![]() While this book will be most interesting to scholars of the 16th century Reformation, the issues are important to all Christians who want to root their practice in the past, or to call on an unbroken heritage of reformation. How much authority did a magistrate have? How unified should the national church be? What did pure reformation look like? What liturgical and theological items were adiaphora, or "things indifferent"? These questions were there from the very beginning and weren't brought into play by the development of Puritanism under Elizabeth. More specifically, he argues that the conflicts between conforming and sectarian puritans and the Anglican church had roots in the earliest phases of the Reformation. ![]() ![]() Gunther demonstrates how futile this exercise is likely to be, if the purpose is to show that some unified vision of reformed English Protestantism ever existed. Christians in general, Protestants in particular, and perhaps those Protestants especially with an English puritan strain in their past, love to call on Reformation history to explain and justify their theological and liturgical practice.
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