laudable Practice

It is ordered, that the same Psalms shall be read the day of the said months [i.e. those months with thirty-one days] which were read the day before - The Order How the Psalter is Appointed to be Read, 1662. Of all the disciplines and practices of the classical Prayer Book tradition, I find the most spiritually and emotionally significant to be the monthly reading of the Psalter.  Contemporary Anglican daily office lectionaries - often either reading the Psalter a mere four times a year, or replacing its ordered, monthly reading with thematic Psalms - losing the rich gift of, month by month, having our prayer shaped and sustained by the Psalms of Israel, the Psalms of Jesus Christ, the Psalms of the Church. As the years go by, the rhythms of the monthly reading of the Psalter become part of our prayer at Mattins and Evensong. There is the fact that each month begins with the words of Psalm 1, itself offering an description of the richness of the Psalter: And he shall be like a tre...

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders.  With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter.  The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition).  Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical).  Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...

Returning to William Bulman's idea of Anglican Enlightenment, words from a 1789 sermon by Horsley.  This is a good example of the High Church tradition rejecting obscurantism, affirming the good of scientific inquiry, and celebrating a Thomist and Hookerian understanding of the gift of Reason.  It is also a reminder, as Bulman insists, that Enlightenment discourse was not the preserve of Latitudinarians but was also embraced by the High Church tradition (and, indeed, throughout the 18th century, not ceasing, as Bulman suggests, early in the century), offering a conservative reading of the Enlightenment.  In this case, Horsley points to "the light which philosophy and revelation may be brought to throw upon each other".  The Age of Reason, then, coheres with and does not undermine the Church's proclamation: Nothing hath been more detrimental to the dearest interests of man - to his present and his future interests, – to his present interests, by obstructing the progr...

It is perhaps not without significance that the term 'postliberal', now so common in political theory and commentary, originated in theology.  Amidst much contemporary debate over the meaning of postliberalism in the political sphere, we should then return to those original theological sources in order to discern the term's meaning.  In the Foreword to The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984) George Lindbeck counselled: all the standard theological approaches are unhelpful.  The difficulties cannot be solved by, for example, abandoning modern developments and returning to some form of preliberal orthodoxy . Similarly in the Foreward to the German edition , Lindbeck observed the opposition "on the right" to the book's thesis: preliberalism seems safer than postliberalism . Such concerns have been reflected in influential statements of political postliberalism.  In Red Tory (2010), Phillip Blond explicitly rejected anti-liberal...

Part of the purpose of laudable Practice is to act in a small way as a means of ressourcement for the 18th century High Church tradition, drawing attention to the theological and spiritual richness of a tradition routinely overlooked or dismissed within Anglicanism.  Extracts of works from a range of figures have therefore been shared on this blog: Waterland, Secker, Van Mildert, Mant, those from the Hackney Phalanx.  Now we turn to Samuel Horsley (b.1733, consecrated to the episcopate 1788, d.1806).  F.C. Mather's excellent study of Horsely, High Church Prophet: Samuel Horsley and the Caroline Tradition in the Later Georgian Church  (1992), demonstrated how Horsley embodied the vitality of the High Church tradition in the later 18th century. Here in a sermon on I John 5:6 (Sermon IX in Volume One of his sermons), Horsley echoes Augustine's reading of the blood and water pouring forth from the Crucified Lord's pierced side as the fount of the Sacraments.  Th...

Amongst the significant differences between the classical forms of the Litany in traditional Anglican liturgies and contemporary forms of the Litany is how the Church is prayed for in the former.  In the classical form, the Church is prayed for amidst the other institutions which shape our common life.  Thus, for example, in the Irish BCP 1926 (using the variants for use in Northern Ireland), petitions for the Church are interspersed with petitions for the Crown, the Royal Family, Ministers of the Crown, Parliament, magistrates, and the armed forces.  At the outset there is a petition for "thy holy Church universal"; in the midst, a petition for bishops, priests and deacons; at the conclusion, a petition for "all thy people". It is possible to dismiss this as a reflection of a historic ecclesiastical establishment no longer applicable to Anglicanism outside of England: and even there, it embodies an understanding of establishment which is routinely dismissed by CofE...

From Daniel Waterland's A Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, as laid down in Scripture and Antiquity (1737), Chapters XI and XII, a defence of Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth's understanding of the Eucharist as 'a feast upon a sacrifice' (the mainstream 18th century High Church view).  Waterland here particularly addresses the criticisms of Cudworth voiced by John Johnson's The Unbloody Sacrifice  (1714) and Lutheran theologians. It is further pleaded [quoting Johnson], that Dr, Cudworth’s notion seems "much of a piece with that conceit of the Calvinists, that we receive the natural body of Christ in the Eucharist, though as far distant from us as heaven is from the earth". But that conceit, as it is called, is a very sober truth, if understood of receiving the natural body into closer mystical union, as explained in a preceding chapter ... For how could Dr. Cudworth be supposed to make the Eucharist a bare memorial, when he professedly contends ...