The Churches and the Evolution of Europe

This article offers the reader some theological reflections on the 2014 ‘Agreed Statement on Christology’ (ASC). Its scope is thus limited to shedding light on certain aspects of the document that appear to the author as theologically complex and not self-explanatory. The author’s intention is not to provide the reader with a comprehensive theological evaluation of the document, but to initiate a discussion about the content of the statement so as to provide some theological groundwork for a future comprehensive evaluation. The article starts with a brief and schematic exposition of theological developments during the fourth to early fifth centuries that threatened ecclesial unity. It then delineates certain problematic aspects of Christological thought that pushed a united Christendom to the state of disunity. The main body of the article then endeavours to elucidate two sections of the ASC which were of particular interest to the author. An assessment (necessarily partial) of the ASC’s theological significance and of its ecumenical import concludes the article.     

The secularisation of Scotland

The history of religion in Scotland is interesting for the light it casts on the links between secularisation and secularism. The creation of secular social institutions was not the work of secularists but was an unanticipated result of Protestant schisms originally intended to purify the dominant religion so as to justify its imposition. The diversity thus created forced the growth of a secular public sphere. It also prevented a coherent nativist response to Irish Catholic immigration and thus encouraged Catholic integration. Over the twentieth century, Scotland changed from being a country in which most people had some association with organised religion into one in which the population divided radically into small groups of religious people and a majority who had no association at all with organised religion. Neither the new religions of the 1960s, nor New Age spirituality, nor the charismatic movement have made any significant inroads. Prospects for the conversion of the non-religious seem remote, when religion is now carried primarily by demographically or ethnically distinct populations.     

Frank Weston,the Kikuyu Controversy,and the necessity of episcopacy

This article provides a historical and theological account of the controversy that erupted in 1913 when Frank Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar, appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, to try W.G. Peel, the Bishop of Mombasa, and J.J. Willis, the Bishop of Uganda, for ‘heresy and schism’ for their having participated in an interdenominational conference in Kikuyu in British East Africa. By agreeing to a Scheme of Federation with non-episcopal churches and holding a joint communion service at which non-conformists received communion from an Anglican Bishop, Peel and Willis had undermined the principle of episcopacy, thereby endangering the status of the Church of England as the English Section of the universal, Catholic Church. This article considers the theological arguments Weston advances for his condemnation of the Kikuyu Conference and examines his grounds for holding that episcopacy is an indispensable doctrine of the Christian faith.