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The problem of Reformed church government Joseph Hall acted as the mouthpiece of English Calvinists when he explained that issues of discipline were of minor importance for relations between the different Reformed Churches. The varying forms of Protestant church government were, he explained, ‘not … essential to the being of a church, though much importing the well or better being of it, according to our several apprehensions thereof’, and the different Protestant Churches therefore retained ‘a reverent and loving opinion of each other’. While this explanation may have seemed straightforward, it was still problematic in its treatment of an area where Protestants were openly at variance. Most Reformed Churches considered themselves to be ‘the best reformed church’, and even if few considered their form of church government to be vital to the esse (being) of a church, their conviction that it might well ‘import the well or better being of it’ naturally tended to undermine any suggestion that all forms of church government and ceremony were essentially things indifferent, to be varied at will in each individual church. Even Joseph Hall himself did not always sustain the relativistic tone adopted above.In a different context, Hall could be found urgingthe Church of England's own form of episcopal church government as ‘universaland unalterable’ and ‘appointed by the Holy Ghost’, and maintaining that ‘to depart from the judgment and practice of the universal church of Christ ever since the apostles’ times, and to betake ourselves to a new invention,cannot but be, besides the danger, vehemently scandalous'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

THE PROTESTANT CHURCH BEFORE LUTHER I began with this consideration that there were two sortes of questions betweene the Catholiques and Protestants the one of right or Doctrine the other of Fact or Story. As this, Whether Luther were the new preacher of the protestant fayth. Whether it hadd a visable apparanc of pastors and teachers before this tyme. I resolved to begin my inquiry with the questions of fact … because they were so few and so comprehensable by all capacytyes and the controversyes of doctrine so many and so Intricate as they required much tyme and Learning for theyr dis-quisition. When he set out in this way to resolve his conscience on the issues separating the Roman and Protestant Churches, Walter Montague, son of the earl of Manchester, doubtless followed the instincts of many lay readers of the Roman/Protestant controversy. Rather than the complex and seemingly endless points of doctrinal conflict, it was the more tangible and straightforward questions of historical fact surrounding the separation of the Protestants from the Church of Rome which seemed to offer the clearest guide to the troubled layman. It was here, however, that Montague claimed to have found the weakest point in the Protestant armoury against Rome, and he converted to Rome as a consequence. But how incoherent really was the Church of England's perception of its own past? And how far did this perception complicate English Protestants' understanding of their present relationship with the Roman Church? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

THE ATTRACTIONS OF ANTI-POPERY In 1600 Andrew Willet had urged anti-popery as the main vocation of the Church of England. He argued that it would unite puritans and bishops, enabling them to put the presbyterian upheavals behind them, and would stimulate an awareness of a common identity which conformists and precisians shared. In practice, things were rarely that simple. Estimations of the relative importance of the papal threat, and therefore of the value of opposition to it, were changing during the early Stuart period. Later chapters will study the structure of anti-papal thought in England and will investigate some of the doctrinal changes which possibly underlay these different assessments. However, it will be necessary to devote this first chapter to exploring the rationale of Elizabethan and Jacobean antipopery, and the purposes which it served. After an initial examination of the evaluations built into this ideology, the changes within it will then be placed within the context of the political chronology of the period, and the rapid developments during the 1630s, when the value of anti-popery was fundamentally challenged.Recent scholarship has already demonstrated how anti-papal polemic acted during the Elizabethan period as the established means whereby moderate puritans such as Willet could both display their loyalty to the Church of England, and at the same time affirm their commitment to further reformation.In Jacobean times anti-papal writings, at least in the first half of the reign, were the most distinctive feature of English Protestant theology and occupied the energies of all the principal members of the Jacobean episcopate. Recent scholarship has already demonstrated how anti-papal polemic acted during the Elizabethan period as the established means whereby moderate puritans such as Willet could both display their loyalty to the Church of England, and at the same time affirm their commitment to further reformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...