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 book considers three defining movements driven from London and within the region that describe the experience of the Church of England in New England between 1686 and 1786. It explores the radical imperial political and religious change that occurred in Puritan New England following the late seventeenth-century introduction of a new charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Anglican Church in Boston and the public declaration of several Yale 'apostates' at the 1722 college commencement exercises. These events transformed the religious circumstances of New England and fuelled new attention and interest in London for the national church in early America. The political leadership, controversial ideas and forces in London and Boston during the run-up to and in the course of the War for Independence, was witnessed by and affected the Church of England in New England. The book appeals to students and researchers of English History, British Imperial History, Early American History and Religious History.

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.

To many people, the Church of England and worldwide Anglican Communion has the aura of an institution that is dislocated and adrift. Buffeted by tempestuous and stormy debates on sexuality, gender, authority and power - to say nothing of priorities in mission and ministry, and the leadership and management of the church - a once confident Anglicanism appears to be anxious and vulnerable. The Future Shape of Anglicanism offers a constructive and critical engagement with the currents and contours that have brought the church to this point. It assesses and evaluates the forces now shaping the church and challenges them culturally, critically, and theologically. The Future Shape of Anglicanism engages with the church of the present that is simultaneously dissenting and loyal, as well as critical and constructive. For all who are engaged in ecclesiological investigations, and for those who study the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion, this book offers new maps and charts for the present and future. It is an essential companion and guide to some of the movements and forces that are currently shaping the church.

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.

This is a study of the social construction and the impression management of the public forms of worship of Catholicism and Anglicanism. Interest centres on the dilemmas of the liturgical actors in handling a transaction riddled with ambiguities and potential misunderstandings. Simmel, Berger and Goffman are used in an original manner to understand these rites which pose as much of a problem for sociology as for their practitioners.;These rites are treated as forms of play and hermeneutics is linked to a negative theology to understand their performative basis. The study is an effort to link sociology to theology in a way that serves to focus on an issue of social praxis.

Tractarians and Evangelicals, the extremists of the nineteenth-century church, have successfully imposed their propaganda on posterity. Every text assumes that these militants saved the Church of England from the slough of complacency and corruption that their most powerful enemies - 'high and dry' dignitaries - had created.
This book rehabilitates the bishops and deans who are commonly supposed to have lavished preferment on unworthy friends and relations. It shows how members of the Hackney Phalanx, the high-church equivalent of the Clapham Sect, used their patronage to co-opt the able and energetic sons of rising business and professional families: ordinands with the talent and ambition to make a substantial contribution to the church from families that might have otherwise been lost to dissent. A single clerical connection, of nine related clergymen revolving round a mid nineteenth-century Dean of Canterbury, William Rowe Lyall (1788-1857), illuminates a number of central features of church and society: patronage; the co-option of new men; and the attraction of the church as a professional career.
This exceptionally readable book contains vivid pen-portraits of Dean Lyall and his clients, rigorous economic analysis of the financial returns of a clerical career.

First critical edition and translation of documents crucial to our understanding of the English Reformation. The English Reformation began as a dispute over questions of canon law, and reforming the existing system was one of the state's earliest objectives. A draft proposal for this, known as the Henrician canons, has survived, revealing the state of English canon law at the time of the break with Rome, and providing a basis for Cranmer's subsequent, and much better known, attempt to revise the canon law, which was published by John Foxe under the title `Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum' in 1571. Although it never became law, it was highly esteemed by later canon lawyers and enjoyed an unofficial authority in ecclesiastical courts. The Henrician canons and the `Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum' are thus crucial for an understanding of Reformation church discipline, revealing the problems and opportunities facing those who wanted to reform the Church of England's institutional structure in the mid-Tudor period,an age which was to determine the course of the church for centuries to come.This volume makes available for the first time full scholarly editions and translations of the whole text, taking all the available evidence into consideration, and setting the `Reformatio' firmly in both its historical and contemporary context. GERALD BRAY is Anglican Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University.

Described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas, the Swiss pastor and theologian, Karl Barth, continues to be a major influence on students, scholars and preachers today.
Barth's theology found its expression mainly through his closely reasoned fourteen-part magnum opus, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Having taken over 30 years to write, the Church Dogmatics is regarded as one of the most important theological works of all time, and represents the pinnacle of Barth's achievement as a theologian.

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.