Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Society, clerical conference and the Church of England
- Part II The godly ministry: piety and practice
- Part III ‘These uncomfortable times’: conformity and the godly ministers 1628–1638
- Part IV ‘These Dangerous Times’: the Puritan Diaspora 1631–1643
- 13 John Dury and the godly ministers
- 14 Choices of suffering and flight
- 15 The ‘non-separating Congregationalists’ and early Massachusetts
- 16 Thomas Hooker and the Amesians
- 17 Alternative ecclesiologies to 1643
- 18 Conclusion
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History
17 - Alternative ecclesiologies to 1643
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Society, clerical conference and the Church of England
- Part II The godly ministry: piety and practice
- Part III ‘These uncomfortable times’: conformity and the godly ministers 1628–1638
- Part IV ‘These Dangerous Times’: the Puritan Diaspora 1631–1643
- 13 John Dury and the godly ministers
- 14 Choices of suffering and flight
- 15 The ‘non-separating Congregationalists’ and early Massachusetts
- 16 Thomas Hooker and the Amesians
- 17 Alternative ecclesiologies to 1643
- 18 Conclusion
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History
Summary
That that the bedrock of alternative English ecclesiological thought among the godly ministers was Amesian in form, we are led to ask a question that would seem strange to those who have assumed the normative content of ecclesiological opposition to be Presbyterian: where were the English Presbyterians before 1643? Here it is necessary to reiterate that, despite the individuals discussed in the previous two chapters, many godly ministers, and probably the majority, regarded church-government issues as superfluous, as a divisive waste of energy or as questions of a secondary nature. Indeed, one of the lessons of the 1640s was that episcopacy was not an institution unanimously reviled as Antichristian, and if the middling sorts who put their names to petitions in favour of the bishops could distinguish between the office and the incumbent, and between Laudian prelacy and old-fashioned preaching bishops, so too could their ministers, and many of those ministers would be regarded as godly. Moreover, before the civil war many ministers who might have been sympathetic to questions of ecclesiology and the ceremonies were put off by the manner of these disputes. Thomas Goodwin admitted that
It is to bee observed generally that All Men writing upon Ceremonies they fal to bitterness wrangling et personalities and so the matter becomes never to bee fully searched et elaborated. So in Dr Ames in all his other writings moderate yet here delinquent.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Godly Clergy in Early Stuart EnglandThe Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620–1643, pp. 310 - 332Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997