scholarly journals Benjamin Hoadly, Samuel Clarke, and the Ethics of the Bangorian Controversy: Church, State, and the Moral Law

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 599
Author(s):  
Dafydd Mills Daniel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Ideological Conflict ◽  
Apostolic Succession

The Bangorian controversy has been described as ‘the most bitter ideological conflict of the [eighteenth] century’ (J.C.D. Clark). However, while its impact is widely recognised, there are few studies dedicated to the controversy itself. Moreover, the figure at the centre of it all—Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor—has not always been taken seriously. Such scholars as Norman Sykes, G.R. Cragg, and B.W. Young have dismissed Hoadly as an opportunistic ‘political bishop’, rather than an adept theological thinker. By contrast, this article demonstrates that Hoadly’s Bangorian writings were embedded within the ethical rationalist moral theology of Isaac Newton’s friend, and defender against Gottfried Leibniz, Samuel Clarke. As a follower of Clarke, Hoadly objected to the doctrine of apostolic succession, and to the existence of religious conformity laws in Church and state, because they prevented Christianity from being what he thought it ought to be: a religion of conscience.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Degree Of Acceptance ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State ◽  
The Relationship

This volume charts the development of protestant Dissent between the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) and the repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828). The long eighteenth century was a period in which Dissenters slowly moved from a position of being a persecuted minority to achieving a degree of acceptance and, eventually, full political rights. The first part of the volume considers the history of various Dissenting traditions inside England. There are separate chapters devoted to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—the denominations that traced their history before this period—and also to Methodists, who emerged as one of the denominations of ‘New Dissent’ during the eighteenth century. The second part explores the ways in which these traditions developed outside England. It considers the complexities of being a Dissenter in Wales and Ireland, where the state church was Episcopalian, as well as in Scotland, where it was Presbyterian. It also looks at the development of Dissent across the Atlantic, where the relationship between Church and state was rather more loose. The third part is devoted to revivalist movements and their impact, with a particular emphasis on the importance of missionary societies for spreading protestant Christianity from the late eighteenth century onwards. The fourth part looks at Dissenters’ relationship to the British state and their involvement in campaigns to abolish the slave trade. The final part discusses how Dissenters lived: the theology they developed and their attitudes towards Scripture; the importance of both sermons and singing; their involvement in education and print culture; and the ways in which they expressed their faith materially through their buildings.

San Antonio's Old Franciscan Missions: Material Decline and Secular Avarice in the Transition from Hispanic to Mexican Control

1987 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Félix D. Almaráz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Municipal Government ◽  
San Antonio ◽  
Land Grants ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Franciscan Missions

In the twilight years of the eighteenth century, Spanish authorities of church and state resolved that the original Franciscan missions of Texas had achieved the goal of their early foundation, namely conversion of indigenous cultures to an Hispano-European lifestyle. Cognizant that the mission as a frontier agency had gained souls for the Catholic faith and citizens for the empire, Hispanic officials initiated secularization of the Texas establishments with the longest tenure, beginning with the missions along the upper San Antonio River. Less than a generation later, in the transition from Spanish dominion to Mexican rule in the nineteenth century, the Franciscan institutions, woefully in a condition of material neglect, engendered widespread secular avarice as numerous applicants with political contact in municipal government energetically competed to obtain land grants among the former mission temporalities.

Berlin and Vienna

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-203
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Personal Transformations ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
New Institutions

This epilogue argues that the meaning of the Enlightenment resides in political structures and personal transformations that emerged in the course of the eighteenth century. These are most visible in the lives and ideas found in its last quarter. Since the late 1680s into the 1790s, all sorts of people tried to break with tradition and find alternatives to absolutism in church and state. By 1800, space and time on earth were filled by fewer miracles, saints, and prophecies than had been the case in 1700. Ultimately, the eighteenth-century philosophes, despite their disagreements, shared a universal distrust of organized religion and the priests who enforced it. Indeed, the century ended with revolutions that focused minds on making new institutions, new laws, new hopes and dreams.

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.

Georgian Churchmanship Reconsidered: Some Variations in Anglican Public Worship 1714–1830

1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. C. Mather
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Good Works ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Public Worship

Current evaluation of the Church of England under the first four Georges follows in the main the assessment made by Norman Sykes in his monumental Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1934. According to that view the Church, which was lastingly cleared of the universal slackness previously imputed to it, exhibited a pervasive Latitudinarianism sympathetically portrayed by Sykes as ‘practical Christianity’, an emphasis on cdnduct and good works to the neglect of ‘organised churchmanship’ and the ‘mystical element’ in religion. R. W. Greaves detected similar features in the concept of ‘moderation’: suspicion of popery and friendship towards dissenters, a cult of plainness in theological explanation and a very general contempt of whatever was medieval. Historians have been willing to acknowledge as exceptions to this ‘mild’ quality of Anglican churchmanship the early Methodists and ‘small Evangelical and High Church minorities’, but only the two former have been taken seriously. Piety of a more traditional kind - rubrical, sacramental, Catholic - has been identified, only to be discounted. The Establishment has been seen in the light of the judgement recently summarised by Dr Anthony Russell: ‘Certainly the temper of the eighteenth century which favoured reason above all else, and was deeply suspicious of mysticism and the emotions, was against any form of sacramentalism.’

Reserve and Physical Imagery in the Tractarian Poetry of Isaac Williams (1802–65)

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 246-258
Author(s):  
John Boneham
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
Established Relationship ◽  
Apostolic Succession ◽  
The Church

The Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement began as a conservative reaction to the reforming measures of the 1820s and 1830s and in particular to the Whig government’s passing of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill in 1832. For the Tractarians, the cumulative effect of such legislation was that the authority of the Church was being seriously compromised by interference from the secular government, which could now include those who were not necessarily Anglicans or even Christians. While it was these overtly political concerns that moved John Keble to preach his ‘Assize Sermon’ which has. traditionally been seen as marking the beginning of the movement in July 1833, the Oxford Movement was to develop into a spiritual revival whose concerns went far beyond politics. In rejecting the established relationship between Church and state the Tractarians came to emphasize the Church’s innate spiritual autonomy and appealed increasingly to the authority of tradition as reflected in the writings of the church fathers of the third and fourth centuries. In doing so their emphasis on certain beliefs and practices of the primitive Church, such as baptismal regeneration, the real presence and the apostolic succession, was seen as betraying sympathy for Roman Catholicism and disloyalty towards the Church of England.

Tractarian Theology in Verse and Sermon

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Boneham
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
Apostolic Succession ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Practical Teaching

In this chapter the author explores the role of poetry and sermons in propagating Tractarian theological ideas. The use of these two distinct genres was closely connected to the principle of reserve, a theory of knowledge holding that religious truth ought to be conveyed in accordance with the recipient’s ability to receive it. While poetry allowed a more detailed theological reflection, sermons offered a better opportunity for practical teaching. The chapter examines how the Tractarians used these genres to deal with the interpretation of Scripture, the relationship between Church and state, apostolic succession and the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN AMERICA: MYTHS AND REALITIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 465-478
Author(s):  
FRANCIS G. COUVARES
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
American History ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Christian Conservatives

The Whiggish story of ever-evolving liberty issuing from the Revolutionary decades and progressing straightforwardly over the next two centuries is dead. But so too, it seems, on the evidence of these two good books, is the revisionist tale of either “republican virtue” (often trumpeted by progressives) or “evangelical piety” (often trumpeted by Christian conservatives) governing the American mind and its understanding of rights, obligations, and collective identity. Both Steven K. Green and David Sehat see the narrative arc of American history as a continual tension between the religious and secular understandings of the American Constitution. Sehat is more doubtful that the Jeffersonian–Madisonian doctrine of separation of church and state ever commanded broad assent. The “myth” that America was born religiously free, though peddled by liberals, he argues, actually disables secularists who are struggling to create a public realm truly free from religious coercion. Green more readily accepts the proposition that the germ of religious freedom grew from its eighteenth-century origins along a non-continuous but nonetheless clearly secularizing trajectory.

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