Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I | Church History | Find Articles at BNET

Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I Church History Find Articles at BNET

Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I. By Stephen Hampton. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 296 pp. $240.00 cloth.

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.

This is not an easy book. The treatises examined were works of sophisticated theologians, and Hampton does not simplify their arguments. Much of these academic treatises were in Latin, and Hampton provides translations in his text and the Latin in footnotes. On the other hand, if the book is difficult and the analysis subtle, Hampton writes with enviable clarity and precision. It is a study that anyone interested in the theological controversies of the late Stuart church will have to read; in light of that consideration, it is a pity that Oxford University Press has priced it beyond the reach of most academics.

Paul S. Seaver

Stanford University