Orthodoxy is given form by language, and language is always in motion. This essay uses the history of the 1611 King James Bible to examine the tension between the fundamental Protestant conviction that the Bible ought to be made available in the ‘vernacular’ – that most mercurial, evanescent form of language – and the long-standing Christian (and pre-Christian) impulse to place certain texts into holy stasis. Protestantism’s emphasis on religion of the heart, and prayer in one’s own native tongue, naturally meant that in England the Bible in use shifted from the Latin Vulgate to translations in English. Yet the desire of the faithful to have the ‘word of God’ fixed and unchanging remained. Out of the many Reformation-era English translations the King James Bible came to be dominant, a victory which rested not only on its monumental prose but on its ability to serve as a successor to the Latin Vulgate, a universal translation that did not appear to be a denominational weapon. The essay argues that over the following centuries the King James Bible became in effect a new English Vulgate, a pillar of orthodox teaching and practice acquiring something close to inspired status. The very fact of its language being left behind by everyday usage gave it the opportunity to achieve universal relevance by transcending its own cultural context. We see in Gebarowski-Shafer’s study another glimpse at the diversity, cross-channel influences and global reach of English national religion.

Christianity’s struggles to define orthodoxy in its first centuries have cast a long shadow. This essay explores the historiographical and historical background of Jewish Christianity, a category made all the more fraught since Christianity and Judaism, despite their apparent ‘parting of the ways’, remained deeply entangled entities. Hence, the clarity between the two groups found in early chroniclers of Christianity would seem to be more aspirational than actual. Irenaeus adopted an essentialist narrative, that the pure gospel of Jesus was distorted by the ‘heresies’ of later groups, including Jewish believers who held on to practices of the law. Following a teleological approach, Eusebius described Christianity as ‘a consistent distancing from and critique of Judaism’. In the process the contention is made that, arguably, the first and most consequential Christian orthodoxy and heresy, namely ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’, were, like all subsequent heresies and orthodoxies, not so much ‘begotten’ but made, shifting taxonomies, which do not sit easily with static definitions. The study of ‘Jewish Christianity’, which throws up complex issues of definition, gives acute voice to this observation, suggesting more generally that Christianity’s historians take a more nuanced and suspicious view of the idea of ‘difference’.

Orthodoxies can live only if they are taught, and if they are passed down from generation to generation: but that process can be fraught. When the younger generation are caught up in an exciting new movement such as Enlightenment philosophy, their priorities – the very questions they ask, never mind the answers they reach – can twist out of their parents’ anguished reach. This essay lays bare the intergenerational agonies of a leading family of late eighteenth-century English Moravians, detailing how the son of one of the denomination’s senior leaders came to question and challenge the orthodoxies in which he was raised, with painful consequences for all concerned. The rigours of the Moravians’ educational structures were designed to preserve orthodox teachings and piety for the next generation, even as the ferment of Enlightenment philosophy put those teachings under unprecedented pressure. Those who taught Benjamin Latrobe the younger borrowed the methods of Enlightenment philosophy and science but shied away from the difficult questions those methods posed; the result was ultimately his loss to the community and his reinvention of himself in the new United States as an architect and thinker.

Orthodoxy is not an abstract phenomenon; it always has a context, and sometimes the precise details of geography can shape that context decisively. Specific places, institutions and groups can serve as petri dishes to breed challenges to old orthodoxies, and change can be a community affair. This essay takes us to the English Reformation, and to the precincts of London’s Augustinian (Austin) friary, where Thomas Cromwell made his home. The essay argues that this site was a critical context to Cromwell’s career, serving as a key entry point for Continental ideas into London and an incubator of many early English evangelical reformers, facilitating the forging of cross-Channel networks that accelerated the evangelical cause in England. Cromwell’s address carried an association which his contemporaries will have heard more plainly than we do, and it gave him access to a network which served him well during the 1530s.

Orthodoxy ought in principle to be stable, but is in fact always shifting. This essay exemplifies this truth through a study of John Everard, a politically subversive Puritan preacher whose conversion to spiritualism influenced generations of radical Protestants in England and early America. Everard’s apparent leap from mainstream Puritanism to antinomian spiritualism was not, in fact, marked by any sharp disjuncture, but by piecemeal developments of entirely orthodox themes in Puritan practical divinity which took him almost insensibly into new territory. It was a religious journey which took him to an unexpected destination, namely, cautioning readers and hearers against making an idol of the Scriptures, whose primary meaning he came to believe was allegorical. The essay looks into Everard’s sources, ancient and Reformation era, showing in the complexity of one man’s religious influences that orthodoxy is often less geographically specific than nationalist historiographies have imagined. Everard’s life and thought provides an important example of how deeply England has been integrated into, and dependent on, the religious life of its neighbours, and how much its Christian thinkers have in turn influenced patterns of piety beyond its shores.

Orthodoxy is an ever-moving target, a fact that was famously recognised by John Henry Newman in his theory of the historical development of doctrine. As this essay reminds us, this was not an abstract matter for him. In his own conversion from Anglican to Roman Catholic, an apparently sharp disjunction masked a deeper spiritual and intellectual continuity. In his later career, a monopoly on the Catholic orthodoxy to which he was profoundly committed was claimed by forces within the church which sought to narrow and over-define it. This essay explores the tension between Newman’s commitment to dogma but opposition to dogmatism, and his understanding of orthodoxy as a corporate collaborative attempt to articulate the mystery of God in time, rather than a system of infallible propositions impervious to change, generated by and immediately available to ecclesiastical authority. Newman’s confidence both in the Church’s authority as “the oracle of God”, and in the legitimate role of spiritual intuition and intellectual exploration in the development and recognition of religious truth, led him to urge those unsettled by the ultra-orthodoxy of 19th century Ultramontanism to patience, and to trust that time, and the Spirit, would correct any imbalance and would “trim the boat”.

Keeping orthodoxy stable across the span of centuries is never easy. This essay’s starting point is Krister Stendahl’s insight that ‘sayings which originally mean one thing later on were interpreted to mean something else, something which was felt to be more relevant to human conditions of later times’. Applying this to Luther’s doctrine of justification, it asks whether Luther was rightly understood by later Protestants, and, more fundamentally, did Luther rightly understand Paul? In his letter to the Romans, Paul defied Jewish Christian expectations for who could be a believer, arguing for a reinterpretation of the Law of Moses that included Gentile believers through participation in Christ. Luther, for whom the inclusion of Gentiles was no longer a live question, instead read Romans in light of the pastoral needs of his day, arguing against those who would try to earn salvation through pious works and in the process breaking with established orthodoxies. Later Protestants emphasised Luther’s ‘forensic justification’ by faith as the enduring principle of the Reformation, to the exclusion of Paul’s understanding of participation in Christ, but Luther himself did not make that mistake: his teaching of the ‘happy exchange’ emphasised justification as union with Christ, since Jesus assumed human sin and gave believers his righteousness instead. Despite reading Paul in a very different situation from the apostle’s, Luther created a new, but never stable, orthodoxy which still was fundamentally faithful to the heart of the Pauline gospel.

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

How can one define and defend orthodoxy when the very notion itself is fluid and contested? This essay examines how the very concept of ‘orthodoxy’ itself was fought over during the Reformation era, with the new Lutheran and Reformed establishments being quick to clothe themselves in the language of orthodoxy and their enemies in that of heresy, in the same way that Protestant historians from the Reformed martyrologists to the Magdeburg Centuriators positioned themselves, not their Roman Catholic opponents, as the true heirs of ancient and medieval Christendom. In the process, these new establishments unwittingly demonstrated that the doctrinal content of orthodoxy can be less important than the language in which it is dressed. Ambiguous terminology and shifting definitions can create a reassuring illusion of continuity even amid a period of dislocating change. Shifts in orthodoxy are not exactly what they seem, and the essay shows how dramatic shifts can be downplayed, presented as mere elucidations of existing principles, or described as reversions to an older truth that has become corrupted. The more dramatic a reform, the more urgent the need to present it as seamless continuity.

Few institutions can incubate more instinctive orthodoxies than armies, those giant mobile universities in which questions of life and death are never very far away. The breaking and remaking of orthodoxy happens most readily under the pressure of a crisis, and armies are in the crisis business. This essay considers the religious life of soldiers in the British army from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The conventional view of contemporary observers and of most historians was that the ‘scum of the earth’ were a godless lot. The truth, this essay argues, is more interesting. Armies are transient, intensely concentrated communities whose age structures, gender profiles and lived experiences are radically different from the civilian world’s. It should be no surprise that those distinctive circumstances fostered a distinctive religious culture, at least as intense as that of civilians, but with distinct emphases. The long Protestant aversion to prayer for the dead crumbled under the pressure of the First World War. There was a wider flourishing of practices and mindsets which the church establishment called superstition and fatalism, but that establishment’s inability to control soldiers’ religious experience should not lead us to accept its dismissals uncritically. British soldiers’ religion may not have adhered to the civilian world’s norms, but their distinct history should in fact lead us to question quite how normative the civilian experience was.

Orthodoxy is a shifting target, and so is the terminology used to manage it. This essay explores the plight of royalist defenders of the former Protestant establishment in seventeenth-century England – those who would later be called Anglicans – as they lamented the destruction, impropriation and secularisation of church property during the Civil War and Republic. These people could be forgiven for being perplexed: they embraced doctrines which in the previous century would have risked sending them to the fire as heretics, but which in their own times saw them damned as crypto-papists. They believed themselves to have stayed in the same position; as a result, they had changed sides. This was not merely about shifts in definitions, but also in language. The essay explores how, during the 1640s and 1650s, the term ‘sacrilege’ went from being a Catholic response to Protestant iconoclasm and plunder to a widespread English Protestant response to the parliamentary and republican regimes’ seizures and depredations of church property, material, spiritual and theological. The experience served to nurture the growth of an emergent new orthodoxy: the High Church sensibility that would become a part of nascent Anglicanism.

The Reformation simplified everything. It effected a shift from a religion of symbol and allegory, ceremony and formal gesture to one that was plain and direct: a shift from the visual to the aural, from ritual to literal exposition, from the numinous and mysterious to the everyday. It moved from … a religion that sought out all the senses, to one that concentrated on the word and innerliness.

This essay looks at one of the perennial sites of conflict over both orthodoxy and orthopraxy: the regulation of sexual morals, which brings both issues to a sharp point. The essay considers how the notorious scandal around the bigamy of the Lutheran prince Philipp of Hesse in 1539–40 placed emerging Lutheran understandings of orthodoxy under excruciating pressure. In this new world, where long-settled doctrines were suddenly open to negotiation, it was not entirely unreasonable of Philipp and his supporters to appeal to the ambiguous biblical evidence and to question whether Christianity necessarily entailed monogamy. At the moment of the crisis, the blunt realities of power politics pushed Martin Luther in the same direction. Yet, over the decades that followed, those same blunt realities meant that Lutheranism had to be seen to reaffirm traditional sexual orthodoxies. Even if theologians’ conservative instincts had not tended this way in any case, the risk of reputational damage from not disavowing Philipp’s adventures was intolerable. The result was the reverse-engineering of a distinctive theological method: since sola scriptura could not be relied on to provide a sufficiently unambiguous answer to the question of polygamy, Lutherans in the so-called age of orthodoxy turned to natural law instead.

Orthodoxy is universal but lived Christian experience is local and culturally specific: negotiating this relationship has always been tricky. This essay reminds us how odd and problematic we should find the link between the now-global tradition we call ‘Anglicanism’ and the religious history of one island kingdom. Despite persistent myths to the contrary, England does not define Anglicanism, and Anglicanism does not define England. Yet, as the essay argues, as the Anglican Communion has shed its post-imperial trappings, it has also struggled increasingly to define itself and its orthodoxies. Indeed, it has often reverse-engineered the process, deducing a hermeneutical method from the answer to a question on sexual morals which a particular party urgently needs to reach. Yet the Anglican Communion remains more than a myth, having retained bonds of loyalty and commonalities of practice, and theological tools such as provisionality, that allow it to continue to contain at least a degree of diversity.