Bisschop's Bench: Contours of Arminian Conformity in the Church of England, c.1674—1742

Arminian conformity in late seventeenth-century England was a variegated movement, whose internal diversity helped to reconfigure perennial questions about the relation of the English Church to its continental counterparts, Reformed and Remonstrant, with consequences that no modern study has sought to address. This monograph rectifies this problem by analyzing modes of engagement with the Dutch Remonstrant tradition by Arminian conformists of the later Stuart and early Hanoverian Church of England. In so doing, it argues that several of the period’s fiercest theological controversies arose from what traditionalist divines took to be the uncritical appropriation of that tradition by their fellow churchmen. It shows that many Arminian conformists credited Remonstrant ideas with facilitating the emergence of an intellectually robust Unitarianism, and that such divines accentuated identifiably Reformed emphases in an unprecedented display of disambiguation from the Remonstrant tradition. In this way, the study challenges the notion that a broadly unified Arminian consensus emerged at the Restoration on the basis that—whatever Arminian “reaction” the interregnum may be said to have produced—it was a movement comprising divergent theological agendas. Contending that signal associations of Remonstrant theologians with Socinian heterodoxy came from leading Arminian conformists themselves, and that such churchmen were not as comprehensively opposed to their Reformed contemporaries as has previously been thought, this wide-ranging monograph provides a fresh perspective on the Arminian theological tradition in the political, confessional, and educative contexts of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.