laudable Practice

Having warned how the death of Bishop Forbes was a moment of foreboding for the Church and Kingdom of Scotland, Alexander Scrogie, one of the Aberdeen Doctors, in his sermon marking Forbes' funeral, turned to happier times - Forbes' 1618 appointment as Bishop of Aberdeen. Scrogie notes that this episcopal appointment was not sought by Forbes: Thereafter, his calling to the Episcopall dignitie, was rare, and examplarie, without his knowledge, or seeking, directlie, or indirectlie, sine ambitu and vsurpation, hunting after places and preferment, as manie doe, thorow ambition, and loue of gayne and glorie, not awayting the LORD'S calling. What is most striking about this comment is the use of the term 'episcopal dignity' to refer to the office of bishop. To those in the Church of Scotland in 1635 opposed to episcopal order and ideologically committed to government by presbytery, the term would have been regarded as encapsulating the ministerial imparity and hierarchy ...

In this series reflecting on the Aberdeen Doctors - the group of eirenic thinkers in the Church of Scotland centred around Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen 1618-35 - we have considered the sermon given at Forbes' funeral by one of their number, Robert Baron. Today we turn to a  further sermon marking the funeral of Forbes , given by another of the Aberdeen Doctors, Alexander Scrogie, minister in the Cathedral Church in the city. Scrogie opened his sermon with a prophetic declaration, that Forbes' death had fatally weakened the Church and State of Scotland: This is a praecursorie judgement and punishment. So God maketh a way for his judgementes to come vpon a Church, or kingdome, when insensiblie and graduallie hee eateth out the heart and strength of a State; and so, by degrees, weakeneth, and praepareth it for a fatall blow; that so, without resistance, hee may ruine it; as pyking out, and taking away, nowe a prudent and experienced Counsellour, and then another out of the w...

'Inclusive Orthodox' is a term I have never warmed to. Nor is it a term I have ever used to describe myself. Today's post is an attempt to explain why this is so in five reasons. Firstly, the term became popular within a TEC constituency in the early 2000s and came to be also found in other parts of the Protestant Mainline in the United States. This locates its origins in the cultural and ecclesial concerns of the Mainline in the early 21st century United States. It is, then, a response to a very specific cultural and ecclesial context. Its application to other, quite different, cultural and ecclesial contexts is, at the very least, a matter for some debate. Seeking to apply the term on this side of the Atlantic strikes me as unconvincing as British political parties following the trends of US politics: this tends to be embarrassingly awkward at best and usually out of step with the actual concerns and experience of British society. Put bluntly, Inclusive Orthodoxy is a mic...

Peace is so great a blessing, and disputations and questions in religion are so little friends to peace, that I have thought no man's time can be better spent than in propositions and promotions of peace, and consequently in finding expedients, and putting periods to all contentious learning ... So said Jeremy Taylor in a Preface to his famous sermon Via Intelligentia , preached to Trinity College Dublin in 1661. Those reading Taylor's words would have immediately understood that he was referring to the past three decades in the Three Kingdoms. The heated and embittered theological culture wars of the 1630s had given way in the 1640s and 50s to violent and bloody wars of religion, the constitution overthrown, the established church torn down, and ecclesiastical disorder and confusion reigning in the Three Kingdoms. Looking back over those bitter, bloody, chaotic decades, Taylor's listeners and readers knew only too well that "disputations and questions in religion are ...

It is not at all original to read Hooker's exposition of the Sacraments in Book V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity alongside the Consensus Tigurinus (the Consensus of Zurich), the 1549 agreement between the Churches of Zurich and Geneva on the Sacraments. Torrance Kirby , for example, has said that Hooker's teaching on the Sacraments as 'moral instruments' is "demonstrably in agreement with the Consensus Tigurinus". Similarly, Diarmaid MacCulloch regards Hooker's eucharistic views as being at home in "Bullinger's Zurich".  The purpose of this post, therefore, is not to offer any original commentary but to consider how the Consensus Tigurinus is significantly reflected in Hooker. The focus of this post is V.57.3-5 of the Laws . We begin, however, with a passage from the Laws just prior to V.57, as Hooker considers "The union or mutuall participation which is betweene Christ and the Church of Christ in this present worlde". In...

Of all the descriptions I have read of Cranmer, it is Diarmaid MacCulloch's, in his essay ' Tolerant Cranmer? ', which I find most attractive: "a cautious, well-read humanist". Elsewhere, discussing the biographers of Cranmer, MacCulloch suggests that it is in Cranmer that we see something of what Anglicanism should be: which forces the individual to undertake a good deal of hard thinking in order to make sense of the world around, rather than reaching for some simple model in a book. Not mentioned by MacCulloch amongst Cranmer's biographers, but, I think, an account which points in this direction, evoking the spirit of  "a cautious, well-read humanist", is William Gilpin's 1784  The life of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury . Gilpin was a representative of Georgian England's enlightened clergy and in Cranmer he sees an Erasmian humanist who embodied "wisdom, prudence, learning, moderation" - a precursor, then, of 18th centur...

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 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...

As we approach the anniversary of the death of surely the most influential Anglican of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, I share a wonderful extract from his English Literature in The Sixteenth Century , discussing Richard Hooker. While Lewis prefaces this extract with a reminder that "Hooker had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism", what would become Anglicanism, at its best, embodies this Hookerian ethos, in which an exhausting (and inherently deceptive) spiritual search for 'the true Church' is, thankfully, not ordinarily an Anglican concern. As Hooker declared, such searching is the pursuit of "they [who] define not the Church by that which the Church essentiallie is, but by that wherein they imagin their own more perfect than the rest are" ( LEP V.68.6).  In this, Lewis was truly Hookerian, his writings demonstrating a catholic spirit free of of such a stultifying, narrow spirit. If there is a 'patron saint' of the ordinary Anglican - con...

Wherefore, to resume that mother-sentence, whereof I little thought that so much trouble would have grown, "I doubt not but God was merciful to save thousands of our fathers living in popish superstitions, inasmuch as they sinned ignorantly": alas, what bloody matter is there contained in this sentence that it should be an occasion of so many hard censures! Did I say that "thousands of our fathers might be saved"? I have showed which  way it cannot be denied. Did I say, "I doubt it not but they were saved"? I see no impiety in  this persuasion ... On this commemoration of Richard Hooker, we turn to words from his A Learned Discourse on Justification   (1585),   responding to those who attacked him for affirming that salvation was to be found within the pre-Reformation Roman Church. We might begin by noting Hooker's insistence regarding the salvation of "our fathers", an insistence that surely echoed the Christian instincts of the average pari...

Gardiner insisted that John 6 referred to the Eucharist: this discourse "set forth the doctrine of the mystery of the eating of Christ's flesh and drinking his blood in the sacrament, which must needs be understanded of a corporal eating". Cranmer, in his Answer to Gardiner (1551), explicitly denied that Our Lord's words, " Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you", are an account of the Supper: The spiritual eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood by faith, by digesting his death in our minds, as our only price, ransom, and redemption from eternal damnation, is the cause wherefore Christ said, that if we eat not his flesh, and drink not his blood, we have not life in us: and if we eat his flesh, and drink his blood, we have everlasting life. And if Christ had never ordained the sacrament, yet should we have eaten his flesh and drunken his blood, and have had thereby everlasting life, as all the faithful d...