"John Edwards of Cambridge (1637-1716) has typically been portrayed as a marginalized 'Calvinist' in an overwhelmingly 'Arminian' later Stuart Church of England. In Retaining the Old Episcopal Divinity, Jake Griesel challenges this depiction of Edwards and the theological climate of his contemporary Church. Griesel demonstrates that Edwards was recognized in his own day and the immediately following generations as one of the preeminent conforming divines of the period, who featured prominently in notable theological controversies concerning contemporaries such as John Locke, Gilbert Burnet, Daniel Whitby, William Whiston, and Samuel Clarke. Despite some Arminian opposition, Edwards' theological works are shown to have enjoyed a warm reception among sizable segments of the established Church's clergy, many of whom shared his Reformed convictions. Instead of a theological misfit, this study contends that the anti-Arminian Edwards was a decidedly mainstream churchman. Griesel's reassessment has ramifications far beyond the figure of Edwards, however, and ultimately serves as a prism through which to visualize with much greater clarity the broader theological landscape of the later Stuart Church of England, and particularly the place of Reformed orthodoxy within it. It substantially develops recent research on the persisting vitality of Reformed theology within the post-Restoration Church by demonstrating to an unprecedented extent the sheer strength and numbers of conforming Reformed divines between the Restoration and the evangelical revivals. Finally, Griesel problematizes the idea that the post-Restoration Church developed a fairly homogeneous 'Anglican' identity, and argues instead that the Church in this period was theologically and ecclesio-politically variegated"--

This volume is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on how Reformed theology and ecclesiology related to one of the most consequential issues between the Elizabethan Settlement (1559) and the Hanoverian Succession (1714), namely conformity to the Church of England. This volume enriches scholarly understandings of how Reformed identity was understood in the Tudor and Stuart periods, and how it influenced both clerical and lay attitudes towards the English Church’s government, liturgy and doctrine. In a reflection of how established religion pervaded all aspects of civic life in the early modern world and was sharply contested within both ecclesiastical and political spheres, this volume includes chapters that focus variously on the ecclesio-political, liturgical, and doctrinal aspects of conformity.