laudable Practice

As I continue to read Stephen Hampton's Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England (2021), I am struck by the assumption throughout that Reformed Conformity straightforwardly represented 'orthodoxy' in the ecclesia Anglicana .  This seems - at best - rather difficult to reconcile with the debates of the Jacobean and Caroline Church. For example, the English delegation's contribution to the Synod of Dort is described by Hampton as "the most authoritative statement of English Reformed Orthodoxy since the Lambeth Articles".  Not referenced is the fact that the Supreme Governor of the Church of England refused authority to publish the Lambeth Articles.  No minister of the Church of England had to subscribe to them.  What is more, Overall's opposition to the Lambeth Articles did not prevent his advancement:  Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge 1596, Dean of St. Paul's 1601, Bishop of Coventry and L...

Beginning to read Stephen Hampton's Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England , I was struck by some of the contrasts made in his description of the 1624 consecration of the chapel of Exeter College, Oxford.  Hampton contrasts the views of the preacher at the service, John Prideaux, with those of the bishop presiding, John Howson.  Prideaux, we are told, articulates a view of "sacred space, and of orthodox Conformist devotion" that is "Reformed", cohering with the Second Helvetic Confession, over and against "the likes of Howson, on the one hand, and the Puritans, on the other". Unlike Prideaux, Howson had previously - in a 1598 sermon - critiqued the view of the Second Helvetic Confession that "The greater part of meetings for worship is ... to be given to evangelical teaching", that is, preaching.  Howson quite rightly noted, "the Church of England hath no such constitution".  ...

Having recently purchased Hampton's Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England (2021), I thought it might be useful to repost my 2018 review of Anti-Arminians . --- The renaissance in the historical appreciation of 18th century Anglicanism - condemned by Newman in 1841 as the "miserable century" - began with J.C.D. Clark's  English Society 1688-1832 .  With a few exceptions (particularly E.R. Norman's 1976  Church and Society in England 1770-1970 ), historians of Left and Right, and latter day Puritans and Tractarians, agreed with Newman in presenting a moribund national Church during the 'long' 18th century (i.e. 1660-1832).  Clark radically challenged this, with his picture of an intellectually vibrant, robustly orthodox, socially and culturally significant Anglicanism. From this has flowed a number of ground-breaking works, demonstrating that Clark's interpretation - with its focus on political th...