Five Catholick Letters Concerning The Means Of Knowing With Absolute Certainty What Faith Now Held Was Taught By Christ

Five Catholick Letters Concerning the Means of Knowing with Absolute Certainty, what Faith, Now Held, was Taught by Christ

Saving the Church of England

On his second Atlantic voyage, George Whitefield read lengthy quotations from a work of a deceased English cleric. Writing in his journal, he exclaimed, “[These words] deserve to be written in Letters of Gold.” Whitefield’s associate, the American Jonathan Edwards, concurred. That cleric was John Edwards, an anomaly in several respects: a self-proclaimed Calvinist who conformed to the Church of England at a time when most Calvinists left in the Great Ejection of 1662. In leading a public debate against prominent intellectuals of his day, including John Locke and Samuel Clarke, over the definition of orthodox Christianity, he allied himself with the same church leaders who decried his Calvinist theology. Edwards retired in his mid-fifties due to “ill health”—a retirement in which he wrote over forty scholarly books. At the heart of his concern was the unity and doctrinal orthodoxy of the church, themes over which contentious disputes have reverberated throughout church history. Saving the Church of England tells the story of why the church was in trouble and of John Edwards’s heroic effort to save it.

Bible and Novel

The Victorian novel acquired greater cultural centrality just as the authority of the scriptures and of traditional religious teaching seemed to be declining. Did the novel supplant the Bible? The novelists often adopted or participated in a broadly progressive narrative of social change which can be seen as a secular replacement for the theological narrative of 'salvation history' and the waning authority of biblical narrative. Victorian fiction seems in some ways to enact the process of secularization. But contemporary religious resurgence in various parts of the world and postmodern scepticism about grand narratives have challenged and complicated the conventional view of secularization as an irreversible process, an inevitable 'disenchantment of the world' which is an aspect and function of the grand narrative of modernization. Such developments raise new questions about apparently post-Christian Victorian fiction. In our increasingly secular society novel-reading is now more popular than Bible-reading. Serious novels are often taken more seriously than scripture. Norman Vance looks at how this may have come about as an introduction to four best-selling late-Victorian novelists: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Ward and Rider Haggard. Does the novel in their hands take the place of the Bible? Can apparently secular novels still have religious significance? Can they make new imaginative sense of some of the religious and moral themes and experiences to be found in the Bible? Do Eliot and her successors anticipate some of the insights of modern theology and contemporary investigations of religious experience? Do they call in question long-standing rumours of the death of God and the triumph of the secular? Bible and Novel develops a new context for reading later Victorian fiction, using it to illuminate the increasingly perplexed and confusing issue of 'secularization' and recent negotiations of the 'post-secular'.