laudable Practice

In a 30th January sermon in 1660, just months before the Restoration, John King (Dean of Tuam) praised the Royal Martyr as "the British Josiah".  This (deliberately, of course) placed Charles in venerable company.  Not only had Edward VI been obviously regarded as a latter-day Josiah but Bancroft's famous 1588 sermon had proclaimed Elizabeth "as a most zealous Solomon, Jehoshaphat, and Josiah".  In other words, King placed Charles within the narrative of (in words from the 1662 Preface ) "the Reigns of several Princes of blessed memory since the Reformation". This understanding of the Royal Martyr as "the British Josiah" animated, in a variety of ways, much 30th January preaching in the Restoration Church.  It found expression as a means of interpreting the Laudian agenda.  Thus, for example, a 1670 sermon : Josiah was very zealous for the House of God, took great care for the Repairing and Beautifying of the Temple. So our Josiah was zeal...

When a UK newspaper recently reported a Prayer Book Society statement on the increased attendance which marked the renewed use of the Book of Common Prayer 1662 in a London parish church, some quarters of Anglican clerical Twitter (rather predictably) lamented that the use of 1662 was inherently reactionary.  My initial response was a mixture of frustration and amusement.  To judge the average Anglican congregation throughout these Islands attending 1662 (or variant) Early Communion or Evensong as reactionary culture warriors is, to say the least, odd.  Indeed, it comes rather close to bearing false witness.   Of course, it also suggests another difficulty.  For some Anglican clerics, having conservative views on the constitution and standing for the National Anthem is indeed reactionary.  Whatever would they have made of Clement Attlee ?  The suggestion that use of 1662 is reactionary also betrays a lack of theological imagination, a flat, insi...

To pray the Litany amidst the bleak pain and deep shame of Holocaust Memorial Day is to hear a profound challenge to Christian antisemitism, past and present. Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers ... The dark shadow of antisemitism has long blighted and disfigured the Church's life: from anti-Semitic comments of Chrysostom to the blood libel in medieval Christendom, from Luther's vile sermons against the Jews to the contemporary antisemitism found in both progressive and 'radtrad' theologies.  The Anglican tradition has not been immune to this toxic virus.  Robert Ingram's study of Thomas Secker - the mid-18th century Archbishop of Canterbury - notes how Secker sought to defend the 1753 Jew Bill, which provided for the naturalisation of Jews as British Subjects, against a coalition which included "many Anglican clergy".  Secker lamented "the clerical assault on the Jew Bill", referring to their "astonishing ...

Following on from yesterday's post on Mark Frank's sermon celebrating the Restoration as a Laudian conversion, a similar sermon was also delivered in St. Paul's in May 1660 by James Duport .  As Frank would do, he celebrated the miraculous nature of the Restoration: Remember, I beseech you, and consider how great things God hath done for you: it was Samuel's advice to Israel upon the coming in of their King. Consider, the better to stir you up to practice this duty of the Text, what a prevailing argument and engagement thereunto God hath laid upon you, by his late miraculous providences, and those wonderful changes and revolutions he hath wrought among you. What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me? now may England say, and now may London say ... Indeed, how shall we express our gratitude to God for his great and manifold mercies to this unworthy Nation! especially for this so remarkable, so extraordinary, so transcendent a mercy, the very top-st...

We may tell those who still contrive the ruin of the Church, the best and the best-reformed church in the Christian World ... that God would not so miraculously have snatched this Church as a brand out of the fire, would not have raised it from the grave, after he had suffered it to be buried so many years, by the boisterous hands of profane and sacrilegious persons, under its own rubbish, to expose it again to the same rapine, reproach and impiety. Thus did Clarendon, Charles II's chief minister 1660-67, describe the restoration of the Church of England. As readers of Paul Lay's excellent Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate (2020) will know, it was a close-run thing.  If the issue of Cromwell's succession had been better managed, there was a likelihood that the Protectorate would have continued, with Royalism militarily defeated and the populace reluctantly reconciled to the peace and order brought by the Cromwellian regime.  Contemporary rec...

Reading Theophilus Dorrington's A Familiar Guide to the Right and Profitable Receiving of the Lord's Supper (1695), I was particularly struck by the advice he gives to communicants at the conclusion of the service, after the blessing: Then rising from your Knees, kindly and courteously salute your fellow Communicants at the parting of the Congregation. It reflects the coherence of the Prayer Book rite, with the reconciliation effected by our participation in the Lord's Body and Blood expressed in the post-Communion Lord's Prayer, the "good will towards men" of the Gloria, and the blessing's unchanging "The peace of God".  In a much more significant and meaningful manner than is evident in the placing of the Peace in contemporary Eucharistic rites, this speaks of the consequences of our sharing in the Eucharist, as Rowan Williams has described: I've often preached - like other, I'm sure - on how, when we have come back to our places afte...

If High Churchmen could explain German Lutheranism's model of superintendency as an expression of episcopacy , what of the vexed issue of Eucharistic doctrine?  For Non-Juror (and Non-Juror aligned) critics of High Church defences of Lutheranism, Lutheran consubstantiation was little different than transubstantiation.  As Daniel L. Brunner has shown in his study of the pamphlet wars at the time of the Hanoverian succession, for Non-Jurors and their fellow-travellers, Lutheran Eucharistic doctrine contradicted the Sacramental teaching of the Church of England and certainly disallowed Anglicans and Lutherans receiving at each others altars.   Against this, High Churchmen and others routinely denied that consubstantiation was an insurmountable barrier.  To begin with, it was not mentioned or defined in the Augsburg Confession, the Eucharistic teaching of which - "Of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are dist...

In his Candles in the Dark: Faith, hope and love in a time of pandemic (2020), Rowan Williams suggests that the experience of observing the Eucharist being celebrated online recalls a practice that was common for many Christians over centuries: We look back with puzzlement at the days when - in both Western and Eastern Churches, well into the twentieth century - relatively few people actually took Communion regularly.  They went to church to gaze at the drama of God's work in redemption and to adore and give thanks. This often represented a distorted model of the Eucharist, one that went all too comfortably with a pattern of clerical domination and privilege.  Yet, to speak personally for a moment, I have found that the experience of concentrating on 'spiritual communion'; of quieting myself down to focus on the great gift of God in Jesus, absolutely present in this act, these things; of doing all this in the quiet of home, in a moment of physical stillness and silence - a...

Amidst the debates over Lutheranism which arose in the context of the accession of George I, it is notable that those High Churchmen who robustly asserted the compatibility of Lutheranism and Anglicanism - for example, William Dawes (Archbishop of York) and Theophilus Dorrington - did not address the issue of episcopacy.  Rather, however, than this being the result of embarrassment concerning German Lutheranism lacking episcopal order, it reflected a rather different established, settled Laudian view of German Lutheranism. Laud himself had pointed to the role of superintendents in German Lutheranism as retaining the substance of the episcopal order.  He challenged those in England and Scotland who rejected episcopacy on the grounds that it was unknown in the Reformed Churches overseas: unless these Men be so strait Laced, as not to admit the Churches of Sweden, and Denmark, and indeed, all, or most of the Lutherans, to be Reformed Churches. For in Sweden they retain both th...

The 1715 publication ' The Lutheran Liturgy ' was attributed to "a late Gentleman-Commoner of Magdalen College in Oxford", likely to have been Theophilus Dorrington.  As noted last week regarding other works of Dorrington, as a High Church Tory supporter of the Revolution and the Hanoverians, he participated in the debates surrounding the 1714 accession of the Lutheran George I.   The work emphasises the similarities - "how parallel it runs" - between the BCP and the Lutheran liturgy.  This enabled a contrast to be drawn between, on the one hand, the Church of England and the Lutheran churches, and on the other, those in England who dissented and rejected the authorized liturgy:  Although the great Apostle of the Gentiles hath taught that there is but One Christ, One Faith, and One Baptism, and so there ought to be One Religion; yet hath some People through Prejudice, Interest, or Ignorance separated themselves from the Church of God; and being so impudent ...

Cosin ended his 1653 Epiphany sermon by noting "there are more Sundays belonging to this Epiphany of Christ than one".  In a 1623 sermon at a marriage on the Second Sunday after Epiphany (the appointed Gospel being the miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee), he had expounded the meaning of "Epiphany time": You are to know, then, that this is Epiphany time. You see they are called the Sundays of the Epiphany; and Epiphany time is the time of Manifestation, the time when Christ was pleased to manifest Himself, and make His glory known to the world. According to which, the Church hath suited her office, and fitted us with a course of service, that might help to bring into our minds in order, the things themselves, as they were done here by Christ our Saviour while He was upon the earth. Thus there were three great and prime manifestations that He made of Himself.  The Church begins with them at Twelfth Day. The first, that He made to the Gentiles; and accordingly...

And on Thursday morning, January 7, my teenage daughter asked me about what had happened on Epiphany, January 6, in our nation’s capitol building, And even after nearly twenty years of being formed in a supposedly alternate polis, I told her that the insurrectionists had “desecrated” it. And I truly believe that. I reached deep down into my heart of hearts and discovered that the American in my heart of hearts ran just as deep as the Christian did. The words are those of an Episcopal priest , shaped and and influenced by the theology of Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas came to mind last week when I saw Episcopal priests on my Twitter timeline lament the use of sacral discourse in condemnation of the events of 6th January 2020.  'Desecration' was used by a number of commentators.  David Brooks , for example, said: it felt like a desecration to me. I mean, this is our holy of the holies. This is where America comes, usually in awe. The Capitol was described by others as 'sacred...

... his Altar, as the greatest place of Gods Residence upon earth. (I say the greatest, yea greater then the Pulpit. For there tis Hoc est Corpus meum , This is my Body. But in the Pulpit, tis at most, but; Hoc est Verbum meum, This is my Word. And a greater Reverence (no doubt) is due to the Body, then to the Word of our Lord. And so, in Relation, answerably to the Throne, where his Body is usually present; then to the Seate, whence His Word useth to be Proclaimed.) So said Archbishop Laud in 1637 .  I noticed these words being quoted on Twitter on Sunday past, the commemoration of Laud's martyrdom.  The implication was that Laud here was a precursor of advanced Anglo-Catholic views.  Is this the case? Firstly, we must note the context.  Laud is speaking against the charge of innovation, which he dismisses again and again in the speech as "pretended innovations".  He declares that he is upholding "the Practise and Rule of the Church of England since the ...

I thought also that it might be of use to us in England, to understand and know the Principles and Practices of the Lutheran Churches (which are the true Protestant Churches beyond the Seas) ... In 1703, Theophilus Dorrington -  one time Dissenting minister then ordained in the Church of England, a High Church (Juror, supporter of the Revolution settlement, Hanoverian) Tory - translated Lutheran theologian Samuel von Pufendorf's The Divine Feudal Law , originally written in 1695 to aid Lutheran-Reformed reconciliation in Germany.  A second edition of the translation was published in 1714.  This time Dorrington's objectives were made rather more explicit with a new title:  A View of the Principles of the Lutheran Churches; Shewing how far they Agree with the Church of England .  The words above are from Dorrington's preface to the work.  In the work itself, Pufendorf regards the Church of England as part of the Reformed tradition, while noting how the Church...