Hi Drew –
Nice to have time to chat again. 
The odd thing about the history site that I referred you to is that when I first accessed it on 24 November 2011 it contained both the text of ‘An Ordinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies’, and contextual information (presumably written by C.H. Firth, R.S. Rait, the 1911 editors ‘Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660’). The contextual stuff seems to have been withdrawn and I’m sorry for any confusion. Fortunately I copied it when I first looked at the site.
It says that -
**In England the Protestants, in drawing up their Forty-two Articles of Religion, in 1552, condemned Universalism. Ten years later, when the convocation revised the doctrines of the Church, the number of articles was reduced to thirty-nine, omitting, among others, the one condemning Universalism. Since that time Universalism has not been a forbidden doctrine in the Church of England… **
So this is what I meant by confirmation of the ‘abrogation hypothesis’ (and by the way I’ve found a number of examples of the ‘abrogation hypothesis’ as expressed by Anglican clergymen since the seventeenth century; I’ll post them just before Christmas to cheer you).
Firth and Rait go on to explain that
The Presbyterian Parliament of 1648, which temporarily overthrew Episcopacy, passed a law against all heresies (that is, the Ordinance of May 1648), punishing the persistent holders of some with death, and of others with imprisonment. “That all men shall be saved” was among the heresies punishable in the latter manner. This law was not long operative, for the Independents, headed by Cromwell, soon overthrew the law-makers. Gerard Willstanley published a work in advocacy of Universalism only a few days after the passage of the law, which was soon followed by similar works from his pen. William Earbury fearlessly preached Universalism. Richard Coppin was active in its advocacy, publishing largely in its exposition and defense, and was several times tried for his offence.
So the context here is the Rump Parliament after the overthrow of Charles I in the Civil War/English Revolution. Charles I had been a sort of High Church Anglican of the Armenian tendency and one of the many causes of the Civil War was his attempt to impose the letter of the 39 Articles on Calvinist Anglicans, rather than being content to allow them to conform to the spirit of the Articles (of course, part of his concern in doing this was to limit their power).The Rump Parliament was composed of powerful Calvinists. What is interesting in this source is the evidence that the Rump felt the need to forbid the teaching of Universalism, whereas the Anglican Church had not done so – it shows that the Calvinists had a far greater concern to police/control the beliefs of the common people than the Anglican Divines of the Elizabethan Settlement; and I think in their need to proscribe universalism they were more in line with the policy of the other continental state/magisterial Protestant Churches (see following section). However, this attempt at censorship was short lived. As stated above Cromwell, the head of the Army, backed the Independents, a substantial force in the Army, to overthrow the law in the cause of Christian Liberty (the ‘Independents’ is the name for those parties and sects who believed that religion should not be controlled by the state, but should be a matter of voluntary association by Believers – their beliefs were in some ways parallel to those of the continental Anabaptists but not all were directly influenced by continental Anabaptism). This gave a number of Universalists the liberty to express their faith during the period of the Commonwealth. This experiment with religious liberty – way in advance of Anglican toleration - was exceptional at the time.
D.P. Walker and ‘The Decline of Hell’
I’ve just read D.P. Walker’s The Decline of Hell,(University of Chicago Press, 1964). This is the classic authority on changing views of hell in the seventeenth century (with a nod to the sixteenth century); I have found it enormously useful and relevant to our discussion. I think I need to outline the scope of this for you –
Walker argues that the beginnings of the decline in the belief in Hell in the seventeenth century, were part of a gradual and glacially slow revolution in sentiment (some of which can be seen in embryonic form in the sixteenth century – but only in a marginal and exceptional way – and much of which only becomes clear in the late nineteenth century). He gives several examples of this ‘shift’ but most important for our purposes are -
• A dawning awareness that the savage punishments formerly meted out to criminals (including traitors and heretics), and to the insane and the young (different in degree if not in kind from the punishments of criminals) were not in keeping with Christian charity.
• A gradual acceptance of religious tolerance and pluralism by Church and Society. Religious persecution had formerly been justified on grounds of the need to protect believers from the spread of false teaching and in this way to prevent their corruption and damnation. However, after a century of savage religious wars, sectarian violence, and persecution and with the idea of toleration becoming increasingly attractive, believers of all sects and parties became less happy to consign those who did not share their religious views to the flames and/or to damnation, even in imagination.
Certainly this shift has influenced the Anglican Church – but not explicitly at first. We need to remember that Anglicanism is a form of Magisterial Protestantism – its original purpose was to replace the Catholic Church’s monopoly of religion with the State’s monopoly of (Protestant) religion enforced by the magistrates. As it was developed in the Elizabethan Settlement it was far more tolerant than most contemporary continental forms of Magisterial Protestantism. However, there were limits to tolerance and conformity was enforced by a network of spies, the torture chamber, and by persecution on the pretext of preventing schism and anarchy in the State. However, the seventeenth century sees a shift in Anglicanism as it gradually comes to operate in a more pluralistic framework.
He argues compellingly that for any Magisterial Protestant church, allowing universalism would have been madness in the sixteenth century and for much of the seventeenth. He gives multiple examples from writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestantism to assert that the authorities of Magisterial Protestantism(s) believed that if the common people stopped believing in the threat of Hell – either through adopting annihilationism or UR -there would be nothing to prevent them succumbing to all manner of wickedness and sedition. Civil society would crumble into anarchy and perdition.
He also shows that by the end of the seventeenth century some Anglican churchmen and scholars – especially those associated with the Cambridge Platonist movement –began to argue for universalism. However, their writings were published posthumously and/or pseudonymously – for fear of the personal consequences, and/or for fear of encouraging wickedness in the common people. Indeed these authors went to great length to specify the appalling and prolonged physical suffering awaiting the damned – even if this fate was not everlasting
Finally , he argues that the sects in seventeenth century England that openly preached universalism did so precisely because they believed that this world was passing away and that Christ was about to come and reign with his Saints. Therefore they were not concerned with questions of maintaining the civil order. Although these sects were short-lived and ‘eccentric’ – not least because millenarians with mass appeal are usually rather vindictive in their expectations - Walker argues that they had a big influence on the ‘Decline of Hell’.
Back to the Elizabethans
In the light of Walker’s thesis, I would suggest that when the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were established, if there were any men with UR sympathies in the Convocation which formulated them these would have been Christian Humanist scholars with a knowledge of Patristic literature and, therefore, of Origen and/or knowledge of the Greek New Testament and the ambiguous meaning of terms such as ‘aionos’. (Such men may also have thought that ‘perish everlastingly’ in the Athanasian Creed means ‘age long perishing’ in the original Greek). I understand that Matthew Parker was indeed a Humanist scholar with knowledge of Erasmus’ edition of the Greek New Testament and, unusually for an English Reformers, a scholar of Patristic literature; so he fits the bill. If secret Universalist sympathies were behind the abrogation of the 42nd Article the intention behind this may have been to secretly include any clergy who also had secret Universalistic sympathies. However, it would not have been to allow the teaching of Universalism to the laity. This may be a wild idea, but it is worth thinking about further before dismissing.
Regarding the ambiguous meaning of ‘aionos’ in New Testament Greek, D.P. Walker that Thomas Burnett (c.1635–1715), an Anglican Theologian connected with the Cambridge Platonists and ‘others’ – presumably other associates of the Cambridge Platonists - argued ‘with some success, that the word used for eternal in Matthew XXV and other crucial texts, need not mean more than age-long…”(‘Decline of Hell’, p.7). Burnett is writing more the a hundred years after the Convocation met to establish the39 Articles – but this does not mean that the issue was unknown earlier.
Final note for further consideration
Even if the evidence for secret Origenism in the Elizabethan Church hierarchy proves to be thin, I still think that the abrogation of the 42nd article by a Magisterial Protestant Church at this time seems nothing short of miraculous for reasons given above and others. It seems mind blowing considering the wildly exaggerated fear of the Anabaptists in Elizabethan England, who suffered severe state persecution (two were burnt as heretics even though the law for the burning of heretics had been repealed). The Anabaptists, like the later English Independents, taught (and still teach) that Church membership should be voluntary for believers and no business of state coercion – a seditious doctrine to Magisterial Protestants. At this time they were greatly feared – largely, and unfairly, because of the association of all Anabaptists with those who notoriously took control of Munster from 1553 – 1555. They also had a reputation –probably undeserved – for teaching Universal salvation; and this makes the suppression of the 42nd article curious because it could easily have been construed as condoning the Anabaptists (and this was certainly not the intention).
Also, to my knowledge, all of the Confessional documents for continental Magisterial Churches at this time contain clauses explicitly affirming eternal damnation. For example Article 17 of the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg (1530) affirms that ‘in the consummation of the world (at the last day), Christ shall appear to judge, and shall raise up all the dead, and shall give unto the godly and elect eternal life and everlasting joys; but ungodly men and the devils shall he condemn unto endless torments’. The Confession then goes on to explicitly ‘condemn the Anabaptists who think that to condemned men and the devils shall be an end of torments’. It seems very odd indeed that the Elizabethan Church should risk offending Lutherans by not explicitly condemning Universalism associated with Anabaptism when Article 29 of the Book of Common Prayer’s 39 Articles– ‘Of the Wicked Which Eat Not The Body of Christ’ –was at first omitted from the Prayer Book, very probably to ease diplomatic negotiations with the Lutheran Princes of Germany (because the Lutheran sacramental teaching states that both the good and the wicked do indeed receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the sacramental elements, the former to their benefit, the latter to their condemnation). The omission may well have been due to the personal intervention of the Queen, and the Article was not restored until 1571.This is all very curious, and food for thought for another time).
Thanks for your patience - that’s rathe ra lot of information I’ve spewed out…
All very good wishes
Dick
–