English Theology Research Articles

English Catholicism Rethought? Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. By Lucy E. C. Wooding. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) Pp. x+305. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. £40. 0 19 820865 0

The history of English Catholic theology between the break with Rome and the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I remains relatively little-known, despite (or perhaps because of) the publication of two recent American studies by P. S. O'Grady and E. A. Macek respectively: Henry VIII and the conforming Catholics, Collegeville, Minn. 1990, and The loyal opposition: Tudor traditionalist polemics, New York 1996. The appearance of a work which proposes to undertake a fresh survey of the whole period must therefore be welcomed.

Heinrich Bullinger, Marriage, and the English Reformation: "The Christen State of Matrimonye" in England, 1540-53

Much work has been accomplished in recent years on the relationship between the English and contiental reformations but research is focused primarily on the impact of Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli on English theologians and university students during the reign of Edward VI. Comparatively little has been written about Heinrich Bullinger, whose writings, translated into English more frequently than Bucer's or Vermiglis', reached a wider English audience. Bullinger's Christen State of Matrimonye offers an excellent case study of the religious and cultural connections between Zurich and England during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. The content of the book reveals much about the Zurich reformer's marital, covenantal, and pastoral views. The history of the book's translation and extensive publication in English sheds light on the motives of English reformers, writers, and printers, while its reception and impact allow a more precise evaluation of Bullinger's influence in England.

Fitting Geomagnetic Fields before the Invention of Least Squares: II. William Whiston's Isoclinic Maps of Southern England (1719 and 1721)

The English mathematical practitioner and theologian William Whiston (1667-1752) made the first known maps showing the direction of magnetic inclination (for south-eastern England) in 1719 and 1720. He also anticipated Graham's 1723 measurement of the ratio of horizontal and vertical magnetic intensities, and he understood their relationship to magnetic inclination. Whiston's work is examined to determine how he fitted the planar isoclinic surfaces. This is of interest because his study precedes the publication of 'Meyer's method' by thirty-one years and the Legendre-Gauss 'method of least squares' by eighty-six years. It is suggested that Whiston fitted the surfaces using observations of inclination at a chosen triplet of localities; and that he did this in order to use data from non-included localities as a check on his model. Best fits to his maps are given by inclinations based on Salisbury, Wiltshire, London, and Ainho [Aynho], Northamptonshire, in 1719, and on Wanstead, Essex, Ainho, and Saltfleet, Lincolnshire, in 1720. However, in both cases, the orientation of the isolines appears to be inconsistent with roughly contemporary data from Europe and Scandinavia, as well as a hindcast of the geomagnetic field in 1720, based on the modern Bloxham-Jackson global, time-dependent, spherical harmonic model.

LONDON'S BARBER-ELIJAH: THOMAS MOOR AND UNIVERSAL SALVATION IN THE 1690S

A prominent feature of post-Reformation English theology is a strong tradition of plebeian heresy. English people, men and women, without knowledge of learned languages or the theological canon, derived original religious ideas from their own experiences or personal study of the Bible, as well as from an eclectic miscellany of other texts.England did not, of course, have a monopoly on plebeian heresy. The most celebrated early modern plebeian heretic known to us today is probably the Italian miller Menocchio, the subject of Carlo Ginzburg's study: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Trans. John and Ann Tedeschi; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Plebeian heretics often emerged from the artisan classes, possessing literacy and access to at least a small collection of books, always including the Bible. They elaborated their individual theologies outside both the dominant orthodoxy of the Anglican church and that of the major dissenting bodies.

Postmodernism and the ‘Trinity’: How to be postmodern and post‐Barthian too

The trouble with post-modern theology is that it tends to be pre-Barthian. Indeed, two main strands of English theology that have attempted to write from a postmodern perspective—the ‘Sea of Faith’ school surrounding Don Cupitt, and the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school surrounding John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock— share very little else but their postmodernism and different kinds of pre-Barthianism. I suspect the arguments of this article could be applied equally to the American ‘post-liberal’ school surrounding George Lindbeck, but space forbids treatment of too many variants.For a definition of postmodernism I follow Milbank:The end of modernity, which is not yet accomplished, but continues to arrive, means the end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like.Modernism then represents faith in three things: 1Deductivism: the idea that all meaningful language forms a single deductive system, wherein the truth value of any proposition can be calculated;1Foundationalism: the idea that this system can be securely based on universally accepted premises1Correspondence theory: the idea that statements exist to express truth, which consists in the correspondence between what they assert and what is the case.Modernism hopes one day to get at a text that is consistent with itself, demonstrable to all reasonable people, and adequate to the world. Of course, there is a lot out there in the world that is currently ‘outside the text’, but one day we will expand the text to fit the world exactly, like a glove.

The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist 12: Smaller Bodleian Collections: English Miscellaneous, English Poetry, English Theology, Finch, Latin Theology, Lyell, Radcliff Trust. Ralph Hanna III

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsThe Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist 12: Smaller Bodleian Collections: English Miscellaneous, English Poetry, English Theology, Finch, Latin Theology, Lyell, Radcliff Trust. Ralph Hanna III Nicholas WatsonNicholas Watson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 77, Number 1Jan., 2002 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2903828 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 2002 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Radical Orthodoxy and the Future of British Theology

David Ford traite du livre Radical Orthodoxy. A new theology edite par John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock et Graham Ward (Londres et New York, 1999), qui est un manifeste d'un mouvement, present notamment a Cambridge, pour considerer ses positions et sa relation au reste de la theologie actuelle. L'article est suivi de la reponse de Catherine Pickstock sur ce qu'est l'orthodoxie radicale en theologie ainsi qu'a un article de guy Collins paru dans la meme revue, suivie a son tour d'une reponse de David Ford.

Mechanoelectric contributions to sudden cardiac death.

Time for primary review 28 days. Sudden death, a major problem in developed countries and increasingly so in some underdeveloped countries, justifies research on the mechanisms and identification of patients at high risk of sudden death. Most sudden deaths are secondary to ventricular tachyarrhythmias [1,2]. Primary electrical disturbances, such as Brugada syndrome, long QT syndrome, are rare and account for few sudden deaths. Sudden death as a rule complicates the situation with an underlying cardiac disease with different classes of heart failure [2]. The alteration of the cardiac mechanical properties developing early in heart failure is accompanied by action potential lengthening [3], which is modulated by acute stretch [4–6]. The English theologian and philosopher William of Occam (1280–1349) stated: ‘Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum’. This is recognised as Occam's Razor. Roughly interpreted, it proposes that it is better to have one hypothesis to explain five observations than five hypotheses to explain each one. The cardiovascular clinical parameters used for predicting sudden arrhythmic death ranging through indices of neurohormonal status (i.e. heart rate variability) to indices of electrophysiological substrate (i.e. late potentials, QT dispersion, alternans) are influenced by and associated with mechanical disturbances in heart. Although some of these issues have been related to mechanical factors in previous reviews [6–12], this review describes the possibility that many of the mechano-arrhythmic factors affect a common pathway. Moreover, several arrhythmic mechanisms and their clinical correlates infringe such a pathway. That is, we will try to apply the Occam's Razor principle to this problem. We have to satisfy several criteria to support this contention (Fig. 1). First, the currently accepted situation (Fig. 1A). The black arrows represent the paths taken by the conventional dogma. The etiological factors (Fig. 1A top centre), through a variety of mechanisms act via … *Corresponding author. Tel.: +33-2-4747-4687; fax: +33-2-4747-5919 d.babuty{at}chu.med.univ-tours.fr

From John Locke to Dugald Stewart

"We see that throughout Europe, for nearly a half-century now," wrote an anonymous reviewer of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, "the taste for philosophy has become more dominant and more widely cultivated, but nowhere has there been more progress than in [Britain]. Metaphysics especially is greatly improved there. In emulation, many of the learned English have been stimulated to turn their studies in this direction." 1 The editors of The Dictionaryof Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers, having noticed this same phenomenon, have undertaken to give us brief accounts of the lives and ideas of those who contributed to the philosophical Britain of the eighteenth century. In doing so, they have cast their net broadly. It is the "long eighteenth century," the period from the first publication of John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) to, more or less, the death of Dugald Stewart (1828), with which they are concerned. Moreover, "philosophy" is here understood to include not only those who "made a contribution to the history of ideas, or represented to a non-specialist reader notions about the way human beings perceived and responded to the sensible (or immaterial) world" (viii), but also a fair number of individuals whose achievements were entirely in natural philosophy or mathematics, and of a reasonably technical nature. Some may wonder if all the clergymen included did in fact address themselves to philosophical issues, but the editors rightly set out to be inclusive, while the reviewer cited above also said [End Page 359] that "among some English theologians it is now fashionable to sprinkle even their sermons with the most subtle metaphysics. At the least, unless we have Locke at our fingertips, we cannot begin to understand them."

From John Locke to Dugald Stewart

"We see that throughout Europe, for nearly a half-century now," wrote an anonymous reviewer of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, "the taste for philosophy has become more dominant and more widely cultivated, but nowhere has there been more progress than in [Britain]. Metaphysics especially is greatly improved there. In emulation, many of the learned English have been stimulated to turn their studies in this direction." 1 The editors of The Dictionaryof Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers, having noticed this same phenomenon, have undertaken to give us brief accounts of the lives and ideas of those who contributed to the philosophical Britain of the eighteenth century. In doing so, they have cast their net broadly. It is the "long eighteenth century," the period from the first publication of John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) to, more or less, the death of Dugald Stewart (1828), with which they are concerned. Moreover, "philosophy" is here understood to include not only those who "made a contribution to the history of ideas, or represented to a non-specialist reader notions about the way human beings perceived and responded to the sensible (or immaterial) world" (viii), but also a fair number of individuals whose achievements were entirely in natural philosophy or mathematics, and of a reasonably technical nature. Some may wonder if all the clergymen included did in fact address themselves to philosophical issues, but the editors rightly set out to be inclusive, while the reviewer cited above also said [End Page 359] that "among some English theologians it is now fashionable to sprinkle even their sermons with the most subtle metaphysics. At the least, unless we have Locke at our fingertips, we cannot begin to understand them."

Hobbes's Translations of Homer and Anticlericalism

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In a recent article, Paul Davis has claimed that Hobbes's primary reason for translating Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was to continue his anticlerical agenda.1 My purpose in this response is to argue that the case he presents is not cogent.By 1673, when the first part of his translation of Homer's Odyssey appeared, Hobbes was eighty-five years old and had been arguing, often acrimoniously, with English scientists, mathematicians, and theologians on a fairly regular basis for more than twenty years. So the reason he took up translating Homer's epics should be obvious. He was tired, had left disputation behind, and wanted to enjoy the little time he expected was left to him. He had written a half-dozen substantial treatises, not to mention others in the range of fifty to one hundred pages. Moreover, many of these works were extended replies to earlier objections to his views. So it is plausible that he realized that he had had his say on all the issues, that he had not yet convinced his opponents and that it was unlikely that he would. There is evidence that he had lost his zest for debating. It was said that 'if any one objected against his dictates, he would leave the company in a passion, saying, his business was to teach, not dispute'.2Finally, if we look at the most particular and relevant fact about Hobbes's reason for translating and then publishing Homer's poems, namely, the reason he gives, we find a mundane explanation, consistent with what has already been said:Why then did I write it? Because I had nothing else to do. Why publish it? Because I thought it might take off my adversaries from showing their folly upon my more serious writings, and set them upon my verses to show their wisdom.This is a witty and sarcastic remark, not at all mysterious, and containing nothing to move us to look for an X-file to supply a motivation. The one he gives is explicit and plausible. In particular, there is no good reason to accept Davis's inflated description of the brief passage above:Hobbes mixes lofty contempt for his 'adversaries' with vindictive stabs at them, the cool elegance of chiasmus ('folly'/'serious writings'; 'verses'/'wisdom') with uncharacteristically raw sarcasm.3Either all contempt is lofty or there is nothing lofty in the contempt shown in this passage. Juxtaposing 'folly' and 'serious writings' does not count as cool elegance of any kind; the phrase 'serious writings' is leaden and banal. The terms 'verses' and 'wisdom' are neither contraries nor contradictories; 'verses' is a nonevaluative term, and 'wisdom' is an evaluative one, being used sarcastically. There is no high wit or cleverness. Finally, Hobbes's two line dismissal of his opponents hardly counts as uncharacteristically raw sarcasm in the light of other remarks by Hobbes. The harshest of these is probably: 'In sum, it [Wallis's work] is all error and railing, that is, stinking wind; such as a jade lets fly, when he is too hard girt upon a full belly'.4 But many of his jibes at Bramhall cut much deeper, such as his comment that the bishop had 'drawn up [the issue to be debated] to his advantage, with as much caution as he would do a lease' and that the bishop 'hath spent no little part in seeking preferment and increasing of riches'.5 In comparison, Hobbes's quip about publishing his translation is tame.My description of the reasoning relevant to understanding Hobbes's motivation is designed to instantiate what I believe are good principles: the use of general propositions about human nature, broad facts about a particular person in his situation, and finally specific facts about what he says and does. Such a strategy forestalls the use of unnecessary, extravagant explanations, explanations that appeal to recondite or overly subtle considerations.This notwithstanding, interpretation is akin to inductive logic in this way: what counts as a good inference given certain evidence, may not be a good inference given additional evidence. …

"KILL[ING] OUR SOULS WITH LITERALISM": READING ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

If Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) swept across England like a cataclysmic flood, as Charles Kingsley presciently observed, then the pseudonymous Essays and Reviews (1860) was the storm.1 From this blast “troubling the stagnant waters of orthodoxy,” English orthodoxy became “convulsed with indignation and panic.” Constituting “a landmark in the history of English theology,” Essays and Reviews was even “more alarming— a conspiracy of clergymen to blow up the Church from within.”2 This was precisely what the architects of the Oxford Movement of 1833 had dreaded and wanted to preempt: the theological and biblical skepticism of German higher criticism. With its “guerilla warfare of essays,” where “hundreds of points are touched, none completed,” Essays and Reviews was viewed as an act of what we now call bio-terrorism, “the scattering of poison in the wells of a city,” a metaphor based on the familiar nineteenth-century practice of dumping raw, untreated sewage into the streets, which then contaminated the water supplies.3 In a related metaphor, the most recent editors of Essays and Reviews likened its effect to an illness and an epidemic: “the rising temperature of the established church as fears of heretical fever … gripped the nation” (E&R, 30). In the language of another favorite metaphor, Essays and Reviews virtually “set a torch to what proved to be dry timber.”24

Accessus ad auctorem: The Case of John Wyclif

"Accessus ad auctorem: The Case of John Wyclif," John Wyclif, the radical English philosopher and theologian of the late fourteenth century, wrote a large number of texts, many of them of considerable length. To facilitate access to these works a number of tools were produced very soon after Wyclifs lifetime both in England and in Bohemia. Chapter by chapter summaries, various modes of index, and a list of biblical passages discussed within Wyclifs texts are all found. Study of these tools reveals a process of trial and improvement in their making, as well as a comprehensiveness and efficiency hard to achieve in a period of manual copying. This study investigates the evidence that survives for these tools, assesses their origin and possible models, and suggests how Bohemian disciples of Wyclif extended and refined ideas that were initiated in England.

A New Theological Vision: A Call to Join the Forum for Religion and Theology

On the 26 and 27 September, a group of theologians met at Liverpool Hope University College and reflected on the state of contemporary British theology. The following statement was the result. This statement was widely circulated inviting colleagues throughout higher education to become signatories.

Between Hell and Plum Island: Samuel Sewall and the Legacy of the Witches, 1692-97

SAMUEL SEWALL'S tribute to the natural beauty and religious significance of Plum Island and Newbury, Massachusetts, comes as a surprise in an otherwise pedantic tract devoted to New England's potential role in the millennium. A lone paragraph on the penultimate page of Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, a prophetic exercise published in Boston in 1697, the passage appears out of place, a bit of bravado or, perhaps, selfindulgent nostalgia for the writer's childhood stamping ground.' Appreciators of Sewall's brief prose-poem are usually silent about the balance of the lengthy tract it so strikingly brings to a close. But, of course, as with all great writing, the part loses much of its power when divorced from the whole. Sewall's treatise had a serious purpose. It was a strong reaction to English theologian Joseph Mede's depressing forecast about the New World's role in the prophetic drama of the millennium, about which English theologians were increasingly excited as the Civil War approached. Mede (1586-1638), of Cambridge University, died sixteen years before Samuel Sewall was born. But no matter, his writings outlived him by many years and were still being discussed in America far into the eighteenth century.2

Logic's God and the natural order in late medieval Oxford: The teaching of Robert Holcot

Summary Recent students of late medieval intellectual history have treated Oxford theologians' Sentences lectures from the 1320s to 1330s as revealing the interface of the theological, logical, and scientific thinking characteristic of a historically momentous ‘New English Theology’. Its conceptual achievement, historians generally concur, was the casting off of the speculative (ultimately Neoplatonic) metaphysics of such thirteenth-century authors as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon; its methodological novelty made it akin to twentieth-century analytic philosophy and seminal for the early Scientific Revolution. Yet the metaphysically cast thirteenth-century sciences of perspectiva and astrologia persisted among scholars long into the early modern period. To show how this apparent paradox may be dissolved, this article details the intersection of thirteenth-century metaphysics and fourteenth-century analysis in the lectures of a controversial and influential proponent of the Oxford theology of the 1330s.

The Strange Fate of Czech Utraquism: The Second Century, 1517–1621

This article aims to reassess current historical judgements on the Czech Utraquist Church during the second century of its existence, from 1517 to 1621. It seeks to outline the special problems which Bohemian Utraquism faced as a religious via media, partly viewed from the comparative perspective of the kindred phenomenon of the post-Reformation Church of England. After a discussion of the historiographic issues, the focus is on the distinctive development of sixteenth-century Utraquism and its relations to English theology and eastern Orthodoxy. The Church's intermediate position between the Church of Rome and the fully reformed Protestant Churches is then explored more systematically through the writings of the authoritative, but neglected, theologian of sixteenth-century Utraquism, Bohuslav Bílejovský.

:Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War

This is a major study of the theology of grace in the English Church between the Reformation and the Civil War. On the basis of a wide reading of both English and continental writings, the author challenges the prevailing view that there was essentially a 'Calvinist' consensus in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church, and stresses instead an indigenous latitudinarianism of doctrine against which a concerted campaign was conducted in the last decade of the sixteenth century in the controversies which led to the Lambeth Articles. Mr White reviews the impact Arminian ideas had in England, firstly through a detailed exposition of the theology of Arminius, and subsequently by means of a review of the links between the English and Dutch churches as the quarrel between the Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants reached its climax in the Synod of Dort. Other chapters discuss the place of Hooker in English theology, the impact of Richard Montagu, the ideas of Thomas Jackson, the writings of Neile and Laud on predestination, and the regulation of doctrine in the period of Personal Rule. At all stages the theological debate is related to its political - and often polemical - context, not least in a carefully documented reassessment of the role of the court both in the last years of James' reign and in the early years of the rule of Charles I.

An English Gallican: Henry Holden, (1596/7–1662) Part I (To 1648)

THE writings of the seventeenth-century English theologian, Henry Holden, played a small but significant part in the development of western religious thought in the centuries following his death. His most important work,Divinae fidei analysis,first printed in Latin at Paris in 1652 and afterwards translated and published in English, was several times reprinted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was later incorporated in two theological collections, J. P. Migne'sTheologiae cursus completus(tom.6, 1839), and Josef Braun'sBibliotheca regularum fidei(tom.2, 1844). It influenced the thinking, in the nineteenth century, not only of avowed liberals such as Dôllinger and Acton, but also, in some degree, of moderate progressives like Newman. In recent years, specialist studies on different aspects of Holden's thought have appeared in English and in French. So far, however, no serious attempt has been made to revise his bibliography: we still have to rely, in large measure, on that published by Joseph Gillow more than a century ago. In this article I want to bring together material that has come to light since Gillow's time and to examine Holden's works afresh against the background of his life and the religious and political developments in England and France at that period. I shall devote particular attention to two themes that run through all his work. One is gallicanism, that amalgam of mediaeval theories limiting the authority of the papacy in relation to secular states and their rulers and national churches and their bishops. It will be seen that plans which Holden advanced in the 1640s for the reform of the Catholic Church in England along gallican lines are based largely on ideas developed in hisDivinaefidei analysispublished a few years later. The other is his analytical and critical approach to doctrine, aiming always to distinguish truths solidly based on Scripture and tradition from the mere speculations of theologians. It is an approach that had been made popular in France by the Catholic controversialist, François Véron, whoseRégula fidei catholicaewas first published at Paris in 1644 when Holden was probably already at work on hisDivinae fidei analysis.It reveals itself in all Holden's writings and distinguishes him from many of the other Catholic apologists who were drawn into controversy with the Anglican divines of the post-Chillingworth era.

Karl Barth and British Theology

Die Theologie Karl Barths hat in Grosbritannien seit den 20er Jahren Beachtung gefunden. Auf Barths dialektisch-polemische Abgrenzungen reagierten britische Theologen vorwiegend mit Mistrauen; nur einzelne Personen, vor allem Schotten und englische Freikirchler, offneten sich seinem Einflus. Fur die anglikanische Theologie ist lange Zeit der Widerstand Barths gegen die — in der angelsachsischen Tradition sehr lebendige — naturliche Theologie der wichtigste Punkt der Auseinandersetzung mit ihm gewesen. Schottland dagegen hat, nicht zuletzt durch den Einflus Barths, seine reformierten Wurzeln wiederentdeckt und in Thomas Forsyth Torrance den bedeutendsten Vermittler des Werkes Barths im englischen Sprachraum hervorgebracht. Er verbindet die Hochschatzung Barths mit eigenen wissenschaftlichen Anliegen fur die Erkenntnisund Methodenlehre der Theologie. Erst in den letzten Jahren versucht auch die englische Theologie, Anschlus an die durch Torrance initiierten Diskussionen um Barth zu gewinnen. Insgesamt gesehen rechtfertigen es die zahlreichen und ganz unterschiedlich gefuhrten Auseinandersetzungen mit Barth nicht, von einem generellen Um-Barth-Herumgehen der britischen Theologie zu sprechen.