The Crisis of British Protestantism

The Westminster Assembly remains an important landmark in the development of anglophone Protestantism, but historians approach it with trepidation. In common with a great many Church councils before and since, the Assembly was a lumbering monolith. It involved vast numbers of leading churchmen for almost a decade between 1643 and 1652. The Assembly’s remit was deceptively simple: to reform the Church of England to a greater Reformed purity. Its discussions, however, became entangled with the escalating conflict between Charles I, his Parliament and the ongoing efforts of the Scottish Covenanters to secure their own religious settlement. The present book by Hunter Powell owes much of its detail to the five volumes of papers transcribed and recently published by Chad Van Dixhoorn which open up the Assembly’s internal debates for the first time. While not the most approachable of recent monographs, this detailed narrative rewards the intrepid reader. Powell’s main aim is to show how labelling those present at the Assembly as either ‘independents’ (who wanted local congregations to hold church power) or ‘presbyterians’ (who wished to replace bishops with church courts) is misleading. The traditional narrative treats these two groups as distinct entities with opposing political manifestos—with the presbyterian group coming under the strong influence of commissioners sent from Scotland and the independent group being pushed by those in Parliament to demand stronger sanctions against Charles I. Powell attacks those who present a static ‘presbyterian versus independent’ narrative and instead prefers to see a ‘high amount a variegation’ between them (p. 242)

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