laudable Practice

On this 30th January, we turn to a 1660 sermon delivered on the anniversary of the day - as its title states - "on which that Sacred Martyr, King Charles the First was murdered". The preacher was John King, who, as Dean of Tuam (the office to which he was appointed in 1638), ministered to and served the interests of King Charles II in exile. (He is found in Bosher's 'A List of Clergy in Exile'.) From January 1660, it was increasingly evident that opinion in the political nation was moving in the direction of the restoration of the monarchy. That said (as Henry Reece has superbly explored in his The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic ), restoration was by no means a foregone conclusion during the days of January 1660. The ending of King's sermon certainly speaks of uncertainty, albeit with a recognition that, unlike even as late as 1659, restoration was now a realistic possibility: The Lord in mercy look upon us, and wipe away these tears from our eyes, ...

Ye shall pray for Christ’s holy Catholick Church; that is, for the whole Congregation of Christian People dispersed throughout the whole World, and especially for the Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland. So began the bidding prayer required to be said, according to the 1604 Canons of the Church of England , by preachers before "all Sermons, Lectures, and Homilies" (Canon LV). It sets before us the Jacobean ecclesiastical vision of the national Churches of the Three Kingdoms, with "the King’s Power within His Realms of England, Scotland and Ireland, and all other his Dominions and Countries ... the highest Power under God" (Canon I, on the King's Supremacy).  Crucial to this vision was that the Church of Scotland did not stand apart from the Churches of England and Ireland. This did not mean that diversity was unacceptable. The Church of Ireland, after all, had the 1615 Articles of Religion, different to the English Articles. The Church of Scotland also had...

In the  previous post  in this series, we have seen how Gardiner enjoyed invoking the Holy Communion in BCP 1549 against Cranmer. We now come to another example of this: In the  Book of Common Prayer, now at this time set forth in this realm, it is ordered to teach the people, that in each part of the bread consecrate, broken, is the whole body of our Saviour Christ, which is agreeable to the catholic doctrine. Gardiner is here referring to the rubric at the conclusion of the 1549 Holy Communion, explaining why communicants received a broken rather than unbroken wafer: For advoyding of all matters and occasyon of dyscencyon, it is mete that the breade prepared for the Communion, bee made, through all thys realme, after one sort and fashion: that is to say, unleavened, and rounde, as it was afore, but without all maner of printe, and somethyng more larger and thicker than it was, so that it may be aptly devided in divers pieces: and every one shall be devided in two piec...

In the account provided by Nelson in his 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull , of how Bull's Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) defended "the old Catholick doctrine" of divine monarchy and the Son's subordination - according to Nicene faith - against the assertion of "the Calvinistical School" that the Son is autotheos , we saw last week how Bull's "generous Liberty of Mind" allowed him to approvingly quote Remonstrant thinkers with whom he otherwise disagreed on Trinitarian doctrine. The same "generous Liberty of Mind" Nelson also sees in Bull's approach to Calvin. Bull's rejection of Calvin was robust, regarding the doctrine of autotheos as undermining the fundamentals of Trinitarian teaching. This, however, does not at all result in an outright rejection of Calvin: While I am telling these Things, I have an Horror upon me; and therefore I most seriously exhort the pious and studious Youth, that they take heed of that Spirit from wh...

At the Parish Eucharist on the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, 25.1.26 Matthew 4:13 “He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the lake.” [1] Some time in the late fourth or early fifth century AD, a large Christian church was built in Capernaum, by the Sea of Galilee, in the shape of an octagon. It was built around and centred upon an earlier 1st century AD building, a quite modest house.  Why was this grand church built around a 1st century AD house in Capernaum? The house in question was identified as the home of Saint Peter. Those who built the church in the 4th or 5th century knew what archeologists have recently confirmed: the home had been a place of Christian worship from the earliest years of Christianity. Archeologists have discovered that the house had been renovated to become a place of Christian worship.  Pilgrims had been visiting it long before the 4th or 5th century church was built around it. The walls of that 1st century dwelling carried inscription...

I have much more respect for those poor readers [i.e. non-preaching clergy], whom he mentioneth every where with contempt. I hope they may do, and many of them do, God good and acceptable service in His Church, and co-operate to the salvation of many Christian souls, by reading the Holy Scriptures, and the Liturgy and Homilies of the Church, and administering the Holy Sacraments. And I have heard wise men acknowledge, that if it had not been for these very readers, in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign, when preaching was very rare, England had hardly been preserved, as it was, both from Popery and from atheism. Their very reading is a kind of preaching; Acts xv. 21- "Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day." And their reading of Homilies doth yet approach nearer to formal preaching. Or if it come short of preaching in point of efficacy, it hath the advantage of preaching in point of security. The pri...

... now seeing all memory of bypast superstition is past, in reverence of God, and in due regard of so divine a mystery, and in remembrance of so mystical a union as we are made partakers of, the assembly thinketh good, that the blessed Sacrament be celebrated hereafter, meekly and reverently upon their knees - Articles of Perth , Article I. In his 1621 account of the 1618 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth , David Lindsay, Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38), building on his previous exposition of the Scottish formularies on ceremonies having "the nature of things indifferent", applied this understanding to the view of those critics of the Articles of Perth, who insisted on the need to sit in order to receive the holy Sacrament: And that he who sware, That he did thinke that no policie, and order in ceremonies can be appointed for all ages, times, and places, but that the same may, and ought to be changed, when necessitie requir...

In his Answer to Gardiner (1551), Cranmer had to address a point that Gardiner clearly delighted in emphasising - that Cranmer's developing eucharistic theology stood apart from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer and the Catechism Cranmer himself had published in 1548: Truth it is, as St. Augustine saith, we receive in the sacrament the body of Christ with our mouth, and such speech other use, as a book set forth in the Archbishop of Canterbury's name, called a Catechism, willeth children to be taught, that they receive with their bodily mouth the body and blood of Christ; which I allege, because it shall appear it is a teaching set forth among us of late, as hath been also and is by the book of Common Prayer, being the most true catholic doctrine of the substance of the sacrament, in that it is there so catholicly spoken of, which book this author doth after specially allow, howsoever all the sum of his teaching doth improve [i.e. change] it in that point. So much is he contrary ...

Last week we saw, from Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull , how Bull's Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) asserted a subordination of the Son on the basis on Nicene confession that He is begotten of the Father, "God of God", the Father thus being "the Fountain, Original and Principle of the Divinity". This view of the divine monarchy and the Son's subordination was, of course, controversial, provoking sustained critiques of Bull, despite (as previously noted) divines such as Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor sharing this understanding. Nelson himself has no hesitation whatsoever in affirming Bull's position, placing it in a wider context of Lutheran and Roman Catholic divines who likewise understood the Nicene Confession, and identifying its opponents as "the Calvinistical School": he hath learnedly and solidly confuted the unreasonable and uncatholick Notion of the Moderns, which maketh the Son a self-dependent Principle of Divinity (and by...

Peter Lake's On Laudianism: Piety, Polemic and Politics During the Personal Rule of Charles I (2023) has been sitting on my desk for some months. I began reading it on 2nd January and am now one-third of the way through the book. As I had realized from reviews I had previously read, I am in fundamental disagreement with his understanding of Laudianism. Over the next few weeks, there will be a series of posts as I make my way through the book, explaining my disagreements. Let me begin, however, by stating some agreements. Lake states, "Laudianism was one of a number of ways of being protestant, just one of the modes of reformation available in and to the English post-reformation church" (p.19f). As Laud himself declared in his conference with Fisher, "And the Church of England is Protestant too". Those contemporary critics who accused Laudianism of rejecting the Reformation, and those historians who repeat this claim, entirely miss a fundamental aspect of Laudia...