Doctrinal Catholicity
The desire for doctrinal catholicity is especially evident in early modern English Protestantism. ThChurch of England’s 1571 Canons of Church Discipline expressly stated that preachers “shall take heede, that they teach nothing in their preaching . . . but that which is agreeable to the doctrine of the olde Testament, or the newe, and that which the catholicke fathers, and auncient Bishops have gathered out of that doctrine.”1
Notes
Michael Lynch, John Davenant’s Hypothetical Universalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 23