This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN BEGINNINGS 9orously for religious and political reform. However, in spite of his staunch Calvinisttheological views, the new king was committed to retaining both royalsupremacy and the rule of bishops in the church. In James’s eyes, monarchy andepiscopacy stood together as the twin pillars of authority in English society, andat the Hampton Court conference of January 1604, he rejected Puritan requestsfor change with the cry, “No bishop, no king.”The situation became even worse for the Puritans after James’s son Charles Ibecame king in 1625. Charles and his advisers implemented repressive measuresto enforce ecclesiastical conformity. Beyond that, as strong believers in the divineright of kings, they also attempted to rule England without calling the PuritandominatedParliament into session. Such despotism helped promote both thelarge-scale emigration of Puritans to America (a permanent settlement was establishedat Boston in 1630) and the steady drift toward internecine conflict at home.The English Civil War and the triumph of the parliamentary army under OliverCromwell eventually led to the overthrow of episcopacy and monarchy together.As a result of this struggle, England became a Protestant republic for a briefperiod. Between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of theStuart rulers under Charles II in 1660, episcopacy was abolished, hundreds ofAnglican clergy were ejected from their parishes, and the liturgy of the Book ofCommon Prayer was proscribed.In the midst of these bitter church controversies, English Episcopalians advancedwhat proved to be a lasting defense of the Anglican via media against itsdetractors on both the Protestant left and the Roman Catholic right. The basis ofAnglican identity, they argued, was located as much in the traditions of the firstfive centuries of Christian history as in the Bible. Despite separating from Romeand overturning the alleged accretions of the medieval period, Anglicans emphasizedtheir continuity with the past, especially with the church in the patristic era.Thus, in rejecting the authority of the papacy, they sought the restoration not ofthe New Testament church but of the beliefs and practices of the “old Catholicfathers.” As John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury, asserted in 1570, the patristicwriters were “witnesses unto the truth, . . . worthy pillars and ornaments in theChurch of God,” with whom Anglicans wished to remain in theologicalcommunion. 16The classic expression of Anglican thinking on the nature of the church wasadvanced by theologian Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, firstpublished during Elizabeth’s reign in 1593. In contrast to the relatively staticpositions adopted by Puritans and Catholics—the Puritan insistence on the sufficiencyof scripture and the Catholic emphasis on the primacy of the traditionsof Rome—Hooker focused on the evolution of church institutions and practices.The church, he believed, was an organic body that was capable of changing itsgovernance according to circumstances. Human reason, moreover, played a criticalrole in the church’s ongoing development. Reason was a divinely implantedinstrument that enabled human beings to apprehend the truths continually revealedby God in nature and in scripture. Hooker’s affirmation of scripture, tra-