THE ‘TRUE CHURCH’ IN PROTESTANT ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF ROME

The precise nature of the Church of Rome was a problem which exercised and perplexed the minds of English Protestant divines throughout the early Stuart period, provoking recurrent confusion and occasionally violent conflict. In his Ecclesia Triumphans and Antilogie of 1603, Andrew Willet had joined the authors of A Christian Letter in condemning the assertion made in Hooker's Laws that the Roman Church was a member of the family of Christ. Unrest on this issue continued in the 1610s, and it figured among the accusations made against Richard Montagu in parliament and pamphlets during the 1620s, and complaints against Laudian writers in the 1630s. Yet this was not merely a reaction against the innovations of Hooker and Laud: open pamphlet controversies broke out on this very issue between puritans and episcopalian Calvinists in the late 1620s. Much of the reason for these conflicts, it will be argued, rested in the confusion caused by the inconsistent use of polemical categories, but (as we shall see) these disputes were also rooted in profound inconsistencies within the Protestant doctrine of the church.

From the Reformation onwards, Protestant ecclesiology in England, as elsewhere, was preoccupied with the need to combat the claims of the visible Church of Rome to be the universal Catholic Church, the one true church of God, in which alone salvation was to be found. Against these claims, it was argued that the Holy Catholic Church of the Creed was fundamentally distinct from the national, institutional churches on earth.It wascomprised solely of the predestinate, of God's elect.