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Chapter 2 shows how perseverance was a major topic in the debates at Cambridge University that set the context for the famous Lambeth Articles of 1595. Furthermore, the chapter looks specifically at the way perseverance was handled in the construction of the Lambeth Articles and how variant readings and receptions of Augustine factored into the version of the articles that was finally approved. Thus, it shows that readings of Augustine influenced the way bishops made policies and strictures for the University of Cambridge. It suggests the existence of a strong Reformed influence in England that was broad enough to admit diversity on perseverance due to its regard for the early church. That is, it discovers the existence of a minority opinion within the Reformed tradition that took advantage of the confessional latitude and dissented from the majority opinion regarding the perseverance of every saint.

This chapter shows that religious turmoil, not the peace and stability implied by the term Elizabethan Settlement, characterized the reign of Elizabeth I. Polemical theology was rife, as was exhibited by John Jewel’s ‘Challenge Sermon’, Roman Catholic attacks on the English Church, the ‘Vestiarian’ controversy over the established Church’s retention of vestments, and the urgent ‘Admonitions’ to Parliament by those who sought further and more radical reforms. These were followed by Thomas Cartwright’s campaign to remake the English Church in the image of that of Geneva, Martin Marprelate’s sensational depictions of the English bishops, and the condemnations of the ‘halfly reformed’ English Church by religious separatists. Archbishop John Whitgift’s campaign against nonconformity and Richard Hooker’s apology of the Church were concerted attempts to secure the nation’s support of the established Church of England. Nevertheless, discontents were clearly evident and a religious consensus was still elusive at the end of the Queen’s reign.

This chapter explores the creation of conforming Puritanism, a powerful alternative to Presbyterianism in Puritan thought. This strain of Puritanism reconciled the demands of edifying reform with conformity to the Established Church, by proposing a model of godly episcopacy and showing the benefits of conformity. In the 1570s, Matthew—now a key player in Elizabethan Puritanism—argued that ‘edifying reform’ could only be secured in the Established Church. Drawing on arguments about godly magistracy first used in the vestment crisis, Matthew stressed that as part of the Established Church, ministers could rely on magistrates to exercise the monarch’s powers in the Church in order to pursue godly reform. Popularized by increasingly virulent anti-Catholicism, this vision of godly magistracy secured conformity but was potentially seditious.

Chapter 1 surveys writings by important English theologians—including William Tyndale, Thomas Becon, John Hooper, and John Whitgift—and shows that race became a powerful tool for clarifying the Church of England’s theology concerning baptism and the origins of Christian identity. Race functions in two ways in the Church of England’s baptismal theology: one, in arguments against English Anabaptists, as the Church of England asserted that the children of Christians should be baptized just as the children of Jews were circumcised; and two, in arguments asserting that the children of Christians who died before being baptized were nevertheless saved because God is also the Father of Christian “seed.” This chapter also shows that the rhetorical force of theological arguments about baptism often presupposes a belief among English readers that infidels, namely Turks, were racially different from themselves.

This chapter shifts attention from the private reading of the Bible to its public reading in church. It explores complaints about the ‘bare reading’ of the liturgy from the 1570s, and its defence by defenders of the established church. It explores the guides that promoted rhetorical delivery, and which explained the Bible as a series of affecting stories that congregants could relate to. It recognizes that complaints about bare reading in the 1570s had a second phase in the late 1580s and 1590s when a style of oral reading as protest was launched to defend preaching by a group of puritans writing as ‘Martin Marprelate’. It explores an unusual riposte from an unexpected quarter, Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares over Jerusalem, arguing he set out to give readers the experience of live preaching in book-form. And it invites us to think differently about how books in this period were experienced.

Peter Lake’s coinage of a new term for ‘anti-Calvinists’—‘avant-garde conformists’—has been one of the most fruitful interventions in recent early Stuart ecclesiastical history. This chapter interrogates the origins and meanings of the epithet as found in the pivotal decade of the 1590s. While noting precursors of some associated ideas and attitudes, the chapter considers in detail the competing claims of Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Hooker to be accounted the first ‘avant-garde conformists’. It also discusses the question of lay support (or even sources) for this new ‘style’ of churchmanship that emerged under Whitgift in the last decade of Elizabeth’s long reign.

Perkins contributed significantly to the English and European discussion of the controversial issues of salvation and predestination. He wrote two important Latin treatises on the subject, both intended for a scholarly audience. They grew out of controversies in Cambridge. The first book, translated almost at once into English as A Golden Chaine (1591), became one of his most widely read treatises. Its argument is consistent with Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, authorized by the Queen in 1571. Archbishop Whigift’s Lambeth Articles of 1595 covered much of the same ground and was intended to put an end to a stubborn and damaging controversy, but was never officially authorized by the Queen. Perkins’s discussion of the doctrine of predestination was far more discursive and was based on an analysis of key passages of scripture. Perkins’s second treatise provoked the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius into challenging the prevailing teachings of the Reformed Church in the Netherlands.