Why I Became an Anglican

2010

Fig. 7.1. Timothy Mather Cooley served as pastor of Granville's First Congregational Church for sixty years. By 1845. he had admitted more than 330 people to fu ll communion. Courtesy of Denison University. MODERN C HRISTIANITY TO 1900 meetings, correspondence with colleagues, sermon notes, and most important, brief autobiographical narratives submitted by candidates for full church membership. Cooley's endorsements on this last group warrant careful scrutiny. During the eighteenth century, parishioners seeking access to the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper in New England's Congregational churches were required to compose a brief written statement in which they described their personal beliefs and religio us experiences. Jedidiah Smith initially had referred to the short narratives as "Relations"; but four decades later, Cooley wrote the word "Experiences" beneath his predecessor's original notations. What was the significance of the changing terminology? The question becomes even knottier when we stop to consider that during the seventeenth century, Puritan clergymen called these same church-admission testimonies "confessions." Adding to the confusion, modern historians have classified this distinctive genre of New England religious literature as "conversion narratives;' but even a cursory examination of their theological arguments, autobiographical content, and physical appearance suggests that their meaning and significance changed dramatically over the two centuries in which they were employed as a formal test to gauge the spiritual fitness of prospective church members. This chapter examines the shifting language of conversion in New England Congregationalism-the bastion of Puritan culture in North America-from the period of settlement in the 1630s to the eve of the Civil War. Evidence is drawn from a database of more than a thousand church-admission narratives from nearly three dozen communities scattered across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. 1 Throughout this period, most Congregational ministers remained committed to a Calvinist theology that emphasized innate human depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace. Yet the importance of conversion-the sacred calculus through which God winnowed saints

2016

Journal of Anglican Studies, 2008

Fred Hoyle was one of the most distinguished astrophysicists of the twentieth century. In 1957 he published a science fiction book, The Black Cloud. This was the story of a black cloud of immense intelligence that settled itself between the sun and the earth, gradually freezing the earth. A special group of highly intelligent scientists was set up in a country house in Nortonstowe, England and with highly complex computers tried to communicate with the cloud. This did not work and one scientist connected the information stream directly to his brain and died. His brain was not up to handling the material. While the scientists reviewed this development the gardener, a simple person, wandered into the radio shack and put the earphones on and conducted a conversation with the cloud. He was able to converse and obtained an extensive story about how the cloud had been looking for the beginning of the universe, and had searched for some super nova which had occurred in the vicinity of the universe. Fred Hoyle, with tongue in cheek, was trying to say that the way in which the physicists had learned to think was inadequate. A different kind of thinking was required to communicate with this different and more powerful intelligence. Communication with others is often made difficult by what we bring unstated and often unknowingly to the conversation. The easy option is simply to disagree and walk away. The harder, and in the church the more appropriate, option is to argue. Argument is disagreement in embrace. It is the determination to find with our fellow Christians some way of loving each other through times of division and conflict. Anglicans around the world are experiencing just how difficult this can be. Yet the vocation to love is central to our witness and to our own integrity as Christians and Anglicans. It is one of the very great strengths of the recent IATDC report Communion, Conflict and Hope that it places this aspect of our Anglican faith centre stage and points to the eschatological hope in Christ that sustains such a vocation. In their central argument they strike a remarkable note of practical and theological realism in the history of the church. There