Modern British Heresy

Index to theory pages <previous: Church as an imagined community I wish to tread gingerly here. It may be that Rene Girard's notion of sacrifice can shed some light on some cases of heresy. (Wiki: Rene Girard ) I don't pretend to understand Girard very deeply, though I have read some of his work, but I was taken by (a limited grasp of) his reconstruction of primitive sacrifice as a continuing - occasional - element in social relationships, not least in religion. My sparse summary is that, in circumstances of discontent, people look for someone to blame: a scapegoat ( Wiki ).  At times, in primitive societies, generalised discontent - whatsoever its cause - would become fixed on a particular individual: someone must be to blame for the mess we're in . This someone could be at the top or the periphery of the community, but either way the sense might grow that we'd all be better off without them. In this context, the key elements of sacrifice (as opposed to murder) were

Index to theory pages <Previous:  Criteria for inclusion on this site Each Church, and thence Christianity as a whole, is an imagined community   Imagined community Churches are imagined communities in the sense used in Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book on nationhood , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.  [ Wiki ] Just as a nation is imagined as an entity by both its citizens and outsiders so too is a church. Members will never know or even hear of almost all other members and yet consider themselves and those strangers as constitutive parts of the same body. M embers hip implies an expectation of shared  belief, culture, language and understandings . E ach member holds and enacts a mental image of mutual affinity which – however attenuated in practice - is nonetheless greater than the divisions between them. C ommonality is strengthened by internal difference and disputes. Contention and disagreement are only important if all are strugglin

Ramsden Street Chapel, Huddersfield, was independent and associated with the Congregational Union. It  had been in existence from at least 1825 and was governed according to a trust deed (created in 1849) which gave responsibility for buildings and church life to 21 trustees. The deed specified that the chapel was for the purpose of worship according to the teaching of Pædo-Baptists (those who baptised infants).   Appended to the trust deed was a 10-point statement of beliefs which “were all in harmony with Calvinism, and some of them were distinctly Calvinistic.” But chapel leaders had not seen this as a means to exclude anyone and had been open and welcoming, accepting of a wide range of views. When a number of Weslyans seceded from the Huddersfield circuit many joined the Ramsden Street Chapel. They were welcomed because they were Christian with no further test. Their theology was Arminian ( wiki ), not Calvinist ( wiki ) but it did not seem to have been a source of friction. The