Early modern governments constantly faced the challenge of reconciling their own authority with the will of God. Most acknowledged that an individual's first loyalty must be to God's law, but were understandably reluctant to allow this as an excuse to challenge their own powers where interpretations differed. As such, contemporaries gave much thought to how this potentially destabilising situation could be reconciled, preserving secular authority without compromising conscience. In this book, the particular relationship between the Tudor supremacy over the Church and the hermeneutics of discerning God's will is highlighted and explored. This topic is addressed by considering defences of the Henrician and Elizabethan royal supremacies over the English church, with particular reference to the thoughts and writings of Christopher St. German, and Richard Hooker. Both of these men were in broad agreement that it was the responsibility of English Christians to subordinate their subjective understandings of God's will to the interpretation of God's will propounded by the church authorities. St. German originally put forward the proposition that king in parliament, as the voice of the community of Christians in England, was authorized to definitively pronounce regarding God's will; and that obedience to the crown was in all circumstances commensurate with obedience to God's will. Salvation, as envisioned by St. German and Hooker, was thus not dependent upon adherence to a single true faith. Rather it was conditional upon a sincere effort to try to discern the true faith using the means that God had made available to the individual, particularly the collective wisdom of one's church speaking through its representatives. In tackling this fascinating dichotomy at the heart of early modern government, this study emphasizes an aspect of the defence of royal supremacy that has not heretofore been sufficiently appreciated by modern scholars, and invites consideration of how this aspect of hermeneutics is relevant to wider discussions relating to the nature of secular and divine authority.

Autumn 1536. Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn are dead. Henry VIII has married Jane Seymour, and still awaits his longed for male heir. Disaffected conservatives in England see an opportunity for a return to Rome and an end to religious experimentation, but Thomas Cromwell has other ideas.The Dissolution of the Monasteries has begun and the publication of the Lutheran influenced Ten Articles of the Anglican Church has followed. The obstinate monarch, enticed by monastic wealth, is determined not to change course. Fear and resentment is unleashed in northern England in the largest spontaneous uprising against a Tudor monarch – the Pilgrimage of Grace – in which 30,000 men take up arms against the king.This book examines the evidence for that opposition and the abundant examples of religiously motivated dissent. It also highlights the rhetoric, reward and retribution used by the Crown to enforce its policy and crush the opposition.

​The Palgrave Handbook of Religion and State Volume II: Global Perpectives addresses issues of Religion and State from a multitude of disciplines. The volume begins with the philosophical discussion of perennial issues that have to do with the origin and nature of rights. One question centers on the right to use one’s religious beliefs to enact laws. This discussion alone sets this handbook apart from other handbooks of its type. While addressing these perennial questions, this volume includes authors who interact with the work of John Rawls, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of contemporary philosophers. The subsequent sections address the American Constitutional Experiment, religion, state, and law in the Americas.

This study examines themes in the political ideas of Episcopalian, Puritan, and Separatist authors from the reign of Edward VI until the death of Elizabeth I. Cosmic harmony, providentialism, natural law, absolutism, and government by consent are examined in the context of the theological, political, and social upheavals of the Reformation period.

In Ordained Ministry in Free Church Perspective Jan Martijn Abrahamse offers a methodologically innovative way to understand ordained ministry in terms of covenantal theology by returning to the life and thought of the English Separatist Robert Browne (c. 1550-1633).

How do Christians determine when to obey God even if that means disobeying other people? In this book W. Bradford Littlejohn addresses that question as he unpacks the magisterial political-theological work of Richard Hooker, a leading figure in the sixteenth-century English Reformation. Littlejohn shows how Martin Luther and other Reformers considered Christian liberty to be compatible with considerable civil authority over the church, but he also analyzes the ambiguities and tensions of that relationship and how it helped provoke the Puritan movement. The heart of the book examines how, according to Richard Hooker, certain forms of Puritan legalism posed a much greater threat to Christian liberty than did meddling monarchs. In expounding Hooker's remarkable attempt to offer a balanced synthesis of liberty and authority in church, state, and conscience, Littlejohn draws out pertinent implications for Christian liberty and politics today.

This study commends the public theology of the English Reformation as a fruitful though neglected resource for a critical analysis of the contradictions of freedom that riddle late-modern liberal democracies and a constructive response to them. Drawn from the key legal, liturgical, homiletic and confessional elements of the English Reformation, this foundational Anglican tradition provides a theological vantage point for understanding current moral and political impasses in the western legacy of natural rights. The extensive development of natural rights in pre-modern scholastic theory and practice and its continuity with theoretical development from the 17th century onward make the Reformers' criticisms of scholastic moral, political, and ecclesial thought germane to identifying the problematic features of the prevailing modern tradition and to furnishing a theological alternative to them. These features are: an individualistic and voluntarist conception of moral agency, a regulative and juridical orientation to human relationships, and an anthropocentric concentration on human rather than on divine right, judgement, and freedom. The humanity they portray is detached from its created ordering to Christological perfection and bound within a self-enclosed ethical and political self-understanding. This is effectively countered by the English reformers' presentation of the salvation of creation in Christ, faith working through love, the spiritual fellowship of the church, and the provisional character of political jurisdiction.