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. It is not the same in a large denomination as in a

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.   At his s

Arthur Bury 1624-1714 Rector of Exeter College, Oxford Bury, a vicar’s son, went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1639, aged 15. He was awarded the degree of BA in 1642 and subsequently elected a Fellow of the college. He was a strong royalist and during the civil war helped in the defence of Oxford for the King. Consequently, in 1648, he was expelled from the city and lived out the remainder of the war and the Cromwellian peace in relative quiet with his father in Devonshire. He married Mary Southcott, a widow, and became Rector of Duloe in Cornwall. As a Royalist he was turned out of this living in 1649 and returned to it after the war. The restoration of the monarchy also meant the restoration of his fellowship, and Bury returned to his College. In May 1662 he was elected Rector [head] of the College, on the recommendation of Archbishop Tillotson and the explicit instruction of King Charles II despite the Fellows’ ingrained resentment of external interference in their

This blog is focused on modern heresy in Christian churches in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales from the Act of Toleration (1689) to the present. My starting question was: "what's the point of heresy in a tolerant era?" I have yet to find a single and sufficient answer. ( Why I began to study heresy ) To date, I have identified around 150 individuals who meet my dual criteria  that : 1. they have been formally accused of heresy  and  2. some form of official action followed.  I am confident that other cases will continue to come to light. Some of these accusations and trials are well known to historians. Others have been forgotten because they were - and are - wholly marginal: there has been no need or desire to remember them.  Sometimes there have been clusters of cases as church leaders determined to expel a group or, perhaps more accurately, the ideas the group has expounded, from the boundaries of that church.  But the majority of accusations have been agains