Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I. By Stephen Hampton. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 296 pp. $240.00 cloth.

摘要

In 1716 William Nicolson, the bishop of Carlisle and almoner to George I,npreached the Spital Sermon at St. Bride’s before the assembled Londonnmagistracy. His text was Ephesians 2:8–9: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lestnany man should boast.” Essentially Stephen Hampton has set out to explainnwhy a bishop, apparently favored by the Crown, should be preaching on thentheme that one is justified by faith alone a long generation after the supposedntriumph of Arminianism at the Restoration of Church and Crown inn1660. After all, Reformed Protestantism was supposed to have beenndiscredited by the Civil Wars and Interregnum, by the Puritan Revolution,nand while the Reformed faith might survive among some of the Dissentingnchurchmen, the Reformed divinity and its adherents were supposed to havenbeen purged from the restored episcopalian church by the Act of Uniformitynin 1662. Certainly Archbishops Sheldon and Tillotson were known to benhostile to a Reformed soteriology, so what Hampton has set out to explain isnhow it came about that a minister and bishop as late as 1716 was stillnpublicly preaching in defense of so central a Reformed understanding ofnjustification.