Catholic and Reformed. The Roman Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600-1640.

When historians disagree about the theology of the early seventeenth-century Church of England - as they do very often - their disagreement tends to focus on terms like 'orthodoxy' and 'consensus'. By defining the normal, they attempt to locate the deviant, for their aim, in most cases, is to identify a current of mainstream Protestant divinity, in order to show whether or not Archbishop Laud and his supporters departed from it, and whether Laudianism was a theological innovation that could have led to Civil War. Opinions differ dramatically. On the one hand, Nicholas Tyacke defines orthodoxy in terms of a Word-centred, predestinarian Calvinism, challenged head-on by Laud's sacramentalism ('anti-Calvinism'); on the other, Peter White sees Laud as a loyal, orthodox and much misunderstood son of the Church of England, and his Puritan opponents as the real innovators. White believes in a distinctively Anglican via media, a religious moderation enshrined in the Prayer Book and inherited by Laud, whereas Tyacke implies that Anglicanism is an empty concept, and that orthodoxy is redefined in each generation by the party that happens to be in power at the time. The debate between these two entrenched and irreconcilable positions has come to resemble a dialogue of the wilfully deaf: hence the bewilderment and frustration …