Jake Griesel
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Reformed orthodoxy as conformity in the post-Restoration Church of England
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In the scholarly literature on the post-Restoration period, ‘conformity’ typically denotes membership of the established Church and adherence to its liturgy, rites, and episcopal polity. Post-Restoration conformity is thus depicted primarily in ecclesiological and liturgical terms, rather than denoting doctrinal conformity to the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, and particularly its soteriological articles, which define doctrines such as justification by faith alone and eternal predestination. After all, many post-Restoration clergy desired to shed the Reformed soteriology which the Church had inherited from the Edwardian, Elizabethan, and early Stuart periods. Yet there remained many post-Restoration clergy who regarded the Thirty-nine Articles as authoritative articles of faith, and as stipulating the Church’s officially established orthodoxy. Many of these churchmen considered subscription to the Articles as including a confessional commitment to Reformed soteriological orthodoxy on the doctrines of grace, election, and justification. For these post-Restoration Reformed conformists, Reformed orthodoxy was integral to their notion of conformity to the established Church, and a number of them were quite troubled by what they perceived as the nonconformity to the Church’s soteriological articles among many of their clerical brethren. Along with ecclesiology, liturgy, and church polity, another dimension of conformity can therefore be identified in the writings of many post-Restoration churchmen, namely doctrinal conformity, which took the form of adherence to Reformed orthodoxy and the Church of England’s Reformation heritage. This chapter will explore how post-Restoration Reformed conformists understood Reformed orthodoxy to be synonymous with doctrinal conformity to the Church of England.

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