Law and Modernization in the Church of England

Throughout his academic career, Robert E. Rodes, Jr., has tracked the legal history of the peculiar church-state relationship that has prevailed in England since the gospel was first preached to the Anglo-Saxon kings. Here he examines the legal materials (cases, statutes, canons, and measures) used in the English experience of updating the medieval synthesis of church and state.

This volume begins with the restoration of the monarchy (and the Anglican Church) in 1660. The first chapter describes the relatively peaceful century and a half-from the Restoration to the reform agitation of the early nineteenth century-when the spiritual condition of the nation was more closely reflected in the institutional patterns of the church than it had ever been before or ever would be again. The next two chapters detail the painful juridical adjustments that had to be made when the old synthesis finally came unstuck and the church had to take its place among the other institutions of a modern, efficient, and pluralist state. The last chapters show the equally painful and far more tumultuous adjustments of the laws governing the church's doctrine, liturgy, and internal affairs to accompany its changed position in society.

In addition to close examination of the legal materials, Rodes analyzes the anomaly of having an "established" church in a pluralist society, and deals with the dialectical tension between two ecclesiological emphases he calls "Erastianism" and "High Churchmanship." Using the English example, he also sets forth some thoughts on how a church-state relation should be structured. His professional legal analyses, fortified with extensive notes, will be clear to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

Robert E. Rodes, Jr., (1927- 2014) was the first permanent holder of the Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Paper Corporation Chair in Legal Ethics as a professor at Notre Dame Law School. Professor Rodes taught and wrote in the areas of administrative law, civil procedure, ethics, jurisprudence, law and theology, legal history and welfare legislation. He is the author of Pilgrim Law (Notre Dame Press, 1998).