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Laymen in synod: an aspect of the beginnings of synodical government in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Peter Hinchliff
Peter Hinchliff*
Affiliation:
Rhodes University, South Africa
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Extract

Even quite eminent Tractarians tended to think that, however impossible things might be in the Church of England, the colonies provided the sort of field where they could create the kind of Church in which they really believed. That Church would follow patristic patterns, of course, would be free from the nexus of establishment, and would be governed by synods. As regards South Africa they nourished particularly high hopes. Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Cape Town, was campaigning for synodical government, the creation of ecclesiastical courts to replace the Erastian Privy Council, and to check and outlaw the heresy of Bishop Colenso. It looked so very much as though this were a situation—heresiarchs and councils locked in battle—straight out of the pages of early church history. So when Gray lost his case against Colenso in the Privy Council in 1855, Dr Pusey wrote in a letter to the Churchman, ‘It is no loss to us that it is discovered that the Queen had no power to give the temporal powers which the former legal advisers of the Crown thought she could.. .The Church in South Africa, then, is free.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 7: Councils and Assemblies , 1971 , pp. 321 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1971

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References

Page No 321 Note 1 Gray, C. N., Life of Robert Cray, 1876, 11, 196 Google Scholar.

Page No 321 Note 2 Wirgman, A. T., Life of James Green, 1909, 1, viii Google Scholar.

Page No 322 Note 1 E. W. Kemp, Counsel and Consent, 1961, 172.

Page No 322 Note 2 Diocesan Library, Cape Town: some of the pamphlets have Gray’s name written on them.

Page No 322 Note 3 C. N. Gray, Life, 1, 312 ff. and nn.

Page No 323 Note 1 C. N. Gray, Life, 1, 419 ff., but Cf. Gray’s letter to Keble (in the Keble Papers, Keble College, Oxford), 17 December 1863, ‘I shall probably throw the responsibility very much on the laity themselves. If they are very anxious to come, I must invite them. If they are indifferent, they will forfeit their privilege. ’

Page No 323 Note 2 Correspondence between the Lord Bishop of Capetown and F. R. Surtees, Esq., Cape Town, 1857.

Page No 323 Note 3 Ep. xiv, 4 and Cf.xxxiv, 13.

Page No 323 Note 4 Ep. XLV, 2.

Page No 323 Note 5 Cf.Benedict XIV, , in De Synodo Diocesana, 1, 1 Google Scholar, n.b. the final sentence.

Page No 323 Note 6 See M. Deanesly, The Preconquest Church in England, 1961, 212 ff.

Page No 324 Note 1 C. N. Gray, Life, 1, 313 n.

Page No 324 Note 2 P. Hinchliff, John Wilham Colenso, 1964, 77.

Page No 325 Note 1 R. T. Davidson, The Six Lambeth Conferences, 1929, 59 f.

Page No 326 Note 1 Bishopscourt Archives, Cape Town. Letter dated 3/1/1888.

Page No 326 Note 2 See e.g. M. H. M. Wood, A Father in God, 1913, 234.

Page No 326 Note 3 Puller, F. W., Synodical Government in the Church of the Province of South Africa, Kolhapur 1911 Google Scholar.