What Are You Reading This Week?

By Robin G. Jordan

I am reading two books – one online at Internet Archive, Francis Carolus Eeles’Traditional Ceremonial and Customs Connected with the Scottish Liturgy, the other, Walter Thomas Conner’s Christian Doctrine, a book that a friend loaned me and which I have just gotten around to reading. He was a student at Mid-Continent University in Mayfield, Kentucky and graduated just before it closed due to financial troubles. He was enrolled in its Christian and Biblical Studies program.

Traditional Ceremonial and Customs Connected with the Scottish Liturgy I began reading almost from the beginning of the book. Several pages from Chapter I are missing. I found them in an edition of Eeles’ book posted on Google Books.

Christian Doctrine I started at Chapter X, about two-thirds of the way through the book. I will sometimes read the second half of a book before I read the first half, starting with the part of the book that interests me the most.

A number of observations that Percy Dearmer made in connection with the American and Scottish liturgies in Illustrations of the Liturgy and other works, a longstanding interest in the Non-Jurors and their influence upon Anglican worship, and the recent developments in the Scottish Episcopal Church, formerly the Episcopal Church in Scotland, has prompted me to do further reading on the history of the Church in Scotland and the Scottish liturgy.

Neither Dearmer nor Eeles were evangelicals. Both regarded the practices that the “Romanizing ceremonialists” in the Oxford Movement introduced into the English and Scottish churches as not consistent with the ancient traditions of either church and in the case of the Scottish church with the Non-Juror tradition of that church, which was greatly influenced by the practices of the primitive Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.

According to Dearmer, the lack of an Ornaments Rubric or a canon regulating ornaments and ceremonial in the American church, coupled with the strong influence of the “Romanizing ceremonialists,” resulted in liturgical chaos in the American Church. The dual English and Scottish heritage of the American Prayer Book was disregarded and the post-Tridentian innovations of the Roman Catholic Church in doctrine and worship substituted in its place.

To Continuing Anglicans using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and faithful to its doctrine and usages, the dual English and Scottish heritage of the American Prayer Book should be a subject of particular interest because this heritage shaped the American Prayer Book. I would hazard that the rites and services of the 1928 Prayer Book cannot be appreciated to their full extent except within the context of this heritage.

My motives for reading Christian Doctrine is that it was used as a theological text book in the Mid-Continent University’s Biblical and Christian Studies program. I was curious about what had been taught at Mid-Continent before its closure. Its author was a professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas for thirty-one years. The Reformed Reader posted the following biographical information about Dr. Conner, excerpted from Timothy George and David S. Dockery’s Baptist Theologians.

Both Conner's life and theology were grounded upon an abiding confidence in the validity of evangelical Christian conversion. He was baptised by W.M. Reynolds and received into the fellowship of Harmony Baptist Church at Caps, TX.

As a professor at Southwestern Theological Seminary, Conner used A.H. Strong's Systematic Theology. From 1918 until 1922 he used The Christian Religion in its Doctrinal Expression by E.Y. Mullins. In 1922, Conner began to use his own notes in mimeographed form and in 1926 shifted to his book, A System of Christian Doctrine. In later years he required the reading of his Revelation and God and The Gospel of Redemption. Conner basically agreed with the position of John Calvin and Emil Brunner that general revelation is not salvific but the basis for human accountability and preparatory for the revelation in Jesus Christ. Following Strong, he did not attempt to espouse a specific theory as to the process of divine inspiration of the Bible, and, following Mullins, he utilized the concept of progressive revelation.

Redemption, a major theme in Conner's theology, includes election, the work of Christ, becoming a Christian, the Christian life, the church, and last things. But it is not the self-election of believers by repentance and faith or merely God's foreknowing who would repent and believe. God is responsible for faith, but not unbelief. Hence, Conner has been classified under "modified Calvinistic predestination."

Conner taught one general resurrection of all humans at the time of the second coming of Jesus, whereas in 1945 he, following T. P. Stafford, inclined toward the view that resurrection bodies are received at death and resurrection itself will accompany the second coming. In 1924 Conner inclined toward postmillennialism, but in 1945 he identified himself generally with Amillennialism.

I am interested in comparing his views on faith and unbelief with those of Henreich Bullinger who co-authored the First Helvetic Confession, who counseled and encouraged the English Reformers, whose Decades served as a theological textbook for the Elizabethan Church, and who is sometimes described as a leading light of the “other Reformed theology.”