Gilbert Burnet and the Problem of Nonconformity in Restoration Scotland and England

Although one of the most influential figures of his time, Bishop Gilbert Burnet has become one of the most neglected. This article outlines Burnet's worldview, arguing that it can only be partly understood by labelling him a ‘latitudinarian’ as scholars have hitherto tended to. Alongside Burnet's conventionally latitudinarian descriptions of Christianity as a set of rational and simple beliefs that could command very wide assent, the bishop also had a strong sense of history as a providential and apocalyptic unfolding of a battle between ‘true’ and ‘false’ churches, which was characterized by a powerful European dimension and by an identification of Antichrist with religious persecution. The article concludes with suggestions about how such lines of thought might have cohered with the more traditionally ‘latitudinarian’ elements of Burnet's philosophy, and about how they might allow historians to re-think the latitudinarian movement more generally.

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MATTHEW TINDAL'SRIGHTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH(1706) AND THE CHURCH–STATE RELATIONSHIP

Levitin

2011

Hist. J.

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Matthew Tindal's Rights of the Christian church (1706), which elicited more than thirty contemporary replies, was a major interjection in the ongoing debates about the relationship between church and state in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Historians have usually seen Tindal's work as an exemplar of the ‘republican civil religion’ that had its roots in Hobbes and Harrington, and putatively formed the essence of radical whig thought in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. But this is to misunderstand theRights. To comprehend what Tindal perceived himself as doing we need to move away from the history of putatively ‘political’ issues to the histories of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, patristic scholarship, and biblical exegesis. The contemporary significance of Tindal's work was twofold: methodologically, it challenged Anglican patristic scholarship as a means of reaching consensus on modern ecclesiological issues; positively, it offered a powerful argument for ecclesiastical supremacy lying in crown-in-parliament, drawing on a legal tradition stretching back to Christopher St Germain (1460–1540) and on Tindal's own legal background. Tindal's text provides a case study for the tentative proposition that ‘republicanism’, whether as a programme or a ‘language’, had far less impact on English anticlericalism and contemporary debates over the church–state relationship than the current historiography suggests.

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Gilbert Burnet and the Problem of Nonconformity in Restoration Scotland and England

Abstract: health sciences, history THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW utpjournals.press/chr Offering a comprehensive analysis on the events that have shaped Canada, CHR publishes articles that examine Canadian history from both a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective.

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Introduction: histories of philosophy between ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Enlightenment’

Introduction: histories of philosophy between ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Enlightenment’

Latitudinarianism and Apocalyptic History in the Worldview of Gilbert Burnet, 1643–1715*

MATTHEW TINDAL'SRIGHTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH(1706) AND THE CHURCH–STATE RELATIONSHIP

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