined some of the Church's key economic activities and the impact of state reforms upon each. State policy toward the Church in the northern Mexican borderlands has received the attention of C. Alan Hutchinson, Manuel P. Servín, David J. Weber, John L. Kessell, Lawrence and Lucia Kinnaird, and others. Together with earlier works, these studies have documented a drama which began with the absolutistinspired reforms by the Crown, which regarded ecclesiastical privilege and power as incompatible with its own interests, and ended violently with the political and economic power of the Church and its clergy severely reduced and subordinated to the secular state.

The challenge to laïcité: church, state and schools in Vichy France, 1940–1944

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Atkin
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Vichy France ◽  
Vichy Regime ◽  
French Catholicism ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis article examines the role which education played in church/state relations during the Occupation. It begins with an evaluation of catholic reactions to the defeat and explains why so many church leaders were quick to blame military collapse on the laïcité of the republican educational system. It then investigates the policies which the church wanted to see pursued in regard to schools and assesses how these were received by the Vichy government. Analysis of these issues reveals that Vichy was not as pro-clerical as is sometimes believed. Although initially sympathetic to church requests, by 1942 the regime had become reluctant to introduce any measure that might provoke religious division. At the same time, the article illustrates that French Catholicism was not a monolithic bloc. Arguments over education served only to intensify divisions already present within the church and soon led to catholic disenchantment with the Vichy regime.

scholarly journals Stanislav Orikhovsky's Views on Church-State Relations

2006 ◽  
pp. 116-128
Author(s):  
R. Mnozhynska
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
The State ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

Before talking about the vision of Orikhov's essence of the relationship between the church and the state, one must first determine what the church is about - Catholic or Orthodox. After all, the thinker lived in Poland when there were still strong, even parity positions of both denominations. He himself was brought up in a family where his father was Catholic and his mother was Orthodox. This was reflected in his mentality: he repeatedly publicly stated the benefits of certain tenets of the Orthodox faith. But most of all he settled on the problem of relations between the Catholic Church and the state.

One Church and Two Nations: a Uniquely Irish Phenomenon?

1990 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Katherine Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Lasting Effect ◽  
Religious Plurality ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
Tacit Assumptions ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Reformation in the sixteenth century brought with it the complex and—for contemporary religious and political groupings—unacceptable phenomenon of religious plurality. In the Middle Ages citizenship as an independent concept scarcely existed, and tacit assumptions about the function of Church-State relations rested on the view that all inhabitants of the polity were members of the Christian respublica. There were, of course, some specific, necessary, and therefore tolerable exceptions, such as Jews in many, but not in all countries. Heretics and infidels, who did not conform to these specifications, were therefore regarded as legitimate targets for repression, even for physical violence, in the complex machinery of the Inquisition and in the ideology of the crusades. The Reformation brought about a reversal of this monolithic thinking about the nature of the Christian polity. Faced with plurality of religious ideas and organizations, various solutions were attempted. The earliest, and that which was to have the most widespread and long-lasting effect in pre-Enlightenment and pre-Emancipation Europe, was that formulated in the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555). Here the decree of cuius regio, ejus religio—with a deliberate retrospect to the Emperor Constantine—guaranteed the continuation of the medieval principle, whereby the good and loyal citizen was one who conformed in religious as well as political sentiment with the ruling authority.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document