• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1387 0

in the Dutch republic in the early seventeenth century provoked by the anti-predestinarian preaching of Arminius. His followers, who became known as the Remonstrants, rejected double predestination and supralapsarian beliefs on the grounds that they made God the author of sin. But this reopened the possibility that responsibility for damnation lay with the sinner – as if free will, or the actions of humans, might affect the will of God – a question at the heart of the Reformation. It was also overlain with political significance, since the Arminians were associated with those supporting peace with Catholic Spain after nearly fifty years of war, and the abandonment of the southern Netherlands to Catholicism. In 1618 a synod was called at Dort, at which representatives of reformed churches from all over Europe were present. Stern predestinarian views were confirmed as the principal tenets of mature Calvinism, Arminianism was roundly condemned, and the Remonstrants were politically defeated in an associated coup.40

From the later 1620s onwards Charles was associated with changes in the English church which were denounced as Arminian, and this weakened respect for the English church in Scotland, which had in any case been very measured. England’s Reformation had also been marked by pragmatism and compromise. There, as in Scotland, predestinarian thought had been very influential, but Presbyterianism, ‘two kingdoms’ theory and austere views of worship were much less so. The ‘official Reformation’ of the 1530s had been primarily jurisdictional, excluding the authority of the Pope from the affairs of the English church, rather than doctrinal: ‘Catholicism without the Pope’, as its detractors have claimed ever since. Thereafter the Royal Supremacy in the Church was a vehicle for quite different purposes, not just under Henry VIII, whose official policy shifted somewhat, but much more so under his evangelical Protestant son Edward VI and Catholic daughter Mary. It was only with the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 that the Reformation was securely established, particularly if that is taken to imply the widespread acceptance of Protestantism among the English population. Even in the 1590s, as Elizabeth’s death approached, with no heir named, there were fears (or hopes) that the Protestantization of England might falter.41 Sir Cheney Culpeper was not alone in dating the start of the Reformation to Elizabeth’s reign, or in seeing it as unfinished business in the 1640s: writing in 1646 he thought that the imperial Antichrist (the Pope) ‘was (through God’s providence) pulled down 80 years since’, but the ‘spoil [was] divided between the King [sic] and bishops’. Now, in the excitement of the 1640s, he could see hopes for the completion of the process, the full liberation of Christians from such spiritual bondage.42

As Protestantism took firm root under Elizabeth a broad Calvinist consensus around the doctrine of predestination developed which survived into the reign of James I. University doctorates and official policy consistently defended the doctrine, which acted as an ‘ameliorating bond’ among men divided on other issues. In particular, the English Reformation was unusual in leaving the institutions of the medieval church more or less completely intact. Bishops, cathedrals and church courts were preserved as the vehicle for the reformation of the faith, and the only (albeit very notable) casualty of reform was the regular clergy – the monasteries and nunneries had gone, alongside chantries, mainly as an act of asset stripping in order to finance war. Associated with the persistence of the institutions of the medieval church was the survival of traditional forms of worship: for example, the wearing of surplices by the clergy, kneeling at communion and other relatively formal tastes in worship. This ceremonialism was particularly prevalent in cathedrals (and Westminster Abbey) where professional musicians were also employed to help in the edification of the believers.43

Defence of tradition had been an important part of English Protestantism