Laudian

Laudianism was an early seventeenth-century reform movement within the Church of England, promulgated by Archbishop William Laud and his supporters. It rejected the predestination upheld by the previously dominant Calvinism in favour of free will, and hence the possibility of salvation for all men. It is probably best known for its impact on the Anglican High Church movement and its emphasis on liturgical ceremony and clerical hierarchy. Laudianism was the culmination of the move towards Arminianism in the Church of England; but was neither purely theological in nature, nor restricted to the English church.

The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, that set the tone for English religious policy until the rise of Laudianism, was theologically a mixture of Catholic doctrine, Calvinism and some minor elements from Lutheranism without adhering to one of them as official. Although the doctrine of predestination was to be handled with care at a parish level in order to offset despair and the ensuing disobedience, the seventeenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles sets out a doctrine of predestination to life as one of the founding principles of the English Church but omits reference to reprobation. Unlike Calvin's and Beza's own doctrine on predestination, which is supra-lapsarian, double and unconditional, the more usual opinion among the Reformed was sub- or infra-lapsarian which viewed God's predestination as acting on human beings considered as those already created and fallen, so that reprobation was judicial. The essence of Laudianism in a theological sense was a belief in God's universal grace and the free will of all men to obtain salvation. Thus, various Reformed theories of predestination were rejected, and predestination was based on God's foresight of who would believe, so compromising the fundamental teachings of the established Church of England. In addition Laud's insistence on uniformity in ritual aroused great opposition from the Puritans.

In practice, this led to a polarization within English Protestantism, to the extent that the movements of Laudianism and Puritanism could no longer be described under this all-encompassing banner. Predestination had been a unifying feature of the Reformed Church and, although more radical groups might have been rejected, there was still a sense of brotherhood among the adherents of supra- and infra- approaches. Archbishop Laud disagreed with the views of his predecessors, such as John Whitgift, that Puritans were aberrant brethren, erring but deserving some level of leniency, but believed instead that the Protestant non-conformists presented a direct threat to the establishment and that there was more common ground between his own, true position and that of the pre-Reformed Roman Catholic Church.

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