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The conclusion summarises the findings of the book, using two case studies of composite local priests in 900 and 1050 to bring out some of the key changes that had taken place over this period in how the Church functioned at the local level. It considers the causes that lay behind these changes and explores the historiographical implications of these findings.
That God could have not created the world is a commonplace of Christian theology, often invoked to articulate the meaning of divine freedom. This essay argues that this counterfactual predication cannot be made consistent with the classical doctrine of God and so cannot be an adequate way of characterising God’s freedom. Drawing on a critical realist account of coherent counterfactual predications, it is shown that every cogent counterfactual attribution implies that the subject of the attribution is located in time, possessed of potential, and knowable in its essence. These entailments of counterfactual predications render them formally incompatible with a classical theist doctrine of God, in which God is not temporally located, purely actual and unknowable in essence by humans in the status viatoris. If the counterfactual on divine predicating compromises the divine simplicity, divine perfection and divine pure actuality, it should be understood to be a metaphorical, not substantial divine predication.
This chapter investigates how local priests related to their superiors by examining a set of handbooks for bishops that were made in the Rhineland and surrounding regions. These handbooks have been overshadowed in the historiography by Regino of Prüm’s well-known Sendhandbuch. However, Regino’s handbook was not the only collection of material available, and this chapter highlights nine manuscripts that – it argues – were composed for the organisation of the episcopal Sendgericht. Through these itinerary courts of law that these manuscripts point to, bishops imposed discipline on priests in their diocese, who during the tenth and eleventh centuries experienced an increasing degree of control that they had not known before.
The introduction presents the aim and themes of the book within its historiographical framework. It accounts for the relative obscurity of local priests in historical research on the period by examining their role in three influential historiographical approaches and explains the way in which the study of this group of clergymen can improve our understanding of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. As well as setting out the structure of the rest of the book, this introduction provides an overview of the sources examined in the following chapters and briefly discusses the study’s geographical scope.
This chapter looks at moments when local priests came together. It focuses on the diocesan synod, the regular meeting which in theory all priests in the diocese were supposed to attend. Drawing on different kinds of evidence, including liturgies, charters, sermons, hagiography and poems, it argues that local priests attended these meetings more frequently than has been supposed, and examines what sort of things they might have learned and experienced at the synod. It argues for a change in the nature of the diocesan synod from the year 1000, as the occasion became more ceremonial, perhaps as part of episcopal strategies of representation, but perhaps also simply in response to the rising numbers of attendees, as the Church network continued to expand and consolidate.
This is a brief introduction to a special issue highlighting the relevance of philosophy of science to many core topics in theology and philosophy of religion. Several points of intersection between knowledge production in the sciences and knowledge production in philosophy and theology are discussed.
This article considers John Owen’s introduction of the word ‘atonement’ as a term of art for Christ’s satisfaction in response to Socinian attacks on that doctrine. Owen’s innovation complicates the use of atonement theories in the dogmatic history of atonement by F. C. Baur and his successors, because Owen’s account of Christ’s work extends beyond satisfaction, and he uses ‘atonement’ to emphasise not the mechanism of that work but its relational necessity. Even as the framework of atonement theories obscures these aspects of Owen’s work, his novel use of ‘atonement’ lays the foundation for satisfaction to become an atonement theory in Baur’s sense.