Examines the pursuit of orthodoxy, and its consequences for the history of Christianity.
Christianity is a hugely diverse and quarrelsome family of faiths, but most Christians have nevertheless set great store by orthodoxy – literally, ‘right opinion’ – even if they cannot agree what that orthodoxy should be. The notion that there is a ‘catholic’, or universal, Christian faith – that which, according to the famous fifth-century formula, has been believed everywhere, at all times and by all people – is itself an act of faith: to reconcile it with the historical fact of persistent division and plurality requires a constant effort. It also requires a variety of strategies, from confrontation and exclusion, through deliberate choices as to what is forgotten or ignored, to creative or even indulgent inclusion. In this volume, seventeen leading historians of Christianity ask how the ideal of unity has clashed, negotiated, reconciled or coexisted with the historical reality of diversity, in a range of historical settings from the early Church through the Reformation era to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These essays hold the huge variety of the Christian experience together with the ideal of orthodoxy, which Christians have never (yet) fully attained but for which they have always striven; and they trace some of the consequences of the pursuit of that ideal for the history of Christianity.
Table of Content
1. ‘Jewish Christianity’ in antiquity: meaningless category or heuristic irritant?
James Carleton Paget
2. ‘
Sola Fide’: The Wrong Slogan?
Morna D. Hooker
3. Both Cromwellian and Augustinian: The influence of Thomas Cromwell on reform within the early modern English Austin Friars
Anik Laferrière
4. Lex, Rex, and Sex: The Bigamy of Philipp of Hesse and the Lutheran Recourse to Natural Law
Korey D. Maas
5. The Authority of Scripture in Reformation Anglicanism: Then and Now
Ashley Null
6. Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Post-Reformation
Euan Cameron
7. Profanity and Piety in the Church Porch: The Place of Transgression in Early Modern England
Ethan Shagan
8. Writing on the Walls: Word and Image in the Post-Reformation English Church
Felicity Heal
9. The Myth of the Church of England
Alec Ryrie
10. Mysticism, orthodoxy and Reformed identity before the English Revolution: the case of John Everard
Sarah Apetrei
11. Sacrilege and the Sacred in England’s Second Reformation, 1640-1660
Judith Maltby
12. ‘I had not the patience to be quiet’: Arthur Bury and
The Naked Gospel
Alison Dight
13. ‘A Soul-Corrupting Indifferentism’: The Intellectual Development of Benjamin Henry Latrobe
Jonathan Yonan
14. Newman, Dogma and Freedom in the Church
Eamon Duffy
15. ‘Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?’ Reconsidering Religion and the British Soldier
Michael Snape
16. King James Vulgate
Ellie Gabarowski-Shafer
17. The Myth of the Anglican Communion?
Hannah Cleugh
About the author
ALEC RYRIE is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University.
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