Confessional History and the Authority of Erudition

2019 ◽  
pp. 264-300
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Main Text ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Genuine Effort

In his History of the variations of the Protestant Churches, his major work of confessional controversy, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) made a genuine effort to use various primary sources. In the case of England, however, he chose to rely on a single authority, Gilbert Burnet’s (1643-1715) History of the Reformation of the Church of England, which was available to him in a recent French translation. This reflected Bossuet’s tactical determination to employ only authors whom his Protestant adversaries could not object to, but also his paradoxical affinities with Burnet, whose very political reading of the English Reformation fitted well with his own interpretation. Burnet, however, had included in his History a rich collection of records, which Bossuet studied and occasionally used to challenge Burnet’s main text. Although Bossuet’s interests remained those of a polemical divine, he spoke the language of historical erudition to assert his trustworthiness.

The Reformation in Anglicanism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alec Ryrie
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The State ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
The Church

The outline of the English Reformation under Henry VIII and the later Tudors is no longer heavily contested. While politically led and slow to take root, it eventually took shape as a decisively Reformed Protestant, even Calvinist, Reformation with a stress on the doctrine of predestination, even though Cranmer retained some traditional trappings in his Prayer Books. Terms such as ‘Anglican’ and ‘via media’ ought not to be applied to the Church of England before 1662. However, that church’s subjugation to the state and the central position it acquired in English national identity helped to sow the seeds of later Anglican distinctiveness. The Reformation’s legacy for modern Anglicans is divisive, and it is used dishonestly, as a weapon, by all sides. This is in part because the true extent of its popularity in its own time remains open to dispute.

Recent Literature in Church HistoryKleine Texte für theologische Vorlesungen und Uebungen. Hans LietzmannHistory of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church. Henry Charles LeaRegesta Pontificum Romanorum. P. F. KehrDas Mönchtum, seine Ideale und seine Geschichte. Adolf HarnackThe Censorship of the Church of Rome and Its Influence upon the Production and Distribution of Literature: A Study of the History of the Prohibitory and Expurgatory Indexes, Together with Some Consideration of the Effects of Protestant Censorship and of Censorship by the State. George Haven PutnamChristliche Antike. Ludwig von SybelPersecution in the Early Church. Herbert B. WorkmanLo Gnosticismo storica di antiche Lotte Religiose. E. BuonaiutaThe Stoic Creed. William L. DavidsonLa théologie de saint Hippolyte. Adhémar d'AlèsDer Traktat des Laurentius de Somercote, Kanonikers von Chichester, über die Vornahme von Bischofswahlen; Entstanden im Jahre 1254. Alfred von WretschkoLes réordinations. Louis SaltetLes martyrologes historiques du moyen âge. Dom Henri QuentinHistory of the Christian Church. Vol. V, Part I: The Middle Ages from Gregory VII, 1049, to Boniface VIII, 1294. Philip Schaff , David S. SchaffLehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte. Wilhelm Moeller , Gustav KawerauW. Capito im Dienste Erzbischof Albrechts von Mainz. Paul KalkoffAhasver, "der ewige Jude," nach seiner ursprünglichen Idee und seiner literarischen Verwertung betrachtet. Eduard KönigLes leçons de la défaite; Ou la fin d'un catholicisme. Jehan de BonnefoyDer Solinger Kirchenstreit und seine Nachwirkung auf die rheinisch-westfälische Kirche bis zum Fall César. Friedrich NippoldA Short History of the Baptists. Henry C. VedderJames Harris Fairchild; Or Sixty-Eight Years with a Christian College. Albert Temple SwingDisestablishment in France. Paul SabatierA History of the Inquisition in Spain. Henry Charles LeaThe Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. Charles Henry LeaKirchliches Jahrbuch. Kirchliches Jahrbuch. Auf das Jahr 1907, J. SchneiderNachwirkungen des Kulturkampfes. Georg GrauePaul Gerhardt. Artur BurdachDie russischen Sekten. Karl Konrad GrassHistory of the Christian Church since the Reformation. S. CheethamThe English Reformation and Puritanism, with Other Lectures and Addresses. Eri B. Hulbert , A. R. E. Wyant

1908 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-319
Author(s):  
Franklin Johnson ◽  
Edward B. Krehbiel ◽  
Albert Henry Newman ◽  
J. W. Moncrief ◽  
David S. Muzzey ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Christian College ◽  
Early Church ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Short History ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Modern State ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

The conclusion explains why the English Reformation ended in the late eighteenth century. It discounts a secular and secularizing Enlightenment as an explanation. Rather, it offers three other reasons for the Reformation’s ending. Firstly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century enough time had passed to make the seventeenth-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. Secondly, the Reformation issues with which the eighteenth-century English dealt got supplanted by other, more urgent ones, often having to do with England’s expanding empire. Finally, and importantly, the Reformation ended because the polemical divines who are the subject of this book failed fully in their tasks of defining truth and of defending the autonomy of the established Church of England. In the end, the modern state took on the role as truth’s arbiter and made the Church a subordinate, dependent institution.

A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan

1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Collinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Time Span ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
James I ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Life ◽  
The Church

With Professor Christianson, one can only deplore the paucity of books dealing with the history of the Church of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. With the exception of histories covering a somewhat longer time span, there has been no attempt at synthesis since Bishop W. H. Frere's The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904), which was part of a series answering to a semi-popular and general interest in the Church of England ‘as a factor in the development of national life and character’. It is remarkable and even scandalous that the greatly altered perspectives of twentieth-century historians are not reflected in a more recent and adequate account of the post-Reformation and pre-revolutionary Church. The Jacobean epoch is a particularly neglected subject, to which even Frere devoted no more than 100 of his 400 pages, giving it no particular shape or significance. Jacobean bishops of the calibre of Toby Matthew, James Montague and Thomas Morton were not even mentioned. Today that singular and exemplary figure, Arthur Lake, Laud's predecessor as bishop of Bath and Wells, is totally forgotten. The reason for our myopia is not very flattering to modern historiography. Unlike the Reformation of the Church of England, or the Elizabethan Church, the Jacobean Church was not a subject for Gilbert Burnet or for John Strype, and consequently (or so it seems) it is not a subject for us.

Community Control And Puritan Politics In Elizabethan Suffolk

1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Seaver
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Community Control ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Basic Assumptions ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reformed Churches ◽  
The Church

We are apt to associate Puritanism, quite reasonably, with evangelical preaching, and to talk about the Puritan movement as the tail end of the English Reformation, as the last attempt to take Biblical Christianity into every parish pulpit and hence into the hearts of God's “Elect Nation.” As a consequence, it has seemed both proper and illuminating to view the history of Elizabethan Puritanism as a series of confrontations between Puritan ministers and the Queen's bishops, the bishops attempting to create unity by imposing uniformity of practice, the Puritan ministers attempting to follow what they believed Scripture and the example of the best reformed Churches dictated, with the inevitable consequence that they found themselves engaged in a kind of perpetual guerrilla war with the Queen's guardians of a prescribed uniform order.If such basic assumptions are accepted, then the history of Elizabethan Puritanism can be seen as a series of escalating encounters, beginning in 1564, when the Queen forced the issue of discipline and order on a reluctant Church by requiring that Archbishop Parker publish his Advertisements. The debating stage was over in the Spring of 1566, when Parker and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners summoned the defiant London clergy to conform to the prescribed clerical dress or face expulsion for refusing to wear what Robert Crowley called “the conjuring garments of popery.” The year 1570 saw an escalation of the controversy. Cartwright's lectures on the nature of the true church mounted a much more substantial attack than had been seen in the first decade of the reign, for it was one thing to attack the surplice as a popish garment, quite another to argue that episcopacy itself lacked a Scriptural basis and that by implication it was, therefore, the Queen's duty to impose “discipline out of the Word”—a Presbyterian order—on the Church of England. In 1572 two Londoners, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, tried to give political reality to these notions in theirAdmonition to the Parliament.

Remembering the English Reformation in the Revision of the Communion Liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, 1906–1920

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-257
Author(s):  
Dan D. Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Liturgical Theology ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Main Period ◽  
The Church

This paper will examine how the Convocations of the Church of England remembered their past liturgies, and the reformation theology that formed the previous Prayer Books of the Church, in their main period of work on the revision of the Prayer Book from 1906 to 1920. Focusing on the Communion Service, it considers the lack of defenders of the 1662 Communion service and its reformed theology. It will examine how the 1549 Prayer Book was used as a basis for reordering the Communion service, and how this original Prayer Book was seen in relation to preceding medieval Roman Catholic theology. Ultimately it considers how a re-imagination of the English Reformation was used to justify the incorporation of liturgical theology that had no historical basis in the Church of England.

Writing the History of the English Bible in the Early Eighteenth Century

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 268-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Mandelbrote
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Rule Of Faith ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

The letter of Scripture suffering various Interpretations, it is plain that Error may pretend to Scripture; the antient Fathers being likewise dead, and not able to vindicate themselves, their writings may be wrested, and Error may make use of them to back itself; Reason too being bypassed by Interest, Education, Passion, Society, &c…. Tradition only rests secure.The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.

High or Low? Writing the Irish Reformation in the Early Nineteenth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ford
Keyword(s):  
Primary Sources ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regius Professor

The Irish Reformation is a contentious issue, not just between Catholic and Protestant, but also within the Protestant churches, as competing Presbyterian and Anglican claims are made over the history of the Irish reformation. This chapter looks at the way in which James Seaton Reid, (1798–1851), laid claim to the Reformation for Irish Dissent in his History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. It then examines the rival Anglican histories by two High Churchmen: Richard Mant (1775–1848), Bishop of Down and Connor; and Charles Elrington, (1787–1850), the Regius Professor of Divinity in Trinity College, Dublin. It is clear that, in each case, theological and denominational conviction decisively shaped their history writing. Equally, however, significant advances were made by all three scholars in unearthing important new primary sources, and in identifying key points of controversy and debate which still represent a challenge to eccleciastical historians, of whatever denomination or none, today.

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