The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638
366
The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638
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Overview
Focusing on ascetic teachings and rites, which in their severity fostered the "precisianist strain" prevalent in Puritan thought and devotional practice, Bozeman traces the reactions of believers put under ever more meticulous demands. Sectarian theologies of ease and consolation soon formed in reaction to those demands, Bozeman argues, eventually giving rise to a "first wave" of antinomian revolt, including the American conflicts of 1636-1638. Antinomianism, based on the premise of salvation without strictness and duty, was not so much a radicalization of Puritan content as a backlash against the whole project of disciplinary religion. Its reconceptualization of self and responsibility would affect Anglo-American theology for decades to come.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807838983 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Omohundro Institute and UNC Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2012 |
| Series: | Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 366 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Precisianist Strain
Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638By Theodore Dwight Bozeman
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2004 The University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8078-2850-5
Chapter One
Disciplinary Themes in the English ReformationThe first decades of Elizabeth's reign were a polarizing time. Reflecting the temperate aims of the religious settlement of 1559, the outlook of, say, John Whitgift, Richard Field, or Richard Hooker was measurably less personal and exacting than that of the presbyterian militants who came to the fore in the 1570s and 1580s. Nowhere was the contrast sharper than in disciplinary issues. All defenders of the arrangements of 1559 emphasized law and moral reformation, but within a context of moderation and conformity. Favoring more and more the liturgical religion of the Book of Common Prayer, seeking quiet and collective consent to the authorized forms, they rebuffed calls for an apostolically reorganized and tightened church discipline. In their eyes, the presbyterian clamor for firmer regulation seemed a virtually Catharist extreme. Contrary to the spirit of the settlement, its advocates were driven by a sectarian will "to purge the earth of all manner evil."
A radical minority well to the left within the Puritan spectrum in their time, early English presbyterians were an importunate breed. This is evident most readily in their disciplinary proposals, but it is apparent too in many other ways, as in their growing revulsion against festivities and recreations of the older communal culture, practices more easily tolerated in Lutheran Germany or Scandinavia and in earlier Protestant England. In such patterns one finds an early expression of the drive toward harder regulation that evoked the epithets "puritan" and "precise." The objective of this study is to analyze this venture and provide a partial chart of its course and effects. Specifically, we trace it in the presbyterian propaganda, next through the Puritan practical theology and practice of piety of later Elizabethan and early Stuart times, and then into earliest New England. Finally, we view it in the mirror of its antinomian antithesis, which arose in the mid-1610s and became an insurrectionary movement in Massachusetts two decades later.
To understand the surge of moral demand that arose in mid-Elizabethan times and not only persisted but intensified after the presbyterian defeats of the 1580s, we first should attempt to estimate at least some of the forces that underlay it well into the following century. The matter is far too complex to permit a neatly causal account, let alone one that would connect English developments to similar cycles of disciplinary fervor in Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, the Palatinate, and elsewhere in the middle and later seventeenth century; but we can identify a number of probable influences. Socioeconomic changes and worries as well as the experience of resistance and persecution played a part and are addressed in Chapter 3. Chapters 1 and 2 sketch a background in religious history, a long arc of Protestant disciplinary emphasis traceable back to Henrician times. Aligned with patterns in Reformed Protestant lands, it was also in some respects distinctively English.
Initial Sources and Backgrounds
Presbyterian debts to the earlier English Reformation are sure but difficult to reckon. Thomas Cartwright and his associates cited Continental Reformed contemporaries like Theodore Beza or Franciscus Junius more readily than they did their pre-Marian forebears, yet they belonged to a national tradition that from the beginning had accented legal and ascetic elements of the faith. Although a small minority in the land, England's earliest Protestants had espoused a forthright solifidian-"faith alone"-belief and the pessimistic estimate of human nature that it presupposed. They therefore were evangelicals in the Reformation sense. Yet, if their theologies were solifidian, they were also disciplinary in fundamental intent. This can be shown by comparison with Martin Luther's teachings, many of which were "highly idiosyncratic and individual to Luther himself." In varying degrees, the English shared Luther's belief in unconditional pardon and his denial that personal exertions and merits are a hinge of human destiny; and, like him but to a more limited extent, they defined a humbler place for law and duty within the Christian life. Few, however, embraced with full force Luther's view that sola fides contradicts the native human sense of good and evil, his sometimes starkly drawn and dialectical distinctions between gospel and law, his relegation of the law's disciplinary purposes to a secondary category below its penitential function, his affirmation of a rare but real situational liberty to transcend positive law, his conception of Christian obedience as an unconstrained overflow, his softening of the traditional ascetic ideal, his conception of the Bible as a Trostbuch (book of consolation) and not a lawbook, his rejection of belief that Christ and Moses were lawgivers for Christians, his exclusion of the secular commonwealth from the realm of Christian renewal, or his dismissal of the covenantal and Deuteronomic theology of the Old Testament.
Since views like these seemed to dilute morality, they had limited appeal in the island kingdom. There the Reformation emerged in a period of deeply felt concern about social order. Memory of the widespread disruptions of the mid-fifteenth century remained vivid in the sixteenth. For generations after the cessation of hostilities, ruling classes who dreaded a reversion to anarchy were preoccupied with issues of social unity and obedience, and by the 1530s they were troubled as well by a changing economic pattern that increased poverty and social tension. The Reformation itself was destabilizing. Shaped and restrained by the king's religious conservatism and his scrupulous attention to the forms of legitimacy, it nonetheless entailed sweeping institutional and ideological changes that must have been anomic for many citizens. Throughout the body of religious legislation and admonition emanating from king and Parliament, and in much additional commentary by both clerical and secular leaders, advocacy of reformation was conditioned by a fear of disorder. The fear was reinforced by anti-Protestant rebellions in 1536 and 1549, which disrupted ordinary life in large regions of the country and posed alarming problems for both national and local government. By accentuating concerns about social discipline, these intertwined backgrounds helped to temper the charm of a pure solifidianism and to encourage correlation of "fayeth, dutie and obedience."
They also might have bolstered the appeal of ethically laden theological sources. Prominent English evangelicals affirmed continuities between their own movement and the Wycliffite-Lollard line of dissent and appear to have recognized-or acknowledged-no sharp break between Wyclif's or Lollard concepts of redemption and their own. The Wyclifite heritage might have served them more as a broadly congenial native antecedent than as a substantive influence upon their theory of redemption, but their unqualified praise for a tradition whose theory of redemption focused on law and obedience attests that their notions of "faith only" were less categoric than Luther's and less sharply sundered from the past.
Additional support for this conclusion appears when we turn to the most obvious inheritance of all: the Catholic heritage in all its cumulative weight. In England as in other Protestant lands, medieval patterns of thought persisted. The strongly ethical emphases of Robert Barnes, Myles Coverdale, John Hooper, and John Bale, for instance, echo their early monastic training. Catholic Christian humanism, not a monolithic doctrine, but a widely shared set of intellectual values, also greatly influenced the founding figures of the English Reformation. Most emerged from a humanistically flavored educational background, and their new, ardently contra-Catholic theologies all continued, albeit in differing ways and degrees, to reflect humanist concerns. Like Wyclif and the Lollards, humanists focused their theories of redemption, not upon guilt and insecurity, but upon moral weakness and corruption. They venerated patristic theology and drew without question upon the Fathers' construction of the gospel as a new law. Luther had drawn the line hard against such doctrine, but many English evangelicals took a strikingly different attitude. "Notes on Justification," gathered by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, placed Desiderius Erasmus, the foremost Christian humanist, among historic authorities who had excluded from justification "the merit and dignity of all works and virtues"; and George Joye stated outright that "Erasmus ... affirm[s] onely faith to iustifye." Others prepared editions of Catholic humanist texts, and a royal injunction of 1547 required that a translation of Erasmus's Paraphrases on the four Gospels and Acts be placed in every parish church; all clergy beneath the rank of bachelor of divinity were ordered to obtain and study a personal copy. Clearly the Reformation that English Protestants envisaged was one in which humanist writings and ideas, with little if any modification, held an honored place.
In other ways, too, Christian humanism crossed doctrinal boundaries between the old faith and the new and brought with it a moralizing flavor. The solifidian element in evangelical teaching was joined to, and inevitably qualified by, a zeal to recover primitive ways. Quod primum verum ("that which is first is true"), a basic premise of medieval Catholic reform movements (including Lollardy) and certainly of Christian humanism, remained structural to Protestant thinking. Evangelicals shared humanist beliefs that the apostolic order-"the first, original, and most perfect church of the apostles"-was normative for the Christian movement in all periods and places and that the early church and its theologians had remained faithful to the norm for some five centuries after Christ. Since the Christian movement thereafter had veered from the original, the Reformation must reinstate the "primitive church, and [the time] nigh therunto when the church was most purest" as the Christian movement's regulative guide. Finding a prescriptive model at the apostolic Scripture's core, and venting their ire as much upon inherited forms and practices lacking original warrant as upon fallacious theories of redemption, evangelicals further magnified legal demand.
Humanist literature and its summons ad fontes (to the ancient sources) also promoted direct and extensive reading of the patristic theologians and an appreciation of their heavily ethical and legal orientation. It was thus at least partly responsible for the evangelicals' frequently doubled appeal to "scriptures and of the ancient fathers." The theological impact of this linkage is registered most revealingly in the widespread (and wholly anachronistic) conviction that many of the Fathers propounded a doctrine of justification in a solifidian sense. This was a great point with Cranmer, who in his "Notes on Justification" as well as his Homily of Salvation prepared for the 1547 book of homilies, confidently marshaled citations from "divers ancient authors," including Augustine, Chrysostom, Jerome, Origen, and Ambrose, to prove their doctrine of justification "the same" as that of the apostle Paul. Likewise regarding the patristic era as a loyal extension of the Christian primordium, Coverdale and Joye found in Protestant teaching "the same article of justification ... maintained by the [patristic] doctors ... specially by St Augustine [but also by] Cyril, Ambrose, Origen, Hilary, ... [and] Athanasius, with other more." In stark contrast with Luther's view that the Fathers "one and all disregarded the supremely plain and clear teaching of Paul" on the subject of grace, these judgments further display the English tendency to merge solifidian belief with a strongly disciplinary conception of Christian existence.
If evangelicals nurtured a sense of positive continuity with Lollard, patristic, and humanist concepts of redemption, it is easier to understand why, long before the rise of Puritanism, they had come to identify by and large with the emergent Reformed branch of the Reformation. English theology at midcentury defies tidy labels, but it exhibited a far closer kinship with developments at Strasbourg, Zurich, and other Reformed centers than with those at Wittenberg. In this study the term "Reformed" calls attention to two specific and interrelated features of soteriological thought: a relatively conservative, "eminently ethical" understanding of individual redemption together with an emphasis upon organized ecclesiastical discipline and, second, inclusion of the civil community within the realm of religious and moral reformation.
Both tendencies are exemplified in the career and thought of Martin Bucer, leader of the Reformation in Strasbourg until he was forced from the city in 1549. Appointed then to the Regius chair of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, he took an active part in the intensified phase of the English Reformation under Edward VI (1549-1553). Both in Strasbourg and Cambridge Bucer exhibited the tendencies in Reformed thinking that proved congenial to the English. With particular dependence upon Augustine and Erasmus, he was more concerned with moral corruption than with the problem of an afflicted conscience and propounded "a strongly ethical conception of justification." Indeed, he explicitly "implicate[d] human moral action under the aegis of justification." He understood Scripture as law and was comfortable with phrases like "the law of Christ." With other reformers bred theologically in cities of the German Rhineland, he saw the course of individual redemption taking place within a larger, intensely corporate, Christian civil community duty-bound to obey the Lord's law under pain of temporal punishment. At Cambridge, he "crie[d] incessantly ... that [the English] should practice penitence, ... and constrain [them]selves by some sort of discipline" and outlined a program for national religious and moral reform in a book dedicated to the young king, De regno Christi.
Bucer's vision of reformation both meshed with and promoted a trend already well in evidence by the reign of Edward VI. The great published collection of letters from the Zurich archives relative to the English Reformation reveals an extensive network of associations with Reformed leaders. Protestants of advanced views who fled to the Continent in the wake of the conservative Six Articles Act of 1539 tended to establish Reformed associations, and they returned after Henry's death to participate in the Edwardian reformation as "radical Protestants, principally of Zwinglian persuasion"; and the form of worship and church polity of the "Strangers' Churches" that emerged in London in the early 1550s, and were an element of Cranmer's strategy for hastening reform of the English church, were drawn largely from the models of Strasbourg, Zurich, and Geneva.
Continues...
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What People are Saying About This
A rigorous and highly readable account. . . . A masterful exposition of Puritan religious history.—The Journal of Religion
[A] definitive exposition of the movement's biblical restoration. . . . A brilliant study. . . . Add[s] substantially to scholars' comprehension of the early seventeenth-century transatlantic Puritan movement.—William and Mary Quarterly
This is a work of mature reflection based on a thoughtful and careful reading of many of the principal clerical sources.—American Historical Review
Bozeman's book is a mature work of scholarship that fulfills the potential of a previous seminal article and complements his earlier work.—Historical Journal
[Bozeman's] consideration of the rise of English pietism significantly deepens our understanding of that school of Puritanism.—Seventeenth Century News
Dwight Bozeman elaborates English Protestant devotional routine. . . . He argues forcefully for the various movements in England and New England termed 'antinomianism' to be seen as sustained protests against and deliberate alternatives to this great and defining Puritan achievement in practical divinity.—Stephen Foster, Northern Illinois University
Bozeman skillfully traces the origins of disciplinary exactitude as a hallmark of Puritanism. . . . By demonstrating how the Antinomian Controversy in Massachusetts derived from longstanding tensions among the godly in England, while feeding off unique local circumstances, he adds a new dimension to our understanding of Puritanism in its transatlantic context.—Louise A. Breen, Kansas State University
This book sets the rise of antinomianism in old and New England in the context of a full-scale reinterpretation of Puritanism from the 1570s to the 1640s. The range of reading is remarkably wide, the analysis and argument both precise and broad. The book contains many vignettes of startling insight. . . . A must-read for scholars and students of Puritanism on both sides of the Atlantic." —Peter Lake, Princeton University