Archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland James Ussher (1581–1656) cuts a decidedly unusual figure in the turbulent decades of the mid-seventeenth century in Britain and Ireland. At times of polarization, the natural tendency is to find the camp most suited to your general disposition, and once you have done this you will find a general set of principles to which you set your mind, and sometimes your body, to defend. During the Civil Wars a crude demarcation would be Laudian, Arminian, and Royalist on one side, and Calvinist and Parliamentarian on the other. So where do we fit Ussher into this dichotomy? Here we have an archbishop who writes a tract called the Eirenicon, just as England is gearing up toward all-out war, in which he claims that the episcopacy is not a fundamental feature of a true church and, furthermore, that as an institution it could sit comfortably next to a system of elders. In another work entitled The Power of the Prince we find one of the most ardent defenses of divine-right monarchy ever committed to paper, and yet after Cromwell’s victory not only did he remain in England largely unmolested, but he was in fact granted a rather elaborate state funeral when he died in 1656. He was sometimes lionized by one side as the author of the Westminster Confession by virtue of the use it made of his Irish Articles of 1615, and equally esteemed by the other as the scholar who produced, via the letters of Saint Ignatius, prima facie proof that bishops existed in the early church. There were even, according to some Catholics, manuscripts in the Vatican Library that proved that the primate converted to Rome. After his death, various biographies quickly appeared from authors with different theological agendas, all claiming their subject was one of their own. All this was possible for two reasons: first, Ussher was a highly respected scholar and churchman; and, second, he seems to have had an almost unique ability to give to his admirers something from which they could construct their own version of his theology.

All this makes the task of an Ussher scholar very interesting, but also rather complicated. With this volume Richard Snoddy has presented us with something that represents the theological equivalent of unravelling the Gordian knot. The author rightly identifies the central question of Ussher’s soteriology as hinging on whether atonement is general or limited. For an answer, Snoddy embarks on a sedulous examination of polemical, devotional, and catechetical works, and, above all, manuscript collections of sermons. With regard to the latter, the author recognizes the inherent risk of assuming that words written by an auditor are the same as those spoken by the orator, yet he makes an excellent case for their use and provides an object lesson in how to use such primary sources. The discussions and the thesis in this volume are highly technical and not for the reader uninitiated in the language and thinking of the authors who were so exercised by the fraught technicalities of salvation at this time in history. However, Snoddy is an expert guide. In particular, this reviewer is immensely grateful for his personal correction of my misunderstanding over decretal theology in a book I wrote about Ussher some years ago. His thesis is lucidly presented and altogether convincing. Ussher, he tells us, evolved theologically in two ways. In his early years he is, as one might expect of a product of Trinity College Dublin, a high Calvinist. However, by 1618 he had become a hypothetical universalist, though he stipulated the necessity of God’s saving grace. In addition, he was in later life an experimental predestinarian; in this respect, the theological understandings of Perkins and Beza are crucial to Ussher’s development.

This is a well-written and well-constructed book. It has clearly been a labor of love for the author, and his sense of engagement with his subject is palpable. Ussher is a highly important theologian, and as we advance toward a better grasp of what it was that he actually stood for, we are learning more about the religion of his turbulent century. Snoddy has done much to advance our progress in this direction.