Future Of Church Research Articles

Anglicans and Methodists in the countryside: convergence and divergence in Church structures

Anglican and Methodist institutional structures betray striking divergence caused by the different functional purposes associated with their disparate origins and ideals. The pursuit of closer unity between them, subsequent upon the acceptance by both denominations of the Anglican-Methodist Covenant in July 2003, will necessitate prolonged discussion, centred not only on theology or ecclesiology, but also on the common structure which a future united Church must take. This article charts the extent of divergence and factors which have made for convergence in recent years and suggests ways in which further convergence can take place.

Farewell to Christendom: The Future of Church and State in America. By Thomas J. Curry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 143 pp. np.

Journal Article Farewell to Christendom: The Future of Church and State in America. By Thomas J. Curry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 143 pp. np. Get access Lee Canipe Lee Canipe Baylor UniversityWaco, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 44, Issue 3, Summer 2002, Pages 587–589, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/44.3.587 Published: 01 July 2002

Free Church Constitutionalists and the Establishment Principle

asserting the right and duty of the civil magistrate to maintain and support the establishment of religion in accordance with God's Word and reserving to ourselves and our successors to strive, by all lawful means, as opportunity shall in God's providence be offered, to secure the performance of this duty agreeably to the Scriptures, and in implement of the statutes of the Kingdom of Scotland, and the Treaty of Union as understood by ourselves and our ancestors, but acknowledging that we do not hold ourselves at liberty to retain the benefits of the Establishment.3 In 1863, negotiations were begun with a view to union between the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church, a predominantly lowland denomination which had always been a 'voluntary' church, that is, it opposed the idea of the national establishment of religion. The Free Church's union committee, set up to negotiate with the United Presbyterians at first included men who were opposed to altering the church's constitution to accommodate voluntary views. It was soon obvious to these men that the United Presbyterians would insist that ministers and office bearers be allowed to oppose establishment, within a future united church. Moreover by 1865, the more conservative Free Church ministers had concluded that many United Presbyterian ministers held views on other doctrines, in particular the Atonement, 4 which were not in accordance with the Confession of Faith. With the passing of the first generation of Free Church ministers, the outlook of the Free Church began to change, making sympathy for the more theologically liberal United Presbyterians widespread among the Free Church ministry. The Free Church's insistence on strict adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith as a statement of faith began to slip. Nowhere was this more obvious than among the theological professors. Whilst the first generation of professors, such as William

Farewell to Christendom: the Future of Church and State in America. By Thomas J. Curry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 143 pages. $25.00.

Farewell to Christendom: the Future of Church and State in America. By Thomas J. Curry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 143 pages. $25.00.

The Christian Churches of Jerusalem in the Post-Oslo Period

This article surveys the main trends in the relations of Jerusalem's historic churches with Israel and the Palestinians since the 1967 occupation and especially since Oslo. It examines the shift from cooperation with the Israeli state in the early period to a closer identification with the Palestinian nationalist position under the impact of Israeli actions and other factors, including pressures from the laity and an increasingly "Palestinianized" higher clergy, and details the growing cooperation among the churches themselves. The article ends with an examination of the various options for a future church role, especially in the light of the churches' proposal for a "special statute" for Jerusalem, and concludes that a holy places administrative regime under Palestinian sovereignty would be more likely to protect long-term Christian interests.

Small Christian Communities: Imagining Future Church. Edited by Robert S. PeltonC.S.C., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. xi + 132 pages. $14.00 (paper).

Small Christian Communities: Imagining Future Church. Edited by Robert S. PeltonC.S.C., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. xi + 132 pages. $14.00 (paper).

Small Christian communities: imagining future church

Small Christian communities: imagining future church

Theological education for the future church and the future world

Theological education for the future church and the future world

Living next to godliness: Residential property values and churches

This article extends the analysis concerning the impact of neighborhood churches on residential property values by investigating nearly 5,000 residential property transactions in Henderson, Nevada, between January 1986 and December 1990. We find that real property values decrease, at a decreasing rate, as distance from a neighborhood church increases. This result is the opposite of that reported by Do, Wilbur, and Short in a previous edition of this journal. We bolster our findings by showing that distance from the site of a future church has little or no impact on residential property values, whereas distance from an existing church is associated with lower property values. Our evidence indicates that neighborhood churches are amenities that enhance the value of neighborhood residential property. Finally, we demonstrate that larger churches (as measured by square foot of lot size) tend to have a greaterpositive impact on residential property values.

Was John Foxe a Millenarian?

That many divines during the middle decades of the seventeenth century were filled with high hopes for the Church's future, and that many of these high hopes were expressed in millenarian terms is by now a commonplace. That, furthermore, this phenomenon did not appear out of the blue and must have had a prehistory would be evident to most. But how far back should one go to find its roots? More than twenty years ago William Lamont argued in his controversial studyGodly rulethat Elizabethan reformers shared with their more radical brethren of the revolutionary years the hope of ‘godly rule’, a term he never clearly defined but which he nevertheless called millenarian. He singled out John Foxe as the chief spokesman of the ‘godly rule’ idea, and moreover claimed that Foxe was the one who above all ‘made the pursuit of the millennium respectable and orthodox’ in England. The idea that Foxe was a millenarian, even the chief spokesman of millenarianism in Elizabethan England, has not found general approval. In well-documented studies on Foxe, the British apocalyptic tradition, or the English Reformation, scholars such as Bernard Capp, Viggo Norskov Olsen, Richard Bauckham, Katharine R. Firth and Patrick Collinson have all denied that Foxe believed in a this-worldly and future period of peace and ecclesiastical felicity; they have instead drawn attention to his view of end-time persecution, and to his belief in the imminent end of the world.

Book Review: The Once and Future Church: Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier

Book Review: The Once and Future Church: Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier

DIE REFORMIERTE KIRCHE UND DIE JUGEND IM 17. UND 18. JAHRHUNDERT: EINE UNTERSUCHUNG VON PREDIGTEN UND ANDERER ERBAULICHER LITERATUR

During the 17th and 18th centuries the Dutch Reformed Church was very much concerned with youth, as appears from sermons and other works of edification and moral guidance. In this paper we present the results of an investigation of the ideas about youth and especially adolescence, recorded in the works of pietistic pedagogues, moderate Calvinists and more enlightened preachers. In this way continuities and changes over time as well as similarities and differences between denominations with regard to their attitude towards youngsters could be determined. All agreed that the educational task of the Church was a supportive and supplementary one: the main responsibility for the well‐being of the young, and thus for the future of Church and society, belonged to the Christian families.

Image and Spirit in Sacred and Secular Art by Jane Dillenberger

738 BOOK REVIEWS tical ruin, for what is required is a proper legal response to their illegal acts and a properly political response to their political acts. Burtchaell is usually close to the truth in his ethical judgments, hut one is often uneasy with these judgments either because of some glaring inconsistencies or because they do not seem grounded on a solid theoretical basis. He is possessed of some remarkably clear insights and a powerful rhetorical style, hut these suffer from his inability to string these insights into a consistent outlook on these critical biomedical issues. University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, Illinois ROBERT BARRY, O.P. Image and Spirit in Sacred and Secular Art. By JANE DILLENBERGER. New York: Crossroad, 1990. Pp. 217. $29.95. In the quarter century since the close of Vatican II, it is surprising how few Catholic seminaries in this country have followed the Council mandate that called for the study of sacred art by candidates preparing for ordination. On the contrary, the preconciliar ambivalence toward the arts in general, and the visual arts in particular, has been superseded by an incipient iconoclasm that has flourished hand in hand with the liturgical renewal. In the exuberance of throwing out the vestiges of preconciliar culture, hasty reformers have unwittingly embraced new art forms that are all too often lacking in aesthetic or spiritual value. Their untrained eyes predictably gravitate toward the insipid, the garish, and the gaudy. Much of what has been lauded as Catholic art in the past two decades finds itself as hopelessly outdated as the burlap banner. Catholic culture has devolved into Catholic kitsch. It is ironic that the most eloquent voice for the study of art in American seminaries today belongs not to any priest or prelate, hut to a Protestant woman, Jane Dillenherger, who has established a long and distinguished career teaching in theological seminaries. These include: Drew Theological Seminary, San Francisco Theological Seminary, the Pacific School of Religion, and the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley . The Harvard-educated Dillenherger is the author of numerous hooks and articles dealing with art and religion. That she foresaw a career dedicated to rebuilding bridges between these two long-estranged fields of study was evidenced early on when she sought an inter-disciplinary doctoral degree with a dissertation committee that would include the theologian Paul Tillich alongside the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky. The innovative proposal was denied. Undaunted, Dillen· BOOK REVIEWS 739 berger later went on to establish at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley a doctoral program of studies in the Arts and Religion, the only one of its kind in the United States, where theologians, artists, and art historians collaborate in the education of future church leaders. Jane Dillenberger's latest book, Image and Spirit in Sacred and Secular Art, is fitting testimony to a career that has stretched over five decades. The hook is a compendium of essays and lectures addressed to "the inquiring, intelligent adult who has little or no formal background in the visual arts." The offerings include such diverse subjects as "The Image of Evil in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Art" (what would have been her dissertation topic under Tillich and Panof· sky), "Picasso's Transformations of Sacred Art," "The Appearance and Disappearance of God in Western Art,"" Lucas Cranach, Reformation Picture-Maker," and "Images of Women in American Art." Al· together, ten essays have been included in this Crossroad publication which is generously filled with 133 reproductions of works discussed in the text. The overarching theme of this hook is to look at visual images and analyze how they have changed through successive cultural eras. In doing so the author makes every attempt to connect art and religion with everyday life. In her introductory essay, "Looking for Style and Content in Christian Art," Dillenberger calls on all viewers to discard their private prejudices as they gaze upon artworks: "Nothing less than a kind of self-abdication is demanded of us by a great work of art. It asks us to see it, if only for a few moments, in terms of the vision that it represents and expresses." Only by placing biases in check can the...

Anglo-Catholicism, the ‘Crisis in the Church’ and the Cavalier Case of 1899

Much of the history of the late nineteenth-century Church of England is dominated by the phenomenon of Anglo-Catholicism. In the period between 1890 and 1939 Anglo-Catholics formed the most vigorous and successful party in the Church. Membership of the English Church Union, which represented a broad spectrum of Anglo-Catholic opinion, grew steadily in these years; advanced ceremonial was introduced in an increasing number of parish churches and, from 1920 onwards, a series of congresses was held which filled the Royal Albert Hall for a celebration of the strength of the ‘Catholic’ movement in the Established Church. In theChurch Timesthe Anglo-Catholics possessed a weekly newspaper which outsold all its rivals put together and which reinforced the impression that theirs was the party with the Church's future in its hands. Furthermore, Anglo-Catholicism could claim to be supplying the Church of England with many of its saints and with a fair proportion of its scholars. Slum priests like R. R. Dolling and Arthur Stanton gave their lives to the task of urban mission; Edward King, bishop of Lincoln, was hailed as a spiritual leader by churchmen of all parties; Charles Gore, Walter Frere and Darwell Stone were scholars of renown, while Frank Weston, bishop of Zanzibar, combined academic achievements and missionary zeal with personal qualities which brought him an unexpected pre-eminence at the 1920 Lambeth Conference. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, therefore, Anglo-Catholicism was the party of advance, offering leadership and vision and presenting the Church of England with a concept of Catholicity which many found attractive.

:The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570-1625

Introduction. Ecclesiology and soteriology history and the future church membership and saving faith visible saints and the logic of Anabaptism government of the gathered church - democracy and aristocracy autonomy and uniformity between the gathered congregations church and magistrate. Conclusion. References. Index.

Grundtvig i europæisk åndsliv.

Grundtvig and European culturea lecture by Jørgen ElbekThe main idea in this paper is that Plato, Goethe and Grundtvig share an anthropology that seems to be identical with the yoga concept of invisible man; but that Plato expresses his through a philosophy of society (in the Republic), Goethe through a philosophy of nature (in The Metamorphosis o f Plants) and Grundtvig through a philosophy of history (in, amongst others, The Pleiades o f Christendom). In the case of Plato there is a structural merger between the Republic and the series of 30 or so dialogues that constitute his life’s work. In Goethe’s case there is a harmony between his picture of life in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) and his own biography (for example, Mignon’s death corresponds to Goethe’s own renunciation in connection with Die Wahlverwandtschaften (pub. in English in 1914 as Elective Affinities) and Harfner’s death corresponds to the resignation of Marienbadelegie). In the case of Grundtvig, there is a correspondence between his subdivision of church and world history and the well-known phases of his own life: thus the history of the Jews, the Greeks and the Romans corresponds to the years 1801-10, 1810-17, and 1817-23, characterized by imagination, emotion and reason respectively. The arrival of Christianity coincides with the turning-point in Grundtvig’s life in 1824; whilst the history of recent times, moving through the Lutheran and the Grundtvigian to the future church corresponds to the years 1825-32, 1832-44 and 1844-67, characterized by faith, hope and love respectively. These are in turn incorporated into Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, or the creed, baptism and Holy Communion.

Mystical Experience as Related to Present and Anticipated Future Church Participation

The relationship between reported mystical experience and present and anticipated patterns of church participation was investigated in an initial sample of 324 persons. A scale to measure reported mystical experience that allowed for a distinction between the report of mystical experience (Factor I) and its religious interpretation (Factor II) was utilized. Each factor differentially related to church denomination, frequency of church attendance, decision to change church membership, decision to quit church participation, and decision of non-church members to join a church. It was concluded that on the basis of these exploratory data the report of mystical experience is an important variable related to patterns of church participation.

Book Review: The Once & Future Church: A Communion of Freedom

Book Review: The Once & Future Church: A Communion of Freedom

The problem of the native clergy in the Portuguese and Spanish Empires from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries

A learned Jesuit historian of the Japan mission recently observed: ‘The aim of Christian missionary activity in every mission land is to establish the Church. The goal of the foreign missionary is primarily to prepare the ground and lay the foundation of the future Church. What he envisages, therefore, is the idea of a fully matured hierarchy of native-born bishops and priests capable of carrying on the work of the Church without foreign assistance.’Identical sentiments have been voiced by other erudite Jesuit historians of Portuguese India and the Spanish Philippines; but their own well-documented works show very clearly that, however much this was a consummation devoutly to be wished, the road to its achievement was a long and an arduous one. Indeed, at times this objective was actively opposed by those very missionaries who should have been most anxious to attain it. Whatever the theory may have been, in practice the indigenous clergy were apt to be kept in a strictly subordinate condition to the European priests, particularly where these latter were members of the Regular clergy. How this discrimination arose, and the length of time for which it endured, is the theme of this paper.