Recent decades have witnessed significant advances in scholarly understandings of the early modern English religious landscape and its taxonomical spectrum. Terms such as ‘moderate Puritans’ and ‘avant-garde conformity’ have added much-needed hues to historians’ palettes, and several recent historians have moved beyond the ‘Puritan versus Laudian’ binary of conventional Caroline historiography to acknowledge – though never quite explore – so-called ‘Calvinist conformists’ as an important bloc within the early Stuart Church of England. This is where Stephen Hampton's Grace and conformity comes in, as the first monograph to specifically consider Reformed conformity as a distinct and coherent tradition within the early Stuart Church.
As a follow-up to his Anti-Arminians (Oxford 2008), which examined the Reformed conformist tradition after the Restoration, Hampton explores ten eminent representatives of early Stuart Reformed conformity, including John Prideaux, Joseph Hall, Daniel Featley, Thomas Morton, Samuel Ward, John Davenant, George Downame, George Carleton, John Williams and Richard Holdsworth. Despite variations among them, the common distinctive of these Reformed conformists was ‘a resolute adherence to the soteriological principles of Reformed orthodoxy, combined with a positive estimation of the institutions which distinguished the English Church from most other Reformed churches in Europe’ (p. 21). This positive embrace and defence of (as opposed to reluctant acquiescence to) the English Church's episcopal polity and prayer book distinguished Reformed conformists from moderate Puritans, whereas they were distinguished from Laudians by their avowed commitment to Reformed orthodoxy along with their aversion to Laudian eucharistic theology and praeter-canonical liturgical practices.
Hampton's first five chapters focus on Reformed conformists’ articulations of Reformed soteriological orthodoxy, specifically on grace, predestination and justification. Chapter i examines Prideaux's Reformed articulation of grace at Oxford (which he took to be the official teaching of the Church's Articles) as well as his identification of the Church (with its ministry of word and sacraments) as the instrument by which God dispenses his predestinating grace. Chapter ii considers how Reformed conformists served as the British delegates to the Synod of Dort, and particularly explores Davenant's articulation of grace and his hypothetical universalist position on Christ's atonement, which Davenant considered ‘the confessional position of the Church of England’ (p. 101). Chapter iii demonstrates that Reformed conformists (particularly Prideaux, Featley, Ward, Carleton and Hall) were at the forefront of the public opposition to Richard Montagu's ‘Arminianism’ that challenged the hitherto-prevailing Reformed orthodoxy of the English Church, whereas chapter iv investigates how Ward and Davenant continued to advance their vision of grace and conformity at Cambridge even after the 1626 royal proclamation had attempted to silence debates on grace and predestination. Chapter v evinces how the interrelated doctrines of justification by faith alone and the imputation of Christ's righteousness were central to the Reformed conformist position and were still promulgated by them at Oxford and Cambridge during Charles’s Personal Rule.
In chapters vi–viii Hampton examines the Reformed conformist understanding of what conformity entailed in relation to eucharistic theology, episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer. Chapter vi traces the Reformed conformist response to the avant-garde conformist and Laudian articulation of the eucharist as a sacerdotal ‘sacrifice’ and the communion table as an ‘altar’ (along with the Laudian reintroduction of altars placed ‘altar-wise’ against the east walls of churches), which Reformed conformists protested as deviations from the Church's Articles, homilies, canons and prayer book rubrics. In chapter vii Hampton exhibits how, for Reformed conformists, the symbiosis of Reformed orthodoxy and episcopacy was not a ‘politically driven eccentricity’ but flowed from a coherent understanding of how divine grace was dispensed through the church's ministry (p. 258). For Reformed conformists, episcopacy was a divinely sanctioned and apostolic institution that tied the English Church to Christian antiquity, safeguarded good order and ensured lawful ordinations, which in turn ensured the rightful ordinary administration of word and sacraments in the outworking of God's electing grace in the Church. Hampton also shows how Reformed conformists navigated the Puritan charge that the English Church's polity diverged from that of most other Reformed Churches, and how they recognised non-episcopal Reformed Churches as sister Churches while regarding their lack of bishops as ‘a tolerable response to exceptional circumstances, not a legitimate alternative to episcopacy’ (p. 251). Chapter viii considers how Reformed conformists defended the liturgical ceremonies and calendar of the Book of Common Prayer as conducive to Reformed piety and edification, against the Puritan charge to the contrary.
Hampton's book contains numerous fascinating discoveries but ultimately makes two primary scholarly contributions. Firstly, Hampton makes an incontrovertible case for Reformed conformity as a distinct and coherent tradition in the early Stuart Church while carefully articulating its distinctiveness in historical-theological context. Having hitherto received only cursory attention, Hampton brings this tradition to the foreground of the early Stuart English ecclesiastical landscape, identifiably distinct from (and, as it were, sandwiched in-between) its contemporary Puritan and Laudian counterparts. Its representatives included ‘theologians without whose work it is not possible to give any useful account of the religious debates that took place during the Early Stuart period’, who were ‘all figures of recognized distinction and influence within the English Church’, and yet were merely ‘the tip’ of a Reformed conformist ‘iceberg’ among the clergy (p. 306).
Secondly, this book is a landmark contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the variegated nature of the Reformed tradition as shaped by different ecclesio-political contexts, different appropriations of sources and different theological predilections. As Hampton concludes:
English Reformed Conformity shows that an accurate grasp of the Reformed tradition cannot fail to make room for episcopacy, for choral music, for ancient liturgical forms, indeed for all aspects of the eccentric polity that shaped the Early Stuart English Church. As a result, proper attention to English Reformed Conformity further undermines an overly narrow conception of the Reformed tradition as a whole (p. 308).
In sum, Hampton's Grace and conformity is a must-read for all historians of post-Reformation Reformed theology and early modern English religion, and has paved the way for further study of the featured individual theologians as well as various other affiliates of the now much better understood Reformed conformist tradition.
