This thesis is an ethnographic description of the Charismatic movement in England as it is to be found in the mainstream denominations. It specifically focuses on the Baptist denomination and uses the life and faith of the Jesus Fellowship Church as a controlling example of a Charismatic group which sits on the boundaries of both denominational and Baptist life. It traces the history, social organisation and framework of understanding of the movement and then highlights the Charismatic practice known as a worship time. It argues that in worship Charismatics become individual axis mundi, or channels for the transitory presence of the sacred on earth. This thesis also traces evidence which suggests that Charismatics represent this transitoriness in their use of physical space to delineate the sacred. They base their use of this space around a model by which they also construct the shape of the universe and organise their social relationships. In the activity conducted in this sacred space Charismatics journey towards the sacred through the use of music, words and ideas which are built into a flow of feeling that moves towards a goal. This ethnographic description is based on the theoretical and methodological programme of cultural anthropologists such as Turner, Bell and Geertz who have emphasised the idea of ritual as a functional process and, in the case of the latter two, the creation of meaning by which to live as a fundamental basis for all social and cultural life. It does so in direct response to other understandings of the Charismatic movement which focus on issues of power and forms of social relationships by using a different theoretical and methodological programme.

The argument of this thesis is that ideas and values relating to sin and forgiveness, deemed appropriate for theocratic and hierarchical societies, have lost authority in the increasingly democratic and egalitarian context of a post-traditional and post-Christian Britain. It seeks to show this by describing the shift in understanding of the concepts of sin and forgiveness from the period of the Hebrew Bible, through the Christian era until the present day, using examples from literature and art in the process. The need to identify 'sin' in the form of personal and social transgressions, and the need to find ways of healing the damage that these cause, is however a basic human task. As the role of the Churches in individual and interpersonal trauma has diminished, a range of therapies, some quasi-religious, some psychological, some resolutely secular, has offered alternative responses to distress. Where criminal activity is involved the task has become the prerogative of the State. As a nation however we appear to be unable to find satisfactory ways of addressing what are seen to be areas of moral ambiguity in both individual sin and structural sin. What appears to be individual sin is illustrated by reference to four case studies. One is the story of Myra Hindley who has now spent thirty-five years in prison as a result of decisions by a succession of Home Secretaries. The other three are stories of children who have been killed, on two occasions by other children, on one occasion by a paedophile. Three case studies of poverty, slavery and violence illustrate structural sin. The conclusion of the work is that British society is hovering between two paradigms, one of retributive, one of restorative justice. What is being left behind is the Judeo-Christian belief in sin only as an offence against God, requiring repentance and atonement, which lead to forgiveness and redemption. The emerging paradigm, while not yet clear, appears to be developing through a belief in the equal value of human beings, the power of truth and of justice allied to compassion based on a shared citizenship.

This study is an exercise in historical theology and theolinguistics. The mention of historical theology entails that this investigation will dialogue with Christian authors of the past in order to illuminate modern theological issues. On the other hand, the allusion to theolinguistics (the study of how religious belief, thought and practice relates to language) indicates that this study will endeavor to discern what Christians mean when they employ terms like “Father” in theological discourse or corporate worship (i.e. liturgy). Should “Father” be viewed as a literal assignation for God? To what extent does this divine title signify the ontology or being of God? These questions will be addressed in the course of this study to show what bearing the doctrine of God the Father has on Christian belief and praxis. In particular, we are interested in what Lactantius means when he refers to God as Father. What implications thereby follow from his usage of this expression? I would briefly like to explain why Lactantius has been chosen as a test case for an ancient Latin writer, who thought of God as Father. While it seems that numerous early church writers conceived God as Father in a metaphorical sense, the Lactantian concept of divine paternity seems to hold promise for additional studies in view of his contention that God is Father in a number of senses and primarily in terms of his status as Lord (dominus). Lactantius is accustomed to call God “Father and Lord” (pater et dominus). This vocabulary is used in the context of Roman notions such as paterfamilias, pater patriae and pater or patria potestas. Lactantius also stresses the eschatological character of God’s paternity in the final book of his Divine Institutes (Divinae institutiones). While modern theology has articulated and expanded our knowledge of God’s eschatological fatherhood, this study proposes that the Lactantian concept illuminates elements of God’s future paternity that may be useful to those engaging in historical theology. Finally, I would like to thank the following persons for their varying and diverse contributions to this study: Dr. Philip Blosser gave me the inspiration to pursue the question of divine gender and pointed me towards useful definitions for the term “metaphor” such as “ambiguous identity synthesis” or “cross-modal sorting.” Rotary International (especially in the Lenoir and Hickory area) made my studies in Glasgow possible and they have been a fine support even after my 2001-2002 tenure as a Rotary scholar ended. I also want to express my appreciation to Dr. John Blakey (my erstwhile classics professor), Stacy Feldstein (a colleague in classical studies), Edward and Eleanor Foster (my parents), Sylvia Foster (my wife); David Schuman (for emphasizing the importance of carefully scrutinizing primary texts from antiquity when one undertakes a research project), and Solomon Landers (Hebrew and Aramaic specialist) for helping me understand the significance of certain Hebrew verbal stems.

The claim of this thesis is that the landscape of the Scottish Highlands has ever posed a challenge to ecclesiastical endeavour over the centuries and has determined the patterns of religiosity that remain largely extant. The landmass under review conforms to a notional Highland line running north-eastwards from Helensburgh in the west of Stonehaven in the east, but does not include the county of Caithness or the Orkney and Shetland Islands. The time-scale of the thesis focuses mainly upon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the twelfth century, the Celtic Church had been fully absorbed into the Church of Rome. At the Calvinist Reformation within Scotland in 1560, Roman Catholicism was proscribed, but due to prevailing factors in the Highlands, mainly connected with the remoteness and inaccessibility of the landscape, the “Old Faith” was never completely eradicated. Of cardinal importance was the ownership of the land, the dearth of a Reformed ministry conversant in the Gaelic language and overlarge parishes that precluded regular contact between congregation and minister and his manse. A serious impediment to Highland Reformed mission was the lack of a translation in Scots-Gaelic vernacular, of the Authorised Bible until 1767 publication of the New Testament in that language. Following the deposition of James VII in 1690, Prelacy was proscribed and Presbyterianism was declared to be the lawful structure of the Reformed Kirk within Scotland. Nevertheless the structure of the Episcopalian Church survived relatively intact and many of its clergy, retained their pulpits in the Highlands. The key to survival, yet again, had been the protective power of the Highland landowner. From the outset, secession and reunion have characterised the Established Church of Scotland, with the most damaging episode, that of the Disruption in 1843, on the platform of patronage. The emergent Free Church retained a legacy of evangelicalism within the Highlands long after the Free Church (Continuing) has declined south of the notional Highland line. It is stressed that in all its many facets, the Highlands displays no uniform pattern in time, place or will; the region is more profitably examined as a collection of localities, each with its own distinctive character. What can scarcely be denied is that the landscape of the Highlands determined the patterns of religiosity that we can still recognise within its boundaries today. The thesis develops its several themes both synthetically – through a geographical reading of existing historical works on religion in the Highlands – and empirically – through a detailed archival inquiry into the story of one particular Highland parish, that of Glenmuick, Tullich and Glengairn, in Upper Deeside, Aberdeenshire.

The last half of the twentieth century has seen the development of several significant Christian theologies of liberation. These have emerged out of historical contexts of race, class and gender oppression and have been initiated by Christian communities and individuals who seek to respond to their social, economic and political contexts through the medium of their Christian faith. This study seeks firstly to explore the central criteria for the creation of such theologies and then to use these criteria as a means of exploring the ways in which the Black Led Church has been able to engage with the concept and material realities of liberation within its own British context. The exploration begins with an analysis of five key developmental themes which have had a significant impact on the Church's relationship to both its theology and its manifestation of liberation. These themes are then further developed through six essential criteria for liberation which are applied to its contemporary interaction in British society. The study argues that the syncretistic foundation of the Church stands as both a source and a limitation to full theological liberation. Nonetheless, a holistic and contextual liberational spirituality does exist and provides an essential energy for both passive and radical change. The methodological emphasis is contextual. Therefore the study draws heavily from transcripts of interviews and services and also utilises, as much as possible, works produced by Church and network organisations in addition to the observation carried out at five key denominations in Birmingham. The study's emphasis on a contextual understanding of theological liberation is important in that it firmly aligns the Church with meaningful liberation in Britain - not only for its members, but also for wider Black communities. In so doing it highlights the often unacknowledged role of the Church in the cultural and political mobilisation of Black people in British society.

The Christian Church is one of the oldest institutions in the UK. Furthermore, the Church is an important economic actor in the British economy, with the current Church of England holding investment assets of approximately £8billion. In addition it provides the largest amount of explicitly religious spaces, through its network of Churches, in the nation. However, despite a recent resurgence of interest from geographers in religion, through the Geography of Religion discourse, the Christian Church is, and has remained, an understudied institution. In contrast, I will argue that the particular characteristics of the faith make it an ideal institution for study. By investigating the Church I will integrate the previously disparate literatures of the Geography of Religion and Economic Geography to identify how the spaces of Christian religious institutions, such as the Parish Church, continue to exist in the capitalist economic system of the UK. To this end the thesis will adopt an economic institutionalist perspective to understanding religious bodies; using the case studies of The Church of England, The Baptist Union, and The Assemblies of God to investigate the process of institutional reproduction. In addition to providing an overview of how religious institutions are reproduced the thesis will make a further two contributions to Geography. First, it will investigate how Christianity and capitalism interrelates. In so doing I will argue that, whilst geographers have traditionally argued that institutions influence the practices of capitalism, this is a two-way process as the economic imperative of reproduction entails that capitalism itself also alters the properties of religious institutions. Second, the thesis will provide an investigation of the internal properties of institutions to argue that, rather than being a cohesive body, religious institutions are an assemblage of a number of linked networks. This has a severe impact on the process of institutional reproduction as finance and resources do not flow freely around the institution to where they are needed.

This study examines a form of religious debate that saw Catholic priests and ministers across the reformed spectrum arguing in direct opposition to one another, and drawing on long-standing academic forms and intellectual ideals in doing so. Public religious disputation is first defined and placed in its religious, cultural and intellectual context, alongside formal disputation in the universities, printed controversy, literary dialogue and other manifestations of discourse and debate. The structures, tropes and tactics of the formal, academic process – as used in public or ‘professional’ controversial debate – are then detailed, in order to give a more precise definition, and a framework for the analysis of individual events. The chapters following this move chronologically from the accession of Elizabeth I and the 1559 Westminster conference to the aftermath of the death of James and the 1626 debate at York House. Drawing on the trends discussed in the first chapter and the procedures detailed in the second, these sections place individual disputations in their immediate context; examining the use and restriction of public religious debate by state and church authorities, the impact academic forms could have upon public, controversial disputation, the interplay between faith and human learning on display and the changing perceptions of the practice as political, religious and cultural conditions developed through the period. The aim of this study is to assert the significance of public religious disputation, and accounts thereof, as something more than a simple ‘variety’ of religious controversy or polemic. Its formal structures and direct interactions shed light on Reformation and post-Reformation religious arguments; but its structures and ideals also demonstrate a shared, fundamental mode of discourse and competition underlying those arguments. These encounters, and the accounts they produced, are not just examples of partisan polemic – they are potentially invaluable tools for the religious and cultural historian.

This essay traces the reception of Augustine in the 20th and 21st century phenomenological tradition. It gives special attention to recent monographs on Augustine by Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chrétien, but contextualises these both fore (by examining the earlier work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as earlier and less determinative Augustinian engagements by Marion and Chrétien) and aft (by critically considering the philosophical, philological and theological implications of phenomenology for the study of Augustine). The cross-fertilization of its study of Augustine himself and its study of the various phenomenological appropriations of Augustine sheds new light on the Augustinian questions of Platonism, ontology, and the role of Scripture in philosophy.

Statistical trends among the Anglican Churches of Canada, the United States of America and England demonstrate significant patterns of decline not yet apparent in the Anglican Church in Newfoundland. This dissertation sets out to assess the extent to which this resilience is associated with a civic and church structure that has maintained a high level of investment in the social components of religious expression and the more private devotional patterns of Anglican life. This dissertation is divided into three parts. Part 1 will look at the origins of the Anglican Church in Newfoundland and its contemporary place in society and will propose social capital theory as a theoretical explanation for the patterns of Anglican Church life in Newfoundland. The relevance of religious orientation theory will be considered as a counterbalance to ask if the social capital found among Anglican churchgoers in Newfoundland is at the expense of intrinsic religious motivation. Part 2 begins with a discussion of methodological considerations followed by a comparison of statistical trends since 1960 for the Anglican Church in Newfoundland, the Anglican Church in the rest of Canada, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America and the Church of England. A contemporary profile of the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador will then be considered followed by a qualitative study of the Diocese. Results from the US Congregational Life Survey administered in the Diocese will also be presented, enabling comparisons to be undertaken between the Anglican Church in Newfoundland and the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Part 3 will reveal that in and around the Anglican Church in Newfoundland social capital remains high along with intrinsic religious motivation among churchgoers but it will be shown that the resilience of the Church is due to an unusually high degree of passive church membership in the wider society and the mutually beneficial way in which the Church and the community around it relate.

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