Protestant orthodoxy and the Puritans

The Reformation's heirs

When Luther and Calvin had died, the next generations faced a different task. They had to teach the Reformation's faith in universities and train ministers, answer the able Jesuit controversialists, and work out where Lutheran and Reformed churches differed. So they took up again the method of the medieval schools: define terms exactly, draw careful distinctions, and argue topic by topic. Historians call this movement, from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, Protestant orthodoxy.

Among the Lutherans, Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) of Jena set out Lutheran teaching topic by topic in his many-volumed Loci Theologici; as a young man he had also written a devotional book, Sacred Meditations. Among the Reformed, Francis Turretin (1623–1687) of Geneva published his Institutes of Elenctic Theology in the 1670s and 80s. Question by question he stated the opposing views, then answered them from Scripture and reason, and his work served Reformed seminaries as a textbook for a long time.

This age is often labelled ‘dead orthodoxy’, and there were dry and bitter debates. But these theologians preached as well as lectured, wrote prayers and meditations, and saw their doctrine sung in hymns and learned in catechisms; the Lutheran pastor Paul Gerhardt wrote hymns in this same century that are still sung today. Precision need not be coldness. It can be faithfulness, the care to hand on exactly what was received. Paul told Timothy:

Hold on to the pattern of sound teaching you have heard from me, with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

2 Timothy 1:13

Wesley glossed Paul's phrase as "The model of pure, wholesome doctrine" Wesley. The verse also gives the measure for judging the age: sound teaching, held with faith and love.

Arminius and the Synod of Dort

The century's sharpest controversy broke out in the Netherlands. Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), professor at Leiden, taught that God elects in Christ those whom he foreknows will believe Arminius, Declaration of Sentiments. In 1610, the year after his death, ministers who followed him presented the Remonstrance in five articles The Five Articles of Remonstrance: God has decreed to save those who believe and persevere; Christ died for all people; no one can believe without the grace of the Spirit; yet that grace can be resisted.

The Remonstrants did not deny grace. They held fast to the God who "wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), wanted to keep God from seeming the author of sin, and heard in Stephen's words, "You always resist the Holy Spirit" (Acts 7:51), that grace can be refused. The Reformed answered that salvation "does not depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy" (Romans 9:16), and that "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4).

The synod that met at Dordrecht from 1618 to 1619 gathered the Dutch church with delegates from Reformed churches abroad, and it answered the five articles with the Canons of Dort. Their five heads of doctrine are taught in the Reformed Faith course's lesson The five heads of Dort. After the synod, Remonstrant ministers were removed from their pulpits and many were driven into exile, in a quarrel tangled with the politics of the day.

Evangelicals still differ here. Presbyterian and Reformed churches follow Dort; a century later John Wesley, the Methodists and many others held a view close to Arminius. Both confess that salvation is by grace from first to last, and both argue from Scripture. Even the Westminster Confession, firmly on Dort's side, says that "The doctrine of this high mystery of predestination is to be handled with special prudence and care" Westminster Confession 3.8. For both views, see What is predestination?

Westminster and the Puritans

In England, the Puritans' wish for a church more thoroughly reformed found its moment in the civil war between king and Parliament. In 1643 Parliament summoned divines to Westminster to reform the church's worship, government and doctrine, and commissioners of the Church of Scotland joined them. By 1649 the Westminster Assembly had produced the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. The Shorter Catechism begins with the purpose of life:

What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q1

The Reformed Faith course unfolds this answer in Man's chief end. For the Puritans, theology served exactly this end. William Ames, one of their teachers, defined theology as the teaching of how to live to God, and their theology is often called ‘practical divinity’. They preached plain sermons that opened a text, drew out its doctrine and applied it to life. They kept the Lord's Day for worship and rest, apart from work and recreation, and every household was to gather daily to read Scripture and pray.

Three Puritans of this age are still widely read. John Owen (1616–1683), who for a time led the University of Oxford, argued in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ that Christ died for those the Father had given him Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, and he wrote searchingly on putting sin to death by the Spirit and on communion with God. Richard Baxter (1615–1691), pastor at Kidderminster, urged ministers in The Reformed Pastor to watch over themselves first and to teach their people household by household Baxter, The Reformed Pastor. John Bunyan (1628–1688), a tinker turned preacher, spent long years in prison for preaching without a licence, and there conceived The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), the journey of Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress.

After the monarchy returned in 1660, the Act of Uniformity of 1662 required every minister to follow the Book of Common Prayer in full, and some two thousand who could not in conscience do so lost their pulpits. This was the Great Ejection. Matthew Henry (1662–1714) was born that very year, the son of an ejected minister, Philip Henry, and grew up in his father's family worship. Later, as minister of a Nonconformist congregation in Chester, he wrote the commentary this app carries in abridged form (Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary). On Deuteronomy 6 he writes, "Here are means for maintaining and keeping up religion in our hearts and houses" Matthew Henry, and he names meditation, the religious education of children, godly conversation and the frequent reading of the word. It is a window into a Puritan home.

What they left us

The orthodox theologians and the Puritans refused to separate sound doctrine from holy living. Peter writes, "just as He who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do" (1 Peter 1:15). Their catechisms taught the faith to generation after generation of children and new believers, Korean Presbyterians among them. Ministers who kept their consciences under persecution, and a preacher who wrote a pilgrim's journey in prison, show what faith under suffering looks like.

The age had its shadows too. Debates between Lutheran and Reformed, Calvinist and Arminian, were often harsh, and even Owen and Baxter, both Puritans, clashed sharply in print over justification and the scope of Christ's death. When they held power, they too drove others out: the Remonstrants after Dort, and in the England of the 1640s and 50s, when Puritans held sway, many clergy loyal to the Prayer Book lost their livings. Rules for the Lord's Day and for daily life could harden into severity.

Matthew Henry's own counsel on Deuteronomy 6 was a good medicine for his age: to talk with those about us "not of matters of doubtful disputation, but of the plain truths and laws of God, and the things that belong to our peace" Matthew Henry. Zeal for truth and the gentleness of love belong together.

In the next generation some felt that orthodoxy had stayed in the head, and sought a religion of the heart. That story continues in Pietism and the Great Awakening.

Practice