Introduction
Introduction This volume covers roughly the period 1560–1740. Each chapter, however, has a slightly different timeframe, owing to the distinctive nature of the religious tradition involved, with different sets of personalities and events.
For example, the English chapters end around 1690, whereas the Roman Catholic chapters go on to about 1750.
A few words about the content:
First, the subtitle The Age of Religious Conflict may seem odd. Could that not be the subtitle of any of the preceding volumes in this series? Yes. But as I did the research for the current volume, it struck me forcibly several times that no other period had been so profoundly marked by sheer intensity of conflict: conflict between traditions, conflict within traditions. For instance, when Roman Catholics were not fighting Protestants or Eastern
Orthodox, they were fighting each other, and just as fiercely. The epic of the Jansenist controversy must be one of the most explosive and convulsive in Catholic history, and it was fought out within the precincts of the Catholic
Church, leaving huge and ugly bloodstains.
Second, some may protest against what seems the exaggerated space devoted to English religious history. I sympathize, and it was not my intention to produce an England-dominated volume. However, three points can be made: i. This was surely the great creative epoch of English Christianity. There is just nothing like it before or after in England's spiritual odyssey. To this era we must trace the origins of Puritanism, the documents of the Westminster Assembly, High Church Anglicanism, Broad Church
Anglicanism ("Latitudinarianism"), Congregationalism, Baptists, Quakers, the Arminian-Calvinist divide, the Anglican-Nonconformist divide, and a host of other things that make English Protestantism so distinctive. Where else in the world did Protestantism show itself so bursting with innovative diversity? If we are to tell the story at all, we must give it room to breathe. ii. Given the unique impact that English Protestantism has made on world
Christianity, through the several centuries of the British Empire, the creation of America as a new Protestant nation, and the King James
Bible, we should not scruple to assign appropriate space to seeing how English Protestantism took shape. iii. Most readers of this book will in any case welcome the opportunity to immerse themselves in the English story. Who am I to disappoint them, being English myself?
Third, I have omitted several topics from the present volume, because of their more intimate connection with the next one. Chief among these is the scientific revolution and its impact on religious thought. This seems so bound up with the ultimate emergence of the Enlightenment, the distinctive phenomenon of the 18th century, that I decided to treat the two as one. Our next instalment, then, will deal with the rise of modern science and the dawn of the Enlightenment—for good and ill (there were both gains and losses).
Alert readers will also note the absence of the Moravians from the section on Pietism in chapter 1. Again, I postponed coverage of the Moravians to the next volume because of their fairly profound link with the Evangelical Revival in England, especially through John Wesley, who was in some ways an English Moravian.
Finally, I make little apology for not devoting separate sections to nations other than England, Scotland, France, Germany, and (to an extent) Russia.
They serve as templates for the wider story. This volume would have more than doubled in length, had I constructed it on a nation-by-nation plan rather than thematically. Those with a special interest in the detailed story of Welsh, Irish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, Italian, Polish,
Hungarian, Austrian, or Balkan (etc.) Christianity, will be able to find excellent treatments elsewhere. If they appear in this volume, it is by way of particular episodes that had a global impact, e.g. the Arminian controversy in the Dutch Republic.
• • • • • • • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Unitarian whose agonizing life-journey led him at last to humble Trinitarian faith, was an avid reader, and his comment on histories of the English Civil War (one of the central conflicts of this volume) can be applied more widely to our theatre of events:
How many books are still written and published about Charles the First and his times! Such is the fresh and enduring interest of that grand crisis of morals, religion, and government! But these books are none of them works of any genius or imagination; not one of these authors seems to be able to throw himself back into that age; if they did, there would be less praise and less blame bestowed on both sides.1
1 S.T. Coleridge, Tabletalk November 9th 1833. Whether the present book has any genius or imagination is for others to say.