Until relatively recently, scholars have generally depicted the theological character of the post-Restoration Church of England as having been overwhelmingly Arminian and marked by a decisive shift away from the Reformed theology that had dominated in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This depiction has been challenged by Stephen Hampton and I, who have both demonstrated that although the majority of later Stuart conformist clergy did indeed incline to Arminianism, yet Reformed orthodoxy retained a large and influential minority of adherents among the clergy, resulting in a broad theological divide between an Arminian majority and a substantial Reformed minority.

Building on this revision, Samuel Fornecker, in his pioneering Bisschop’s Bench has shone the spotlight on yet another hitherto-underappreciated dimension of the theological landscape of the later Stuart and early Hanoverian Church of England: intra-Arminian polemics. Whereas the extant scholarship has tended to speak of Arminian conformists in an undifferentiated way, and whereas Nicholas Tyacke associated the proliferation of English Arminianism in the later seventeenth century with an increased convergence with the Dutch Remonstrant tradition, Fornecker analyzes six episodes of controversy among Arminian conformists between the 1670s and 1740s to demonstrate that, despite their common rejection of Reformed doctrines of grace and predestination, sharp fissures emerged among Arminian conformists themselves, specifically concerning theological alignment with the Dutch Remonstrant tradition. Fornecker’s key contention is that, whereas some Arminian conformists were indeed favorably disposed to Remonstrant theology, many others shared a “negatively defined consensus” with their Reformed counterparts (notwithstanding their disagreements on grace and predestination) in suspecting the Remonstrants of inclining toward the heterodoxy of Socinianism. Although Thomas McCall and Keith Stanglin have previously flagged heterogeneity among English Arminians, Fornecker here exhibits the contours of this theological landscape in higher definition and with many fresh insights, especially within the polemical context of the post-Restoration Church of England.

In Chapter 2, Fornecker provides the first exemplar of his thesis from the manuscript lectures of Joseph Beaumont (Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge). Although (as Tyacke had previously shown) Beaumont did indeed engage positively with Remonstrant thought on grace and predestination, yet on other key matters such as ecclesiology and church-state relations, he was entirely critical and even contemptuous of Remonstrant thought, and especially of their spokesman Simon Episcopius (Bisschop in Dutch, hence the book’s title). Beaumont, then, provides a prime example of how conformist engagement with the Remonstrants could be very selective, both appreciative and depreciative.

Chapter 3 turns to the Trinitarian disputes of the 1690s, especially William Sherlock’s controversial Vindication of the Trinity (1690), which echoed Remonstrants such as Étienne de Courcelles and Jean le Clerc in positing that the three persons of the Trinity are three “minds” or centers of consciousness whose unity consisted in sharing the same nature, which was accused of tritheism not only by Reformed conformists such as Robert South and John Wallis but also by prominent Arminians, whether high-church Tories such as Jonathan Edwards (principal of Jesus College, Oxford) or latitudinarian Whigs like Edward Stillingfleet (bishop of Worcester), who both explicitly opposed the Remonstrants on this issue.

Divergence in Arminian engagement with Remonstrant sources is further demonstrated in Chapter 4 with regard to the Christology of the latitudinarian Gilbert Burnet (bishop of Salisbury), who deviated from Chalcedonian Christology by holding that the incarnation consisted in the divine indwelling of the human person of Christ (basically, a rejection of the orthodox doctrine that Christ’s human nature is anhypostatic apart from its unity with the person of the Son) – which was attacked by the aforementioned Edwards not only as amounting to Nestorianism and Socinianism, but which he also expressly linked with the teaching of Remonstrants such as Episcopius and Philipp van Limborch, the latter of whom had enjoyed friendly correspondence with Burnet. In Edwards’ view, christological orthodoxy was being threatened by one of the Church of England’s bishops, and affinity with Remonstrant thought was largely to blame.

In Chapter 5, Edwards is once again seen at loggerheads with fellow Arminian conformists regarding affiliation with the Remonstrants, this time concerning the doctrine of original sin. When Daniel Whitby (precentor of Salisbury Cathedral) rejected the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity and explicitly sided with Episcopius, Courcelles, and Limborch in doing so, Edwards, in common with his Reformed namesake and contemporary John Edwards, accused Whitby of promoting Socinianism and Pelagianism.

Chapter 6 once again turns to christological controversy, this time in relation to Samuel Clarke’s subordinationist “Arian” Christology which denied the Son’s self-existence and which closely resembled the views of Episcopius and Courcelles. It then explores how the chief respondent to Clarke’s views, Daniel Waterland (master of Magdalene College, Cambridge), repudiated the position of Clarke and the Remonstrants, while maintaining the aseity of the Son as to his divine essence.

Fornecker’s thesis is encapsulated in Chapter 7, which unearths fascinating epistolary correspondence between the Arminian William Nicholls (prebendary of Chichester) and the Remonstrant Le Clerc, the latter of whom complained that Nicholls had in his Defensio Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1707) misrepresented the Remonstrants and denigrated them as heretics, to which Nicholls responded not only by citing from the representative Remonstrant Limborch’s own writings to disprove the charge of mischaracterization but also by citing Dutch Reformed divines in vindication of his negative judgment of the Remonstrants.

The great takeaway is that later Stuart and early Hanoverian Arminian conformity was not monolithic, and on key doctrines, such as the Trinity, Christology, original sin, and ecclesiology, many sided with their Reformed counterparts rather than with the Remonstrants. Masterfully navigating the intricacies of theological polemics, Fornecker’s penetrating investigation into once-eminent but since-forgotten English divines clearly demonstrates that to be an “Arminian” conformist did not necessarily entail alignment with “Episcopian” theology, nor did being “anti-Remonstrant” necessarily imply espousal of Reformed views on grace and predestination. This study is a landmark contribution to the yet under-researched but now much-better-understood field of post-Restoration Church of England theology, and future accounts of the Church’s theology in this period cannot afford to leave its findings unheeded.