laudable Practice

The sixth breach of the Institution made by kneeling, is the taking away of the distribution that ought to be amongst the Communicants. When Christ sayd, Take yee, eate yee, he insinuates, that they should take and diuide amongst themselues. So said an opponent of the Articles of Perth , which had introduced kneeling to receive the Sacrament in the Church of Scotland: kneeling to receive prevented seated communicants from breaking the Bread among themselves. The response of 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 , is significant because he invoked, in support of kneeling to receive, the continental Reformed tradition's emphasis on the Fraction in the Lord's Supper. In Reformed-Lutheran disputes of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the Fraction had become a distinctive Reformed act, the characteristic sign of a Reformed eucharistic understanding. As...

Amongst the points of debate between Gardiner and Cranmer, in Answer to Gardiner (1551), was the nature of the sacraments of the Old Covenant: were they a sign of the people of Israel partaking of Christ? While Gardiner's key point is that the sacraments of the Old Covenant were not a means of partaking of Christ, his position is less than clearly stated as he is forced to admit that "in a sense" that those of the Old Covenant did so partake of Christ: Their sacraments were figures of the things, but ours contain the very things. And therefore albeit in a sense to the learned men, it may be verified, that the fathers did eat the body of Christ and drink his blood, yet there is no such form of words in Scripture, and it is more agreeable to the simplicity of Scripture to say, the fathers before Christ's nativity did not eat the body and blood of Christ, which body and blood Christ himself truly took of the body of the Virgin Mary.  A chief difficulty for Gardiner, of ...

After considering Bull's  Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) in the context of the heated Trinitarian debates experienced by the Church of England in the closing years of the 17th and opening decade of the 18th centuries, Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull  turned to what might be thought a more prosaic subject, that of Bull being appointed to another parish. Nelson's account of this process sets before us something of a Tory idyll. "It was in the Year 1685, when Mr. Bull was presented to the Rectory of Avening in Gloucestershire":  both the year and the geography point to the Tory idyll. 1685 was the year of the accession of James II. With the support of both the Church of England and the Tories - an alliance of parson and squire, shaped by the bitter memories of the 1640s - James had come to the throne, overcoming the attempts of Whigs to prevent the accession of a Roman Catholic. Bull's Toryism has, of course, previously been recognised by Nelson. 1685 was ...

Has been received into the Catholic Church. Please pray for me. This was recently posted on 'X' by a high profile Anglican who has become a Roman Catholic. It was not, from what I can gather, an unsurprising development. I had assumed that this was the individual's direction of travel for some time. It is, of course, always a matter of some sadness when an individual leaves the ecclesial tradition and communion you cherish for another tradition and communion. These things, however, happen: it is (and has been for centuries) part of ecclesiastical life. I serve in a parish which includes those who are former Methodists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics. They bring to Anglicanism gifts and strengths from their previous traditions, within a context of gratitude for the Anglican tradition. What they have not brought to Anglicanism is bitterness, resentment, or anger. And for that I am deeply thankful. The words of Burke capture the mindset of those Christians who, embracing ...

On Fridays throughout Lent, laudable Practice will be posting extracts from Jeremy Taylor's The Worthy Communicant; or, A discourse of the nature, effects, and blessings consequent to the worthy receiving of the Lord's Supper and of all the duties required in order to a worthy preparation (1667). Taylor's work is, to say the least, difficult to place within current Anglican practice, shaped by the Parish Communion Movement, with the expectation that weekly reception will be the norm. Added to this, not only is the penitential aspect of contemporary eucharistic liturgies much inferior to that in Prayer Book tradition, any sense of an expectation of preparation to partake of the Sacrament is almost entirely absent from Anglican piety (as in most other liturgical and sacramental traditions).  This is what Michael Ramsey warned Anglicans about in his 1956 essay ' The Parish Communion ', noting that that were "weaknesses which haunt the wide and rapid growth of t...

At the Eucharist of Ash Wednesday, 18.2.26 Matthew 6.16 “And whenever you fast, do not look somber, like the hypocrites, for they mark their faces to show others that they are fasting.” [1] On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, it is difficult not to recognise that this day begins a season of fasting. We heard it in the introduction to our liturgy: “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Lord to observe a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial …” [2] We heard it in the first reading from the prophet Joel: “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting …” [3] And we will hear it again in our final hymn, referring to our Lord’s time in the wilderness: “Forty days and forty nights, thou was fasting in the wild …” [4] Lent is a time for fasting. Depending on our age, health, and circumstances, this may mean abstaining from one of the day’s meals throughout Lent; or it may mean simplifying our diet in Lent; or...