Responding to Lake's 'On Laudianism': the illusion of 'Arminianism'
1] That Christ did not die for all men, but only for the elect.
2] That God created the greater part of mankind for eternal damnation, and wills not that the greater part should be converted and live.
3] That the elected and regenerated can not lose faith and the Holy Spirit, or be damned, though they commit great sins and crimes of every kind.
4] That those who are not elect are necessarily damned, and can not arrive at salvation, though they be baptized a thousand times, and receive the Eucharist every day, and lead as blameless a life as ever can be led.
Reading Peter Lake's On Laudianism (2024), we might assume that these are words from a Laudian publication of the 1630s, for "Arminian assumptions were absolutely central to the Laudians' own position" (p.425). 'Laudianism', after all, was "an attempt gradually to Arminianise the culture, to disseminate ... Arminian assumptions ... an official espousal of Arminianism" (p.429). The 'Laudian' figures reviewed by Lake were all, it seems, devoted Arminians: Reeve was "overtly Arminian" (p.392), Shelford "decidely Arminian" (p.400), while Skinner, Heyln, and Kellett promoted "a fully Arminian vision" (p.420). This resulted in Laudian works which were "a full-on Arminian treatment of the doctrine of reprobation" (p.380), espousing a "frankly Arminian theological framework" (p.390), and "overtly Arminian" (p.392).
This being so, perhaps the above declaration of 'The False and Erroneous doctrine of the Calvinists On Predestination' was a statement by one of these zealots for Arminianism. But, no. The above declaration is, of course, from the Saxony Visitation Articles of 1592, part of the attempt by Lutheran orthodoxy to repulse Calvinist influence in the Electorate. The Visitation Articles obviously illustrate the fact that Arminianism was not the only source of Protestant anti-predestinarianism.
This is significant because amongst Lake's many references to 'Laudian' Arminianism, and his insistence that 'Laudianism' was a thoroughly Arminian movement, there is not a single reference demonstrating in any way that 'Laudian' writers were influenced by Remonstrant theology. Absolutely nothing. The word 'Arminian' is peppered throughout the book, but not once is any evidence presented to show that these 'Laudians' were directly influenced by the Remonstrants.
What makes this distinctly odd is that alongside the book's numerous statements that 'Laudianism' was thoroughly Arminian, there are times when it appears as if Lake recognises that he must qualify such a judgement. Indeed, at the book's outset he admits that Arminianism cannot be regarded as providing 'Laudianism' with its intellectual centre:
one of the major claims made by this book is that the phenomenon under discussion here [i.e. 'Laudianism'] is not satisfactorily characterised or defined solely in terms of the theology of grace (p.41).
Added to this, we are told that Laud - the man after whom this 'movement' is named (something which, by the way, Lake describes as "both convenient and sensible") - had no interest in encouraging controversy on the matter of predestination:
When Samuel Brooke, the Master of Trinity, sent Laud an Arminian treatment of predestination for his perusal, and presumably approval, Laud replied that, if 'the tract be not too long', he would look at it, but added that 'I am yet where I was, that something about those controversies is unmasterable in this life. Neither can I think any expression be so happy as to settle all these difficulties. And however I do much doubt that the king will take any man's judgement so far as to have these controversires any further stirred, which now, God be thanked, begin to be more at peace' (p.360).
As Kevin Sharpe declared in 1992, "A convincing case that Laud was a doctrinal Arminian has yet to be made" - and Lake certainly has not made it. What is more, Lake himself points to two collections of 'Calvinist' sermons, "licensed by the Laudian authorities" (p.653), and dedicated to Laud himself. Humphrey Sydenham's sermons, published in 1637, were "a statement of Calvinist orthodoxy", dedicated "in the most fulsome terms" to Laud (p.448). Two years earlier, in 1635, Robert Sanderson, who, as Lake notes held to "Calvinist treatments of the central doctrines" (p.455), likewise dedicated a collection of sermons to Laud. If this is not enough, Lake also highlights how Sydenham's sermons included "visitation sermons for Laudian bishops", while Sanderson's sermons were both visitation sermons for Laud himself (p.458). Sanderson's dedication to Laud certainly does not suggest that the preacher detected Arminianism:
First, for that they were both preached by appointment from your Grace: the former, in the City, when you were L: Bishop of London; the other, in the Country, at your late Metropoliticall Visitation: and to what hand should they rather returne, then to that that first occasioned their being? As also, for that they tend to the suppressing of Novelties, and to the preservation of Order and Peace (of both which you are most zealous) in that Church, wherein (under God and the King) you worthily sit at the sterne. The God of heaven multiply his blessings upon you; prosper the affaires of his Church in your hands, that Truth and Peace may flourish therein more and more; and remember you according to all the good deeds you either have already done, or entend farther to doe for his house, and for the prosperity thereof.
If the man after whom 'Laudianism' is named was not a doctrinal Arminian, what are we to say about the 'movement'? It is here that the 1592 Saxony Visitation Articles are a useful comparison. To describe the Visitation Articles as 'Arminian' would be, of course, ridiculous. If anything, it was the understanding of Lutheran orthodoxy which influenced Arminius and the Remonstrants, not the reverse. What the Saxony Visitation Articles point to, then, is anti-predestinarian theologies in magisterial Protestantism that were not dependent on Arminius and the Remonstrants.
It is this that we also see within the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England. Was Elizabeth, as Supreme Governor, an Arminian when, in 1595, she refused assent to the Lambeth Articles and described them as "dangerous to weak ignorant minds"? Was Lord Burleigh, a key architect of the Elizabethan Settlement, an Arminian when he said that the Lambeth Articles "were charging God with cruelty, and might make men to be desperate in their wickedness"? Was James I/VI an Arminian when, at the Hampton Court conference, he refused permission to include the Lambeth Articles with the Articles of Religion, because it was improper "to stuff the Book with all conclusions Theological"?
Also at Hampton Court, Bancroft, Bishop of London, and Overall, Dean of St. Paul's - two senior figures in the Church of England, appointed to their posts during Elizabeth's reign - obtained the agreement of James for their critiques of predestinarianism. Mindful that the Hampton Court conference took place in 1604, and that the controversy around Arminius in Leiden was only beginning, with the publication of the Five Articles of Remonstrance occurring in 1610, describing Bancroft and Overall as Arminian is nonsensical.
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: And even now I had much rather hear than speak of them my self. And indeed, since the Place it self is doubtful, and has on both sides dangerous Precipices: Since some of the Texts of St. Paul (from whence commonly these Opinions are drawn) are to be reckoned (as St. Peter observes) amongst the Δυσνόητα, Things hard to be understood: And since there are not many amongst the Clergy, who are able to manage such Matters with that Niceness and Dexterity as they ought, and few among the People that are fit and proper Hearers of such Things, I should advise (if it were possible) that nothing might be said on either side about it, that this Dispute might not every where be so rashly and unskilfully managed, as it is wont to be.
It was this caution which shaped anti-predestinarian thought in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England, not Arminian and Remonstrant doctrine. If what Lake terms 'Laudianism' had Andrewes as its "great ideologist", there was no need to look across the North Sea to a theological dispute in a foreign church with a non-episcopal order. Something of this is also seen in the 1625 letter of Bishops Buckeridge, Howson, and Laud to Buckingham, with its emphasis on Dort as "a synod of that nation ... of no authority in any other national church". Against this, the three bishops urged the "moderation" of the Church of England, refusing to "be too busy with every particular school-point". There is no invocation of Arminian or Remonstrant doctrine in this letter; it is, rather, an affirmation of a native ecclesial moderation and liberty.
Lake himself points to how this stream of thought shaped 'Laudian' writers. For example, Edmund Reeve's The Communion Booke Catechisme Expounded (1636) opens with an acknowledgement of two anti-predestinarian divines within the Church of England:
The first instrument which God used for to instruct me in the Catholicke faith, was that most greatly learned Divine Master Doctor Overall, the late Lord Bishop of Norwich. Afterward I received further light in the great Mysterie of godlinesse, from that renowned and profoundly understanding Prelate in the Church, Master Doctor Buckeridge, the late Lord Bishop of Elie.
It is here that we can see how anti-predestinarian thought was nurtured and passed within the Jacobean and Caroline Church of England. It was a native tradition, not an import from Dutch Remonstrant circles. It was not, in other words, Arminian. Again, Lake gestures in this direction when he refers to those "opposed to something called Arminianism" (p.470) - calling something Arminian does not make it so.
John Bramhall - Bishop of Derry 1634-1660, Archbishop of Armagh 1660-1663 - provides an example of how the charge of Arminianism was refuted by those identified with Laud. In his Vindication of himself and the Episcopal Clergy, answering Richard Baxter (and published posthumously in 1672), Bramhall described how the charge of Arminianism was levelled "because we maintained some old innocent Truths which the Church of England and the Catholick Church even taught her Sons, before Arminius was born". Likewise, in his Answer to Hobbes (c.1657), Bramhall pointed to those "deep controverists" who "accused the Church of England of Arminianism, for holding those truths which they ever professed before Arminius was born". It is also in Bramhall that we can see why those identified with Laud were suspicious of Remonstrant theology. In his sermon at Bramhall's funeral in 1663, Jeremy Taylor related an incident which occurred as Bramhall was returning from exile at the Restoration:
at his leaving those Parts upon the Kings Return, some of the Remonstrant Ministers of the Low-Countries coming to take their leaves of this great man, and desiring that by his means the Church of England would be kind to them, he had reason to grant it, because they were learned men, and in many things of a most excellent belief; yet he reprov'd them, and gave them caution against it, that they approached too near and gave too much countenance to the great and dangerous errors of the Socinians.
It is not without relevance that Lake's book has no reference to Bramhall, despite his central role in ensuring that the Church of Ireland adopted the Thirty-nine Articles to replace to the Irish Articles of 1615 - a crucial moment for those whom Lake term 'Laudians'. It is, however, in Bramhall that we see an explicit statement of the native nature of anti-predestinarian thought in the reformed Church of England.
If, on the other hand, we are looking for Remonstrant influence on thought within the Church of England, we need to be looking at another tendency, the Cambridge Platonists. The critique of predestinarianism offered by leading Cambridge Platonists shared much more in common with Remonstrant theology and philosophy than anything seen amongst 'Laudians'. Perhaps the most significant expression of Cambridge Platonist criticism of predestinarianism is found in a 1647 sermon by Ralph Cudworth before the House of Commons - not, therefore, amongst the 'Laudians', but in a sermon preached to the very Commons which had led the charge against 'Laudianism' and Arminianism. In the words of Cudworth:
We have no warrant in Scripture, to peep into these hidden Rolls and Volumes of Eternity ... to perswade our selves that we are certainly elected to everlasting happiness ... Now, I may be bold to add that God is therefore God, because he is the highest and most perfect Good, and Good is not therefore Good because God out of an arbitrary will of his, would have it so.
As Christian Hengstermann states in a recent definitive anthology of the Cambridge Platonists:
Both Cudworth and Moore report in vivid autobiographical narratives their conversions from the arbitrary God of the Calvinism of their childhood and youth to the good God of the Platonism of their early adulthood and maturity. The Cambridge Platonists emerged as vociferous critics of Calvinism in the era of the civil war and the Commonwealth and Protectorate in the 1640s and 1650s ... As early as 1647, we find the landmark tenets of the group's anti-Calvinist soteriology put forward with great audacity in the youthful Cudworth's Sermon Before the House of Commons ... It contains in dense argument and in stirring language the outlines of the Cambridge Platonists' emphatically anti-Calvinist rational soteriology.
Amongst the Parliamentarian gentlemen in the Commons - and contrary to simplistic stereotypes - there was an important constituency open to anti-Calvinist soteriology. The Table-talk of the leading Parliamentarian John Selden provides a good example of the view of this constituency, using the Reformed Conformist divine Prideaux as an unfortunate illustration:
Doctor Prideaux, in his Lectures, several Days us'd Arguments to prove Predestination; at last tells his Auditory they are damn'd that do not believe it. Doing herein just like School-Boys, when one of them has got an Apple, or something the rest have a mind to, they use all the Arguments they can to get some of it from them: I gave you some t'other Day: You shall have some with me another time: When they cannot prevail, they tell him he's a Jackanapes, a Rogue and a Rascal.
Selden also draws attention to how the accusation of 'Arminianism' in the 1620 and 30s was fundamentally shaped not by theology but by a political understanding:
The Puritans who will allow no Free-will at all, but God does all, yet will allow the Subject his Liberty to do, or not to do, notwithstanding the King, the God upon Earth. The Arminians, who hold we have Free-will, yet say, when we come to the King, there must be all Obedience, and no Liberty to be stood for.
Selden's views, critical of both predestinarianism and those 'Arminian' clergy associated with the Personal Rule, help us to understand how the anti-Calvinist Cambridge Platonists - because supporters of the Parliament - did not lose their positions under Parliamentarian rule and served in the Cromwellian Church. Indeed, Cudworth himself had the ear of key figures in the Protectorate.
All of this has relevance for the debate about 'Laudianism' and Arminianism. It was the Cambridge Platonists, not the 'Laudians', who were the English equivalent of the Remonstrants. As Lake himself admits, the 'Laudians' had nothing at all like a theological and philosophical account of grace and election in any way comparable to the Remonstrants. In England, it was the Cambridge Platonists who had this theology and philosophy.
This means that the polemical deployment of 'Arminianism' in the Jacobean and Caroline Church had nothing at all to do with Remonstrant influence on 'Laudianism' or its antecedents. The term in this context had all the coherence and accuracy of the 'Laudian' deployment of the term 'Puritan' which, as Lakes states, was invoked to condemn "what, until recently, had passed as acceptable, or even 'orthodox', amongst English protestants" (p.329). It is rather ironic that Lake's emphasis on 'Laudianism' as Arminianism does precisely the same regarding English protestant anti-predestinarianism.
Lake, in other words, is fundamentally wrong in his depiction of 'Laudianism' as Arminian. The various points in the book in which he himself hesitates about this depiction should warn readers of how misleading the term is. The English roots of 'Laudian' anti-predestinarian thought, while hinted at in the book, are neither explicitly stated or adequately addressed. Such 'Laudian' anti-predestinarian thought was an expression of a wider stream of Protestant thought that pre-dated Remonstrant theology. When contrasted with the Cambridge Platonists, we see how 'Laudianism' was in no serious, meaningful way the English equivalent to Remonstrant thought.
Prideaux drew, as most of his Reformed contemporaries did, from far too broad a range of Reformed authorities for him to be helpfully labelled a 'Calvinist'. Antagonists such as Peter Heylyn undoubtedly tarred him with that brush; but the label is only as helpful in Prideaux's case, as is the label 'Arminian' in the case of William Laud or Richard Montagu ... describing Prideaux as a 'Calvinist' does no justice to Prideaux's range of theological references, nor to the ways in which Prideaux's theological agenda was shaped by his particular ecclesiastical situation.
So it is with those Lake terms 'Laudians' and the description 'Arminian'.
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