This book studies the way the central act of Christian worship (variously known as the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, the Holy Communion, and the Mass) has been treated in the thought and practice of the Evangelical tradition in the Church of England. Evangelicals are not associated with an emphasis on the Eucharist, and Dr. Cocksworth's study is important and potentially very influential because it demonstrates that--at its times of strength--the Evangelical tradition has held the Eucharist in the highest regard.

From 1824 to 1843 Newman was an active clergyman of the Church of England; during this time, he entered the pulpit about 1,270 times. Newman published 217 of the sermons which he wrote during these years; a further 246 sermons survive in manuscript in the Archives of the Birmingham Oratory, some only as fragments but the majority as full texts. These sermons will be published in a series of five volumes, the aim being to transcribe them accurately, with sufficient editorial apparatus for the theological development within them to be understood, and their historical situation to be clear. The forty-three sermons contained in Volume I reveal Newman's attitude to his pastoral charge, his theology of liturgy based on the Book of Common Prayer; his gradual acceptance of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as a substitute for his earlier belief in conversion as understood by the Evangelicals; the eventual supremacy of the Eucharist in his own spiritual life; his growing reserve about preaching on the Atonement; his faith in the divinity of Christ the Mediator; and finally, his understanding of the Church as the remedial and mediatorial kingdom of Christ on earth.

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.

This wide-ranging and original book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Church of England in the period between 1660 and 1828. Through a detailed study of the diocese of the archbishops of Canterbury it explores the political, economic, cultural, intellectual and pastoral functions of the established Church and argues that we should see the Church in a far more positive light than has hitherto been the case.

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.

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.

'No better way could have been found to mark the end of the long unchallenged reign of Cranmer's Prayer Book than Dr Cuming's superb charting of its history.' Journal of Theological Studies

This book considers the work of Charles Taylor from a theological perspective, specifically relating to the topic of ecclesiology. It argues that Taylor and related thinkers such as John Milbank and Rowan Williams point towards an "Aesthetic Ecclesiology," an ecclesiology that values highly and utilizes the aesthetic in its self-understanding and practice. Jamie Franklin argues that Taylor's work provides an account of the breakdown in Modernity of the conceptual relationship of the immanent and the transcendent, and that the work of John Milbank and radical orthodoxy give a complementary account of the secular from a more metaphysical angle. Franklin also incorporates the work of Rowan Williams, which provides us a way of thinking about the Church that is rooted in a material and historical legacy. The central argument is that the reconnection of the transcendent and the immanent coheres with an understanding of the Church that incorporates the material reality of the sacraments, the importance of artistic beauty and craftsmanship, and the Church's status as historical, global, and eschatological. Secondly, the aesthetic provides the Church with a powerful apologetic: beauty cannot be reduced to the presuppositions of secular materialism, and so must be accounted for by recourse to transcendent categories.