A Pilgrim People. Learning through the Church Year – John H. Westerhoff III

Book reviewed:
A Pilgrim People. Learning through the Church Year , John H. Westerhoff III, Seabury Classics (Church Publishing Inc.) 2005 (1-59628-010-7), ix + 114 pp., pb $13.00     

Loving the Questions, an Exploration of the Nicene Creed – Marianne H. Micks

Book reviewed:
Loving the Questions, an Exploration of the Nicene Creed , Marianne H. Micks, Church Publishing Incorporated 2005 (1-59628-008-5), xii + 115 pp., pb $14.00     

Contemporary Doctrine Classics: The Combined Reports by the Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England – Church House

Book reviewed:
Contemporary Doctrine Classics: The Combined Reports by the Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England , Church House Publishing 2005 (0-7151-4045-0), xxxiv + 475 pp., pb £20.00     

Karl Barth, the Church and the Churches – Edited by William G. Rusch (ed.)

Book reviewed:
Karl Barth, the Church and the Churches , William G. Rusch (ed.), William B. Eerdmans 2005 (0-8028-2970-8), xi + 59 pp., pb $12.00     

Lumen Gentium No. 8, and Subsistit in, Again

Francis A. Sullivan says that the one Church of Christ continues to exist perfectly in the Catholic Church, and is present imperfectly in other churches and ecclesial communities. However, he thinks Lumen Gentium 8 also enables us to say that the many churches, non-Catholic and Catholic, are all in the one Church of Christ, since to say the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church means no more than "continues to exist in" the Catholic Church. In this way, he denies the identity of the one Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. We point out that magisterial documents since Vatican II have consistently refused this proposal, and have instead spoken only of the one Church being present or operative, according to degrees, in non-Catholic churches and communities. We argue that while it is true there is "ecclesial reality" outside the Catholic Church, in that there are elements of truth and sanctification outside of her, the one Church of Christ of which Vatican II expressly speaks is the Church with all the gifts of unity and instruments for salvation with which Christ endowed it. The Catholic Church is not contained in any larger divinely willed and dominically instituted ecclesial reality, and it is without qualification the one Church of Christ and the one Church of Christ is without qualification the Catholic Church.     

Harvesting Martin Luther's Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church – Edited by Timothy J. Wengert (ed.)

Book reviewed:
Harvesting Martin Luther's Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church , Timothy J. Wengert (ed.), Lutheran Quarterly Books, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 2004 (8-028-2486-2), xiv + 260 pp., £21.99     

Christian bioethics and the Church's political worship.

Christian bioethics springs from the worship that is the response of the Church to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Such worship is distinctively political in nature, in that it acknowledges Christ as Lord. Because it is a political worship, it can recognize no other lords and no other prior claims on its allegiance: these include the claims of an allegedly universal ethics and politics determined from outside the Church. However the Church is called not just to be a contrast society, but also to witness to the freeing of the world from salvific pretensions in order that it may embrace its proper temporality. The implications of this for the distinctiveness of Christian bioethics are brought out in three movements: first, the Church's itself learning how it is to conceive bioethics; second, the Church's role in unmasking the idols of secular bioethics; and third, the Church's witnessing to the freeing of medicine from idolatrous aspirations.     

Sustaining churchgoing young Anglicans in England and Wales: Assessing influence of the home

ABSTRACT

Responding to the problem facing the Church of England, as identified by the Church Growth Research Programme, regarding sustaining churchgoing young Anglicans, and also responding to the Renewal and Reform agenda to address this problem, the present study discusses the roles of three agencies in delivering effective Christian education and Christian formation: local churches, local schools, and the home. Building on a fruitful stream of research within Australia and the UK, the present study drew on two samples of young Anglicans: 2,019 9- to 11-year-old students attending church primary schools in Wales, and 2,323 13- to 15-year-old students attending church secondary schools mainly in England. The data demonstrated that young Anglicans who practised their Anglican identity by attending church did so primarily because their parents were Anglican churchgoers. Moreover, young Anglican churchgoers were most likely to keep going to church if their churchgoing parents (especially mother) talked with them about their faith. The implications from these findings, for an Anglican Church strategy for ministry among children and young people, is that alongside resourcing local churches and promoting deeply Christian schools, it may also be wise for the Church to invest in the education and formation of churchgoing Anglican parents.     

Impressions of the Church of Sweden: liberal and catholic with nuances of Lutheranism

The Church of Sweden is difficult to describe or to characterise, whether as a Folk Church, a national church, as catholic or liberal, or as, in some sense, Lutheran. This article refers to aspects of its complex relations with the Roman Catholic Church and with Lutheranism at large. The author detects, from ecumenical agreement and practice, an incipient new communion of churches, based on a common claim to be catholic and also to be open to developments in society. This group includes the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in the USA, the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht and the Philippine Independent Church, all of which are in communion with each other. The author's presentation is set out in relation to the Church of Sweden's liturgical and sacramental life, its church–state relations, and in an account of the rather asymmetrical shape of ecumenism in Sweden, in all of which the question of gender plays a role.     

Biblical mothers as images of the Church

Among the many images and symbols of the Church which the church Fathers used, biblical mothers had an important role. Some of these images, such as Mary as an image of the Church, became widespread and have influenced later Christian theology and iconography. In this article, both the development and different applications of these images will be explored. How and to what purpose these images were used in the Early Church will also be studied. Among the topics dealt with by using these images were the origin, age, character and purpose of the Church, as well as its relation to several ‘others’ (the Jews, the schismatics and the heretics). In modern ecclesiological discussions, especially of Eve and Mary as images of the Church, the role of the Church in salvation, as well as the communal interpretation of biblical mothers, are relevant.     

Widows, women, and the bioethics of care.

Widows, women, and the bioethics of care must be understood within an authentic Christian ontology of gender. Men are men and women are women, and their being is ontologically marked in difference. There is an ontology of gender with important implications for the role of women in the family and the Church. The Christian Church has traditionally recognized a role for widows, deaconesses, and female monastics, which is not that of the liturgical priesthood, but one with a special relationship to care and therefore with particular implications for health care and a Christian bioethics of care in the twenty-first century. In the shadow of early male mortality, women as wives should turn to support their husbands and as widows to support those in need. Widows, in becoming authentic Christian monastics, can bring into the world an icon of rightly ordered women providing rightly ordered Christian care for those in need. They can enter the moral vacuum created by misunderstandings of the place of women and the service vacuum created by a disappearance of religious nuns in Western health care facilities with a presence that is at one with the Church of the Fathers.     

The Catholic Church, the American military, and homosexual reorientation therapy.

Homosexual activist groups have targeted the Catholic Church and the American military as institutions especially in need of transformation. Associations of healthcare professionals are also under assault from homosexual activists. It is, nevertheless, appropriate for the Church and the military to defend themselves against this assault, to affirm that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian ethics and military service, and to help homosexuals free themselves from the vice of homosexuality. Arguments that homosexual reorientation therapy is unethical are unsound. Such therapy is consistent with the Christian virtue of charity.     

The Motherhood of the Church in Henri de Lubac and John Calvin

Both Henri de Lubac and John Calvin described the Church as ‘mother’. From the patristic tradition, the motherhood of the Church had two dimensions: (i) the Mother Church as an institution delimited by the episcopacy of which inclusion was a necessity for salvation; and (ii) the Church as the mother of believers through whose ‘motherly’ care of bringing to life, nourishing and teaching through the sacraments God makes provision for his children. Both de Lubac and Calvin stress the maternal functions of the Church, but differ over how the Church’s motherhood relates to its visible identity and why inclusion in the Church is necessary for salvation. This article argues that this connection represents a rich theme for ecumenical ecclesiology. Despite divergent ecclesiological grammars and themes, Catholic and Reformed traditions are drawing from a shared patristic inheritance which gives good ground for dialogue for respective ecclesial self-understandings.     

The Orthodoxy of the Anglo-Saxons: conversion and loyalty in the pre-conquest English Church

Though Eastern Christians generally regard the Western part of the Church to have split from Orthodoxy permanently in 1054, there have been calls by some to modify the date of this as regards the Anglo-Saxon Church. These Orthodox lay scholars and bishops argue that the Anglo-Saxon Church was more closely aligned with the Orthodox East rather than the Roman Catholic West, as evidenced by the canonisation of St Edward the Confessor and advocacy for the canonisation of King Harold II. This article questions these assertions by looking at the evidence provided by Anglo-Saxon connection to the Western Church, as well as the migration of Anglo-Saxons to Byzantium following the Battle of Hastings, as described in the Játvarðar Saga. It concludes by discussing what implications these findings have for the Orthodox Church in its canonisation of a technically non-Orthodox saint.     

Factive knowability and the problem of possible omniscience

Philosophical Studies - Famously, the Church–Fitch paradox of knowability is a deductive argument from the thesis that all truths are knowable to the conclusion that all truths are known. In...     

The Orthodox Church in the Contemporary Ecumenical Dialogue

Since its beginnings, the ecumenical movement has been influenced by the Orthodox Church, as seen, for example, in the 1920 Encyclical of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Two convictions have underpinned the ecumenical commitment of the Orthodox Church: the need for better mutual understanding between churches and the desire of the Orthodox Church to witness to the truth in its ecumenical relations. There have been instances where the Orthodox Church has not been able to assert its views, and indeed its dialogue partners have come to decisions contrary to the principles of the Orthodox Church. However, this article will focus on the extent to which the Orthodox Church has been able to present its message and effectively influence developments, something that can be observed mainly in two areas: (i) the early church creedal tradition, specifically the Nicene Creed, and (ii) the liturgical heritage, particularly the relationship between baptism and chrismation.     

Married with children: the experience of women ministers of word and sacrament in the United Reformed Church

The experience of women being admitted to full ministry has a much longer history within the Free Churches than in the Anglican Church, although from the way in which the Church of England debate on women priests and bishops has been reported this is often not acknowledged. The United Reformed Church (URC) has given equal access for men and women to ministry from the date of the union in 1972 between the Congregational Church and the Presbyterian Church. Both denominations have a long history of women in ministry. This paper examines the experience of 50 URC clergywomen who combine marriage, children and ministry to explore their experience of ministry, marriage and motherhood. The findings demonstrate that, overall, the women’s experience is mixed, although the general expectation among congregations and moderators is that women are the primary care‐givers within the family. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Old Catholic churches of the Union of Utrecht

Abstract

The Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht have different historical backgrounds. The Dutch Church has her roots in the Catholic Counter‐Reformation, the German‐speaking Churches in the protest‐movements against Vatican I, and the Polish Churches in the problems of emigrants to USA. However, they adhere in common to the conciliar and synodical tradition of the Catholic Church. They lay stress on the relative autonomy of the local church, the episcopal apostolic succession, and the Eucharist as the manifestation of the Church. The autonomy of the local church is not seen as detached from the universal Church or the responsibility to stay in or to restore Church unity. This leads to an ecumenical engagement which has resulted in full communion with the Anglican Churches and a doctrinal consensus with the Orthodox Churches. Reference back to the undivided Church is a key feature of Old Catholic ecclesiology, though this does not lead to uncomplicated ecumenical solutions.     

The Architectural Expression of Primitive Christianity: William Beveridge and the Temple of Solomon

Abstract

On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a resurgent religious identity in church and state was informed by identifying the English nation with the biblical Israel, and the worship and buildings of the Church of England with those of the Temple in Jerusalem. The dedication of the Church of St Peter, Cornhill (rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 and designed by Christopher Wren) in 1681 by the Revd William Beveridge was an expression of the Church of England's confidence in its identity with the ‘primitive Church,’ and as the Church of a chosen and favoured people.