Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England: The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley

by Greg A. Salazar

Overview

Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England is the first modern full-scale examination of the theology and life of the distinguished English Calvinist clergyman Daniel Featley (1582-1645). It explores Featley's career and thought through a comprehensive treatment of his two dozen published works and manuscripts and situates these works within their original historical context.

A fascinating figure, Featley was the youngest of the translators behind the Authorized Version, a protégé of John Rainolds, a domestic chaplain for Archbishop George Abbot, and a minister of two churches. As a result of his sympathies with royalism and episcopacy, he endured two separate attacks on his life. Despite this, Featley was the only royalist Episcopalian figure who accepted his invitation to the Westminster Assembly. Three months into the Assembly, however, Featley was charged with being a royalist spy, was imprisoned by Parliament, and died shortly thereafter.

While Featley is a central focus of the work, this study is more than a biography. It uses Featley's career to trace the fortunes of Calvinist conformists—those English Calvinists who were committed to the established Church and represented the Church's majority position between 1560 and the mid-1620s, before being marginalized by Laudians in the 1630s and puritans in the 1640s. It demonstrates how Featley's convictions were representative of the ideals and career of conformist Calvinism, explores the broader priorities and political maneuvers of English Calvinist conformists, and offers a more nuanced perspective on the priorities and political maneuvers of these figures and the politics of religion in post-Reformation England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197536902
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/26/2022
Series:	Oxford Studies in Historical Theology
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Greg A. Salazar is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. His research was funded by scholarships and grants from the Lightfoot and Archbishop Cranmer funds at Cambridge University. He co-edited volume 6 of The Works of William Perkins (2018) and serves as Managing Editor for the Journal Studies in Puritanism and Piety,

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Note on Transcriptions and Translations

Introduction

Chapter 1 - The Formation of a Calvinist Conformist
Chapter 2 - Regulating the Reformed Consensus: Chaplaincy, Licensing, and Censorship
Chapter 3 - Anti-Catholicism: Scripture, Patristic Tradition, and Pastoral Polemicism
Chapter 4 - English Reformed Soteriology: Countering Pelagianism, Arminianism, and Popery
Chapter 5 - Pastoral and Practical Theology: Preaching, Piety, and Ecclesiastical Conformity
Chapter 6 - Ecclesiology and Polity of an English Calvinist Conformist
Chapter 7 - The 'Afterlife' of an English Calvinist Conformist

Conclusion

Appendix
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"The complexities of Featley's career offer a compelling prism through which to see Calvinism." — D. K. McKim, CHOICE

"Greg Salazar's meticulous, methodical, indeed magisterial account of Daniel Featley sheds light on a tertium quid type of divines in early-to mid-seventeenth century England: conforming Calvinists whose ecclesiological and soteriological perspectives were situated between the Puritans and the Laudians. Featley's identity embodied several complex and oft-contradictory impulses which historians had not always regarded as inhabiting together. Salazar is to be praised for offering an account that proves the maxim that history is far more complicated than theology." — Paul C.H. Lim, Vanderbilt University

"Calvinist Conformity in Post Reformation England is a well-researched and absorbing scholarly analysis of the complex and tension-filled life of Daniel Featley. Against the background of the social, political, ecclesiastical and theological upheaval that characterized seventeenth-century England, Greg Salazar portrays him both as polemicist against Rome, Arminianism, Pelagianism and Anabaptism, and as defender of both episcopacy and the rights of the monarchy. In this study, Salazar has combined the details of careful research with a narrative whose plot is worthy of a novel. He is to be congratulated on giving us a work of scholarship that is as interesting as it is informative." — Sinclair Ferguson, Reformed Theological Seminary

"The conformist Calvinist divines of early Stuart England have been neglected by comparison with their puritan and Laudian contemporaries. This outstanding case study of Daniel Featley rectifies the neglect, shedding a flood of new light on their convictions and their positioning. Displaying a mastery of archives and ideas, it shows how a distinguished clerical intellectual adjusted to dizzying shifts of ecclesiastical policy." — John Coffey, University of Leicester

"The Westminster Assembly is typically regarded as representing the puritanism that later led to English non-conformity and Scottish puritanism but some of the most interesting figures involved at points do not fit such a taxonomy. Such is the conformist Daniel Featley, whose life and thought united Anglican churchmanship and profound Reformed theology. As such he is representative of an important but neglected strand of post Reformation English Protestantism. Historically sensitive and theologically acute, Salazar's analysis is to be welcomed for bringing another important English theologian of the seventeenth century into the ongoing discussion of post-Reformation Reformed theology." — Carl R. Trueman, Grove City College

"An intellectual biography of Daniel Featley has long been overdue, and readers of this volume will quickly agree that it has been well worth the wait. Historian Greg Salazar has expertly delivered a clear, scrupulously well-research study of one the seventeen century's leading Calvinists and anti-Catholics. The multi-faceted Featley appears in these pages in all his puzzling complexity: as a respected debater, court preacher, risk-taking censor, smooth political operator, patristic scholar, and pious pastor. I commend this work not only as an exemplary study of a post-Reformation theologian, but as a salutary addition to a growing store of scholarship on the subject of Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England." — Chad Van Dixhoorn, Westminster Theological Seminary

"Greg Salazar's excellent book sheds fresh light on the fluid and contested phenomenon of Calvinist conformity in early modern England. Focusing on the intriguing figure of Daniel Featley, it compels us to reconsider the nature and significance of moderate puritanism and challenges the distorting polarities between polemicist and pastor that have often bedevilled this subject. Salazar's careful study opens a window onto the deeply held convictions and tactical accommodations that enabled one seventeenth-century divine to navigate the ecclesiastical turbulence that defined this critical period." — Alexandra Walsham, University of Cambridge

"Greg Salazar's outstanding account of Daniel Featley offers new insights into the principles that drove this most important of early seventeenth-century Calvinist conformists, and into the often surprising relationships that shaped the theology, culture and politics of English and international Reformed orthodoxy." — Crawford Gribben, Queen's University Belfast

"As a Baptist historian, the name of Daniel Featley is one that has been long familiar to me due to his The Dippers Dipt, a famous attack on the early Baptist cause. Beyond this hostility to ecclesial radicalism, though, I, like far too many Baptist historians, really knew very little about Featley. This robust study by Professor Salazar of Featley's conformist Calvinism, as well as his other theological and political commitments, is therefore most welcome. It is a needed reminder of the theological complexity of the 1630s and 1640s as it comprehensively illuminates the nature of Featley's various conflicts and provides details of what motivated him and how he arrived at his convictions. An incisive and thought-provoking study." — Michael A.G. Haykin, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

"While Featley is a central focus of the work, this study is more than a biography...It demonstrates how Featley's convictions were representative of the ideals and career of conformist Calvinism, explores the broader priorities and political maneuvers of English Calvinist conformists, and offers a more nuanced perspective on the priorities and political maneuvers of these figures and the politics of religion in post-Reformation England." — Crawford Gribben, New Books Network

"The significance of Salazar's research includes not only the rehabilitation of the 'real Featley' but as well to further identify the reformed conformist position during the first half of the 17th century." — R.W. de Koeijer, Theologia Reformata

"This book is a fine study for those desiring to expand their understanding of English history, both before and during the English Civil War." — Ryan M. McGraw, Theology and History

"This is a superb study, which simultaneously offers a substantive scholarly contribution and makes for edifying reading. Modern Reformed Anglicans struggling with the tensions in the modern Anglican communion will likely find Featley's career a fascinating story to reflect upon." — Matthew N. Payne, The Global Anglican

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