The Trinity, Adiaphora, Ecclesiology, And Reformation: John Owen’s Theory Of Religious Toleration In Context

By Paul Lim

[Paul Chang-Ha Lim is Assistant Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass.]

That they had neither care of the truth,
nor love of peace, nor conscience of scandal,
nor would by any means be prevailed on
to lay down their malice and animosities.
—Emperor Constantine[1]

I

In the historiography of early modern Britain, the question of toleration and liberty—political, ideological, and religious—has been of paramount importance, whether in reception, repudiation, or in reappraisal of this admittedly modern concept. Among other groups, the Independents have commanded much attention for their putative role in championing religious liberty during the Civil War, presaging the emergence of the full-blown tolerationist rhetoric of John Locke, among others.[2] Whiggish historians such as W. K. Jordan have found in the Independents and radical Puritans a fertile seedbed for the rise of religious toleration in the modern western world. However, the historiographical paradigm of a steady progression toward greater ideological and religious tolerance and diversity has been questioned by revisionist historians, who instead find in early modern England a transitional existence which, rather than influence the rise of modernity, owed its existence to and was influenced by the habits of thought of the late Middle Ages, thus giving a more nuanced reading of a society where ideas of tolerance and intolerance were often locked in intense battles.[3]

Blair Worden has questioned the historiographical truism of W. K. Jordan, William Haller, S. R. Gardiner, to name a few, that the Independents were instrumental in the rise of religious liberty and toleration in early modern England.[4] In a seminal article, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate,” Professor Worden has convincingly argued that “puritan theological conservatism” was a keystone in “the formation of the government’s doctrinal policies in the Protectorate.”[5] Avihu Zakai and Carolyn Polizzotto have echoed Worden’s position and reconstructed the Independents’ stance on religious toleration during the English Civil War and during the early 1650s, showing that the Independents were more concerned with preservation of doctrinal orthodoxy rather than liberty for its sake.[6] More recently, however, John Coffey and Norah Carlin have each questioned the revisionist perspective and argued that, even within the context of mid-seventeenth-century politics and religion, some Puritans were clearly proponents of tolerance.[7]

In the case of John Owen we have an interesting picture, a potential dilemma. Historically it has been assumed that Arminianism and other theologically liberalizing tendencies were largely responsible for theories of toleration in the seventeenth century and paved the way for modern liberal political and religious discourses.[8] Despite the number of historians who have been so inclined, looking across the “historiographical divide” between the Interregnum and the Restoration,[9] there were a number of dissenting theorists of liberty of conscience who were committed Calvinists, not just Arminians. How can we account for this? A simple explanation would be to blame it on the volteface of the erstwhile Calvinist ecclesiastical architects of the Cromwellian church—Owen, Thomas Goodwin, and Philip Nye, among others. Another answer might lie in their theological convictions applied in different contexts. Admittedly their (and particularly Owen’s) attitude toward theological and religious dissent was different before and after the Restoration; however, it is important to recognize, as I hope to show, that it was a principled stance that has its ideological foundation in Owen’s pre-Restoration theory of liberty of conscience.

Referring to the views of religious conscience and toleration of John Owen, Sir Charles Wolseley John Humfrey, Slingsby Bethel, and William Penn, respectively, Gary De Krey noted that “each of these spokesmen for conscience deserves treatment in his own right.”[10] His call for a more fruitful engagement with the political and theological thought of the above five thinkers, especially of Owen, has yet to be responded to.[11] This essay, then, is part of the effort to fill the historiographical lacuna by providing a contextual reading of John Owen’s theology of religious toleration during the Interregnum and the Restoration. Three important criteria in Owen’s tolerationist thought will suggest themselves: the rhetoric against imposition of the adiaphora, the developed position of Congregationalism and the vision of primitive ecclesiology,[12] and the drive to complete the work of reformation.[13] Adiaphora became a contentious issue during the Reformation debates, more in England than other European countries. Adiaphora was usually defined as that which was “neither good nor bad, neither commanded nor proscribed” in the Word of God, thus (apparently) leaving it to human decisions, without causing harm to the consciences of those who dissented.[14] We will briefly look at the Interregnum context of Owen’s position on liberty of conscience, then focus on his Restoration debates on conscience and toleration, especially with Samuel Parker and Edward Stillingfleet.

II

The exact date of Owen’s embrace of Congregationalism is difficult to ascertain. From the rare autobiographical reference in his Review of the true Nature of Schism, we learn that it was through reading John Cotton’s Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644) that Owen “was prevailed on to receive. .. those principles which I had thought to have set myself in opposition unto,” thus providing 1644 to be the terminus a quo.[15] In June 1645, John Owen was a signatory to a letter written by Thomas Goodwin and other concerned English divines to the Massachusetts General Court, pleading for clemency toward “some Anabaptists in that Jurisdiction” who were dissenting from the ecclesiastical imposition of the Colonial authorities.[16] As the debate in the Westminster Assembly on the issue of toleration and church polity was raging, Owen published “A Country Essay,” an appendix to A Vision of Unchangeable Free Mercy, his sermon delivered at the House of Commons on 29 April 1646. Owen warned Parliament and the divines whose zeal for establishing reformed orthodoxy in doctrine, polity, and worship often found expression in demonizing ideological “others”:

Now, I am mistaken if this principle, that the civil magistrate ought to condemn, suppress, and persecute every one that he is convinced to err, though in smaller things, do not at length, in things of greater importance, make Christendom a very theatre of bloody murders, killing, slaying, imprisoning men round in a compass; until the strongest becomes dictator to the rest, and he alone be supposed to have infallible guidance, - all the rest to be heretics, because overcome and subdued.[17]

In this “Essay,” Owen even mentioned the difficulty attendant to “judge of heresies and heretics,” citing Luther, Beza, and Gregory of Nazianzen as those who divulged the abuses—political and ecclesiastical—of the early ecumenical councils.[18] Elsewhere he argued that the persecutorial syllogism, “He is to suppress evil deeds; heresy is an evil deed: therefore that also,” was a “paralogism ... so foul and notorious” in its logic and utterly devoid of force in argumentation.[19] To demonstrate the evil of magisterial imposition of doctrinal issues and the resort to violence to stamp out heresies, Owen recounted that the early church maintained its pristine doctrinal coherence and clarity, all without recourse to either magisterial intervention or violence:

For three hundred years the church had no assistance from any magistrate against heretics; and yet in all that space there was not one long-lived or far-spreading heresy, in comparison of those that followed. As the disease is spiritual, so was the remedy which in those days was applied; and the Lord Jesus Christ made it effectual. .. but for corporeal punishment to be inflicted on them, in their writings not a syllable.[20]

Ironically, if not tragically, the official sanctioning of Christianity in the Roman empire, Owen argued, brought about the very opposite result of seeing heresies abound: “Witness Arianism, which had almost invaded the whole world.”[21] Here we notice that for Owen, primitive ecclesiological purity was compromised by the involvement of the magistrate in spiritual things. The desire to rediscover the pristine purity of the church and the communion of saints was a powerful impetus behind the Congregationalist vision of the church.[22]

By March of 1646, however judging from Ralph Josselin’s diary, Owen seems to have “proposed a new project for gathering of churches,” indicating Owen’s move closer toward Independency. And in two years, when Essex ministers were discussing a feasible Presbyterian ecclesiastical settlement, Owen objected to it and “conceived this too broad, and would have first a separacion to bee made in our parishes; and that by the minister, and those godly that joyne unto him, and then proceed to choosing”[23]

Owen’s role in presenting The Humble Proposals of 1652 and his attack on Socinianism, however, helps to contextualize the limits of liberty of conscience.[24]

For Owen, only the consciences of those who were “Reformed, Protestant” and Trinitarian could be tolerated.[25] During the early years of the Cromwellian government, one of the most subversive religious threats came from the Socinianism of John Biddle whose A Twofold Catechism caused the Independents to think soberly about the terms and limits of orthodoxy and toleration. It was in this context that the Council of State called upon John Owen to confute Biddle’s “soul-destroying” heresies.[26] Owen’s point-by-point refutation of Biddle was published as Vindiciae Evangelicae. For our purposes, what is noteworthy is “Chapter XXXIV” where Owen calls into question Biddle’s insistence on the set form of prayer, especially the Lord’s Prayer, as part of public worship. For Owen, there was no exegetical proof that Jesus meant to impose this—word and spirit—for future generations as part of public worship. And even if he had “prescribed us a form,” that would not weaken Owen’s argument since that would simply mean that no human can “dare to prescribe another.” This refusal to allow for human imposition in public worship was a hallmark of Owen’s theology of liberty of conscience which came to the fore in the Restoration debates. As we will see, for Owen, the forms and fixed ceremonies were part of worship in the Old Testament era, but with the advent of Christ, especially after Pentecost, God had given New Testament believers a genuine freedom and liberty in the Spirit. Thus to go back to set forms of prayer as part of public worship was retrogressive.[27] Owen’s attack on Biddle over set forms of prayer for public worship was also the very bone of contention between the Puritans and the Laudians; thus, attacking set forms of prayer as part of the warped theological framework of a heretic would serve Owen’s polemical purposes well.

Therefore it is not surprising that Thomas Long, who emerged in the Restoration as a leading Anglican polemicist, took up the cudgel to defend the legitimacy of the Lord’s Prayer in public worship, and that the Church and the magistrate could sanction its use. Citing the reformed authorities of Calvin,[28] Beza,[29] Lutheran theologian Martin Chemnitz,[30] and David Paraeus,[31] Long insisted that there was a general consensus as to the usefulness of the Lord’s Prayer, even in public worship. To hit a bit closer to home, Long argued that “our Assembly” (the Westminster Assembly), and John Ball also endorsed an edifying usage of the Lord’s Prayer.[32]

Despite the litany of Protestant and Puritan authorities arrayed to confute Owen, Long did not prevail in this pamphlet attack. Owen did not respond to this treatise, but in a short work entitled Two Questions concerning the Power of the Supreme Magistrate, published in 1659, argued against magisterial and human imposition in divine worship, which Owen deemed antithetical to gospel liberty:

Although the magistrate is bound to encourage, promote, and protect the professors and profession of the gospel.. . yet in such differences about the doctrines of the gospel or ways of the worship of God as may befall men exercising a good conscience, manifesting it in their conversation, and holding the foundation, not disturbing others in their ways or worship that differ from them, there is no warrant for the magistrate under the gospel to abridge them of their liberty.[33]

III

Adiaphora had become a shibboleth during the early years of the English Reformation. Those who identified with the reformed theology, particularly that of Huldrych Zwingli of Zurich, were the most vociferous critics of the magisterial imposition of ceremonies in the Tudor Church of England.[34] The Vestiarian Controversy during Elizabeth’s reign, John Hooper’s dispute with Nicholas Ridley over the usefulness of the adiaphora in the Church, and the fall-out among Marian exiles in Frankfurt over the use of the Prayer Book were just three notable examples demonstrating the explosive potential of the imposition of what many had regarded as indifferent matters: neither prescribed nor proscribed in the Bible.[35]

Recently, Gordon Schochet pointed out that while the adiaphora became a hotly debated issue during the Restoration religious settlement, it failed to generate much historiographical interest.[36] In the context of discussing Samuel Parker’s adiaphorist argument, Schochet included the exchange between Owen and Parker. This was a continuation of a debate which dated back, as mentioned earlier, to the days of the Henrician reformation, and had resurfaced during the early 1660s. William Bradshaw, a leading light in Jacobean Puritanism, was a vocal critic of human imposition and addition to divine worship whose treatise on the adiaphora and worship, first published in 1605, was reprinted in 1660, connoting the heightened intensity of the debate.[37] Bradshaw argued that since for anything to “be a Mean between two Extreams” it must be “enclining no more to the one than to the other,” thus ought not incite “passions [to be] wrought. Otherwise, the issue or ceremony considered cannot be truly adiaphorous.” Thus, unsurprisingly, Bradshaw concluded that “there is no absolute Indifferent thing,” hoping to dismantle the logic of the Jacobean conformists.[38]

Owen’s critique of the reestablished Church of England was based on its imposition of ceremonies and other adiaphorous matters, its neglect of pastoral discipline, and the difference between the Dissenters and the Churchmen with regard to edification and reformation. These three desiderata will remain consistent throughout Owen’s Restoration theological career, including his debate with Samuel Parker and Edward Stillingfleet. First of all, Owen was convinced that imposition of the adiaphora and taking of oaths to uphold such newly subscribed matters was the direct cause of “expel[ling] all peace and union among Protestants,” citing the “Et cetera” oath of 1640 and the “late oath at Oxford” of 1665 as two examples.[39] In his Discourse concerning Liturgies, published anonymously in 1662, Owen argued, using scholastic categories, that there was no distinction between the “circumstantial or accidentary part of God’s worship” and “worship substantially taken, or the substantial parts of it,” thus concluding that “whatever is instituted of God in and about those circumstances is a substantial part of his worship.” This was designed to disprove the validity of human imposition of the “circumstantial” parts of worship; for Owen, all of divine worship was to follow divine blueprints which, by the way, were “few and easy to be observed,” especially as a result of Christ’s ministry.[40]

Between Owen and the Restoration Anglican apologists, especially Samuel Parker, there was a consensus that magistrates ought to be involved in upholding public religion, ensuring that vice be stamped out, and encouraging godly ministers.[41] However, Owen was clear to argue that the magistrate qua magistrate did not possess any intrinsic right to direct the specifics of the already infallibly ordained worship of God.[42] This was a radical curtailment of the power of the magistrate:

That the will of God is the sole rule of his worship, and all the concernment of it, and that his authority is the sole principle and cause of the relation of any thing to his worship in a religious manner; and consequently, that he never did, nor ever will, allow that the will of his creatures should be the rule or measure of his honour or worship, nor that their authority should cause any thing to hold a new relation unto him, or any other but what it hath by the law of its creation. And this is the sum and substance of the second commandment.[43]

A Peace Offering, published anonymously in 1667, is representative among Owen’s Restoration writings for its succinct and lucid defense of conscience against human imposition. As the persecution against the dissenters mounted, Owen took to writing for liberty of conscience and for the autonomy of congregational churches. One of the recurring themes of Peace Offering is the identification of the “great concernment in.. . religion” as "to commend our conscience unto God,” especially “in the things of his own worship.”[44] This idea is recapitulated throughout the treatise to show how guaranteeing the liberty of conscience ensured the security and longevity of the public face of religion and peace. Owen countered the Anglican claim that once religiously indifferent issues were made into law, then it became civic matter, requiring all subjects’ obedience. For Owen, this was a slippery slope.[45] Providing the exemplary dilemma and subsequent resolution in Paul while he was in Rome (Acts 16:21) since he was accused of violating the civic mandate of refusing to accept any unsanctioned religion, of which Christianity was one such example, Owen commends Paul’s non-violent resistance, for otherwise “the light and truth of Christianity. .. must have lain shut up in darkness to this day.”[46] That became the ideological bolster for Owen to argue similarly for the case of Restoration Dissent.

During the period of the prorogation of the second Exclusion Parliament, Edward Stillingfleet, then the Dean of St Paul’s, London, preached a sermon in May 1680 at the Guildhall. The sermon, subsequently published as The Mischief of Separation, went through four printings in less than twelve months, provoking both praise and scorn from Anglicans and Dissenters. The third volume of Owen’s Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews was published around this time, thus helping us to trace some of Owen’s own ecclesiology vis-a`-vis the Church of England. In the Exposition, Owen continued his criticism of the Restoration Church of England for its imposition of the adiaphora in worship. Worship, for Owen, had reached its “consummation” in the work of Christ as the “high priest.” For Owen this meant that while “carnal minded persons” could “perform” the outward duties of worship as well in the Old Testament era, in the New Testament, God’s design of making the “church unto a more perfect state in point of worship” was fulfilled.

From his exegesis of Heb 7:11–12, Owen concluded that the “Levitical priesthood” stood for ceremonies and temporary things necessary “for a season,” but with Christ all was made more instructive and less ceremonial, less material and more spiritual, not difficult but easy, and above all giving access to “the Holy place.” Thus, to add human impositions and ceremonies not specified in God’s will was to deny the “efficacy of ordinances or institutions of worship” revealed in Scripture and through Christ.[47] Of such paramount importance was the right worship of God in Owen’s thought that he even went so far as to argue that if “a church should impose the observation of Judaical ceremonies,[48] and make their observation necessary, though not to salvation, yet unto the order and decency of worship,” he would endorse and encourage separation from such churches.[49] “Order and decency of worship” had been an Anglican slogan since the days of Archbishop Laud. If the Dissenters emphasized edification and individual pursuit of purity away from the mixture of unconverted mass, Anglicans—Laudians and Restoration churchmen alike—were concerned with the corporate and institutional nature of the church and the order, decency, and beauty of holiness.[50] Thus Robert Grove bitterly complained that “there is a Liturgy, or Set Form of Public Worship prescribed; That there are certain Ceremonies in joyned; That the use of these Controverted things gives great Scandal to the weak; That they cannot safely joyn in our mixt Communion; That they leave our Assemblies for the sake of greater Edification, which they find elsewhere.”[51]

IV

The early church—its faith and practice—as well as the Fathers of the Church were the most common and acknowledged source for theological justification and support. This Patristic dependence was true of both the Anglicans and the Puritans.[52] For Owen, the practice of mutual charity and allowance of multiplicity of perspectives concerning issues secondary and tertiary was the lesson he drew from the early church. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians 3:16 is perhaps best known as the text Edward Stillingfleet used in his famous sermon against the sin of separation and schism of the Dissenters. What has not been noted before was that actually Owen’s exegesis of Phil 3:15–16 was one of the controlling principles for his tolerationist position, as early as 1667.[53] The historical background for this text was the struggle that existed between the Jewish and Gentile believers. Owen argued that in most metropolitan centers, these two churches co-existed harmoniously, perhaps having taken Paul’s apostolic exhortation given in Rom 14, yet “differing as to some ceremonial observances.”[54] Taking the statement of Phil 3:15–16 as acknowledging the diversity within the Christian communion, Owen concluded that “coercion, restraints, corporal punishments, were far from their thoughts, yea, the very exercise of any ecclesiastical power against them who dissented” was an unthinkable course of action.[55]

After five years of state-sponsored persecution of religious dissent, the unexpected fall of Clarendon in 1667 presented itself as a potential reversal (at least modification) of fortune for the Dissenters.[56] However, while dissenters with Presbyterian sensibilities such as John Humfrey and John Corbet were ardently pleading for comprehension on the heels of Clarendon’s impeachment and subsequent fall, Owen was, to their chagrin, vying for toleration, not compre-hension.[57]

His critique of the comprehension project and further espousal of the tolerationist rhetoric shows Owen’s commitment to his congregationalist ecclesiology. Owen argued that to “plant the kingdom’s peace” on ecclesiastical uniformity was indubitably impolitic.[58] Not only was ecclesiastical uniformity unwise, but more importantly, at least for Owen, it was diametrically opposed to primitive ecclesiology, which clearly denied the co-extensive nature of church and state, a defining character of Christendom for over 1300 years since the days of Constantine:

The true civil interest of this nation. .. every Englishman is born unto; he falls into it from the womb; it grows up with him, he is indispensably engaged into it. .. and is not at liberty to dissent from the community. But as for religion, it is the choice of men, and he that chooseth not his religion hath none.[59]

Recently Mark Goldie has convincingly demonstrated that the Restoration Anglican church was a persecuting institution. Apologists for this Augustinian just-persecution theory were quite numerous, and in addition to merely theological rationale, other factors such as political fear that the Dissenters were agents of the Jesuits, a hackneyed argument the erstwhile leaders in the Cromwellian Church had used against the Laudians, were brought to the fore of the national consciousness.[60]

Owen argued that the case with Protestant dissent in England was analogous to the case between Cain and Abel, a Puritan self-fashioning at the expense of the demonized Anglican prelatists.61 Over against Stillingfleet’s argument that if the Dissenters were willing to acknowledge in private that the Church of England was a true church, then it should lead to communion in public worship, Owen stressed that

this is one of the greatest evils that attend this controversy. Men are forced by their interest to lay more weight on a few outward rites and ceremonies, which the world and the church might well have spared, had they not come into the minds of some men. .. than upon the most important graces and duties of the gospel. Hence, communion in faith and love is scarce esteemed worth taking up in the streets, in comparison of uniformity in rites and ceremonies! Let men be as void of. .. true gospel faith. .. yet if they comply quietly with, and have a little zeal for, those outward things, they are to be approved of as very orderly members of the church![62]

Thus, even though the Church of England did possess true marks of the church, since “the generality of their members are openly wicked in their lives, and they have no lawful or sufficient ministry,” Owen could not acknowledge it as a true church insofar as a church with which he was willing to communicate and join.[63]

Owen wondered out loud if “we are some of the first who ever anywhere in the world, from the foundation of it, thought of ruining and destroying persons of THE SAME RELIGION with ourselves, merely upon the choice of some peculiar way of worship in that religion.”[64] Moreover, Owen provided a cogent critique of the Augustinian theology of conpelle intrare (Luke 14:23), forcing of the human conscience in view of the future benefit of a broken yet conforming conscience: “Now let others do what they will, conscience will still make this judgment, nor can it do otherwise. Whatever men can alter in the outward actings of men’s lives, they can alter nothing in the inward constitution of the nature given it by God in its creation, which refers to its future end. How can this be forced?”[65]

However, Owen emphasized that the Church of England, as judged by the Thirty-Nine Articles, was doctrinally sound and based on its soteriological stance there was no real grounds for separation.[66] Consequently, this approbation of the Restoration Church as being in doctrinal agreement with the Dissenters problematized the cause of Dissent, for as Anglican apologists such as Parker, Perrinchief, Thomas Long, and Stillingfleet have bitterly argued, to separate over non-doctrinal issues was tantamount to schism and separation. And Anglican apologists buttressed their position by citing numerous magisterial reformers themselves. Bucer’s approbation of the existence of liturgies, Melanchthon’s specific endorsement of the adiaphora, and Calvin’s twofold marks of the church (preaching and sacraments) were proffered as endorsing the Restoration Anglican polemic.[67] Therefore, it was incumbent upon Owen to base his plea for toleration on issues of worship and the virtually wholesale absence of pastoral discipline alone, projecting them to be of paramount significance. However, criticism of half-reformed Anglican worship and its attendant vices had been a consistent part of the Puritan polemic against the Church of England; thus it was not surprising to find Owen resorting to it as a way of legitimating the more radical dissenters’ wish for toleration. The fervor for true worship and the corresponding contempt for false worship had been a staple part of Owen’s theological vocabulary. In his sermon delivered at the Commons on 31 January 1649, when the nation was still reeling from the shock of the unprecedented regicide of Charles I, Owen hammered away at the theme of false worship, especially how it precipitates the irreversible destruction of a nation when “superstition and persecution, will-worship[68] and tyranny” rule; they become the “procuring causes” and portents of sure disasters.[69] Thus it was a theological imperative for Owen, before and after the Restoration alike, to keep the purity of gospel worship intact.

This pursuit of the purity of worship required less than what was considered important for prayer-book Anglicans: no Prayer Book, no ceremonies, and no altar. Owen had argued that one of the characteristics of the primitive church was not liturgical uniformity, but precisely the opposite: flexibility and freedom, mutuality and multiplicity of perspectives. Citing Origen for support, Owen argued that the early Christians recognized the intrinsic inevitability of flexibility over secondary and tertiary issues, one of which was over outward ceremonies and rites. So long as there was no compulsion to observe one tradition over another, there was pax Christi in the Church.[70] This “variety of judgment and difference in practice,” a mark of the new covenant worship, “from the days of the apostles” was an abiding quality of the visible church; thus to hold the dissenters to be schismatics over the issues where no consensus had existed, was a betrayal of Christian charity.[71] In fact, the persecutory innovation in the church was in large measure attributable to the rancor caused by the Arian heresy. Arius had become a specially targeted persona non grata during this period of intense polemic. Anglicans, including yet not limited to Peter Heylyn,[72] identified as Arius’s most dastardly error his rejection of episcopal authority over him. The Dissenters, however, highlighted the violent persecution provoked by Arius as the main problem. Owen’s emphasis on the primitive diversity of liturgical expression was designed to rectify the misdirected effort of the Churchmen in looking to the early church for jure divino episcopacy. Owen further charged the Anglican church for being duplicitous, for internecine doctrinal differences of greater import (the Calvinist vs. Arminian divide) existed within the Church of England.[73]

Lastly, for Owen, the very point of dispute between Daniel Cawdrey and himself, the true nature of the gospel church, was rehashed during the Restoration. The congregational nature of all the early churches was the lynchpin with which Owen attacked Parker and Stillingfleet and other Anglican apologists. Thus he argued that

there was no church before the end of the second century of any other species, nature, or kind, but a particular congregational church only, as hath been proved before. Let any one instance be produced of a church of one denomination, national, provincial, or diocesan, or of any other kind than that which is congregational, and I will give over this contest.[74]

Instead of giving over the contest, Owen was certain that the English diocesan system was a positive impediment to a true reformation.

V

As one historian recently commented regarding the “dissenting agenda for reformation” during 1679–82, its emphasis on individual choice and liberty in religious matters was a call for “the complete abandonment of the church settlement of 1662–65,” striking “at the heart the persecuting church championed by Restoration Anglicanism.”[75] However, when Owen’s pre-Exclusion Crisis (1679–82) writings are examined, the rhetoric of returning to the purity of the early church is clearly discernible, providing the precedent for renewed emphasis during the tumultuous years of the Popish Plot when both Anglicans and Dissenters were claiming themselves to be the true heirs of the reformation.

Religious persecution, in Owen’s mind, was inconsistent with reformation. In a redefinitional exercise, Owen pushed the reformation back to the first Advent of Christ, thus giving two emphases. Firstly he posited a radical discontinuity between the Old and the New Testaments. We have already seen, in our discussion of the weakness and shadowy nature of the Old Testament worship, that Owen regarded the Old Testament as a preparatory stage before the beginning of true reformation and climax of revelation in Christ. Secondly he stressed the continuity between the apostolic and early church and the current dissenting churches. They were both anti-persecutorial and allowed for a multiplicity of liturgical perspectives without human imposition.[76] In that sense, Owen could extol the suffering endured by the early church of the “first reformation,”[77] lament the treachery of the council of Constance and emperor Sigismund in reneging on the original safe conduct and in killing John Huss and Jerome of Prague,[78] offer both encomium for Cranmer and other framers of the Edwardian Prayer Book while reminding the readers that their reform was self-admittedly fragmentary and incomplete,[79] and finally encourage the members of numerous Interregnum Parliaments to get back to the zeal of the “real reformation.”[80]

John Spurr has commented that for the Restoration churchmen to acknowledge the validity of the dissenters’ separation and to relax the terms of comprehension was “tantamount to are cognition of the dissenters’ case for separation,” and to betray the historical legacy and legitimacy of the anti-dissent ecclesiastical policies of the English church, and most significantly to admit that the Anglican pattern of reformation was not always licit and edifying.[81] Peter Heylyn, for instance, devoted his literary skills and energies to writing the true history of the English Reformation. Following the examples of Cyprian and Augustine, the Restoration churchmen were careful to emphasize that a true reformation was always carried out in unity.[82]

Owen, while commending the Edwardian reformers for their adherence to the word of God and for their zeal in pushing forward the reform, nevertheless pointed out the incomplete nature of their work, especially in regards to the ceremonial issues. There were two reasons why liturgical imposition had been necessary before the time of the reformation: first, the “disability of the present ministers of the churches to celebrate and administer the ordinances. .. to the honour of God and edification of the church,” and secondly, the “great importance of uniformity in the worship of God.” If such unreformed nature of the church necessitated liturgical impositions, as was the case in the Edwardian reformation (and Owen is not too critical of that), then they surely could not be made a fixture in the ecclesiastical life, for according to Owen, the church was to be reforming into the primitive pattern all the time, soon bringing about a “timely expiration” of the Prayer Book liturgy.[83] To Owen, this was the legacy of the Edwardian reform which subsequent generations of reform-minded Protestants ought not to have owned; thus it was ludicrous to remain content with the imposition of the adiaphora.[84] Moreover, Owen’s encomium of the episcopal reformers of the sixteenth century provided the requisite ammunition to critique the doctrinal deviation of the late-seventeenth-century churchmen, especially Samuel Parker.[85]

Two different conceptions of edification also entailed two divergent views of reformation. Owen conceived of the primary impetus of reformation to be individual believers and pastors in union with Christ, the aggregate sum of this individual union giving rise to a community of believers in a church. Neither reforming of the nation’s “faith by statute”[86] nor reformation by Prelates could be envisioned, and that is why Owen’s rhetoric of toleration was often couched in the language of a continuing reformation. For Owen, to complete effectively the work of reformation, no imposition of indifferent matters could be allowed. Such was precisely what Parker and Stillingfleet were calling for, and more crucially, the systematic fault within episcopacy was too great to be tolerated by anyone who seriously contemplated the work of reformation.

In fact Owen criticized the Restoration Church, turning the polemic of schism on its head, and argued that since the Church of England was not placing more emphasis on conversion and edification, they were part of the “fundamental causes of our divisions.” Moreover, the virtual collapse of congregational discipline, Owen argued, robbed the established Church of one necessary tool for further reform. Consequently he ruefully warned, “Neither will things have any better success where the discipline degenerates into an outward forcible jurisdiction and power."[87]

However, it was not until Owen’s debate with Stillingfleet that the cause of the Reformation was brought to the fore of the polemic. Stillingfleet had charged the Dissenters with weakening “the Cause of the Reformation” with their separatistic zeal. To bolster his claim, Stillingfleet quoted heavily from Calvin’s Institutes. Moreover, Jean Daille, Moise Amyraut, and Francis Turretin’s anti-Roman writings were adduced as further proof of the sin of unjustifiable separation.[88] Owen’s answer to this charge was somewhat ambiguous, for herein Owen and his dissenting colleagues faced a dilemma. Could they justify their separation from the Church of England without having to hear from the Roman Catholics that such a fissiparous and ever-dividing outcome is the richly deserved harvest of the first separation? Owen argued that the Church of England had right doctrine and possessed the two marks of the true church, but the main problem was the lack of desire for further reform:

That though a church ... do [sic] not profess any heinous error in doctrine. .. yet there may be sufficient reasons to refrain from its communion in church order and worship, and to join in or with other churches for edification; that is, that where such a church is not capable of reformation, or is obstinate in a resolution not to reform itself, under the utmost necessity thereof, it is lawful for all or any of its members to reform themselves, according to the mind of Christ and the commands of the gospel.[89]

Moreover, contrary to Stillingfleet’s claim, Owen argued that “the whole cause of the Protestant’s separation from the church of Rome is strengthened and confirmed” by the Dissenters’ refraining from communion with the Church of England. Principles of the Reformation which Owen owned for the cause of Dissent were sola scriptura, the priesthood of all believers, and absolute anti-popery. Sola scriptura was used by the Protestants to inveigh against the Catholic additions of traditions and the Apocrypha, among other things, as ways of having diluted the purity of the gospel. Much as the Dissenters agreed with the Thirty-Nine Articles, they nonetheless dissented concerning the additional ceremonies that went beyond the principle of sola scriptura, as interpreted through the hermeneutics of the Puritans. The priesthood of all believers was an ambiguous principle for the magisterial reformers since this maxim was often taken to its extreme position of levelling all distinctions lay and clerical, and was associated, in their minds, with subversive anticlericalism.[90] However, for those who had embraced a Congregationalist ecclesiology, this was a welcome polemical tool to wield, especially as the Anglicans were arguing that the laity had no power to choose its own pastors. Owen noted:

This principle of the Reformation, in vindication of the rights, liberties, and privileges of the Christian people, to judge and choose for themselves in matters of religion, to join freely in those church-duties which are required of them, without which the work of it had never been carried on, we do abide by.. .. Yea, we meet with no opposition more fierce than upon the account of our asserting the liberties and rights of the people in reference unto church order and worship.[91]

In an oblique reference to the Laudian overtures made before the Civil War, prompted more recently by such events as the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670,[92] the Popish Plot of 1678–81,[93] and the further intensifying of persecution of the Dissenters,[94] Owen had enough confidence to claim that “so far as there is a declension from this principle [of anti-Popery], so far the cause of the Reformation is weakened, and the principal reason of separation from the Roman church is rejected.”[95]

Finally, it must be remembered that for Owen true liberty of conscience, as secured by the reformation principle of the priesthood of all believers, would be a catalyst for further reformation in the church. The Church of England, though a real church, had no concrete plans for reformation, nor did its “dalliances” with Popery and damning of Dissent show any hope for ecclesiastical reunion, a hope that was much dimmer than Owen perhaps was prepared to admit.

VI

Describing the rhetoric of toleration among the dissenters, De Krey explained:

Like the sectarians they embraced religious pluralism despite their attachment to a state church. They were utterly confident of the ability of individuals of different religious persuasions to “live peaceably and quietly” under a regime devoted to liberty of conscience, an optimistic perspective that separated them from the conservative anthropology of traditionalist cases for uniformity.[96]

In terms of traditional theological anthropology it was actually the Calvinists— of whom Owen was perhaps England’s best known in his life-time—not the Arminianizing tendencies of the established Church that had a less “optimistic perspective.” Then, how does one account for the claim of De Krey? The answer seems to lie in ecclesiological differences. Since Owen and his Independent colleagues believed in gathered churches of believers, since the Restoration Church of England, though possessing of correct doctrine in the Thirty-Nine Articles, was jeopardizing its purity and ecclesial validity due to a woeful lack of discipline, and since the dissenters’ idea of reformation held liturgies and impositions to be unnecessary if not positively detrimental elements, it was inevitable that Owen, one who was so committed to doctrinal orthodoxy, would be committed to religious toleration as well.

The development of Restoration Anglican ecclesiology in a more Roman Catholic direction and its attendant view of the reform of the church made dim the prospect of reconciliation between the Church and Dissent.[97] Perhaps the political exigencies of the period called for the granting of toleration in 1689. However, it is important that for Owen—and by extension other Independent dissenters—a theology of religious toleration was based on his opposition to imposition of the adiaphora, congregationalist ecclesiology and a vision of reforming the church which could only be allowed to practice outside the pale of a national church. The “Protestant uniformity” pushed for during the Restoration soon gave way to the “Protestant diversity” and pluriformity of the Glorious Revolution. Owen, albeit failing to anticipate the religious indifference that would rise from a great multiplicity of religious perspectives, made a contribution to this diversity which, though incidental, was not insignificant.[98]

The author would like to thank John Coffey, Eamon Duffy, and Brent Whitefield for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 1.34, cited in John Owen, Of Toleration, in The Works of John Owen (16 vols.; ed. W. H. Goold; London: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–53; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1967), 8:185; hereafter Works.
2. See, e.g., J. Wayne Baker, “Church, State, and Toleration: John Locke and Calvin’s Heirs in England, 1644–1689,” in Later Calvinism: International Perspectives (ed. W. Fred Graham; Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994), 525–43; hereafter Later Calvinism.
3. See essays in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); hereafter Tolerance and Intolerance.
4. W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (4 vols.; London: Allen & Unwin, 1932–40); William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); S. R. Gardiner, The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1878), 136. See also Joseph Lecler, Toleration and Reformation (2 vols.; trans. T. L. Westow; London: Longmans, 1960), 2:453–61; George Yule, The Independents in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 13, 45; A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–49) from the Clarke Manuscripts (London: J. M. Dent, 1938); Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), 170.
5. Blair Worden, Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate, in Persecution and Toleration (ed. W.J. Sheils; Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 207.
6. Avihu Zakai, ‘Religious Toleration and Its Enemies: The Independent Divines and the Issue of Toleration During the English Civil War,” Albion 21 (1989): 1-33; idem, “Orthodoxy in England and New England: Puritans and the Issue of Religious Toleration, 1640–1650,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 135 (1991): 401-41; Carolyn Polizzotto, “The Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652,” JEH 38 (1987): 569-81.
7. John Coffey, “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 41(1998): 961-85; idem, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (New York: Longman, 2000); Norah Carlin, “Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution,” in Tolerance and Intolerance, 216–30.
8. Though this has usually been associated with Whiggish historiography even revisionists such as Blair Worden, at least by implication, assume that Arminianism, and especially its “sinister” sibling Socinianism, tended to foster a zeitgeist of tolerance and ideological mutuality See Worden, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate,” 202–3.
9. Recent historiography has emphasized the continuity of the issues and personnel that shaped the trajectory of the Restoration ecclesiastical and political settlement. See, e.g., Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie, eds., The Politics of Religion in Restoration England(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
10. Gary S. De Krey, “Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667–1672,” Historical Journal38 (1995): 54. Juxtaposing this with Geoffrey Nuttall’s comment that “the more positive, and to some extent new, religious motives which lay behind the Congregational men’s opposition to persecution and compulsion in matters of faith have perhaps been insufficiently appreciated,” the necessity of a study of Owen’s theology of liberty of conscience emerges more clearly. See G. F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), 104.
11. To be sure, Christopher Hill, Richard Ashcraft, and J. Wayne Baker have treated Owen s theory of religious toleration. However, their treatments have given us either a picture of an erstwhile radical tamed by the adverse turn of events during the Restoration, or that of the radical influence on John Locke, both of which historians such as Gordon Schochet, Richard Greaves, and GaryDe Krey have challenged. See Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London: Faber &Faber, 1984), 170–78; Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), xii-xiii, 42–47, 62–66, 70–74; J. Wayne Baker, “Church, State, and Toleration: John Locke and Calvin’s Heirs in England, 1644–1689,” in Later Calvinism, 525–43. For countervailing views, see Gordon Schochet, “Radical Politics and Ash-craft’s Treatise on Locke,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 491-510; Richard Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); idem, Enemies under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1677 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); De Krey, “Rethinking the Restoration,” 55–56, 67–69, 74, 79.
12. By espousing a congregational autonomy in deciding these controverted points, the Independents diffused the ecclesiastical policy-making power-base, from Lambeth to localities. As R. S. Paul points out, it was this different conception of ecclesiology that drove a wedge between the Presbyterians and the Independents. See Paul, Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), 31, 191–94, 199–206, 487–91. However, as Chad Van Dixhoorn has shown in his recently completed doctoral thesis at Cambridge University on the Minutes of the Westminster Assembly, the view that ecclesiology was the primary issue of debate, as has thus far been understood, needs to be revised substantially.
13. John Wilson, Pulpitin Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640–48 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).
14. See Bernard Verkamp, T he Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977); and J. H. Primus, The Vestments Controversy (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1960).
15. Works, 13:223. See Nuttall, Visible Saints, 16. The best introduction to Owen s life and thought is Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen, Pastor, Educator, Theologian (Exeter: Paternoster, 1971). Two more recent works on Owen help us contextualize his trinitarian theology and method. See Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, England: Paternoster, 1998); Sebastian Rehnman, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002).
16. The text of this letter is found in Winthrop Papers, Vol. 5, 1645–1649 (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society 1947), 23–25.
17. Works, 8:63.
18. Ibid., 8:61. Luther s critique of the Council of Nicea is found in Of Councils and the Church, in Luther’s Works (55 vols.; ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1958–75), 41:3–178.
19. Works, 8:168.
20. Ibid., 8:183.
21. Ibid., 8:184. This is not to say that Owen was entirely critical of Constantine. Despite the coalescing of the start of the decline of Christian purity and Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as state religion, Owen reported that it was Constantine who proclaimed that “liberty of worship is not to be denied; and therefore the Christians, as others, should have liberty to keep the faith of their religion and heresy.” Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 10.5, cited in Works, 8:185.
22. See William Bartlett s significant treatise which amply reflects the ecclesiological concern of the Independents, Iconographia, Or a model of the primitive Congregational way (London, 1647). See also Nuttall, Visible Saints, 1–2, 43–70, 131–55; T. D. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). The best treatment of the fascination with the renaissance ethos among English Puritans is J. S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
23. The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683 (ed. Alan MacFarlane; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 57, 121, dated 31 March 1646 and 31 March 1648.
24. See Polizzotto, “Campaign against The Humble Proposals,” 569–81.
25. This was the phrase used to describe the type of Christians whose liberty of conscience would be protected in the Commonwealth. See Commons Journal 7 (7 December 1654): 397.
26. Calendar of State Paper Domestic 1654, 3. For John Biddle, see DNB; and H.J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1951).
27. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, in Works, 12:577–79.
28. Calvin, Institutes, 3.20.34, cited in Thomas Long, An exercitation concerning the frequent use of our Lords Prayer in the Publick worship of God (London, 1658), 50, 58, where Calvin’s letter to Somerset, dated 22 October 1548, is quoted to support Long’s position.
29. Beza, Annotation on the New Testament, on Luke 11, cited in Long, An exercitation, 50.
30. Martin Chemnitz, Harmony of the Gospels, 175, cited in Long, An exercitation, 50.
31. David Paraeus on Matt 6, cited in Long, An exercitation, 52.
32. Long, An exercitation, 53, 56.
33. Works, 13:513. See also sermon notes on Owen’s Parliamentary sermon delivered on 31 January 1649, Cambridge University Library mss Add. 4876, fol. 622.
34. See G. W. Bromiley introduction to Zwingli and Bullinger (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 29: “For Zwingli there were, strictly speaking, no adiaphora.”
35. For the theological context of John Hooper s radical anti-Adiaphorist position, see John R. Franke, “The Religious Thought of John Hooper” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1997); Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 70–76, 150–51. The fall-out among the exiles in Frankfurt is described in Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 33, 72, 153; [William Whittingham], A Brief Discours off the Troublesbegonne at Franckford (1575).
36. Gordon Schochet, “Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (ed. Roger Lund; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 145 n. 35.
37. William Bradshaw, A Treatise of the nature & use of things indifferent (repr., 1660). This was part of a larger reprint work of Bradshaw’s eight treatises, originally published between 1604–5, concerning conformity and the adiaphora. For a helpful discussion of the ideological context of Bradshaw and Jacobean Puritanism, see Peter Lake, “William Bradshaw, Antichrist, and the Community of the Godly,” JEH 36 (1985): 570-89.
38. Bradshaw, A Treatise of. .. things indifferent, 19, 22, 23–24.
39. Works, 14:522.
40. Ibid., 15:42. See also Owen, An answer to Dr. Stillingfleet’s book of the unreasonableness of separation (1681), in Works, 15:421 for a Zwinglian stance on the adiaphora.
41. De Krey argues that Owen was joined by Philip Nye and John Humfrey during the late 1660s and early 1670s in drawing “a sharp distinction between the external sphere of public morality and religious order” and the “internal sphere of spiritual belief and worship”: the former was of magisterial prerogative and the latter of the individual. See De Krey, “Rethinking the Restoration,” 58.
42. Works, 15:43. See also Truth and Innocence Vindicated (1669), in Works, 13:381 where Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian dictator and Roman emperors Caligula and Domitian are proffered as evidence of usurpation of the divine prerogative to institute terms of worship.
43. Works, 15:38–39.
44. Ibid., 13:544, 547, 550, 555.
45. Owen was countervailing the Restoration churchmen’s claim: “as though that were grown a civil difference, by the interposition of a law, which before was purely religious” (ibid., 13:549).
46. Ibid., 13:549–50.
47. Owen, A continuation of the exposition of theEpistle to the Hebrews, III (1680), in Works, 21:410, 415, 416–17, 430, 433.
48. This was an allusion to the ecclesiastical policies of imposition in the Restoration.
49. Works, 15:426.
50. For a helpful discussion of the Laudian fascination with order and decency in worship, see Peter Lake, “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (ed. Kenneth Fincham; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 161–86.
51. Robert Grove, in A Collection of Cases and other Discourses, Lately written to recover Dissenters to the Communion of the Church of England, By Some Divines of the City of London (1694), 7.
52. For Anglican interest in Patristics, see Jean-Louis Quantin, “The Fathers in Seventeenth-century Anglican Theology,” in The Reception of the Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists (2 vols.; ed. Irena Backus; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 2:987–1008; J. K. Luoma, “Who owns the Fathers? Hooker and Cartwright on the Authority of the Primitive Church,” Sixteenth Century Journal8 (1977): 45-59; John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 107–9, 111, 158.
53. Works, 13:561–62 where his exegesis of Phil 3:15–16 is linked thematically with the Pauline injunction in Rom 14 and 15. Not surprisingly Stillingfleet differed from Owen’s interpretation of Phil 3:15–16 and the supposed link between that and Rom 14.
54. Ibid., 13:561. Owen also asserted: “Differences in external rites of worship which were found amongst them, where the substance of faith was preserved, they looked upon as no breach of union at all” (ibid., 13:563).
55. Ibid., 13:561–62.
56. D. R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 55.
57. Ibid., 56.
58. Owen, Indulgence and Toleration considered (1667), in Works, 13:531. See also ibid., 13:573, 586 where Owen quotes Tacitus (Annales 15.44) to argue that the misery of Christians tended to strengthen, not weaken, their conviction, thus actually increasing the subversive potential of those long under persecuting hands of the regime.
59. Ibid., 13:532.
60. Three of the most representative Augustinian henchmen during this period were Richard Perrinchief, Thomas Long and Samuel Parker. Unsurprisingly, Owen comes to blows directly with Parker and Long. See Goldie, “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (ed. O. P. Grell, J. Israel, and N. Tyacke; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 331–68. See Works, 13:556 where Owen speaks of the utter impossibility of cultural, epistemological, and intellectual, let alone religious, uniformity thus critiquing the zeal of the Restoration church for their Sisyphean endeavor.
61. See especially Owen’s commentary on Heb 11:4 on the example of Abel whose faith was commended, above all, for right worship—externally and internally For Puritan self-fashioning see Margo Todd, “Puritan Self-fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 236-64.
62. Works, 15:395. Owen’s position had much similarity with Edward Bagshaw’s who stressed the counterintuitive nature of the Restoration ecclesiastical policies. Bagshaw argued that imposition of the indifferent things “brings in the Essence, though not the Name of Popery” and that by imposing severe penalties for nonconformity “we seem to lay as much. .. stress upon these Indifferent things, as upon any the most material parts of our Religion.” Bagshaw, The great question concerning things indifferent (London, 1660), 11, 12.
63. Works, 15:396.
64. Ibid., 13:526.
65. Ibid., 13:527. Elsewhere, Owen argues that religious coercion will often bring about the opposite of the desired effect: “For no man, surely, is so vain as to imagine that compulsion and penalties are a means suited to persuade or convince the minds of men; nay, commonly it is known that they have a contrary effect, and do exceedingly confirm men in their own persuasions, and into an alienation from the things they are compelled unto” (ibid., 13:533). Augustine’s exegesis of Luke 14:23 and its context of the Donatist controversy is in one of Augustine’s letters: “You are of opinion that no one should be compelled to follow righteousness; and yet you read that the householder said to his servants, ‘Whomsoever ye shall find, compel them to come in.’. .. You are also of opinion that no coercion is to be used with any man in order to his deliverance from the fatal consequences of error; and yet you see that, in examples which cannot be disputed, this is done by God.” Letter 93.2.5 (to Vincentius, A.D. 408); see Letter 173.1 (to Donatus, A.D. 416).
66. Though on the whole Owen approved the doctrinal stance of the Anglican church, at other times he was an unambiguous critic of the Arminian innovation, which, to him, was prompted by the decline of Calvinist orthodoxy in the Jacobean and Caroline Church. For instances of approbation, see Works, 13:354 where Owen argues: “The chief glory of the English Reformation consisted in the purity of its doctrine, then first restored to the nation. This, as it is expressed in the articles of religion, and in the publicly-authorized writings of bishops and chief divines of the church of England, is, as was said, the glory of the English Reformation.” See also Works, 13:182–206, 551–52, 554, 555; 2:304. For instances of disapproval due to Arminian innovation, see Works, 14:520–27; 2:279–80.
67. See, e.g., Thomas Long’s Calvinus redivivus; or, Conformity to the Church of England. .. perswaded by Mr. Calvin (1673); William Saywell, Evangelical and Catholick Unity (1682), 228–45 (Bucer); 246–55 (Luther); 256–61 (Melanchthon); 261–71 (Calvin); Francis Fullwood, Humble Advice to the conforming and non-conforming mininsters and people (1673), 86; idem, Doctrine of Schism fully opened (1672), 135–36.
68. For the Puritan criticism of “will-worship” of the Laudian church, see for example, Daniel Cawdrey, Diatribe triplex: or A threefold exercitation, concerning. .. Will-worship. .. With the reverend and learned Dr Hammond (1654); idem, The vindication of the three-fold diatribe (1658). William Fenner’s Four select sermons. .. wherein the idolatry and will-worship of the church of Rome is. .. confuted, &c. was published in 1668, indicating the depth of the controversy the issue of liturgy and additions of worship had become.
69. Works, 8:137–38, 143.
70. Ibid., 13:563. Aside from Origen (Adversus Celsus, Bk. III), Owen also cited Justin Martyr’s Second Apology and Ignatius’s letter to the Philadelphians.
71. Ibid., 13:553.
72. See Peter Heylyn, Aerius redivivus: or, The History of the Presbyterians. .. From the year 1536, to the year 1647 (1670).
73. Works, 13:568: “In the meantime, we know that the most of them who agreed together to press for severity against us for dissenting from them do differ among themselves in things of far greater importance in the doctrine of the gospel than those are wherein we differ from them.” For the Calvinist-Arminian theological divide in the Church of England up to the time of the Civil War, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
74. Works, 15:441.
75. Gary De Krey “Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679–1682,” in Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688 (ed. Donna Hamilton and Richard Strier; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 234.
76. See especially his A Discourse on Liturgies and their Imposition, in Works, 15:54–55. See also Works, 13:12 where Owen criticises the hermeneutical “confusion” among Anglicans, specifically referring to Herbert Thorndike’s Of Religious Assemblies and the Public Service of God (1642) where Thorndike looks to the Old Testament examples and precepts to develop an Anglican blueprint for liturgy and worship.
77. Works, 13:547.
78. Ibid., 13:565.
79. Ibid., 15:29. See also ibid., 15:206–8.
80. Ibid., 8:422–23, 424–25.
81. John Spurr, “Schism and the Restoration Church,” JEH 41 (1990): 420-21; idem, “The Church of England, Comprehension and the Toleration Act of 1689,” English Historical Review 104 (1989): 941-43.
82. [John Fell], Of the Unity of the Church. .. written. .. by Cyprian Bishop of Carthage and Martyr (Oxford, 1681). Augustine’s anti-Donatist polemic was effectively utilised by the Restoration churchmen to persecute and stamp out dissent: see Mark Goldie’s excellent article, “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in From Persecution to Toleration, 331–68. The judgment of. .. St. Augustine, concerning penal lawes against conventicles, and for unity in religion. Deliver’d in his 48th epistle to Vincentius (London, 1670) was reprinted to set forth Augustine as the apologist for the Anglican insistence on ecclesiastical unity and anti-separatism. Peter Heylyn left a rich historiographical legacy for the Church of England. Representative of his apologia for the Laudian and Restoration Church are: Ecclesia vindicata; or, The Church of England justified (London, 1657); Ecclesia restaurata; or, The history of the reformation of the Church of England (London, 1661); Examen historicum (London, 1659); Aerius redivivus; or, The history of the Presbyterians. .. from. .. 1536 to. .. 1647 (London, 1670); Cyprianus Anglicus: or, The history of the life and death of. .. William. .. archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1668).
83. Works, 15:29–32.
84. Owen’s view was also echoed in [Vincent Alsop], Melius Inquirendum, or a Sober Inquiry (London, 1681 edn.), 31, 37; A Proposal of Union amongst Protestants (London, 1679), 3.
85. Works, 13:355.
86. See Norman Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and Settlement of Religion, 1559 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982).
87. Works, 15:115–16, 116–25, 121, 100, 433.
88. Stillingfleet, The Unreasonableness of Separation (London, 1681), 178–87. Calvin’ s Institutes, 4.1.9–19; 4.2.1–6 were cited as proof of his anti-separatistic stance.
89. Works, 15:397.
90. See Willem Balke, Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981).
91. Works, 15:403–4.
92. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics, 60, 63.
93. See Jonathan Scott, England’ s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot, in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, 108–31.
94. Richard Ashcraft commented that the period centering 1670 marked a significant intensification of the political persecution of religious dissidents,” thus helping us to situate the historical context of Owen’s tolerationist writings. See Richard Ashcraft, “John Locke, Religious Dissent, and the Origins of Liberalism,” in Restoration, Ideology, and Revolution (ed. Gordon Schochet; Washington, D.C.: The Folger Library, 1990), 152.See also G. Lyon Turner, ed., Original Records of Early Nonconformity under Persecution and Indulgence (3 vols.; London: T F. Unwin, 1911), 3:56; Victor Sutch, Gilbert Sheldon: Architect of Anglican Survival, 1603–1688 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973), 115.
95. Works, 15:404.
96. De Krey ‘Rethinking the Restoration," 80.
97. See Spurr, “Schism and the Restoration Church,” 423. One of the earliest “warnings” of the “defection” of the Laudians from the true legacy of the Reformation came from, not too surprisingly, Richard Baxter, a leading Puritan anti-papal polemicist. In his Grotian Religion Discovered (London, 1658), he divided the Episcopal men into two camps, the “good old” Episcopal men such as James Ussher, John Davenant, Joseph Hall, and Thomas Morton, among others, and the “Grotian or Cassandrian Papists,” who were theologically Arminian and allegedly aspiring to an ecclesiastical reunion with Rome. For more on Baxter’s ecclesiology, see Paul Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Its Seventeenth-Century Context (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
98. For the shift from a Protestant nation to a nation of Protestants, see C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); De Krey, “Reformation in the Restoration Crisis,” 248.