laudable Practice

The False and Erroneous doctrine of the Calvinists On Predestination and the Providence of God. 1] That Christ did not die for all men, but only for the elect. 2] That God created the greater part of mankind for eternal damnation, and wills not that the greater part should be converted and live. 3] That the elected and regenerated can not lose faith and the Holy Spirit, or be damned, though they commit great sins and crimes of every kind. 4] That those who are not elect are necessarily damned, and can not arrive at salvation, though they be baptized a thousand times, and receive the Eucharist every day, and lead as blameless a life as ever can be led. Reading Peter Lake's On Laudianism (2024), we might assume that these are words from a Laudian publication of the 1630s, for "Arminian assumptions were absolutely central to the Laudians' own position" (p.425). 'Laudianism', after all, was "an attempt gradually to Arminianise the culture, to disseminate  .....

He that comes to the holy communion, must examine himself concerning his passions ... A searching self-examination regarding our hearts and interior life are urged as necessary by Taylor in The Worthy Communicant . This, he emphasises, is not " the consideration of single actions", which "will do but little". Rather: See, therefore, what you are from head to foot, from the beginning to the end, from the first entry to your last progression: and although it be not necessary that we always actually consider all; yet it will be necessary that we always truly know it all, that our relative duties, and our imperfect actions, and our collateral obligations, and the direct measures of the increase of grace, may be justly discerned and understood. Such a self-examination is, of course, demanding and challenging. For the vast majority of us, it will be painful and humbling. Not least is this so because it is an examination of the heart, of our desires and passions: Are your ...

As David Lindsay, Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38), in his 1621 account of the 1618 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth , continues his defence of the Articles of Perth providing for kneeling to receive the Sacrament, he emphasises that this practice is related to another aspect of the administration of the Sacrament - that is, that communicants receive the Bread and Wine from the minister.  This was contrary to those who opponents of the Articles of Perth who defended sitting to receive the Sacrament as more appropriate, enabling communicants to break the Bread for each other and pass the Cup to each other. In the words of an opponent quoted by Lindsay, "The sacramental Supper should carry the resemblance of a Supper, in the formes and fashions thereof, or else it cannot rightly be called a Supper". Lindsay, however, points out that the means and reality of our partaking of Christ in the Sacrament requires a quite contrary unde...

In his Answer to Gardiner (1551), Cranmer had to address Gardiner's allegation that his view of the Sacraments of the Old and New Covenants, as both being a participation in Christ, was "a novelty of speech". Cranmer, we should note, entirely rejected what we might term 'Scriptural primitivism' - that is, a belief that a thousand years of erroneous teaching within the Churches was of little concern as that was required was to return to Scripture. Instead, Cranmer invoked the genealogy for Reformed eucharistic teachings that he had previously set out in this work , with particular regard to how it also supported the Reformed emphasis on the sacraments of the New Covenant working as did the sacraments of the Old Covenant.  The last post in this series demonstrated how this understanding of the sacraments was " after the mind of St. Augustine ". Cranmer, however, did not stop with the great Augustine. He then turned to the 9th century Frankish divine Ratra...

Last week, we left Parson Bull and Squire Sheppard in 1685, in the Tory idyll of the Cotswolds' parish of Avening. Perhaps we spoke too soon, for all was not well in the Tory idyll. In the parish, according to Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull , "there were ... many more disaffected to the Discipline and Liturgy of the Church of England". Nelson's reference here probably reflects one of the consequences of the 1640s and 50s, when use of the Book of Common Prayer was prohibited. In addition to this, of course, criticism of the Prayer Book had also loomed large in the political controversies of the civil wars, with renewed controversy surrounding the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Indeed, Nelson had referred to this in his description of Bull's ministry at the Restoration. Added to this, Nelson's readers in 1713 would also have recognised the situation, as the Toleration Act of 1689 gave recognition to Dissenting bodies largely defined by a rejection of the Pr...

I am coming to the end of reading G.W. Bromiley's Zwingli and Bullinger (1953) in the 'Library of Christian Classics' collection. Over the past months, a few pages have been read each day, with some extracts shared on 'X'. During the past two years, Zwingli has figured quite a bit in my reading. It began with G.R. Potter's Zwingli (1976), followed by Bruce Gordon's Zwingli: God's Armed Prophet (2021). Along the way, I dipped into Gordon's The Swiss Reformation (2002) and the collection of essays edited by Gordon and Emidio Campi, Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger (2004). Should an Old High Churchman have such an interest in Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation? My interest is partly it is a result of the now well-established historical understanding of the influence of the Swiss Reformed theologies on Cranmer and on the Elizabethan Settlement. Ben Crosby on Draw Near With Faith has an excellent article on how recognis...