Journal of Ecclesiastical History: The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume III: Partisan Anglicanism and its Global Expansion, 1829-c. 1914. Edited by Rowan Strong. Pp. xxiv + 504. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. £95.00. 978 0 1996 9970 4 (original) (raw)
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‘“True churchmen”? Anglican Evangelicals and history, c. 1770-1850’, Theology (Sep-Oct 2012), 339-49
In the first half of the nineteenth century the relationship between the Church of England and the state shifted dramatically. This influenced, and was in turn influenced by, heated debates about Anglican history in general and about the Reformation in particular. Some of the bitterest debates revolved around differing understandings of the Church's foundational literature -the Articles, Homilies and Prayerbook -and what they stood for. These debates drove scholarly understanding of the Reformation, but they also sharpened developing party boundaries. This article examines how these supposedly unchanging texts were reinterpreted as first Evangelicals and 'Orthodox' churchmen then Tractarians too sought to demonstrate that they, and not their adversaries, were the 'true churchmen'.
International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2018
Any claim for the ecclesiological integrity of Anglicanism seems, at the moment, tenuous. The divisions within the Anglican Communion over the issues of human sexuality and gender do not seem easily healed, despite the efforts of the current archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and his predecessor, Rowan Williams. Despite the proud assertions of Anglican apologists down the ages that the Church was positioned, following the Elizabethan ‘settlement’ of 1558, with moderation and good sense as a via media between Rome and Geneva, this new five-volume history of Anglicanism reveals a church that has been in conflict from its very origins. In seeking to be a church for the whole of England, it was naturally constituted of competing theological and ecclesiological visions, influenced by continental reformations, that could never be entirely congruent – divisions which, at certain junctions since the break with Rome almost 500 years ago, have been the source of significant aggravation and tribalism. Those politico-theological tensions, the History underlines, were exported across Britain’s expanding empire, spawning vibrant new networks and associations that only served further to disrupt the fragile unity of the Church of England after the confessional state was dismantled by the British parliament in 1828–1832. Despite the enormous vibrancy engendered by this conflict of traditions, now stretched across a global Communion and influenced as much by post-colonialism and globalisation as older theological traditions, the final two volumes pose challenging questions for any who would seek to speak meaningfully of a single entity called the ‘Anglican Church’. This article suggests that the greatest threat to contemporary Anglicanism, however, lies in a postmodern retreat from the ecumenical task as truth becomes ever more contextualised, driven by a desire for peaceful cohabitation rather than institutional coherence. These volumes might suggest, rather, that Anglicanism’s hope (and its gift to the wider Church) is to be found precisely in its conflicted quest for truth and unity in faithful response to Scripture, tradition and reason.
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2018
coal-face research by other scholars, and he seems to have read everything: aficionados of a well-crafted citation will explore the endnotes with admiration and profit. He has an eye for arresting possibilities, such as the report by the veteran courtier and Catholic recusant Sir Francis Englefield that he had been employed by Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole to exhume and cremate the corpse of King Henry VIII (p. ). He enjoys the observation which in its incongruity invites reflection: as in the fact that the Dutch Sea Beggars-Protestant pirates in the North Sea who might be labelled terrorists todaygloried in an Islamic crescent badge and the motto 'Rather Turkish than popish' (p. ). He also displays a proper historical agnosticism. Having described at p. the typical profile of a convert to evangelical religion in the early Reformationwell-educated, Erasmian humanist, critical of Church abuses, advocate of a vernacular Biblehe points out that this is the profile of Sir Thomas More. This is an utterly reliable history of the English Reformation, but it is also its imaginative biography, treating the story as a single narrative, watching its birth, its growth, its growing complexity, ending with the prospect that finally, as one hopes in a human life, a rueful wisdom may follow. Marshall is an historian's historian, probing the close-up warp and weft of the period with admirable curiosity and archival expertise, but he also enjoys an enviably light touch for the general reader. DIARMAID MACCULLOCH ST CROSS COLLEGE, OXFORD The Oxford history of Anglicanism, I: Reformation and identity, c. -. By Anthony Milton. Pp. xxvi + incl. ills. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, . £. JEH () ; doi:./S As the first volume of the Oxford History of Anglicanism, this collection of twenty-five essays by leading scholars takes the brave, if awkward, decision to renounce the label 'Anglican' on the grounds that, prior to , the Church of England lacked a stable theological identity; it was an institution, not an 'ism'. As one essay wittily notes, whereas on the Continent the different Churches, each with a distinctive theological platform, competed for Christian souls, in England, Christians espousing very different theological platforms, competed for the soul of the English Church (p. ). Hence, whereas prior studies of the fledgling Church of England championed one or another churchmanship as the true 'spirit of Anglicanism'whether Hooker's ceremonious and rationalist traditionalism favoured by Tractarians, the post- Calvinist consensus model, or the mid twentieth-century big-tent non-confessional via mediathe current volume portrays the period between about and as a 'struggle between competing claims' to be 'the authentic and representative voice of the Church of England' (p. ). Yet, although the essays do on the whole avoid privileging any one churchmanship as the orthodox mainstream, most do betray the shaping hand of the past four decades of front-line scholarship, and if they do not fully embrace the Calvinist consensus model, see the Tudor-Stuart Church as unequivocally Reformed in doctrine and self-understanding.
'Neither Catholic Fish nor Protestant Fowl': the question of Anglicanism
Any claim for the ecclesiological integrity of Anglicanism seems, at the moment, tenuous. The divisions within the Anglican Communion over the issues of human sexuality and gender do not seem easily healed, despite the efforts of the current archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and his predecessor, Rowan Williams. Despite the proud assertions of Anglican apologists down the ages that the Church was positioned, following the Elizabethan 'settlement' of 1588, with moderation and good sense as a via media between Rome and Geneva, this new five-volume history of Anglicanism reveals a church that has been in conflict from its very origins. In seeking to be a church for the whole of England, it was naturally constituted of competing theological and ecclesiological visions, influenced by continental reformations, that could never be entirely congruentdivisions which, at certain junctions since the break with Rome almost 500 years ago, have been the source of significant aggravation and tribalism. Those politico-theological tensions, the History underlines, were exported across Britain's expanding empire, spawning vibrant new networks and associations that only served further to disrupt the fragile unity of the Church of England after the confessional state was dismantled by the British parliament in 1828-1832. Despite the enormous vibrancy engendered by this conflict of traditions, now stretched across a global Communion and influenced as much by post-colonialism and globalisation as older theological traditions, the final two volumes pose challenging questions for any who would seek to speak meaningfully of a single entity called the 'Anglican Church'. This article suggests that the greatest threat to contemporary Anglicanism, however, lies in a postmodern retreat from the ecumenical task as truth becomes ever more contextualised, driven by a desire for peaceful cohabitation rather than institutional coherence. These volumes might suggest, rather, that Anglicanism's hope (and its gift to the wider Church) is to be found precisely in its conflicted quest for truth and unity in faithful response to Scripture, tradition and reason.
2017
This chapter surveys the history of the Church of England between the Hanoverian succession and the American Revolution. The religio-political questions that bedevilled the English nation during the 1530s remained live ones during the eighteenth century. What sort of Church should the Church of England be? What should the relation of Church to state be? What should constitute the Church’s doctrinal orthodoxy? Whom should the Church comprehend? What were the bounds of toleration? These questions had not been solved at the Glorious Revolution, so that the story of the eighteenth-century Church of England is the concluding chapter in the story of England’s long Reformation. What ultimately brought that particular story to a close was not Enlightenment secularism but the changes catalysed by war and the fear of relapse into seventeenth-century-like religious violence.