Protestant jurisdictionalism and the nature of puritanism, c. 1559–1642

Abstract

The ecclesiology of the magisterial European Reformation established princes and magistrates as God’s chosen rulers over the Christian church, in all external matters, with a corresponding duty to legislate and enforce God’s laws across both the civil and ecclesiastical spheres. In the English context, this ecclesiology was harboured in the Tudor royal ecclesiastical supremacy, which by means of parliamentary statute, exalted the English monarch over the church hierarchy. In his celebrated Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1563), Bishop John Jewel described the godly role allotted to civil magistracy repeatedly as ‘our doctrine’. Through a series of thematic case studies, using printed debates, manuscript treatises, parliamentary records, and private letters, this thesis traces loyalty to this ecclesiology, emerging as a form of Protestant ‘jurisdictionalism’, throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. A key finding is that Elizabethan and early Stuart puritanism can only be understood within the broader European context of Protestant kingdoms, territories, and city-states codifying and enforcing church discipline according to established law, and under the supreme authority of the Christian magistrate. While previous historical scholarship has focused on the ‘disciplinarian’ tendencies of pre-1640 puritan ecclesiology, as tending towards presbyterianism, this thesis argues that Elizabethan and early Stuart attempts to legislate a reformed English church discipline were fundamentally Erastian, and seen as the necessary fulfilment of the Tudor Settlements of Religion, and without which, the royal ecclesiastical supremacy would inevitably descend into an absolutist tyranny, in competition with England’s laws and customs. Many Elizabethan and early Stuart puritans exalted the examples of the Emperors Constantine and Justinian, who codified civil and ecclesiastical constitutions, and in this sense subjugated clerical rulers to the laws and decrees of Christian princes, rather than allowed them to rule over the ecclesiastical jurisdiction with a separate and independent authority. This jurisdictional impulse to unite the spheres of civil and ecclesiastical authority, and to return to a purer and more ancient model of civil religion long since forsaken by the Church of Rome, proved deeply polarising in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, fermenting England’s divisive ‘long Reformation’ politics to the outbreak of Civil War.