RICHARD HOOKER 1554-1600
“God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever
we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or
our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright."
Hooker helped to define Anglicanism theologically as a
church continuous with historic Catholicism, but critical of both Puritanism on
one side and Rome on the other. He defended the historic episcopate and the
Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He also defended strongly the unity
of the church and the secular state, a position that is no longer a common
theme in Anglican theology.
“Of all the spirits, I believe the
spirit of judging is the worst, and it has had the rule of me, I cannot tell
you how dreadfully and how long... This, I find has more hindered my progress
in love and gentleness than all things else. I never knew what the words,
"Judge not that ye be not judged," meant before; now they seem to me
some of the most awful, necessary, and beautiful in the whole Word of God.”
“The truth is that every man is in Christ; the
condemnation of every man is that he will not own the truth, he will not act as
if it were true, that except he were joined with Christ, he could not think,
breathe, live a single hour.”
Fredrick Denison Maurice converted to the Church of
England from Nonconformity, and was a strong exponent of 19th
Century “Incarnational” theology. He was an outspoken advocate for social
justice and democratic socialism, and was regarded with suspicion by the
intellectual and ecclesiastical elite of his time.
Charles Gore, DD (22 January 1853 – 17 January 1932) was an
English theologian and Anglican bishop. Born in 1853, Gore became one of
the most influential of Anglican theologians. He helped reconcile the Church to
some aspects of biblical criticism and scientific discovery, yet was Catholic
in his interpretation of the faith and sacraments
… in 1890 a stir was created by the publication, under
his editorship, of Lux Mundi, a series of essays by different writers,
attempting to bring the Christian creed into a right relation to the modern
growth of knowledge, scientific, historic, critical, and to modern problems
of politics and ethics.
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William Porcher
DuBose (April 11, 1836-August 18, 1918) was an American priest and
theologian in the Episcopal Church in the United
States. He spent most of his career as a professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is remembered on August
18 on the Episcopal Calendar of Lesser
Feasts and Fasts. His middle name, Porcher, is pronounced as if
it were spelled por-shay.
DuBose’s rigorous incarnational
theology set him at odds with the prevailing revivalist mentality of American
religion, particularly in the South. One of his most provocative proposals was
the idea that even Satan might someday repent and be received back into the
kingdom of heaven.
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1875-1941
“In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the
beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes
on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses
and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the
disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of
the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a
diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable,
attainable, alive.”
― Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and
Development of Spiritual Consciousness
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ROWAN WILLIAMS, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. B. 1950
In
a careful, academic way, Bishop Rowan, along with such intellectual
heavyweights as Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is calling us
to a new appreciation for "the profundity of surfaces", to what
Ricoeur has famously called a "second naïveté," and to do so without
compromising a commitment to scientific method and the achievements of
modernity. This calls for "the suspicion of suspicion," a kind of
ultra-skepticism that leads to something like faith.
Perhaps we need not"...suggests Williams, "...be left with the
bald alternativest of false naïveté...and manipulative reductionism."
Ricoeur leads us, he believes, to a place of "fruitful and irresoluble
puzzlement."
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