Against the Calvinist school-authors: a day to give thanks for the Royal Supremacy

On this day in 1595, John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, issued the Lambeth Articles.  Responding to a debate within Cambridge University regarding predestination, the Lambeth Articles - while moderated from their draft form by Whitgift - affirmed what was identified as a Calvinist account of predestination.

We do, however, need to pause at this point.  Those within the ecclesia Anglicana opposed to the Lambeth Articles did not reject Article XVII's account of the doctrine of predestination.  In fact, we can go further than that.  John Overall, a leading critic of the Lambeth Articles, declared that "St. Austin‘s Opinion is true".  He demonstrated a characteristically Augustinian concern regarding the doctrine:

That Grace may not be thought to be the necessary Consequence of Free-will, but that all our Vertue and Strength, in pious Affections and good Works, of Faith as well as Perseverance, is owing, not to the uncertain co-operation of Man’s Free-will, but to the efficacy of Divine Grace: That in the End all may be ascribed to God, and that he that glories, may glory in the Lord.

Similarly, Lancelot Andrewes does not hesitate to affirm the doctrine of Augustine and - as he pointed out - "the School-men":

That God in his Eternal (whether you will call it Fore-knowledge,) or Knowledge, whereby he sees things which are not, as though they were, has predestinated some, and reprobated others, is (I think) without all manner of doubt ... And if this do not appear plain enough, I would add, That some are predestinated one way, namely by Christ; and others are reprobated another, namely for their Sins.

To describe Overall and Andrewes (and see here for their writings on the Lambeth Articles here) as 'anti-Calvinists' should not obscure their assent to the Augustinian and Thomist account of predestination.  Their opposition was to a Calvinist scholasticism which was increasingly going beyond Augustine and Thomas, presenting and employing the doctrine of predestination in an unbalanced manner and thus undermining the need for believers - in the words of Overall - to be "solidly rooted in Faith and Charity".

At stake in the account of predestination given by Calvinist scholasticism, the use made of the doctrine, and the prominence given to it, was the nature and vocation of the ecclesia Anglicana as a national Church.  The predestination promoted by the Calvinist school-authors was incompatible with the vision of a national Church Elizabeth had articulated in her 1559 Injunctions:

because in all alterations, and specially in rites and ceremonies, there happen discords amongst the people, and thereupon slanderous words and railings, whereby charity, the knot of all Christian society, is loosed; the queen's majesty being most desirous of all other earthly things, that her people should live in charity both towards God and man, and therein abound in good works, wills and straitly commands all manner her subjects to forbear all vain and contentious disputations in matters of religion, and not to use in despite or rebuke of any person these convicious words, papist or papistical heretic, schis-matic or sacramentary, or any suchlike words of reproach. 

Against the pastoral comprehensiveness and generosity of Elizbaeth's vision of the parish church (and Hooker robustly defended examples of how this was embodied in specific practices), Judith Maltby has shown in her Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England the pastoral and parochial outcome of the account of predestination given by Calvinist scholasticism, "the godly's assessment of the multitude".  This resulted in Puritan clergy routinely refusing to administer the Sacraments and other rites of the Church to those deemed "unregenerate".

What is the relationship between such sectarianism and the doctrine of predestination?  Andrewes points to the relationship when he says:

I in truth ingenuously confess, that I have followed St. Austin‘s Advice, Such Mysteries as I cannot unfold, to admire them as they are concealed: And therefore for these sixteen years, ever since I was made Priest, I have neither publickly nor privately disputed about them, or medled with them in my Sermons.

Or, as Overall stated, "we ought not easily to presume upon Election".

For Andrewes and Overall the fundamental issue with the Lambeth Articles was such presumption, disregarding the warning of Article XVII that "we must receive God's promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in holy Scripture".  Against the Lambeth Articles and their public speculation regarding the high and hidden mystery of predestination, Andrewes urges a practical, reasonable, and pastoral focus in the pulpits of the ecclesia Anglicana:

It would be to much better purpose to teach our People plainly the Way to Salvation in things manifestly relating to a holy and a well-govern’d Life, than to trouble their Heads with the Secrets of Providence, and the hidden things of God: whereas an over-curious Inquiry into these Things does but turn Peoples Heads, and make them break out into Enthusiastick Frensies, and scarce ever tend to the Edification of strait and narrow Dispositions.

This leads us to then recognise the significance of the Royal Supremacy regarding the Lambeth Articles.  Elizabeth suspended the Lambeth Articles, over-ruling Whitgift, saying of the doctrine of predestination that it was a "matter tender and dangerous to weak and ignorant minds".  James I/VI rejected the Puritan call at the Hampton Court Conference "that the nine orthodoxal assertions concluded on at Lambeth might be inserted into the Book of Articles".  His 'Directions concerning Preachers' (1622) also warned against addressing predestination from the pulpit:

That no preacher of what title soever under the degree of a bishop, or dean at the least, do from henceforth presume to preach in any popular auditory the deep points of predestination, election, reprobation or of the universality, efficacity, resistibility or irresistibility of God's grace.

And the Royal Martyr, in his Declaration which was added to the Articles of Religion, similarly declared:

We will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God's promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them. 

In addition to this, it was Charles I who secured the Church of Ireland receiving and approving the Articles of Religion, in place of the Irish Articles of 1615 which had incorporated the Lambeth Articles.  As historian John McCafferty has stated, this exemplified the Royal Martyr's vision of the British Churches "centred on a royal, not Canterburian, supremacy".

It was the Royal Supremacy which ensured that the Lambeth Articles did not enshrine a sectarianism incompatible with the character and vocation of a national church, and which secured Article XVII's Christocentric rendering of the doctrine of predestination against scholastic speculations.  This resistance against the Lambeth Articles exemplifies the significance of the Royal Supremacy - and why contemporary Anglicans should not be embarrassed about its historic role within the shaping of our tradition.

The Crown's concern to avoid - in the words of the Royal Martyr's Declaration - "unnecessary Disputations, Altercations, or Questions ... which may nourish Faction both in the Church and Commonwealth", rather than being dismissed as Erastian pragmatism, was crucial in both nurturing and protecting the character of a national Church over and against a sectarian agenda.  This character of a national Church has fundamentally determined Anglicanism's ethos and practices even in jurisdictions where this is no longer, or never has been, the legal order. It is seen, for example, in pastoral offices characterised by welcome and hospitality, in celebrating the sanctity and vocation of civic life, and in what John Milbank has described as being "sturdily incarnated in land, parish and work".  Such practices would have been undermined - perhaps fatally - by an account of predestination such as promoted by the Calvinist school-authors and the Lambeth Articles, oriented as this was towards a sectarian vision of the church.

Elizabeth, James, and the Royal Martyr, by rejecting the Lambeth Articles, protected the heart of Anglicanism's vocation and identity as national church, a heart found in what Kevin Sharpe has described as "the rhythms and rituals of parish life which were [and are] central to ... the ecclesia Anglicana".