This chapter examines the ways in which the Laudians mixed and matched the authorities of scripture, of natural law, of apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition and of the positive law of the church. Where, on the issue of church government, the Laudians pushed the claims of scripture and of apostolic precept and precedent to assert and exalt the iure divino status of episcopacy, on the Sabbath they played down the authority of scripture and of apostolic practice, while exalting the authority of the church. The result was a nuanced position which refuted the scripturalist sabbatarianism of the puritans, while allowing the Laudians to retain an account of Sunday worship exalted enough for their own purposes and perfectly compatible with their account of the power of the church to consecrate holy times as well as places.

Having dealt with Laudianism as an ideology, and sought to reconstruct it in all its coherences and inner tensions, this chapter introduces the notion, and explains the value, of viewing it as a coalition made up of persons and groups of different views, with different levels of commitment to the Laudian agenda; some fully signed up to the whole package, others committed to some parts of it but not to others, others still merely performing compliance and collaboration with varying degrees of intensity and conviction.

The chapter provides an account of the various authorities – the scripture, apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition, the positive law of the church – that underpinned and informed the practices of the national church. The Laudian contention that the right sort of ceremonial performance served to unite the practice of the militant church with that of the triumphant is outlined, and the Laudians’ combination of traditional conformist arguments about things indifferent with more novel contentions about scripture, and thus their capacity to render ceremonies previously held to be indifferent religiously significant and spiritually effectual while still insisting on their status as adiaphora, is stressed. The result was minimum and maximum justifications of the Laudian programme, which could be used to win over different audiences or constituencies.

John Thompson describes how Martin Luther and John Calvin treated conscience. For Luther, natural conscience is beset by knowing that a person can never meet the rigorous requirements of the law. Faith can relieve a person’s downtrodden conscience, which would otherwise condemn him. Once a person accepts the favor of God that flows solely from trusting him, his conscience is liberated. He knows he can do nothing himself to merit that favor. His conscience is freed “to trust God’s promise of mercy and forgiveness.” The highest functioning conscience for Luther, then, is the one that does not depend on its own goodness or perfection. Calvin teaches that, though a person’s conscience is a natural faculty, it is marred and affected by the fall. Once a person is saved, however, his conscience is transformed so that he desires to obey the will of God found in the law. This is true even though adherence to the law will not add in the least to his salvation. For this reason, Calvin created a catechism to train and chasten Genevan Christians’ consciences. Calvin also helped to establish the Geneva consistory, which was less a disciplinary body, and rather “a school for consciences.”

To understand what puritans were doing in New England, we have to begin elsewhere, for the place of New England is itself not a beginning but a consequence – an effect of causes long in process before there ever were colonists at Plymouth, Salem, or Boston. Puritanism originated many decades before as a movement for reform of worship and the church in Scotland and England, a movement committed to a certain understanding of redemption – the passage from sin to salvation in the Christian life – that had wide-ranging social, political, and theological ramifications. This chapter maps the basic features of that movement and carries the dynamics forward into the “puritan revolution” of c. 1640–1660, including the theological currents that swirled beyond 1660. Tracking how Calvinist ideas circulated from the Continent to England and Scotland and what impact those ideas had on society, this chapter spells out the origins of puritanism and describes the battles and transatlantic dynamics that shaped American puritan literature.