Congregationalists were a major presence in the ecclesiastical landscape of Edwardian Hampshire. With a number of churches in the major urban centres of Southampton, Portsmouth and Bournemouth, and places of worship in most market towns and many villages they were much in evidence and their activities received extensive coverage in the local press. Their leaders, both clerical and lay, were often prominent figures in the local community as they sought to give expression to their Evangelical convictions tempered with a strong social conscience. From what they had to say about Congregational leadership, identity, doctrine and relations with the wider world and indeed their relative silence on the issue of gender relations, something of the essence of Edwardian Congregationalism emerges. In their discourses various tensions were to the fore, including those between faith and good works; the spiritual and secular impulses at the heart of the institutional principle; and the conflicting priorities of churches and society at large. These reflect the restlessness of the period and point to a possible 'turning of the tide'. They also call into question the suitability of constructs such as 'faith in crisis' or 'faith society' to characterise the church history of the Edwardian era.

This thesis is an examination of the historical thought of several key English reformers regarding the assimilation or rejection of different aspects of late medieval notions of the sacrament of penance during the Henrician phase of the English Reformation. It is a study primarily concerned with how notions of penance in the theology of these reformers were inherited from patristic, humanist, and continental reformers and how the evangelicals reworked them. While these reformers did not agree on all matters of theology, important points of contact can be found in how they understood the roles of contrition, confession, and satisfaction within a framework that denied the efficacy of human participation in the forgiveness of sins. There are three distinct sections. The two chapters of the first section are concerned with establishing the context of sacramental penance in the sixteenth century. The first chapter identifies distinct phases of the evolution of notions of sacramental penance from the early church through the scholastics, and the second chapter explores the theology of three important influences on the evangelicals—John Wycliffe, Desiderius Erasmus, and Martin Luther—and shows that while their views were unique, they shared important points of connection with the evangelicals in England. The second section consists of the next four chapters, which are dedicated to individual English exiled evangelicals from 1524-1535. Chapter three identifies Tyndale’s unique use of terminology in his redefining of the terms and rearranging of the formula of sacramental penance as he focused on the covenantal language of Christ’s blood as the satisfaction in place of human effort. Chapter four is concerned with Robert Barnes’ notion of the coexistence of contrition and confession, with oral confession occurring after forgiveness has been made. Chapter five details John Frith’s notion of repentance as related to an earthly purgation of sins and a passive, effortless turning from them. Chapter six examines George Joye’s notion of how an effective confession was to be made to God or to man. The third section comprises only one chapter (seven), and it contends that these exiles had significant influence on the later Henrician formularies, and that within them an evangelical notion of confession prevailed, particularly in the relationship of confession and purgatory, but also the understanding of the relationship between sorrow for sin and its forgiveness.

This work seeks to examine traditional Christian doctrines regarding life after death, from a pastoral perspective. The study explores new ways of interpreting the meaning in human identity, dis-innocence and forgiven-ness specifically as relating to the continuing evolution of Humankind, and offers a description of humankind as Homo sanctus. The thesis is built around three individual selected case examples of death and dying together with a constructed narrative of ‘problem dying’, and a group of five persons in a Fellowship of the Dying; it describes the development and praxis of new approaches to ministry in these areas. A number of new terms are introduced to better convey the substance of meanings. The study itself may be considered as offering significant new insight in two respects: 1. It engages with the idea that bio-death has teleological meaning within the evolution of Personhood in resurrection. 2. It offers the experiences of Christian pastoral ministry pro-actively engaging with dying as a pilgrimage into and through bio-death, in which every member of the immediate community of faith is pro-active in pilgrimage with the dying Person. The study draws on extensive cross-cultural and multi-faith experience in Britain and Africa.