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The Appeal to Sound Learning—I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Henry St John O.P.
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The apologetic defence of the central Anglican position, if the extremes of Anglo-Catholic papalism and Protestant fundamentalism are excepted, finch its final justification in an appeal to sound learning. The formula is Bishop Creighton’s. It was the application of this principle, he maintained, that brought about the changes made in the English Church in the sixteenth century. Not that the Church of England claims a monopoly of learning, but that it owes its present existence to the fact that the theology and devotional life of Western Christendom, of which up to the Reformation it was an integral part, had become overweighted and distorted in its development, and was maintaining an ecclesiastical system that obscured rather than illustrated the vital principles on which the Christian life is founded.

Efforts at reform from within were defeated because the logical fabric of scholastic theology on which it rested was so strong that it was difficult to deal with it in detail; it was hard to see where reform was to begin or where it was to end. Reforming efforts resulted in a sense of hopeless weariness, and at length it became apparent that reform was only possible by returning to the principles of sound learning. It was these principles that were applied during the formative years of the Reformation, not by any one great leader whose personality impressed itself upon the changes that were made, but by the long process of the aspirations which have sprung from these principles, producing by gradual evolution the formularies, and in particular the Prayer Book, from which the Anglican oudook and ethos derive.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 35 , Issue 410 , May 1954, pp. 195 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Creighton, The Church and the Nation, pp. 250–252.

2 H. Hensley Henson, The Church of England, p. 59.

3 A Catholic will not deny that the experience of the Christian community, understood in this sense, can be a true and valid experience, the work of the indwelling Spirit. But Christ gives to no community the authority to formulate and teach truth without error, save to the hierarchy of the visible Church in union with its appointed head, St Peter's successor.

4 But for an important modification of this position, vide E. C. Rich, Spiritual Authority in the Church of England, pp. 209–214.

5 Theology, May 1951, p. 184.

6 The Glass of Vision, Lecture VIII, p. 138.

7 Theology, February 1951, The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A sermon preached before the University of Oxford, in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, on 17th November, 1950, by the Revd. H. E. W. Turner, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the University of Durham and a Canon of Durham Cathedral.

8 The Resurrection of Christ. By A. M. Ramsey, Chapter IV, History and Criticism, pp. 51–57.

9 Kerygma and Myth, a theological debate by R. Bultmann and others. Edited by H. W. Bartsch and translated by R. H. Fuller; p. 220.

10 A Christian learning that insists on pushing the claims of scientific evidence beyond this point seems to be unsound, even as learning. It deals in the kind of evidence that isolates facts and treats them in abstraction from their circumstances; in this case from their significance for Christ's own mind and the minds of his followers. This was the error at the root of the nineteenth‐century criticism which set the Historic Jesus in opposition to the Christ of Faith.

11 Retrospect of an Unimportant Life, Vol. III, ‘An open letter to a young padre’, pp. 380–382.