Sacerdotalism and Civil Society

Sirota, Brent S.

doi:10.12987/yale/9780300167108.003.0005

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“…84 In the face of withering anticlericalism, Nelson and other Anglican high churchmen advanced an aggressive sacerdotalism, which affirmed the indispensability of the ordained priesthood and its sacramental ministrations to the salvific mission of the Christian church. 85 As Nelson bluntly put it, that "there could be no Church without Priests." 86 Nelson cannily reserved his meditations on the Christian priesthood for his considerations of the four rounds of Ember Days in the Anglican liturgical calendar.…”

Section: Church Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Robert Nelson's Festivals and Fasts and the Problem of the Sacred in Early Eighteenth-Century England

Sirota¹

2015

Church Hist

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The pious layman Robert Nelson's 1704 tract A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England was arguably the most popular and important Anglican devotional work of the eighteenth century. Ostensibly a simple guidebook to the Anglican liturgical calendar, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was, in fact, a précis of Anglican theology and ecclesiology. What has been less clearly recognized, however, was the extent to which Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was also a sharply polemical work. This article considers Nelson's tract as a defense of “the sacred” as demarcating a socially and cognitively distinct sphere of life. Nelson's work takes great pains to maintain the spaces, offices, festivals and personnel of the church as “set apart” from the commerce of everyday life; and nearly every page exudes a fear of encroachment on the sacred. Nelson's conception of the sacred, and the manifold threats to its differentiation, provokes a reconsideration of the prevalent narratives of religious transformation in the early English enlightenment. Most importantly, it underscores the serious limitations of the current debate over secularization in this period.

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Section: Church Historymentioning

confidence: 99%