James Clark is the author of The Witness of Beauty and Other Essays, and the Book Review Editor at The North American Anglican. His writing has appeared in Cranmer Theological Journal, Journal of Classical Theology, and American Reformer, as well as other publications.
That the Resurrection is central to Christianity is well known, so it is unsurprising that Browne comments on its centrality in his chapter on Article IV: The Resurrection is in many respects the key-stone of the Christian Faith. On the truth of it depends the truth of the Gospel; for it was to this great…
As discussed previously, Browne argues that “Hell” in Article III should be understood as “Hades,” the place of departed spirits, and does not refer to “Gehenna,” the realm of damned souls. However, even simply stating that Christ entered Hades broadly rather than Gehenna specifically is not uncontroversial. Browne notes that Calvin argued Christ’s descent into…
The popular conception of life after death—inasmuch as the idea is still entertained by the average person—undoubtedly draws on Christianity, but in a muddled fashion. Confusion on the subject is so pervasive that even professing Christians are liable to use terms such as “Heaven” and “Hell” in ways that do not conform to biblical teaching….
As we have seen, Article I affirms God is “without…passions.” To say God is without passions, i.e., impassible, means that God is not susceptible to being harmed or deprived of any good that is constitutive of his well-being. He is never acted upon so as to become disposed in a manner contrary to his well-being…
In his discussion of Article I, Browne says we can infer that the Son is God because “the peculiar attributes of God are ascribed to Him,” including the fact that “he knows the thoughts, yea, all things.” At the same time, concerning Article II he writes that the fact Christ had a perfect human soul…
The question of whether, or in what sense, the Son can rightly be characterized as “subordinate” to the Father has been a contentious topic in recent decades. The controversy reached a fever pitch in 2016 with an explosion of online posts and exchanges, in which many self-identified evangelicals defended what has been variously termed “eternal…
What makes the use of reason vital in arriving at the catholic doctrine of the Trinity is that the Bible does not contain anything like the sort of explicit trinitarian formulas found in the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds.[1] Indeed, anti-trinitarian heretics make much of the fact that the word “Trinity” does not appear anywhere in…
In the early days of the church the doctrine of the Trinity soon became fraught with controversy, as anyone with even a basic sense of Christian history is aware. When consulting Browne’s historical survey of this controversy, one theme becomes apparent: in all times and places, perversion of the doctrine of God—and the doctrine of…
If you turn to the Litany of any American Book of Common Prayer, you will find among the deprecations (prayers for deliverance) the following: From all inordinate and sinful affections; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us.[1] The corresponding deprecation in the English Book of…
Bisschop’s Bench: Contours of Arminian Conformity in the Church of England, c. 1674‒1742. By Samuel Fornecker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 256 pp. $83 (cloth). There is, Samuel Fornecker writes, a historiographical tradition that says the post-Restoration Church of England was a “via media” characterized by “a distinct ‘Anglican’ identity in contrast to the…