In this first serious assessment of the meaning of church division, Ephraim Radner provides a theological rationale for today's divided church in the Christian West that goes far beyond the standard socio-historical explanations of denominationalism. Through an examination of controversial, post-Reformation discussions about the church, Radner offers a significant theory that describes the relation between Christian division and the work of the Holy Spirit within Western modernity. Radner's description of the church is based on the traditional notion that a divided church is, in a significant sense, a "dead" church, after the figure of the pneumatically abandoned "dead Christ," who himself suffers redemptively the disintegration and restoration of divided Israel in his physical and spiritual passion. The hermeneutical basis for the usefulness of this figure lies deep in the scriptural practice of the undivided church, and was common up through the Reformation. Radner's recovery of this figural perspective is applied to the cluster of pneumatological issues that define ecclesial life.

A model edition of the early correspondence of one of George III's favourite bishops. ARCHIVES Richard Hurd is best known to ecclesiastical historians as one of George III's favourite bishops who was offered, and declined, the archbishopric of Canterbury. These letters, therefore, illuminate the early career of one of the most prominent clerics of the late eighteenth century. The letters begin in 1739, just after Hurd had graduated B.A. at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. They chart his gradual climb up the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment, through his time as Fellow at Emmanuel and end with him settled in the comfortable country rectory of Thurcaston in Leicestershire. Hurd had a wide circle of correspondents. He became a close friend of William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, perhaps the most prominent controverialist of the period. He was also a member of a literary circle which included the poets Thomas Gray and William Mason. Indeed, Hurd himself is well-known to students of English literatureas the author of Letters on Chivalry and Romanceand as a significant figure among the so-called `pre-romantics'. Hurd's letters reveal the full range of his interests, from theology and university politics, through literature, to painting and sculpture. This edition, therefore, not only tells us about Hurd's early life and career, but also provides a valuable insight into the social life of the Anglican clergy in the eighteenth century.