laudable Practice

In his Lord Liverpool: A Political Life (2018), William Anthony Hay notes that by 1825 "Tory opinion, both elite and popular, had moved from an earlier neutral or even sympathetic view of Catholicism to seeing a resurgent post-Napoleonic Church as a threat to Britain's Protestant constitution". This was the context in which debates surrounding a Roman Catholic Relief Act - enabling Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament without taking an oath denying transubstantiation - took place. It was also the background to Thomas Burgess, Bishop of Salisbury, in his August 1826 primary visitation charge to his clergy in Salisbury Cathedral, addressing the matter. He began in an innocuous, fashion, referring to how Canon One of the Canons of 1604 required clergy to teach the Royal Supremacy: One of these subjects respects the very first Canon of our Church, by which you are required, four times every year at the least, in your Sermons and Lectures, to maintain the King's Supremac...

Something of a tradition has emerged on Laudable Practice of marking the early May Bank Holiday with a reflection related to Georgian church interiors. While this holiday has other connotations, I enjoy it as quiet celebration of Spring, before the louder, garish days of Summer arrive. There is something about late Spring - its gentle light, the modest warmth after Winter, the fresh greenery of these days - which, I think, is reflected in the interior of Georgian churches. This May Day, I am prompted to address the 'New Georgians' - yes, in the words of the well-known meme, 'There are dozens of us. Dozens!'. I have previously suggested that those of us who might be called New Georgians seek "to promote an appreciation of 18th century Anglicanism, Georgian churches, and the ordinary, stolid piety that characterised the Georgian Church of England". Actually, it might be that there are a few more than 'dozens of us'. Something I enjoy posting on 'X...

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...

In a 1773 speech , Edmund Burke responded to a petition, laid before the House of Commons, from a Methodist congregation, opposing a Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters, perhaps on the grounds that many Dissenting congregations had become heterodox. The petition claimed that the defence of the Church of England (from which Methodism had not yet legally separated) was incompatible with toleration for such Dissenting congregations.  Burke's response, rejecting and refuting the assumptions of the petition, offered not only a defence of toleration ("I would have toleration a part of establishment, as a principle favorable to Christianity, and as a part of Christianity") but also an account of the principled comprehension of 18th century Anglicanism, defined by the generous orthodoxy of the Articles ("the security of her own doctrines"), as a confident, robust, and meaningful alternative to sectarianism: Sir, the Church of England, if only defended by this m...

From a 1773 speech by Burke in the House of Commons, in which he points to the gracious and generous latitude in the 18th century Church of England regarding the Articles of Religion, with particular reference to Article 17.  There are those of the Dissenters who think more rigidly of the doctrine of the Articles relative to Predestination than others do. They sign the Article relative to it ex animo, and literally. Others allow a latitude of construction. These two parties are in the Church, as well as among the Dissenters; yet in the Church we live quietly under the same roof. I do not see why, as long as Providence gives us no further light into this great mystery, we should not leave things as the Divine Wisdom has left them. We see here a Burkean wisdom for Anglicanism; a gracious, wise, rational latitude, after Burnet , regarding the Articles of Religion (clerical subscription to which, we must recall, was robustly defended by Burke); a recognition that probing beyond that w...

The very finest words in the Church of Ireland's modest Prayer Book revision of 1878 are to be found in the closing paragraph of the Preface : And now, if some shall complain that these changes are not enough, and that we should have taken this opportunity of making this Book as perfect in all respects as they think it might be made, or if others shall say that these changes have been unnecessary or excessive, and that what was already excellent has been impaired by doing that which, in their opinion, might well have been left undone, let them, on the one side and the other, consider that men's judgements of perfection are very various, and that what is imperfect, with peace, is often better than what is otherwise more excellent, without it. I first encountered these words as a precocious teenager, sitting in the parish church before Sunday Morning Prayer, and browsing through the Prayer Book, bought as a Confirmation present and carried with me each Sunday, as was then normal ...

The Bishop of Chichester preached before the King, and made a great flattering sermon, which I did not like that Clergy should meddle with matters of state. So Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary on 8th July 1660. The comment stands as representative of the wisdom of Anglican laity over centuries regarding a particular type of 'political sermon'. While a loyal servant of the King and committed to the re-established Church of England, Pepys was no clericalist. A clergyman who "discoursed much" from the pulpit against marital relations during Lent was, in the words of Pepys, "the most comical man that ever I heard in my life" (7th March 1662). A "ridiculous, affected sermon ... made me angry, and some gentlemen that sat next to me" (14th June 1668). A sermon "full of words against the Nonconformists", preached at Whitsuntide, was not "proper for the day at all" (15th June 1663). Pepys here reflected wider sentiment amongst Anglica...

A recent interview with thoughtful post-liberal thinker Adrian Pabst - published on the Together for the Common Good site - provides an interesting example of the limitations and contradictions of postliberal thought.  The interview is significantly entitled ' How Christian is Postliberalism? '.  This should alert us to the importance of theological and ecclesial consideration of postliberalism because it is indeed being presented as a renewal of a Christian tradition of political thought. What is perhaps most striking about the interview is Pabst's admission that all is not well within postliberalism.  His insistence that "the post-liberal alternative is emphatically not authoritarian populism" and the reference to "some self-styled post-liberals" immediately alert us to this.  He then distances himself from those postliberals in the United Kingdom and the United States who have explicitly presented the governments of Poland and Hungary as expressions...

The very reason the Church of England has survived and flourished over centuries is because ministry has evolved. The Anglican stability that people rightly cherish - as do we - is the result of our willingness to change. So said the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in this week's Spectator .  And they are, of course, correct.  The very idea of 'Reformation', after all, is dependent upon a recognition that the absence of change can mean the Church failing to be faithful.  As the messages to the seven churches in the Revelation to John indicate, an openness to change is part of what it means to be attentive to God's purposes: "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches".   It was, however, what the Archbishops go on to state in defence of this point that particularly caught my attention: As the theologian Hans Küng once observed: ‘To stay the same when everything else around you changes is not to stay the same.’ We might wond...