England Minister Research Articles

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

To Proclaim Afresh: Declaration and Oaths for Church of England MinistersThe Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England Church House Publishing, London, 2022, ix + 35 pp (paperback £6), ISBN: 978-1-78140-254-2

To Proclaim Afresh: Declaration and Oaths for Church of England MinistersThe Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England Church House Publishing, London, 2022, ix + 35 pp (paperback £6), ISBN: 978-1-78140-254-2 - Volume 24 Issue 3

The Role of Nature in New England Puritan Theology: The Case of Samuel Willard

Abstract This article discusses the role of nature in the theological system of New England minister Samuel Willard (1640-1707). I focus specifically on his account of theological anthropology, the relationship of nature and grace, and the moral (or natural) law, and show how each relates to his views on civil government and civil law. Willard affirmed the natural law, natural religion, and natural worship, and he acknowledged and respected pagan civic virtue and grounded civil order and social relations in nature. Willard’s theological articulations are substantively the same as those found among the ‘Reformed orthodox’ theologians of 17th century Europe, which provides evidence for the thesis that Reformed orthodoxy was a transatlantic movement. His reliance on nature also corrects scholarship on the New England Puritans, which often assumes that they rejected the Christian natural law tradition.

The causes of poverty: Is a biblical understanding reflected in the experiences of today’s poor?

In September 2000, the United Nations adopted their Millennium Declaration: a commitment to improving the lives of the world’s poorest people. Of the eight Millennium Goals declared, the foremost was to “Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger,” with a target to halve the proportion of people whose income is less than US $1 per day. Many have attempted to address this problem, yet debate rages as to what causes poverty in many communities. Dr. Christopher Wright, a Church of England minister, contends that the root causes of poverty are indeed identifiable from Old Testament texts: natural disasters, laziness, and oppression. While Wright presented a brief overview of this biblical approach to the causes of poverty, he did not elaborate on whether it would be reflected in the experience of poor people. This study therefore presents a critical synthesis of Wright’s model with contemporary field research. We conclude by reinforcing the importance of the Church engaging with the causes of poverty—not just the expressions of poverty—in order to fully demonstrate the love of God to the world.

Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New EnglandEmpowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early AmericaWriting the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America

Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New EnglandEmpowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early AmericaWriting the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America

The Politics of Faith During the Civil War. By Timothy L. Wesley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 273 pp. $45.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Politics of Faith During the Civil War . By Timothy L. Wesley . Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press , 2013. xi + 273 pp. $45.00 cloth.Book Reviews NotesHistorians have devoted considerable attention to ministers during the American Civil War. More than three decades ago James H. Moorhead (American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants the Civil War, 1860-1869 [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978]) analyzed the millennial overtones in sermons of New England ministers. More recently, Harry S. Stout (Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War [New York: Viking, 2006]) depicted the northern clergy as kneejerk supporters of a war that oftentimes was conducted in an immoral, unchristian manner. In this fine volume, social historian Timothy Wesley maps out much underexplored territory by examining the impact of ministers' words deeds the multifaceted responses to these utterances actions by the laity, denominational leaders, military civil authorities, the secular press. He effectively shows how people inside outside the church manipulated or inhibited the political behavior of clergymen (7), in the process revealing rifts between ministers laypersons regarding the extent appropriateness of the politicization of the church confirming how religion politics were thoroughly blended during the war.One strength of Wesley's work is the geographic breadth of his ministerial coverage. Indeed, his careful attention to regional differences unique local conditions illuminates the diversity complexity of clerical experiences. For instance, he discusses northern clerics who unequivocally supported the Union; northern pastors who were accused of disloyalty for both sins of omission or commission; border state ministers who sometimes served divided congregations oftentimes clashed with either coreligionists or secular figures; clergymen in the occupied South who were arrested or exiled by officers; southern divines who defended the war effort promoted Confederate nationalism; African American preachers who championed moral self-improvement education as stepping stones along the path to freedom rights.Wesley's discussion of treason during the war is also instructive. He explains how most Northerners went beyond the constitutional definition of treason scrutinized a minister's words for signs of disloyalty. In fact, a clergyman need not commit an overt act against the government to be considered a traitor. Laypersons, newspaper editors, military authorities branded numerous preachers as disloyal for failing to pray for Abraham Lincoln, for refusing to give vocal support to the cause, or even for holding personal opinions (the open-ended allegation of sympathizing with the South) that called into question their loyalty to the United States. Although he recognizes that in many cases Republicans targeted Democratic pastors for purely partisan reasons, at times Wesley makes unsubstantiated claims about the extent of disloyalty in the northern pulpit. For example, at the beginning of chapter 3 he asserts, and still other clergymen, at least in sentiment if less often in deed, were openly disloyal to the Union (43). At the chapter's end he concludes, treacherous congregational pastors who sapped their congregants' commitment to the war effort were threats to the Union (58). …

Robert Persons’s Resolution(1582) and the issue of textual piracy in Protestant editions of Catholic devotional literature

Despite current attention to continuing crypto-Catholics in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, less attention has been paid to the extent to which Catholic culture may have affected the Protestant mainstream. This study demonstrates the general neglect of this subject, and examines the role played, then and now, by the attack of Robert Persons SJ on Edmund Bunny, a Church of England minister, for publishing a Protestant adaptation of Persons’s work. This study argues that Bunny had a more serious intent than the ‘piracy’ he is widely credited with, and that his editorial practices resembled those employed by Roman Catholics, including Persons himself. While more serious cases of textual piracy have been largely overlooked, conventional condemnation of Bunny’s edition has done little more than contribute to a general misunderstanding of (and a paucity of interest in) the reception of Catholic literature in whatever format by Protestants.

OP0143-PARE Improving Patient Experience in Enhanced Recovery after Surgery

BackgroundEnhanced Recovery (ER) is a new approach to elective surgery with the primary focus being on improving patient outcomes. The basis is that patients are prepared to be in the...

David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New EnglandWays of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. David D. Hall. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 248.

<i>David D. Hall</i>, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England<i>Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England</i>. David D. Hall. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 248.

Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England (review)

Reviewed by: Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England Adrian Weimer Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. By Scott D. Seay. (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 217. $36.00. ISBN 978-0-875-80402-6.) New Englanders witnessed 460 public executions before the early-nineteenth century, when legal theory, theology, and middle-class sensibilities converged to confine the ritual to a private space. In the able hands of Scott D. Seay the sermons accompanying these executions provide fruitful material for understanding changing attitudes toward criminals and sin in early New England. A study rich in its longitudinal scope and detailed analysis, Hanging between Heaven and Earth mines these sermons for insight into crime literature, religious and political thought, and the historical ethics of capital punishment. Protestant ministers knew their execution sermons would reach an enormous audience. Increase Mather’s sermon on the execution of James Morgan [End Page 611] in 1686 packed the large Old North Church so tightly that “the walls of the gallery began to crack under the weight of the audience.” Instead of canceling the event, the crowd, perhaps numbering 5000, moved to Old South Church and its environs to hear the rest of the sermon (pp. 24–25).What were these kinds of crowds hearing? Seay argues that while the basic literary structure of the execution sermons remained constant, the message changed significantly when ministers considered the reasons for crime, the possibility for dramatic conversions, and the purpose of civil government itself. Espousing a strong view of hereditary sin, early New England ministers encouraged “moral identification” between the condemned and onlookers. For example, in 1721 Cotton Mather asked the crowd if the man to be executed was “the only One that may be charged with Murdering his Wife among us.” No, Mather preached, “all husbands who speak harshly to their wives, fail to provide them with sufficient food, or break their hearts . . . are guilty of murdering them” (p. 54). Seay finds that the early preachers saw noncriminals as restrained from literal murder only by God’s grace, not because of any innate moral difference between a person in the crowd and the murderer on the scaffold. Criminals were providentially denied this restraining grace in a slippery slope of small sins leading to larger ones—a progression into which any citizen could slide. In early New England, ministers and magistrates largely agreed on the efficacy of the “gruesome displays” at the scaffold to communicate a moral warning and to cleanse the community of guilt and discord. In the eighteenth century, communities put increasing pressure on the condemned person to experience an emotional repentance. Laypeople and ministers increased their efforts to facilitate his or her conversion through prison visits and communal prayers, and legislated further delay between arrest and execution. In the context of evangelical revivalism “when the condemned failed to achieve repentance or actively refused to strive after it, the ritual virtually was robbed of its significance entirely” (p. 44).When they did convert, however, these redeemed criminals became exemplars, held up for the entire community to emulate. Seay argues convincingly that execution sermons in New England showed marked change in the early national period as ministers absorbed John Locke and John Taylor’s exegetical and philosophical arguments for humans as “independent moral agents” and for guilt as “nontransferable” (p. 62). Many sermons adopted a new view of human sinfulness which saw crime as a result of individual choice rather than inherited human depravity. This emphasis on individual responsibility led to a qualitative difference between capital criminals and ordinary people. Sermons on the executions of blacks, who led in condemnations for rape and arson, intensified this rhetoric of difference. The trope of the morally “peculiar” criminal accompanied calls for renewed efforts in moral education. God’s restraining grace was no longer so mysterious—it worked through “religious education and proper family government” (p. 74). [End Page 612] Pennsylvania reformers, especially Quakers, led the effort to change how criminals were treated, working to establish penitentiaries as well as to limit the scope of capital punishment and to...

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. By Rachel Hope Cleves. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi, 296 pp. $80.00, ISBN 978-0-521-88435-8.)

In this brilliant book, Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates the prominence and long-term significance of anti-Jacobinism in the early United States. Too often dismissed as simply an overblown, elitist reaction to popular political activity, the Federalist assault on the French Revolution also represented a coherent ideology with a compelling ethical core. In particular, New England ministers and politicians responded with alarm to international revolution because they viewed it in terms of violence, as one of the “uncivilizing” effects that human aggression had on Western culture (p. 86). The irony of this archetypal conservative assessment was that it laid the foundation for a series of archetypal progressive movements in the nineteenth century. At the core of Federalists' moral and political sensibilities, Cleves shows, was a long-standing belief in human depravity and the tenuousness of civil society. In the 1790s and early 1800s, that belief blossomed into an activist commitment to portray and avert French revolutionary bloodshed. “Anti-Jacobins labored,” the author writes, “to persuade their audiences that the violence in France was not incidental to the Revolution… but rather its very essence” (p. 75). The logic of that type of thinking in turn pushed conservatives to initiate a variety of reformist movements. For one thing, Federalists not only attacked the War of 1812 as a partisan conflict, they also pushed the boundaries of antiwar activity: they characterized hawkish politicians and soldiers as bloodthirsty murderers, defended nonviolent criticism of the war as constitutionally protected free speech, and eventually “joined together to found the first two American nonsectarian peace societies” (p. 183). Conservatives also broke new ground in their efforts to educate the American populace. Convinced that lack of education helped cause French revolutionary violence, antebellum anti-Jacobins advocated government support of schooling as a way to restrain disorderly passions.

“A Perfect Republic”: The Mosaic Constitution in Revolutionary New England, 1775–1788

Between the United States' declaration of independence and the country's attempt to construct a federal Constitution, a group of New England ministers proclaimed Israel's biblical history an exemplum for their republican and federal aspirations. Tracing this unique interpretive discourse, the essay underscores the importance of political Hebraism to the intellectual history of the early United States.

“Visions on the Battlefields”: Alexander A. Boddy, Early British Pentecostalism, and the First World War, 1914–1918*

This article investigates the relationship between religion and politics in the First World War by examining the work of Rev. Alexander A. Boddy, a Church of England minister and key leader in early British Pentecostalism. The article surveys a wide variety of responses to the war in Great Britain, but focuses, in particular, on how Pentecostalism shaped Boddy's distinctive understanding of events, especially his view of supernatural phenomenon, his attitude toward the nations involved, and his eschatology. The article explores how Pentecostalism, by focusing on signs and wonders in everyday life, contributed to an interpretation of state politics and world events that placed unique emphasis on determining the role of the supernatural in contemporary events that remains part of popular Pentecostalism today.

Reclaiming Ghosts in 1690s England

On Wednesday 1 June 1692, a young man, about fifteen years of age, went to his bed. He had no sooner lain down than he heard ‘a Hand sweeping on the wall’. Then it came ‘with a rushing noise on his beds-head’ and ‘stroaked him over the face twice very gently’. Opening his eyes he saw before him ‘an apparition of a woman cloathed in black apparel’. Following this eerie encounter, other members of the family claimed to have seen the apparition ‘in the same room with a lighted candle’. Perplexed by these unexplained visits the mistress of this ‘Civiliz’d Family’ wrote to the editors of the bi-weekly periodical the Athenian Mercury desiring to know ‘what should be the occasion of the disturbance’ and ‘whether it be advisable to ask the question of the apparition’. Samuel Wesley (father of John), Church of England minister and co-editor of the Athenian Mercury, advised the woman to have a chat with the ghost, to find out its purpose and to discover how it might be satisfied.

Ministers' Finding Faith

In 1992 Finding Faith Today: How does it happen? described the findings of a significant survey in England on how adults came to faith. Although it had a major impact on churches in the Decade of Evangelism, there has been little subsequent discussion of the findings. In this paper we summarise key findings of the original research and relate it to other empirical research. We concentrate on the area of whether conversion is seen as a sudden event or a gradual process. We then report our own findings in surveying ordinands of the Church of England and student ministers of the Methodist church. This specialised group showed a greater tendency to report a sudden conversion and a time in their lives when they were not a Christian.

Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War

Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. By Elizabeth Young. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1999. xvi + 389 pp. $47; 33 [pounds sterling] (paperbound $18; 13 [pounds sterling]). `In a sermon he delivered shortly before the American Civil War began, New England minister Henry Ward Beecher declared that manhood,--manhood,--MANHOOD,--exercised in the fear of God, has made this nation' (p. 1). Thus, with Beecher's ringing assertion, does Elizabeth Young open her study of women's writing in connection with that war, proceeding shortly to observe that `criticism of Civil War fiction foregrounds the works of white male authors' and generally assumes that `a Civil War novel is a book by a white man about a white man in combat'. Such male primacy Disarming the Nation aims to challenge, destabilize, and overturn, as categories and concepts of race, gender, and sexuality are subjected to continuous, searching scrutiny. The military Civil War remains always at the centre of attention, but also `the writers under discussion employ the idea of civil as a metaphor to represent internal rebellions, conflicts, and fractures' (p. 17). Each of the book's six chapters is concentrated principally upon one text, the first of which is necessarily Uncle Tom's Cabin by `the little woman who made this great war', as Lincoln is reputed to have hailed her on meeting, `the little woman' being of course `Manhood' Beecher's sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe's fellow New Englander, Louisa May Alcott, worked as a nurse in a Union Army hospital until laid low by typhoid, and afterwards recorded and meditated upon her experiences in Hospital Sketches. Both Stowe and Alcott were committed abolitionists, who saw the feminization of American culture as a prerequisite for ethical and political progress, to the extent that for Alcott, `at its broadest reaches, feminization becomes feminism' (p. 106). Their modes of thinking, however, were essentially racist, blacks being often presented as figures of comedy or disorder, albeit `incorporating the legacy of Stowe, Alcott's writings use the image of unruly blackness as a feature of her self-representation in an attempt to escape the constraints of white femininity' (p. 80). Less familiar to most readers will be Elizabeth Keckley, an African-American who managed to buy her own freedom and become a highly successful seamstress and during the war dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln, hence the title of her memoir, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. …

“It is Better to Marry Than to Burn”: Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Celibacy, 1600-1800

Ministers in England and New England diverged in their writings about lay sexual renunciation. In England, clerical writers were ambivalent about celibacy. In contrast, New England ministers uniformly opposed lay vows of celibacy. These differing responses resulted from both demographic and cultural factors. English ministers found it difficult to criticize celibacy when nearly 20 percent of some birth cohorts never married. In New England, on the other hand, only a tiny percentage of colonists never married, allowing ministers to condemn celibacy. Culturally, the patriarchal family figured more prominently in New England ministers'minds as the foundation of a well-ordered society. Celibacy, then, was a direct attack on the institution that secured religion and promoted social stability. This article helps explain both the virulent attacks on Immortalists and Shakers in New England and the relative lack of controversy that greeted England's few religious celibates.

The Post-Puritan Paradigm of Early American Religious History

P RONOUNCING recovery of American religious possibly |the most important achievement of last thirty years for understanding American culture, Henry F. May in i964 highlighted six topics restored to the historical front parlor, including three-Puritanism, Edwardsian Calvinism, and revivalism that had much engaged colonial specialists.1 Revisiting this list in late i990S brings to mind how much early American scholarship had contributed to larger resurgence May noted. It also prompts thoughts on degree to which prevailing view of this trinity had come to color expositions not only of New England ways but also of entire colonial period. Now is as good a time as any to take stock of how early American religious history has changed in interim. Credit for bringing religion to forefront of colonial historiography belongs principally to Perry Miller, who remade New England studies in three decades following publication of Orthodoxy in Massachusetts in 1933. Asserting analytic superiority of intellectual history, Miller took writings of New England's ministers as seriously as they did themselves. Perceiving in their theology and literature means for comprehending region's past, he reconstructed powerfully coherent ideational system infusing New England's creed and turned efforts of a clerical clique on Europe's Atlantic periphery to solve their provincial conundrums into intellectual melodramas evoking timeless human strainings to raise God's veil. In process, he vivified study of American Puritanism, refigured Jonathan Edwards from raging arachniphobe into enlightened intellect, and discovered purposive discourse among revivalists where others had found merely rant or cant. In Miller's tale, New England saints designed an

A NINETEENTH‐CENTURY IRASian: SARAH ALDEN BRADFORD RIPLEY

Abstract. Almost entirely self‐educated, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (1793–1867) combined wide‐ranging personal studies with the daily responsibilities of a New England minister's wife, mother, and teacher in her husband's boarding school. As she struggled to reconcile the conventional Unitarian Christian beliefs of her time with her own life experience and with the discoveries of advancing science, her childhood faith gave way to skepticism. Gradually she was able to integrate her understanding of nature, science, philosophy, and religion into a mature faith. She would have welcomed the companionship and support of IRAS if it had existed in her day.

Reading Popular Culture in Early America

Since the heyday of an insurgent social history, now over two decades ago, intellectual historians have scrambled to keep the history of ideas relevant to the history of social change. Attesting to their success are the new cultural historians who explore the relationship between mass behavior and popular thought, especially where the two most obviously intersected, in reading, writing, and publishing. Studies by Richard D. Brown, David D. Hall, and Jane Tompkins, to name but a few, have given special attention to popular books, newspapers, and the circulation of information. The two volumes reviewed here join this important and exciting body of scholarship. However, like so many studies of popular culture, Pillars of Salt and A Fictive People betray the predilections of their authors for either intellectual history or social history. The joining of the two approaches to the past, in other words, remains incomplete. Daniel A. Cohen approaches early American culture from the perspective of intellectual history, attempting to trace popular perceptions of criminal behavior presented in several succeeding genres of crime literature. Nevertheless, he does not ignore social behavior and context, especially where he uncovers the role of ministers, lawyers, publishers, even criminals themselves, in creating popular texts. Moreover, he situates the evolution of crime literature within the Puritan-to-Yankee transformation of New England society. Sixteenth-century European crime literature told of prisoners' passing from doubt to conviction to assurance of grace. New England ministers added