The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700. By W. M. Spellman. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1993. x + 228 pp. $40.00.

1994 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-635
Author(s):  
R. Barry Levis
Author(s):  
William Horbury

Charles Francis Digby Moule (1908–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was probably the most influential British New Testament scholar of his time. The youngest of their three children, he was born in the same house as his father, and spent a happy if often solitary childhood in China. Moule spent three years studying theology and training for Holy Orders in the Church of England at Ridley Hall. He soon had to take on leadership of New Testament teaching at the University of Cambridge for the Regius Professor, A. M. Ramsey. Moule was also fascinated, without losing his head as a critic, by the associated question of interaction between liturgy and literature in the early church, posed by such cultic interpreters of the gospels as G. Bertram. He joined the Evangelical Fellowship for Theological Literature, founded in 1942, an impressive body of younger authors that came to include Henry Chadwick, G. W. H. Lampe, S. L. Greenslade, and F. W. Dillistone; the moving spirit was Max Warren.


Author(s):  
Andrew Atherstone

Protestantism was a major rallying cry during the Tractarian controversies. It was anathematized by some Oxford Movement radicals as a ‘heresy’, and held tenaciously by evangelical campaigners as ‘the pure Gospel of Christ’. Protestant polemicists decried Tractarianism as a revival of Roman Catholicism in an Anglican disguise and called their brothers-in-arms to fight the theological battles of the Reformation over again. Focusing on the events in Oxford itself between 1838 and 1846, this chapter surveys the rhetoric which surrounded three overlapping themes—Protestant Reformers, Protestant Formularies, and Protestant Truth. It shows how these loomed large in the speeches and writings of those who wanted to defend the Protestant hegemony of the Church of England and the University of Oxford.


1985 ◽  
Vol 78 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Barlow

The British theological world was stirred at the beginning of the eighteenth century by what the learned and staunchly orthodox Presbyterian historian James Seaton Reid has called “latitudinarian notions on the inferiority of dogmatic belief and the nature of religious liberty.” In the 1690s John Locke had published his Reasonableness of Christianity and Letters on Toleration, followed by John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious. In 1710 “Honest Will” Whitson, Sir Isaac Newton's successor as Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, was expelled from the University for embracing Arian views. His departure was accompanied by rumors—long since substantiated—about his great predecessor's heterodox theology. Traditional theologians were shocked next by the appearance of Dr. Samuel Clark's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity which resulted in the author's arraignment before Convocation of the Church of England in 1714. The very same year John Simson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow, was first tried before the General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church for teaching Arian and Pelagian errors. In 1729, after three more trials, Simson was suspended from his professorship for denying the numerical oneness of the Trinity. Fierce doctrinal contentions also began to occupy English Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, erupting during the famous Salters’ Hall meeting early in 1719.


Author(s):  
William Gibson

This chapter explores Samuel Wesley’s decision to abandon his family’s commitment to Dissent and conform to the Church of England around 1684. Wesley was raised in a Dissenting family and educated at a Dissenting academy. His decision to conform to the Church of England was therefore surprising and there have been a number of explanations for it. This chapter explores the range of motives for Wesley’s decision and presents new evidence for the reasons for this decision. The decision was undoubtedly influenced by the desire to go to the University of Oxford. Other accounts have suggested that Wesley was unhappy with the attitudes of his fellow students at the dissenting academy he attended, and that he had developed a strong commitment to the idea of Charles I as a martyr. He may also have attended Oxford with the intention to remain a Dissenter but gradually found himself drawn to the Church of England. Other influences may have been his future wife, Susanna, who had conformed at the age of twelve.


2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (38) ◽  
pp. 266-288
Author(s):  
Philip Barrett

In December 1994 the Revd Philip LS Barrett BD MA FRHistS FSA, Rector of Compton and Otterbourne in the Diocese of Winchester, successfully submitted a dissertation to the University of Wales College of Cardiff for the degree of LLM in Canon Law, entitled ‘Episcopal Visitation of Cathedrals in the Church of England’. Philip Barrett, best known for his magisterial study, Barchester: English Cathedral Life in the Nineteenth Century (SPCK1993), died in 1998. The subject matter of this dissertation is of enduring importance and interest to those engaged in the life and work of cathedrals, and the Editor invited Canon Peter Atkinson, Chancellor of Chichester Cathedral, to repare it for publication in this Journal, so that the author's work might receive a wider circulation, but at a manageable length. In 1999 a new Cathedrals Measure was enacted, following upon the recommendations of the Howe Commission, published in the report Heritage and Renewal (Church House Publishing 1994). The author was able to refer to the report, but not to the Measure, or to the revision of each set of cathedral Statutes consequent upon that Measure. While this limits the usefulness of the author's work as a point of reference for the present law of cathedral visitations, its value as an historical introduction remains.


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 721-744 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUCINDA MATTHEWS-JONES

AbstractThis article considers how lecturing in Victoria Park in the East End of London allowed three early heads of the university settlement Oxford House to engage local communities in a discussion about the place of religion in the modern world. It demonstrates how park lecturing enabled James Adderley, Hebert Hensley Henson, and Arthur Winnington-Ingram, all of whom also held positions in the Church of England, to perform and test out their religious identities. Open-air lecturing was a performance of religious faith for these settlement leaders. It allowed them to move beyond the institutional spaces of the church and the settlement house in order to mediate their faith in the context of open discussion and debate about religion and modern life. The narratives they constructed in and about their park sermons reveal a good deal about how these early settlement leaders imagined themselves as well as their relationship with the working-class men they hoped to reach through settlement work. A vivid picture of Victorian religious and philanthropic life emerges in their accounts of lecturing in Victoria Park.


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