Anglicanism’s Roots in the North African Fathers

Anglicanism’s Roots in the North African Fathers

A Theological Conference at the Church of the Advent in Beacon Hill exploring connections of the Anglican tradition to the Patristic period of the Church, particularly the North African Fathers.

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An emphasis on the Patristic period has often been noted as a distinctive feature of Anglicanism. This reflected a vision of the early church as upholding the depositum of faith passed on by the apostles to their successors, the bishops in God’s Church. This understanding was seen as supported by the proximity of the Fathers to the apostolic age as well as their character, their witness and their mode of life.

All this, gave the early church a particular weight of authority as a guide to the interpretation of scripture, and as an arbitrator in doctrinal disputes, as well as an ideal for Christian piety and discipline. In the words of Henry Dodwell, (professor of ancient history at Oxford and a leading lay non-juror), the early church thus offered Anglicans a paradigm as the “Catholick Church of the first and purest ages.” A church which was by implication both very splendid yet also one unsullied by the corruptions of later times and to which we should therefore always look to return.

The object of this conference is to explore this terrain with particular reference to the early North African Church. How was this heritage used within Anglicanism from the time of the Reformation and the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, through to the Caroline divines of the early and mid-seventeenth centuries and on through to the Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism?

The latter part of this story is one in which the Church of the Advent played an historically important role in North America, a fact that invites reflection, but also the challenge of asking how that great heritage can now be taken forward and further sustained.

Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff

Conference Organiser

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