Restoration Or The Completion Of The Reformation

Death by drowning or being burned at the stake. In the days of the Reformation, many Christians suffered this horrible fate. What was their crime? Simply being baptised, immersed into Christ as believing adults. Why did they endure death? They preferred death to compromising their faith. Today we are beneficiaries of the stand they took and the spiritual heritage they passed on. Thank God that after 150 years of these killing times a more enlightened age came in. This was the age of religious discussion and discovery as men sought the truth in religion. It was not easy to go against over 1500 years of human tradition. Where was truth to be found? In that which existed from the days of the apostles, the Word of God. Their spiritual quest also blesses our lives if we are but willing to listen. A further 100 years would elapse before Restoration principles produced fruit. Again, we are blessed with the fruit of their labours. However, every generation has to decide what to believe and why. That challenge remains and it is a challenge that confronts each one of us: What are we going do about it?

This wide-ranging and original book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Church of England in the long eighteenth century. It explores the nature of the Restoration ecclesiastical regime, the character of the clerical profession, the quality of the clergy's pastoral work, and the question of Church reform through a detailed study of the diocese of the archbishops of Canterbury. In so doing the book covers the political, social, economic, cultural, intellectual and pastoral functions of the Church and, by adopting a broad chronological span, it allows the problems and difficulties often ascribed to the eighteenth-century Church to be viewed as emerging from the seventeenth century and as continuing well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, the author argues that some of the traditional periodizations and characterisations of conventional religious history need modification. Much of the evidence presented here indicates that clergy in the one hundred and seventy years after 1660 were preoccupied with difficulties which had concerned their forebears and would concern their successors. In many ways, clergy in the diocese of Canterbury between 1660 and 1828 continued the work of seventeenth-century clergy, particularly in following through, and in some instances instigating, the pastoral and professional aims of the Reformation, as well as participating in processes relating to Church reform, and further anticipating some of the deals of the Evangelical and Oxford Movements. Reluctance to recognise this has led historians to neglect the strengths of the Church between the Restoration and the 1830s, which, it is argued, should not be judged primarily for its failure to attain the ideals of these other movements, but as an institution possessing its own coherent and positive rationale.

This book examines the struggle for Protestant consensus and unity through the work of John a Lasco (1499-1560). It is only in recent years that scholars have begun to recognize the importance of Lasco as one of the leading figures of the European Reformation, and a pivotal figure between Lutheran and Reformed theologians. The Polish reformer was among the most dynamic church organizers of the sixteenth century, dedicated to healing the divisions among evangelicals and searching for the key to Protestant unity in the example of the Apostolic Church. It was to this end that he published the Forma ac ratio in 1555, a work that recorded the rites and practices of the London Strangers' Church (of which he had been the first superintendent) and to provide a model for uniting the disparate Protestant communities on the Continent. Although some recent works have focused on aspects of Lasco's early career in Germany and England, this is the first book to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Forma ac ratio, and the reformer's reasons for writing it. This study also puts Lasco's distinct model for Protestant churches into the wider European context and assesses his impact on the struggle for unity through an examination of his correspondence, the reaction to his writings, and his influence on Protestant congregations across Europe.

This book traces British missionary initiative in post-Revolutionary Francophone Europe from the genesis of the London Missionary Society, the visits of Robert Haldane and Henry Drummond, and the founding of the Continental Society. While British evangelicals aimed at the reviving of a foreign Protestant cause of momentous legend, they received unforeseen reciprocating emphases from the Continent which forced self-reflection on Evangelicalism's own relationship to the Reformation.

Why study the life of Manasseh who was such a wicked and deplorable man? Aside from the thief on the cross who hung there next to the Christ, Manasseh is the “other” near deathbed convert that one finds in Scripture. Manasseh ought to hold a special place to two kinds of people who read the Bible. The first is the sinner who thinks they have sins that are bigger than Christ is a Savior. They are timid to come to the Savior, believing that God might not save such a lost person as they are. And the second are believers who wonder how their sinning after conversion affects their standing before God, robbing them of the full assurance of faith that they should have in Christ. God worked in the life of one of the most wretched people who ever lived, and the narrative in 2 Chronicles 33 shows how a despicable heathenish dog can be converted and changed by the abundant power of Jesus Christ through the Covenant of God’s free Grace. As wicked as Manasseh might have been, God still reached down from heaven to change him, save him, reconcile him, and begin reformation not only of his own life, but life in the church at large. Consider that God saved a wretch like Manasseh from sin and hell, as abominable as he was, and abundantly pardoned him through saving grace only found in Jesus Christ. Such a truth should give sinners hope and give Christians a reason to cultivate a greater amount of godly assurance as they walk through the journey of this life before the face of God. Study Questions follow at the end of the work.

Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, but during the early modern period they became a religious battleground. Attacked by reformers in the mid-sixteenth century because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Catholic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide Protestants due to their re-introduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming programme. Moreover, having subsequently been removed by the victorious puritans, they gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This book explores these developments, over a 150 year period, and recaptures the experience of the ordinary parishioner in this crucial period of religious change. Far from being the passive recipients of changes imposed from above, the laity are revealed as actively engaged from the early days of the Reformation, as zealous iconoclasts or their Catholic opponents - a division later translated into competing protestant views. Altars Restored integrates the worlds of theological debate, church politics and government, and parish practice and belief, which are often studied in isolation from one another. It draws from hitherto largely untapped sources, notably the surviving artefactual evidence comprising communion tables and rails, fonts, images in stained glass, paintings and plates, and examines the riches of local parish records - especially churchwardens' accounts. The result is a richly textured study of religious change at both local and national level.