Freewill or Predestination. The Battle Over
Saving Grace in Mid-Tudor England.
(Book Review)
By D. Andrew Penny
By D. Andrew Penny. (Royal Historical Society Studies in History, 61.) Pp. x
+ 249. Woodbridge: Boydell Press (for the Royal Historical Society), 1990.
35[pounds].
Predestination and the causes of the English Civil War are not subjects that
have regularly induced equanimity and irenicism in historians. Recent
intepretations of early seventeenth-century English history have, however,
associated them in a potentially explosive mixture, and the result has been
an outbreak of odium theologicum, which has introduced a thoroughly unwonted
array of theological terms into the pages of Past and Present.(1) The
occasion of all this activity was an article by Peter White, and White has
now returned to the debate with a whole book designed to develop and justify
his initial claims. The considerable scholarly interest in the issues raised
by White stems not only from their significance for religious history but
also from their supposed impact on the politics of the period. Many of the
questions at stake, however, remain recalcitrantly theological, and in his
book White offers himself to the historical community as an expert guide to
whet he presents as intricate and arcane matters. In their comments on the
dust jacket John Guy and John Morrill seem suitably grateful for his advice,
praising the book for its `authority', its `massive' learning and its
`absolutely clear understanding of theological systems'. White certainly
assumes an authoritative, even schoolmasterly, tone; his account is peppered
with utterly self-confident asides and value judgements -- Richard Montague,
we are told, `lacked the subtlety and the capacity for logical rigour of an
academic theologian', while Joseph Hall is praised for having `reached a
balanced verdict on the theological questions at issue' (pp. 217, 234). This
Olympian tone is not merely an irritating affectation; it plays a crucial
role in the overall strategy of White's book, enabling him almost at will to
marginalise some figures and positions and valorise others.
White's argument operates on two levels. At a meta-level it proceeds through
the definition of terms and creation of categories which are then applied,
at a micro level, to a detailed reading of key sources. There are
considerable difficulties with White's case at both levels but in what
follows, largely for reasons of space, I have concentrated on the Thaws in
his conceptual schema, a schema which operates to prejudge many of the
issues at stake and sometimes to render his argument virtually circular.
The basic distinction upon which the book is based is one between theology
and polemic. `The essence of theology is the resolution of the great
antinomies.... In proclaiming the reconciliation of God and man it finds
itself reconciling opposites. It is a search for equipoise, the pursuit of a
middle way' (pp. 5-6). It is, therefore, on the basis of this definition of
`theology' that White goes on to `distinguish theology from polemic' (p.
11). Where theology tries to unite, to reconcile differences, to find a
middle way, polemic tries to set apart, to dichotomise, to define and
exclude. For White some authors are mere polemicists; for anyone interested
in theology as he defines it, therefore, their works are of no value at all.
Other writers, while often trying to do theology in the manner White
approves, sometimes unfortunately slip into polemic. When that happens they
can be gently reproved and the offending statements set aside. When
Buckeridge, Howson and Laud said some particularly rude things about Dort
and the (for White entirely un-Calvinist) Lambeth Articles they are said to
have `resorted to anti-Calvinist polemic' (p. 242) and when the English
delegates to Dort turned on Montague they are gently reproved for allowing
themselves to be driven onto the defensive and abandoning the flexibility of
their earlier position. But if White feels able to `edit' and marginalise
some authors, he completely ignores others. For White, Heylin and Prynne
were mere polemicists, and he proceeds to write as though they did not
exist. In short White's distinction between theology and polemic operates
throughout the book as a licence to marginalise what does not fit his case
and to emphasise what does. For a purported work of historical analysis this
represents a distinctly cavalier attitude to sources.
Moreover, the distinction between theology and polemic is not as
unproblematic as White imagines. It is not readily apparent how it can be
applied to a period in which the nearest thing to systematic theology
produced by English divines was nearly always contained in polemical works,
usually anti-Catholic, sometimes like-Hooker's Laws anti-Puritan, and, more
rarely, like Richard Montague's New Gagg and Appello, pointing in both
directions at once. It was, moreover, a period in which theology was taught
and examined through formal disputations, inherently polemical exercises
designed to sharpen the logical and forensic skills of would-be theologians.
Again, White's formulation of theology as an attempt to resolve `the great
antinomies' is fair enough. Ho-wever, those antinomies could be reconciled
in a number of ways that were not always mutually compatible. In short, the
search for `equipoise' did not necessarily involve the pursuit of
`moderation' in quite the way White appears to imagine.
Of course, in an age drenched in Aristotelianism the notions that virtue was
a mean, and moderation a good thing, were common coin. However, the
substantive content of any middle way depended entirely on the way in which
the two extremes were construed or constructed. Here, one enters the realm
of polemic. For it was precisely in the construction of extreme positions,
positions that one did not hold, that the polemical impulse came into its
own. As such it was an integral part of the construction of any position as
moderate or as middle way. Even quite radical Protestants and Puritans
could, on occasion, present their position as in some sense a middle way
between popish idolatry and Anabaptist or sectarian excess. For many
Jacobean conformists the formal equivalence of the popish and Puritan
threats became almost axiomatic but, in practice, it was a rare divine
indeed who was not more at ease defining his own position against one or
other of these polemically constructed opponents. Styles of polemic and
decisions about the deployment of the polemical mode thus provide us with
crucial evidence about the basic orientation of contemporaries' thought.
Anyone ruling such evidence out of court (as White does) virtually ensures
that he or she will miss the point.
Nor is White's notion of moderation without its difficulties. For in this
intellectual world `moderation' is not best seen as a substantive category,
of which one can attribute more or less to a given group or individual.
`Moderate' only works as a qualifier. One can be a moderate something, but
not merely a `moderate'. Of course, to use moderate in this way implies a
spectrum of opinion along which it is possible to locate individuals and
positions in relation to one another. The notion of a spectrum allows one to
distinguish shades of opinion, to chart change over time, to categorise and
sift different positions and schools of thought, with a far greater subtlety
than the view of the period (attributed perhaps unfairly by White to
Nicholas Tyacke) which sees it as simply polarised between monolithic and
unchanging Calvinist and Arminian camps.
Anxious to overthrow what he takes to be Tyacke's view, White initially
embraces the notion of a spectrum with enthusiasm. However, that enthusiasm
only operates at the lever of theory, for in practice, as he admits in the
introduction (p. xiii), he largely fails to use any coherently defined
spectrum of opinion to describe or locate any of the various positions on
predestination he outlines in the book. In part this is because of his
semi-covert drive to replace what he takes to be the false polarity between
Arminians and Calvinists, which was centred on the issue of predestination,
with another polarity, that between Anglicans and Puritans, which he sees as
only partly concerned, and only on the Puritan side, with the double decree.
A serious deployment of the notion of a spectrum of opinion would be even
less kind to the Anglican/Puritan dichotomy, to which White remains wedded,
than it is to the Calvinist/Arminian dichotomy which he wants so much to
reject. And so, since White's aim is, through the invocation of something
called doctrinal Puritanism, to expand the Anglican middle into a very
capacious category indeed, the notion of a spectrum is of no great practical
value except for the narrowly polemical purpose of attacking Dr Tyacke.
Of course refuting Tyacke involves closely following his argument. The
result is that White faithfully reproduces Tyacke's concentration on the
single doctrinal crux of predestination. That may be a forgiveable
narrowness in someone (like Tyacke) who is convinced of that doctrine's
centrality and importance. However, it seems positively bizarre in a book
dedicated to the proposition that predestination was not all that important
after all, except to Puritans, whose views, on this or any other subject,
are not accorded extended discussion. There is, moreover, a considerable
price attached to White's concentration on the theology of grace. For, as he
admits, the significance of the various predestinarian positions he is
describing can only properly be appreciated by looking at their relationship
with other doctrinal loci. Yet since he refuses to discuss any doctrine
other than predestination he is unable to categorise or analyse the various
positions on predestination outlined in his book by relating them to their
wider theological context.
In fact, White does, intermittently, invoke other doctrinal issues. But he
does so only by implication, with a coyness that raises but never answers
any number of crucial questions. In particular, his notion of doctrinal
Puritanism begs a whole series of questions about the relations of doctrine
to discipline and ceremony. It is never clear in what other senses of the
word those who held only the doctrinal aspects of doctrinal Puritanism were
Puritans. Thus in his account of the York House Conference White is forced
to describe Bishop Morton, future royalist and defender of the Prayer Book,
as espousing the `doctrinal puritanism of Lord Saye'. This is clearly very
odd, yet White can only address the seeming contradictions of his own
position by attributing doubts to Morton himself -- `it is hard to believe
that Morton can have had any real confidence in his own espousal of Saye's
doctrinal puritanism'-- for which there is no textual warrant (p. 226). In
fact, unless he wants to define Puritanism solely in terms of the doctrine
of predestination, White's whole notion of doctrinal Puritanism must rest on
other issues, issues that he continually invokes but never discusses.
Similarly, whenever he is forced to concede that there were very different
schools of thought at play in the English Church, White either leaves them
unexplained or cryptically invokes other issues and doctrines to explain
them. Thus of Richard Montague he writes that `the general orientation of
his theology reflected fundamental differences of outlook between him and
his opponents' and then leaves it at that. Admitting that `there were indeed
two different conceptions of protestant orthodoxy ranged against each other
in 1625-9', White dismisses them as irrelevant to his present purpose
because `they were well established, many-faceted and related essentially to
perceptions of Rome'. Elsewhere he is happy to refer to `Laudian theology'
but never tells the reader what that might be (pp. 218, 222, 255). He
certainly never discusses how these other divisions might be related to
predestination. The implication is that they were not related at all but
since the question is never directly addressed it is hard to be sure. Even
in the case of doctrinal Puritanism, where there surely must be some
connection, the substantive basis of the correlation between Puritanism and
Calvinism is never explained.
All this is scarcely enlightening. However, White displays no desire to
shoulder the responsibility of categorising or explicating contemporary
religious opinion or theological schools of thought. In fact the categories
`Anglican' and `Puritan' continually shape his argument but he feels no need
to define or defend either of them. The whole thrust of the argument serves
to lever the doctrine of predestination out of any wider doctrinal or
polemical context/s. We are left, then, with a spectrum upon which it is
virtually impossible to locate anyone; with categories that White refuses to
define, or even in the case of Anglicanism, explicitly to address; with an
issue -- predestination -- that, on White's account, was peripheral to the
concerns of most of the men he is writing about; an issue, moreover, whose
significance can only be understood in relation to other doctrines, about
which White refuses to talk.
Spectrums, of course, require end points, and White proceeds to define his
in ways that effectively predetermine the course of his argument. White
defines the end of the spectrum conventionally labelled `Calvinist' entirely
in terms of the supralapsarianism of Theodore Beza. Citing Beza's
Tractationes theologicae published at Geneva between 1570 and 1582, White
constructs a version of Calvinist orthodoxy to which a strictly limited
vision of the atonement and an irrespective doctrine of reprobation are
central. Sublapsarian versions of the doctrine of predestination, since they
do not contain a sufficiently irrespective doctrine of reprobation, do not
count, nor do any views of the atonement not strictly limited to the elect.
Thus, while he largely avoids the word White has in effect produced a
definition of Calvinist or reformed orthodoxy with scarcely a mention of
Calvin. Given the huge scholarly literature concerned with the relationship
between Calvin and the Calvinists, with the question of the impact of Beza
and later reformed scholasticism on the insights and balance of Calvin's
position, this is odd.
Moreover, White's criteria for distinguishing moderates from extremists
(and, one assumes, middle way `Anglicans' from `doctrinal Puritans') are
similarly peculiar. For White, anyone who goes out of his way to deny that
God is the author of sin, to assert that election is in Christ, to argue
that security rather than assurance is bad, to point out that even the elect
must work out their salvation in fear and trembling, who emphasises that
good works are a necessary sign of a true and lively faith, who talks more
about election than reprobation, who stresses the need to preach the word to
all, who balances predestination with notions of a covenant between God, the
believer and the godly community or Church, who points out the very close
resemblance between the spiritual graces vouchsafed to the reprobate and
those vouchsafed to the elect, any such person must be some sort of
`moderate'. If these were indeed the marks of moderation there can hardly
have been any radicals left. These sorts of claims and characteristics were
the common coin of most Puritan and evangelical Calvinist preaching. And yet
White persists in using doctrinal Puritanism as a synonym for Bezan
extremism on predestination.
At this point White seems to be in danger of allowing his own analytical
criteria and categories to be formed by the sort of caricature of Calvinist
and/or Puritan divinity produced by anti-Calvinists like Richard Montague.
For just as those concerned to defend notions of absolute predestination
dwelt on the doctrine of election, those concerned to attack it turned to
reprobation -- and White follows suit with enthusiasm. Having accepted and
effectively reproduced the anti-Calvinists' caricature of Calvinist and
Puritan divinity, White naturally finds their notion of doctrinal Puritanism
plausible. He then goes on more or less to endorse both their presentation
of themselves as moderates and their version of their relationship to the
inherently moderate constitution of the Church of England, a vision which he
then projects back into the sixteenth century. In a highly polemicised
period like this, one sure way to misunderstand and misconstrue events is to
adopt the perspectives and values of one party to a debate. The genuinely
historical task, which White consistently shirks, is to explain and
imaginatively inhabit the positions and polemical claims of each group in
turn, not to distribute marks for theological subtlety and rightness from
the standpoint of one of the parties to the dispute.
Next White turns to Arminianism, which he defines strictly in terms of the
theology of Jacobus Arminius. Any criticism of absolute predestination that
diverges from this position cannot be called Arminian. At a stroke,
therefore, White has managed to abolish English Arminianism and to produce a
touchstone of Calvinist orthodoxy to which, on his own admission, even the
Synod of Dort did not adhere. This, however, does not prevent him from
applying his exalted standard of reformed rectitude throughout the book,
even to periods before Beza had fully formulated his position. Responding to
A. G. Dickens's perhaps rather intemperate description of the articles of
religion as displaying an `immoderate Calvinism' and a `rigorous
supralapsarianism', White uses Beza as a touchstone of Calvinist rigorism.
Of course Beza's position, although it precedes the discussion of the
Forty-Two Articles in White's book, did no such thing in the sixteenth
century. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the Articles of Religion
should not have betrayed the influence of books which had yet to be written.
In fact the chronological arrangement of White's book is, in general, rather
odd. Starting with chapters on the works of Prynne and Heylin taken from the
very end of White's chosen period, he then returns to the middle to discuss
Beza and Arminius, and from there finally proceeds to the beginning. While
this is an odd way to structure a historical study it serves the purposes of
White's argument admirably. For in White's view, where Calvinism, defined as
supralapsarian Bezanism, is not present we cannot speak of Calvinism at all.
Unsurprisingly then he is able to detect very little Calvinism in the
Edwardian or early Elizabethan Churches, a little more in the second half of
Elizabeth's reign, but virtually none in the early Stuart Church (except
among `doctrinal Puritans') and almost no Arminianism anywhere at all,
except in Holland and that, of course, was and is `abroad'. Any reader
prepared to accept White's categories cannot but agree with him. The
categories, however, are distressingly unhistorical and the reader is
presented with no very compelling reasons to adopt them.
Moreover if we unpick the categories, the material presented in the book
takes on a rather different significance from that White himself attributes
to it. We start with an early English Protestantism obsessed with
justification by faith and the need to distinguish between itself and a
Catholic theology of merit. At this stage Protestants were not much
concerned with the issue of predestination and some few of them (Latimer and
Hooper), when they did discuss it, tended to say things that, by later
standards of reformed orthodoxy, could sound distinctly Arminian. Able for
the first time to espouse a formal doctrinal position in the relative
freedom of Edward's reign, and now under the influence of a number of
continental reformed divines (Bucer, Martyr) who (as White shows) believed
in absolute predestination but did not always express themselves in the
harsh terms or with the rigour later used by Beza and others, English
Protestants produced in the Articles of Religion a distinctly reformed
document.
A. G. Dickens pointed out some time ago that the articles were in part
shaped by an anti-Anabaptist impulse. As Catharine Davies's recent research
has confirmed, if the position of the English Church can be seen as a middle
way at all during Edward's reign the resulting via media was conceived at
the time as a reformed rejection of both popish and Anabaptist extremes. The
free willers, who form the subject of Andrew Peeny's book, were often
(inaccurately, he argues) presented in official circles as Anabaptists.
Betraying no acquaintance with Davies's important dissertation, Penny does
not perhaps pay enough attention to the way continental models of Anabaptist
extremism were appropriated and deployed by Edwardian writers to legitimate
the official reformation as mainstream and moderate and to explain and
conceptually control the lay activism and radicalism that forms the subject
of his book. He is accordingly perhaps a little too trustful of official
refutations of Anabaptist error as a guide to the real opinions of his free
willers. However, he is able to show that included under the rubric of
Anabaptist radicalism were certain proto-Arminian opinions on free will and
predestination circulating at a plebeian level in Kent and London.
Interestingly for White's argument, Penny abandons the mid-Tudor Protestant
establishment, the establishment of Cranmer, Ridley and John Bradford -- the
establishment, of course, that produced the Articles of Religion -- to an
increasingly assertive predestinarianism.
As Penny effectively shows in his analysis of some of the books published to
refute the free willers, the Articles of Religion did not embrace the most
extreme formulations on predestination available at the time. They remained,
how-ever, a forceful statement of absolute predestination that dwelt on
election not reprobation but which, by the standards of the time, might
fairly be called distinctly reformed or, in a loose sense of the word,
Calvinist. White's attempts to avoid this conclusion, on the one hand by
looking backwards and glossing the articles with a text -- A necessary
doctrine and erudition of a Christian man -- produced in 1543 at the height
of the Henrician reaction, and, on the other, by looking forwards and
comparing them with Beza, do not indicate a developed sense of historical
context.
The adoption of the same articles by the Elizabethan Church represented an
endorsement of the same reformed position. White quotes a passage on
predestination from a document produced by certain prominent Protestants
(Jewel, Cox and Sandys amongst them) designed `to justify themselves against
hostile criticism after their disputation at Westminster with Marian
Catholics' (p. 62). Those debates concerned the authority of individual
churches over their own ceremonies, the mass and the use of Latin in divine
service. That they felt the need to defend a position on predestination at
all in this context, facing down popish error on the subject, associating
the issue with the crucial `doctrines of grace and our free justification
and salvation by Christ', and endorsing Augustine's De bono perseverantiae
in the process, seems less a sign of caution and moderation than White
appears to think. As he points out the authors justified their treatment of
predestination in part by reference to the presence `in these our days' of
some `who also pretend the name of the gospel' but who `oppugned' the
articles on justification and predestination. This is almost certainly a
reference backwards to the disputes in the King's Bench prison under Mary
and also to the scattered groups of early Elizabethan Protestants who
continued the cause of Penny's free willers into the next reign. Penny can
find precious few such men and concentrates his account on the work of John
Champneys and the even more obscure Thomas Talbot, parson of Milk Street,
London. This is a rather slender basis for a non-Calvinist Anglican
tradition of the sort posited by Penny but it provides an interesting
context for the passage quoted by White. For here we have the opponents of a
predestinarian gloss on article I 7 being described by Jewel and others as
only `pretending' the name of the gospel and being firmly put in their place
by leading proponents of White and Penny's moderate Anglican compromise. If
there was, as Penny argues, a `predestinarian offensive' (p. 206) during
this period is appears to have included amongst its proponents Cox, Jewel
and Sandys, and, in Mary's reign, Ridley, if Penny's admittedly tenuous
attribution to him of an anonymous but strongly predestinarian manuscript
reply to the free willers in the King's Bench prison is correct.
In the immediate aftermath of the settlement Jewel and others accepted and
indeed gloried in the reformed doctrine of the English Church, despite their
embarassment at the relatively unreformed nature of its liturgy. The
tensions that White discerns between Jewel's claim that the Church of
England shared a common doctrinal position with the wider reformed community
and his claims to true catholicity betray White's own assumptions rather
than Jewel's. In a classic instance of his use of the theology/polemic
distinction he manages to write off the former claim as merely polemically
`mandatory' and to embrace the latter as `fundamental' to both the
`principle and method of Jewel's apologetic' (pp. 70-1). This, of course, is
to miss the point that for Jewel both claims were central and, indeed,
virtually synonymous. It was precisely because in comparison with the
papists all the reformed Churches could claim true catholicity that he could
assume a basic doctrinal consensus amongst them and thus `gloss over points
of contention' (p. 71).
In the mid-Elizabethan period those who openly challenged the doctrine of
absolute predestination were few and far between and often got into serious
trouble. Most of these were foreigners often of eccentric doctrinal opinions
(Antonio del Corro, Francesco Pucci, Peter Baro). The one Englishman to
repudiate overtly `Calvinist' versions of predestination -- Samuel Harsnet
-- was told to be quiet by Whitgift himself. According to White the most
popular reformed authority in this period was the moderately but firmly
predestinarian Commonplaces of Musculus. Despite some very scattered
objections to doctrinal implications extracted from the Prayer Book and in
one instance the Thirty-Nine Articles (drawn mostly from anonymous Puritan
manuscript manifestos) the dispute between Puritans and conformists over
church government took place within an assumed doctrinal consensus openly
and repeatedly acknowledged in print by both sides. White largely ignores
the printed pamphlet exchanges but notes that even Whitgift took exception
when Beza tried to dent this English reformed front by imputing some
doctrinal implications to differences over polity.
This situation was disrupted, in part, by the increasing prominence in
England of genuinely Bezan opinions on predestination, and in part, by the
doctrinal zeal of Puritans whose commitment to the English Church hung on
its claims to true doctrine and whose vision of true doctrine (at this date)
contained an uncompromising (Bezan?) version of absolute predestination at
or near its heart. These Bezan tendencies represented a distinct shift from
the position enshrined in the Thirty-Nine Articles and the more moderate
formulations of earlier reformed authorities. Penny contests this reading
and is able to provide interesting examples of earlier predestinarian zeal
in the Edwardian and early Elizabethan periods. These show that an
uncompromising espousal of absolute predestination was not new in the 1580s
and 1590s and had never been a Puritan monopoly. As Muller and others have
argued, Protestant scholasticism did not represent a break from, so much as
a development out of, earlier reformed thinking,(2) but one does not have to
espouse the most extreme version of a decisive discontinuity between Calvin
and the Calvinists to note a certain increase in the prevalence of
supralapsarian opinions and a change in tone (in some circles) in the course
of Elizabeth's reign. The assumption of certain centrally placed figures in
the universities and elsewhere that such Bezan opinions represented a
summation of received opinion within the English reformed community proved
divisive. It drove some of those least comfortable with the doctrines of
absolute predestination, perseverance and assurance into more and more
coherent critiques of the Calvinist position and thus brought into the open
differences of emphasis and tone that had remained largely implicit until
that point. Penny's attempt to associate Peter Baro, a French divinity
professor at Cambridge who had arrived in England in the 1570s, with the
native plebeian and rather anticlerical free will tradition of Mary's reign
is, in the absence of any evidence, unpersuasive.
The result was the affair of the Lambeth Articles in which, after a certain
amount of negotiation, both archbishops accepted a formula drawn up largely
by William Whitaker to list those common assumptions about predestination
that would unite English theological opinion. In an interesting account of
Archbishop Hutton's treatise on predestination `White shows (in spite of
himself) how even more moderate predestinarians educated under Edward could
find the proto-Arminianism of Peter Baro worryingly Pelagian and popish and
unite with divines of a more overtly Bezan stamp and Puritan pedigree, like
Whitaker or Chaderton, behind a distinctly reformed or Calvinist standard of
orthodoxy. The very act of definition, however, proved fatal. Failing to
find royal favour the Lambeth Articles had no more authority than the
cultural capital and political clout of the authors could lend them. Those
out of sympathy with the Calvinist principles that prompted the articles
were free to gloss them as they would.
However, the 1590s represented the high water mark of Bezan influence in
England. Thereafter a combination of pastoral, polemical and theological
considerations rendered the predominant style of English predestinarian
theorising sublapsarian and much play was made with Calvin's distinction
between the sufficiency and efficiency of the atonement, a tendency that
culminated in the hypothetical universalism of the English delegation to
Dort. The nature of reformed orthodoxy was never fixed but, as White shows,
for all that the high water mark of Bezan influence was past, under James,
such sublapsarian, potentially universalist opinions were cited often to
demonstrate the essential solidarity of the Church of England with the other
reformed Churches and with the thought of the great luminaries of the
reformed tradition like Calvin.
Not everyone shared that perception, and some men, like `Dutch' Thomson and
later Thomas Jackson, started to press against the boundaries of even the
modified sublapsarian position, as Barrett, Baro and Hooker had done before
them. In doing so, for all their conversance with parallel developments in
the Low Countries, they never reproduced anything like the full scholastic
panoply of Arminius' reformed system building. Despite the continued public
canvassing at court, Paul's Cross and the universities, of various versions
of absolute predestination these differences scarcely reached the stage of
public dispute in England until the end of James's reign.
Things were brought to a head by the disputes in the Low Countries and the
Synod of Dort. White's account of the synod shows effectively just how
isolated the hyper-Calvinists Gomarus and Maccivius were. The English
delegation, initially divided over the extent of the atonement, united
behind the more moderate universalist position and generally exercised a
remarkably successful restraining influence an the more aggressive and
extreme tendencies of the Contra-remonstrants. White deploys some
interesting material here from the published correspondence of Grotius and
other Dutch scholars which shows clearly the links between the Remonstrants
and sympathetic figures in England like Andrewes and Overall.
White produces an effective if rather brief summary of the moderate
sublapsarian and hypothetical universalist Calvinism of the British Suffrage
and shows effectively how the delegates used the position hammered out at
the synod in their campaign to refute or at least to gloss into
insignificance the controversial works of Richard Montague. The position
taken by Davenant and Ward was certainly more moderate than that of some
other English predestinarians. But a hard line against both the Remonstrants
and Richard Montague was never a Puritan monopoly, as White effectively
proves. George Abbot, the archbishop of Canterbury, disapproved of the
universalism of Davenant and Ward. George Carleton, head of the delegation,
was initially hostile and wrote a sharp rebuke of Montague. Bishop Morton
was an outspoken critic of Montague's position at York House as was the
Puritan John Preston. Nor was moderation on the subject of predestination
unknown in Puritan circles. In an important and as yet unpublished paper
David Como has shown that two notoriously nonconformist Puritans -- Ezekiel
Culverwell and John Cotton -- both produced modified and moderated -- and in
Culverwell's case hypothetical universalist -- positions on the subject in
the 1610s and 1620s.
After a period of some confusion and no little dispute in parliament, the
pulpit and the press, in the course of which the position many
contemporaries called Arminian was placed under considerable pressure, calm
was restored in the 1630s. Public discussion of predestination was
discouraged. Davenant was rebuked for touching on the matter in a court
sermon, and, for the first time since the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, it
became very difficult, though not altogether impossible, to publish the
sorts of Calvinist opinions that Prynne thought orthodox and Peter Heylin
took to be heterodox. While these difficulties were not accompanied by
anything like a campaign to establish a Remonstrant or Arminian orthodoxy,
it now became possible to do something very like what Samuel Harsnet had
done in 1584, indeed, to do it at court, and yet to escape scot free. To
many people, to all Puritans and to many who were not Puritans in any normal
sense of the word, this seemed, variously, unfortunate, shocking and, to
some, even disastrous. However, the Civil War, war of religion or no, was
not fought about predestination nor was it fought between Calvinists and
Arminians.
This seems to me to be something like the moderate, mainstream view of these
matters and, stripped of the rather distorting and polemically generated
categories and assumptions that White brings to much of his material,
White's book in the main confirms it. Yet even within the rough outlines of
the account summarised here there is still plenty of room for argument about
what it all means. A variety of more or less plausible cases could be made
on the terrain that White attempts to occupy. Predestination was more cent
al to some churchmen and Christians than to others during this period.
Disputes on the subject were intermittent and their timing and political
resonance owed much to factors other than theology, The categories of
Calvinist and Arminian were less stable than some usages of the terms might
suggest. Seen negatively, they might be conceived as polemically constructed
labels deployed by those concerned to expel certain tendencies and opinions
from the pale of Protestant respectability. Seen positively, the objects of
those labelling processes might be pictured as loose coalitions, made up of
more or less compatible ideological strands, rather than as tidy monolithic
parties organised around tightly defined orthodoxies. The positive agenda of
most anti-Calvinists was dominated by issues and priorities other than
predestination. In general divisions about predestination represented only
one of the fault lines running through the English Church. The destabilising
effects of English Arminianism were in part caused by and worked out through
other divisions, disputes and tensions centred on the terms Puritanism and
popery. White could have argued such a case. He could, in fact, have taken
on board those central features of Tyacke's case that are founded on
evidence of essentially irrefutable profusion without necessarily accepting
all the alleged consequences of that case.(3) But in throwing the baby out
with the bath water White has done both himself and his readers a serious
disservice.
And here, of course, we return to the subject of polemic. White's book is
not properly a work of history. Its odd chronological arrangement, openly
evaluative language, narrow concentration on predestination and lack of any
great concern for wider polemical or theological context ensure that it is
best seen as a work of historical theology. And yet on White's own criteria
it cannot really qualify as theology either, for it is, first and foremost,
a work of polemic, that owes its shape and whatever claims it has to
coherence to the fidelity with which White tracks the argument and
reproduces the researches of other scholars, most notably those of Dr
Tyacke. The book is best seen, in fact, as an attempt formally to refute
Tyacke's thesis. Suitably enough, then, White's major conclusions remain
negative: predestination was never all that important. The real causes of
religious dispute lay elsewhere in other doctrines and other (often
political) concerns. The Church of England can never be said to have been
Calvinist. There were no English Arminians to speak of and so on.
White retains, however, one implicit positive claim - his book is, in fact,
a defence of a version of Anglicanism that never quite manages to speak its
name. For throughout the book, for all his talk of change and diversity,
White maintains an essentially stable, changeless vision of something called
`English theology' as `a middle way, a way that concentrated on fundamentals
and avoided extremes, but nevertheless was comprehensive and irenic' (p.
202). This vision of an Anglican `tradition of moderation and compromise'
(p. 215) also pervades the later stages of Penny's book. In a rather garbled
conclusion he tries to ground his version of the Anglican via media on an
ostensibly rather unlikely free will tradition linking the Kentish lay
conventicler and sect leader, Henry Hart with Archbishop William Laud. For
Penny, Laud and Hart are connected by a common espousal of frankly Arminian
opinions on the theology of grace. These, of course, are the very sorts of
firm doctrinal convictions on predestination from which White feels the need
to defend Archbishops Neile and Laud at `the bar of history' (p. 286). It
has often proved easier for historians of the English Church to agree on
Anglicanism's inherent moderation than on its positive ideological content
and here, as ever, one man's moderation turns out to be another's doctrinal
dogmatism. These distorting `Anglican' assumptions are happily peripheral to
the bulk of Penny's book which is simply a competent and interesting, if at
times necessarily tentative, account of the debates on predestination and
free will in the King's Bench prison under Mary. They are far more
destructively central to White's project. All history books are written in
some sort of tension with the existing historiography but the distorting
effects on White's argument of his basic commitment to an Anglican middle
ground are so considerable that one begins to wonder whether there might not
be something, after all, in his distinction between barefaced polemic, on
the one hand, and a scholarship in genuine dialogue both with its sources
and its interpretative rivals, on the other. (1) P. White, `The rise of
Arminianism reconsidered', Past and Present ci (1983), 34-54; W. Lamont,
`Comment: the rise of Arminianism reconsidered', ibid. cvii (1985), 227-31;
P. Lake, `Calvinism and the English Church, 1570-1635', ibid. (1987), 32-76;
N. Tyacke and P. White `Debate: the rise of Arminianism reconsidered', ibid.
cxv (1987), 36-68; S. Lambert, `Richard Montagu, Arminianism and
censorship', ibid. cxxiv (1989), 36-68. (2) R. Muller, Christ and decree,
decree, Durham, NC 1986. (3) For more support for these positions see K.
Fincham and P. Lake, `The ecclesiastical policies of James I and Charles I',
P. Lake, `The Laudian style', and A. Milton, `The Church of England, Rome
and the True Church: the demise of a Jacobean consensus', all in K. Fincham
(ed.), The early Stuart Church, London 1993. See also P. Lake, `Calvinism
and the English Church', and `Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge and avant
garde conformity at the court of James I', in L. L. Peck (ed.), The mental
world of the Jacobean court, Cambridge 1992; `Anti-popery: the structure of
a prejudice', in R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds), Conflict in early Stuart
England, London 1989; `Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire axe-murder',
Midland History xv (1990), 37-64; `Serving God and the times: the Calvinist
conformity of Robert Sanderson', Journal of British Studies xxvii (1988);
and `The moderate and irenic case for religious war: Joseph Hall's Via Media
in context/s', in a volume of essays on political culture in
seventeenth-century England forthcoming from Manchester University Press.
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