Book Reviews: Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I

In 1716 William Nicolson, the bishop of Carlisle and almoner to George I, preached the Spital Sermon at St. Bride's before the assembled London magistracy. His text was Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast." Essentially Stephen Hampton has set out to explain why a bishop, apparently favored by the Crown, should be preaching on the theme that one is justified by faith alone a long generation after the supposed triumph of Arminianism at the Restoration of Church and Crown in 1660. After all, Reformed Protestantism was supposed to have been discredited by the Civil Wars and Interregnum, by the Puritan Revolution, and while the Reformed faith might survive among some of the Dissenting churchmen, the Reformed divinity and its adherents were supposed to have been purged from the restored episcopalian church by the Act of Uniformity in 1662. Certainly Archbishops Sheldon and Tillotson were known to be hostile to a Reformed soteriology, so what Hampton has set out to explain is how it came about that a minister and bishop as late as 1716 was still publicly preaching in defense of so central a Reformed understanding of justification.

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Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I

The title of Stephen Hampton's important revisionist monograph mirrors Nicholas Tyacke's Anti-Calvinists (1987; rev. ante, ciii [1988], 425–7). Both books make a strong case for the weight of Calvinist (or better, Reformed) theology within the post-Reformation Church of England. Tyacke demonstrated that, far from plotting a via media between Rome and Geneva, most of the leading theologians within the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church were firmly aligned with the orthodoxy of the continental Reformed churches. Hampton builds on Tyacke's later articles to show that, far from being vanquished at the Restoration, Reformed theology continued to enjoy some powerful support within the higher echelons of the Church. ‘The overthrow of Calvinism’, to borrow a phrase from Gerald Cragg, proves to have been exaggerated. English Arminians still had a fight on their hands.

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Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I

This book is a study of the Anglican Reformed tradition (often inaccurately described as Calvinist) after the Restoration. Hampton sets out to revise our picture of the theological world of the later Stuart period. Arguing that the importance of the Reformed theological tradition has frequently been underestimated, his study points to a network of conforming reformed theologians which included many of the most prominent churchmen of the age. Focusing particularly on what these churchmen contributed in three hotly disputed areas of doctrine (justification, the Trinity and the divine attributes), he argues that the most significant debates in speculative theology after 1662 were the result of the Anglican Reformed resistance to the growing influence of continental Arminianism.

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