Search Results

The avant-garde clerical group came to enjoy ascendancy in the 1630s, and consequently, their comprehension of the Polity enjoyed a dominant position. This collapsed, however, with the crumbling of royal power, and something akin to a Reformed understanding of Hooker reasserted itself before the English Church was suppressed entirely during the Civil War. In the face of outright hostility, even former Church moderates amongst them were forced to become more extreme and embrace what can arguably be described as an Anglican interpretation of Hooker.

One of the ways in which the strength of the Wesley brothers' partnership proved of fundamental importance to the future of Methodism was in the controversies that plagued the Evangelical Revival virtually from its beginnings. The Wesley brothers engaged in conflict with other evangelical groups as well as the parent Church of England and it was in this struggle that Wesleyan Methodist identity was forged. The brothers' combined strength of character and combative nature proved decisive in elevating the Wesleyan movement to the forefront of the Evangelical Revival.

The marriage of Charles Wesley to Sarah Gwynne in April 1749 represented a watershed in the groom's life and ministry. Charles's itinerant preaching was reduced until it ceased altogether in 1756 and this aggravated other tensions that were starting to appear in relations between the Wesley brothers. John and Charles seem to have viewed each other's marital intentions as a threat and this climaxed in Charles's deliberate destruction of his brother's engagement to Grace Murray in October 1749. A decisive personal break between the brothers was only narrowly avoided, but their old closeness was severely undermined and this alienation started to impact on the Methodist movement.

William Bentley began his tenure as assistant pastor of the East Church in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1783, and immediately came into conflict with the much older senior pastor. But within two years, the senior pastor was gone, driven out by the church he had served for half a century. That minister, James Diman, was a Calvinist, but Bentley believed in a theology of salvation called Arminianism—in the benevolence of God and the possibility of salvation through moral behavior. The church's members picked Bentley's Arminianism over Diman's Calvinism. How and why they did so sheds light on the power of the sacraments (Communion and baptism) in New England Christianity, on the unique relationships in Congregationalism between members, parishioners, and pew proprietors, and on the liberating potential of the American Revolution, particularly in the economic power gained from privateering.

The theological claims called Arminianism were, in 18th‐century New England at least, attached to a set of economic, social, and political ideas as well. In questions of wealth and class, race, and gender, Arminians, including William Bentley, were also subscribers to the ideology of classical liberalism. This chapter examines that connection and its widely felt implications for the lives of his congregants and townspeople. The new minister's views on poverty and the proper kinds of Christian charity, women and their place in public life, and the slave trade were all of great interest. What they all found was that while classical liberalism's desire to elevate law and reason over arbitrariness and whim did remove the fear of a tyrannical deity, it also removed the hopes of effecting social change through protest and passion.

This chapter deals mainly with the theological characteristics of the sermons, and briefly with the use that Wesley makes of his sources, especially the scriptures. The sermons are examined in two groups, the early and the later, and set in the context of Wesley's evangelical conversion experience of May 1738. The way in which the gloom and soteriological pessimism of the early work seems to give way, though with some relapses, to a greater confidence is examined. The relationship between works and faith in Charles’ thought is briefly examined, and the fact that he remained always a thoroughgoing Arminian is noted.

Threatened by Unitarianism and Finneyite progressives, the Edwardsians of the 1820s banded together to fight off the encroachment of theological liberalism and “new measures” revivalism. By 1828, with the publication of Taylor's Concio ad Clerum, the fissures in the Calvinist front that remained hidden during the first part of the decade became more noticeable. Fears spread that Taylor had fallen into Arminianism and abandoned Edwardsian Calvinism. As Lyman Beecher moved to Cincinnati to take the presidency of Lane Seminary, Bennet Tyler continued to warn of the dangers of Nathaniel William Taylor's teaching. By 1850, when the sabers ceased rattling between Taylor and Tyler, Catharine Beecher publicly began teaching a form of Arminianism, which she claimed she learned from Taylor. In his seventies, Taylor was unable to fight the errant claims. Sweeney argues that the battle between Taylor and Tyler was symptomatic of the decline of Edwardsian Calvinism in New England. The true decline of New England Calvinism began when the leaders of New England Theology became so self‐absorbed in their minor theological battles that they lost their voice in the culture wars of the mid‐nineteenth century.

Predestination was a required belief right from the Scots Confession of 1560. Knox wrote a lengthy tract on the subject, and no committed Presbyterian ever challenged the doctrine. But Scottish divines were aware of the emergence of Arminianism in the Low Countries and cautioned against it, though their use of the term tended in the direction of English usage, to describe the programme of ‘high’ church reform urged by William Laud and his associates. In the 1630s, there were a few Scottish critics of the Reformation doctrine, and it appears that St Andrews was the focal point of its rather limited presence in the country. Those who leaned toward a less than enthusiastic embrace of Augustinian and Calvinist predestinarian doctrine and toward an acceptance of liturgical changes, Episcopal polity, and the royal supremacy placed a greater value than Presbyterians on the authority of Christian antiquity.

The chapter analyses the differences between Wesley’s Arminianism, and the moderate and hyper-Calvinism held by other sections of the Revival. All groups believed in the Fall of man and in man’s utter dependence on grace; differences arose over such issues as how grace operated, whether man enjoyed any degree of free will, how (if so) that free will related to the sovereignty of God, and where the dividing line lay between God’s justice and his mercy. In the years immediately prior to 1770, despite some personal tension between Lady Huntingdon and John Wesley, relations were generally cordial between the Calvinist and Arminian wings of the Revival; this harmony was broken by Wesley’s Conference Minutes of 1770, which appeared to allow for salvation by works. Lady Huntingdon led the initial Calvinist reaction, expelling non-Calvinist staff from her college, and presiding over a pamphlet war with the Wesleyans, although, as the 1770s progressed, the controversy developed a momentum of its own, and the Connexion did not remain in the vanguard of Calvinist attacks. Occasional rivalry occurred between individual Wesleyan and Connexion congregations (as it did between the Connexion and some other Calvinist groups, such as Whitefield’s Tabernacle Connexion), but by the end of the century the doctrinal controversy had largely played itself out.

Excluded from the day-to-day running of the Church of Ireland, Ussher in the late 1630s devoted himself to historical research. The result was his 1196-page historical magnum opus of 1639, Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates: quibus inserta est pestiferae adversus Dei gratiam a Pelagio Britanno in ecclesiam inductae haereseos historia. As with Gottschalk, he used his scholarly standing, and the Latin language to launch covert broadsides against the new theological orthodoxy. Though the main purpose of this work was to provide the first detailed critical account of one of the major historical issues confronting church historians at the time — the origins of Christianity in Britain and Ireland — Ussher also included a detailed account of the rise and fall of Pelagianism in England, a direct parallel to the rise of Arminianism. Though, to modern eyes, somewhat credulous in what he included, Ussher's account of Patrick's conversion of Ireland represented considerable progress compared to earlier treatments of the saint's life. Less overtly polemical than his earlier works, Ussher even drew on, and acknowledged the contribution of Catholic scholars.

On 29 January 1625, James Ussher was appointed Archbishop of Armagh. Initially, he spent much of his time in England, where he was sucked in to the controversy surrounding Richard Montagu and the rise of ‘Arminianism’. Ussher made his opposition to Montagu plain, preaching an outspoken sermon before the King in 1626 attacking the toleration of such views. When he returned to Ireland he continued the fight, albeit rather obliquely, by publishing in 1631 a Latin history of the 9th-century monk Gottschalk of Orbais, who had been persecuted for his firm predestinarian views. Ussher launched a more direct attack on official policy in 1627, when he and two of his fellow Irish bishops preached publicly against the ‘Graces’ — particularly the proposal to grant toleration to Catholics. The evangelical success of presbyterian clergy within in north-east Ulster — some of whom had been accommodated within the Church of Ireland by tolerant bishops — led to further pressure upon the modus vivendi, which had been reached between nonconformists and the Church of Ireland in the early 17th century, as Henry Leslie, the Dean of Down, pressed for firm action to be taken against them by Ussher and the Irish authorities.

Two spectres, often indistinguishable, haunted many theologians in England during the 17th century. They called one popery and the other by the names of Arminianism and Socinianism, seeing their embodiment in particular individuals or groups. Those so accused sometimes replied in kind, but more usually they resorted to a counter-charge of puritanism. Truth, half-truth, and falsehood were all involved in this labelling. Although the focus of concern altered with circumstances, most of the ingredients can be found present in Oxford from the late Elizabethan period onwards. Broadly speaking, an obsession with Roman Catholicism was increasingly paralleled by alarm about a novel rationalizing tendency in religion. An important milestone in this development was the Oxford publication, in 1638, of The Religion of Protestants, by William Chillingworth. The character of Oxford divinity, until the reign of Charles I, was militantly protestant, generally Calvinist, in the sense of adhering to the Reformed theology of grace, and strongly evangelical.

The last Calvinist discussed in this book is John Edwards, whose father Thomas Edwards had been a Puritan heresiographer. Nonetheless he conformed to the Church of England in 1660, picturing himself as embattled in that church as he defended Calvin against detractors, argued that the Church of England's theology was properly Calvinist, and continued the struggle against Arminianism within it. Unlike others in this book, he proudly claimed the term “Calvinist” for himself. He confronted the challenges discussed in other chapters—the new science, Deism, scoffing, atheism, Socinianism, Anti-Trinitarianism—opposing them in numerous writings that dealt with epistemology, the role and definition of reason, natural theology, and the authority of scripture. Like others in the Church of England at that time he was deeply interested in the Church Fathers.

At the end of the sixteenth century parallel debates arose in both Catholic and Reformed areas of Europe on the role of divine grace and human free will. Augustine's works against the Pelagians played a prominent part in this discussion. The debates shaped the development of orthodox thought in each of the confessional settings. This chapter focuses on two of the key places for these debates, Catholic Leuven (the Baianist controversy) and Protestant Leiden (the Arminian controversy), to compare and assess the dynamics between public opinion, expressed in different media of communication (such as sermons, songs, pamphlets and plays) and academic scholarship (esp. the contributions by Michel Baius, Robert Bellarmine and Gerardus Joannes Vossius on heresiology and the history of the early Church).