laudable Practice

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...

At the heart of the preparation for the Sacrament urged by Taylor in The Worthy Communicant is the recognition that the Sacrament itself is prayer - and that, therefore, faithful prayer in daily life is necessary if we are to faithfully partake of the Lord's Supper: The holy sacrament is, in its nature and design, a solemn prayer, and the imitation of the intercession, which our glorious High Priest continually makes for us in heaven; and as it is our ministry, and contains our duty, it is nothing else but the solemnity and great economy of prayer, for the whole, and for every member, and for all and every particular necessity of the church; and all the whole conjugation of offices and union of hearts, and conjunction of ministers, is nothing but the advantages, and solemnity, and sanctification of prayer; and, therefore, in order to do this work in solemnity as we ought, it were very fit that we examine ourselves, how we do it in ordinary and daily offices. In other words, if th...

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 ...