laudable Practice

Our least reading from Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull considered how Bull's 1694 Judicium Ecclesia Catholicae was a response to the use put by English non-Trinitarians of Episcopius' view that the Apostles' Creed did not require the faith of Nicaea. Nelson notes how Bull's work drew on a wider theological tradition to affirm that the Nicene faith was inherent to the Apostles' Creed: he hath given such an Account of the ancient Creeds, and more particularly, of the first and most ancient Creed of all, and the Explications thereof, which are found in Ireneus and Tertullian; as it will be very hard after him to add any further Light to that Matter. For all what the Elder Vossius, with so much Pains and Judgment, had collected up on this Subject, with what our most learned and pious Archbishop Usher had also written hereupon, after mature deliberation upon the whole, will be found applied with great Skill, and set in a very advantageous Light, for removing...

In many Church of Ireland parish churches, you will notice something about stained glass depictions of Saint Patrick. Saint Patrick, contrasting with much of his traditional iconography, is not wearing a mitre.  Nor is he wearing eucharistic vestments. His attire is simple, plain robes. He is identified as a bishop solely by the fact that he holds a pastoral staff. Many of these stained glass windows date from around 1932, marking the 1,500th anniversary of Saint Patrick's arrival in Ireland. It was a time of heightened tensions between the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. The triumphalist nature of the centenary celebrations of Catholic Emancipation in 1929 had led the Irish Times to note "too frequent suggestions" that the Church of Ireland represented "an alien creed, an alien culture and alien aspirations".  In late 1931 , the Roman Catholic primate, Cardinal Joseph MacRory, publicly declared that the Church of Ireland had not exi...

As Ussher continued to reflect on 'the priest's power to forgive sins', he looked towards the East. He pointed to two examples from the liturgies of the East to demonstrate that this power directly belongs only to God: Add hereunto the prayer of Damascen, which is still used in the Greek Church before the receiving of the Communion: "Lord Jesus Christ, our God, who alone hast power to forgive sins, in thy goodness and loving-kindness pass by all the offences of thy servant, whether done of knowledge or of ignorance, voluntary or involuntary, in deed or word, or thought; and that which is used after, in the Liturgy ascribed to St James, wherewith the priest shutteth up the whole service: "I beseech thee, Lord God, hear my prayer in the behalf of thy servants, and as a forgetter of injuries pass over all their offences. Forgive them all their excess, both voluntary and involuntary: deliver them from everlasting punishment. For thou art he who didst command us, sayin...

As this is the week in which Lent begins, laudable Practice will pause the readings from Nelson, Cranmer, and Lindsay until next week. This will allow for some hopefully appropriate seasonal reflections as we enter into the season of penitence and fasting. Today and tomorrow, there will be extracts from Ussher. Ussher has been on my mind recently as I have pondered the possibility of a revisionist reading of the Irish Articles of 1615 - that is, seeing them as something more than simply a 'Calvinist' statement (a simplistic term which Ussher would certainly not have regarded as praise). Ussher, in his own terms, was not a 'Calvinist'. Rather, he understood himself to be an orthodox catholic: the way which they call heresy is not new, but hath been trodden in long since by such as in their times were accounted good and catholic teachers in the Church. These words are taken from his Answers to a Jesuit (1622). In this work, Ussher addresses 'the Priest's power ...

Ussher may seem to be an odd source for a blog which stands in the Old High tradition. As laudable Practice has sought to previously demonstrate, however, there is good precedent for an Old High regard for Ussher. The Laudian Bramhall, after all, praised his predecessor in the See of Armagh as "an ornament to the Reformed Church". This year's Jeremy Taylor Week on the blog also explored how Taylor the Laudian and Ussher the Reformed Conformist shared theological commitments on the liturgy , episcopacy , the Royal Supremacy , the Lord's Supper , and the Reformed identity of the Church of England. There is a rich seam of sacramental teaching in Ussher's works, underpinning the view that the theological gap between Reformed Conformists and Laudians is too often overstated and exaggerated . This is no new claim. Henry Charles Groves , in his 1858 work refuting Tractarian interpretations, declared that Reformed Conformists such as Ussher had a eucharistic theology ...

As our readings from  In The Teaching of the Anglican Divines in the Time of King James I and King Charles I on the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1858) - by Henry Charles Groves, a clergyman of the Church of Ireland - begin to draw to a close, we turn today to a reference to the 9th century Frankish theologian Ratramnus (or Bertram). Groves notes that Keble and Pusey both appeal to Bertram's work,  De corpore et sanguine Domini , in defence of their own eucharistic teaching. For Groves, such invocation is very odd: Both he and Dr. Pusey appeal to the book of Bertram often. And yet, with their profound learning, I should have thought that they would rather have avoided a book which was placed in the Index librorum prohibitorum, which speaks so strongly against the Objective Presence, that some Roman authors, as Sixtus Senensis and Possevin, (Cosin, Hist. of Transub., p.131,) affirmed that it was written by the Zuinglian, Ecolampadius; a book, of the author of which the ...

There is no concept of "consecration" anywhere in the service at all. The only "moment" is reception—and the only point where the bread and wine signify the body and blood is at reception. If a point of "consecration" has to be sought - then it is at reception. This, of course, is the famous and influential judgement of Colin Buchanan in What Did Cranmer Think He Was Doing? It is, perhaps, no surprise that laudable Practice rather firmly rejects Buchanan's interpretation. Cranmer, after all, did have a theology of consecration, as set out quite clearly in his Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ (1550): Consecration is the separation of any thing from a profane and worldly use unto a spiritual and godly use. And therefore when usual and common water is taken from other uses, and put to the use of baptism, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, then it may rightly be c...

... the Church of England is the best Reformed Church in the world. Jeremy Taylor's declaration in his sermon at Bramhall's funeral would have won the vigorous agreement of Bramhall's predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh, Ussher. Something of this was indicated by  Richard Parr , a chaplain to Ussher and later biographer, describing how the Archbishop viewed the fate of the Church of England in the 1640s as "the greatest blow that had been ever given to the Reformed Churches". When Charles Richard Elrington - Regius Professor of Divinity, Trinity College Dublin - edited the works of Ussher in the mid-19th century, his introduction used the same phrase to describe Ussher's view of the Churches of England and Ireland: "the best reformed in the world". For Taylor, no less than for Ussher, the Churches of England and Ireland were Reformed . Both Taylor the Laudian and Ussher the Reformed Conformist were sons of the Reformation. In controversy with Count...

... whosoever shall hereafter maintain, that the Kings-Majesty hath not the same authority in causes Ecclesiastical, that the godly Kings had amongst the Jews, and Christian Emperors in the Primitive Church, or impeach in any part his Regal supremacy in the said causes restored to the Crown, and by the laws of this Realm therein established, let him be excommunicated, and not restored but only by the Archbishop of the Province, after his repentance, and publick revocation of his error. So declared the Canons adopted by the Convocation of the Church of Ireland in 1634. It was Ussher, as Archbishop of Armagh, who had insisted that the Irish Church should have its own Canons, rather than - as the Laudian Bramhall had desired - merely adopt those of the Church of England. What was never in question, however, was that the Irish Canons would robustly affirm, like the English Canons of 1604 , the Royal Supremacy.  Ussher's commitment to the Royal Supremacy was already evident through his...

For so St Irenaeus who was one of the most Ancient Fathers of the Church, and might easily make good his affirmative: We can (says he) reckon the men who by the Apostles were appointed Bishops in the Churches, to be their Successors unto Us; leaving to them the same power and authority which they had. Thus St. Polycarp was by the Apostles made Bp. of Smyrna; St. Clement Bp. of Rome by St. Peter, and divers others by the Apostles, saith Tertullian, saying also that the Asian Bps. were consecrated by St. John; and to be short, that Bps. are the Successours of the Apostles in the Stewardship and Rule of the Church, is expresly taught by St. Cyprian, and St. Hieron, St. Ambrose, and St. Austin ... and the diadoch, or succession of Bps. from the Apostles hands in all the Churches Apostolical was as certainly known as in our Chronicles we find the succession of our English King. So Jeremy Taylor declared in his sermon at the consecration of two archbishops and ten bishops (including himself...