laudable Practice

The announcement that the Right Reverend Dr Bonnie Perry is to be the guest preacher at the forthcoming Changing Attitude Ireland annual Pride service, to be held in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, signifies a deeply concerning departure from the historic faith and established discipline of the Church of Ireland. So begins a statement from ' First Things ', a coalition of conservative evangelical and charismatic organisations in the Church of Ireland. It is, to say the least, a rather odd statement.   To begin with, as the statement notes, the service in question is annual.  What has caused it to be a matter of such controversy this year? Is it because the preacher is a bishop in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States? No. It is because the preacher has solemnised same-sex marriages? No. It is because the preacher is gay? No. We are told that the cause of the controversy is quite specific: Although the cathedral has hosted similar services in previous year...

There has been a significant revision of the historical understanding of Richard Hooker in recent decades.  The 19th century conception of Hooker as the architect of an 'Anglican via media' has been replaced by a much more historically compelling account of Hooker the Reformed theologian. This has led to some conservative evangelical Anglicans claiming Hooker for themselves, often invoking Nigel Atkinson's  Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason . While Atkinson provided a somewhat unsophisticated summary of more recent Hooker research, he did aid conservative evangelical Anglicans in apparently rediscovering Hooker. Missing, however, from this newfound conservative evangelical enthusiasm for Hooker the Reformed theologian is the context established by serious Hooker research. As Hooker scholar Torrance Kirby has brilliantly demonstrated, 'Reformed' was a deeply contested category in Hooker's Elizabethan Church of England. Likewise,...

There are also obvious reasons why a Christian should never attend a gay wedding. Many wedding liturgies, including that of the Book of Common Prayer, require the officiant to ask early in the service if anyone present knows any reason why the couple should not be joined together in matrimony. A Christian is at that point obliged to speak up ... Of course, that applies beyond the issue of gay marriage. A marriage involving somebody who has not divorced a previous spouse for biblical reasons involves that person entering into an adulterous relationship. No Christian should knowingly attend such a ceremony either. Thus did Carl Trueman recently declare in First Things . It is rather odd that a conservative Presbyterian should invoke the Book of Common Prayer, rejected by the Presbyterian tradition when its representatives embraced schism rather than conformity in 1662. This, however, might explain why Trueman badly misinterprets the robustly Anglican 1662 rite.   To begin w...

Every Minister ought to be well skill'd and studied in saying his Office, in the Rubricks, the Canons, the Articles, and the Homilies of the Church, that he may do his duty readily, discreetly, gravely - Jeremy Taylor, Rules and Advices to the Clergy of the Diocese of Down and Connor , 1661. Have you likewise a book of the Sermons, or Homilies ... and a book of the Constitutions or Canons Ecclesiastical? - John Cosin, Articles of Inquiry during his primary visitation of the Diocese of Durham, 1662. It is worthy of note that Restoration bishops, after "the late unhappy confusions", drew attention to the Canons as one of the mechanisms of restoring the common life and order of the ecclesia Anglicana and ecclesia Hibernia . The Canons of 1604  (in Ireland, the  Canons of 1634 ), rather than the revised Canons of 1641, were authorised by Parliament, wisely ensuring that settled canon law - untouched by the controversies associated with the Laudian overreach of 1641 - woul...