Modern British Heresy

Principal John Caird It took less than a month from the first intimation that an accusation of heresy could be laid against John Caird, Principal of Glasgow University, to its evaporation. The aftermath played out for a couple of months longer.  Intimation of a charge On January 7 1874, Mr William Wallace, an elder at Kirkintilloch, told an ordinary meeting of the Glasgow Synod of the Church of Scotland that he would like to see Rev Caird, Principal of Glasgow University, summoned to the following meeting. He wished to discuss Caird's sermon on “Unbelief” which he had recently preached in Govan and, slightly modified, in Dundee. These had been reported in the Glasgow News on December 22, 1873 and January 5, 1874. Wallace  had already been in communication with Professor Caird by letter. He had suggested to Caird that the tenet that a person was not responsible for his religious belief was at the root of his teaching; Caird had denied that he held such a doctrine. Despite this denia

   This case meets my criteria for inclusion in this study in a way that is unique. My tests are (1) that there should have been an accusation of heresy followed (2) by some form of official response. In every other case I have come across the official response is addressed to the accused - in this case the person who instigated the accusation was the person prosecuted. Exonerated in his first trial, he was condemned in the second.   Part of the context, though beyond the stretch of my focus on heresy, was several court cases in the same year and earlier, on issues of worship and ritual as part of the continuing civil war in the church initially sparked by the Oxford Movement in the 1830s.      Background In the summer of 1874 Rev Flavel Cook, incumbent of Christ Church, Clifton in Bristol, gave a series of sermons on the nature of rationalism. Amongst his congregation and audience was Mr Jenkins, a barrister of independent means. The men and their families lived a few houses apart on

Matthew Caffyn (1628-1714)   Memorial window to Caffyn in Horsham Unitarian Church   Matthew Caffyn inhabited a world very different from the literary, clerical and academic milieux of many others accused of heresy.  He was a general Baptist (denominational labels were somewhat less precise than they became in subsequent centuries). He was a doughty nonconformist and his theology was unitarian and Arminian . In 1645, aged 17, Caffyn was expelled from Oxford University for his refusal to accept a trinitarian faith.  He returned to Horsham, Sussex where he was to serve as minister to the general baptist congregation for over 60 years, while continuing to farm. He was not shy of altercation and crossed verbal swords with Quakers and Socinians, publishing four works against those with whom he disagreed ( WorldCat ). He was imprisoned  for unauthorised preaching and, in 1653, for his opposition to infant baptism. In 1673 Thomas Monk published ‘A Cure for the cankering Error of the New Eu

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