With this book, Daniel Eppley provides a well-researched and thought-provoking sapling for the continuously growing forest of English Reformation studies. The particular conundrum discussed in this volume consists of how theorists from William Tynedale to Richard Hooker attempted to square obedience to the Royal Supremacy of the Church with God's will, so as to allow subjects to recognize the king (or queen) in parliament as capable of defining doctrine and refuting any notions of Christians' God-given right to interpret scripture and exercise their individual conscience before their duty as subjects obedient to their monarch and the ecclesiastical laws enacted by parliament. While all the theorists discussed agreed that God's will expressed in scripture is the highest form of law that Christians are charged to obey, interpreting God's will emerged as the basis for a multiplicity of interpretations and applications that are the subject of Eppley's study.

This book contains two major sections, the first detailing efforts to defend the Henrician Royal Supremacy established by parliament, and the second detailing those, primarily of Richard Hooker, to defend the Elizabethan Anglican settlement. In the first part of the book, Eppley draws upon and integrates the works of scholars such as Richard Rex to discuss how slippery a slope it was to make the case for obedience to the sovereign's not only enforcing but also formulating doctrine after the jurisdictional phase of the English Reformation, which had destroyed the edifice of papal authority in England as it transferred it to (or recognized it as vested in) imperial kingship. As ecclesiastical policy was effectively collapsed into the rubric of civil domestic policy, even such staunch defenders of the Royal Supremacy as William Tynedale, Thomas Starkey, and Stephen Gardiner fell short of a watertight endorsement of the king's ability to define and enforce doctrine, because they effectively and ultimately acknowledged the right of individual Christians to follow their own conscience when it interprets royal commands as contrary to God's law. The problem here: as long as defining doctrine remained beyond the king's power, so did the power to claim the exclusive allegiance of his subjects in ecclesiastical affairs. As Martin Luther inadvertently unleashed the power of the individual Christian conscience on the Continent, the horrors of the German peasant revolts of the mid-1520s were not lost on Henry VIII and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, over the course of the 1530s. To Eppley, Henry's theoretical knight in shining armor was Christopher St. German, who attempted to demonstrate that individual English Christians could rest assured that the king-in-parliament was capable of defining doctrine without placing their salvation at risk by demanding that they obey a law not directly sanctioned by scripture. In works such as A treatyse concerninge the power of the clergye, and the lawes of the Realme (1534–35), St. German accomplishes this in a variety of ways but, most important, through the conceptual idea that the “church” is not just the clerical establishment but the entire community of the realm, as represented in parliament, the “national” version of a “general council” of the church. St. German recognized that although a universal reformed church was the ideal, a latter-day Council of Nicaea was not likely in practice and, thus, that English Christians could put their trust in the divinely inspired “national” council that the king-in-parliament represented.

If St. German was Henry VIII's knight in shining armor, Elizabeth's was Richard Hooker, who labored to defend the Anglican settlement against Presbyterian encroachments in his eight-book seminal work, Of the laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593, 1597, 1648, 1662). Eppley is not sure of the direct connection between St. German and Hooker, but the former certainly provided the latter with a theoretical jumping-off point for a vigorous defense of episcopacy, in response to the Admonition Controversy of the 1570s between the puritan Thomas Cartwright and the future archbishop of Canterbury and vigorous defender of Anglicanism John Whitgift. As Hooker picked up the gauntlet of defending both the Elizabethan Royal Supremacy and the Anglican ecclesiastical settlement, his particular line of attack was the nature and definition of adiaphora, matters not regarded as essential to the faith, which formed the main line of dispute with Presbyterian thought. To Presbyterians, Saint Paul's injunctions to the Corinthians to adopt uniformity with other churches was a call to further reform the English ecclesiastical polity in concert with Continental reformed churches. Hooker's response, echoing that of St. German, was the ability of the “visible” church, represented by the queen and her parliaments, to define doctrine within the scope of a broadly interpreted body of adiaphora. Like St. German, Hooker also addressed one of the fundamental issues of the Protestant Reformation in general: why a uniform and unified reformed church did not emerge over the course of the sixteenth century.

The Tudor century was characterized by the emergence of an increasingly sophisticated and all-pervasive polity, which required justifications from theorists as diverse as John Aylmer and Sir Thomas Smith. As the English Reformation, jurisdictional first and doctrinal second, also required its own champions to rationalize the absorption of the ecclesiastical polity into the temporal one, all the theorists discussed in this book, with varying degrees of success, tackled the issue of combining church and state within one establishment while retaining the primary allegiance of its Christian subjects. At the heart of this book, which ties both halves together, is a detailed and enlightening discussion concerning the continuously evolving relationship between the individual Christian conscience and the dictates of the state.