laudable Practice

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...

The Sign of the Cross is the most universally "Catholic coded" thing in the world. The comment appeared on X in the midst of a debate on Christmas Day about the ecclesiastical identity of the McCallister family in 'Home Alone'. (Yes, you read that correctly.) This particular comment was regarding Kevin crossing himself while saying Grace before a meal. This matter, of course, is not entirely straightforward. Kevin, as some contributors pointed out, crosses himself in the Orthodox fashion. A previous comment achieved 'community note' status when, after describing Kevin walking into a church on Christmas Eve as "one of my earliest encounters with Catholicism in film", it was pointed out that the church in question was actually Episcopalian - albeit with some clearly Roman Catholic statues added. To return to Kevin crossing himself, various contributors to the debate also pointed out that many Lutherans and Anglicans/Episcopalians also made the sign of ...

In our last reading , prior to Advent, from the 1621 account of the 1618 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth , by David Lindsay, Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38), we considered how Lindsay's critique of the rejection of festival days by the opponents of the Articles of Perth stood well within the mainstream of the Continental Reformed tradition. We resume the readings from Lindsay's work as he refutes those who, rejecting the Articles of Perth, appear to make the provisions of the 1560 Book of Discipline (rejecting festival days, requiring communicants to sit for reception etc.) a necessary order: Yee are not able to produce any warrant for the vniforme iudgement of the Church, nor Canon of Assembly, nor act of Parliament, nor confession of faith, nor publike protestation, which either condemnes the points concluded at Perth, as vnlawfull to bee vsed in the worship of God; or establisheth the contrary as things necessary, that ca...

Resuming weekly readings from Cranmer's Answer to Gardiner (1551), we turn to Gardiner challenging Cranmer's account of our true feeding on Christ. This account, insists Gardiner, falls far short of catholic teaching: But the catholic teaching, by the Scriptures, goeth further, confessing Christ to feed such as be regenerate in him, not only by his body and blood, but also with his body and blood delivered in this sacrament by him indeed to us, which the faithful, by his institution and commandment, receive with their faith and with their mouth also, and with those special dainties be fed specially at Christ's table. Before proceeding to Cranmer's response, we might note how Gardiner uses the phrase "at Christ's table", suggesting that the use of 'table' with reference to the altar was not necessarily an inherently Reformed usage. In terms of Cranmer's response, he again declares that he does not disagree with Gardiner's statement that Ch...

We left Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull before Advent , considering how Bull's chief concern in Defensio Fidei Nicaenae  (1685) was to refute Socinian and some advanced Remonstrant critiques of Nicaea. Having pointed to Bull's defence of Nicaea's understanding of the Son's pre-existence, divine substantiality, and eternity, we now turn to another but much more controversial "pillar" of Nicene teaching for Bull - the Son's subordination to the Father. Nelson quotes a lengthy extract from Bull, contending that the pre-Nicene and Nicene Fathers were agreed on the Son's subordination: For they all with one consent have taught, that the divine Nature and Perfections do agree to the Father and Son, not Collaterally or Co-ordinately, but Subordinately: that is, That the Son hath indeed the same divine Nature in common with the Father, but hath it communicated from the Father, so as the Father alone hath that divine Nature from himself, or from no o...