Chapter 5 considers the ways in which Piers Plowman attempts to translate a Franciscan form-of-life into vernacular, worldly terms. While the Franciscan forma vitae details the way of living for each brother, from his clothing to his daily activities to the correction of his faults, Piers Plowman details the means of making a living in an inappropriable world. I argue that the poem asks these questions by way of its sustained meditation on the meaning and nature of labour as the continual payment of an unpayable debt. Langland explores the value and meaning of labour most explicitly in and through the three figures in the poem who are most closely linked with Franciscanism, and who court most dangerously the charges of idleness and default: Rechelesnesse, Nede, and the Dreamer himself. As this chapter shows, the irreducibly ambiguous nature of these three figures, who mix truth with half-truth and misunderstanding, who aspire to the ideals taught by Holy Church, Patience, Kynde, and Conscience, but who embody an all-too-human failure to attain them, encapsulates the poem’s interpretive inappropriability.

This chapter asks whether Augustine agreed with the Stoics and Platonists that there were no necessary outward differences between the lives of the vicious and the virtuous. Answering this question requires investigating whether he thought in terms of political virtues; this chapter finds that he did not. It finds that, for Augustine, justice – whether human justice or true justice – was not a political virtue, because it was primarily a description of our loves: the humanly just and the truly just differed at the level of their loves, but not at the level of their actions.

This chapter explores the Laudian critique of the (allegedly) puritan doctrine of absolute predestination, and particularly absolute reprobation. This critique imputed an absolute, fatal or stoic necessity to questions of salvation and damnation, which, the Laudians claimed, reduced the role of human free will and moral effort to nothing. In so doing it created desperately difficult pastoral dilemmas for ministers trying to rescue members of their flocks from the desperation such doctrines all too often induced. This was particularly the case for absolute reprobation. It was in the course of dealing with puritan error on this subject that the Laudians came to deal with the topic of predestination, and faute de mieux, to adumbrate their own position, asserting that saving grace was offered to all, that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, that God willed the salvation of every sinner, that human effort was required for salvation, that true faith could be totally and finally lost and that no one was simply doomed to damnation; contentions which they defended not as resolutions of the paradoxes at the heart of the debate about predestination, but rather as saving truths central to the nature of Christianity.

This chapter concerns the place of predestination in Andrewes’ own style of divinity. On the one hand, because of the organising role of predestinarian error in Andrewes’ sense of puritanism and of the importance of puritanism as the defining other against which Andrewes constructed his own position, predestination was in some sense central to Andrewes’ thought. But on the other, since presumption was precisely what was wrong with the puritan attitude to predestination, a topic which the puritans thought they could subjugate to their own rationalist cross-questioning, this was an area in which Andrewes affected an extreme reticence. Nevertheless, what looks like an explicitly Arminian account of theology of grace can be teased out of his sermons and assigned a central role in his overall theology, which stressed the collaboration between the grace of God and human effort, the will of God and that of fallen humanity, enabled by Christ’s sacrifice and the ameliorating effects of sacramental grace to help people collaborate actively in their own salvation.

This chapter deals with the positive content of Andrewes’ divinity and the ways in which, through the practice of repentance and of good works, the Christian believer could achieve some sense of his or her own salvation. The works involved were organised under three headings: those of charity, which were directed towards fellow Christians; of piety, directed towards God through divine worship; and of chastisement, directed towards the self in response to sin, of which fasting was the leading example. Thus, in spite of what Andrewes insisted were puritan claims to the contrary, not merely faith but also works, not merely the gospel but also the law, were necessary if salvation were to be achieved. In this way something like a sense of assurance could be achieved, composed in equal parts of fear and security, anxiety and comfort. This was a position constructed (once again) against what Andrewes presented as a false (puritan) assurance, indeed a presumption, based on the false assumption that one was one of the elect.

This chapter examines the Laudian account of the relation between faith, hope and charity, and thus of that between faith and works. The Laudian answer to the question of how far, in this life, fallen humanity could fulfil the law of God is addressed.

This chapter sets up the problem of the relationship between Arminianism – defined as a set of propositions on the subject of predestination, at odds with Calvinist orthodoxy – and Laudianism as it has emerged in this book. Predestinarian error played a central role in the Laudian analysis of puritanism – it underlay a great deal of puritan presumption and hypocrisy, as well as their most divisive, indeed sectarian, impulses and behaviour. In addition, puritanism was the organising other of the Laudian project. All of which meant that predestination was a topic of great interest to the Laudians. But when it came to the positive case for Laudian reformation, to Laudianism as a style of piety and way of being Christian, the doctrine was far less central. Indeed, the topic tended to fall within the remit of those things best left unaddressed and certainly not subjected to the sort of assertion and counter-assertion that had recently threatened to plunge the Low Countries into chaos. However, the intensity of the Laudians’ repudiation of the puritans’ Calvinist predestinarianism more than implied the presence of a counter-orthodoxy and certainly called down accusations of Arminianism upon the Laudians’ heads.

Overviews the church–state relationship across time and nations, drawing attention to countries and circumstances in which the neutrality principle does not apply. Explores the origins of the doctrine, traces its developmental history in relation to religion in various countries, explains key concepts and identifies some different academic interpretations. Discusses the public/private dimensions to religious belief and their balancing within the Western liberal democratic model of government. It gives an overview of the law relating to religious freedom.