True Church, National Church, Minority Church

The Church of Ireland in the later seventeenth century faced many challenges. After two decades of war and effective suppression, the church in 1660 had to reestablish itself as the national church of the kingdom of Ireland in the face of opposition from both Catholics and Dissenters, who together made up nearly ninety percent of the island's population. While recent scholarship has illuminated Irish protestantism as a social group during this period, the theology of the established church remains unexamined in its historical context. This article considers the theological arguments used by members of the church hierarchy in sermons and tracts written between 1660 and 1689 as they argued that the Church of Ireland was both a true apostolic church and best suited for the security and salvation of the people of Ireland. Attention to these concerns shows that the social and political realities of being a minority church compelled Irish churchmen to focus on basic arguments for an episcopal national establishment. It suggests that this focus on first principles allowed the church a certain amount of ecclesiological flexibility that helped it survive later turbulence such as the non-jurors controversy of 1689-1690 fairly intact

Church History · Ecclesiology · English Reformation · Irish · Political science · Politics · Population · Protestantism · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Classics · Demography · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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

  Simon Lewis, Simon G Lewis•The Journal of Religion•2023

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• The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People’

  Open Access•Kathleen M Noonan•The Historical Journal•1998

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• Crises of Identity Among Irish Protestants 1641-1685

  Toby Barnard, T C Barnard•Past & Present•1990

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