A National Apostasy
England’s Servile Church & Dechristianization
Old fogies of today grew up aware how a young Vera Lynn rallied the troops and cheered the home front singing There’ll Always Be an England in the darkest days of World War II. In 1995, at age 78, Dame Vera delighted the crowds gathered before Buckingham Palace on the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day with a final rendition of her wartime hit. In purely geographical terms, the land mass of England will surely remain as home to the largest national component of Great Britain until the Last Day, but long-term developments in church and state that have more recently attained crisis proportions prompt a healthy skepticism whether Dame Vera’s signature song could honestly be belted out eadem sententia eodem sensu (i.e., in the same meaning or sense, with due acknowledgment to St. Vincent of Lerins, who coined the expression in a dogmatic context) in the England of today.
Sharp adjustment of historical perspective is needed to grasp that, when John Keble delivered his famous sermon On National Apostasy from the pulpit of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on July 14, 1833, England was still not merely a Christian country but only a year away from being one of those quaint phenomena of old, a confessional state. Until the passage of the Reform Act of the previous year, Englishmen hoping to take part in the deliberations of one of the chambers of Parliament had to subscribe to the 39 Articles and denounce transubstantiation. Keble shuddered that legislators no longer needed to profess even the Atonement!
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John R. Stephenson taught at Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary, St Catharines, Ontario, for 34 years, until his retirement at the end of 2022.
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