The flavours of English protestantism

(Today's entry covers pages 16-21 of Gardiner's History. The picture to the left is of a young John Calvin.)

We're taking a tour here. It's not a bad thing to consider Big Ideas when our attention is not distracted elsewhere, but we shouldn't get stuck on them, should we?

Unfortunately, there are some huge (and vague) Big Ideas strewn like boulders in our way through the 17th century, and some of the biggest have to do with the beliefs--and the ceremonies that reflect them--of varieties of English Protestants.

Why should I emphasize Protestant Big Ideas rather than Catholic ones? Well, for one thing, I can hardly discuss protestant ideas without discussing catholic ones: they can best be understood in contrast to what was believed before. And by the time of Charles I, more than 90% of Englishmen paid at least lip service to some variety of Protestant belief. The big rocks are all protestant.

The central idea of protestantism is salvation by faith. Protestants aren't opposed to good works; they just don't think you can save your soul by them. Martin Luther was the first teacher to give this idea wide currency in the modern age. The idea is important in terms of ceremony, more so in terms of doctrine, but very important in terms of church government. Gardiner tries to summarize the importance in these areas in a very few paragraphs. He doesn't try very hard, and comes far short of succeeding. I can recommend a few books on the subject, such as Protestant Thought Before Kant, but I don't recommend you bring any of them along on the tour.

Because salvation by faith is least important in terms of ceremony, the forms of worship in early protestant churches were not wildly different than in catholic ones. More of the service was in the worshippers' tongue; some prayers were omitted; some homilies diverged. This allowed the English church to become protestant almost underhandedly, with the same ministers using largely the same liturgy as they had before.
Gardiner does do a good job of explaining this, and why a growing trend in protestantism, Calvinism, which adds several Big Ideas of its own, had to be resisted during the reign of Elizabeth.

As we know, Elizabethan resistance had little long-term effect on the spread of Calvinism, due, as Gardiner points out, "to its logical completeness, and to the direct antagonism in which it stood to the doctrines of the Roman Church."

A form of Calvinism was allowed to take hold in Scotland, however. We'll talk about Presbyterianism when we pick up on page 22.