Word: knox
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Effective Procedures. The council's first president: handsome, 60-year-old Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, to which post he was elected in 1947-one of the youngest men ever so honored. A longtime leader of the ecumenical movement in the U.S., Brooklyn-born Yaleman Sherrill seemed a natural choice to head the new superagency. Vice presidents at large: Mildred McAfee Horton, World War II commander of the WAVES, onetime (1936-49) president of Wellesley College; Abbie Clement Jackson, executive secretary of the African Episcopal Zion Church Women's Home and Foreign...
Enthusiasm, Knox thinks, only came into its full flower a century after Luther "shook up the whole pattern of European theology." The Quakers were the first of this flowering, and Knox "cannot resist the impression" that there is a direct line of influence upon them from the Anabaptist movement that ended in a bloody civil uprising at Münster 18 years after Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. Early Quaker simplicity strikes Knox as "almost . . . boorishness," and he takes fastidious note of Founder George Fox's "barbarous" style of writing. But he nonetheless pictures Fox as a potent...
Platonic Revolt. Knox is impressed too, though sometimes amused, by John Wesley, founder of Methodism. "Wesley," he writes, "was unashamedly a retailer; his societies formed a kind of cooperative movement, acquiring their culture on reduced terms at secondhand." But, although the gatherings Wesley addressed were often seized with the cacophony of shouts, sobs and groanings that are associated with enthusiasm, Knox feels that Wesley himself was no enthusiast. He finds the appeal of Wesley's sermons was "to the head, not primarily to the heart...
Enthusiasm, Knox decides, is basically the "revolt of Platonism against the Aristotelian mise en scene of traditional Christianity . . . Your Platonist, satisfied that he had formed his notion of God without the aid of syllogisms or analogies, will divorce reason from religion . . . the God who reveals Himself interiorly claims a wholly interior worship as his right" instead of observing traditional Christianity's balance of doctrine and emphasis...
...Knox confesses that, though he originally conceived of his book as "a trumpet-blast ... a kind of rogues' gallery, an awful warning against Illuminism . . ." his attitude changed through the years. Even the Roman Catholic Church, he feels, sometimes needs warming at the fires of enthusiasm. "How nearly we thought we could do without St. Francis, without St. Ignatius! Men will not live without vision; that moral we do well to carry away with us from contemplating, in so many strange forms, the record of the visionaries. If we are content with the humdrum, the secondbest, the hand-over-hand...