The Doctrine of Simony: A Theological Retrieval and Appraisal by Conley Owens

"There is hardly one sin in the world, whose nature is less known, and whose heinousness is less considered, than the sin of simony."

Simony — the buying or selling of spiritual things — was once a central category of Christian moral reflection, argued over by the fathers, the medieval canonists, the Reformers, and the English divines. Today it is nearly forgotten, a word most Christians could not define. Conley Owens argues that this forgetting is not harmless: the Reformation itself began in opposition to the sale of spiritual things, and a church that can no longer name simony has lost the means of recognizing it in its own practices.

The book works in six parts. It traces the history of the doctrine and makes the case for its retrieval; it recovers the classical definition piece by piece — "an earnest desire to buy or sell something spiritual or something annexed to a spiritual thing"; it sets out a positive account of ministerial maintenance under the headings of gifts, giving, and receiving; it examines the scriptural forefathers of simony and the proofs; it weighs the church's censure of the sin, as sin and as heresy; and it closes with an analysis of spiritual words, mediated obligation, and present danger.

This is the fuller, scholarly companion to the argument Owens made popularly in The Dorean Principle. Published by Dorean Press and dedicated to the public domain.