Introduction

The very essence of Lancelot Andrewes's awareness of the universal implications of doctrine was that God had entered and taken to Himself the realities of the world, including the affairs of Caesar, in the Incarnation. The failure here is to grasp the insistence by Andrewes that God is concerned with the physical, the corporeal, the 'secular', society and state, as much as with the spiritual and 'doctrinal'. The order of the Triune God is revealed in the Incarnation. This is the prime economy of God towards and in His creation. In the relation between the Incarnation and the Eternal economy or order of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit in their unity and dispensation of office, the Laudians speak of the work of Father, Son and Holy Spirit towards creation, and penetrate back through the order of all time and things focused on the Incarnation, to the eternal relationships of the Trinity.