Occasional Conformity: The Congregationalism Of Henry Jacob And John Owen

By Michael G. Brown

Michael G. Brown, M.A., M.Div., is Pastor of Christ United Reformed Church, Santee, CA. This article points to some foundational trajectories in Reformed Baptist confessional ecclesiology. Henry Jacob is important as the first minister of the ‘Mother Church’ of the Particular Baptists, the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church. His writings demonstrate the fundamental principles worked out in that church and provide hints for their further development when the Particular Baptists emerged in the 1630s. One hardly needs mention the enormous importance of John Owen. His contribution to our own ecclesiological identity is almost self-evident. I commend this work to your study. Prof. James Renihan.

In recent decades, interest in the life and theology of John Owen (1616-83) has increased substantially. Although he is not as well known as the sixteenth-century Reformer John Calvin (1509-64) or the eighteenth-century Protestant thinker Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), he has become the subject of a growing number of published studies and academic dissertations.[1] This is fitting, given the fact that Owen was one of the most significant theological figures in England during the Seventeenth Century. As Carl Trueman has put it, “In his own day he was chaplain to Cromwell, preacher to Parliament, Chancellor of Oxford University, leading light of the Independents, and the pre-eminent Puritan theologian. By any standard one of the most influential men of his generation.”[2]

One area of Owen’s theology that needs further research, however, is his ecclesiology. Few studies are devoted to it.[3] That Owen was a Congregationalist in polity is widely known today, as well as the fact that he arrived at this conviction largely through reading The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644) by John Cotton (1584-1652). Yet, little has been done to recognize the roots of Owen’s Congregationalism in the thought of Henry Jacob (1563-1624). The purpose of this article, therefore, is to pursue the question of how Jacob’s Congregationalism developed in England during the Seventeenth Century. It’s thesis is that the ecclesiological polity of Owen ultimately had its roots in the thought of Henry Jacob. In order to substantiate this thesis, we will examine the Congregationalism of these two thinkers.

The Congregationalism Of Henry Jacob

Drawing upon the study of B. R. White, Michael Watts shows that English Nonconformity springs from two different theological sources and flows in two distinct currents.[4] The first, which he calls “radical,” finds its roots in the Lollards of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and the Anabaptists of the Sixteenth Century. The second, which he calls “Calvinistic,” comes from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Puritans within the Established Church. Watts makes the case that the Independents find their roots in the second source, not the first, having descended from Henry Jacob and that later they formed into two main camps, the Non-separating Congregationalists and the Separatist Independents.[5] Who then was Henry Jacob and what were his views concerning the church?

Born the son of a yeoman in the county of Kent in 1563, Jacob was educated at St. Mary’s Hall, Oxford, graduating BA in 1583 and MA in 1586.[6] He became a precentor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was later appointed vicar of Cheriton. Jacob was a staunch Puritan and active in efforts to reform the Church of England, as evidenced by his role in organizing the 1603 Millenary Petition to King James I (1566-1625), which was an attempt to persuade the new King to bring further reformation to the established church particularly in the areas of worship and ecclesiastical discipline.[7] Jacob, however, did not believe that the work of reformation called for separation. He had, as Michael Watts puts it, “a Puritan’s horror of Separatism.”[8] Separatism, or “Brownism” as it is sometimes called, so named for one of its founding leaders, Robert Browne (c.1550-1633), was a movement of extreme Protestants during the reigns of Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts who chose to separate themselves from the Church of England out of conviction that it was a false church.[9] Unlike Puritans of the same era who sought to reform the Church of England from within, the Separatists opted to meet in secret conventicles and later formed congregations of “gathered” believers, adopting a form of church government that put all ecclesiastical power and discipline in the hands of a local congregation rather than a higher (or broader) assembly. While Jacob had, as we shall see, a Congregationalist ecclesiology, his Congregationalism was rooted, as Stephen Brachlow has argued, “in the puritan, not the separatist tradition.”[10]

From early on, Jacob displayed a particular distaste for Separatism. Between 1596 and 1599, Jacob was engaged in a lively debate with the Separatist Francis Johnson (1563-1618) concerning the validity of Separatism. In 1595, Johnson, at one time a pastor of a Separatist church in Holland, corresponded with Jacob regarding the issue of Separatism in which he argued that the Church of England was a false church and her members therefore could not be “accounted true Christians.”[11] Jacob in turn responded and in 1599 this correspondence was published in Jacob’s work, A Defence of the Churches and Ministery of Englande, which bore the subtitle, Written in two Treatises, against the Reasons and Objections of Maister FRANCIS IOHNSON, and others of the Separation commonly called BROWNISTS. In it, Jacob argued that matters of church polity are adiaphora and not prescribed by Scripture. Whereas doctrines such as “the doctrine of God, his Nature, his Persons, his Properties, of the Messias Christ Iesus, of Iustification, of Sanctification, of the Resurrection, &c.,” are essential to confess for the “foundation of saving faith,” matters of church order may vary:

[O]utward orders in the Church…they be not simply of the foundation, neither written, nor certen, perpetuall, but at the arbitrarie appointment of the Church and Magistrate, and yet to be Christ’s owne neverthelesse, who hath left this libertie for the Church to vse; Thus we hold and thus we practice, and wee are perswaded no Scripture to be against all this, but rather for it.[12]

In other words, according to Jacob, Johnson failed to understand the qualitatively different soteriological value between essential Christian doctrine (which Scripture prescribes) and particular forms of church government (which Scripture does not).[13] For Jacob, the Church of England was not a false church, only a corrupt church in need of reformation.

Over the next few years, however, Jacob shifted somewhat in his thinking. As Watts summarizes, “some of Johnson’s arguments left their mark on him and the position Jacob finally arrived at was midway between that of the Separatists and of the traditional Puritans.”[14] Although, as Brachlow suggests, this shift may have more to do with the events surrounding the enthronement of James I, namely, the failure of the Millenary Petition in 1603 and (from a Puritan perspective) the Hampton Court Conference the following year.[15] In 1604, Jacob published a book titled, Reasons taken out of God’s Word and the best human testimonies proving a necessitie of reforming our Church in England, in which he put forth the following eight reasons for reforming the established church: First, the Second Commandment requires that everything in the church, including its form of government, be regulated by Scripture alone.[16] This meant that Congregationalism is the biblically prescribed form of church government since the New Testament knows nothing of a national, provincial, or diocesan church, “only a Particular ordinary constant Congregation of Christians in Christes Testament is appointed and reckoned to be a visible Church.”[17] Second, a true, visible church has the divine right to govern itself in ecclesiastical matters.[18] This included the right of such “ordinarie particular Congregations” to choose their own officers and “excommunicate offenders” in the presence of its gathered members.[19] Third, that church officers must, according to Scripture, have membership in a true local church.[20] This implied that bishops who “rule Ecclesiastically, som 300 som 400 proper and distinct Visible Churches…are all contrarie to God’s word, and ought necessarilie to be reformed.”[21] Fourth, a pastor should oversee one gathered congregation, not several.[22] Fifth, pastors have equal authority and cannot rule over each other.[23] Sixth, a diocese has no authority to ordain ministers, for such authority has been delegated by Christ to the officers in the local gathered church.[24] “That Church which is to have the Minister ought to bee present and to shew a liking and consent in their Minister’s Calling.”[25] Seventh, proper church discipline in each true visible church is a necessary part of the ordinary means of salvation.[26] Eighth, by necessary consequence, the Episcopacy denies Christ to be the only Prophet, Priest, and King of his church.[27]

After providing these eight reasons in his argument, Jacob made three assertions. First, he made an historical case for Congregationalism by claiming that for the first two centuries after the Ascension it was the only polity present in the church. Episcopalianism did not come into being until at least A.D. 200.[28] Second, he argued for a clear distinction between the extraordinary offices of apostle, prophet, and evangelist, and the ordinary office of pastor.[29] Third, he maintained that since Congregationalism is the biblically prescribed polity, it cannot be changed by men and it alone is lawful.[30] These reasons and assertions reveal that Jacob clearly shifted from his previous position in 1599, in which he argued that church government was merely adiaphora.

Nevertheless, Jacob’s “new” position did not drive him to a full Separatist position. He insisted that the following three conclusions were likewise true:

1. Every particular ordinarie Congregation of faithfull people in England is a true & proper Visible Church.
2. Everie such Congregation heere and everiewhere is indued with power immediately from Christ to governe itself Ecclesisticalie or spiritullie.
3. Everie true and proper Visible Church everie where is but one ordinarie or constant Congregation only.[31]

In other words, a true visible church could still exist within the Church of England and, therefore, a “gathered” congregation should not refuse communion with the parish churches of England.

Jacob’s position was a middle way between Separatism and conforming Puritanism. This has earned him many titles by historians: “Independent Puritan,”[32] “non-separatist Congregationalist,”[33] and “semi-Separatist.”[34] Watts, however, makes the insightful observation that the first two of these terms are “anachronistic when applied to the early seventeenth century.”

As for the term “semi-Separatist,” Watts contends that “it would have been vigorously repudiated by Jacob himself.”

In organizing a congregation outside the established church while continuing to communicate with those who remained within, Jacob was practicing a form of occasional conformity which would not have deprived him of the title of Dissenter in the later seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but at the time he lived his position was one which neither himself nor those who were indisputably Separatists would recognize as one of separation. The most appropriate term to use of Jacob’s views on church government is the one which contemporaries themselves used, the eponymous term ‘Jacobite.’[35]

This “occasional conformity” practiced by Jacob, however, did not make things easy for him. Reasons taken out of God’s Word cost him eight months in prison. Likewise, fellow Jacobites William Bradshaw (1571-1618), Paul Baynes (1573-1617), Robert Parker (c.1564-1614), and William Ames (1576-1633) also suffered for their “occasional conformity.” Bradshaw and Baynes were deprived of their lectureships, and Parker and Ames fled to the Netherlands.[36]

Despite persecution, Jacob continued to write in defense of his model of Congregationalism. In 1605, he participated in a request for toleration of Congregational churches in another petition to the King: “A Third Humble Supplication.” In particular, it asked for Congregational churches to be permitted to assemble publicly for worship and appoint their own officers, namely, pastors, elders, and deacons. It also expressed the willingness of the Congregationalists to take an oath of allegiance before a magistrate to the King’s royal authority and supremacy in matters in the civil realm, maintain communion with other English churches, and pay all dues that the law required. King James denied the Jacobites their request.[37]

In 1609, Jacob took part in yet another petition to the King called A Supplication for Toleration addressed to King James I. This time, the Jacobites attempted to persuade James that they believed ruling synods and united presbyteries usurped the supremacy of the civil magistrate insofar as they assumed authority to impose laws.[38] Once again, however, the King was not convinced. He responded by pointing out that if it was king’s laws they were concerned about, they should simply obey the king’s laws that are already made.[39]

In 1610, Jacob produced a work titled The Divine Beginning and Institution of Christs True or Visible Ministeriall Church. Two important features of this work are his definition of a true church and his insistence on the voluntary consent of its members. Concerning the former, Jacob wrote:

The true visible and ministerial church of Christ is a number of faithful people joined by their willing consent in a spiritual outward society or body politic, ordinarily coming together into one place, instituted by Christ in his New Testament, and having the power to exercise ecclesiastical government and all God’s other spiritual ordinances (the means of salvation) in and for itself immediate from Christ.[40]

In other words, the church, as Christ instituted it, consists of visible believers in a gathered congregation. Brachlow points out that this appears to be Jacob’s most precise definition of a true church.[41] This statement also touches on his claim that a true church is a gathered community of believers who have joined themselves to the church by their “willing consent” in a covenant relationship.

In 1613, Jacob published An Attestation of Many Learned, Godly and Famous Divines.[42] This was a massive accumulation of quotations from divines throughout church history—from the patristic writers to the Reformers—that Jacob hoped would lend weight to his argument that the biblical government of the church requires the willing consent of its members.[43] Yet, he also made clear the fact that such willing consent did constitute a congregation a free democracy:

The whole Congregation is Christs Church, his Spouse, his Kingdome, his sacred Body, as I have said. From whence by a necessary and vndeniable consequence it followeth that Christ hath given the power of imposing hands, of Censures, of Sacraments, of Preaching the word, and all vnto the Congregation to bee performed in the best order they can. And so it is, that our Attestators before have taught, that the Keyes are given the whole Church…But active, actually they only can administer them who are the Churches instruments for that purpose by them assigned.[44]

For Jacob, the keys of the kingdom have been given to the whole church of Christ, but only duly ordained officers have the authority to use them. This shows us that the sort of Congregationalism to which Jacob subscribed was not a democratization of the church, nor a removal of all distinctions, including those of authority, between minister and laity. Only ministers were authorized to preach and administer the sacraments. And while discipline cases were to be brought before the congregation in accordance with Matthew 18, they were first to be judged by the eldership.[45]

In 1616, Jacob returned to England from the Netherlands to see this model put into practice in his native country. He established a Congregationalist church in Southwark by covenanting together with fellow Jacobites:

Each of the brethren made open confession of his faith in our Lord Jesus Christ; and then, standing together, they joined hands and solemnly covenanted with each other in the presence of Almighty God, to walk together in all God’s ways and ordinances, according as He has revealed, or should further make known to them. Mr. Jacob was then chosen pastor by the suffrage of the brotherhood, and others were appointed to the office of deacons, with fasting and prayer and imposition of hands.[46]

In connection with the planting of this church, he wrote, with the advice of other ministers such as John Robinson (1575-1625), a confession titled, A Confession and Protestation in the name of certain Christians showing therein wherein they consent in doctrine with the Church of England, and wherein they were bound to dissent, with their evidence from the Holy Scriptures for their dissent in about twenty-eight particulars.[47] The twenty eight articles ran as follows:

1. Of Christ’s Offices
2. The Sufficiency of the Scriptures
3. Of the Church’s Distinction
4. The Nature of the Visible Church
5. Of Synods and Councils
6. Of a Catholic, or Universal Church politic
7. Of a Provincial Church Independent
8. How true visible politic Churches are in England
9. Of Lord Archbishops and Lord Bishops Diocesan and Provincial
10. The Making of Ministers
11. Of our communicating with the parish ministers and parishes in England
12. Touching plurality of pastors and non-residents
13. Of discipline and censures
14. Touching the number of Pastors in each Church
15. Touching the profane and scandalous mixtures of people in the congregation
16. Of human traditions
17. Of Apostolic traditions
18. Of prophecy
19. Of the reading of homilies in the church
20. Of Christ’s descent into hell
21. Of Prayer
22. Of so-called holy days
23. Of marriage and burying, and churching, as it is called
24. Of ministers also made magistrates by the State
25. Of Lord’s Day offerings
26. Of tithes, and the pastor’s maintenance
27. Of the civil magistrate’s duty
28. The necessity to obey Christ rather than men[48]

While an analysis of the whole confession is beyond the scope of this essay, attention should be drawn to Article 5, for it represents an interesting nuance in Jacob’s Congregationalism. Although he viewed a true church as a gathered congregation of believers that is independent of outside ecclesiastical authority, he nonetheless affirmed the usefulness of a broader synodical superstructure of congregations. This would allow independent congregations to have a “consociation” for the purpose of fellowship, communion, and accountability with one another, although such synodical meetings could not rule over or impose laws upon independent congregations.[49] Such broader assemblies belonged not to the esse of the church, but to its bene esse.

Within four years of establishing the Congregationalist church in Southwark, however, Jacob emigrated to the American colonies, having experienced difficulty “within and without” the church.[50] He died in 1624.

For the purpose of our thesis, we summarize four key points in Jacob’s thought which gave shape to his Congregationalism. First, the Scriptures alone regulate all ecclesiastical matters in the church, including its government. Second, Congregationalism is the form of government prescribed by the New Testament. Third, every true church must be served by duly ordained officers, especially a pastor, to whom have been given the responsibility of preaching, sacraments, and discipline. Fourth, while a true church has the divine right to govern itself in ecclesiastical matters, it still has the right to enter in to consociations of broader assemblies with other independent congregations for the well being of the church.

The Congregationalism Of John Owen

Before considering the Congregationalism of John Owen, it will be helpful to consider, albeit briefly, some of the developments in the rise of Independency in England after the death of Jacob in 1624. Initially, things became increasingly difficult for Nonconformists, whether Presbyterians, Congregationalists, or Separatists. In 1625 James I died, causing the throne to pass to his son, Charles I, under whom the high-church theologian William Laud became Chancellor of Oxford University (1630) and Archbishop of Canterbury (1633).[51] Laud’s aggressive moves to bring Oxford and the Church of England into more high-church forms of worship are notorious. He advocated the imposition of conformity to the Book of Common Prayer and the punishment of nonconformity with unprecedented levels of severity. This caused Jacob’s former congregation in London to divide into two congregations in order to avoid detection, and provoked a Puritan diaspora to both the Netherlands and New England, which included divines upon whom the writings of Jacob had great impact.[52]

Of those who fled to the Netherlands were Jeremiah Burroughs (c.1599-1646), Sidrach Simpson (c.1600-55), William Bridge (c.1600-71), Philip Nye (c.1596-1672), and Thomas Goodwin (1600-80), all of whom returned to England in the early 1640s as things changed once again upon the beginning of the Long Parliament (1640-53). All five of these men played an important role in non-separating Congregationalism, or, as the Puritan Henry Burton (1578-1648) called it in 1641, “Independency.”[53] In 1643, shortly after the eruption of the English Civil War, all five of these men signed and submitted to Parliament the Apologeticall Narration of some Ministers Formerly in Exile. Moreover, all five were appointed members of the Westminster Assembly and, in 1645, drafted and delivered to the Assembly A Copy of a Remonstrance Lately Delivered in to the Assembly. Both documents, Apologeticall Narration and Remonstrance, revealed a Congregationalism much in line with Jacob’s. With these views, they became known to the Presbyterians in the Assembly as the “Five Dissenting Brethren.”[54]

Noteworthy figures emigrating to New England around the same time included the influential Congregationalist John Cotton. In 1632, Cotton was summoned to appear before Laud’s Court of High Commission. He escaped, however, and landed in the colony of Massachusetts Bay in July of the following year. In 1641, he wrote The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England, which bore the marks of Jacob’s thought. In 1644, he published The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, which, as noted above, was tremendously influential on Owen. In 1647, in response to an attack by the Scottish Presbyterian Robert Baillie (1559-1662), Cotton produced The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared.[55]

Significantly younger than Cotton or the Five Dissenting Brethren, John Owen remained on English soil throughout the Laudian years and the reign of Charles I. Peter Toon notes that “It was in the thirteenth year of the reign of James I in England, the year in which William Shakespeare died, that John Owen came into the world.”[56] As we have seen, however, this was also the year that Henry Jacob planted the first semi-Separatist Congregational church on English soil. Unbeknownst to Jacob, as he began to serve the new Independent Church in Southwark, England’s leading Independent of the Seventeenth Century was just beginning his life.

Owen was born into an Episcopalian church and family, although, according to his own account, his father, Henry Owen (n.d.), was a Puritan and a Nonconformist minister.[57] For Owen’s part, he was a convinced Presbyterian. His 1643 The Duty of Pastors and People Distinguished makes this quite clear.[58] In fact, by his admission, he was unacquainted with “the congregational way” until 1644 when he began to study both sides of the ecclesiastical debate:

[S]undry books being published on either side, I pursued and compared them with the Scripture and one another…After a general view of them, as was my manner in other controversies, I fixed on one to take under peculiar consideration and examination, which seemed most methodically and strongly to maintain that which was contrary, as I thought to my persuasion. This was Mr. Cotton’s book of the Keyes. In the pursuit and management of this work, quite beside and contrary to my expectation…I was prevailed on to receive that and those principles which I had thought to have set myself in an opposition unto.[59]

While Owen highlighted Cotton’s Keyes of the Kingdom, he did not reveal the titles or authors of the other books he studied. Clearly, however, the thought of Henry Jacob, in one way or another, was impressed upon Owen, as we shall see.[60]

While a comprehensive study of Owen’s ecclesiology is beyond the scope of this paper, we will seek to gain a clear picture of his Congregationalism and the extent to which it was shaped by the previous thought of Jacob by focusing on several key points from two of his most mature works, namely, An Inquiry into the Original, Nature, Institution, Power, Order, and Communion of Evangelical Churches (1681),[61] and the posthumously published second part to this work, The True Nature of a Gospel Church and its Government (1689).[62] These works were written after Owen had more than three decades to reflect on his Congregationalism, decades that contained the tumultuous events of the executions of Laud (1645) and Charles I (1649), the rise of the Independent sympathizer Oliver Cromwell as the Lord Protector to the new British Republic (1653-58), the Restoration of Monarchy in 1660, and the subsequent enforcement of the Clarendon Code.[63] They were the result of Owen’s controversy with Edward Stillingfleet (1635-99), who previously preached and printed a sermon titled, “On the Mischief of Separation,” in which he charged Nonconformists, both Presbyterians and Independents, of being in sin for separating from the Church of England. Owen responded to this printed sermon with his Brief Vindication of the Nonconformists from the Charge of Schism as it was managed against them in a sermon preached before the Lord Mayor by Dr. Stillingfleet, Dean of St. Paul’s (1680), followed by his Inquiry and True Nature.[64]

There are four main points in Owen’s thought that we will observe. These points correspond to those of Jacob which we observed above. First is Owen’s insistence that Scripture alone regulates all ecclesiastical matters of the church, including its form of government. Nonconformists, then, could not be charged with schism if their dissent from the Church of England was done in conformity to the Word of God. The only true conformity, argued Owen, was conformity to “the rule of faith, love, and obedience contained and revealed in Scripture; and in particular, the commands that the Lord Jesus Christ hath given for the order and worship that he requires in his churches.”[65] On the contrary, “those who recede from this rule, in any material branch of it, are guilt of the breach of church-unity.”[66] This was his main point in his lengthy preface to his Inquiry.[67]

For Owen, this meant that no one, including the King, Parliament, the Church of England, or any ecclesiastical body, had the authority to impose practices that are at variance or in addition to what is of Christ’s own institution and command. To do so is “an unwarrantable abridgment of the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.”[68] It is not, therefore, schism to dissent from the Established Church when it violates the freedom Christ purchased for his people by imposing things that have no “divine institution” or “Scriptural authority.”[69] While Christians are to be obedient to the state, the church itself is distinct from the state and cannot be regulated by rules that are contrary to Scripture.[70] This was nearly identical to the arguments Jacob had made so many years earlier.

The second point we must consider in Owen’s thought is his assertion that the New Testament prescribes Congregationalism as the proper form of government, or “church-state,” as he often called it. Like Jacob, Owen maintained that there is no evidence that either Christ or the apostles ever instituted a hierarchical structure of episcopacy,[71] and that for the first two centuries of church history, Congregationalist polity was the norm.[72] Christ appointed the model of a local, “gathered” congregation of believers as a manifestation of his true church, rather than a national or provincial church:

The visible church-state which Christ hath instituted under the New Testament consists in an especial society or congregation of professed believers, joined together according unto his mind, with their officers, guides, or rulers, whom he hath appointed, which do or may meet together for the celebration of all the ordinances of divine worship, the professing and authoritatively proposing the doctrine of the gospel, with the exercise of the discipline prescribed by himself, unto their own mutual edification, with the glory of Christ, in the preservation and propagation of his kingdom in the world.[73]

In other words, the church, as Christ instituted it, consists of visible believers in a gathered congregation. This was the same model for which Jacob argued as early as 1604. It was “only a Particular ordinary constant Congregation of Christians in Christes Testament is appointed and reckoned to be a visible Church.”[74] Owen’s statement should also be compared with Jacob’s definition of a true church in his 1610 The Divine Beginning and Institution of Christs True or Visible Ministeriall Church. For Owen, the gathering of visible saints was the “material cause” of a church.

This New Testament model of the church functions with the members’ “voluntary coalescency into such a society or congregation.”[75] This is the “formal cause” of a church. Again, the clear similarities to Jacob’s position are difficult to miss. For Jacob, a church “is a number of faithful people joined by their willing consent.”[76]

Apart from this formal cause of a church, the “ends” of the church cannot be reached, namely, the preaching of the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, the exercise of church discipline, and the visible subjection unto Christ. To such a congregation belongs “of right all the privileges, promises, and power that Christ doth give and grant unto the church in this world.”[77] Every believer is therefore obligated to join himself to a true local church, “some particular congregation of Christ’s institution, for his own spiritual edification, and the right discharge of his commands.”[78] Such a church must be one in which no “fundamental article of faith is rejected,” worship is not corrupted, and “the fundamentals of church order, practice, and discipline” are carried out.[79]

This brings us to the third point noteworthy in Owen’s Congregationalism, which is that every true church must be served by duly ordained officers to whom have been given the responsibility of preaching, sacraments, and discipline. Like Jacob, Owen contended that the local congregation must be served by “a pastor and elders, who are its guides and rulers,” and the community of the faithful must submit to their rule.[80] Owen emphasized the importance of a congregation having its own pastor who is “duly chosen by the church itself” and “duly qualified,” one who takes heed to his ministry in order to fulfill it and is an example to the flock.[81] That this topic was of particular importance to Owen can be seen from the number of places it appears in his writings.[82]

Also like Jacob was Owen’s belief that rightly ordered Congregationalism does not equal a democratized body of believers. To this charge which Stillingfleet made against him, Owen said, “I never thought, I never wrote any such a thing. I do believe that the authoritative rule or government of the church was, is, and ought to be, in the elders and rulers of it, being an act of the office-power committed unto them by Christ himself.”[83] For Owen, this meant a plurality of elders, which is the biblical model: “Particular churches were of such an extent as necessarily to require many elders, both teaching and ruling, for their instruction and government; for the better observation of order and decency in the public assemblies; for the fuller representation of the authority committed by Jesus Christ unto the officers of his church.”[84] While the keys of the kingdom are “originally and properly given to the whole church,” it is specifically to the elder of the church that they are given “ministerially, and as unto exercise.”[85] Moreover, these officers, contrary to the ordered ranks of Episcopacy, do not have varying degrees of authority. “But there is not any intimation in the Scripture of the least imparity or inequality, in order, degree, or authority, among officers of the same sort, whether extraordinary or ordinary. The apostles were all equal; so were the evangelists, so were elders or bishops, and so were deacons also.”[86]

Fourth, Owen saw a necessity for Independent congregations entering into broader synodical relations with other Independent congregations for the purpose of consociation. “The necessity and warranty of such synods ariseth,” in the first place, “from the light of nature:”

for all societies which have the same original, the same rule, the same interest, the same ends, and which are in themselves mutually concerned in the good or evil of each other, are obliged by the power and conduct of reason to advise in common for their own good on all emergencies that stand in need thereof…Churches are such societies.[87]

Secondly, they are necessary because they manifest communion between churches who “in one Head, by one Spirit, through one faith and worship, unto the same ends” are one mystical body. Third, they are necessary because they are “an institution of Jesus Christ, not in an express command, but…with apostolic example.”[88] Fourth, they are warranted because “the end of all particular churches is the edification of the church catholic unto the glory of God in Christ.” Fifth, such synods lend themselves to promoting order, accountability, and wisdom regarding cases of discipline. While an individual congregation “hath power to determine” a particular case, “no church is infallible in their judgment absolutely in any case; and in many their determinations may be so doubtful as not to affect the conscience of him who is censured.” But because that member is also a member of the church catholic, not only a particular congregation, it is useful to have broader assemblies to assist with difficult cases.[89]

Conclusion

The impact that Henry Jacob had upon later generations of Congregationalists in England (as well as New England and the Netherlands) is obvious. Jacob’s thought is latent and pervasive in the most mature writings on ecclesiology of none other than England’s most prominent Independent (and, we could argue, theologian) of the Seventeenth Century, John Owen. This brief look at the some of the writings these men produced supports the thesis of Champlain Burrage that “the beginnings of Independency or Congregationalism” are not to be traced “to the Brownists or Barrowists, but to the Congregational Puritanism of Henry Jacob.”[90] Such Congregationalism was not only noticeable by its Calvinistic and Reformed roots, but it bore nothing of the marks of the radical Anabaptism on the Continent in the Sixteenth Century or the radical democratized congregationalism found in America in latter centuries. Both Jacob and Owen evidenced a structured sort of Congregationalism that gave a place to local officers in the church, leading some scholars to suggest that “Owen’s congregationalism is essentially a truncated form of presbyterianism.”[91] Whether or not that assessment is correct, we can certainly agree with Geoffrey Nuttall’s evaluation of seventeenth-century Congregationalism and even apply it to Jacob and Owen’s form of “occasional conformity,” that “underlying the seemingly disproportionate concern with forms of government, there was, nevertheless, a passionate desire to recover the inner life of New Testament Christianity.”[92]

Notes

1. For books on Owen, see Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen (Exeter: Paternoster, 1971); Sinclair Ferguson, John Owen and the Christian Life (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987); Carl Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998); idem, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007); Robert Oliver [ed.], John Owen: The Man and His Theology (Philipsburg, PA: P & R, 2002); Sebastian Rehnman, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002). For a bibliography of published articles and unpublished dissertations on Owen, see the website, johnowen.org.
2. Trueman, Claims of Truth, 1.
3. See Graham S. Harrison, “John Owen’s Doctrine of the Church” in Oliver [ed.], John Owen: The Man and His Theology, 157-90; Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian Life, 154-83; Toon, God’s Statesman, 18-19, 123-49.
4. B.R. White, The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971),
5. See Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (1978, reprint ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
6. On Henry Jacob’s life and ecclesiology see the entry by Stephen Wright in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Champlain Burrage, The Early Englissh Dissenters 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 281-361; Watts, Dissenters, 50-62; White, English Separatist Tradition, 112, 158-59, 165-68; Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570-1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16-18, 194-212; Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Henry Jacob and the First Congregational Church,” in J. I. Packer [ed.], Puritan Papers: Volume Four 1965-1967 (Phillipsburg, PA: P & R, 2004), 173-97; Edward S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 28-41, 78-86, 156-58; Horton Davies, The English Free Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 56-57.
7. Watts, Dissenters, 51. The Millenary Petition (1603) resulted in the Hampton Court Conference in January 1604 between bishops from the Church of England and representative Puritans to discuss the Puritan pleasing the Petition for further reform. From the Puritan’s point of view, the conference was unsuccessful, as very little change resulted, as evidenced by the 1604 Book of Common Prayer.
8. Watts, Dissenters, 51.
9. Watts, Dissenters, 1. Watts also points out that the term “Separatist” morphed somewhat with the unfolding events of England’s turbulent Seventeenth Century. For more on the early Separatists in England, see White, English Separatist Tradition; and Brachlow, Communion. White makes the argument that, despite the term “Brownism,” Robert Browne’s thought in the development of Separatist ecclesiology may have been more marginal than has sometimes been assumed.
10. Brachlow, Communion, 17.
11. As quoted by Jacob in Henry Jacob, A Defence of the Churches and Ministery of Englande (Middleburg, 1599), 18.
12. Jacob, Defence, 12.
13. Brachlow makes the interesting observation that “Jacob’s adiaphora line of reasoning in 1599, at the close of his debate with Johnson, sounds very much like the Calvinist Whitgift against a radical Cartwright–or, for that matter, the moderate Cartwright against a fanatical Richard Harrson!” Brachlow, Communion, 57.
14. Watts, Dissenters, 51.
15. See Brachlow, Communion, 60-64, for an analysis of Jacob’s shift between 1599 and 1604.
16. Henry Jacob, Reasons taken out of God’s Word and the best human testimonies proving a necessitie of reforming our Church in England (Middleburg, 1604), 1-17.
17. Jacob, Reasons, 5.
18. Jacob, Reasons, 17-33.
19. Jacob, Reasons, 22. Jacob cited Matt 18:17; Acts 14:24; 1 Cor 5:4-5; and 2 Cor 8:19.
20. Jacob, Reasons, 33-35.
21. Jacob, Reasons, 33.
22. Jacob, Reasons, 35-40.
23. Jacob, Reasons, 40-44.
24. Jacob, Reasons, 44-51.
25. Jacob, Reasons, 45.
26. Jacob, Reasons, 51-52.
27. Jacob, Reasons, 52-57.
28. Jacob, Reasons, 57-67.
29. Jacob, Reasons, 67-70.
30. Jacob, Reasons, 70-78.
31. Jacob, Reasons, 22.
32. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:287.
33. Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 73-76.
34. Geoffrey Nuttall, Visible Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 10. See also Watts, Dissenters, 52-53. In addition to noting the titles for Jacob above, Watts quotes a Ph.D. thesis by Slayden Yarbrough called, “Henry Jacob, A Moderate Separatist, and his Influence on Early English Congregationalism” (Baylor University, 1972).
35. Watts, Dissenters, 53.
36. Nuttall and Watts point out that Robert Parker initially held the Jacobite view of synods being for counsel and advice only, but later came to the conclusion that synods had authority over particular churches and became a member of the Dutch Presbyterian classis in Amsterdam. See Nuttall, Visible Saints, 10 and Watts, Dissenters, 53. On William Ames’ life, see Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972); John Dykstra Eusden, “Introduction” in William Ames, The Marrow of Theology [1629] trans. John Dykstra Eusden (1968; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 1-66.
37. See Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:285-86; Lloyd-Jones, “Henry Jacob,”181; and Watts, Dissenters, 54.
38. Henry Jacob, A Supplication for Toleration addressed to King James I (1609), reprinted with the King’s notes by S.R. Maitland (1859), 13.
39. Henry Jacob, Supplication, 32.
40. Henry Jacob, The Divine Beginning and Institution of Christs True or Visible Ministeriall Church (Leiden, 1610), Sig. A1, as quoted in Brachlow, Communion, 136-37.
41. Brachlow, Communion, 136.
42. Between 1609 and 1613, Jacob also published A plain and cleere exposition of the 2d. commandment (Leiden, 1610); and A Declaration & Plainer Opening of Certaine Points in the Divine Beginning (Middleburg, 1611).
43. See Henry Jacob, An Attestation of Many Learned, Godly and Famous Divines (Middleburg, 1613), 52-69, a chapter titled, “The Testimonies and practice of the best Antiquitie, after the New Testament, herein likewise with us.”
44. Jacob, Attestation, 298.
45. Jacob, Attestation, 249-50, 289-90.
46. Hanbury, Historical Memorials (1841), 1:292, as quoted in Horton Davies, The English Free Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 57. It should also be noted that Jacob’s planting of this Congregationalist church in Southwark is a fact substantiated by John Cotton in The Way of the Congregational Churches cleared (1648), 8.
47. For a list of the ministers with whom Jacob consulted, see Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:294; and Brachlow, Communion, 138-39.
48. See Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:294-95 and Lloyd-Jones, “Henry Jacob,” 187-96. Lloyd-Jones provides a helpful summary of each article.
49. Henry Jacob, A Confession and Protestation in the name of certain Christians (Amsterdam, 1616), B2, as found in Brachlow, Communion, 221.See Brachlow’s analysis of this point on pages 221-22.
50. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:319. See also Watts, Dissenters, 56.
51. On Laud’s life see Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, Second Edition (London: MacMillan, 1940; reprint ed., London: Phoenix Press, 2001).
52. See Watts, Dissenters, 71.
53. See Watts, Dissenters, 94. According to Watts, this term was disputed by many Puritans who themselves held the views that latter came to be widely known as “Independent.” Geoffrey Nuttall suggests that the earliest printed use of the term “Congregational way” was by the Particular Baptist William Kiffin (1616-1701), also in 1641. See Nuttall, Visible Saints, 8n4. Bryan Spinks is probably correct when he states, “while it is generally agreed among historians that the English Independent, or Congregational tradition did not emerge as a distinct ecclesiastical movement until the tumultuous years of the 1640s, it has long been a matter of controversy as to the movement’s precise origin.” See Bryan D. Spinks, Freedom or Order? The Eucharistic Liturgy in English Congregationalism 1645-1980 (Allison Park: Pickwick, 1984), 1.
54. On the Five Dissenting Brethren see Geoffrey Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640-60 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957); Bryan Spinks, Freedom of Order? The Eucharistic Liturgy in English Congregationalism 1645-1980 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1984), 31-51; William Barker, Puritan Profiles (Ross-shire: Mentor, 1999), 69-94.
55. On John Cotton, see Cotton Mather, The Great Works of Christ in America (Hartford, 1853) and Mark Dever, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2000), 40-41, 56-57.
56. Toon, God’s Statesman, 1.
57. Toon, God’s Statesman, 2-3.
58. In Works, vol.13.
59. John Owen, A Review of the True Nature of Schism, with a Vindication of the Congregational Churches in England from the Imputation thereof unjustly charged on them by Mr D. Cawdrey (1657), in Works, 13:223.
60. I failed to determine if the books of Henry Jacob were included in Owen’s impressive library, the contents of which were posthumously published as Bibliotheca Oweniana in 1684.
61. In The Works of John Owen, William H. Gould [ed.] (reprint ed., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1998), 15:187-373.
62. Works, 16:1-208.
63. The “Clarendon Code” was the name for a series of four legal statutes drafted by Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, and passed by an overwhelmingly Anglican Parliament. The first was the Corporation Act (1661), which excluded Non-Conformists from holding public office by requiring all municipal officials to be communicants in an Anglican church, subscribe a declaration that it was unlawful under any circumstances to take up arms against the king, and formally reject the Solemn League and Covenant. The second statute was the Act of Uniformity (1662), which required all ministers, under penalty of fines, imprisonment, and the forfeiture of their livings, to subscribe to everything in the Book of Common Prayer, renounce the Solemn League and Covenant, and be re-ordained if they had not received Episcopal ordination in the first place. All ministers were to fulfill these requirements by St. Bartholomew’s Day on August 24, 1662. The result was “The Great Ejection,” with nearly 2000 ministers forced to resign their vocations and livings. The third statute was the Conventicle Act (1664), which made it illegal for five or more persons to gather at any religious assembly, conventicle, or meeting conducted in any other manner than what was prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer. The final statute was the Five-Mile Act (1665), which forbade all ministers who had not taken the oaths in the Act of Uniformity to come within five miles of the corporate town or parish where they had previously served. For the background on the period of the Restoration see David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
64. Works, 13:303-42.
65. Works, 15:213.
66. Works, 15:214.
67. Works, 15:193-222.
68. Works, 15:54. A noteworthy quote from his Discourse Concerning Liturgies, written in 1662 immediately after the Act of Uniformity. Compare this to his 1657 treatise, Communion with God with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Each Person Distinctly, in Love, Grace, and Consolation, in which he pointed out that imposition was at the heart of all superstition and idolatry throughout the history of the Christian Church: “[T]hat principle that the Church hath power to institute and appoint any thing or ceremony belonging to the worship of God, either as to matter or to manner, beyond the orderly observance of such circumstances as necessarily attend such ordinances as Christ himself hath instituted, lies at the bottom of all the horrible superstition and idolatry, of all the confusion, blood, persecution, and wars, that have for so long a season spread themselves over the face of the Christian world…This, then, they who hold communion with Christ are careful of:--they will admit of nothing, practise [sic] nothing, in the worship of God, private or public, but what they have his warrant for; unless it comes in his name, with ‘Thus saith the Lord Jesus’, they will not hear an angel from heaven.” Works, 2:150-51.
69. Works, 16:208. See also 214ff.
70. Works, 16:302-13.
71. See Works, 16:195.
72. Works, 15:277-302.
73. Works, 15:262.
74. Jacob, Reasons, 5.
75. Works, 15:262.
76. Jacob, Divine Beginnings, A1, as quoted in Brachlow, Communion, 136-37.
77. Works, 15:263.
78. Works, 15:320. Owen took up this particular point in Chapter 8 of his Inquiry, 319-27. He then elucidated what sort of churches Christians ought to join in Chapter 10, 334-44.
79. Works, 15:335-36.
80. Works, 15:263.
81. Works, 15:336-38.
82. For example, he has a whole chapter on the matter of a pastor’s duty to his church in True Nature of a Gospel Church, in Works, 16:74-96. He also deals with this explicitly in an ordination sermon he preached on January 23, 1673, and another on September 8, 1682, found respectively in Works, 9:431-41; 452-62.
83. Works, 15:194.
84. Works, 16:46.
85. Works, 16:63.
86. Works, 16:46.
87. Works, 16:195.
88. Works, 16:196.
89. Works, 16:196-97.
90. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:33. See also Watts, Dissenters, 95.
91. Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian Life, 161.
92. Nuttall, Visible Saints, 3.