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Arminianism and Laudianism in Seventeenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

T. M. Parker*
Affiliation:
University College, Oxford

Extract

It is, I suppose, an indication of the general bewilderment caused by the apparently abrupt appearance of a new and strangely named religious party in the England of James I, the Arminian, which makes one’s pupils occasionally describe the High Churchmen of those days as ‘Armenians’. It is a pardonable mistake. They are vaguely aware that many have regarded Arminianism as a theological heresy. They have no doubt also heard rumours that the Armenians are regarded by most of the rest of Christendom as heretical. Hence the natural confusion.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1964

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References

Page 20 of note 1 Quoted by Harrison, A.W., Arminianism, London 1937, 130 Google Scholar.

Page 21 of note 1 Harrison (op. cit. 15) gives the date of Arminius’s ordination as 11 August 1588, ‘the day before Communion Sunday,’ a date repeated from his earlier book, The Beginnings of Arminianism to the Synod of Dort, London 1926, 11. But 11 August was not a Saturday in 1588, either according to Old Style or New Style, so this is impossible. He has in fact misunderstood the clear statement of Arminius’s biographer, Brandt, who says that Arminius was invited by the consistory of Amsterdam to accept ordination on 11 August, but was ordained later die quodam Saturni pridieque ante coenae dominicae celebrationem.(Historia vitae Jacobi Armimi auctore Gasparo Brantio, ed. I. L. Moshemius, Brunswick 1725, 19. The passage is quite correctly translated by John Guthrie, A. M., The Life of James Arminius, D.D., trs. from the Latin ofCaspar Brandt, London 1854, 31.)Google Scholar

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Page 22 of note 1 McNeill, J. T., The History and Character of Calvinism, New York 1954, 265 Google Scholar.

Page 22 of note 2 He was the son of Walter Balcanquhall (1548-1616), the presbyterian minister, who was one of the most prominent opponents of James VI on the question of episcopacy and was publicly rebuked by the king in St Giles, Edinburgh, in 1586. Walter the younger was born about that year and died in 1645. After taking his M.A. at Edinburgh in 1609, he significantly migrated to Oxford, where he proceeded B.D. and became a fellow of Pembroke in 1611. Before the Synod of Dort the university conferred on him the D.D. degree. He was a royal chaplain, became master of the Savoy in 1617, dean of Rochester in 1625 and dean of Durham in 1639. In 1638 he returned to Scotland as chaplain to the marquis of Hamilton, Charles I’s royal commissioner, and aroused great hatred as a prominent supporter of Charles’s ecclesiastical policy which had led to the Bishops War; in 1641 he was among those denounced by the Scottish Parliament as ‘incendiaries’. He suffered much in the royalist cause and died in Wales. So he was very much an Anglicanised Scot.

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Page 26 of note 2 Porter, H.C., Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge, Cambridge 1958, 409 Google Scholar.

Page 27 of note 1 Ibid. 411 f.

Page 27 of note 2 Ibid. 405 f.

Page 27 of note 3 Ibid. 367.

Page 27 of note 4 Ibid. 344.

Page 28 of note 1 Ibid. 350 f.

Page 28 of note 2 ‘Formula Concordiae, Epitome xi,’ in Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelischlutherischen Kirche, 3, verbesserte Aufl., Göttingen 1956, 821. Cf.Porter, , op. cit. 282 fGoogle Scholar.

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Page 30 of note 1 Ibid. 128 ff.

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Page 31 of note 4 Ibid. 144 f.

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Page 32 of note 2 ‘But none, or, if any, certainly very few of them, were believers in royal absolutism.’ Allen, op. cit. 185.

Page 32 of note 3 Allen, op. cit. 187 f.

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