An article reviewing the work of Eric Mascall and suggesting that he is developing an Anglican nouvelle théologie. The importance of Mascall’s work on Christ and the Church is also explored.

Discipleship is a key topic for the worldwide Anglican Church. Approaches to Christian learning have varied over the centuries. The time has come to liberate Christian formation, education, and training from the constraints of the clergy and laity dualistic narrative, where lay people are defined negatively as Christians who are not clergy, not ordained, and not qualified. Inequality of discipleship exists in this clergy/laity disposition. The laity need to be educated. The paper explores the biblical, theological, and educational background for the need to emancipate Christian learning in parishes from the ‘lay’ era, with its limitations on Christian growth, to another ‘discipleship’ era where equality of discipleship exists, like the early church prior to around 96 ce. Disciples know that they are learners and ministers and engage in Christian learning as people who are ordained through baptism-confirmation, commissioned through Holy Communion, and qualified through their Christian faith, abilities, and skills, uniquely participating in the missio dei. The implications are discussed and illustrated in three practical examples of ‘emancipatory space’: A Learning Community Approach; Theology and the People of God; and Democratizing Christian Learning. The Church is called to help people become and be disciples, not laity!

Many Christian groups and churches have been forced to recognize that they have been complicit in behaviour which has betrayed the gospel. How then is the church to address the historical reality of being an abusive healer? The image of the bronze serpent (Num. 21.4-9; 2 Kgs 18.4; Jn 3.14) offers an ambiguous image which may reveal the reality of the church as both a source of abuse and trauma as well as an instrument of healing within a pattern of restorative justice.

Eric Mascall and Karl Barth shared a common concern with the influence of liberal Protestantism on their churches in England and Germany. They agreed this problem was best addressed through the lens of natural theology. Yet, while for Mascall a Thomistically informed understanding of natural theology was the best way to counteract liberal Protestantism’s influence on the Church, for Barth, natural theology was to blame for the Church’s confusion. The concern this paper raises was Barth’s sharp delineation between human reason and divine revelation in the end, complicit with the ontological duality of modernity that was the basis of the liberal Protestantism he was rejecting? By dealing with modernity on its own terms, Barth undermined the capacity of the Church’s ministry of Word and Sacrament to be effective agents of personal transformation. Whereas Mascall’s realistic ontology not only repudiates the idealist foundations of liberal Protestantism but also offers the Church the necessary ontology foundation for understanding its ministry of Word and Sacrament as effective embodiments of God’s transforming grace.

E. L. Mascall devoted much of his early scholarly career to developing accounts of analogy and natural theology grounded in the study both of Thomas Aquinas and in his Thomist successors. This essay examines Mascall’s account of analogy in relation to other views on analogy in his day, finding that in the 1950s, ‘image’ becomes at least as important a category for Mascall as ‘analogy’. Even while beginning from Thomist metaphysical standpoints and motivated by Thomist considerations, Mascall develops an account of thinking and speaking about God that diverges from his Thomist contemporaries, resembling more the thought of his ‘para-Thomist’ friend and colleague, Austin Farrer.

Manning Clark is regarded as a pioneer of Australian national history. His output has been unequalled but it has provoked a vigorous division of opinions concerning its accuracy and the all-pervading thesis that Australia, to achieve its true national self-perception, must throw off the British heritage that included the baleful influence of the Anglicanism in which Clark was raised by his priest father. Here the work of three key scholarly critics, namely Dr George Shaw, Professor Brian Fletcher and Professor Alan Atkinson is evaluated, all of whom are Anglican historians of Australia. They have made very different assessments of the evolution of Australian national identity and the permanence of the British heritage. Shaw, as a former student of Clark, has assessed his mentor’s work not as rigorous history but essentially as ‘sentimental humanism’. As well, the opportunity is taken to reflect on the two extensive biographies of Clark, namely by Brian Matthews and Mark McKenna. Both these men were educated as Roman Catholics at a time when Rome was decidedly allergic to the idea of ecumenical outreach. Consequently, it is argued here that an accurate assessment of Manning Clark’s oeuvre is yet to be accomplished.

The timeless and unchanging nature of God was defended by Dr. Eric Mascall throughout his books. He argued against process theology, and in particular the works of mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who was one of its foremost exponents. In his books, Mascall defended the distinction between our temporal and created nature and God’s divine and uncreated nature as found in historic theology. In a manner suited to his learning, he discussed the implications of modern physics for theology.

As Nigeria grew as an independent nation, the role of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) began to evolve, reflecting the needs of a burgeoning multi-ethnic society. This transformation is particularly evident in the Diocese on the Niger – the first indigenous Anglican diocese in Western Africa – a topic of debate within various factions of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion. These contentions – centred on historical accuracy, heritage and primacy – mirror broader socio-political disputes concerning the Igbo people’s history and reveal postwar ethnocentric trends in Nigeria. We propose that the strategic positioning of the Diocese on the Niger was part of the CMS mission’s expansion plan into Islamic-dominated Western and Northern Nigeria. Igboland, with its geographical significance and potential as a fertile ground for the gospel, was a deliberate choice. The debates around these contested viewpoints and legacies epitomize the societal disputes over historical interpretation and its theological implications – extending beyond the events themselves and prompting reflection on the embodiment of Christ’s teachings in navigating socio-political complexities. These discussions go beyond religious or geographical disagreements – they symbolize a broader struggle to understand and interpret the past.

Coronations in Great Britain previously offered an occasion for national civic and spiritual renewal. However, the recent crowning of Charles III threw a spotlight on some of the deepening dissonance, diversity and divisions within British society. This paper is an ‘in principle’ argument for change and development. As the clamour for constitutional reform in the United Kingdom continues, and the awkwardness of Church of England bishops sitting in the House of Lords becomes more apparent, the time is ripe to reconsider disestablishment. In particular, the power and privilege of one denomination over all others is interrogated in relation to a kenotic ecclesiology, and which may now require the intentional divesting of kingly power: not clinging to status any longer, but self-emptying and embracing equality.

Given as the Pusey House Recollections Lecture 2023.

This article explores Eric Mascall’s contribution to theodicy and (possibly) providence. It offers a taxonomy of Christian responses to the problem of evil: those which see suffering as instrumental to the purposes of God, those which see suffering as inevitable within the purposes of God, and those which see suffering as inimical to the purposes of God. It offers a critique of all three families of such responses. It then locates Mascall’s theodicy on that ‘map’. It argues that Mascall’s proposal, if accepted, removes the main argument against the inimical family of responses, which it sees as fitting best with the healing ministry of Jesus, as being most unambiguously committed to the goodness of God, and as being the most pastorally sensitive of the three categories. It also raises, without advocating, the possibility that all divine action may be indirect, thus safeguarding the non-coerciveness of God without compromising eschatological hope.

This article builds on the first in the trilogy, ‘What’s in a Name? An Examination of Current Definitions of Resource Churches’, by evaluating narratives in current literature about the origins of resource churches. These will be assessed according to the criteria, highlighted through the perspective of Foucault and Arendt on origin stories, of believability in their depiction of historical events, application to the manifest properties of contemporary resource churches, teleological purpose, and attentiveness to conflict. The origin, or creation, stories to be examined particularly consider the formation and development of resource churches in relation to the first century and Anglo-Saxon England, as well as following the start of the parish system.

This article argues that E.L. Mascall develops the eschatology of C.S. Lewis to answer three common critiques of the consensual doctrine of hell. First, Mascall argues that human persons are capable of refusing the love of God because their potential reciprocal love depends on a freedom to give the self, or refuse to do so, in an indissoluble union. Second, the perfection of the new heavens and new earth is not a numerical perfection, and the numerical imperfection of finite creation demonstrates that this is not God’s goal in creation. Third, human nature and Christian revelation reveal that persons are made with the capacity to receive grace and participate in glory, but this reception and participation cannot be coerced. In order to test the plausibility of this position, I present David Bentley Hart’s critique of Lewis’s particularism and Mascall’s answer to such objections.

Confirmation, one of the seven sacraments in Lombard’s schedule, was retained by the English Reformers, but not as a sacrament and without any distinctive quasi-sacramental grace attributed to it. It became a ceremony to complete the catechizing process for children who, having been baptized as infants, were at the age of discretion now to come to holy communion. The reformers thought that a post-baptismal laying on of hands had been practised from apostolic times, and so commended the ceremony for their church practice. This requirement enabled later generations, such as Gregory Dix, to bid up its significance, teaching that confirmation completes baptism, and thus that water-baptism is of itself incomplete. The underlying premise has been that from the apostles onwards a requisite second initiatory ceremony invariably followed baptism. Both Bible and early church history contradict this thesis, not least the eight post-apostolic authors of the first two centuries who mention baptism. All eight testify to the use of water without any further ceremony. Thus, any insistence upon a two-stage sacramental initiation today lacks historical foundations; Anglicans ought to review residual texts and practices which reflect such a pattern.

Reared in antebellum South Carolina, Peter Fayssoux Stevens was a typical white southerner until Reconstruction. He came of age in the 1840s and 1850s and fought for the Southern Confederacy during the Civil War. Before his military service commenced in 1861, he was ordained a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church (PEC) of North America. After Appomattox, as Black communicants deserted white Protestant churches in droves, Stevens believed that they might return to the PEC if they could choose their leaders and decide fundamental questions affecting their parishes. When white church leaders refused to follow Stevens’s recommendations, he left the PEC and joined the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC). He spent more than four decades after the war ministering to Black communicants. Although Stevens was not a champion of civil rights, his career provides a compelling case study of a white clergyman who evolved from a traditional southerner and zealous Confederate soldier to an advocate for Black communicants in the church.