The Caroline Divines and the Church of Rome

A Contribution to Current Ecumenical Dialogue

Mark Langham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351390903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

In the early seventeenth century, as the vehement aggression of the early Reformation faded, the Church of England was able to draw upon scholars of remarkable ability to present a more thoughtful defence of its position. The Caroline Divines, who flourished under King Charles I, drew upon vast erudition and literary skill, to refute the claims of the Church of Rome and affirm the purity of the English religious settlement. This book examines their writings in the context of modern ecumenical dialogue, notably that of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) to ask whether their arguments are still valid, and indeed whether they can contribute to contemporary ecumenical progress.

Drawing upon an under-used resource within Anglicanism's own theological history, this volume shows how the restatement by the Caroline Divines of the catholic identity of the Church prefigured the work of ARCIC, and provides Anglicans with a vocabulary drawn from within their own tradition that avoids some of the polemical and disputed formulations of the Roman Catholic tradition.

1 The historical context

The work of the early seventeenth-century Caroline Divines (we shall discuss that title later) cannot be separated from their historical context. They were members of, and spokesmen for, a Church that had emerged from a turbulent sixteenth century, but which still faced threats from within and without. Queen Elizabeth had sought to contain a wide range of churchmanship within her Settlement, epitomised by Francis Bacon’s adage that the Queen wished to make ‘no window into men’s souls’.¹ However, the corollary was suppression and persecution of those who would not subscribe to her (admittedly idiosyncratic) view of the state of the Church – and in practice that meant both Puritans and Roman Catholics. ‘Puritan’ is a broad and rather imprecise term for who felt that the English Reformation had not gone far enough, and that, in the words of the Marian exile John Jewel, the Elizabeth settlement was a ‘leaden mediocrity’.² The first task of the conforming theologians immediately after Elizabeth’s reign was, then, to defend, against the Puritans and in positive terms, the status quo of the national Church, demonstrating its authenticity and suitability for the English people.

A particular threat, however, was felt to be presented by the Roman Catholic Church, which was assuming a more aggressive theological stance towards those who rejected its authority. Heresy was considered by Rome to be a matter of ignorance, to be combatted by clear reasoning and firm argument.³ The readiness of Roman theologians to enter into debate – most notably Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) who ‘answers all the arguments in the world, whether it be possible or not possible’⁴ – increased the pressure on the Church of England to provide spokesmen capable of conducting its defence. Rather than repeated denunciations of Roman positions, what the Church of England most needed was a positive statement of its ecclesiology that would establish the religion of the Church of England in the hearts of its citizens as the natural form of religion for the country.

Defending the settlement: Jewel and Hooker

The shape that this project took was defined by the historical situation in which the seventeenth-century Divines found themselves. Modern scholarship has rightly affirmed that the English Reformers were sensible of their connection to a ‘Protestant International’.⁵ But against this can be set a chauvinistic element in the English Reformation. The process of reform in England was seen to be providential and distinctive, and the growing sense of nationhood throughout Elizabeth’s reign included an understanding of the place of the Church within, and its role in forming, the nation. Above all, Queen Elizabeth’s resolve to have conformity only in essentials, and to tolerate diversity in non-essentials, contrasted with the Genevan model which demanded absolute adherence to scriptural principles in all details. Rightly or wrongly, the Elizabethan Church assumed that its Reformation had been distinctive, a system of belief and worship peculiarly suited to the life and culture of the nation. This view was to receive a definitive expression in Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which insisted that the ‘extreme and rigorous’ measures taken by the continental reformers were not suited to the ‘moderate kind which the church of England hath taken’.⁶ Cautious reform, and elevation of the ‘middle path’, called by Archbishop Matthew Parker the ‘golden mediocrity’ of the English Church, together with the stress upon the continuity of the English Church with its predecessor, were themes which would be developed by Jacobean and Caroline Divines into overarching characteristics of the English Church.

John Jewel (1522–1571) wrote perhaps the first clear defence of the Church of England. The Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae refuted the claims of Rome on grounds that were to become familiar to seventeenth-century theologians. For Jewel, the English Church is governed ‘as much as we possibly could, very near to the order used in the old times’, so that while it is true that the Church of England has departed from the Roman allegiance, ‘yet for all this, from the primitive Church, from the Apostles, and from Christ we have not departed’.⁷ Accordingly, the Apologia employs the texts of antiquity, notably the Fathers and Canons of early Councils, to establish the nature of the early Church, and thereby to demonstrate that the English Church truly represents it in the modern age.

Richard Hooker (1554–1600) was a friend and protégé of Jewel, whose masterful Laws⁸ was an attempt not merely to justify the Elizabethan religious settlement, but to present it as the natural and reasonable form of religion for the English people. Eventually published in eight books, the entire work reflects Hooker’s vision not just of the Church, but the just ordering of society. With early fans such as King James I and his son King Charles, the Laws achieved magisterial status within Anglicanism.⁹ Acknowledging that scripture contains all things necessary for salvation, Hooker argues that this is not the same as saying that all truths are explicitly apparent therein. The aim of scripture is salvation, not laying down the precise model of Christian polity, and there is always the need for judgment and decision: ‘Much of that which Scripture teacheth is not always needful, and much the Church of God shall always need which the Scripture teacheth not’.¹⁰ Hooker attacked Puritan criticism of rites and customs that they claim are not directly sanctioned by scripture, making a distinction that was to be crucial in seventeenth-century theology between things ‘essential’ and ‘things indifferent’ – adiaphora. Under this second category fall disputed usages, which are not to be rejected outright, but rather judged according to the axioms of godliness, antiquity, expediency and adaptability.

Hooker’s monumental work is of such significance that he is sometimes accused of having constructed, rather than consolidated, the faith he expounded.¹¹ But even if his writings became something of a political football in the centuries following his death, his themes, and the method he used to treat them, were highly influential on theologians who succeeded him.¹²

In the first place, Hooker established a tone of debate that was reasoned and moderate, a ‘measured tranquility’.¹³ While, for Hooker, authority in society derives ultimately from God, he was adamant in allowing a role for human reason. The heady polemics of Jewel did not appeal to him, nor did the outright refusal to admit any virtue whatever in the Church of Rome. Serenity, however, did not betoken timidity. Hooker took the fight to his opponents, comfortably employing Aquinas to support his arguments, and bequeathing to English apologetics the confidence to make use of medieval scholastics who were considered the champions of Roman Catholicism.

Hooker’s treatment of scripture is another important legacy. He argues powerfully that scripture cannot be left to the unaided subjective interpreter, since not all truths rise immediately from its pages. Those aspects of the Church that have no express authority in the Bible, what Hooker termed ‘things indifferent’ or adiaphora (a category including particularly the rites and ordering of the Church), are to be judged also by reason and Tradition. This will mean giving due weight to history and common experience. Hooker therefore tended to diminish the aspect of revolution within the Reformation, viewing it not as a break in the Church’s history, but rather claiming that English reformers were only ‘reducing [the Church] to that perfection from which it hath swerved. In this case we are to retain as much … of former things as we may’.¹⁴ This sense of continuity was to be a strong inheritance for the Stuart divines.

Hooker’s treatment of ministry is notable for the relatively low importance he attributes to preaching. His views on the sacraments, in particular the Eucharist, are not themselves exceptional or out of tune with reformed views; what is radical is the prominence he gives to them at the expense of preaching. At the same time, Hooker’s affection for the liturgy, and in particular the Book of Common Prayer, is clearly evident, and helped establish an Anglican piety and taste for decorum in religion for centuries to come.

The English Church in the seventeenth century

At the dawn of the seventeenth century, the attitude of the new king, James I, and that of his son Charles I, to the threats and demands of religious dissenters forms the background to the world of the Jacobean and Caroline Divines, and is essential for understanding their true contribution to the history of Anglicanism.

James I was an interested and informed amateur theologian. Although he never swerved from his preferred Calvinism, he liked the breadth and moderation of the Church of England, and left Puritans in no doubt that he was unwilling to accede to their demands for further reformation of the Church. On the other wing of the Church’s life, the king at first appeared conciliatory towards Roman Catholicism, but concrete gestures to bring relief to Catholics did not materialise, and radical elements within the Catholic community perpetrated the fateful Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Following the failure of the Plot, Parliament enacted rigorous anti-Catholic legislation. James himself took a more nuanced line, insisting on an Oath of Allegiance to be taken by Catholics explicitly rejecting papal authority in the temporal sphere. It was the summary dismissal of this strategy by Rome that induced James to respond in the extravagantly entitled pamphlet Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus: ‘A triple wedge for a triple knot’ – the triple knot being two papal briefs and Cardinal Bellarimine’s letter that had refuted the royal Oath. To this Cardinal Bellarmine responded in a pamphlet under the name of his secretary: Responsio Mattei Torti; this elicited from James a Premontion to Christian Princes and drew into the fray a host of other apologists on both sides. John Donne published his Pseudo-Martyr in 1610, mocking contemporary Roman Catholics who compared their plight to the martyrs of antiquity. It was, however, to a reluctant Lancelot Andrewes that James turned for the major refutation of Bellarmine. Andrewes’ Tortura Torti of 1609 denied papal power to dispense Catholics from moral and civil laws, and defended the Royal Supremacy. Bellarmine responded in the following year, with his Apologia pro Responsione sua, which elicited from Andrewes the further reposte, Responsio ad Apologiam Card. Bellarmine. Despite the intense nature of this controversy, Andrewes’ Responsio was to be his most systematic and convincing exposition of the differences between the English and Roman Churches. Responding point by point to the Cardinal’s work, he refutes many key tenets of Roman Catholicism, but also demonstrates that he is willing to enter into theological debate on these issues. Andrewes’ conciliatory and even liberal attitude towards the Roman Church was in contrast to the invective of many protestants, and was to herald the more constructive and pacific approach of the emerging High Church party.

James’ son and successor, Charles I, was as devoted as his father to the Church of England, but not to its Calvinist theology. Already, as heir, his tastes had allied him to the High Church party, and Lancelot Andrewes, as Dean of the Chapel Royal, had encouraged him in this direction, not least by selecting appropriate preachers and chaplains for the royal chapel.

High Churchmen, popularly known as ‘Arminians’, had been, before the reign of Charles I, in a small minority, but the new king saw in this party a bulwark against Puritan troublemakers. Within months of becoming king in 1625, he promoted its members to key posts in the Church, thereby arousing the suspicion of his Puritan critics that he favoured, or even professed, Roman Catholicism. From 1629 Charles ruled without Parliament, allowing the Arminians unchecked authority to impose their views. It was William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, who in his person came to symbolise (particularly for its opponents) the Arminian cause. Laud’s reforms were met with horror by many within the English Church: chalices and patens were to be used instead of Protestant communion cups. Communion tables were moved to the east end of churches, dressed as altars, and divided from the nave by communion rails. The sermon, always a central issue for the Puritans, was downplayed. Charles’ attempt to enforce a version of the Book of Common Prayer in Scotland in 1637, with a heightened emphasis on the Eucharist, ceremonies and order, resulted in rebellion which spiralled into broader conflict between Parliament and the King.¹⁵ William Laud records that the General Assembly that met in Scotland in 1638 condemned Episcopacy, and expressed abhorrence at the Prayer Book and its rituals. Under increasing pressure, Charles made concessions to the Puritans; Laud was sent to the Tower, and Charles found himself disowning much of the worship and order that was dearest to his heart. When, through a succession of bad luck and appalling judgement, Charles faced execution on the scaffold, he begged his son to stand by the Church, and to remain ‘as I hope you are already, well-grounded and settled in your religion, the best profession of which I have ever esteemed that of the Church of England […] as coming nearest to God’s word for doctrine and to the primitive examples for government’.

Following Charles’ execution, with the abolition of episcopacy and the establishment of a Presbyterian government, the Caroline bishops either retired, fled abroad or languished in prison. Yet Oliver Cromwell himself was inclined to toleration in England, while Parliament and the Westminster Assembly never formally defined their religious position. There had been indications that considerable sympathy remained for the old established Church. A book purporting to contain the final thoughts of King Charles, the Eikon Basilike, became a best seller, elevating the memory of the executed (or ‘martyred’) king to cultic status. Even before an official restoration, Church ceremonies were reinstated, and in 1662 the new Book of Common Prayer enshrined forever much of the teaching of the Divines. It was to be a victory for the Laudian party, and an indication that the labours of those Stuart Divines had not been in vain; rather, they had identified and had helped form what eventually became known as ‘Anglicanism’.

The Caroline Divines

The seventeenth-century Church of E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 The historical context
• 2 Features of Caroline theology
• 3 Eucharistic doctrine
• 4 Ministry and ordination
• 5 Authority in the Church
• 6 Salvation and the Church
• 7 The Church as Communion
• 8 Life in Christ: Christian morality
• 9 Mary, Grace and Hope in Christ
• 10 A Caroline contribution?
• Bibliography
• Index