Getting Off the Map: Response to "George Herbert's Theology: Nearer Rome or Geneva?" (MLA Special Session, 1986) (original) (raw)

George Herbert (1593-1633): Faith Shaper in Verse

Taking a jaundiced view of his earlier career choices, George Herbert pursued ordination first as a deacon but then, after being ordained priest in 1630, he became Rector of Bemerton, in the Diocese of Salisbury. First and foremost he was a godly parish priest who refused to be linked with either of the two conflicting church parties of his day. He dissociated himself from both the ‘outlandish’ practice of some who were later described as ‘high’ churchmen, and also from the bare Puritan worship of those who abandoned ecclesiastical dress and the Church’s liturgy. He was a moderate Calvinist in his theology, with a deeply perceptive spirituality, expressed in beautiful seventeenth century English poetry. The twelve sections, consisting of quotations, relate to the headings of the compiler’s website, www.faithshapers.co.uk and the Academia papers online, 'Finding the Evangelical Anglican Way: 1375 to the present day', but also derive from reflection upon his own personal spiritual journey.

Breaking The Church: George Herbert’s Problem with Obedience

Studies in Philology, 2020

This essay begins by asking why, in revising, restructuring, and extending his work in the Bodleian Manuscript, George Herbert broke the original sequence of The Church after "Obedience." I then offer a speculative response to this question based on a close reading of "Obedience" and an effort to historicize its theological and social content. Three claims are central. First, I suggest that particular devotional and theological significance ought to be attributed to "Obedience" in relation to The Church sequence overall. This is true, as I figure mainly through the writings of Martin Luther, insofar as the poem addresses what for Reformation theology was a definitive principle of Christian liberty. Correspondingly, "Obedience" purposes to conduct what for the Christian subject is a defining but only potentially redeeming act of consent to God's Law. Second, through close reading and discreet reconstruction, I consider how this act of consent is obstructed in Herbert's poem. Above all, I suggest, this obstruction should be understood in terms of a social and religious contest for the voice of the first-person speaker, and a failed introspection of the Christian neighbor. Finally, I argue that "Obedience" not only marks a theological impasse that was decisive for Herbert's restructuring of The Church in the Bodleian manuscript, but additionally, and crucially, that it also shows us how his poetry and theology were vitally responsive to changing social and class relations in England during the early seventeenth century.

George Herbert: An Anglican Saint for Scriptural Reasoning

An experimental paper from 2003 exploring George Herbert's /The Temple/. It was written as a response to the reflections by Peter Ochs on the relation between 'temple', 'house' and 'tent' as models for religious study. Through engagement with Herbert's poems, I show how the meaning of 'temple' is transformed in Christian theology. The essay also engages with Britten's setting of Herbert's 'Antiphon'.

Natural Religion, Priestcraft, and Orthodoxy in Herbert, Toland, and Cudworth

INTRODUCTION-HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SUBVERSIVE IDEAS With regard to David Hume's Natural History of Religion (1757), Frank Manuel writes, in The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1967): Between the rationalist apologiae for the truths of revealed religion current in eighteenth-century England and a naturalistic interpretation of religious experience there was no great divide. The act of apology itself involved a momentous leap-objectifying the problem-and once this gap had been bridged the reduction of religious mystery to mere anthropology could not be long delayed. 1 The attempt to defend Christian revelation on 'rationalist' grounds, he writes, ultimately backfired. Thinkers in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Britain developed theories of religion that, for Manuel, rendered Christian revelation theologically unnecessary, a priori, and historically improbable, a posteriori. That is, apologists for natural religion made such a strong case for its universality and sufficiency that any specific revelation, including Christian revelation manifested in the Bible, became superfluous. At the same time, historical investigations of early religion elaborated accounts of 'priestcraft' by which false claims to divine revelation were invented. Theological writings in defense of Christian doctrine were co-opted by radical deists who stripped away revelation in their account of true religious belief that derived from unaided human reason. Seemingly inevitably, this ended in Hume's account of religious belief as a product of human passions-the reduction of Mystery to mere anthropology. 2