In 1885, J.C. Ryle, then Bishop of Liverpool, wrote a series of Disestablishment Papers addressing calls by Liberal politicians and Non-Conformist ministers to disestablish and disendow the Church of England. William Gladstone, a liberal High Church Anglican,...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
The (Anglican) Church Aggressive
By the 1850s significant theological and ecclesiastical battle lines had been drawn the between sympathizers of the Tractarian Movement and the Low Church party in the Episcopal Church in the United States. Although not every devotee of the Tractarians could qualify...
A Nineteenth Century Anglican Christmas in Egypt.
Edmund Winder mounted the steps of his modest pulpit on Christmas Day, 1854. Christmas Day fell on Monday but the congregation gathered anyway. A British bishop gave Winder special license to preach; he wasn’t a rector, or even a curate; he was just a simple chaplain....
Anglicanism, Church and State, and the American Republic.
In January 1861 Bishop Stephen Elliott spoke to an ecclesiastical council in Savannah, Georgia to address how he and his diocese would respond to the eminent secession of his state from the United States. The bulk of Elliott’s speech was an explanation of why he...
Jonathan Edwards and the Southern Presbyterians
Jonathan Edwards was indicted for falling away from Calvin’s views on the Lord’s Supper.
Anglican Political Theology and the American Republic
Jon Askonas, a professor of politics at Catholic University of America, recently delivered an address on Anglican political theology to Providence Magazine’s Christianity and National Security Conference. His address is important for several reasons. The first reason...
Bishop Chase and the Sacralized Contemporary Moment
Philander Chase, Bishop of Illinois and Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, preached at the consecration of the first Bishop of Alabama, Nicholas Cobbs, in May of 1844. Chase took as his theme man’s defiant intransigence towards the precepts of the Almighty....
Why The Church Fathers Were Comfortable With Caesar
“I might even say with good cause, Caesar is rather ours, being appointed by our God”- Tertullian
“The Christian Statesman”: Why liberal disestablishments need Christianity in government.
Moses Drury Hoge, the Old School Presbyterian minister of Peterburg, Virginia’s Second Presbyterian Church, offered a throaty defense of disestablishmentarianism in his short work on Christian statesmanship. He did not, however, propose that institutional Christianity...
Charles P. Krauth and the Conservative Reformation
It is en vogue among a certain subset of Protestant intellectuals, especially those that might be denominated Evangelicals, to hesitatingly endorse the events surrounding the religious changes in the first half of the Sixteenth Century. These events have been gathered...