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Calvinist Bishops, Church Unity, and the Rise of Arminianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
According to Nicholas Tyacke, the doctrine of predestination worked as a “common and ameliorating bond” between conformists and nonconformists in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England. Anglicans and Puritans both accepted Calvin's teachings on predestination as a “crucial common assumption.” Puritans were stigmatized either because of their refusal to conform to the church's rites and ceremonies or because of their rejection of the church's episcopal government, but their agreement with the episcopacy on predestinarian Calvinism imposed “important limits” on the extent of persecution. The Synod of Dort, a Dutch conference held in 1619 which included several English representatives, repudiated Arminianism and affirmed the Calvinist view of salvation, Tyacke calls “an event which has never received the emphasis it deserves from students of English religious history,” because the Synod “served to emphasize afresh the theology binding conformist and nonconformist together, and the limits which that common bond imposed on persecution.” The rise of Arminianism broke this common bond and contributed to the causes of the Civil War. To the Arminians, Puritans were those who opposed the new religious policies of King Charles I and archbishop William Laud. The Arminians' elimination of Calvinist influence in the church and at court, along with intensified persecution of Puritans, “generated a Puritan militancy” that erupted in 1640. By that date, Tyacke concludes, predestinarian Calvinism had been “transformed with relative ease into a call for ‘root and branch’ remedies”; at the same time, presbyterianism emerged as “the cure of Arminian disease.”
- Type
- The 1985 Denis Bethell Prize Essay of the Charles Homer Haskins Society
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1986
References
1 Tyacke, Nicholas R. N., “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” in Russell, Conrad, ed., Origins of the English Civil War, (New York, 1973), pp. 119–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though the actual presence of an “Arminian party” in England has recently been questioned by historians, the term Arminianism will be used throughout this essay according to Tyacke's definition: The “rejection of the arbitrary grace of predestination with a new found source of grace freely available in the sacraments” (p. 130). Calvinism will refer to the belief in irresistible predestination of the elect to salvation. On the basic tenets of the soteriology of Arminianism and Calvinism, see Arminius, James, The Writings of James Arminius, 3 vols., trans. Nichols, James and Bagnall, W. R. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1959), 1:193–275Google Scholar; and Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. McNeill, John T., trans. Battles, Ford Lewis (Philadelphia, 1970), 2:920–86Google Scholar. Puritanism will be used according to Anthony Fletcher's definition as “the godly tradition which emphasized preaching, market day lectures and Sabbatarianism,” without “irreconcilable oppositionism, presbyterianism or sectarianism”; Fletcher, Anthony, “National and Local Awareness in the County Communities,” in Tomlinson, Howard, ed., Before the English Civil Wir: Essays in Early Stuart Politics and Government (New York, 1984), p. 164Google Scholar.
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