Church History

This study examines, within a chronological framework, the major themes and personalities that influenced the outbreak of a number of Evangelical clerical and lay secessions from the Church of England and Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though the number of secessions was relatively small, between a hundred and two hundred of the ‘Gospel clergy’ abandoned the Church during this period, their influence was considerable, especially in highlighting in embarrassing fashion the tensions between the evangelical conversionist imperative and the principles of a national religious establishment. Moreover, through much of this period there remained, just beneath the surface, the potential threat of a large Evangelical disruption similar to that which occurred in Scotland in 1843. Consequently, these secessions provoked great consternation within the Church and within Evangelicalism itself, contributed to the outbreak of millennial speculation following the ‘constitutional revolution’ of 1828–32, led to the formation of several new denominations, and sparked off a major Church–State crisis over the legal right of a clergyman to secede and begin a new ministry within Protestant Dissent.

This book demonstrates that British imperialism was integrally connected to British religion. Using published sources, the book identifies the construction, development, and ingredients of a public Anglican discourse of the British Empire between 1700 and c.1850. It argues that the Church of England exhibited an official and conscious Anglican concern for empire and for missions by the Church of England, from the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701. Much of that earlier 18th century understanding went on to shape later Anglican Evangelical imperial attitudes in the Church Missionary Society founded in 1799. In this Anglican engagement with the British Empire, a public theological discourse of empire was formed and promulgated. This religious public discourse of empire was developed in an imperial partnership with the state. It was formulated in the Anglican engagement with the North American colonies in the 18th century; it underwent a revival of the church-state partnership in the period between 1790 and 1830, as witnessed in Bengal; and it was fundamentally transformed in a new paradigm of imperial engagement in the 1840s, which was implemented in the colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Both the old and the new imperial Anglican paradigms developed a religious and theological imperial discourse that constructed the identities for various colonized peoples and British colonists, as well as contributing to English-British identity between 1700 and 1850. It was a Christian lens that proved remarkably consistent and enduring for both the old and the new British Empires.

This book is a study of the Anglican Reformed tradition (often inaccurately described as Calvinist) after the Restoration and it sets out to revise our picture of the theological world of the later Stuart period. Arguing that the importance of the Reformed theological tradition has frequently been underestimated, the study points to a network of conforming Reformed theologians which included many of the most prominent churchmen of the age. Focussing particularly on what these churchmen contributed in three hotly disputed areas of doctrine (justification, the Trinity and the divine attributes), the study argues that the most significant debates in speculative theology which erupted within the English Church after 1662 were the result of Anglican Reformed resistance to the growing influence of continental Arminianism. It demonstrates the strength and flexibility of the Reformed response to the developing Arminian school, and shows that the Reformed tradition remained a viable theological option for Anglicans well into the eighteenth century. The study therefore provides a significant bridge linking the Reformed writers of the Elizabethan and early Stuart period to the Reformed Evangelicals of the 18th Century. It also shows that, throughout its formative period, Anglicanism was not a monolithic tradition, but rather a contested ground between the competing claims of those adhering to the Church of England's Reformed doctrinal heritage and the insights of those who, to varying degrees, were prepared to explore new theological avenues.

Mexico is famous for its notoriously graphic and bloody crucifixes depicting the broken and tortured body of Jesus on the cross. Images of Christ’s suffering frequently outnumber images of the Virgin Mary in local and household devotions throughout Latin America. How do we explain the enduring significance of these images for the popular Roman Catholic faith of poor and ordinary Mexicans? Based on original archival and ethnographic research, this book uncovers the diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings that the symbol of the crucifix has held for indigenous and mestizo Mexicans over many centuries. By recounting the epic story of the Christianization of Mexico from the perspective of a specific, sculpted crucifix of colonial origin, this book offers a profoundly sympathetic portrait of indigenous Christian belief and practice and a lively defense of the diverse and “heterodox” local expressions of Christianity alive in the world today.

This book argues that the central concept of Bonhoeffer’s early theology, ‘person’, positions his thought in relationship to his own Lutheran tradition as well as the two most important post‐First World War theologies, Karl Barth’s dialectical theology and Karl Holl’s Luther interpretation. Barth convinces Bonhoeffer that theology must understand revelation as originating outside the human self in God’s freedom. But whereas Barth understands revelation as the act of an eternal divine subject, Bonhoeffer treats revelation as the act and being of the historical person of Jesus Christ. On the basis of this person‐concept of revelation, Bonhoeffer rejects Barth’s dialectical thought, designed to respect the distinction between God and world, for a hermeneutic way of thinking that begins with the reconciliation of God and world in the person of Christ. Here Bonhoeffer mines a Lutheran understanding of the incarnation as God’s unreserved entry into history, and the person of Christ as the resulting historical reconciliation of opposites. This also distinguishes Bonhoeffer’s Lutheranism from that of Karl Holl, one of Bonhoeffer’s teachers in Berlin, whose location of justification in the conscience renders the presence of Christ superfluous. Against this, Bonhoeffer emphasizes the present person of Christ as the precondition of justification. Through these critical conversations, Bonhoeffer develops the features of his person‐theology—a person‐concept of revelation and a hermeneutical way of thinking—which remain constant despite the sometimes radical changes in his thought.

This is the first major study for over forty years of the liturgical arrangement of Anglican churches in the period between the Reformation and the Oxford Movement. The book is based both on surviving buildings and on a wide range of archival sources, such as seating plans, which are used to document internal changes and to suggest reasons behind them. This book challenges many widely held assumptions about the liturgical outlook of the Pre-Tractarian period, and about the impact of ecclesiology on the Church of England. In particular, it emphasises the existence, hitherto disregarded, of a Church of England movement for liturgical renewal between 1780 and 1840, which to a degree anticipated some of the ideas previously attributed solely to the ecclesiologists. The discussion is firmly set within the context of European Protestantism, and comparisons are drawn with the liturgical practices both of Calvinists and Lutherans.

For much of his career as a Reformer, John Calvin was involved in trinitarian controversy. Not only did these controversies span his career, but his opponents ranged across the spectrum of theological approaches — from staunch traditionalists to radical antitrinitarians. Remarkably, the heart of Calvin's argument, and the heart of others' criticism, remained the same throughout: Calvin claimed that the only-begotten Son of the Father is also, as the one true God, ‘of himself’. This book investigates the various Reformation and post-Reformation responses to Calvin's affirmation of the Son's aseity (or essential self-existence), a significant episode in the history of theology that is often ignored or misunderstood. Calvin neither rejected eternal generation, nor merely toed the line of classical exposition. As such, these debates turned on the crucial pivot between simple unity and ordered plurality — the relationship between the processions and consubstantiality — at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity. This book's aim is to explain the historical significance and explore the theological implications of Calvin's complex solidarity with the classical tradition in his approach to thinking and speaking of the Triune God. It contends that Calvin's approach, rather than an alternative to classical trinitarianism, is actually more consistent with this tradition's fundamental commitments regarding the ineffable generation of God from God than its own received exposition.