Laud provoked great hostility for his vigorous and uncompromising reforms of Church liturgy, involving set hours of prayer and a more ritualistic approach to worship, which Puritans regarded as a move towards Roman Catholic practices. In response, Montagu argued that the Calvinist positions objected to were held only by a small, Puritan minority in the Church of England, and that the majority of clergy in the Church of England rejected high Calvinism. His works were brought back into print two decades after his death in 1623. This was the only issue on which the Arminians and James clashed and it was primarily a philosophical/ideological one. He believed in the… Netherlands: The Twelve Years’ Truce. The king’s stance on the Arminians was tested when a rector from Essex, Richard Montagu, wrote “A New Gag for an Old Goose” in 1624. [14] Abbot had anti-Arminian works written, by Sebastian Benefield and Robert Abbot, his brother (In Ricardi Thomsoni Angli-Belgici diatribam, against Thomson); his reception in 1613 of Hugo Grotius, the leading Dutch Arminian intellectual, was chilly (unlike the king's). Thomson was refused permission to print his Diatriba de amissione et intercisione gratiae, et justificationis later in the 1590s. The book was framed as a rebuttal of a Catholic critique of the Church of England. The status of the canons of Dort in relation to the Church, and the interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in the light of these and other pronouncements on Reformed theology, remained unclarified until the 1640s. Richard Bancroft as the first Archbishop of Canterbury chosen by James acted as an enforcer against Puritan nonconformity; George Abbot, however, who took over after Bancroft's death in 1610, was an evangelical Calvinist, and agreed with James on a solid opposition to Arminianism in the Netherlands, typified by the hounding of Conrad Vorstius and the loading of authority on the Synod of Dort as an international council of Reformed churches. The name was also applied to John Wesley's Methodists during the 18th century because of their hostility to Calvinism. Many in Parliament were alarmed by Montagu’s pamphlet and complained to James that it expressed the views of Jacob Arminius at the expense of the Thirty Nine Articles. Under James I, opposition to Arminianism became official policy, and anti-Calvinist views remained subject to effective censorship. James died in 1625 but the Arminian issue and the career of William Laud were to have a major impact on England in the reign of Charles I. Laud, however, had supporters in the "moderate" group who would later emerge as the recognisable "Durham House" faction, around Richard Neile. The intervention by John Whitgift led to the delineation of the Church of England's reception of Calvinist purely theological teaching in the 1595 Lambeth Articles. [11], George Abbot suspected William Laud at an early stage of his career of anti-Calvinism; and attempted to block Laud's election as President of St John's College, Oxford. Arminian views held in England after that time are variously seen as advanced, and even disruptive of Calvinism that was quite orthodox in the Church of England by the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (a position argued by Nicholas Tyacke);[1] or on the other hand a return to the spirit of the Elizabethan Settlement. Related Posts. [3], The third of the Thirty-Nine Articles affirmed the Harrowing of Hell. W illiam Laud was born at Reading in Berkshire on 7 October 1573. History Learning Site Copyright © 2000 - 2020. A term with a more accurate focus is Durham House group.[21]. As far as his own kingdom of England was concerned, he issued instructions via George Abbot in 1622 suggesting restrictions on preaching, on the topics involved, and a moderate approach.[19]. Peter Baro was a Huguenot Calvinist, but also close to Niels Hemmingsen, who was in the Lutheran tradition of Philipp Melanchthon that was brought to Denmark by John Macalpine (Maccabeus); Baro preached conditional predestination. Arminian influence was driven out during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth era, but re-emerged after the Restoration amongst Anglo-Catholics. In the factional church disputes under Charles I, however, this was certainly a common accusation. The Church of England's embrace of the Elizabethan Settlement allowed for a large-scale acceptance of Calvinist views. These include prominent bishops of the period around 1600: Lancelot Andrewes,[8] Thomas Dove,[9] and John Overall. His Ecclesiastical Polity supplied arguments on justification, less individualistic than the Calvinistic norm; and these were adopted by John Cosin in his Collection of Private Devotions. Richard Neile, a prominent Arminian, also publicly criticised Parliament for failing to give its full support to the king. In 1613 Antonius Thysius published Scripta Anglicana, a collection of documents from the Cambridge disputes of the 1590s around Peter Baro. Despite this, the Arminians were tolerably liberal in their views on Rome and declared that it was the mother church of Christendom. Thomas Bilson preached in favour of a literal reading of this article before the queen and at Paul's Cross in 1597; ostensibly he was aiming at the Protestant Separatist objections to this view of the descensus or descent to hell of Christ as mentioned in the Apostles Creed. [17] This publication was directed against Remonstrant claims that they had backing from the Church of England's doctrinal formularies; it included works by Baro, Matthew Hutton, Laurence Chaderton, Robert Some, Andrew Willet, George Estye, Whittaker, and Johann Piscator. [23][25] Of the two most notorious clerical supporters of royal prerogative of the reign of Charles I, Robert Sibthorpe at least had Arminian associations (with Owen and others in the diocese of Peterborough); while Roger Maynwaring did not. But anti-Calvinism was closed down as far as discussion in print was concerned. One of the High Church Caroline divines, he opposed radical forms of Puritanism. Laudianism, the programme of William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 to shape the Church of England in terms of liturgy, discipline, and polity, has only with difficulty been equated by historians with the operation of an actual Arminian faction in the Church of England. [22] Given the involvement in this group of clerics who would hold important bishoprics after 1660, most obviously Gilbert Sheldon, this strand of Arminianism has been seen as significant for the tradition of the Church of England in the longer term. [26], Tyacke's view on English Arminianism as innovative and disruptive in the early Stuart period had a significant effect on historiography: Kevin Sharpe wrote that. Tozer Andrew Murray R.A. Torrey David Pawson Leonard Ravenhill David Wilkerson John R. Rice Conclusion.