Weak Christians, backsliders, and carnal gospelers: Assurance of salvation and the pastoral origins of puritan practical divinity in the 1580s

Church History

Volumn 70, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 462-481

  Winship, Michael P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 58449099376     PISSN: 00096407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3654498     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. Rogers, Seven Treatises (London, 1603), 572.
2. For the chronology of writing Seven Treatises see Knappen, Two Elizabethan Diaries, 69, 71,
3. See Dewey D. Wallace Jr., Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 54.
4. and John Coffey, Politics, Theology and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 117-22. This scholarship sometimes suggests that the shift to introspection was a result of the pastoral need to offer comfort to anxious believers, as the example of Rogers above suggests. The early literature of puritan practical divinity certainly supports this claim, but it also suggests a far broader web of motivation.
5. George Yule, "Theological Developments in Elizabethan Puritanism," Journal of Religious History 1 (1960): 16-25,
6. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, 2d ed. (New York: Shocken Books, 1967), 501-6.
7. The argument is widely taken as a given. For examples of its deployment see Patrick Collinson, "Towards a Broader Understanding of the Early Dissenting Tradition," in The Dissenting Tradition, ed. C. Robert Cole (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 12, 15,
8. Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 202-3;
9. W. J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough 1558-1610 (Northampton: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1979), 66-67, 144-45. The argument is a high elaboration of a contemporary attack on puritan Sabbatarianism.
10. See the preface to Thomas Rogers, The Faith, Doctrine, and Religion . 39 Articles (Cambridge, 1607), par. 20.
11. John More, A bryefe and necessary Catechisme (London, 1577) sig. Biir.
12. On this very influential catechism see Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon, 1983), 298.
13. John Foxe, A Sermon of Christ crucified, preached at Paules Crosse the Friday before Easter, commonly called Goodfryday (London, 1570), sig. Siiiv;
14. John Knewstub, Lectures of John Knewstub upon the twentieth Chapter of Exodues, and certeine other places of Scripture (1577), 39;
15. Richard Greenham, The Workes (London, 1605), 53;
16. Knewstub, Lectures, 39.
17. See also Ian Green, The Christian's ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530-1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 388-90.
18. Rogers, Seven Treatises, 201.
19. Knewstub, Lectures, 17, 44, sig. Par. ii v, P Pr-v.
20. George Gifford, Foure sermons: upon the seven chiefe vertues of faith (London, 1582), sig. A5 i v.
21. J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984);
22. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993);
23. Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
24. Bartimeus Andrews, Certaine Verie worthie, godly and profitable Sermons, upon the fifth Chapter of the Songs of Solomon (London, 1583), 52-53;
25. Perkins, Workes, 1: 425.
26. Haigh, English Reformations, 279-81, has a convenient summary of these disruptions.
27. Andrewes, Lectures, 194-95;
28. B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 85. For lay separatist activity in Essex in the 1580s,
29. see Collinson, Godly People, 12-13.
30. See also Kenneth L. Parker and Eric J. Carlson, "Practical Divinity": The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1988).
31. Greenham, Workes, 264, 267-68;
32. Thomas Sparke, A Short Treatise, very comfortable for all those Christians that be troubled and diquieted in thyr consciences with the sight of their owne infirmities (London, 1580), sig. AV v-AV ir, BViiir, Biir;
33. John Udall, Amendment of Life (London, 1584), sig. Cii v-r.
34. For an introduction to the extensive scholarly literature on Perkins, see H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 288-313;
35. Ian Breward, ed., The Works of William Perkins (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay, 1970), 80-99;
36. Richard A. Muller, "Perkins' A Golden Chaine: Predestinarian System or Schematized Ordo Salutis?" Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978): 69-81;
37. R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 51-76;
38. Richard A. Muller, Christ and the Decrees: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham: Labyrinth, 1986), chap. 6;
39. Michael McGiffert, "The Perkinsian Moment of Federal Theology," Calvin Theological Journal 29 (1994): 117-48.
40. Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 181, 192.
41. On the role of the English universities in forging puritan policies, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 122ff.
42. Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 281-84.
43. See, for example, notes of Chaderton sermons from 1590-91 that closely parallel Perkins's contemporaneous writings in Lake, Moderate Puritans, 158-59.
44. Michael A. Eaton, Baptism with the Spirit: The Teaching of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1989), chap. 1;
45. John Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and to the Thessalonians, trans. Ross Mackenzie (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1973), 167.
46. The unconscious hypocrite was a structural necessity in Reformed doctrine, needed for explaining the gap between theoretical perseverance of the saints and the reality of backsliding. It can be found roughly as Perkins described it, albeit not in such an elaborated fashion, in continental theologians on whom Perkins built, such as Calvin, Beza and Ursinus. For the terrifying potential in Calvin's scattered remarks on unconscious hypocrites see David Foxgrover, "'Temporary Faith' and the Certainty of Salvation," Calvin Theological Journal 15 (1980): 220-32.
47. Zacharius Ursinus, The Summe of Christian Religion (Oxford, 1587), 287.
48. Andrews, Certaine . Sermons, 260;
49. George Gifford, A Sermon on the Parable of the Sower (London, 1582), sig. Bv iiir.
50. Rogers, Seven Treatises, 45, 47;
51. Greenham, Workes, 266;
52. Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (London, 1601), 259.
53. As a starting point to the vast literature on covenant theology see Michael McGiffert, "Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Theology in Elizabethan Puritanism," Harvard Theological Review 75 (1982): 463-502;
54. William K. B. Stoever, "A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven": Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1978);
55. John Von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta: Scholars, 1986);
56. See Giles Firmin, The Real Christian, or a Treatise of Effectual Calling (London, 1670), sig. Cv,
57. For discussions of the "direct" and "reflex" acts of faith by which ministers explained the separation of faith and assurance see Stoever, "Faire and Easie," 132-37;
58. Paul S. Seaver, Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-century London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 18;
59. Tom Webster, "Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality," The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 33-56;
60. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 51-52;
61. Owen D. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 11.
62. McGiffert, God's Plot, 45.
63. John Crandon, Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorized and Authorized (London, 1654), sig. C2r-v.
64. Peter Lake, "Robert Some and the Ambiguities of Moderation," Archiv für Reformationsgeschicte 71 (1980): 259-60. On the changing role of ministers in the Reformation,
65. see E. Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 148-50, 390-96;
66. Lewis Baylie, The Practise of Pietie (London, 1613);
67. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 122-23.
68. Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990);
69. Patrick Collinson, "A Comment on Eamon Duffy's Neale Lecture and the Colloquium," in England's Long Reformation: 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (London: UCL Press, 1998), 73.
70. Richard Hooker, A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certaintie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5: 69-82;
71. Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988).