What Was the Restoration Church of England?

Abstract

Abstract In 1680 the controversy that followed two high-profile London sermons brought into the public arena bitter divisions among the clergy of the Church of England about the nature of their Church. Was the Church of England a society of Christians united by faith and governed as seemed appropriate to English conditions? Or was it one local part of a distinct and sacred institution, the mechanism of eternal salvation, established by Christ and organised and immutable according to his will? Those who held the second view (one of them was instantly characterised as ‘the High-Church-Man’) damned their opponents as Erastians, Hobbists and latitudinarians, and accused them of betraying the Church to the state and the nonconformists. Their insistence on the separate identity and authority of the Church led some of them into schism after the revolution of 1688–9, when the state brusquely asserted its power over the Church and removed and replaced several bishops. The controversy of the 1680s suggests that the Restoration Church was much less coherent and united than some influential accounts have suggested, and that divisions within it were not the product of the Glorious Revolution and the later growth of a ‘High Church’ party. There were already conflicting conceptions of what the Church of England actually was, and crucial differences over how souls could get to heaven.