Saturday, February 19, 2011

Reasonable Christian: The True Profession of the Gospel: Augustus Toplady and Reclaiming Our Reformed Foundations


Anglo-Reformed Evangelicals will appreciate the work of Lee Gatiss in this concise survey of the Reformed theological tradition in the Church of England from the time of the English Reformation up to the eighteenth century Arminian and Calvinist controversies between John Wesley and George Whitefield and between Wesley and Augustus Toplady. The material comes from Gatiss' studies for a serious of lectures given for the Church Society's Fellowship of Word and Spirit Conference in 2009. The lectures then served to inspired Gatiss toward this focus in his thesis for a master of theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He did his undergraduate work in the United Kingdom at Evangelical theological schools at New College, Oxford and Oak Hill, London.

What I particularly like about this book is Reverend Gatiss' irenic tone while at the same time making pointedly critical observations about the state of the Anglican church primarily in the United Kingdom; his observations apply with equal ultimacy to the Anglican Communion around the world. He begins with an assessment of the modern situation in the Evangelical and Anglican movement and how it relates to the more latitudinarian and liberal parties as well as the Anglo-Catholic and Tractarian parties within Anglicanism. In particular the controversies over the biblical, moral and ethical stances taken by the Global South against theological relativism and pan sexuality in the more “civilized” provinces in the U.K., U.S.A. and Canada has heated things up considerably. Gatiss describes this conflict as a midlife crisis....

To read more, click here.

1 comment:

Daniel Stoddart said...

Although I am very much in favour of the recovery of the Anglican
Formularies and their application to the modern Church, and express my overall approval of this summary, I'd like to point out one small, but significant, quibble.

The author states: also argues strongly that the British delegation to the Synod of Dort (1611-1618) shows the English Church had a vested interest in Reformed theology and represented a tradition committed to both double predestination and particular atonement, although Gatiss does concede that some of the delegates were likely moderates on those issues. (Pp. 18-20).

Does Gatiss really say that some of the English delegates to the Synod of Dort were "likely" moderates? If so, I think he should correct this to a definitive.

It is abundantly clear from the sources that John Davenant, Samuel Ward, Thomas Goad, Joseph Hall, Matthius Martinius, Ludwig Crocius, and Johann Heinrich Alsted were collectively committed to a broad Calvinism, yet specifically rejected limited atonement.

http://spindleworks.com/library/brj/brj_Nov99_english.htm