Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Prologue
- Introduction: English Protestantism at the dawn of the seventeenth century
- Part I The Church of Rome
- 1 ‘This immortal fewde’: anti-popery, ‘negative popery’ and the changing climate of religious controversy
- 2 The rejection of Antichrist
- 3 Rome as a true church
- 4 The errors of the Church of Rome
- 5 Unity and diversity in the Roman communion: inconsistency or opportunity?
- 6 Visibility, succession and the church before Luther
- 7 Separation and reunion
- Part II The Reformed Churches
- Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
6 - Visibility, succession and the church before Luther
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Prologue
- Introduction: English Protestantism at the dawn of the seventeenth century
- Part I The Church of Rome
- 1 ‘This immortal fewde’: anti-popery, ‘negative popery’ and the changing climate of religious controversy
- 2 The rejection of Antichrist
- 3 Rome as a true church
- 4 The errors of the Church of Rome
- 5 Unity and diversity in the Roman communion: inconsistency or opportunity?
- 6 Visibility, succession and the church before Luther
- 7 Separation and reunion
- Part II The Reformed Churches
- Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
Summary
THE PROTESTANT CHURCH BEFORE LUTHER
I began with this consideration that there were two sortes of questions betweene the Catholiques and Protestants the one of right or Doctrine the other of Fact or Story. As this, Whether Luther were the new preacher of the protestant fayth. Whether it hadd a visable apparanc of pastors and teachers before this tyme. I resolved to begin my inquiry with the questions of fact … because they were so few and so comprehensable by all capacytyes and the controversyes of doctrine so many and so Intricate as they required much tyme and Learning for theyr dis-quisition.
When he set out in this way to resolve his conscience on the issues separating the Roman and Protestant Churches, Walter Montague, son of the earl of Manchester, doubtless followed the instincts of many lay readers of the Roman/Protestant controversy. Rather than the complex and seemingly endless points of doctrinal conflict, it was the more tangible and straightforward questions of historical fact surrounding the separation of the Protestants from the Church of Rome which seemed to offer the clearest guide to the troubled layman. It was here, however, that Montague claimed to have found the weakest point in the Protestant armoury against Rome, and he converted to Rome as a consequence. But how incoherent really was the Church of England's perception of its own past? And how far did this perception complicate English Protestants' understanding of their present relationship with the Roman Church?
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- Catholic and ReformedThe Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640, pp. 270 - 321Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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