The lives of Christian churches are shaped by doctrinal theology. That is, they are shaped by practices in which ideas about God and God's ways with the world are developed, discussed and deployed. This book explores those practices, and asks why they matter for communities seeking to follow Jesus. Taking the example of the Church of England, this book highlights the embodied, affective and located reality of all doctrinal practices - and the biases and exclusions that mar them. It argues that doctrinal theology can in principle help the church know God better, even though doctrinal theologians do not know God better than their fellow believers. It claims that it can help the church to hear in Scripture challenges to its life, including to its doctrinal theology. It suggests that doctrinal disagreement is inevitable, but that a better quality of doctrinal disagreement is possible. And, finally, it argues that, by encouraging attention to voices that have previously been ignored, doctrinal theology can foster the ongoing discovery of God's surprising work.

This is an introduction to the thought of one of the most fascinating theologians and at the same time most controversial church leaders of our time. In contemporary theology, the work of Rowan Williams is virtually without parallel for its extraordinary diversity and complexity. His writings span the genres of poetry, history, literary criticism, spirituality, theology, ethics, and philosophy - yet this diverse body of work is apparently not unified by any overarching system or agenda. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Williams' thought is a vigorous refusal of completeness and systematic closure. Nevertheless, this book will argue that the complex body of Williams' work is held together by a specific theological construal both of Christian language and of the church's founding event.

C.S. Lewis, himself a layperson in the Church of England, has exercised an unprecedentedly wide influence on the faithful of Anglican, Roman Catholic, Evangelical and other churches, all of whom tend naturally to claim him as one of their own. One of the reasons for this diverse appropriation is the elusiveness of the church in the sense both of his own denomination and of the wider subject of ecclesiology in Lewis writings. The essays contained in this volume critically examine the place, character and role of the Church in Lewis life. The result is a detailed and scintillating picture of the interactions of one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century theology with the contemporaneous development of the Church of England, with key concepts in ecclesiology, and with interdenominational matters.

This volume describes many of the greatest and most engaging Canons in the history of the Church of England. With a wealth of amusing detail and anecdote, as well as a skilful marshalling of the essential facts, he brings the Canons alive, and considers their significance in the social and ecclesiastical history of their times. Tracing the course of the dramatic change in the fortunes of the English cathedrals and in turn the lives of the most interesting and significant Canons who were in office, Trevor Beeson provides readers with an interesting and undemanding introduction to two centuries of Church history with these portraits of quite remarkable men. Including characters from St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster, Canterbury, York, Ely, Chester, Bristol, Manchester, Winchester and Oxford there are stories to delight readers from around the UK. About the Author Trevor Beeson was Canon of Westminster Abbey before becoming Dean of Winchester where he raised GBP7 million to restore the cathedral fabric and open a visitor centre. His previous books have all been bestsellers on the SCM list and have been serialised in the national press.

Open the ancient door of an old church, says Ronald Blythe, and framed in the silence is a house of words where everything has been said: centuries of birth, marriage and death words, gossip, poetry, philosophy, rant, eloquence, learning, nonsense, the language of hymn writers and Bible translators - all of it spoken in one place. This work contains words spoken by Ronald Blythe in the churches he serves as a Reader in the Church of England, and as the local writer expected to add his own distinctive voice. Originating as addresses given at Matins or Evensong, they follow various paths into old and new liturgies, literature and the local countryside. They bring together the author's delight in language, his recollections of farming, his recognition of friends and neighbours, and the hopes he has found in faith.

This book reveals the huge sales and propagandist potential of Anglican parish magazines, while demonstrating the Anglican Church's misunderstanding of the real issues at its heart, and its collective collapse of confidence as it contemplated social change.

The Anglican Communion is the third largest Christian denomination and claims a membership of some 80 million members in about 164 countries. Given that there are only around two hundred countries in the world, this makes the churches of the Anglican Communion the most geographically widespread denomination after Roman Catholicism. The 44 essays in this volume embrace a wide range of academic disciplines: theological; historical; demography and geography; and different aspects of culture and ethics. They are united in their discussion of what is effectively a new inter-disciplinary subject which we have termed 'Anglican Studies'. At the core of this volume is the phenomenon of 'Anglicanism' as this is expressed in different places and in a variety of ways across the world. This Handbook covers a far broader set of topics from a wider range of perspectives than has been hitherto attempted in Anglican Studies. At the same time, it doesn't impose a particular theological or historical agenda. The contributions are drawn from across the spectrum of theological views and opinions. It shows that the unsettled nature of the polity is part of its own rich history; and many will see this as a somewhat lustrous tradition. In its comprehensive coverage, this volume is a valuable contribution to Anglican Studies and helps formulate a discipline that might perhaps promote dialogue and discussion across the Anglican world.

A Daily Office Book for all members of the congregation - including adult confirmation candidates. Arranged a page-a-day for a year, it provides an opening prayer, Psalm verses, Old and New Testament readings, and new prayers based on the readings, together with a 31-day cycle of intercessions.

Will the British retain the monarchy and the English church establishment into the 21st century? The preservation of the monarchy and of the establishment of the church of England is a matter that cuts deep in fact and theory. The monarchy and the church are symbols of civil liberty, and as such they carry the freight of British national identity. Yet it is difficult to take those institutions seriously now because Britons give too little consideration to serious reforms of any kind for the monarchy or the church. This book suggests possible reforms.

B. W. Young describes and analyses the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England, in particular relation to those developments traditionally described as constituting the Enlightenment. It challenges conventional perceptions of an intellectually moribund institution by contextualising the polemical and scholarly debates in which churchmen engaged. In particular, it delineates the vigorous clerical culture in which much eighteenth-century thought evolved. The book traces the creation of a self-consciously enlightened tradition within Anglicanism, which drew on Erasmianism, seventeenth-century eirenicism and the legacy of Locke. By emphasizing the variety of its intellectual life, the book challenges those notions of Enlightenment which advance predominantly political interpretations of this period. Thus, eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, notably those who contributed to a burgeoning interest in mysticism, are equally integral to this study.

This collection of essays seeks to redress the negative and marginalizing historiography of Pusey, and to increase current understanding of both Pusey and his culture. The essays take Pusey's contributions to the Oxford Movement and its theological thinking seriously; most significantly, they endeavour to understand Pusey on his own terms, rather than by comparison with Newman or Keble.

English Christendom has never been a static entity. Evangelism, politics, conflict and cultural changes have constantly and consistently developed it into myriad forms across the world. However, in recent times that development has seemingly become a general decline. This book utilises the motif of Christendom to illuminate the pedigree of Anglican Christianity, allowing a vital and persistent dynamic in Christianity, namely the relationship between the sacred and the mundane, to be more fundamentally explored. Each chapter seeks to unpack a particular historical moment in which the relations of sacred and mundane are on display. Beginning with the work of Bede, before focusing on the Anglo Norman settlement of England, the Tudor period, and the establishment of the church in the American and Australian colonies, Anglicanism is shown to consistently be a religio-political tradition. This approach opens up a different set of categories for the study of contemporary Anglicanism and its debates about the notion of the church. It also opens up fresh ways of looking at religious conflict in the modern world and within Christianity. This is a fresh exploration of a major facet of Western religious culture. As such, it will be of significant interest to scholars working in Religious History and Anglican Studies, as well as theologians with an interest in Western Ecclesiology.

John Henry Newman is often described as 'the Father of the Second Vatican Council'. He anticipated most of the Council's major documents, as well as being an inspiration to the theologians who were behind them. His writings offer an illuminating commentary both on the teachings of the Council and the way these have been implemented and interpreted in the post-conciliar period. This book is the first sustained attempt to consider what Newman's reaction to Vatican II would have been. As a theologian who on his own admission fought throughout his life against theological liberalism, yet who pioneered many of the themes of the Council in his own day, Newman is best described as a conservative radical who cannot be classed simply as either a conservative or liberal Catholic. At the time of the First Vatican Council, Newman adumbrated in his private letters a mini-theology of Councils, which casts much light on Vatican II and its aftermath. Noted Newman scholar, Ian Ker, argues that Newman would have greatly welcomed the reforms of the Council, but would have seen them in the light of his theory of doctrinal development, insisting that they must certainly be understood as changes but changes in continuity rather than discontinuity with the Church's tradition and past teachings. He would therefore have endorsed the so-called 'hermeneutic of reform in continuity' in regard to Vatican II, a hermeneutic first formulated by Pope Benedict XVI and subsequently confirmed by his successor, Pope Francis, and rejected both 'progressive' and ultra-conservative interpretations of the Council as a revolutionary event. Newman believed that what Councils fail to speak of is of great importance, and so a final chapter considers the kind of evangelization - a topic notably absent from the documents of Vatican II - Newman thought appropriate in the face of secularization.

Most Christians are completely unaware that for over 200 years there has existed in England, and at times in Wales, Scotland, Canada, Bermuda, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and the USA, an episcopal Church, similar in many respects to the Church of England, worshipping with a Prayer Book virtually identical to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and served by bishops, presbyters and deacons whose orders derive directly from Canterbury, and ecumenically enriched by Old Catholic, Swedish, Moravian and other successions. The Free Church of England as an independent jurisdiction within the Universal Church began in the reign of George III. In 1991 the Church sent a bishop to George Carey's Enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury. In addition to presenting for the first time a detailed history of the Free Church of England, John Fenwick also explores the distinctive doctrinal emphases of the denomination, its Constitution, its liturgical tradition, its experience of the historic episcopate, and its many connections with other churches (including the Reformed Episcopal Church in the USA). He discusses why the Church has, so far, failed to fulfil the vision of its founders, and what the possible future of the Church might be - including a very significant expansion as many Anglicans and other Christians considering new options discover this historic, episcopal, disestablished, Church with its international connections and ecumenical character.

After the Great War, some texts by British Army veterans portrayed the Anglican chaplains who had served with them in an extremely negative light. This book examines the realities of Anglican chaplains' wartime experiences and presents a compelling picture of what it meant to be a clergyman-in-uniform in the most devastating war in modern history.