Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

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.

‘A Just and Sufficient Maintenance’: Some Defences of the Clerical Establishment in the Eighteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 321-332
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Pastoral Leaders ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Church Historians

Arguments in justification of the Church’s wealth can be illuminating in any age. The wealth of the Church of England in the eighteenth century has had a particularly bad press. Nineteenth-century reformers portrayed the Established Church of the previous century as a money-grabbing institution; clergy being too concerned with lining their own pockets to be effective pastoral leaders. John Wade in his Extraordinary Black Book wanted to expose the rapaciousness of clergy who, ‘with the accents and exterior of angels … perpetuate the work of demons’. He concluded that true Christianity was ‘meek, charitable, unobtrusive and above all cheap’. Clergy were castigated for holding a materialistic outlook which seemed to hinder their religious role and which has been taken by both subsequent Church historians and historians of the left as a sign of the clergy’s involvement with secularizing trends in society. Even the work of Norman Sykes leaves the impression that the clergy’s defence of their wealth went no further than jobbery and place-seeking. Like Namier he played down the ideological nature of such arguments, relegating them to the realm of cant and hypocrisy.

Revival

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. McClymond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
British Isles ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Conversion Narratives ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Institutional Boundaries ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Just as definitions of Dissent can be complicated, ‘revival’ was a multifaceted phenomenon in the eighteenth century. It crossed geographic and institutional boundaries and rounded histories of the phenomenon need to look at the connections between what was happening in Europe, the British Isles, and the American colonies, as well as considering groups both within and outside the Established Church. Some groups, notably Methodists, began within the Church of England, although many eventually left it. Others, like the Moravians, did not fit comfortably into the category of either Establishment or Dissent. Revivals and revivalism relied on shared and intensified spiritual experience but also networks of interconnection of people and ideas. Revivals frequently witnessed extensive outdoor preaching and leaders who were prepared to travel extensively to spread the Word. While there was some soteriological disagreement, many of the awakened sought to spread their experiences through personal interaction and conversion narratives.

‘A Practice of a Very Hurtful Tendency’

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 315-326
Author(s):  
W. M. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Clear Pattern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

The church of England in the eighteenth century has been bitterly criticised by succeeding generations for what the high Victorian church of England regarded as two cardinal sins, firstly non-residence of the clergy on their cures and secondly, and consequently, lack of pastoral care. However, generalisations are misleading and especially these generalisations which are largely based on the evidence of opponents of the established church in the early nineteenth century and on standards of pastoral care of one man to one parish, however small the parish, that were only achieved for a period of sixty or seventy years during the later nineteenth century. How misleading these generalisations are becomes apparent when the evidence for non residence and for standards of pastoral care is examined more closely. The object of this paper is to demonstrate that from the evidence of one particular county a clear pattern of clerical residence emerges that is not entirely incompatible with contemporary expectations of pastoral care.

Whigs, bishops and America: the politics of church reform in mid-eighteenth-century England

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Structural Reform ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The Church ◽  
Do So

ABSTRACTThe eighteenth century is traditionally seen as an interlude between two vigorous movements of church reform. This article explores the problems and attitudes which underlay the absence of major structural reform of the Church in this period. To do so, it examines the failure of attempts, especially those of the 1740s and 1750s, to create an anglican episcopate in the American colonies. The leaders of the Church of England were agreed that the need for American bishops was pressing, on both pastoral and administrative grounds, and the 1740s and 1750s witnessed two proposals for their creation which were supported by virtually the whole bench of bishops. Both failed. The whig ministry resolutely opposed these initiatives, largely out of fear that any debate of church reform would revive the political divisions of Queen Anne's reign. The bishops, moreover, were prepared to submit to this ministerial veto, despite their belief in the necessity of reform, not through political subservience, but because they too feared renewed controversy about religion and the Church, believing that such controversy would revive both anti-clerical attacks from without and bitter divisions within.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

Scotland

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Status ◽  
Steep Decline ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Episcopal Authority

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.

F. D. Maurice and the Contemporary Religious World

1966 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Torben Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Kingdom Of Christ ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

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.

Edmund Burke, Dissent and Church and State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church ◽  
At Home

This chapter examines Edmund Burke’s attitude towards Protestant dissenters, particularly the more radical or rational ones who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards the Church of England and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke’s attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. The catalyst for Burke’s emergence as leader of those who feared that revolution abroad might become a distemper at home was Richard Price’s Discourse on Love of Our Country. The chapter analyses how Burke moved from advocating toleration for Dissenters to become a staunch defender of establishment as to have ‘un-Whigged’ himself. It also considers the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as well as Burke’s attitude towards Church–state relations.

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