Some thoughts on Sola Fide
It was during the reign of Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI (1547-53) that the Church of England adopted unequivocal expressions of the doctrine of justification sola fide as its official doctrine. Without...
View ArticleThe New Perspective and Sola Fide
A more recent challenge to the Reformation Anglican doctrine of justification by faith alone has come from the movement within New Testament studies known widely as the ‘New Perspective on Paul’. One...
View ArticleSola Fide for today? (draft)
As Alister E. McGrath writes at the end of his magisterial study Iustitia Dei, these challenges to the doctrine of justification sola fide have led to it having a reduced place in the contemporary...
View ArticleSketch about Reformation Anglican Preaching
For preaching of the gospel is one of God's plough-works, and the preacher is one of God's ploughmen Hugh LatimerIf...
View ArticleEat the word
The comparison by analogy of Scripture to ‘meat’ in the homily (and in Latimer’s sermon) is a typical trope of the English Reformers, who spoken often of the Scripture as something to be tasted, chewed...
View ArticleScripture, Preaching and Reformation Anglican Worship
BLESSED lord, which hast caused all holy Scriptures to bee written for our learnyng; graunte us that we maye in suche wise heare them, read, marke, learne, and inwardly digeste them; that by pacience,...
View ArticleThe difficulty of worship
If ‘worship’ is the term we use to describe the ways in which human beings engage with God,[1] then one rather disturbing feature of the Old Testament witness is the way in which it contains some...
View ArticleEngaging with God on God’s terms
What the attacks on false worship reveal is that, in Biblical terms at least, worship of the God of Israel is very much on his term exclusively. As the Anglican scholar David Peterson says:…worship of...
View ArticleWhy singing in church is worship - a sketch
NB - a train of thought. I will deny all if pressed. 1. I don't much like it when singing is called 'worship' in church circles, since this reduces the concept of worship to JUST this, and is...
View ArticleJesus Christ the Worshipper
In this brief sketch of the Old Testament account of worship, we have been able to see something of the distinctive pattern of the worship of Yhwh that made it distinct from the idol worship of other...
View ArticleWorship of the Triune God
We find then in the New Testament a reminder that worship is a response to the gracious divine initiative, and that it is enabled by God. But we find that the mediatory means of the Old Testament – the...
View ArticleCorporate and Individual Worship
[hey, again - exploratory stuff. feedback appreciated] The distinction that we sometimes observe in English between ‘corporate’ and ‘individual’ worship is actually a false one, since worship of the...
View ArticleThe consequences of Christian worship
God’s people are able to pay homage to him as a result of their union in Christ, who cleanses them by his blood and leads them in adoration of God. They are enabled to worship God because God has...
View ArticleBook Notice: Sydney Anglicanism: An Apology by Michael Jensen
Book Notice: Sydney Anglicanism: An Apology by Michael Jensen
View ArticleUncommon Worship?
On the 20th February, 1547, the nine-year old Edward VI was crowned in Westminster Abbey. His Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, charged him with these words:Your majesty is God's vicegerent, and Christ's...
View ArticleDissolving the Chantries
It would be easy to forget the context in which Thomas Cranmer began to prepare his new liturgies for the English people. The Edwardian program for the Protestantization of the English church was very...
View ArticleThe Song of the Prince Everything
Colossians 1:15-20 Perhaps it is because we don’t actually hear in our heads the notes they used to sing, but it is easy to for we latter-day saints to forget just how simply sing-able early...
View ArticleThe Adoration of the Humble One
Philippians 2:5-11In his long poem ‘The Hymn to Proserpine, Algernon Swinburne, one of the Victorian era’s most celebrated poets, pretends to be a late Roman pagan lamenting the rise of Christianity in...
View ArticleThe Hymn of the Great Mystery -1 Tim 3:16
One of the first things that you work out if you start a blog is that the title makes all the difference to your hit rate; and you can really increase your hit rate if you make your title a ‘how to’:...
View ArticleAnglicans and sacraments 1
There is no question but that the evangelical Reformers of the sixteenth century saw themselves as making a deliberate and conscious move away from the view of the sacraments that had prevailed in the...
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