ABSTRACT
As we have seen, adiaphora emerged in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as an ethical category that was essential to the religious discourse that sought to define the English Church’s orthodoxy. Adiaphora was a theoretical resource for orthodox writers who were attempting to articulate the English Church’s reformed position, differentiating it both from the rock of infallibility that the authority of the Catholic Church founded itself upon and the sand of the more radical skepticism used by reformers to justify the autonomy of the individual conscience. On the eve of the Civil War, England witnessed a debate over religious reform perhaps unparalleled since the effects of the Reformation had redrawn the channels and boundaries of religious authority. In the climate of increasing political and religious tensions as the personal rule of Charles I came to a close, the search for religious truth once again began to call into question the ideal of a national religion unified by doctrine and practice with a new complexity and intensity. A new source of infallibility emerged as the claims of the Laudian bishops alongside the monarch to an unrestricted jurisdiction based on divine right crowded in on the privilege of Parliament and the moral authority of the individual conscience. To varying degrees, members of Parliament, ministers of every religious faction, and pamphleteers weighed the consequences of restructuring the Church in order to diminish the bishops’ influence upon the monarch, civil affairs, and religious doctrine and practice.
