Traditions within the Church of England and Psychological Type: A Study among the Clergy

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Village

Abstract This study examines the relationship of psychological type preferences to membership of three different traditions within the Church of England: Anglo-catholic, broad church and evangelical. A sample of 1047 clergy recently ordained in the Church of England completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales and self-assigned measures of church tradition, conservatism and charismaticism. The majority of clergy preferred introversion over extraversion, but this preference was more marked among Anglo-catholics than among evangelicals. Anglo-catholics showed preference for intuition over sensing, while the reverse was true for evangelicals. Clergy of both sexes showed an overall preference for feeling over thinking, but this was reversed among evangelical clergymen. The sensing-intuition difference between traditions persisted after controlling for conservatism and charismaticism, suggesting it was linked to preferences for different styles of religious expression in worship. Conservatism was related to preferences for sensing over intuition (which may promote preference for traditional worship and parochial practices) and thinking over feeling (which for evangelicals may promote adherence to traditional theological principles and moral behaviour). Charismaticism was associated with preferences for extraversion over introversion, intuition over sensing, and feeling over thinking. Reasons for these associations are discussed in the light of known patterns of belief and practice across the various traditions of the Church of England.

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-154
Author(s):  
Andrew Village

Abstract Liberalism and conservatism have been important stances that have shaped doctrinal, moral and ecclesial beliefs and practices in Christianity. In the Church of England, Anglo-catholics are generally more liberal, and evangelicals more conservative, than those from broad-church congregations. This paper tests the idea that psychological preference may also partly explain liberalism or conservatism in the Church of England. Data from 1,389 clergy, collected as part of the 2013 Church Growth Research Programme, were used to categorise individuals by church tradition (Anglo-catholic, broad church or evangelical), whether or not they had an Epimethean psychological temperament, and whether or not they preferred thinking over feeling in their psychological judging process. Epimetheans and those who preferred thinking were more likely to rate themselves as conservative rather than liberal. Conservatism was associated with being Epimethean among those who were Anglo-catholic or broad-church, but with preference for thinking over feeling among evangelicals.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller

This study of William Perkins’ thought on grace and free choice places his thought in the variegated tradition of the Reformation as established by writers like Calvin, Vermigli, Bullinger, and Musculus. More specifically, his thought can be placed in the version of that tradition exemplified in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and in the Elizabethan Settlement. Closer examination of Perkins’ thought in its context yields a window on the more technical understanding of the relationship of divine grace to human knowing and willing, which demonstrates its eclectic reception of late medieval scholasticism, its elaboration of the work of the Reformers, and its distance from modern theories of compatibilist and libertarian freedom. This work traces Perkins’ views on the nature of free will both as created and in the fallen and regenerate states of humanity, correlating them with the views of Reformed contemporaries, and lining out the issues that they sought to address.


1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 384-395
Author(s):  
R. W. Ambler

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL QUESTIER

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.


Author(s):  
David A. deSilva

The books of the Apocrypha contain extensive reflection on the theologies of earlier Jewish writings, particularly in regard to election, the Torah, and the Deuteronomistic theology of history, in the face of several critical situations facing the Jewish people (the advance and advantages of Hellenization, the repression of Judaism under Antiochus IV, ongoing life as a minority culture throughout the Diaspora, and domination and devastation under Rome). They also bear witness to important developments both in personal and national eschatology and in the identification of supernatural forces impacting human existence (e.g., angels and demons). Early Christians, in turn, found these texts to provide important resources for their reflection upon the person and work of Jesus, applying developments within the Wisdom tradition in their delineation of the relationship of the Son to God and within the Jewish martyrological traditions to their professions about the atoning force of Jesus’ death. These texts thus exercised an important influence on the theologies articulated in the New Testament and the development of the doctrines and creeds embraced by the universal church, despite the ongoing discussions within the church concerning their canonical status.


Author(s):  
Paul Seaward

The lives, and political thought, of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and Thomas Hobbes, were closely interwoven. In many ways opposed, their views on the relationship between Church and State have often been seen as less far apart, with Clarendon sharing Hobbes’s Erastianism and concerns about clerical assertiveness in the 1660s. But Clarendon’s writings on Church-State relations during the 1670s provide little evidence of concern about clerical involvement in politics, and demonstrate his vigorous adherence to a fairly conventional view among early seventeenth-century churchmen about the proper boundaries to royal interference in the Church; his worries about attempts to push further the implications of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs are evident in his writings against Hobbes, as are his even greater anxieties, exacerbated by the conversion of his daughter, the Duchess of York, about the dangers of Roman Catholic encroachment.


Church Life ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Elliot Vernon

This chapter examines the relationship between pastor and congregation in the London parishes during the Interregnum. It addresses how godly ministers, called on by Parliament at the outbreak of the Civil War to reform parochial discipline and prevent the ‘promiscuous multitude’ from polluting the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in England’s parish churches, negotiated issues of authority, changes to worship and liturgy, and the already contentious issues of patronage and finance. These factors forced ministers to look to the lay leaders of the parish, whether as elders or vestrymen, making them subject to factional struggles within the church life of the parish community. This chapter assesses the establishment and operation of Presbyterianism in London’s parishes during the 1640s and 1650s, as well as the practical difficulties, economic and administrative, that godly pastors experienced at the parochial level as a result of the dismantling of the Church of England.


2020 ◽  
pp. 46-76
Author(s):  
Michael Barnes, SJ

The background of Vatican II’s pastoral and missionary concerns cannot be separated from what is arguably the Council’s most unexpected and far-reaching document, Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the relationship of the Church to non-Christian religions. While very often interpreted as changing, not to say reversing, traditional Church-centred soteriology, this chapter argues that Nostra Aetate needs to be understood primarily as an event, a moment of self-understanding on the part of the Church which provokes a radical conversio morum. By calling the Declaration the ‘moral heart of the Council’, the chapter focusses specifically on its original purpose. That the Declaration has opened up a broader interreligious perspective to which all the major religions of the world can relate is testament less to the power of particular theological ideas than to its central conviction that the Church finds its own origins not apart from but through the faith which it shares with the people of the Sinai Covenant.


2007 ◽  
Vol 56 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Laffitte

A partire dalla seconda metà del secolo scorso, la Chiesa si è trovata a dover ripensare i rapporti tra fede, teologia e antropologia in problematiche nuove come, ad esempio, la sessualità umana. Interprete privilegiato di questa rielaborazione è stato, senza dubbio, Giovanni Paolo II che in più occasioni ha avuto modo di riflettere e illustrare la teologia, la antropologia e l’etica che sostengono la visione cristiana della sessualità umana. Di questa vasta produzione, l’articolo prende in esame soprattutto le Catechesi di Giovanni Paolo II con frequenti richiami e illustrazioni del pensiero del filosofo Karol Wojty´la. L’analisi dell’autore prende le mosse dall’esposizione di Giovanni Paolo II dei dati creaturali dei tre primi capitoli del libro della Genesi, esaminando, in particolar modo, i significati fondamentali della solitudine originaria dell’uomo verso la creazione e poi il rapporto maschio-femmina. Vengono illustrati quindi l’esperienza dell’amore e l’ethos del dono: l’esperienza cristiana è presentata dal Pontefice come evento e saggezza e legata all’esperienza di amore che l’uomo sperimenta nel rapporto di filiazione che lo unisce a Dio; l’esperienza dell’amore coniugale ruota attorno alla corporeità umana e ai suoi valori/significati. Il corpo assume dunque un significato sponsale che conserva anche dopo la caduta, testimonianza dell’innocenza originaria e della libertà del dono. In tale contesto l’esperienza dell’amore è vissuta come mediazione di una conoscenza che va al di là della persona dell’amato aprendo l’orizzonte al dono divino anteriore. Nella seconda parte del contributo si prendono in esame i significati dell’amore e l’esperienza etica della sessualità così come sviluppati da Giovanni Paolo II: nella corporeità umana, in cui è impressa la complementarietà biologica, vi è una chiamata alla comunione che non è solo comunione tra i due sessi, ma che rimanda a una divina comunione di Persone. L’autore esamina anche l’esercizio della sessualità in rapporto alla legge naturale intesa come conformità alla ragione umana protesa verso la verità. Tale conformità conduce alla retta comprensione dell’intima struttura dell’atto coniugale, la cui “verità ontologica” si manifesta nell'inscindibilità delle due dimensioni unitiva e procreativa. In questa ampia visione della sessualità è compreso anche il mistero dell’amore nuziale tra Cristo e la Chiesa: la comunione di vita e d’amore tra l’uomo e la donna ha come missione propria di significare e rendere attuale l’unione tra Cristo e la sua Chiesa. L’articolo termina con l’analisi del legame tra corpo e sacramento e della dimensione sacrificale e nuziale del dono eucaristico. ---------- Since the second half of the last century, the Church has found herself having to rethink the relationship between faith, theology, and anthropology within new problems concerning, for example, human sexuality. Without any doubt, a privileged interpreter of this reprocessing was John Paul II, who on more occasions had a way of reflecting upon and illustrating the theology, anthropology, and ethics that support the Christian vision of human sexuality. Out of the vast work produced, the article examines especially the Catecheses of John Paul II with frequent appeals to and illustrations of the thought of Karol Wojty´la. The author’s analysis begins its quest with John Paul II’s exposition of creatural data in the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, examining in particular the fundamental meanings of the original solitude of man toward creation and then the relationship between male and female. The experience of love and the ethos of gift thus come to be illustrated: Christian experience is presented by the Pontiff as event and wisdom and is connected to the experience of love that man experiences in the relationship of filiation that unites Him to God. The experience of conjugal love revolves around human corporeity and its values/meanings. The body thus assumes a spousal meaning that remains even after the Fall, serving as testimony of original innocence and the freedom of gift. Within such a context, the experience of love is lived out as the mediation of knowledge that goes beyond the person of the loved, opening up the horizon to the earlier divine gift. In the second part of this contribution, the meanings of love and the ethical experience of sexuality as such are examined as developments by John Paul II: In human corporeity, upon which biological complementarity is impressed, there is a call to communion that is not only communion between the two sexes, but which refers back to a divine communion of Persons. The author also examines the exercise of sexuality in relation to a natural law intended as conformity to a human reason reaching toward truth. Such conformity leads to the proper understanding of the intimate structure of the conjugal act, whose “ontological truth” manifests itself through the inseparability of the two dimensions: unitive and the procreative. Within this comprehensive vision of sexuality also resonates the mystery of nuptial love between Christ and the Church: The communion of life and love between man and woman that has as its own mission to signify and render present the union between Christ and His Church. The article ends with an analysis of the connection between body and sacrament and of the sacrificial and nuptial dimension of the Eucharistic gift.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document