A Calvinist Confession? Interpreting the Thirty-Nine Articles and Writing the History of the Reformation in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

In eighteenth-century Ireland, there were two competing historiographical traditions, fighting to tell their story of the Church of Ireland’s doctrinal heritage, as outlined in its confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles, which were formulated in the sixteenth-century Church of England. Article XVII: Of Predestination and Election—the most controversial article—contained no reference to the “reprobate.” Mainstream Anglican clergymen, who taught an Arminian soteriology, cited this omission as proof that the sixteenth-century framers had not intended Article XVII to be read in a Calvinist light. These “Caroline” historians also stressed the importance of the Laudian reforms of the 1630s, when the Irish Church’s original, ultra-Calvinist confession, the 1615 Articles, were virtually (but not officially) rescinded in favor of the English Church’s allegedly un-Calvinist confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles. There was, however, another, resolutely Protestant historiographical tradition, stressing the Irish Church’s doctrinal links with the continental Reformation. Proponents of this tradition argued that the Thirty-Nine Articles needed to be read in the light of the 1615 Articles, which, they claimed, remained an authoritative confession in the Irish Church. This essay explores how contemporaries interpreted and reinterpreted the Thirty-Nine Articles, thereby illuminating the ways in which the historiography of the Reformation was shaped by politico-theological concerns in eighteenth-century Ireland. It displays the eighteenth century as a fundamental period of transition, in which a largely dormant historiographical tradition was revived in the Irish Church by a small but growing faction of evangelicals, who sought to write Calvinism back into the history of their denomination.