Modern British Heresy

My working definition of heresy Heresy is a judgement, arrived at after due process, that certain specified teaching which purports to accord with the teaching and standards of a particular church is adjudged incompatible and unacceptable. More...   The two-part test for inclusion in this study That 1) there should have been a public (or publicised) accusation of heresy, however phrased, and that the accusation was followed 2) by some form of formal action.   More...   Each Church, and thence Christianity as a whole, is an imagined community   More...   Heresy and sacrifice   More...  The possibility of heresy is integral to church life Insofar as a church is constituted by its beliefs it is vulnerable to those beliefs being misinterpreted or misrepresented    More...   Heresy is contextual The primary context is the denomination: heresy in a presbyterian church is not the same in substance or process as heresy in an episcopal church. I...

Arthur Whalley was a master in the Free  Grammar School and Lecturer in the Parish Church of Kington, Herefordshire [ present day website] . (The school’s trustees included the Bishop of Hereford.) He was an ordained priest in the Church of England and by 1833 had drifted away from orthodox Anglicanism. His case was first heard on 13 February 1834 in Hereford Consistory Court (the Bishop’s court) before Chancellor Taylor. Twenty-one charges were laid against him, though these were reduced in the process of adjudication and can perhaps be summarised as two: that, by preaching in public places and by the content of that teaching, he had dissociated himself from the Church of England; and that he no longer conformed to the worship of that church.  Whalley accepted as fact the allegations put to him, and wanted the matter dealt with quickly as the court itself, in his view, “was of Anti-christ” and, despite having “the head of all power” on his side, it would find against him. ...