By Richard Baxter
One of our most heinous and palpable sins is pride. This is a sin which has too much sway in most ministers, but which is more hateful and inexcusable in us than in other men. Yet is it so prevalent in some of us, that it fills our discourses, it chooses our company, it forms our countenances, it puts the accent and emphasis upon our words. It fills some men’s minds with aspiring desires and designs. It possesses them with envious and bitter thoughts against those who stand in their light, or who by any means eclipse their glory, or hinder the progress of their reputation. Oh what a constant companion, what a tyrannical commander, what a sly and subtle insinuating enemy, is this sin of pride! It goes with men to the draper, the mercer, the tailor: it chooses them their cloth, their trimming and their fashion. Fewer ministers would ruffle it out in the fashion in hair and clothing, if it were not for the command of this tyrannous vice.
I wish that this were all, or the worst. But, alas, how frequently does pride go with us to our study, and there sit with us and do our work! How oft does it choose our subject, and, more frequently still, our words and ornaments! God commands us to be as plain as we can — that we may inform the ignorant; and as convincing and serious as we are able — that we may melt and change their hardened hearts. But pride stands by and contradicts all, and produces its toys and trifles. It pollutes, rather than polishes. And, under presence of laudable ornaments, dishonors our sermons with childish things, as if a prince were to be decked in the clothes of a stage-player, or a painted fool. Pride persuades us to paint the window, that it may dim the light, and to speak to our people that which they cannot understand, to let them know that we are able to speak unprofitably. If we have a plain and cutting passage, it takes off the edge, and dulls the life of our preaching, under presence of filing off the roughness, unevenness, and excess. When God charges us to deal with men as for their lives, and to beseech them with all the earnestness that we are able; this cursed sin controls all, and condemns the most holy commands of God, and says to us, “What! Will you make people think you are mad? Will you make them say you rage or rave? Cannot you speak soberly and moderately?” And thus does pride make many a man’s sermons! And what pride makes the devil makes, and what sermons the devil will make and to what end, we may easily conjecture. Though the matter is of God — yet if the dress, and manner, and end is from Satan — we have no great reason to expect success.
And when pride has made the sermon in the study — it goes with us into the pulpit — and forms our tone, animates us in the delivery, takes us off from that which may be displeasing, howsoever necessary, and sets us in pursuit of vain applause! In short, the sum of all is this — pride makes men, both in studying and preaching — to seek themselves, and deny God — when they should be seeking God’s glory, and denying themselves! When they should inquire, “What shall I say, and how shall I say it — to please God best, and do most good?” pride makes them ask, “What shall I say, and how shall I deliver it, to be thought a learned able preacher, and to be applauded by all that hear me?”
When the sermon is done, pride goes home with them, and makes them more eager to know whether they were applauded than whether they did prevail for the saving of souls. Were it not for shame, they could find in their hearts to ask people how they liked them and to draw out their commendations. If they perceive that they are highly thought of, they rejoice, as having attained their end; but if they see that they are considered but weak or common men, they are displeased, as having missed the prize they had in view!
But even this is not all, nor the worst, if worse may be. Oh, that ever it should be said of godly ministers, that they are so set upon popular air, and on sitting highest in men’s estimation; that they envy the talents and names of their brethren who are preferred before them. As if all were taken from their praise, that is given to another; and as if God had given them his gifts to be the mere ornaments and trappings of their persons, that they may walk as men of reputation in the world, and as if all his gifts to others were to be trodden down and vilified, if they seem to stand in the way of their honor!
What! A saint, a preacher of Christ, and yet envy that which has the image of Christ, and malign his gifts for which he should have the glory, and all because they seem to hinder our glory? Is not every true Christian a member of the body of Christ, and, therefore, partaker of the blessings of the whole, and of each particular member thereof? And does not every man owe thanks to God for his brethren’s gifts, not only as having himself a part in them, as the foot has the benefit of the guidance of the eye, but also because his own ends may be attained by his brethren’s gifts, as well as by his own? For if the glory of God, and the church’s felicity, be not his end, he is not a Christian. Will any workman malign another, because he helps him to do his master’s work? Yet, alas, how common is this heinous crime of envy and pride — among the ministers of Christ! They can secretly blot the reputation of those that stand in the way of their own; and what they cannot for shame do in plain and open terms, lest they be proved liars and slanderers, they will do in generals, and by malicious intimations, raising suspicions where they cannot fasten accusations. And some go so far, that they are unwilling that anyone who is abler than themselves, should come into their pulpits, lest they should be more applauded than themselves! A fearful thing it is, that any man, who has the least of the fear of God, should so envy God’s gifts, and had rather that his carnal hearers should remain unconverted, and the drowsy unawakened, than that it should be done by another who may be preferred before him!
Yes, so far does this cursed vice prevail, that in large congregations, which have need of the help of many preachers, we can scarcely, in many places, get two of equality to live together in love and quietness, and unanimously to carry on the work of God. But unless one of them be quite below the other in abilities, and content to be so esteemed, or unless he is willing to be ruled by him, they are contending for precedency, and envying each other’s interest, and walking with coldness and jealousy towards one another, to the shame of their profession, and the great wrong of their people!
I am ashamed to think of it, that when I have been laboring to convince people of the great necessity of more ministers than one in large congregations, they tell me, “they will never agree together!” I hope the objection is unfounded as to the most, but it is a sad case that it should be true of any. Nay, some men are so far gone in pride, that when they might have an equal assistant to further the work of God, they had rather take all the burden upon themselves, though more than they can bear, than that anyone should share with them in the honor, or that their interest in the esteem of the people should be diminished!
Hence also it is, that men do so magnify their own opinions, and are as censorious of any who differ from them in lesser things, as if it were all one to differ from them, and from God. They expect that all should conform to their judgment, as if they were the rulers of the church’s faith; and while we cry down papal infallibility, too many of us would be popes ourselves, and have all stand to our determination, as if we were infallible! It is true, we have more modesty than expressly to say so. We pretend that it is only the evidence of truth in our reasons, that we expect men should yield to, and our zeal is the truth — and not for ourselves. But as that must needs be taken for truth which is ours, so our reasons must needs be taken for valid. And if they be but freely examined and be found fallacious, as we are exceedingly backward to see it ourselves, because the opinions are ours — so we are angry that our errors should be disclosed to others. We so espouse the cause of our errors, as if all that were spoken against them were spoken against our persons, and we were heinously injured to have our arguments thoroughly confuted, by which we injured the truth and the souls of men.
So high indeed are our spirits, that when it becomes the duty of any one to reprove us — we are commonly impatient both of the matter and the manner. We love the man who will say as we say, and be of our opinion, and promote our reputation, though in other respects, he is less worthy of our esteem. But we think that one is ungrateful to us — if he differs from us, and deals plainly with us as to our errors, and tells us of our faults. Especially in the management of our public arguings, where the eye of the world is upon us, we can scarcely endure any reproof or plain dealing. I know that railing language is to be abhorred, and that we should be as tender of each other’s reputation, as our fidelity to the truth will permit. But our pride makes too many of us think all men condemn us — who do not admire us, yes, and admire all we say, and submit their judgments to our most obvious mistakes! We are so tender — that a man can scarcely touch us but we are hurt. We are so high-minded, that a man who is not versed in complimenting and skilled in flattery, can scarcely tell how to speak to us, without us being offended at some word, which our proud hearts will fasten on and take as injurious to our honor.
I confess I have often wondered that this most heinous sin should be made so light of, and thought so consistent with a holy frame of heart and life, when far less sins are by ourselves, proclaimed to be so damnable in our people! And I have wondered more, to see the difference between godly preachers and ungodly sinners, in this respect. When we speak to drunkards, worldlings, or ignorant unconverted persons, we disgrace them to the utmost, and lay it on as plainly as we can speak, and tell them of their sin, and shame, and misery. And we expect that they should not only bear all patiently, but take all thankfully. And most that I deal with do take it patiently; and many gross sinners will commend the closest preachers most, and will say that they care not for hearing a man that will not tell them plainly of their sins. But if we speak to ministers against their errors or their sins, if we do not honor them and reverence them, and speak as smoothly as we are able to speak, yes, if we mix not commendations with our reproofs, and if the applause is not predominant, so as to drown all the force of the reproof, they take it as almost an insufferable injury!
Brethren, I know this is a sad confession, but that all this should exist among us, should be more grievous to us — than to be told of it. Could the evil be hidden, I would not have disclosed it, at least so openly in the view of all. But, alas, it has been so long open to the eyes of the world. We have dishonored ourselves by idolizing our honor; we print our shame, and preach our shame, thus proclaiming it to the whole world. Some will think that I speak over-charitably when I call such persons godly men, in whom so great a sin as pride, does so much prevail. I know, indeed, that where it is predominant, not hated, and bewailed, and mortified in the main — there can be no true godliness; and I beseech every man to exercise a strict jealousy and search of his own heart. But if all be graceless who are guilty of any pride, or of most of the fore-mentioned discoveries of pride, the Lord be merciful to the ministers of this land, and give us quickly another spirit, for grace is then a rarer thing than most of us have supposed it to be.
Yet I must needs say, that I do not mean to involve all the ministers of Christ in this charge. To the praise of divine grace be it spoken, we have some among us who are eminent for humility and meekness, and who, in these respects, are exemplary to their flocks and to their brethren. It is their glory, and shall be their glory; and makes them truly honorable and lovely in the eyes of God and of all good men, and even in the eyes of the ungodly themselves. O that the rest of us were eminent for humility and meekness! But, alas, this is not the case with all of us.
O that the Lord would lay us at his feet in the tears of sincere sorrow for this sin of pride! Brethren, may I expostulate this case a little with my own heart and yours, that we may see the evil of our sin, and be reformed! Is not pride the sin of devils, the first-born of hell? Is not pride, that wherein Satan’s image does much consist? And is pride to be tolerated in men who are so engaged against him and his kingdom as we are? The very design of the gospel is to abase us, and the work of grace is begun and carried on in humiliation. Humility is not a mere ornament of a Christian, but an essential part of the new creature. It is a contradiction in terms — to be a Christian, and not humble. All who will be Christians must be Christ’s disciples, and “come to him to learn”; and the lesson which he teaches them, is, to “be meek and lowly.” Oh, how many precepts and admirable examples has our Lord and Master given us to this end. Can we behold him washing and wiping his servants’ feet — and yet be proud and self-important? Shall he converse with the poorest of the people, and shall we avoid them as below our notice, and think none but people of wealth and honor fit for our society? How many of us are oftener found in the houses of gentlemen than in the cottages of the poor — who most need our help? There are many of us who would think it below us, to be daily with the most needy and beggarly people, instructing them in the way of life and salvation, as if we had taken charge of the souls of rich people only!
Alas, what is it that we have to be proud of? Is it of our body? Why, is it not made of the like materials as the brutes, and must it not shortly be as loathsome and abominable as a carcass? Is it of our graces? Why, the more we are proud of them — the less we have to be proud of. When so much of the nature of grace consists in humility, it is a great absurdity to be proud of it. Is it of our knowledge and learning? Why, if we have any knowledge at all, we must know how much reason we have to be humble! And if we know more than others, how much more reason have we to be humble. How little is it that the most learned know, in comparison of that of which they are ignorant! To know that things are past your reach, and to know how ignorant you are, one would think should be no great cause of pride. However, do not the devils know more than you? And will you be proud of that in which the devils excel you? Our very business is to teach the great lesson of humility to our people; and how unfit, then, is it that we should be proud ourselves? We must study humility, and preach humility; and must we not possess and practice humility? A proud preacher of humility is a self-condemning man.
What a sad case is it, that so vile a sin is not more easily discerned in ourselves! Many who are most proud can see it in others, and yet take no notice of the pride in themselves! The world takes notice of some among us — that they have proud hearts, and seek for the highest place, and must be the rulers, and bear the sway wherever they are — or else there is no living with them. In any dialogue, they come not to search after truth, but to dictate to others — who, perhaps, are fit to teach them! In a word, they have such arrogant domineering spirits, that the world sees it plainly — and yet they will not see it in themselves!
Brethren, I desire to deal closely with my own heart and yours. I beseech you to consider whether it will benefit us to speak of the grace of humility — while we possess it not; or to speak against the sin of pride — while we indulge in it? Have not many of us cause to inquire diligently, whether sincerity will consist with such a measure of pride as we have in our hearts? When we are telling the drunkard that he cannot be saved unless he becomes temperate, and the fornicator that he cannot be saved unless he become chaste; have we not as great reason if we are proud, to say to ourselves — that we cannot be saved unless we become humble? Pride, in fact, is a greater sin than drunkenness or whoredom; and humility is as necessary as sobriety and chastity.
Truly, brethren, a man may as certainly, and more slyly, make haste to hell, in the way of earnest preaching of the gospel, and seeming zeal for a holy life — as in a way of drunkeness and filthiness. For what is holiness, but a devotedness to God and a living to him? And what is a damnable state, but a devotedness to carnal self and a living to ourselves? And does any one live more to himself, or less to God, than the proud man? And may not pride make a preacher study for himself; and pray and preach, and live to himself — even when he seems to surpass others in the work? It is not the work without the right principle and end which will prove us upright. The work may be God’s, and yet we may do it, not for God, but for ourselves! I confess I feel such continual danger on this point — that if I do not watch, lest I should study for myself, and preach for myself, and write for myself, rather than for Christ —I would soon miscarry; and after all, I justify not myself, when I must condemn the sin.
Consider, I beseech you, brethren, what baits there are in the work of the ministry to entice a man to self-exaltation, even in the highest works of piety. The fame of a godly man is as great a snare as the fame of a learned man. But woe to him that desires the fame of godliness, instead of godliness! “Truly I say unto you, they have their reward in full.” When the times were all for learning and empty formalities, the temptation of the proud did lie that way. But now, when, through the unspeakable mercy of God, the most lively practical preaching is in credit, and godliness itself is in credit, the temptation of the proud is to pretend to be zealous preachers and godly men. Oh, what a fine thing is it to have the people crowding to hear us, and affected with what we say, and yielding up to us their judgments and affections! What a fine thing is it to be cried up as the ablest and godliest man in the country, to be famed through the land for the highest spiritual excellencies! Alas, brethren, a little grace combined with such inducements will serve to make you join yourselves with the forwardest in promoting the cause of Christ in the world. Nay, pride may do it — without grace!
Oh, therefore, be jealous of yourselves, and, amidst all your studies, be sure to study humility. “He who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.” I commonly observe that almost all men, whether good or bad, do loathe the proud, and love the humble. So far indeed does pride contradict itself, that, conscious of its own deformity — it often borrows the homely dress of humility. We have the more cause to be jealous of it, because it is a sin most deeply rooted in our nature — and is the most stubborn sin to be extirpated from the soul.
Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Tuesday, 30 October 2018
John Murray And The Godly Life
By John J. Murray
Professor John Murray (1898 –1975) was regarded in his own life-time as one of the leading Reformed theologians in the English-speaking world. Dr J. I. Packer in a foreword to the latest edition of Murray’s Principles of Conduct has said: “Had John Murray been blessed with the luminous literary grace of a C S Lewis, or the punchy rhetoric of a Charles Hodge, his name would have been put up in lights for the past half century as the finest theologian of our time.... Few have yet appreciated him at his true worth.” [1]
He was born on the 14th of October, 1898 in the parish of Creich, which is in the county of Sutherland in the Highlands of Scotland. He was reared by God-fearing parents who by the time of his birth had changed their allegiance from the Free Church of Scotland to the newly formed Free Presbyterian Church. After his higher education at Dornoch Academy, Murray served as a soldier in World War I, losing the sight of his right eye. He studied at Glasgow University where he came to a decision to prepare for the Christian ministry. His church sent him to study at Princeton Theological Seminary. Within two years of graduating he was invited back by Casper Wistar Hodge, Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton, to be his assistant. This he did for one year before joining the faculty of the newly formed Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. There he taught successive generations of students until his retirement in 1966, when he returned to his native Scotland.
The aim of this study is to examine the godliness that characterized his life. We look first at the influences that shaped the formation of his godly life.
I. The Shaping Of The Godly Life
1. The Spiritual Life In The Parish In Which He Was Brought Up
At the end of the eighteenth century the parish of Creich had been powerfully affected by the gospel. This took place under the ministry of George Rainy. A native of Aberdeenshire, he was inducted as minister of the parish in 1771. According to Donald Sage he had a struggle mastering the Gaelic language: “In other circumstances this drawback would have been fatal to his usefulness as a minister. But Mr. Rainy was the very model of a sincere, practical Christian; he preached the Gospel more by his life than by his lips.” [2] It is said that “over 100 men could openly testify to a personal work of grace and give a reason for the hope that was in them.”
The depth of the religious conviction among the people was revealed when a minister, Rev. Murdoch Cameron, was imposed on the parish in 1813. The dramatic events are recorded by Sage: “The people to a man were opposed to him, and his settlement was one of those violent ones which so much disgraced the Established Church at that period. The parishioners rose en masse, and barred the church against the Presbytery, so that the Sutherland Volunteers, under the command of Captain Kenneth Mackay of Torboll, were called out to keep the peace. In the riot which ensued, Captain Mackay got his sword, which he had naked in his hand, shivered to pieces by stones thrown at him by an old woman over seventy years of age.” [3] The people never afterwards attended Cameron’s ministry but met for worship on Sabbath at Migdale Rock in the summer, and in a barn in the east end of the parish during the winter months. This arrangement was carried on for thirty years and with true Christian spirit these worthy men and women persevered in prayer for an evangelical minister until in 1843 their prayers were answered. The legislation that permitted the imposition of a minister on an unwilling people led ultimately to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland.
The spiritual health of the work in the parish before 1843 depended on four elders. The minister who was called to the newly formed Free Church was the Rev. Dr. Gustavus Aird, later regarded as one of the most distinguished of the Free Church ministers in the Highlands.
Eight more elders were added to the Session in 1844. They were men of such spiritual caliber that Dr. Aird “often confessed to a sense utter want of fitness to preside over such a session.” John Murray’s father, Alexander (or Sandy as he was known), was born at Badbea in 1851. He later recalled how as a youth being able to count “no less than eight prayer-meetings being held on a Saturday evening in an area of three square miles around Badbea.” It is no small testimony to the esteem in which the congregation held Sandy Murray that he was ordained to the eldership at the early age of twenty-seven.
2. The God-Fearing Parents In The Home
John Murray was nurtured by God-fearing parents. In particular he was molded by the example of his father. Asked in later life who had been his greatest mentor, he might have mentioned some of the stars in the theological firmament in the seminaries at Princeton and Westminster. Instead he replied unhesitatingly, “My father.” Writing at the time of his father’s death in 1942, Murray said: “Though he was my father I may say that there are few men in the Highlands of Scotland whose life and memory was surrounded by such fragrance, and whose life of consistent godliness claimed such veneration and respect.” Even in the daily round the father was imparting spiritual counsel to his son. John Murray once told his nephew that he did not “witness a greater intensity of spiritual exercise of soul in any other person and his very body moved in sympathy with the inner man.” [4]
Before Sandy Murray died in 1942 he had taken care to secure from his minister a solemn promise that no obituary of him would be published in the church’s magazine. “He would rather get a slap than flattery,” men said of him in his lifetime. In an obituary notice in the Northern Times it was said: “The death of Mr. Alexander Murray, Badbea, which took place on 7th January, marks the end of an epoch in Highland religious life. The last of the old time saints whose influence was dominant in our communities a hundred years ago. And he was one of the noblest. As an elder in his native parish of Creich from the age of twenty-three until the time of his death in his 91st year, he was universally respected, and more than respected, he was revered...the secret of the veneration in which he was held defies analysis. He was a genuine saint, to whom the unseen was closer than breathing, and his religion was as intensely devotional.” [5]
In that home at Badbea every morning and evening there was family worship, with psalm singing, Scripture reading, and prayer. The Sabbath day, after special preparations on Saturday, was observed with family worship, public worship, and private spiritual exercises, like Catechism instruction and the reading of good books. The yearly Communion Season in August, lasting five days, brought godly folk from neighboring parishes to participate in the services. Badbea, like other homes, was a center of hospitality and fellowship during the five days.
3. The Correct Doctrinal Instruction In His Youth
John Murray was brought up on the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Use was made of it in the home, in the church, and in the day school. It was an educational process of priceless value. Archibald Alexander, who founded Princeton Theological Seminary where John Murray was later to study and to teach, was also brought up on the Shorter Catechism. The invaluable role of catechetical instruction in a young child’s life is beautifully captured in Charles Hodge’s remarks about this important influence in Alexander’s childhood, words that could have equally applied to the young John Murray: “The principles of moral and religious truth contained in that sublime symbol, when once embedded in the mind, enlarge, sustain, and illuminate it for all time. That God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth is a height of knowledge to which Plato never reached.... A series of such precise, accurate, luminous propositions, inscribed on the understanding of a child, is the richest inheritance which can be given to him. They are seeds which need only the vivifying influence of the Spirit of life, to cause them to bring forth the fruits of holiness and glory. Dr. Alexander experienced this benefit in its full extent.” [6]
4. The Spiritual Change That Came About In His Life
There is no doubt that through the godly example set before him and the teaching imparted to him John Murray’s course of life was set in the right direction. His father was imparting spiritual counsel to him in daily conversation. In later life his wife, Valerie, recalled him expressing the belief that he had known Christ from his childhood. The minister of the Free Presbyterian congregation at Bonar Bridge was Ewan MacQueen. Murray later recalled how when visiting the home at Badbea, Mr. MacQueen had the habit of putting his hand on the boy’s head and saying a few words to him affectionately about spiritual things. Murray spoke of those occasions as being accompanied by the first stirrings of spiritual emotion which he could recall.
He was sensitive about wrong-doing from an early age. There are few incidents recorded of his youth but one concerns his determination not to tell a lie again. It is clear that during his army service in World War I spiritual realities were his main concern. Whenever there was opportunity he would draw aside from his comrades and find some corner where he might read his Bible and pray. He made a profession of faith after returning from his military service.
II. Characteristics Of The Godly Life
We go on to consider some of the characteristics of his godly life.
1. His Life Was Characterized By A God-Consciousness
Murray was brought up in an atmosphere where the living and true God was a reality. He came, however, through a conversion experience to know that God personally. In adult life Murray was to become an admirer and follower of the Reformer, John Calvin. Looking back at his own conversion, Calvin could write, “God subdued my heart to teachableness.” Calvin has been described as “a God-possessed soul.” The same could be said of John Murray. He lived and spoke and wrote as a man deeply aware of the presence of God. Writing in later years about piety, Murray said:
2. His Life Was Characterized By A Covenant-Consciousness
Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, C. H. Spurgeon said: “He who understands the covenant has reached the very core and marrow of the Gospel.” Sadly, in the first half of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom, covenant theology suffered an eclipse. The neglect was observed by Dr. J. I. Packer when he said: “In modern Christendom covenant theology has been unjustly forgotten.” The turning point can be dated to July 6, 1953 and a lecture which John Murray delivered on the covenant of grace in Selwyn College, Cambridge, under the auspices of the Tyndale fellowship for Biblical Research. There is no doubt that the publication of the lecture by Tyndale Press in 1954 marked the beginning of a renewed interest in the subject and marked a significant advancement in the comprehension of the biblical concept of the covenant.
The term “covenant” has to do with the relationship between God and man. How can sinful man stand before the God of transcendent majesty and holiness? The biblical answer is that God has been pleased in His sovereign mercy to enter into covenant with man.
In seeking to define it, Murray said: “A divine covenant is a sovereign administration of grace and of promise.” It is also “a relationship with God in that which is the crown and glory of the whole process of religion, namely union and communion with God.... At the centre of covenant revelation as its constant refrain is the assurance ‘I will be your God and ye shall be my people.’” The pulse and heartbeat of the covenant is its “relational character.” “According to this the covenant means that God gives himself to man and man gives himself to God for that full measure of mutual acquaintance and enjoyment of which each side to the relation is capable.” [9]
3. His Life Was Characterized By The Fear Of God
One of the most profound contributions by John Murray to an understanding of the Christian life is his chapter on “The Fear of God” in Principles of Conduct. Asking the question, What is the fear of God? he says that there are at least two obviously distinct senses in which the word “fear” is used in Scripture. “There is the dread or terror of the Lord and there is the fear of reverential awe. There is the fear that consists in being afraid; it elicits anguish and terror. There is the fear of reverence; it elicits confidence and love.... The fear of God in which godliness consists is the fear which constrains adoration and love. It is the fear which consists in awe, reverence, honor, and worship and all of these on the highest level of exercise.” [10]
True Christianity may be summed up like this: Knowing who and what God is (theology), embracing a right attitude towards Him, and doing what He requires (piety). John T. McNeill, editor of the Battles translation of The Institutes, claims that Calvin’s theology is “his piety described at length.” “The whole life of Christians, says Calvin, ought to be a sort of practice of godliness.” In another place Calvin said, “He ought to be reckoned a true theologian who edifies conscience in the fear of God.” He saw the task of theology not just to be to convey ideas to the mind but to train the souls of men to obey the Word of God by living a different kind of life. Such was the conviction of Murray. “The biblical ethic is grounded in and is the fruit of the fear of the Lord. Ethics has its source in religion and as our religion so will be our ethic. This is to say also that what or whom we worship determines our behavior.” [11]
III. Manifestations Of The Godly Life
The goal of piety, as well as the entire Christian life, is the glory of God. Murray, having imbibed the teaching of the Shorter Catechism, lived out the superb answer to that opening question, What is man’s chief end? “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Here we have the objective and subjective sides of Christianity. It is in the glorifying of God that we enjoy Him. B. B. Warfield has stated: “According to the Reformed conception man exists not merely that God may be glorified in him, but that he may delight in this glorious God. It does justice to the subjective as well as to the objective side of the case.... No man is truly Reformed in his thought, then, unless he conceives of man not merely as destined to reflect the glory of God in his own consciousness, to exult in God: nay, unless he himself delights in God as the all-glorious One.” [12]
John Owen gives us an excellent definition of true fellowship with God: “Our communion with God consists in his communication of himself unto us, with our return unto him of that which he requires and accepts, flowing from that union which in Christ Jesus we have with him.” Although the obvious fruits of communion with God were seen in Murray’s life, he was reticent to speak of his personal experiences. In this he resembled his Princeton predecessor, Archibald Alexander. According to Charles Hodge: “He seldom spoke of his own experience or of his methods of religious culture. He lived with God: and men knew he had been on the mount by the shining of his face; but he was not want to tell what he saw, and he made no record.” The attractiveness of this godliness is observed by Dr. Packer: “The experimental piety of the Puritans was natural and unselfconscious, because it was so utterly God-centered. Our own (such as it is) is too often artificial and boastful, because it is so largely concerned with ourselves. Our interest focuses on religious experience as such and on man’s quest for God, whereas the Puritans were concerned with the God of whom men have experience, and in his manner of dealings with those who he draws to himself.” [13]
We can now consider some of the manifestations of that godliness as they were seen in him as a Christian, as a preacher, and as a theologian.
A. As A Christian
1) This Was Seen First In God-Honoring Worship
The Puritan George Swinnock wrote: “Worship comprehends all that respect which man owes and gives to his Maker.... All that inward reverence and respect, and all that outward obedience and service to God which the word godliness enjoins, is included in this one word worship.” True worship is God-centered. It is to fasten our attention on God’s glory and grace. And for us to adore that grace and to praise the Lamb it must be Christ-centered.
Reformed divines have maintained that there are three spheres of worship: private, in the secret place; domestic, in the family circle; public, in the local church. That was seen most evidently in Puritan England and in Scotland. Every home was regarded as a church with the head of the house as its minister. Parents attended to the spiritual nurture of their children. All members of the household must be given a time and place to pray and meditate. “Heart-work” must have priority in readiness for the Lord’s Day and for public worship. The Christian Sabbath was “the queen of days.” Public worship, according to David Clarkson, is “the nearest resemblance of heaven that earth knows.”
The pattern was clearly evident in John Murray’s life. Family worship in Badbea was something to be relished. The pattern remained the same throughout his life. The Sabbath day was a solemn yet joyful time. The five-day Communion season was a rich feast. It was such people in such homes that contributed greatly to the benefit of the public ordinances. It was heart-work that made worship fruitful and God-honoring. The contribution that Murray made to congregational worship is recorded by Dr. David Freeman, his minister in Philadelphia: “He appropriated the worship as his own, as though there was no one else in the place. God was before his mind and eyes. He was intent on hearing the Word read and preached. I never saw anyone enjoying the singing of praises as he did.” [14] The stirring of emotion was seen in him as member of the congregation and on at least one occasion, as a communicant at the Lord’s Supper, his feelings simply overflowed.
John Murray retained to the end of his life a love for the Christian Sabbath. The pattern of observance was set in his youth in Creich and he did not depart from it during some forty years in the United States. Like his godly forbears he refrained from the using the word “Sunday.” His observance of the day made him stand out in the Christian circles in which he moved. The day was not observed in a legalistic fashion, but rather with the outlook: How much of this day can I give to my Savior? Among the several addresses he gave on the subject he says: “The rest of the Sabbath is not idleness; it is activity in the sacred exercise of meditation, contemplation and prayer.”
2) It Was Seen In Everyday Living
As Murray clearly states in his writings, what and whom we worship determines our behavior. This was seen in the lives of the ordinary folk in the parish of Creich. In the words of Iain Murray: “‘The Christians of Creich amongst whom the head of Badbea’s household was a leader, were as mindful of their relationship to God when farming land or making roads as they were in church.” It was this fear of God that gave such integration to their daily lives. Their living was all of a piece. There was no distinction between sacred and secular. The daily toil on the land or on the roads was to the glory of God. Piety and hard work went hand in hand. Dr. Aird reported to the Royal Commission in 1884, “So far as I remember, I do not know a lazy man in my congregation.” John Murray would come back from the scaling the heights of Reformed scholarship to dig ditches, mend fences, and tend to the sheep on the family croft. As our religion is, so will be our ethic.
B. As A Preacher Of The Gospel
The spiritual quality of his life was also reflected in his preaching and evangelism. “By word and example he insisted that the first need in those called to preach is that they should be religious men: ‘Piety must first burn in the individuality of our own hearts and lives. If there is no cultivation of personal piety, the fervor and effectiveness of our ministry will be stultified.’” [15] It is evident from the history of the Christian church that God prepares men first as Christians before they become effective instruments in the ministry of the gospel. In the words of Robert Murray M‘Cheyne, “My people’s greatest need is my personal holiness” and “A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.”
There was a further manifestation of his godly character in his passion. The godliness that manifests itself in zeal for the divine glory has passion. Murray said: “To me preaching without passion is not preaching at all.” Dr Freeman recalls his preaching: “His whole countenance, his whole being was taken up.” He fulfilled the criteria of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s definition of preaching: “What is preaching? It is theology on fire. And a theology which does not take fire, I maintain, is a defective theology, or at least the man’s understanding of it is defective. Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire. A true understanding and experience of the Truth must lead to this.” [16]
Godliness was also reflected in the authority with which he spoke. He worked in the God-breathed Scripture texts. He aimed to speak the very words of God. He considered the preacher as a voice to get inside the hearts and wills of the hearers and motivate them to read and do the Word. John Murray, like Calvin before him, had the conviction that the sermon has as its goal the vital confrontation of the hearer with the face of God revealed in Holy Scripture. “Man before God’s face in preaching” was a watchword of the Genevan Reformer. Murray viewed the sermon as the climax of the worship service. The preaching that convicts man of his need is the very instrument to convey to him the wonders of the grace of God. Without a true appreciation of grace, in response to the full-orbed declaration of it in preaching, there can be no full-orbed doxology in our congregations.
C. As A Seminary Professor
It was fitting that John Murray should have studied and taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. From the founding of it by Dr. Archibald Alexander, one of its guiding principles was that “a seminary be a nursery of vital piety as well as of sound theological learning.” Alexander began a tradition at Princeton which resulted in an easily identifiable “Princeton piety.” In the early years of Alexander’s life the Presbyterians had shown doctrinal soundness but were singularly deficient in experience. In 1788 Alexander read a book on The Internal Evidences of the Christian Religion by Soame Jenyns which produced a profound impression on him. Powerful revivals marked the beginnings and development of Princeton. Dr. Samuel Miller, one of the members of a committee appointed by the General Assembly to plan a Theological Seminary, summarized the goals in the following words:
Walter Chantry, a former student at Westminster, recalls his impressions of Murray: “Fear of God dominated Professor Murray’s classroom. Each period began with prayer from the Professor’s lips which brought all into the presence of an awesome God. Each subject was handled in a dignified and solemn manner that conveyed deep reverence for the Almighty. Professor Murray breathed the attitude that all things in his lectures were holy and majestic. Not a study of the fear of God, but the Professor’s visible and audible manifestation of that fear, became a main lesson for his young disciples.” [18]
Murray stood squarely in the true Princeton tradition of men like Charles Hodge whose Systematic Theology he used as the class textbook in Westminster. What has been said of Hodge by David Wells could equally be applied to John Murray: “We find his work an almost classic realization of the kneeling as opposed to the sitting theologian. He had seen the grace and glory of God and in his Systematic Theology he turns to the world to explain his vision.” [19] With John Murray there was no such thing as a purely academic study of theology. William Perkins described theology “as the science of living blessedly forever.” Theological understanding and practical piety are inseparable. This is what Professor Murray demonstrated in his life and teaching. This is what he sought to preserve in an age when the two were being put asunder in the church by scholarship.
IV. The Recovery Of The Godly Life
The examination of the godliness of John Murray gives us occasion to consider the situation in the church today and what we need to recover:
1. The Centrality Of God
In his perceptive analysis of contemporary evangelicalism David Wells speaks about the “disappearance of theology” and his research has shown that where this kind of theological character is crumbling, there the centrality of God is disappearing. “God now comes to rest lightly and inconsequentially on the Church.” What a contrast with the great Reformation of the sixteenth century, which represented a move to place God as He has revealed Himself in Christ at the center of the church’s life and thought. The theologies, the catechisms, and the liturgies which flowed from Reformers’ pens all indicate that theirs was a piety which was concerned above all with God. The greatest need of the church today is to recover the sense of the transcendence and holiness of God. There is only one God and He is a God of matchless glory and transcendent majesty. “Without the holiness of God sin is just failure. Without the holiness of God grace is no longer grace. It is not grace from the God who against his own holy nature, has reconciled sinners to himself in Christ. And without justification there is no gospel and without the gospel there is no Christianity.”
2. The Centrality Of The Fear Of God
In the best days in Scotland and particularly in the Highlands the fear of God pervaded communities. The fear of God shaped daily life. There was respect for authority and law. There was an ethical code. There was a sense of shame about open sin. Catastrophes were regarded as the voice of God. There was order in the family and in the school. There was integrity and honesty in the work place. It was said of the wicked, “There is no fear of God before his eyes.” In his classic chapter on the “Fear of God,” Murray has some searching words:
John Murray took his stand on the infallibility of Scripture. He was an exegete of Scripture. He bowed before the Word of God:
4. The Centrality Of A Holy And Spirit-Filled Ministry
In his book Pentecost Today? Iain Murray observes: “The New Testament shows that the times which saw great in-gatherings of people into the kingdom of God were always times when the Word of God was being preached in the power of the Holy Spirit. This was the pattern in Jerusalem, Antioch, Iconium, Thessalonica and Corinth. It has been equally true in subsequent history...when spiritual awakening came it coincided, as in apostolic times, with a change which was first seen in preachers.” [23] It was by the Holy Spirit at the time of the Reformation that preaching was again made powerful. The charge of the Reformers against the ministry that preceded them was that it failed to bring men into the presence of God. Calvin’s view was that if there is to be a meeting between a holy God and sinful man it must take place in the preaching of the written Word of God. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to make hearers conscious of a presence distinct from that of the speaker.
It was such preaching that was instrumental in times of Reformation and revival in Scotland. John Knox in seeking to explain how the Reformation came about said, “God gave his Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance.” Dr. John Macleod in surveying the Scottish scene claimed: “It was the happy lot of the Reformed Church of Scotland to have in the ranks of her ministry not a few of who it was said by David Hume, when he heard John Brown of Haddington preach might be said: ‘That man preaches as if Jesus Christ stood at his elbow.’ Preaching of this kind was to be heard not only in ordinary from week to week; it found a special centre around which it revolved in the services of a communion season.” [24]
The great need for evangelical churches today can be expressed in the words of Robert Sample. Writing in 1897, he said: “The great want of today is a holier ministry. We do not need more stalwart polemics, more mighty apologists, or preachers who compass a wide range of natural knowledge, important as these are; but men of God who bring the atmosphere of heaven with them into the pulpit and speak from the borders of another world.” [25]
Notes
Professor John Murray (1898 –1975) was regarded in his own life-time as one of the leading Reformed theologians in the English-speaking world. Dr J. I. Packer in a foreword to the latest edition of Murray’s Principles of Conduct has said: “Had John Murray been blessed with the luminous literary grace of a C S Lewis, or the punchy rhetoric of a Charles Hodge, his name would have been put up in lights for the past half century as the finest theologian of our time.... Few have yet appreciated him at his true worth.” [1]
He was born on the 14th of October, 1898 in the parish of Creich, which is in the county of Sutherland in the Highlands of Scotland. He was reared by God-fearing parents who by the time of his birth had changed their allegiance from the Free Church of Scotland to the newly formed Free Presbyterian Church. After his higher education at Dornoch Academy, Murray served as a soldier in World War I, losing the sight of his right eye. He studied at Glasgow University where he came to a decision to prepare for the Christian ministry. His church sent him to study at Princeton Theological Seminary. Within two years of graduating he was invited back by Casper Wistar Hodge, Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton, to be his assistant. This he did for one year before joining the faculty of the newly formed Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. There he taught successive generations of students until his retirement in 1966, when he returned to his native Scotland.
The aim of this study is to examine the godliness that characterized his life. We look first at the influences that shaped the formation of his godly life.
I. The Shaping Of The Godly Life
1. The Spiritual Life In The Parish In Which He Was Brought Up
At the end of the eighteenth century the parish of Creich had been powerfully affected by the gospel. This took place under the ministry of George Rainy. A native of Aberdeenshire, he was inducted as minister of the parish in 1771. According to Donald Sage he had a struggle mastering the Gaelic language: “In other circumstances this drawback would have been fatal to his usefulness as a minister. But Mr. Rainy was the very model of a sincere, practical Christian; he preached the Gospel more by his life than by his lips.” [2] It is said that “over 100 men could openly testify to a personal work of grace and give a reason for the hope that was in them.”
The depth of the religious conviction among the people was revealed when a minister, Rev. Murdoch Cameron, was imposed on the parish in 1813. The dramatic events are recorded by Sage: “The people to a man were opposed to him, and his settlement was one of those violent ones which so much disgraced the Established Church at that period. The parishioners rose en masse, and barred the church against the Presbytery, so that the Sutherland Volunteers, under the command of Captain Kenneth Mackay of Torboll, were called out to keep the peace. In the riot which ensued, Captain Mackay got his sword, which he had naked in his hand, shivered to pieces by stones thrown at him by an old woman over seventy years of age.” [3] The people never afterwards attended Cameron’s ministry but met for worship on Sabbath at Migdale Rock in the summer, and in a barn in the east end of the parish during the winter months. This arrangement was carried on for thirty years and with true Christian spirit these worthy men and women persevered in prayer for an evangelical minister until in 1843 their prayers were answered. The legislation that permitted the imposition of a minister on an unwilling people led ultimately to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland.
The spiritual health of the work in the parish before 1843 depended on four elders. The minister who was called to the newly formed Free Church was the Rev. Dr. Gustavus Aird, later regarded as one of the most distinguished of the Free Church ministers in the Highlands.
Eight more elders were added to the Session in 1844. They were men of such spiritual caliber that Dr. Aird “often confessed to a sense utter want of fitness to preside over such a session.” John Murray’s father, Alexander (or Sandy as he was known), was born at Badbea in 1851. He later recalled how as a youth being able to count “no less than eight prayer-meetings being held on a Saturday evening in an area of three square miles around Badbea.” It is no small testimony to the esteem in which the congregation held Sandy Murray that he was ordained to the eldership at the early age of twenty-seven.
2. The God-Fearing Parents In The Home
John Murray was nurtured by God-fearing parents. In particular he was molded by the example of his father. Asked in later life who had been his greatest mentor, he might have mentioned some of the stars in the theological firmament in the seminaries at Princeton and Westminster. Instead he replied unhesitatingly, “My father.” Writing at the time of his father’s death in 1942, Murray said: “Though he was my father I may say that there are few men in the Highlands of Scotland whose life and memory was surrounded by such fragrance, and whose life of consistent godliness claimed such veneration and respect.” Even in the daily round the father was imparting spiritual counsel to his son. John Murray once told his nephew that he did not “witness a greater intensity of spiritual exercise of soul in any other person and his very body moved in sympathy with the inner man.” [4]
Before Sandy Murray died in 1942 he had taken care to secure from his minister a solemn promise that no obituary of him would be published in the church’s magazine. “He would rather get a slap than flattery,” men said of him in his lifetime. In an obituary notice in the Northern Times it was said: “The death of Mr. Alexander Murray, Badbea, which took place on 7th January, marks the end of an epoch in Highland religious life. The last of the old time saints whose influence was dominant in our communities a hundred years ago. And he was one of the noblest. As an elder in his native parish of Creich from the age of twenty-three until the time of his death in his 91st year, he was universally respected, and more than respected, he was revered...the secret of the veneration in which he was held defies analysis. He was a genuine saint, to whom the unseen was closer than breathing, and his religion was as intensely devotional.” [5]
In that home at Badbea every morning and evening there was family worship, with psalm singing, Scripture reading, and prayer. The Sabbath day, after special preparations on Saturday, was observed with family worship, public worship, and private spiritual exercises, like Catechism instruction and the reading of good books. The yearly Communion Season in August, lasting five days, brought godly folk from neighboring parishes to participate in the services. Badbea, like other homes, was a center of hospitality and fellowship during the five days.
3. The Correct Doctrinal Instruction In His Youth
John Murray was brought up on the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Use was made of it in the home, in the church, and in the day school. It was an educational process of priceless value. Archibald Alexander, who founded Princeton Theological Seminary where John Murray was later to study and to teach, was also brought up on the Shorter Catechism. The invaluable role of catechetical instruction in a young child’s life is beautifully captured in Charles Hodge’s remarks about this important influence in Alexander’s childhood, words that could have equally applied to the young John Murray: “The principles of moral and religious truth contained in that sublime symbol, when once embedded in the mind, enlarge, sustain, and illuminate it for all time. That God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth is a height of knowledge to which Plato never reached.... A series of such precise, accurate, luminous propositions, inscribed on the understanding of a child, is the richest inheritance which can be given to him. They are seeds which need only the vivifying influence of the Spirit of life, to cause them to bring forth the fruits of holiness and glory. Dr. Alexander experienced this benefit in its full extent.” [6]
4. The Spiritual Change That Came About In His Life
There is no doubt that through the godly example set before him and the teaching imparted to him John Murray’s course of life was set in the right direction. His father was imparting spiritual counsel to him in daily conversation. In later life his wife, Valerie, recalled him expressing the belief that he had known Christ from his childhood. The minister of the Free Presbyterian congregation at Bonar Bridge was Ewan MacQueen. Murray later recalled how when visiting the home at Badbea, Mr. MacQueen had the habit of putting his hand on the boy’s head and saying a few words to him affectionately about spiritual things. Murray spoke of those occasions as being accompanied by the first stirrings of spiritual emotion which he could recall.
He was sensitive about wrong-doing from an early age. There are few incidents recorded of his youth but one concerns his determination not to tell a lie again. It is clear that during his army service in World War I spiritual realities were his main concern. Whenever there was opportunity he would draw aside from his comrades and find some corner where he might read his Bible and pray. He made a profession of faith after returning from his military service.
II. Characteristics Of The Godly Life
We go on to consider some of the characteristics of his godly life.
1. His Life Was Characterized By A God-Consciousness
Murray was brought up in an atmosphere where the living and true God was a reality. He came, however, through a conversion experience to know that God personally. In adult life Murray was to become an admirer and follower of the Reformer, John Calvin. Looking back at his own conversion, Calvin could write, “God subdued my heart to teachableness.” Calvin has been described as “a God-possessed soul.” The same could be said of John Murray. He lived and spoke and wrote as a man deeply aware of the presence of God. Writing in later years about piety, Murray said:
What is piety? It is godliness. Godliness is God-consciousness, an all-pervasive sense of God’s presence, of his judgment, of our relation to him and his relation to us, of our responsibility to him and dependence upon him. This God-consciousness is spoken of as the fear of God, the profound reverence for his majesty and the dread of his judgments. This fear of God is not something abstract — it is a filial reverence springing from a relation that has been constituted by redemption in Christ, justification and forgiveness by his grace, adoption in his love. [7]In Christian conviction Murray was at one with John Calvin. B. B. Warfield claimed that “the central fact of Calvinism is the vision of God.... It begins, it centers and it ends with the vision of God in his glory and it sets itself, before all things, to render God his rights in every sphere of life-activity.” [8] Casper Wistar Hodge, Murray’s teacher at Princeton, reminds us that “wherever humble souls catch that vision of God in his glory and bow in humility and adoration before him, trusting for salvation only in his grace and power, there you have the essence of the Reformed Faith.” It was that vision which permeated what came to be called the “Princeton piety” and was at the heart of the “Highland piety” in which Murray was nurtured.
2. His Life Was Characterized By A Covenant-Consciousness
Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, C. H. Spurgeon said: “He who understands the covenant has reached the very core and marrow of the Gospel.” Sadly, in the first half of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom, covenant theology suffered an eclipse. The neglect was observed by Dr. J. I. Packer when he said: “In modern Christendom covenant theology has been unjustly forgotten.” The turning point can be dated to July 6, 1953 and a lecture which John Murray delivered on the covenant of grace in Selwyn College, Cambridge, under the auspices of the Tyndale fellowship for Biblical Research. There is no doubt that the publication of the lecture by Tyndale Press in 1954 marked the beginning of a renewed interest in the subject and marked a significant advancement in the comprehension of the biblical concept of the covenant.
The term “covenant” has to do with the relationship between God and man. How can sinful man stand before the God of transcendent majesty and holiness? The biblical answer is that God has been pleased in His sovereign mercy to enter into covenant with man.
In seeking to define it, Murray said: “A divine covenant is a sovereign administration of grace and of promise.” It is also “a relationship with God in that which is the crown and glory of the whole process of religion, namely union and communion with God.... At the centre of covenant revelation as its constant refrain is the assurance ‘I will be your God and ye shall be my people.’” The pulse and heartbeat of the covenant is its “relational character.” “According to this the covenant means that God gives himself to man and man gives himself to God for that full measure of mutual acquaintance and enjoyment of which each side to the relation is capable.” [9]
3. His Life Was Characterized By The Fear Of God
One of the most profound contributions by John Murray to an understanding of the Christian life is his chapter on “The Fear of God” in Principles of Conduct. Asking the question, What is the fear of God? he says that there are at least two obviously distinct senses in which the word “fear” is used in Scripture. “There is the dread or terror of the Lord and there is the fear of reverential awe. There is the fear that consists in being afraid; it elicits anguish and terror. There is the fear of reverence; it elicits confidence and love.... The fear of God in which godliness consists is the fear which constrains adoration and love. It is the fear which consists in awe, reverence, honor, and worship and all of these on the highest level of exercise.” [10]
True Christianity may be summed up like this: Knowing who and what God is (theology), embracing a right attitude towards Him, and doing what He requires (piety). John T. McNeill, editor of the Battles translation of The Institutes, claims that Calvin’s theology is “his piety described at length.” “The whole life of Christians, says Calvin, ought to be a sort of practice of godliness.” In another place Calvin said, “He ought to be reckoned a true theologian who edifies conscience in the fear of God.” He saw the task of theology not just to be to convey ideas to the mind but to train the souls of men to obey the Word of God by living a different kind of life. Such was the conviction of Murray. “The biblical ethic is grounded in and is the fruit of the fear of the Lord. Ethics has its source in religion and as our religion so will be our ethic. This is to say also that what or whom we worship determines our behavior.” [11]
III. Manifestations Of The Godly Life
The goal of piety, as well as the entire Christian life, is the glory of God. Murray, having imbibed the teaching of the Shorter Catechism, lived out the superb answer to that opening question, What is man’s chief end? “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Here we have the objective and subjective sides of Christianity. It is in the glorifying of God that we enjoy Him. B. B. Warfield has stated: “According to the Reformed conception man exists not merely that God may be glorified in him, but that he may delight in this glorious God. It does justice to the subjective as well as to the objective side of the case.... No man is truly Reformed in his thought, then, unless he conceives of man not merely as destined to reflect the glory of God in his own consciousness, to exult in God: nay, unless he himself delights in God as the all-glorious One.” [12]
John Owen gives us an excellent definition of true fellowship with God: “Our communion with God consists in his communication of himself unto us, with our return unto him of that which he requires and accepts, flowing from that union which in Christ Jesus we have with him.” Although the obvious fruits of communion with God were seen in Murray’s life, he was reticent to speak of his personal experiences. In this he resembled his Princeton predecessor, Archibald Alexander. According to Charles Hodge: “He seldom spoke of his own experience or of his methods of religious culture. He lived with God: and men knew he had been on the mount by the shining of his face; but he was not want to tell what he saw, and he made no record.” The attractiveness of this godliness is observed by Dr. Packer: “The experimental piety of the Puritans was natural and unselfconscious, because it was so utterly God-centered. Our own (such as it is) is too often artificial and boastful, because it is so largely concerned with ourselves. Our interest focuses on religious experience as such and on man’s quest for God, whereas the Puritans were concerned with the God of whom men have experience, and in his manner of dealings with those who he draws to himself.” [13]
We can now consider some of the manifestations of that godliness as they were seen in him as a Christian, as a preacher, and as a theologian.
A. As A Christian
1) This Was Seen First In God-Honoring Worship
The Puritan George Swinnock wrote: “Worship comprehends all that respect which man owes and gives to his Maker.... All that inward reverence and respect, and all that outward obedience and service to God which the word godliness enjoins, is included in this one word worship.” True worship is God-centered. It is to fasten our attention on God’s glory and grace. And for us to adore that grace and to praise the Lamb it must be Christ-centered.
Reformed divines have maintained that there are three spheres of worship: private, in the secret place; domestic, in the family circle; public, in the local church. That was seen most evidently in Puritan England and in Scotland. Every home was regarded as a church with the head of the house as its minister. Parents attended to the spiritual nurture of their children. All members of the household must be given a time and place to pray and meditate. “Heart-work” must have priority in readiness for the Lord’s Day and for public worship. The Christian Sabbath was “the queen of days.” Public worship, according to David Clarkson, is “the nearest resemblance of heaven that earth knows.”
The pattern was clearly evident in John Murray’s life. Family worship in Badbea was something to be relished. The pattern remained the same throughout his life. The Sabbath day was a solemn yet joyful time. The five-day Communion season was a rich feast. It was such people in such homes that contributed greatly to the benefit of the public ordinances. It was heart-work that made worship fruitful and God-honoring. The contribution that Murray made to congregational worship is recorded by Dr. David Freeman, his minister in Philadelphia: “He appropriated the worship as his own, as though there was no one else in the place. God was before his mind and eyes. He was intent on hearing the Word read and preached. I never saw anyone enjoying the singing of praises as he did.” [14] The stirring of emotion was seen in him as member of the congregation and on at least one occasion, as a communicant at the Lord’s Supper, his feelings simply overflowed.
John Murray retained to the end of his life a love for the Christian Sabbath. The pattern of observance was set in his youth in Creich and he did not depart from it during some forty years in the United States. Like his godly forbears he refrained from the using the word “Sunday.” His observance of the day made him stand out in the Christian circles in which he moved. The day was not observed in a legalistic fashion, but rather with the outlook: How much of this day can I give to my Savior? Among the several addresses he gave on the subject he says: “The rest of the Sabbath is not idleness; it is activity in the sacred exercise of meditation, contemplation and prayer.”
2) It Was Seen In Everyday Living
As Murray clearly states in his writings, what and whom we worship determines our behavior. This was seen in the lives of the ordinary folk in the parish of Creich. In the words of Iain Murray: “‘The Christians of Creich amongst whom the head of Badbea’s household was a leader, were as mindful of their relationship to God when farming land or making roads as they were in church.” It was this fear of God that gave such integration to their daily lives. Their living was all of a piece. There was no distinction between sacred and secular. The daily toil on the land or on the roads was to the glory of God. Piety and hard work went hand in hand. Dr. Aird reported to the Royal Commission in 1884, “So far as I remember, I do not know a lazy man in my congregation.” John Murray would come back from the scaling the heights of Reformed scholarship to dig ditches, mend fences, and tend to the sheep on the family croft. As our religion is, so will be our ethic.
B. As A Preacher Of The Gospel
The spiritual quality of his life was also reflected in his preaching and evangelism. “By word and example he insisted that the first need in those called to preach is that they should be religious men: ‘Piety must first burn in the individuality of our own hearts and lives. If there is no cultivation of personal piety, the fervor and effectiveness of our ministry will be stultified.’” [15] It is evident from the history of the Christian church that God prepares men first as Christians before they become effective instruments in the ministry of the gospel. In the words of Robert Murray M‘Cheyne, “My people’s greatest need is my personal holiness” and “A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.”
There was a further manifestation of his godly character in his passion. The godliness that manifests itself in zeal for the divine glory has passion. Murray said: “To me preaching without passion is not preaching at all.” Dr Freeman recalls his preaching: “His whole countenance, his whole being was taken up.” He fulfilled the criteria of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s definition of preaching: “What is preaching? It is theology on fire. And a theology which does not take fire, I maintain, is a defective theology, or at least the man’s understanding of it is defective. Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire. A true understanding and experience of the Truth must lead to this.” [16]
Godliness was also reflected in the authority with which he spoke. He worked in the God-breathed Scripture texts. He aimed to speak the very words of God. He considered the preacher as a voice to get inside the hearts and wills of the hearers and motivate them to read and do the Word. John Murray, like Calvin before him, had the conviction that the sermon has as its goal the vital confrontation of the hearer with the face of God revealed in Holy Scripture. “Man before God’s face in preaching” was a watchword of the Genevan Reformer. Murray viewed the sermon as the climax of the worship service. The preaching that convicts man of his need is the very instrument to convey to him the wonders of the grace of God. Without a true appreciation of grace, in response to the full-orbed declaration of it in preaching, there can be no full-orbed doxology in our congregations.
C. As A Seminary Professor
It was fitting that John Murray should have studied and taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. From the founding of it by Dr. Archibald Alexander, one of its guiding principles was that “a seminary be a nursery of vital piety as well as of sound theological learning.” Alexander began a tradition at Princeton which resulted in an easily identifiable “Princeton piety.” In the early years of Alexander’s life the Presbyterians had shown doctrinal soundness but were singularly deficient in experience. In 1788 Alexander read a book on The Internal Evidences of the Christian Religion by Soame Jenyns which produced a profound impression on him. Powerful revivals marked the beginnings and development of Princeton. Dr. Samuel Miller, one of the members of a committee appointed by the General Assembly to plan a Theological Seminary, summarized the goals in the following words:
And they do hereby solemnly pledge themselves to the churches under their care that in forming and carrying into execution the plan of the proposed seminary, it will be their endeavor to make it, under the blessing of God, a nursery of vital piety as well as of sound theological learning, and to train up persons for the ministry who shall be lovers as well as defenders of the truth as it is in Jesus, friends of the revival of religion, and a blessing to the Church of God. [17]One of Murray’s great concerns was that a seminary should cultivate piety. At Princeton in its best days the spiritual ethos of the classroom was strengthened by the total life of the seminary. Professor B. B. Warfield, speaking on “Spiritual Culture in the Theological Seminary” in 1903, could observe that “public means of grace abound in the Seminary.” There were not only daily acts of worship, but a Sabbath morning service in the chapel, a Sabbath afternoon conference on experimental religion, and a monthly concert for prayer. That was the spiritual environment in which Murray felt very much at home. Provision of these means of grace was much less at Westminster Seminary. Too many tended to look upon Murray’s piety as something uniquely his own, whereas in truth it was the genuine fruit of that type of Calvinistic faith which had in other times pervaded whole seminaries and considerable areas of the church.
Walter Chantry, a former student at Westminster, recalls his impressions of Murray: “Fear of God dominated Professor Murray’s classroom. Each period began with prayer from the Professor’s lips which brought all into the presence of an awesome God. Each subject was handled in a dignified and solemn manner that conveyed deep reverence for the Almighty. Professor Murray breathed the attitude that all things in his lectures were holy and majestic. Not a study of the fear of God, but the Professor’s visible and audible manifestation of that fear, became a main lesson for his young disciples.” [18]
Murray stood squarely in the true Princeton tradition of men like Charles Hodge whose Systematic Theology he used as the class textbook in Westminster. What has been said of Hodge by David Wells could equally be applied to John Murray: “We find his work an almost classic realization of the kneeling as opposed to the sitting theologian. He had seen the grace and glory of God and in his Systematic Theology he turns to the world to explain his vision.” [19] With John Murray there was no such thing as a purely academic study of theology. William Perkins described theology “as the science of living blessedly forever.” Theological understanding and practical piety are inseparable. This is what Professor Murray demonstrated in his life and teaching. This is what he sought to preserve in an age when the two were being put asunder in the church by scholarship.
IV. The Recovery Of The Godly Life
The examination of the godliness of John Murray gives us occasion to consider the situation in the church today and what we need to recover:
1. The Centrality Of God
In his perceptive analysis of contemporary evangelicalism David Wells speaks about the “disappearance of theology” and his research has shown that where this kind of theological character is crumbling, there the centrality of God is disappearing. “God now comes to rest lightly and inconsequentially on the Church.” What a contrast with the great Reformation of the sixteenth century, which represented a move to place God as He has revealed Himself in Christ at the center of the church’s life and thought. The theologies, the catechisms, and the liturgies which flowed from Reformers’ pens all indicate that theirs was a piety which was concerned above all with God. The greatest need of the church today is to recover the sense of the transcendence and holiness of God. There is only one God and He is a God of matchless glory and transcendent majesty. “Without the holiness of God sin is just failure. Without the holiness of God grace is no longer grace. It is not grace from the God who against his own holy nature, has reconciled sinners to himself in Christ. And without justification there is no gospel and without the gospel there is no Christianity.”
2. The Centrality Of The Fear Of God
In the best days in Scotland and particularly in the Highlands the fear of God pervaded communities. The fear of God shaped daily life. There was respect for authority and law. There was an ethical code. There was a sense of shame about open sin. Catastrophes were regarded as the voice of God. There was order in the family and in the school. There was integrity and honesty in the work place. It was said of the wicked, “There is no fear of God before his eyes.” In his classic chapter on the “Fear of God,” Murray has some searching words:
It is symptomatic of the extent to which the concept of the fear of God and the attitude of heart and mind which it represents has suffered eclipse that we have become reluctant to distinguish the earnest and consistent believer as ‘God-fearing.’ Perhaps our reluctance arises from the fact that believers manifest so little of the fear of God that we scarcely dare to characterize them as God-fearing; we may even be hesitant to call them godly. But whatever the reason, the eclipse of the fear of God, whether viewed as doctrinal or as attitude, evidences the deterioration of faith in the living God.
If we know God we must know him in the matchless glory of his transcendent majesty, and the only appropriate posture for us is prostration before him in awe and reverence. To think otherwise is to deny the transcendent greatness of God, and that is infidelity.... Our consciousness is not biblical unless it is conditioned by the fear of God. [20]3. The Centrality Of Scripture
John Murray took his stand on the infallibility of Scripture. He was an exegete of Scripture. He bowed before the Word of God:
If the testimony of Scripture on the doctrine of Scripture is not authentic and trustworthy, then the finality of Scripture is irretrievably undermined. The question at stake is the place of Scripture as the canon of faith. And we must not think that the finality of Christ remains unimpaired even if the finality of Scripture is sacrificed. The rejection of the inerrancy of Scripture means the rejection of Christ’s own witness to Scripture. Finally and most pointedly, then, the integrity of our Lord’s own witness is the crucial issue in this battle of the faith. [21]Murray owed much to the instruction he received from Geerhardus Vos, whom he described as “the most penetrating exegete it has been my privilege to know.” His approach to the Word of God exemplified the words of Vos: “To take one’s stand upon the infallibility of the Scriptures is an eminently religious act; it honors the supremacy of God in the sphere of truth.” Dr. A. W. Tozer has to be right when he said: “Let a man question the inspiration of the Scriptures and a curious, even monstrous, inversion takes place: thereafter he judges the Word instead of letting the Word judge him; he determines what the Word should teach instead of permitting it to determine what he should believe; he edits, amends, strikes out, adds at his pleasure; but always he sits above the Word and makes it amenable to him instead of kneeling before God and becoming amenable to the Word.” [22]
4. The Centrality Of A Holy And Spirit-Filled Ministry
In his book Pentecost Today? Iain Murray observes: “The New Testament shows that the times which saw great in-gatherings of people into the kingdom of God were always times when the Word of God was being preached in the power of the Holy Spirit. This was the pattern in Jerusalem, Antioch, Iconium, Thessalonica and Corinth. It has been equally true in subsequent history...when spiritual awakening came it coincided, as in apostolic times, with a change which was first seen in preachers.” [23] It was by the Holy Spirit at the time of the Reformation that preaching was again made powerful. The charge of the Reformers against the ministry that preceded them was that it failed to bring men into the presence of God. Calvin’s view was that if there is to be a meeting between a holy God and sinful man it must take place in the preaching of the written Word of God. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to make hearers conscious of a presence distinct from that of the speaker.
It was such preaching that was instrumental in times of Reformation and revival in Scotland. John Knox in seeking to explain how the Reformation came about said, “God gave his Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance.” Dr. John Macleod in surveying the Scottish scene claimed: “It was the happy lot of the Reformed Church of Scotland to have in the ranks of her ministry not a few of who it was said by David Hume, when he heard John Brown of Haddington preach might be said: ‘That man preaches as if Jesus Christ stood at his elbow.’ Preaching of this kind was to be heard not only in ordinary from week to week; it found a special centre around which it revolved in the services of a communion season.” [24]
The great need for evangelical churches today can be expressed in the words of Robert Sample. Writing in 1897, he said: “The great want of today is a holier ministry. We do not need more stalwart polemics, more mighty apologists, or preachers who compass a wide range of natural knowledge, important as these are; but men of God who bring the atmosphere of heaven with them into the pulpit and speak from the borders of another world.” [25]
Notes
- John Murray, Principles of Conduct (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 5.
- Donald Sage, Memorabilia Domestica (Wick, Scotland: W. Rae, 1889), 67.
- Ibid., 270.
- Iain Murray, Life of John Murray (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2007), 12.
- The Northern Times (Golspie, 1942).
- James M. Garretson, Princeton and Preaching (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2005 ), 5.
- Collected Writings of John Murray, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1976), 183.
- B. B. Warfield, Calvin as a Theologian and Calvinism Today (Edinburgh: Hope Trust, 1909), 14 –15.
- John Murray, The Covenant of Grace (London: Tyndale Press, 1954), 31ff.
- John Murray, Principles of Conduct, 233.
- Ibid., 231.
- Quoted in Carson and Hall, To Glorify and Enjoy God (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994), 115.
- J. I. Packer, Among God’s Giants (Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, 1991), 283.
- Iain Murray, Life, 93.
- Ibid., 130.
- D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1971), 97.
- James M. Garretson, Princeton, xxii.
- Iain Murray, Life, 93.
- David Wells, Christianity Today (August 30, 1974), 10.
- John Murray, Principles of Conduct, 241.
- The Infallible Word (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1946), 41– 42.
- The Banner of Truth, no. 381 (June, 1995), 14.
- Iain Murray, Pentecost Today? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), 80.
- John Macleod, Scottish Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 96.
- The Presbyterian and Reformed Review (Philadelphia, April 1897), 295.
Andrew Willet And The “Synopsis Papismi”
By Randall J. Pederson
Scholarly essays, articles, and monographs on the Elizabethan (1558 –1603) and Jacobean (1603 –1625) eras continue to flourish and fascinate scholars, unmatched by other periods in English history, with the possible exception of the English Revolution (c. 1642-1651) and the death of Charles I. [1] It is not difficult to imagine why the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages are so popular; after all, the “golden age” of Elizabethan life was riddled with rumors of conspiracy and espionage, the threat of civil powers foreign and domestic, the ever-present problem of succession, and the ever-fanciful conflicts of religion and vice. [2] The Jacobean age fares similar with the rise of English Arminianism, disputes over predestination, church life, rival interpretations of Scripture, Spanish politics, contrasting ecclesiological visions, and, of course, the dominant personalities of the period. [3]
Of all the difficulties in English life, few are as intriguing as early modern anti-popery polemics. These profound and virulent attacks on the validity of the papacy and of the Roman Catholic Church shed light as to how early modern Protestants conceived and defined themselves. What some scholars would define as a “pathological hatred” of the Roman church was fueled by several factors, not least of which were wars with Spain, threat to national security, welfare of souls and the ever-persistent idea that the pope was Antichrist — a conviction of prelate and puritan alike. [4]
Anti-popery was further intensified by the cultural and political sensitivities of both eras, as fears of Catholic queens and kings were promoted with popular Protestant martyrologies, such as John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which presented a cohesive narrative for those Protestants experiencing turmoil and social unrest. [5] Further, the “Catholic problem” of the 1580s worsened when Jesuits entered England and began proselytizing efforts; though small in number their influence was great. [6] Other reasons include the emergence of crypto-Catholicism, the arguments of Roman apologists, and the rise of militant Catholic rebels. [7] Elizabeth’s Act against Popish Recusants (1593) is but one example of political measures to curb Catholic digression. [8] Or, as Lord Burghley (1520 –1598) put it: “The state would never be in safety, where there was toleration of two religions. For there is no enmity so great as that of religion, and they that differ in the service of God can never agree in the service of their country.” [9]
Ever since Henry VIII freed the English from the pope’s authority, the pursuit of reformation had begun in degrees and measures away from what was perceived as Catholic superstition. The Henrican reforms were but precursors for the later and more radical reformist wings in the church. Freedom from Rome’s tyranny, political and spiritual, was a prized English possession, as the many anti-papal pamphlets published throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries attest. [10] The resurgence of some of these tracts further attests to their popularity and the lingering English distaste for popery. [11] The troubles of the Jacobean church are well known as wars of religious ideology, especially in the rise of Arminianism, what radical Protestants dubbed “spawn of the papist.” [12] Peter Lake noted that “the catholic threat was never merely political in the narrow invasion-, plot- and sedition-centered sense of the term. It was ideological, and thus for English protestants, at least, in constituting and constructing this sphere, in mobilising and associating all these different senses of the public together, the notion of ‘popery’ was crucial.” [13] Several recent studies have explored this churchly crisis in some depth. [14] Collinson noted, “The confutation of Catholicism became a major industry in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the life work of such university men as John Rainolds in Oxford and William Fulke and William Whitacre in Cambridge.” [15] Still, many personalities remain enigmatic; it is difficult for historians to place Elizabethan and Jacobean attitudes to life, politics, and religion; thorny debates over the origins and definitions of Puritanism are one example of this confusion. [16]
No history of Elizabethan or Jacobean religion can ignore the political, cultural, social, and ideological atmosphere of the time, nor can it gloss over turbulent religious factors, the milieu of which centered on the great Roman crisis in the British church, a crisis not merely of politics, as in the threat of Philip’s Armada (1588), the “anathemas” of a distant pope, or the proposed marriage of Prince Charles to a Catholic princess, but a crisis of creed. Threats of Roman Catholicism were not new to the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, but they were nevertheless persistent. [17]
While there were many personalities staving the Romish tide, such as Cambridge fellow William Whitaker (1547-1595), whose Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura (1588) received critical praise, one person in particular, intertwined in Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and crises in religion, was clergyman Andrew Willet (1561/2-1621), whose Synopsis papismi (1592) went through no less than five editions and was influential well into the eighteenth century. [18] Anthony Milton writes, “The Synopsis was a famous and much-read guide to religious controversies: clearly laid out and easy to read, it yet commanded a scholarly reputation of sufficient importance to be cited in university determinations in England, and read in Latin translation abroad by respectful Calvinist and Lutheran divines alike.” [19] Willet, a famed controversialist by his late twenties, was versed in a wide array of theological literature and history; he was, as Patrick Collinson noted, “one of the most learned of early seventeenth-century Calvinists.” [20] Richard A. Muller recently commented on Willet’s mastery of the original languages, the Pentateuch, and model exegesis. [21] Willet was well acquainted with the most prominent Catholic writers of his time. He had read the Catholic writings of Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), whom Willet considered Rome’s stoutest champion, and directed his Synopsis papismi against them. [22]
This article will examine Willet’s Synopsis papismi, the tenor of its argument, and its contributions to the copious anti-popery literature of the day. In short, it will consider why Willet was so vehement in his anti-popery polemics, especially since modern revisionists are apt to note that “the relations between Catholics and Protestants in [England] were less tense than the wilder rhetoric of anti-popery would have led us to believe.” [23] By looking at the Synopsis papismi, modern readers can gain insight into late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Protestantism, its method and excesses, and learn how moderate Puritans conceived of themselves during a robust and formative time in British history. [24] Even a cursory glance at the Synopsis papismi (and the rhetoric of anti-popery) shows that the Reformed consciousness of this time was that of an ancient, biblical faith that conceived itself in consonance with the ancient “catholic” faith. The Romanists were the innovators of doctrine; or, more so the revivers of ancient heresy. [25] Further, the Synopsis papismi evolved over time to address certain cultural and religious crises in the English church, as the rise of Laudian divines; this shift is crucial in the evolution of seventeenth-century anti-popery. [26]
Willet’s Life And Work
Andrew Willet was one of the most able and prolific of the Puritan exegetes. He was born at Ely, the son of Thomas Willet (1511?–1598), the rector of Barley, Hertfordshire. He studied at the college in Ely before going to Cambridge, where on February 2, 1577, he was admitted to Peterhouse. The same year he transferred to Christ’s College, where the quintessential Puritan, William Perkins (1558 –1602), and the moderate Laurence Chaderton (c. 1536 –1640) were fellows. [27] Keith L. Sprunger comments, “Entering Christ’s college meant entering the stronghold of radical Puritanism at Cambridge.” [28]
Willet graduated BA from Christ’s College in 1581 and MA in 1584. As a fellow of Christ’s, he moved in Puritan circles and in 1588 published a collection of sacred poems and emblems, Sacrorum Emblematum centuria una, dedicated to the famous Cambridge clergy, including William Whitaker and Laurance Chaderton. [29] Both of these divines would prove influential in the development of Willet’s thought. Undoubtedly, Willet’s formative years in education stressed the prominence of divine grace in election, the falsity of the Roman church, its doctrines, and its role in the apocalyptic end-time. Still, Willet’s ecclesiastical affiliation remained strongly Episcopal; though in later years he pleaded on behalf of the Presbyterians, he never himself embraced the Presbyterian form of church government. [30]
Willet served several posts, at Bourn and Fen Drayton, Cambridgeshire, before acquiring his father’s prebendal stall at Ely, in 1587. The following year he left his fellowship on marrying Jacobine Goad, daughter of the provost of King’s College (with whom he had eighteen children [31]), and being presented to the rectory of Childerdley in Cambridgeshire. Throughout the following years he gave lectures at both Ely Cathedral and at St. Paul’s in London, which elevated Willet’s reputation as a skilled controversialist. In 1591 he proceeded BD and in 1601 DD. In 1599 he obtained the living of Barley where he remained until his death. [32]
From 1607 onwards Willet retired to the life of a private commentator, based largely on the suggestion of Richard Bancroft (1544 –1610); Willet complied but only in part; for the rest of his life his commentaries were used as a springboard for political comment, however nuanced and subtle. [33] In fact, civil unrest moved Willet to petition King James I in 1603 that “God hath a great worke to be perfected by your hands;” and to intercede on behalf of the nonconformists and urge suppression of books “maintaining offensive doctrine, too much declining to poperie.” [34]
Several biographers (Peter Smith, Thomas Fuller, Erasmus Middleton, Benjamin Brook, and Anthony Milton) have noted Willet’s precisionist life. [35] Smith, Willet’s first biographer, had known Willet and visited on several occasions. The rigorousness of the family was something of a marvel; signs and postings littered the walls, giving delinquent children forebodings of what was to come. Willet died shortly after a fall from his horse in December 1621. [36]
The Synopsis Papismi
As a religious controversialist, Willet’s reputation rests largely upon the Synopsis papismi, his classic anti-Romish tract that covered such topics as the nature and authority of the Scriptures, papal succession, the prerogative power of popes, ceremonies of the church, angels, transubstantiation, predestination, and a general framework for refuting popish heresies. [37] The first edition of this seminal work was published in a 600-page quarto edition in 1592; by the time of the fifth edition, in 1634, the work had swelled to over 1300-pages folio.
In the first edition of the Synopsis papismi, Willet addressed “three hundreds of popish errors,” which became 400 in the second edition (1594) and 500 in the third (1600). In the fourth edition Willet expands on certain particulars of Catholic practice, such as “popish equivocating”; he also expands his discussion of justification by faith to include Christ’s passive and active obedience. He further incorporates “the consent of the East and South Churches, and the reformed Churches in the west.” The fifth edition (1634) is the same as the fourth with the addition of an extensive “Life of Andrew Willet, Doctor of Divinity” by Peter Smith, who may have been Willet’s son-in-law. [38] The increasing size of Willet’s work was due to several factors: the good reception of the first edition, the continued Catholic tides that buffeted English Protestantism (seen in the publication of Romanist tracts), [39] and the rise of English Arminianism, which was seen as a concession to Roman Catholicism. Further, there was a need for a lay manual of this type, all the standard ones being printed in Latin.
As to the scope of Willet’s work, he states, “My purpose is not to set down all the heresies, which impugne the Christian faith, but onely those which are maintained by the Church of Rome this day; who are the chief troublers & disquieters of the peace of our Church.” His attempt is not to reproduce other well-known works of the time, as that of William Whitaker in Cambridge or Edward Reynolds in Oxford, but to “briefly set downe the grounds of Poperie…collected…out of Bellarmine, the stoutest champion of their side, our English Rhemistes, Eckius, Canisius, and other Papistes, as also out of the late Chapter of Trent, for it deserueth not the name of a Councell.” Further, Willet proposes to include an “antidotum,” or “counter-poyson” with arguments from both sides closely analyzed and places of Scripture annexed and of course “adding also throughout the iudgment of Augustine, who of all the fathers, is most plentifull in these matters.” [40]
There are three benefits that Willet proposes for the reading of his Synopsis: first, readers will gain knowledge of “all popish errors”; second, readers will learn the principle objections Roman Catholics argue and how to defend against such errors; and third, the chief places of Scripture, which either speak for or against them, are expounded and opened. [41] Willet here proposes a similar benefit and methodology that can be found in his commentaries or “hexaplas,” which ultimately rest on Reformed biblical exegesis. His book is divided into what he calls “centuries,” each containing one hundred popish errors; each subsequent edition included more centuries than prior editions.
The first edition of Synopsis papismi (1594) was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth “our dread lady.” Willet heaps elaborate praise on her calling and duty as the English “Deborah, to iudge Israel, an Esther to deliuer the Church.” [42] Throughout the dedication, Willet appeals to the Queen’s sense of identity as the English leader of Christ’s church with the specific mission of guarding against heresy and upholding the true faith: “The Lord hath made you a wall and a hedge to his vineyard to keepe out the wild boare: a goodly tree to giue shade to the beasts of the field, & succour to the soules of the aire, a nurse to the people of God, to carry them in your bosome, as the nurse beareth the sucking child.”
The threat of papacy is addressed as the undoing of monarchial power in matters of religion: “the Papists fret and storme, and cut your Maiestie very short, saying, that the Prince ought neither to giue voice in counsel for matters of religion, nor make Ecclesiastical lawes.” [43] Yet, Willet urges Elizabeth that the whole church salutes her from all parts of the world:
In the “Preface to the Reader,” Willet charges the papists (he calls them papists because their religion hangs “on the sleeve of the pope”) as enemies of the English commonwealth and heretics whose fancied doctrines “haue in the purer ages of the Church been condemned for heresies.” [48] The roll-call of these ancient heretics include: Marcellina, who claimed to have an authentic image of Jesus and worshipped it; Heracleonites, who anointed the dying with oil and balm; Cajani, who believed that Judas’s sin benefited mankind; Pepuzians, who admitted women as priests; Angelics, because they worshipped angels; Friers Flaggelants, because they traveled on bare feet; Priscilianists, for making the Apocryphal books of equal weight with those canonical; Marcus, who claimed that Christ was an apparition and did not suffer in body or soul; Anthropomorphites, because they thought of God after the fashion of a man; [49] Abilians, who thought it prudent to be wed but never made use of their wives; Pelagians, who believed that man can believe of his own free will, unaided by grace; and the Manichees, whose corrupt notions of “flesh” are mimicked by the papists in the Mass. [50]
Willet conceived of the “popish heresy” as a conglomerate of ancient heresies but also an entity entirely its own; its essence of that of innovator in reviving and perpetuating doctrines that the ancient counsels had condemned. Notions that the Protestant or Reformed churches were innovators in doctrine, which Catholic apologists had attested since the beginning, Willet rejects; it is not the prelate but the papist who is the true innovator. Further, Protestantism was founded upon apostolic teaching and ancient authority; for Willet, “A full exposition of patristic bible commentaries…would be highly efficacious in ensuring the ultimate downfall of popery, as well as serving towards a more general Protestant edification.” [51]
An elaborate and detailed analysis of the Synopsis papismi would require a dissertation, especially to trace its progress and changes throughout its many editions; it therefore is not possible to discuss every facet of Willet’s argument or thought but it is reasonable and prudent to provide either an overview of the whole work or a more defined discussion of certain doctrinal particulars. Given the complexity of Willet’s thought, and its progression from the first edition of the Synopsis in 1593 to its mature expression in 1634, I have chosen the latter and the topics of choice are delimited to the Sacred Scriptures and predestination, two hot topics in early seventeenth-century Catholic-Protestant and inter-Protestant dialogue. Another absorbing issue, a study in its own right, would be to trace sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes on the persona of the Antichrist in anti-popery literature. For Willet, one needed only to prove the assertion that the pope was Antichrist to make all other discussions irrelevant. [52]
The Sacred Scriptures
The first general controversy that Willet addresses concerns the prophetic office of Christ as doctor and teacher (i.e. the Sacred Scriptures), “this great and most famous controuersie betweene vs and our aduersaries.” [53] Willet delineates his discussion of the sacred text into seven questions: first, concerning the canonical text, what books are to be received into the canon and which ones are to be rejected; second, concerning the authentic edition of the text (whether Hebrew, Greek, or Latin); third, whether the Scriptures ought to be translated into the common language (and whether church services should be in the vulgar tongue as well); fourth, whether the Scriptures are authorized by the church or known of themselves; fifth, concerning the perspicuity and plainness of the text, whether the commoner can understand it; sixth, concerning the interpretation of the Scriptures (whether there are diverse senses, who is qualified to exegete it, and what means serve to that end); and seventh, concerning the perfection of the Scriptures, whether or not Scripture alone is sufficient for the salvation of souls. [54] Throughout the editions of the Synopsis papismi, this section does not change, possibly due to either its initial thoroughness or perhaps because of the many extant disputations on Scripture available to early seventeenth-century religionists. [55]
On the canonical question, Willet asserts:
The second general question pertains to the authenticity and most-approved texts, whether Greek and Hebrew or the Latin Vulgate. Willet states that the Greek and Hebrew are the most antique but notes that the papists argue for the Vulgate in matters of sermons, readings, disputations, and controversies and that “the vulgare Latine translation should be taken for authentike before the Hebrue or Greeke, and that no man should presume vpon any occasion to reiect it, or appeale from it.” [58] Willet answers that the Hebrew, being the most ancient and mother of the rest, should supersede all later texts, including the Septuagint, Chaldean, and multiple Latin translations. As to the New Testament, though the Syriac is quite ancient, Greek was the language of the apostles and evangelists and therefore is to be preferred; the Latin text of the New Testament, opined Willet, “we are able to proue it to be verie corrupt and faultie and therefore not authentike.” [59]
Third, once preference for the Latin text is supplanted, need for vulgar translations, in the language of the people, becomes evident; or, as Willet argues,
The fifth question pertains to the perspicuity and plainness of the Scriptures; whereas the papists argue that the texts are full of difficulties (“all hard, and doubtfull, and vncertaine”), Protestants attest to the plain sense of the text, allowing for difficult passages, such as some things in Paul to which Peter attests, but nevertheless the whole force of the Scripture can be obtained by the simple. [63] Counter to Catholic claims, Willet argues:
As to who is qualified to interpret Scripture, Willet allows for the laity but also cautions that certain places are harder than others; ultimately, however, it is the Spirit of God who is the interpreter of Scripture in its true sense and meaning. Protestants need not “expect a generall Councell, or go vp to Rome…or trouble the Popes grauitie with euery question.”
Further, the Scriptures are necessary to learn the way of salvation; the reading, preaching, and understanding of Scripture are the principle means that God uses to beget faith in people. Willet’s adherence to classic Reformed orthodoxy is evident throughout his discussion of Scripture and his reliance on the standard commentators of the day are equally evident; of all the printed defenses of Protestantism available in the late sixteenth century, Willet’s chief supporters are Whitaker, Fulk, and Augustine.
The Predestination Of The Saints
The subject of predestination was hotly contested in the early seventeenth century, which is not surprising since historians have often regarded predestination as the central motif of Calvinism. [72] Willet’s discussion of the predestination of the saints offers nothing new or innovative other than its general progression from a supralapsarian to a sublapsarian scheme throughout its editions. Predestination, for Willet, is included broadly under “such questions and controversies as are mooved concerning the benefits of our redemption, purchased vnto vs by the death of Christ” and specifically as “the seventeenth controversie,” which consists of questions and debates surrounding predestination, vocation (or “calling”), and justification. [73] Concerning predestination, Willet poses these questions: first, whether predestination is double (i.e. the “wicked to condemnation, as of the elect to salvation”); second, whether election is of mere grace; and third, whether it is certain and unchangeable.
The papists charge, according to Willet, that “God…is not the cause of any mans reprobation or damnation…He intendeth no mans damnation directly or absolutely, but in respect of their demerits.” Their support is 1 Timothy 2:4, “God would have all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” Therefore the papist concludes that “the perishing or damnation of none must be imputed to God”; man’s eternal damnation, then, is the result not of divine decree but of man’s free will. Willet’s answer to this question, which changes from the first edition of the Synopsis papismi to the fifth is that
As noted before, Willet’s revision and expansion of this issue in the 1634 edition softens the supralapsarian overtones of the first edition. Willet’s revision addresses the issue of reprobation with greater detail:
The third issue deals with the assurance of predestination, which has been the focus of several recent scholarly studies. [79] For Willet, the papist denied the possibility of assurance for the greater mass of humanity on the grounds that only the recipient of special, divine revelation could attain to it; this subjective assurance was different from what the Reformed tradition had historically endorsed. For Willet, assurance of predestination was not a “false illusion, and presumption” but reposes in the promises of God.
Other topics of note in the Synopsis papismi are discussions of the church, councils, bishop of Rome (pope as Antichrist), clergy, monks and friars, civil magistrate, angels, mass, relics, images, prayers to saints, sacraments, merit and justification, and the end times. Regarding justification, Willet argues that the chief error of the papist is his fusing of justification with sanctification; or living in the Spirit with walking in the Spirit. This free justification is God’s gift of grace by faith only by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, not by degrees but once and for all. [82]
Conclusion
The religious and cultural climate of Elizabethan and Jacobean eras was hotly polemical. Inter-Protestant debates and Protestant-Catholic divides were part and parcel to the rhetoric, vocabulary, and literary culture of the Post-Reformation. Of all the anti-popery polemicists, biblical expositor and disputant Andrew Willet was undoubtedly one of the most learned and popular. An arch-enemy of English papists, Willet’s Synopsis papismi, a magnificent compilation of “popish” heresies, served a growing need in the Post-Reformation church, to engage the commoner in the affairs of academics and to further plant anti-Catholic seeds that would become national consciousness.
An example of “moderate” Puritanism, Willet shows us how non-Laudian churchmen tried to diffuse the Catholic problem, both in political address and literary endeavors. His success is evident in the popularity of his work and its reception in academic and lay circles. Contemporary developments in the crises of religion shaped the development of the Synopsis papismi as well as Willet’s own self-identity. Ravages of the popish anti-Christ, infiltrations of anti-Christ’s seed into England, and concern for the true catholic and apostolic church were all part and parcel to Willet’s battle at the end of the world.
Notes
Scholarly essays, articles, and monographs on the Elizabethan (1558 –1603) and Jacobean (1603 –1625) eras continue to flourish and fascinate scholars, unmatched by other periods in English history, with the possible exception of the English Revolution (c. 1642-1651) and the death of Charles I. [1] It is not difficult to imagine why the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages are so popular; after all, the “golden age” of Elizabethan life was riddled with rumors of conspiracy and espionage, the threat of civil powers foreign and domestic, the ever-present problem of succession, and the ever-fanciful conflicts of religion and vice. [2] The Jacobean age fares similar with the rise of English Arminianism, disputes over predestination, church life, rival interpretations of Scripture, Spanish politics, contrasting ecclesiological visions, and, of course, the dominant personalities of the period. [3]
Of all the difficulties in English life, few are as intriguing as early modern anti-popery polemics. These profound and virulent attacks on the validity of the papacy and of the Roman Catholic Church shed light as to how early modern Protestants conceived and defined themselves. What some scholars would define as a “pathological hatred” of the Roman church was fueled by several factors, not least of which were wars with Spain, threat to national security, welfare of souls and the ever-persistent idea that the pope was Antichrist — a conviction of prelate and puritan alike. [4]
Anti-popery was further intensified by the cultural and political sensitivities of both eras, as fears of Catholic queens and kings were promoted with popular Protestant martyrologies, such as John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which presented a cohesive narrative for those Protestants experiencing turmoil and social unrest. [5] Further, the “Catholic problem” of the 1580s worsened when Jesuits entered England and began proselytizing efforts; though small in number their influence was great. [6] Other reasons include the emergence of crypto-Catholicism, the arguments of Roman apologists, and the rise of militant Catholic rebels. [7] Elizabeth’s Act against Popish Recusants (1593) is but one example of political measures to curb Catholic digression. [8] Or, as Lord Burghley (1520 –1598) put it: “The state would never be in safety, where there was toleration of two religions. For there is no enmity so great as that of religion, and they that differ in the service of God can never agree in the service of their country.” [9]
Ever since Henry VIII freed the English from the pope’s authority, the pursuit of reformation had begun in degrees and measures away from what was perceived as Catholic superstition. The Henrican reforms were but precursors for the later and more radical reformist wings in the church. Freedom from Rome’s tyranny, political and spiritual, was a prized English possession, as the many anti-papal pamphlets published throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries attest. [10] The resurgence of some of these tracts further attests to their popularity and the lingering English distaste for popery. [11] The troubles of the Jacobean church are well known as wars of religious ideology, especially in the rise of Arminianism, what radical Protestants dubbed “spawn of the papist.” [12] Peter Lake noted that “the catholic threat was never merely political in the narrow invasion-, plot- and sedition-centered sense of the term. It was ideological, and thus for English protestants, at least, in constituting and constructing this sphere, in mobilising and associating all these different senses of the public together, the notion of ‘popery’ was crucial.” [13] Several recent studies have explored this churchly crisis in some depth. [14] Collinson noted, “The confutation of Catholicism became a major industry in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the life work of such university men as John Rainolds in Oxford and William Fulke and William Whitacre in Cambridge.” [15] Still, many personalities remain enigmatic; it is difficult for historians to place Elizabethan and Jacobean attitudes to life, politics, and religion; thorny debates over the origins and definitions of Puritanism are one example of this confusion. [16]
No history of Elizabethan or Jacobean religion can ignore the political, cultural, social, and ideological atmosphere of the time, nor can it gloss over turbulent religious factors, the milieu of which centered on the great Roman crisis in the British church, a crisis not merely of politics, as in the threat of Philip’s Armada (1588), the “anathemas” of a distant pope, or the proposed marriage of Prince Charles to a Catholic princess, but a crisis of creed. Threats of Roman Catholicism were not new to the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, but they were nevertheless persistent. [17]
While there were many personalities staving the Romish tide, such as Cambridge fellow William Whitaker (1547-1595), whose Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura (1588) received critical praise, one person in particular, intertwined in Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and crises in religion, was clergyman Andrew Willet (1561/2-1621), whose Synopsis papismi (1592) went through no less than five editions and was influential well into the eighteenth century. [18] Anthony Milton writes, “The Synopsis was a famous and much-read guide to religious controversies: clearly laid out and easy to read, it yet commanded a scholarly reputation of sufficient importance to be cited in university determinations in England, and read in Latin translation abroad by respectful Calvinist and Lutheran divines alike.” [19] Willet, a famed controversialist by his late twenties, was versed in a wide array of theological literature and history; he was, as Patrick Collinson noted, “one of the most learned of early seventeenth-century Calvinists.” [20] Richard A. Muller recently commented on Willet’s mastery of the original languages, the Pentateuch, and model exegesis. [21] Willet was well acquainted with the most prominent Catholic writers of his time. He had read the Catholic writings of Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), whom Willet considered Rome’s stoutest champion, and directed his Synopsis papismi against them. [22]
This article will examine Willet’s Synopsis papismi, the tenor of its argument, and its contributions to the copious anti-popery literature of the day. In short, it will consider why Willet was so vehement in his anti-popery polemics, especially since modern revisionists are apt to note that “the relations between Catholics and Protestants in [England] were less tense than the wilder rhetoric of anti-popery would have led us to believe.” [23] By looking at the Synopsis papismi, modern readers can gain insight into late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Protestantism, its method and excesses, and learn how moderate Puritans conceived of themselves during a robust and formative time in British history. [24] Even a cursory glance at the Synopsis papismi (and the rhetoric of anti-popery) shows that the Reformed consciousness of this time was that of an ancient, biblical faith that conceived itself in consonance with the ancient “catholic” faith. The Romanists were the innovators of doctrine; or, more so the revivers of ancient heresy. [25] Further, the Synopsis papismi evolved over time to address certain cultural and religious crises in the English church, as the rise of Laudian divines; this shift is crucial in the evolution of seventeenth-century anti-popery. [26]
Willet’s Life And Work
Andrew Willet was one of the most able and prolific of the Puritan exegetes. He was born at Ely, the son of Thomas Willet (1511?–1598), the rector of Barley, Hertfordshire. He studied at the college in Ely before going to Cambridge, where on February 2, 1577, he was admitted to Peterhouse. The same year he transferred to Christ’s College, where the quintessential Puritan, William Perkins (1558 –1602), and the moderate Laurence Chaderton (c. 1536 –1640) were fellows. [27] Keith L. Sprunger comments, “Entering Christ’s college meant entering the stronghold of radical Puritanism at Cambridge.” [28]
Willet graduated BA from Christ’s College in 1581 and MA in 1584. As a fellow of Christ’s, he moved in Puritan circles and in 1588 published a collection of sacred poems and emblems, Sacrorum Emblematum centuria una, dedicated to the famous Cambridge clergy, including William Whitaker and Laurance Chaderton. [29] Both of these divines would prove influential in the development of Willet’s thought. Undoubtedly, Willet’s formative years in education stressed the prominence of divine grace in election, the falsity of the Roman church, its doctrines, and its role in the apocalyptic end-time. Still, Willet’s ecclesiastical affiliation remained strongly Episcopal; though in later years he pleaded on behalf of the Presbyterians, he never himself embraced the Presbyterian form of church government. [30]
Willet served several posts, at Bourn and Fen Drayton, Cambridgeshire, before acquiring his father’s prebendal stall at Ely, in 1587. The following year he left his fellowship on marrying Jacobine Goad, daughter of the provost of King’s College (with whom he had eighteen children [31]), and being presented to the rectory of Childerdley in Cambridgeshire. Throughout the following years he gave lectures at both Ely Cathedral and at St. Paul’s in London, which elevated Willet’s reputation as a skilled controversialist. In 1591 he proceeded BD and in 1601 DD. In 1599 he obtained the living of Barley where he remained until his death. [32]
From 1607 onwards Willet retired to the life of a private commentator, based largely on the suggestion of Richard Bancroft (1544 –1610); Willet complied but only in part; for the rest of his life his commentaries were used as a springboard for political comment, however nuanced and subtle. [33] In fact, civil unrest moved Willet to petition King James I in 1603 that “God hath a great worke to be perfected by your hands;” and to intercede on behalf of the nonconformists and urge suppression of books “maintaining offensive doctrine, too much declining to poperie.” [34]
Several biographers (Peter Smith, Thomas Fuller, Erasmus Middleton, Benjamin Brook, and Anthony Milton) have noted Willet’s precisionist life. [35] Smith, Willet’s first biographer, had known Willet and visited on several occasions. The rigorousness of the family was something of a marvel; signs and postings littered the walls, giving delinquent children forebodings of what was to come. Willet died shortly after a fall from his horse in December 1621. [36]
The Synopsis Papismi
As a religious controversialist, Willet’s reputation rests largely upon the Synopsis papismi, his classic anti-Romish tract that covered such topics as the nature and authority of the Scriptures, papal succession, the prerogative power of popes, ceremonies of the church, angels, transubstantiation, predestination, and a general framework for refuting popish heresies. [37] The first edition of this seminal work was published in a 600-page quarto edition in 1592; by the time of the fifth edition, in 1634, the work had swelled to over 1300-pages folio.
In the first edition of the Synopsis papismi, Willet addressed “three hundreds of popish errors,” which became 400 in the second edition (1594) and 500 in the third (1600). In the fourth edition Willet expands on certain particulars of Catholic practice, such as “popish equivocating”; he also expands his discussion of justification by faith to include Christ’s passive and active obedience. He further incorporates “the consent of the East and South Churches, and the reformed Churches in the west.” The fifth edition (1634) is the same as the fourth with the addition of an extensive “Life of Andrew Willet, Doctor of Divinity” by Peter Smith, who may have been Willet’s son-in-law. [38] The increasing size of Willet’s work was due to several factors: the good reception of the first edition, the continued Catholic tides that buffeted English Protestantism (seen in the publication of Romanist tracts), [39] and the rise of English Arminianism, which was seen as a concession to Roman Catholicism. Further, there was a need for a lay manual of this type, all the standard ones being printed in Latin.
As to the scope of Willet’s work, he states, “My purpose is not to set down all the heresies, which impugne the Christian faith, but onely those which are maintained by the Church of Rome this day; who are the chief troublers & disquieters of the peace of our Church.” His attempt is not to reproduce other well-known works of the time, as that of William Whitaker in Cambridge or Edward Reynolds in Oxford, but to “briefly set downe the grounds of Poperie…collected…out of Bellarmine, the stoutest champion of their side, our English Rhemistes, Eckius, Canisius, and other Papistes, as also out of the late Chapter of Trent, for it deserueth not the name of a Councell.” Further, Willet proposes to include an “antidotum,” or “counter-poyson” with arguments from both sides closely analyzed and places of Scripture annexed and of course “adding also throughout the iudgment of Augustine, who of all the fathers, is most plentifull in these matters.” [40]
There are three benefits that Willet proposes for the reading of his Synopsis: first, readers will gain knowledge of “all popish errors”; second, readers will learn the principle objections Roman Catholics argue and how to defend against such errors; and third, the chief places of Scripture, which either speak for or against them, are expounded and opened. [41] Willet here proposes a similar benefit and methodology that can be found in his commentaries or “hexaplas,” which ultimately rest on Reformed biblical exegesis. His book is divided into what he calls “centuries,” each containing one hundred popish errors; each subsequent edition included more centuries than prior editions.
The first edition of Synopsis papismi (1594) was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth “our dread lady.” Willet heaps elaborate praise on her calling and duty as the English “Deborah, to iudge Israel, an Esther to deliuer the Church.” [42] Throughout the dedication, Willet appeals to the Queen’s sense of identity as the English leader of Christ’s church with the specific mission of guarding against heresy and upholding the true faith: “The Lord hath made you a wall and a hedge to his vineyard to keepe out the wild boare: a goodly tree to giue shade to the beasts of the field, & succour to the soules of the aire, a nurse to the people of God, to carry them in your bosome, as the nurse beareth the sucking child.”
The threat of papacy is addressed as the undoing of monarchial power in matters of religion: “the Papists fret and storme, and cut your Maiestie very short, saying, that the Prince ought neither to giue voice in counsel for matters of religion, nor make Ecclesiastical lawes.” [43] Yet, Willet urges Elizabeth that the whole church salutes her from all parts of the world:
We haue blessed you out of the house of God, & do encourage you to go forward, gird thy sword to thy thigh: prosper thou with thine honor, ride on, because of the word of truth God hath giuen into your hand a two edged sword: with one edge it defendeth the Church from false religion; with the other, the commonwealth from oppression. [44]These two themes, of false religion and oppression, are crucial in understanding Willet’s polemic against the Roman Catholic or, as Willet called it, “pseudo-catholike” religion of the day. Willet’s own sense of his work was that of a guide to religious controversy “that men not learned, might in one volume finde all the controuersies of religion, which their leisure would not suffer them to collect them selues.” [45] In closing the dedication, Willet notes, “it is the truth, the ancient Catholike Apostolike faith, which we vnder your leading and protection do profess. As for your enemies, they shal be as the dust before the wind, and as the clay in the streetes, but your crowne shal flourish, your horne shal be exalted.” [46] It is evident in these few examples that Willet conceived of the crown as the upholder of true religion, and further that the English church was a representative of that religion, a theme that would continue throughout the Synopsis papismi’s many editions. As with many other Reformed controversialists of the day, Willet urged anti-popery as the main vocation of the Church of England. [47]
In the “Preface to the Reader,” Willet charges the papists (he calls them papists because their religion hangs “on the sleeve of the pope”) as enemies of the English commonwealth and heretics whose fancied doctrines “haue in the purer ages of the Church been condemned for heresies.” [48] The roll-call of these ancient heretics include: Marcellina, who claimed to have an authentic image of Jesus and worshipped it; Heracleonites, who anointed the dying with oil and balm; Cajani, who believed that Judas’s sin benefited mankind; Pepuzians, who admitted women as priests; Angelics, because they worshipped angels; Friers Flaggelants, because they traveled on bare feet; Priscilianists, for making the Apocryphal books of equal weight with those canonical; Marcus, who claimed that Christ was an apparition and did not suffer in body or soul; Anthropomorphites, because they thought of God after the fashion of a man; [49] Abilians, who thought it prudent to be wed but never made use of their wives; Pelagians, who believed that man can believe of his own free will, unaided by grace; and the Manichees, whose corrupt notions of “flesh” are mimicked by the papists in the Mass. [50]
Willet conceived of the “popish heresy” as a conglomerate of ancient heresies but also an entity entirely its own; its essence of that of innovator in reviving and perpetuating doctrines that the ancient counsels had condemned. Notions that the Protestant or Reformed churches were innovators in doctrine, which Catholic apologists had attested since the beginning, Willet rejects; it is not the prelate but the papist who is the true innovator. Further, Protestantism was founded upon apostolic teaching and ancient authority; for Willet, “A full exposition of patristic bible commentaries…would be highly efficacious in ensuring the ultimate downfall of popery, as well as serving towards a more general Protestant edification.” [51]
An elaborate and detailed analysis of the Synopsis papismi would require a dissertation, especially to trace its progress and changes throughout its many editions; it therefore is not possible to discuss every facet of Willet’s argument or thought but it is reasonable and prudent to provide either an overview of the whole work or a more defined discussion of certain doctrinal particulars. Given the complexity of Willet’s thought, and its progression from the first edition of the Synopsis in 1593 to its mature expression in 1634, I have chosen the latter and the topics of choice are delimited to the Sacred Scriptures and predestination, two hot topics in early seventeenth-century Catholic-Protestant and inter-Protestant dialogue. Another absorbing issue, a study in its own right, would be to trace sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes on the persona of the Antichrist in anti-popery literature. For Willet, one needed only to prove the assertion that the pope was Antichrist to make all other discussions irrelevant. [52]
The Sacred Scriptures
The first general controversy that Willet addresses concerns the prophetic office of Christ as doctor and teacher (i.e. the Sacred Scriptures), “this great and most famous controuersie betweene vs and our aduersaries.” [53] Willet delineates his discussion of the sacred text into seven questions: first, concerning the canonical text, what books are to be received into the canon and which ones are to be rejected; second, concerning the authentic edition of the text (whether Hebrew, Greek, or Latin); third, whether the Scriptures ought to be translated into the common language (and whether church services should be in the vulgar tongue as well); fourth, whether the Scriptures are authorized by the church or known of themselves; fifth, concerning the perspicuity and plainness of the text, whether the commoner can understand it; sixth, concerning the interpretation of the Scriptures (whether there are diverse senses, who is qualified to exegete it, and what means serve to that end); and seventh, concerning the perfection of the Scriptures, whether or not Scripture alone is sufficient for the salvation of souls. [54] Throughout the editions of the Synopsis papismi, this section does not change, possibly due to either its initial thoroughness or perhaps because of the many extant disputations on Scripture available to early seventeenth-century religionists. [55]
On the canonical question, Willet asserts:
…our aduersaries the Papistes, that holding all those bookes to be Scripture, which we do acknowledge, doe adde vnto them other bookes which are not canonicall: so that they offend not as other heretikes, in denying any part of Scripture, but, which is as bad in adding vnto it, for both these are accursed. Reuel. 22:18. [56]Those books added to the canonical text are the apocryphal texts, which Protestants have historically repudiated, although allowing for their proper use in the life of the church; or, as Willet states: “they may be read for example of life, and may haue other profitable vse. But the Canonicall Scripture onely hath this priuiledge to giue rules of faith, and thereupon it hath the name, that we may be bold to beleeue and ground our faith vpon the canonicall & holy Scripture, which is the onely word of God.” [57]
The second general question pertains to the authenticity and most-approved texts, whether Greek and Hebrew or the Latin Vulgate. Willet states that the Greek and Hebrew are the most antique but notes that the papists argue for the Vulgate in matters of sermons, readings, disputations, and controversies and that “the vulgare Latine translation should be taken for authentike before the Hebrue or Greeke, and that no man should presume vpon any occasion to reiect it, or appeale from it.” [58] Willet answers that the Hebrew, being the most ancient and mother of the rest, should supersede all later texts, including the Septuagint, Chaldean, and multiple Latin translations. As to the New Testament, though the Syriac is quite ancient, Greek was the language of the apostles and evangelists and therefore is to be preferred; the Latin text of the New Testament, opined Willet, “we are able to proue it to be verie corrupt and faultie and therefore not authentike.” [59]
Third, once preference for the Latin text is supplanted, need for vulgar translations, in the language of the people, becomes evident; or, as Willet argues,
We do beleeue and hold that it is requisite, expedient and necessarie for the Scriptures to be vttered and set forth in the vulgare and common speech, and that none vpon any occasion ought to be prohibited the reading thereof for knowledge and instructions sake: and that Christian Magistrates ought to prouide, that the people may haue the Scriptures in their mother & known toung. Wherefore great wrong was offered to the people of England that diuerse 100. yeares, till king Henrie the eight could not be suffred to haue the Scriptures in English. And how I pray you did the Papistes storme, when as Tindals translation came forth? Some affirming that it was impossible to haue the Scriptures translated into English, some that it would make the people heretikes: others that it would cause them to rebel. Fox. Pag. 117. col 1. What fowle and shamefull slaunders were these? [60]The fourth question that Willet discusses pertains to the authority of the Scriptures and the derivativeness of that authority, whether from the church or from itself. For the papist, argues Willet, the Scriptures receive authentication from the church; earlier papists, such as Johann Eck (1486-1543), had argued that “the Scripture should be of no more credite then Aesopes Fables, without the approbation of the Church;” later papists, such as Bellarmine, “being ashamed of their forefathers ignorance, they say that the Scriptures in them selues are perfect, sufficient, authenticall, but that to vs it appeareth not so, neither are we bound to take them for Scripture without the authoritie of the Church: so Canus, Bellarmin. Stapleton: so that, (say they) in respect of vs the Church hath absolute authoritie to determine, which is Scripture, which not.” [61] Willet answers in classic Protestant fashion that the church’s attestation of the Scripture is valuable but not definitive; rather, chiefly, “because the spirit of God doth so teach vs, and the Scriptures them selues do testifie for them selues: so that everie man is bound to acknowledge the Scripture, though there were no publike approbation of the Church.” [62]
The fifth question pertains to the perspicuity and plainness of the Scriptures; whereas the papists argue that the texts are full of difficulties (“all hard, and doubtfull, and vncertaine”), Protestants attest to the plain sense of the text, allowing for difficult passages, such as some things in Paul to which Peter attests, but nevertheless the whole force of the Scripture can be obtained by the simple. [63] Counter to Catholic claims, Willet argues:
We do not hold that the scripture is euery where so plaine and euident, that it need no interpretation, as our aduersaries do slaunder vs, and therefore here they do fight with their own shadow…We confesse, that the Lord in the Scriptures hath tempered hard things and easie together, that we might be excercised in the Scriptures, and might knocke & labour by prayer and studie, for the opening of the sense: and that there might be order kept in the Church, some to be hearers, some teachers & expounders, by whose diligent search and trauell, the harder places may be opened to the people. [64]For Willet, Luther’s distinction between the res Dei and the res Scriptura is correct; one cannot know or comprehend the depth of God’s mysteries in himself but those things that are opened in Scripture are plain in their sense. [65] The sixth question that Willet poses has to do with the different senses of Scripture and he criticizes the medieval notion that Scripture can have multiple senses or meanings in the same place (the allegorical, tropological, and anagogical); one place of Scripture can have but one sense. [66] This is not to say, however, that there are not different applications, which for Willet are not different senses but diverse applications of the one sense. [67]
As to who is qualified to interpret Scripture, Willet allows for the laity but also cautions that certain places are harder than others; ultimately, however, it is the Spirit of God who is the interpreter of Scripture in its true sense and meaning. Protestants need not “expect a generall Councell, or go vp to Rome…or trouble the Popes grauitie with euery question.”
The Lord hath shewed vs a more easie and ready way: see that we neede not ascend to heauen or compasse the earth or passé the Alpes: but the word of God is amongst vs, the scriptures themselues and the spirite of God opening our harts do teach vs how to vnderstand them: the interpretation of Scripture is not assigned to any succession of pastors, or tyed to any place or persons. [68]Of the means and methods employed in interpreting Scripture, Willet argues a fourfold method: first, one must consult the original languages, Hebrew and Greek, in order to bring clarity to difficult passages; second, one must consider the scope of the text in its immediate context; third, one should compare individual texts and places with other texts that speak to the same issue; and fourth, one must consider the analogy and proportion of faith, which “is nothing els but the summe & grounds of Religion gathered out of scripture, such as are conteined in the Creede, the Lordes Prayer, the ten Commandements, and in our whole Catechisme.” [69] Willet cautions against swerving from this rule of faith or, as he puts it, “impugne any principle of Religion”; as an example of this impugning Willet cites the Catholic understanding of the mass, which would have Christ’s flesh on earth while the biblical witness clearly asserts the contrary. [70] Those who are not able to take this course for understanding Scripture “shall do well to seeke helpe of learned and godly expositors, or to consult with their Pastors and Ministers.” [71]
Further, the Scriptures are necessary to learn the way of salvation; the reading, preaching, and understanding of Scripture are the principle means that God uses to beget faith in people. Willet’s adherence to classic Reformed orthodoxy is evident throughout his discussion of Scripture and his reliance on the standard commentators of the day are equally evident; of all the printed defenses of Protestantism available in the late sixteenth century, Willet’s chief supporters are Whitaker, Fulk, and Augustine.
The Predestination Of The Saints
The subject of predestination was hotly contested in the early seventeenth century, which is not surprising since historians have often regarded predestination as the central motif of Calvinism. [72] Willet’s discussion of the predestination of the saints offers nothing new or innovative other than its general progression from a supralapsarian to a sublapsarian scheme throughout its editions. Predestination, for Willet, is included broadly under “such questions and controversies as are mooved concerning the benefits of our redemption, purchased vnto vs by the death of Christ” and specifically as “the seventeenth controversie,” which consists of questions and debates surrounding predestination, vocation (or “calling”), and justification. [73] Concerning predestination, Willet poses these questions: first, whether predestination is double (i.e. the “wicked to condemnation, as of the elect to salvation”); second, whether election is of mere grace; and third, whether it is certain and unchangeable.
The papists charge, according to Willet, that “God…is not the cause of any mans reprobation or damnation…He intendeth no mans damnation directly or absolutely, but in respect of their demerits.” Their support is 1 Timothy 2:4, “God would have all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” Therefore the papist concludes that “the perishing or damnation of none must be imputed to God”; man’s eternal damnation, then, is the result not of divine decree but of man’s free will. Willet’s answer to this question, which changes from the first edition of the Synopsis papismi to the fifth is that
No man must impute his damnation to God, because the wicked are justly punished for their sins, without any respect had vnto the secret counsel of God: yet it is certain, that God, to set forth his glory, as he hath made some the vessels of honor, so others are ordained to be vessels of wrath, without any respect had to their workes, either good or euill. And this notwithstanding standeth with the iustice of God, to saue some, and reiect others: for he might iustly condemne all to eternall death: Now if notwithstanding he haue mercy of some, his iustice in the condemnation of the rest is not to be complained of but his mercy to be extolled in sauing of some. [74]For Willet, God would indeed have all men to be saved, that is, “all sortes, or all kindes of men,” which he gleans from Augustine’s Enchirid; further, it may be said that God desires all to be saved in that he provides the outward means of salvation to all, as his Word and sacraments. [75] Willet argues from Romans 9:22 that
As God hath prepared some vessels vnto glorie, so also, some are ordained to wrath. And that the counsel of God is most iust herein: for as the Potter may dispose of the clay, as it seemeth best to himselfe, to make of it a vessel of honor or of dishonor at his pleasure: so the Lord hath as great right to deale with his creature. And seeing all things ought to be subdued to the glory of God, which set foorth in the destruction of the rebellious, as in the election of the faythfull: it was necessary and requisite, that the Lord should get vnto himselfe both wayes a glorious name: therefore he saith, Rom. 9:17. That God had set vp Pharao, to shew his power in him. [76]Willet further notes, gleaned from Augustine, that the wicked are only foreknown in their sins, not predestinate; their punishment, however, is predestinate. This qualification serves to dismantle the charge against double predestinarians that God is the author of sin.
As noted before, Willet’s revision and expansion of this issue in the 1634 edition softens the supralapsarian overtones of the first edition. Willet’s revision addresses the issue of reprobation with greater detail:
Concerning the decree of reprobation, our sentence is this: first, that as eternall salvation is from the beginning ordained for the elect, so eternall destruction is decreed for the reprobate: for we cannot but affirme, that God both our first Creator, and last Judge, did both fore-see and appoint the end of every creature. Secondly, God doth reject the wicked two ways, consilio, in his eternal counsel, and facto, by the execution of his counsel and decree, which shall bee in their actuall damnation: his counsel or decree of rejection is also two-fold, it is either…the absolute decree in passing by or not choosing some, but leaving them in their own nature…[and] the decree of reprobation issuing out of Gods prescience and fore-knowledge: who as he did fore-see in the beginning the obstinancie and wickedness of men, so hee preordained in his justice the same to bee punished. [77]The second issue, pertaining to the freeness of God’s predestinating acts, Willet answers:
God indeede electeth all that shall be saued, not with any condition on their behalfe, but on his owne behalfe: for vnto them, whome hee chooseth, he will giue grace to obey, will to be believe in him, and to do that he appointeth…. He hath chosen vs, that we should be holy, not because he saw we should be holy, but to the end that we might be holy…the mercie of God is the onely ground of our election…there is then no respect to be had to our workes. [78]The freeness of God’s election is not contingent on one’s works; rather, good works flow out of God’s free election.
The third issue deals with the assurance of predestination, which has been the focus of several recent scholarly studies. [79] For Willet, the papist denied the possibility of assurance for the greater mass of humanity on the grounds that only the recipient of special, divine revelation could attain to it; this subjective assurance was different from what the Reformed tradition had historically endorsed. For Willet, assurance of predestination was not a “false illusion, and presumption” but reposes in the promises of God.
We doe not teach men to walke securely, or presume of their election. But we protest vnto them, that seeing men are predestinate vnto good workes, that vnless they be careful to lead an holy life, they haue no part in predestination: yet wee teach men notwithstanding, assuredly to beleeue the promises of God made to all those that beleeue to be saued. And this confidence doth very well agree with the feare of God. [80]It is not just a cleaving to the promises but “an assurance that upon the word of God, that through faith in God, and walking in that way which God hath appointed vs, we shall undoubtedly come in the end to eternal life.” This assurance is as certain as one’s predestination. Willet’s position in the Synopsis papismi places greater emphasis on the cleaving to the promise than in the subjective probing of one’s eternal estate through marks and motions of the Spirit. This objectivism, some have argued, is more harmonious with the earlier Reformed tradition than the later; regardless of differences or progressions in the development of assurance the emphasis is one that urged individuals to hope in God and to despair of oneself. [81]
Other topics of note in the Synopsis papismi are discussions of the church, councils, bishop of Rome (pope as Antichrist), clergy, monks and friars, civil magistrate, angels, mass, relics, images, prayers to saints, sacraments, merit and justification, and the end times. Regarding justification, Willet argues that the chief error of the papist is his fusing of justification with sanctification; or living in the Spirit with walking in the Spirit. This free justification is God’s gift of grace by faith only by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, not by degrees but once and for all. [82]
Conclusion
The religious and cultural climate of Elizabethan and Jacobean eras was hotly polemical. Inter-Protestant debates and Protestant-Catholic divides were part and parcel to the rhetoric, vocabulary, and literary culture of the Post-Reformation. Of all the anti-popery polemicists, biblical expositor and disputant Andrew Willet was undoubtedly one of the most learned and popular. An arch-enemy of English papists, Willet’s Synopsis papismi, a magnificent compilation of “popish” heresies, served a growing need in the Post-Reformation church, to engage the commoner in the affairs of academics and to further plant anti-Catholic seeds that would become national consciousness.
An example of “moderate” Puritanism, Willet shows us how non-Laudian churchmen tried to diffuse the Catholic problem, both in political address and literary endeavors. His success is evident in the popularity of his work and its reception in academic and lay circles. Contemporary developments in the crises of religion shaped the development of the Synopsis papismi as well as Willet’s own self-identity. Ravages of the popish anti-Christ, infiltrations of anti-Christ’s seed into England, and concern for the true catholic and apostolic church were all part and parcel to Willet’s battle at the end of the world.
Notes
- The sheer number of monographs on Elizabethan church life and politics is staggering. One of the most entertaining, an examination of book shops, printers, pulpits, and so on, is Peter Lake’s The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Another provocative work, which explores the impact of religious expression on laity, is Peter Kaufman’s Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Champion: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
- Another obvious factor for modern historians is that the Elizabethanism enveloped the best years of William Shakespeare’s life. See Jeffrey Knap, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theatre in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
- See Charles W. A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603 –1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) for a thorough description of how rival biblical interpretations are at the center of much Jacobean churchly dispute.
- Susan Doran and Christopher Durston, Princes, Pastors, and People: The Church and Tradition in England, 1529-1689 (Oxford: Routledge, 1991), 66. See also Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 75, where Lake discusses the unity anti-papal polemic fostered between moderate and radical puritans.
- Rodney L. Peterson, Preaching in the Last Days: The Theme of “Two Witnesses” in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 180. Or, as John Spurr aptly put it, “John Foxe, the author of the Acts and Monuments of the English martyrs, peddled a version of this Christian history that identified the pope with Antichrist and argued that the countdown to Armageddon had begun…. Foxe’s book was officially required to be on display in every parish church and his brand of apocalyptic and millenarian thinking became a major component of English Protestantism” (The Post-Reformation, 1603-1714 [Harlow: Pearson, 2006], 16-17).
- Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Religion 1558-1603 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 55.
- The most famous incident of Catholic rebellion is Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up parliament in 1605 and so displace Protestant rule in England. This aggressive act caused severe repercussions on Catholic dissidents and no doubt shaped Protestant fears of Catholicism for centuries afterward. As Daniel Woolf wrote, “What makes Guy Fawkes…prominent…in English consciousness is not just the gun powder plotter’s historicity but also his identification with a powerful public mythology of the divine preservation of English Protestantism from popery” (The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500-1730 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 299). For an interesting epilogue on Catholic–Protestant disputes of the eighteenth century, see Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 437ff.
- Quoted in Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 149.
- J. R. Jones once commented, “Anti-popery was the strongest, most widespread and most persistent ideology in the life and thought of seventeenth-century Britain” (The Revolution of 1688 in England [London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972], 75). See also Pasi Ihalainen, Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685-1772 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), 299– 323; and Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 55-76. In 1594, Andrew Willet wrote, “Romane Bishops haue nothing to doe with English people: the one doth not traffique with the other: at the least, though they will haue to deale with vs, we will none of their merchandise, none of their stuffe” (Synopsis papismi, “To the Reader”).
- See Robert Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 208, where he notes, “Two other notable features of the output of London’s presses during the ’45 were the reprinting of classic anti-popery polemic, and the remarkable number of sermons published.”
- Nicholas Tyacke was the first historian to suggest that the emergence of Arminianism in England weakened the consensual Calvinist thread that eventuated in the English Civil Wars. See Nicholas Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism and counter-revolution,” in Conrad Russell, ed., The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973), 119– 43; Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590 –1640 (Oxford, 1987). This view has been contested by Peter White who argues that there was no common Calvinistic thread in the early Jacobean period and that the Laudian enterprise was not a denial of predestinarian thinking. Cf. Peter White, “The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered: A Rejoinder,” Past and Present, no. 115 (May, 1987), 217– 229.
- Lake, Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat, 262.
- See, for example, Arthur F. Morotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2005); John D. Krugler, English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600 –1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Lake’s Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church.
- Patrick Collinson, “English Reformations,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 36.
- The best recent discussion of defining Puritanism is Peter Lake’s “Defining Puritanism — Again?,” in F. J. Bremer, Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 3-29. It is easy to conceive categories that are historically “neat” but have no real usefulness in doing history; “Puritanism,” at times, has fit such a description. Karl Gunther recently posed a reanalysis of Puritanism’s origins in “Origins of English Puritanism,” History Compass (Vol. 4 [2]), 235-240.
- On Catholic resistance in England see Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Person’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580 -1610 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007) and Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- Andrew Willet, Synopsis papismi, that is, A General View of Papistry (London, 1592). In the eighteenth century, Cotton Mather (1663-1728) wrote, “To encounter the Romanists you will be admirably furnished in Willet’s Synopsis Papismi.” Quoted in S. Austin Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased from the Earliest Accounts to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century, Vol. III (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1871), 2732.
- Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 13.
- Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994), 201.
- Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 156.
- Concerning Bellarmine’s role in the formation of Willet’s Synopsis, Milton writes, “If his general opponent in this work was the Church of Rome, Willet’s particular adversary was Cardinal Bellarmine, Rome’s most impressive champion, who had published his voluminous Disputationes during the 1590s. These continued to represent the most important single defense of Roman Catholic doctrine throughout the early Stuart period, and all subsequent controversies were indebted to Bellarmine’s works for laying out the structure of their argument. It was a frequent jibe of later Protestant polemicists that their Romanist opponents were merely copying Bellarmine’s arguments” (Catholic and Reformed, 15).
- Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550 –1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 305.
- Historians disagree as to Willet’s precise affiliation. Anthony Milton has no problem seeing Willet as a product of the “moderate puritan tradition” whereas Charles Prior is more cautious in his language. Cf. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 13; Charles W. A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 312.
- Anthony Milton has explored this idea in some depth in Catholic and Reformed, 173-228.
- Milton’s thesis in Catholic and Reformed is that the Laudian divines reshaped anti-popery, pushing the Church of England into a different, non-polarized direction, as in the Laudian refusal to equate the pope as Antichrist (Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 529-46).
- Edmund Sears Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 1558 –1794 (Bobs-Merrill, 1965), 35. For William Perkins, see Ian Breward, “The Life and Theology of William Perkins, 1558 –1602” (Ph.D. diss., Manchester, 1963); for Chaderton, see Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 1-15; 25– 54.
- Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 11.
- C. W. R. D. Moseley notes the daring quality of this work in his review: “Willet’s book, undoubtedly religious, cannot, at that time of acute controversy, avoid being also political. It seems to fish in troubled waters: to include English translations of his emblems, more than a few of which discuss the stewardship of princes and the responsibilities of pastors, is to seek a readership not only of the educated at a time when the power game of factions was dangerous” (The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 26 [1996], 267– 68).
- Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 93– 127.
- For which Willet earned the reputation of being the most libidinous Puritan minister. Robert V. Snucker, “Elizabethan Birth Control and Puritan Attitudes,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Spring, 1975): 666.
- Anthony Milton, “Willet, Andrew (1561/2 –1621)” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93-96.
- For example, Willet endorsed a modest, highly qualified endorsement of resistance theory in his Harmonie upon the First Booke of Samuel (1607) and later in his Hexapla on Romans (1611), following partly the thought of David Pareus. In essence, Willet remarked that tyrants could be resisted in matters of self-defense, though he denied that princes could be excommunicated. See Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 10-11.
- Synopsis papismi (1603), sig. A4v; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 20.
- See Peter Smith, “The Life and Death of Andrew Willet, Doctor of Divinitie,” in Synopsis papismi (London, 1634); Thomas Fuller, Abel Redevivus: Or, The Dead Yet Speaking (London: William Tegg, 1867), 314 –30; Erasmus Middleton, Evangelical Biography, vol. 2 (London, 1816), 395 –99; Benjamin Brook, The Lives of the Puritans, vol. 2 (London, 1813), 284 –88; Milton, “Willet, Andrew,” 93 –96.
- Smith summarized Willet’s character at the time of his death: “He was 59 yeares of age, but of a strong and able body, and an athleticall constitution: he was of a faire, fresh, ruddy complexion, temperate in his diet, fasting often: he was laborious in his studies, but without defatigation; and that times of intermission, especially at his table, verie cheerfull and merrie” (Smith, op. cit).
- Willet also published a sequel or supplement to the Synopsis papismi called Tetrastylon papismi (1599), which confuted the four main pillars of papistry: their slanders, blasphemies, loose arguments, and contradictions.
- Allibone, Critical Dictionary, 2732.
- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein notes, “Furthermore, in England, after the Anglicans gained the upper hand, Catholic printers proved as skillful as their Puritan counterparts in handling problems posed by the surreptitious printing and the clandestine marketing of books” (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 354).
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, sig. B3.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., sig. A3.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., sig. A4.
- Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31.
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, sig. B1– 2.
- Willet writes, “Do not our Rhemists favour strongly of this heresie, which allow the Image of God to be pictured like an old man with gray haires in their Churches?”
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, sig. C.
- Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 15.
- As with most seventeenth-century anti-popery writers, the consideration of the pope (or the long procession of popes) as the Antichrist was crucial in their rejection of popery. Willet writes, “This question pincheth our audersaries very sore, that wee should touch their head so neere, as to make him Antichrist. For this being once knowne, wee neede not labour much about other matters: for Antichrist with all his doctrine must not be heard, but abhorred of the Church” (Willet, Synopsis papismi, 182).
- Ibid., 1.
- Ibid., 1– 2.
- The most popular anti-papist of this period was William Whitaker, whose Disputationes received a wide and scholarly audience. Willet’s Synopsis papismi, which quotes Whitaker extensively, appears to be a bridge between scholarly and lay communities. For a thorough analysis of Whitaker’s influence, see Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 93 –115.
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, 2.
- Ibid., 5. Willet’s assessment is in harmony with the Belgic Confession (1561), Article 6, which states, “The church may certainly read these books and learn from them as far as they agree with the canonical books. But they do not have such power and virtue that one could confirm from their testimony any point of faith or of the Christian religion. Much less can they detract from the authority of the other holy books.”
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, 13.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 17.
- Ibid., 20– 21.
- Ibid., 22.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 24.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 26.
- Ibid., 26-27.
- Ibid., 29.
- Ibid., 32.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 33.
- Brian Cummings, The Literary History of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 282.
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, 284.
- Ibid., 553-554.
- Ibid., 554.
- Ibid.
- Willet, Synopsis papismi (1634), 920.
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, 555.
- The best modern study is Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of Faith: Calvin, English Puritanism, and the Dutch Second Reformation (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); Randall C. Zachman has also written a helpful work entitled The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, 557.
- I totally reject the notion of “Calvin against the Calvinists” on the issue of assurance; rather, the changing circumstances of the later Reformation in England pushed Reformed theologians and pastors to deal with this specific issue of assurance in a more nuanced manner. See Michael P. Winship, “Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s,” Church History, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), 462-81; Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of Faith: Calvinism, English Puritanism, and the Dutch Second Reformation.
- Willet, Synopsis papismi, 591– 93.
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