Anglican Doctrine Research Articles

Mother of Hope. Mary of Nazareth in Anglican – Roman-Catholic Dialogue

Our Hope is Christ but His Mother is also ours. A difficult topic in the dialogue with Anglicans is the issue of Mariology. Mary and the various forms of liturgical and non-liturgical Marian devotion were inherited by Anglicans from the Catholic tradition. However, the influence of the Reformation has also had an impact on this topic. Hence, paradoxically, Mariology links and -at the same time- constitutes an element of polemics between Anglicans and Catholics. The Anglican doctrine about Mary of Nazareth mentions the term “complexion oppositorum”. The ecumenical Dialogue has shown us its present situation, as we can read in these pages. The authors, after presenting a historical introduction, made a presentation of all existing ecumenical documents being the fruit of Catholic-Anglican dialogue, in which there was any mention of the Mother of God. Documents at international level as well as documents from national dialogues, in particular from the USA and Canada, have been analysed.

The Prayer-Book Roots of Griffith Jones's Evangelism*

This article discusses Griffith Jones (1683–1761) an influential Church of England rector in West Wales from 1711, who is usually described as a precursor of Welsh Methodism and Evangelicalism. It refers to an undated, damaged notebook, in the National Library of Wales, containing sermon notes in Jones's own hand. The article seeks to trace the source of his evangelistic outlook, noting his conformist loyalty to the Church of England's doctrine, order and worship. Contrary to the opinion which attributes his pursuit of evangelism, with its seeking of conversions, to supposed Puritan influences, the article shows that the Book of Common Prayer was its inspiration. Preaching is discussed as the predominant component of worship. Jones's thought as a popular evangelist is examined, with reference to the brief sermon outlines in Welsh. The article discusses Jones's view of the defiance of Christian standards and ignorance of the faith, in Wales. Jones's practice was to summon people to faith. He preached this to those within the 'visible' national Church, which included infants, adding a strong demand for moral conformity. His concept of 'membership' was not postEnlightenment voluntarism, but of a statutory and biblical duty. For Griffith Jones the liturgy was not a disincentive to piety, contrary to some Dissenters' misgivings. His wish was for spiritual and moral renewal, not further reformation of Anglican doctrine or practice. He saw catechizing as a means against schismatical vagaries. His famous Circulating Schools reinforced this policy.

The Anglican Doctrine of the Visible Church

This article examines what the Church of England’s historic Thirty-nine Articles of Religion actually mean in context when they define the visible church as ‘a congregation of faithful men in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.’ The article clarifies the meaning of the words ‘a congregation’ here in their historical and polemical context during the Reformation, giving this significant attention for the first time in print, in order to correct common evangelical mis-readings and misappropriations of Article 19. It also unpacks the Anglican view of the marks of the church against the confessional divides of the 16th century, to locate this Article in its Reformed Protestant context against Rome. It outlines ten challenges which a properly understood Anglican ecclesiology presents for evangelicals today.

ПРОБЛЕМА ТРАНСКРИПЦИИ И ГЕРМЕНЕВТИЧЕСКОЙ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ АРХИВНЫХ РУКОПИСЕЙ ИСААКА НЬЮТОНА

In the article, the current situation and future prospects of transcribing, editing, interpreting, and preparing Isaac Newton’s manuscripts for publication are studied. The author investigates manuscripts from the following Newton’s archives: (1) Portsmouth’s archive (Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK); (2) Yahuda collection (National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel); (3) Keynes collection (King’s College Library, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK); (4) Trinity College archive (Trinity College Library, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK); (5) Oxford archive (New’s College Library, Oxford University, Oxford, UK); (6) Mint, economic and financial papers (National Archives in Kew Gardens, Richmond, Surrey, UK); (7) Bodmer’s collection (Martin Bodmer Society Library, Cologny, Switzerland); (8) Sotheby’s Auction House archive (London, UK); (9) James White collection (James White Library, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, US); (10) St Andrews collection (University of St Andrews Library, St Andrews, UK); (11) Bodleian collection (Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford, UK); (12) Grace K. Babson collection (Huntington Library, San Marino, California, US); (13) Stanford collection (Stanford University Library, Palo Alto, California, US); (14) Massachusetts collection (Massachusetts Technological Institute Library, Boston, Massachusetts, US); (15) Texas archive (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas Library, Austin, Texas, US); (16) Morgan archive (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, US); (17) Fitzwilliam collection (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK); (18) Royal Society collection (Royal Society Library, London, UK): (19) Dibner collection (Dibner Library, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., US); (20) Philadelphia archive (Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US). There is a great discrepancy between what Newton wrote (approx. 350 volumes) and what was published thus far (five works). It is accounted for by a number of reasons: (a) ongoing inheritance litigations involving Newton’s archives; (b) dispersing Newton’s manuscripts in countries with different legal systems, consequently, dissimilar copyright and ownership branches of civil law; (c) disappearance of nearly 15 per cent of Newton works; (d) lack of accordance of views among Newton’s researchers; (e) problems with arranging Newton’s ideas in his possible Collected Works to be published; (f) Newton’s incompliance with the official Anglican doctrine; (g) Newton’s unwillingness to disclose his compositions to the broad public. The problems of transcribing, editing, interpreting, and pre-print preparing Newton’s works, are as follows: (a) Newton’s complicated handwriting, negligence in spelling, frequent misspellings and errors; (b) constant deletion, crossing out, and palimpsest; (c) careless insertion of figures, tables in formulas in the text, with many of them being intersected; (d) the presence of glosses situated at different angles to the main text and even over it; (e) encrypting his meanings, Newton’s strict adherence to prisca sapientia tradition. Despite the obstacles described, transcribing Newton’s manuscripts allows us to understand Sir Newton’s thought better in the unity of his mathematical, philosophical, physical, historical, theological and social ideas.

Intensification of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox and Anglican Church in the second half of the 1890s

The article analyzes the relationship between the Anglican and Russian Orthodox churches at the very end of the 19th century. The reasons why the Anglican — Orthodox dialogue received intensive development and significant theological content during this period are considered. Significant attention is paid to the mutual visits of the hierarchs of the two Churches, during which they discussed and agreed on numerous issues related to the rapprochement of the Anglican and Russian Orthodox Churches in connection with the prospect of planned interfaith unity. Emphasis is placed on the problem of recognizing the legitimacy of Anglican ordinations, which arose both due to the historical formation of Anglicanism and in connection with the peculiarities of the Anglican doctrine of the sacraments, particularly the sacrament of the priesthood. The author investigates the reasons why Russian theologians, who have carefully studied the historical, canonical and dogmatic sides of the issue, were forced at this stage to deny the Anglicans the recognition of the legality of their ordinations. In connection with this decision, the prospect of inter-church unity was postponed indefinitely so that Anglican theological thought could finally be defined in the sacramentology of the Anglican creed. At the same time, the dialogue between the two churches was not interrupted, but rather continued fruitfully in the 20th century.

A History of Anglican Exorcism: Deliverance and Demonology in Church Ritual

A History of Anglican Exorcism: Deliverance and Demonology in Church Ritual

N.T. Wright’s New Perspective on Paul: What implications for Anglican doctrine?

The entrance of New Perspectives on Paul as a reinterpretation of what the Apostle Paul wrote evoked varied responses, especially within the evangelical circles of the Reformed community. Interestingly, one of the foremost thinkers within the New Perspectives on Paul school is the retired Anglican Bishop and New Testament scholar Nicholas Thomas Wright. Wright’s scholarship is interesting to study, given his prominence within evangelical circles in general and his respectable standing within the Anglican Communion in particular. Yet there does not appear to be any coherent response or position from the Anglican Communion in relation to the New Perspectives on Paul, let alone Wright’s views. The key question posed in this article is whether Wright’s writings might influence Anglican doctrine. The Communion’s soteriological doctrine as contained in Articles XI, XII and XIII of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion may be understood to affirm the ‘old perspective on Paul’ and its ‘justification by faith only, and not by good works’ approach. Finally, the article examines the complexities that Wright’s influence might have, in the form of a possible shift in doctrinal posture, and the implications for church structures that such a shift might necessitate.

From Common Prayer to Common Ancestor: The Quest for Anglican Liturgical Identity and the Legacy of the Reformation

AbstractAnglicanism's relationship with its Reformation heritage represents a tension. It looks to the Reformation as the movement from which an English Church, independent of papal authority, was inaugurated. At the same time, it refuses to be labelled as a “church of the Reformation”, pointing to its continuity with a much longer history of Christian practice in Britain. The growth of the Anglican Communion and current controversies over church order, the interpretation of scripture and the exercise of authority make Anglican identity difficult to define. Identity would once have been sought in liturgy, but the view that liturgy completely enshrines Anglican doctrine has been convincingly put to rest by scholarship since the 1970s. This paper argues that the liturgical legacy of the Reformation (especially use of the vernacular, concern for the orderly reading and interpretation of scripture, and attention given to the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist) offers categories that can help to form possible approaches to the current crisis of Anglican identity.

A School of Others: Jean-Nicholas Jager, Richard Hurrell Froude, Benjamin Harrison, and John Henry Newman's Turn to the Development of Doctrine

A School of Others:Jean-Nicholas Jager, Richard Hurrell Froude, Benjamin Harrison, and John Henry Newman's Turn to the Development of Doctrine Michael J. G. Pahls (bio) John henry newman penned his public Letter to the Duke of Norfolk on 27 December 1874 in response to Prime Minister William Gladstone's own published attacks regarding the doctrine of papal infallibility. Gladstone had argued that the newly defined doctrine would require a "renunciation of moral and mental freedom," provoking "civil disloyalty" among English Catholics.1 In response, Newman ventured a more winsome presentation for the new dogma, mitigating implications so as to allay fears that a foreign pope might subvert the English monarchy by infallible fiat. More intriguing in his defense, however, was Newman's appeal to the ongoing interpretive work of the Schola Theologorum—the "school of theologians." Considering that Gladstone had committed himself to "a representation of ecclesiastical documents which will not hold."2 Newman declared, "None but the Schola Theologorum is competent to determine the force of Papal and Synodal utterances, and the exact interpretation of them is a work of time."3 Shorn of [End Page 5] this necessary process of theological reception, Newman judged that Gladstone's reading was precipitous and at least potentially inaccurate. Gladstone's understanding of the dogma, like his understanding of the English Catholic faithful, was thereby "neither trustworthy nor charitable."4 While numerous treatments of the Catholic Newman's mature conception of the Schola Theologorum have appeared over the years, few have noticed how his regard for the ongoing, collaborative, and interpretive work of theologians finds an important, embodied precedent in the work of the Anglican Newman and in the Oxford Movement of which he was a principal figure.5 This article will explore a discrete period in that broader story wherein the failure of Newman's via media—a proposal constructed in the context of debate with the Catholic Abbé Jean-Nicholas Jager—was brought home to him under the sometimes-painful interrogations of fellow Oxford Movement collaborators, Hurrell Froude and Benjamin Harrison. I argue here that this ongoing theological reception of Anglican doctrine ultimately pressed Newman to acknowledge both the actuality and permissibility of doctrinal development and so anticipated what Newman envisioned for the Schola Theologorum in embodied practice. ENTANGLED IN CONTROVERSY WITH A FRENCH ABBÉ Since 1832, Newman had been at work as a Tractarian, working to buttress the Church of England's flagging high church hegemony in the face of Lord Charles Grey's Whig Government reforms.6 Fully expecting eventual [End Page 6] disestablishment, Newman sought to arm himself and his growing Association of Tory churchmen against the "systematic hatred … borne by Romanists, Sectarians, Liberals, and Infidels" by "poking into the Fathers with a hope of rummaging forth passages of history which may prepare the imaginations of men for a changed state of things, and also be precedents for our conduct in difficult circumstances."7 Those labors evolved into an effort to prioritize an older apostolicity over the Church of England's Elizabethan preoccupation with monarchical establishment. Resigned to life without royal preferment, Newman imagined that the national church's cause could be entrusted to the English faithful directly—"thrown on the people," as he put it, in both an economic and a theological sense.8 Here, the commonplaces of the Oxford Movement's popular Tracts for the Times—defending the apostolic succession of bishops, the liturgical stability of the Book of Common Prayer, the sacramental powers of the clergy, and the divinely established jurisdiction of the church—developed into Newman's more comprehensive via media theory of the English Church when a chance encounter grew into a fervid epistolary debate. It is well-known that the 1837 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church represent Newman's attempt to realize an only-theoretical via media as the "very truth of the Apostles" amid the competing "real" religions of "Protestantism and Popery."9 This work grew out of his "lectures on Romanism," delivered orally [End Page 7] in Adam de Brome chapel of Saint Mary the Virgin in the summer of 1836, but those lectures were immediately preceded by a months-long correspondence...

Historia liturgii Kościoła anglikańskiego

Paul Jones przedstawił historię i ewolucję liturgii Kościoła anglikańskiego od początków aż do dziś, ukazując równocześnie wpływy reformacji na doktrynę anglikańską. Przedstawił najważniejsze postaci Kościoła anglikańskiego – teologów oraz ludzi kultury. Wykład kończy się opisem współczesnej anglikańskiej liturgii w codziennej praktyce.

‘The extirpation of Athanasianism’: The Considerable Doubts of Francis Stone (1738–1813)

This essay examines the doubts of Francis Stone, rector of Cold Norton, Essex – doubts which brought him notoriety and ruin. In 1806, Stone preached a sermon, four editions of which appeared by 1809, expressing doubts about Anglican doctrine and the Thirty-Nine Articles. He maintained that Christ, though God's ‘great messenger’, was merely human, and that the Virgin Birth was a myth. Moreover, he also doubted the ‘Athanasian trinity in unity’ and the doctrine of the atonement. Stone's doubts were far from new. He had expressed various concerns forcibly in print and had played a major part in the raising of the anti-subscription Feathers Tavern petition. He was determined to teach only ‘that, which . . . [might] be concluded and proved by the Scripture’. But the storm provoked by the sermon was terrible. In 1808, Stone was arraigned before the bishop of London's consistory court. There he declared that the Church of England had no authority to override his conscience. Nevertheless, the court rejected his arguments and deprived him of his living; when he appealed to the Court of Arches, it upheld the sentence. Stone's doubts produced an important test case and a powerful warning for Anglican clerics holding heterodox opinions (and, indeed, liberal churchmen wanting just ‘free’ and ‘candid' theological debate) in the conservative 1800s. Moreover, the issues Stone raised foreshadowed controversies which erupted long after his death.

Gendering Transatlantic Anti-Slavery History

Gendering Transatlantic Anti-Slavery History Marilyn Walker (bio) In Women, Dissent, & Anti-Slavery in Britain & America, 1790–1865 (Oxford, 2011), Elizabeth J. Clapp, Julie Roy Jeffrey, and a plethora of historians explore the activism of British and American women abolitionists and the powerful role of religion in their humanitarian mission to end the slave trade and slavery. Commissioned by the Dr. Williams Centre for Dissenting Studies, the collection focuses on Puritanism and Protestant Dissent. Non-conformists (Methodists, Evangelicals, Quakers, Puritans, Pilgrims, Baptists, Catholics, and Separatists) include sects outside of the Church of England.1 From the Restoration through the early Victorian Period, they were subject to discrimination because of their beliefs, methods of worship, and disavowal of Anglican doctrine. They were unable to attend universities such as Cambridge and Oxford without an oath, cast a vote for parliamentary representation, or work for local or national government (7). They were second-class citizens in England. In search of religious liberty outside of the boundaries of Britain, in 1620, some non-conformists sought exile in Holland and North America.2 The majority of Dissenters in England and America cherished an unmediated relationship with God, enthusiastic worship, and desire for reform in the Church of England. Their descendants would advocate for the physical freedom of slaves in the modern world. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women of a variety of socio-economic classes also endured discrimination and social and institutional oppression. In England, women were unable to attend university, own property within the confines of marriage, or vote for parliamentary representation. Thus, in an interdisciplinary manner, Women, Dissent, & Anti-Slavery illuminates a nexus between a transatlantic Dissenting tradition and women’s persistent activism against African slavery. With contributors such as Clapp, Jeffrey, David Turley, Claire Midgley, and Stacey Robertson, this collection also brings many activists (e.g., Martha Gurney, Mary-Anne Rawson, Ann Taylor Gilbert, Mary Davis, Susan Bishop, Sarah Ernst) to the forefront of the history of abolition and provides a multidimensional appraisal of well-known anti-slavery writers such [End Page 401] as Elizabeth Heyrick and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Studies such as Moira Ferguson’s Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 1670–1834, Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and The Politics of the Body, and Midgley’s Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 also provide extensive histories about protest through domestic economy, theatrical productions, literature, petitions, and boycotts.3 This most recent book intently focuses upon the belief systems that inspired women on both sides of the Atlantic to resoundingly reject slavery in Africa, the West Indies, and the American South. Women, Dissent, & Anti-Slavery also relies on the juxtaposition of iconic images of slavery and freedom. Complementing chapters about women’s devotion to their religious communities and civic engagement, a visual and verbal representation of the British and American movement is prominently displayed on the dust jacket of the book. In the late eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgewood and British women’s societies (such as the Female Society of Birmingham, and the Manchester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society) created and circulated artistic representations of visual messages of one of the earliest liberation movements.4 The original artwork was a male figure with shackled hands and this emotional appeal appeared on publications, brooches, quilts, pottery, and hairpins. Resembling the history and traditions examined within the text, the dust jacket features Thomas Halliday’s medallion, “Slavery abolished by Great Britain, 1834,” a feminized depiction of multiple abolitionist themes. Beneath the depiction of the enslaved woman (with shackled hands) and Lady Justice, a populist and universal rhetorical question appears: “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” Seemingly, this is the enslaved woman’s plea to Lady Justice and potential emancipators beyond the scope of the medallion. In a penultimate plea to the viewer, Halliday’s emblematic medallion proclaims, “Let us break their hands asunder and cast away their cords,” a reference to Psalms 2:3.5 His medallion solicits the agency of the audience to act on behalf of brethren under the yoke. “Slavery abolished by Great Britain, 1834” was also printed on the cover of Lydia Maria Child’s Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery (1838...

Balancing and Limiting Episcopal Power: Bishop Thomas Barlow’s Use of Common Law in Disputes with Arminian Anglican Clerics

Thomas Barlow was a Reformed theologian simultaneously fighting on three fronts against Catholic, Dissenting Protestant and Arminian Anglican opponents. The first two of these groups threatened the Church of England from the outside, while the last group was transforming Anglican doctrine through its domination of the most important posts in the episcopal hierarchy. Barlow could not argue directly against the power of bishops without assisting the external opponents, yet he had to find a way to prevent other bishops from interfering in his continued support for Reformed theology. In order to reduce their power within the Church of England, Barlow had to look outside the institution for ways to limit his superior’s power. This essay examines two arguments in which Barlow ventured into polemics about the secular law of England in an effort to maintain limits on his Anglican opponents’ exercise of power.

Via Media : Transatlantic Anglicanism in The Female American

With its heroine who is stranded on a deserted island and who converts other Native Americans living nearby, The Female American (1767) has primarily received critical attention a unique feminist rewriting of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), yet few scholars have given sustained attention to superiority of Anglican doctrine and proselytizing integral part of how novel rewrites Defoe's classic Puritan spiritual autobiography and ideology of religious imperialism.1 The Church of England, its very inception and name tied to nationhood, faced particular challenges when exported abroad in order to help consolidate Britain's colonial power. Transatlantic travel, colonization, and missionizing, with their attendant messy processes of transculturation, strained Anglicanism's boasted doctrinal purity and its Englishness.2 The Female American engages and attempts to resolve this ideological and cultural struggle by returning to Anglican self-justifications well-reasoned, stable middle way between Puritanism and Catholicism. This via media motif is radically extended in novel, however, to pertain to Anglican missionary's ability to mediate between various forms of religious media technologies well to embrace different kinds of mediating bodies, most notably by envisioning a spiritual mediator who is herself between cultures - Native American and Anglo-British - and between genders, Britons comprehended gender egalitarianism present in many Native American cultures.3 Secured rather than destabilized by this middling identity, biracial heroine Unca Eliza Winkfield draws on Anglican theories and structures of mediation in order to justify appropriation of various types of media in her efforts to missionize among other Native Americans.Published just four years after conclusion of Seven Years' War (1756-63), novel's imperialist vision shares with Church of England and its missionary organization, Society for Propagation of Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), ambition to add religious conquest to Britain's recent military victories.4 As Richard Terrick observed during one of SPG's anniversary sermons, In course of late war, our successes, great in themselves and glorious to British arms, have extended our empire and opened a large field, which in every view, whether of religion or civil policy, demands our culture and improvement.5 Echoing a sentiment ubiquitous in post-war Anglican literature, Terrick acknowledges role of religion the firmest bond, most assured pledge of . . . fidelity for new populations now under British governance.6The author of The Female American seems particularly savvy in recognizing Britain's objectives during peacetime to transition in its role from military conqueror to spiritual director. During extended visit to England, Unca Eliza describes a monument she has designed to commemorate her mother, a Pocahontas-like figure who has died in colonial Virginia. She writes, as I found it was custom in England to erect monuments for persons who often were interred elsewhere, I desired my uncle to erect a superb mausoleum in his church-yard, sacred to memory of my dear mother.7 Such a culturally hybrid funerary monument would have substantially transformed composition of a typical Anglican church-yard: lofty structure is supported by Indians big life. The building is shaped like Egyptian pyramid, each side of which inscribes life of her mother in languages of, respectively, Indian, Latin, and English. At top, where one would expect a sculpture of Unca Eliza's mother, we find instead an urn, on which Indian leans, and looks on it in a mournful posture (51). As Mary Helen McMurran has discovered, Unca Eliza's monument to her mother bears a remarkable resemblance to Robert Adam's funeral monument for Seven Years' war hero, Robert Townsend, designed in 1760's for Westminster Abbey. …

A Question of Allegiance: Mistrust of Catholicism and the Prosecution of Catholics in England, 1674-1771

Modern Westerners tend to think of the persecution of religious dissenters as being motivated by religious intolerance. This study of the records of proceedings in London's Old Bailey from 1674 to 1771, however, shows that the prosecution of Catholics at the Old Bailey had much more to do with stifling perceived political opposition than with enforcing religious orthodoxy. This is shown two ways. First, this paper contrasts the punishments given to Catholics (usually death) with those given to offenders who departed from Anglican doctrine far more drastically. These more drastic heretics were usually given far less severe punishments than Catholics, in spite of their more marked departure from doctrine. Second, this paper shows that the timing of prosecutions of Catholics coincided with outside threats to the English power structure. When Catholic uprisings or invasions, such as the Jacobite rebellions, threatened the English power structure, prosecution of Catholics increased. These two factors demonstrate that the prosecution of Catholics at London's Old Bailey were primarily motivated by political, not religious, concerns.

The Politicization of the Pulpit in Seventeenth-century England: Thanksgiving Sermons after the Duke of Monmouth’s Rebellion

In the early 1530s, the sermon was a basic tool to teach the new Anglican doctrine to people of all social ranks. Later in the century, it would be further employed by moderate and radical ministers to debate ecclesiastical, domestic and foreign policies. This trend continued well into the seventeenth century, when sermons increasingly influenced English public opinion and encouraged actions for and against the status quo.
 The present paper studies how this genre participated in contemporary political controversies. The date selected is 26 July 1685, the day officially appointed for a public thanksgiving for James II’s victory over the Duke of Monmouth’s insurrection. The sermons considered support the doctrine of the divine right of kings endorsed by James, and attempt to discredit each of the arguments for civil disobedience employed by the rebels. Nevertheless, some degree of anxiety permeates these texts, since they attempt to justify the need to obey a legitimate monarch, who, despite being the head of the Anglican Church, openly practised the Catholic faith.

Joanna Baillie’s Religious Ideology: The Dichotomy of Fundamentalism and Liberalism in The Martyr and A View of the General Tenour of the New Testament Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ

Scottish playwright Joanna Baillie grew up as the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister, but after moving to London in her twenties, she embraced Unitarianism like many other writers and thinkers of the early Romantic period. After publishing four volumes of plays, several metrical legends and dozens of poems, in her later years Baillie turned her attention to religious theory. Her 1826 drama The Martyr, later included in Dramas (1836), reveals her fundamental Christian ideology. But her 1831 pamphlet titled A View of the General Tenour of the New Testament Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ broaches one of the most controversial theological arguments of the period—the validity of the Trinity. This essay considers why a financially secure, religious Scot, with a certain intellectual reputation, would turn her attention to Christian fundamentalism and then reveal such a liberal position in a frontal attack on Anglican doctrine.

An Unfortunate Lex Orandi? Some Comments on Episcopacy Envisioned in the 1979 ECUSA Ordinal

ABSTRACTSince the Anglican Church has neither a teaching Magisterium of the Roman model, nor a binding Confession of Faith as in some Lutheran and Reformed traditions, it has become commonplace to invoke the dictum Lex orandi, Lex credendi and claim that Anglican doctrine is enshrined in its liturgy. This of course may have made some sense when all Anglican Prayer Books had not wandered far from the 1662, or even 1637/1764 texts, but it becomes much more problematic today, when, even with ‘guidelines’ issued by the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation (which have only the authority a Province wishes to give them), Provincial liturgies grow further and further away from any common prayer texts. This is particularly pertinent in an ecumenical context with regard to the Anglican understanding of its threefold ministry. The Preface to the Ordinal (1550, 1552 and 1662) stated: ‘It is evident unto all men diligently reading the Holy Scriptures and ancient authors that from the Apostles' time there have been these orders of Ministers in Christ's Church, Bishops, Priests and Deacons’.

Heresy hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the convocation controversy of 1701

ABSTRACTThe aim of the high church agitation in the 1690s for a convocation was to establish doctrinal discipline within the anglican church. When convocation met in 1701 the lower house produced censures on Toland's Christianity not mysterious and Burnet's Exposition of the thirty-nine articles.It was Francis Atterbury who insisted that Burnet's Exposition was heretical. He had long been critical of Burnet's views on the trinity and his erastian interpretation of English church history in his History of the reformation. And if Burnet's History was an attempt re-write English church history from the perspective of a latitudinarian, then his Exposition was its theological counterpart.It was assumed that the charges against Burnet were lost. But a copy of them has surfaced and it confirms that it was the connection between latitudinarians and dissent which led to the attack on Burnet. In his zeal to heal divisions within anglicanism and between anglicans and other protestants Burnet had introduced a ‘latitude and diversity of opinions’ which misrepresented true anglican doctrine. This was dangerous, because Burnet intended his Exposition as ‘a platform laid for Comprehension’ with the dissenters and other ‘Adversaries of our Church’. These included obvious heretics like socinians and the deist Toland.

Mansel's Agnosticism

Nobody is likely to claim that the name of Henry Longueville Mansel is an important one in contemporary Anglican theology. During the 130 years since he gave his Bampton Lectures in 1858 his work has been only sporadically reviewed. But he deserves more than this. As the title of his lecture – The Limits of Religious Thought – suggests, Mansel was partly responsible for bringing the philosophy of Kant into British religious thinking; and the problems he faced in trying to make a concept of regulative truth consistent with orthodox Anglican doctrine make his intellectual dilemma of unusual interest to the modern reader.