Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History) Charles W. A. Prior - Defin Jacobean Church_ The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603-1625-Cambridge University Press (2005).
315 Pages
NOTE ON THE TEXT
The dates in the text take the year to have begun on 1 January, although in all cases I have given the date of published works as it appears on the title page. I have followed the ESTC where attributions needed to be made, and the Bodleian Library Pre-1920 catalogue of printed books in cases where the ESTC was silent. Unless otherwise noted, biographical information is taken from the Oxford dictionary of national biography. I have not supplied biographical details for the writers mentioned in this study, since this information is now easily available in the ODNB, and in the thesis from which the present book is derived.1 Quotations retain original spelling and punctuation. Long omissions and emendations are signalled by square brackets, while shorter omissions are signalled by ellipses.
Throughout, conformist is used to indicate those who sought to defend the Church from either Catholic or Protestant critics. I have not found it either useful or strictly helpful to provide, as others have, a further division of this category, whether moderate or avant garde, nor have I written of either moderate or radical critics of the Church. Instead, those who were obviously critical are referred to as reformists. This was a term widely enough used by writers such as Henoch Clapham, who said of a contemporary that: ‘He differs much from the most of our Reformists here at home.’2 In addition, reformist comes the closest to summing up the ecclesiological position of the various writers to whom I have attached the term – the reform, but not the disestablishment of the Church.
The word dissenter(s) does figure in the literature, but given the associations attached to the term by students of Restoration ecclesiology, I have chosen not to use it. I have, however, employed the term non-conformity in cases where the policies and punishments associated with Jacobean conformity are under discussion.3 In no case do I employ the word puritan, and I have set out my reasons for not doing so in the appropriate place. 4 While the term Anglican does occur in the contemporary literature, it has subsequently acquired a particular meaning that Jacobean writers did not intend, and hence does not appear here.5 Doctrine is used in the contemporary sense – the liturgical and scriptural position of the Church – while discipline refers to the means – subscription, episcopal visitation, deprivation – by which conformity was enforced; this too was the contemporary understanding of the term.
Introduction:
defining 1 – the Church E C CLESIOL OGY AND HISTORY In 1699, Gilbert Burnet, then Bishop of Salisbury, published An exposition of the Thirty-nine articles of the Church of England. The work purported to trace the roots of the English confession from the Reformation forward, and in the preface Burnet lamented that a quarrel over ceremonies and worship, ‘and about things that were of their own nature indifferent’, had been raging for ‘above an Hundred Years’. Burnet certainly knew his subject, having been guided through Elizabethan controversies by Andrew Maunsell’s bibliography, and by reading widely in the controversial literature published during the reigns of the early Stuarts.1 This literature gave him a sense that the general tone and quality of the debate had shifted as the Elizabethan period gave way to the controversies over clerical subscription and ceremonial practice in the early years of James VI and I: Our divines were much diverted in the end of that Reign from better Enquiries, by the Disciplinarian Controversies; and though what Whitgift and Hooker writ on those Heads, was much better than all that came after them; yet they neither satisfied those against whom they writ, nor stopt the Writings of their own side. But as Waters gush in, when the Banks are once broken, so the breach that these had made, proved fruitful. Parties were formed, Secular Interests were grafted upon them, and new Quarrels followed those that first begun the Dispute.2 It turns out that Burnet was largely right. The religious controversies of the Jacobean age were indeed carried on by lesser lights than Whitgift and Hooker, and as the reign went along we find evidence not only that positions began to harden on matters of doctrine and discipline, but also that these positions had implications for politics.
Yet it is also the case that Jacobean controversies took place on a broad scope, which saw the traffic in ideas move beyond massive treatises governed by the strictures of formal controversy – this was the age of the pamphlet, and the genre expanded in the period that this book surveys.3 Burnet’s reference to gushing water and broken banks reveals the impact of the expansion of print on the process of religious polemic. The premise that justifies the present study, therefore, is the existence of a large body of sources whose contribution to and role in ecclesiological debates has not been fully explored. Burnet’s accurate but austere assessment of the Jacobean controversialscene deservesto be revisited. This book is about religious controversies among English Protestants in the reign ofJames VI and I. It seeks to address, in part, J. C. D. Clark’s call for a ‘theoretically articulate history of the Church of England, including its ecclesiology, ecclesiastical polity, and political theory’.4 Contemporaries regarded these themes as being closely linked, and used phrases like the ‘regiment of the Church’ or the ‘definition of the Church’ to refer to a process of deliberation between defenders of the Church and their critics.5 Regardless of their position on aspects of doctrine and discipline, writers conceived of the English Church as partaking in the history of early Christianity; these perceptions shaped arguments concerning its doctrine and governance, as well as the political implications that attended its status as a visible church ‘of the realm’.
Many works published during the period addressed this theme: Richard Field’s Of the Church, and Josias Nichols’ Abrahams faith are typical of the conformist and reformist branches of the literature. Common to all was an interest in how the doctrine, discipline, and governance of the Apostolic church could be carried forth and established in post-Reformation England. In fact, a debate on ecclesiology formed a central theme in pamphlets, sermons, and longer works by writers both famous and unknown. The context for the debates to be examined here was the introduction of new ecclesiastical Canons in 1604, and the subsequent deprivation of some eighty-five ministers who refused to ‘subscribe to’ – that is, to affirm by swearing an oath – the directives concerning doctrine and governance contained in them. Similarly, the Perth Articles, which set forth kneeling at communion as part of the ‘official’ ceremonial practice of the Kirk of Scotland, led to debates between Presbyterians and conformists, and to a deepening of religious tensions in the two kingdoms. In both settings, the introduction of new Canons served as the impetus for a series of debates on ecclesiastical sovereignty, ceremonies, episcopacy, the common law, and the patristic heritage of the Apostolic church. These debates and the literature in which they are preserved help to clarify the political, theological, and historical elements of religious controversy, and are therefore a crucial source for understanding the nature of Jacobean religious conflict. Since English Protestant thought was based on elements derived from sacred and historical sources, it was inevitable that religious conflict would occur along similar lines. Controversial literature, first examined in studies by Roland Usher and Stuart Barton Babbage, has since become peripheral to the interests of those who study early Stuart religion.6 This is unfortunate, because the literature of religious controversy sheds important light on the issues and arguments that divided Protestants in the reign of James VI and I, and also points to divisions that would persist into the reign of his successor.
One premise of this book is that Jacobean ecclesiology did not consist of pure theology: in both the Henrician and Elizabethan settlements defenders of the Church argued that it was ‘dually established’, a partly spiritual and partly temporal association that had its being in the Word and in the world. The debates that this book surveys reveal tensions within this blend of spiritual and political elements, and these tensions help us to discern contrasting approaches to ecclesiology and church polity in the writings of those controversialists who participated in printed polemical exchanges. It becomes apparent that writers on both sides were struggling to come to terms with both the nature of early Christian history and their own place within it, for the institution of the Christian Church in which they all claimed communion was distinguished by a contested history and hence the business of religious polemic was always firmly rooted within a vast and complex historiographical tradition. Where writers divided was on the interpretation of that tradition and its implications for post-Reformation ecclesiology.7
The debates that this book examines were based upon distinct views of the Church’s past, which in turn shaped positions on how it should be ordered and governed, as well as the ‘language’ in which the dispute was carried on.8 It was a language suited to the examination of the nature of an institution through time, and it served to legitimise aspects of the Church by locating them in the past, or to criticise them by searching into the past to discover alternative modes of doctrine and discipline. This search proceeded in the course of debate, and as time goes on one becomes aware of the development of at least two Protestant historiographical traditions, each with its canon of writers, and each putting forth an argument for how the Church should be ordered and governed. For example, conformists argued that the English Church was both a spiritual and a political association: a state church founded on a mingling of doctrine and law, and hence able to enjoin conformity among its members.9 It was also a ‘true’ and ‘ancient’ church, not separated from the institution founded by Christ – the church described in the letters of the Apostles, and in the works of the Fathers of the Christian historical tradition. In short, it was a reformed continuation of the Apostolic church, which retained ceremonial practices and episcopal governance, and reserved the right to interpret ‘custom’ and to establish elements of worship that it deemed ‘comely’ and ‘edifying’.
The concept of adiaphora – which defined aspects of worship that were essential to salvation as against those that were not – lay at the core of the conformist programme, and on this basis conformists justified the ceremonialism and episcopal governance of the English Church. Disputes over these propositions were central to debates about many aspects of ecclesiology. In defending the Church against their Protestant critics, therefore, conformist controversialists sought to establish a sound historical pedigree for doctrine and discipline, and to employ this interpretation to justify ceremonies and governance in the national Church. In doing so, they looked to the record of early Christianity in search of historical precedents, and bolstered these where necessary with testimony from patristic sources and even civil and pagan histories of the Roman and post-Roman polities. The burden of the conformist position, evident in the work of Hooker and many of those who succeeded him, was to establish a usable account of the mingling of sacred and human history, and therefore the mingling of sacred and human authority. Those Protestants who sought further reformation of the Church grounded their arguments on alternate versions of the history of Christianity, some emphasising Presbyterian government within an established church, and others calling for gathered congregations of free Christians governed by their own ‘consent’. They argued that the liturgy, rites, and governance of the Church had to derive from the iure divino authority of scripture, and receive confirmation from the sound and uncorrupted testimony of ecclesiastical historians, the Fathers, and contemporary reformed divines.
The visible church had to emulate the precepts of true doctrine, and this premise shaped a range of ecclesiological positions from ceremonial practice to governance and discipline. Reformists looked to history in order to discover the point at which the church existed in its purest form, and treated the advent of the Roman church as the beginning of a decline. It was through this lens that they scrutinised the Church of England, arguing that it had not proceeded far enough along the path of reform. From a doctrinal point of view, they argued that ceremonialism and governance by bishops had no pedigree either in scripture or in what the testimony of Christian authorities indicated about the worship and governance of the ancient church. These arguments were based upon painstaking scriptural exegesis, and backed up by a great variety of other theological texts; the use of scholastic methods was not limited to conformists, and William Prynne’s catalogue of ‘testimonies’ exemplifies an abiding interest among reformists in the study of ancient and reformed sources. 10 There were political implications to these ecclesiological arguments. Conformists emphasised the visible institution of the Church that blended essential and indifferent elements of doctrine, and argued that since the Church was in some sense domiciled within the channels of civil authority, the uniformity of its public doctrine would be maintained by civil measures.
This led them to link episcopal government with political stability, and therefore to condemn Presbyterian discipline as a threat to the sovereignty of the Crown. By contrast, reformists sought to defend the continuity of a doctrinally ‘pure’ church over which the Word was sovereign; with respect to human involvement in the Church, they insisted that since the locus of ecclesiastical authority lay with the Crown in parliament, these bodies were charged with the promotion of true doctrine, and hence true governance and ceremonial practice. Yet they also put forth political arguments against the established Church, most notably by suggesting that the deprivation of nonconformist ministers violated the common law and the sovereignty of parliament. Scots writers went a step further, and suggested that the imposition of English worship and governance on the Kirk was both doctrinally indefensible and an assault on the legal and national independence of the Scottish confession. In all cases, a distinct vision of church polity was underpinned by assumptions about the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical authority. Hence, the broad theme that this book seeks to trace is how polemical debates on a range of ecclesiological issues and involving a wide sample of writers led to the development of narratives that sought to strike a balance between civil and ecclesiastical authority. Defining the Church was no easy task, and the question accounted for a profound division among Protestant writers in both the English and Scottish settings, which in turn reveals the first stirrings of the religious conflicts that would emerge in the reign of Charles I.
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