In my last essay I demonstrated that contrary to the view sometimes put forth by overzealous Low Churchmen of a Reformed-in-the-continental-sense bent that our English branch of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church affirms her Protestantism in a Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran way in her reformed Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1571, these instead are worded in such a way as to side with neither Wittenberg nor Geneva absolutely on the controversies between the two with the result that while on the matter of the Real Presence in the Lord’s Supper they lean towards Calvin without excluding Luther, on the matter of Predestination they lean towards Luther without excluding Calvin. On several other matters – prioritizing the truths confessed in the Catholic Creeds over other doctrines, retaining the Apostolic episcopacy rather than adopting a presbyterian government (some Lutherans, such as the Swedish, are like us in this regards, others, such as the German, who were unable to retain the episcopacy, did not adopt the Genevan model), the normative principle (what is not forbidden by Scripture is permitted) over the regulative principle (what is not commanded by Scripture is forbidden) – Anglicanism, as confessed in the Articles is far closer to the Lutheranism than to Calvinism.
An
interesting response to this came in an online Anglican group. The matter of the Lambeth Articles of 1495
was raised and the person who brought it up seemed to think that this document
invalidated my entire argument by providing an official Anglican declaration
that Article XVII (On Predestination and Election) is to be understood in the
most Calvinist way possible. What made
this response so interesting was that the answer to it was so obvious – the
Lambeth Articles are not official Anglican doctrine. They were denied royal assent twice, first
by Queen Elizabeth I, then by King James I at the Hampton Court Conference of
1604. Thank God for the divine right
of kings! It was not a matter of the
monarchs refusing out of personal theological prejudice to allow the Church to
teach what she wanted. At the same time
as the events leading to the drafting of the Lambeth Articles the first volumes
of a lengthy treatise defending the Elizabethan Religious Settlement against
the arguments of Calvinists who wished to overthrow said Settlement and
introduce something more radical and less Catholic appeared in print. The way in which this treatise was
subsequently embraced by Anglicans of every party demonstrates that Queen
Elizabeth and King James knew what they were doing in not allowing a narrower,
much more rigid, interpretation of the difficult doctrine of predestination
than that which appears in Article XVII to be imposed on the English Church.
The wisdom
of the royal judgement in not allowing the Lambeth Articles to become the
official doctrine of the Church will become all the more apparent as we look at
the history of how this would-be addendum to the Articles of Religion came to
be.
The Lambeth
Articles indirectly testify to the fact that Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine
Articles does not require those who affirm or subscribe to it to accept the
interpretation of predestination that is taught in the Lambeth Articles. If it did, there would have been no need for
strict Calvinists to draw up the Lambeth Articles and try to make them
enforceable upon the clergy.
The Most
Reverend Matthew Parker had been chosen to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury
upon the accession of Elizabeth I in 1559 and he was consecrated and installed
in that office in December of that year.
Contrary to lies spread by the Jesuits, this was done properly by four
bishops at Lambeth Palace, preserving the Apostolic succession, not in some
untoward way in the Nag’s Head Tavern. Nor are the arguments against the legitimacy
of his Apostolic succession raised by Roman Patriarch Leo XIII in Apostolicae Curae (1896) valid but that
is a subject for another time. One of his first accomplishments was the
revision of the Forty-Two Articles, written by his predecessor Thomas Cranmer
and briefly made the official doctrine of the Church of England in 1552 at the
very end of the reign of Edward VI.
These were revised into Thirty-Nine Articles in the Convocation of 1563,
with much of the work of revision being done by Parker himself. While a couple of changes had to be made
before the Articles received royal assent in 1571 for the most part the Thirty-Nine
Articles were what they would ultimately be in 1563. The following year John Calvin died.
John
Calvin’s death removed what had up to then been the chief restraint preventing
the Genevan school from running to seed on the doctrine of predestination. It seems strange to think of it that way
today, when Calvin’s name is virtually synonymous with predestination, but
compared to those who came after him he was quite moderate on the topic. Like Dr. Luther, he was strongly influenced
by St. Augustine of Hippo, who in the early fifth century led the orthodox
Church in condemning the heresy of Pelagianism (the denial of Original Sin and
assertion that the human will unassisted by God’s grace can move towards God). In defending Augustinian orthodoxy, at least
as he understood it, in On the Bondage of
the Will (1525) his answer to Erasmus, Dr. Luther had taken a strong view
of predestination that was very similar to that of Calvin’s. It did not have as important a place in his
theology as it did in Calvin’s, however, just as in Calvin’s theology
predestination was not near as important is it would become among Calvin’s
followers. While later in his life Dr.
Luther continued to regard On the Bondage
of the Will as his favourite of his own writings, he clearly saw the danger
of fixating on the doctrine, especially if it is considered apart from Jesus
Christ and the Gospel, and warned against this danger, reminding people of the
difference between what God has revealed to us and what He has kept hidden, and
that it is inadvisable to focus on and speculate about the hidden things (he
argued this at length and in several places in his Lectures on Genesis). In
the larger Lutheran tradition predestination and election are affirmed only of
those who will ultimately be saved, there is no teaching of reprobation to
damnation. Jesus is proclaimed as having
died for all, with the Grace He obtained for all on the Cross brought to man in
the two forms of the Gospel, Word and Sacrament. Faith, the sole means of receiving the Grace
so brought to man, is itself formed in the human heart by the Grace contained
in the Gospel, again Word and Sacrament, without any contribution from our own
will. The Grace in the Gospel is
sufficient to produce saving faith in all, but resistible, so that salvation is
entirely of God, damnation entirely of man.
Dr. Luther and his tradition took care that the doctrine of
predestination not be taught in such a way as to either undermine the assurance
of the Gospel or encourage licentious behaviour.
In John
Calvin’s writings, while predestination has a larger role than in Dr. Luther’s,
it is by no means the doctrine to which all other truths must be subordinated
that it often seems to be in the teachings of many of his followers. In his
Institutes of the Christian Religion,
he devotes four chapters to it, towards the end of the third (out of four)
volume. The third volume is about salvation, following after the first, which
is about God the Creator, and the second, which is about God the Redeemer. He turns to election in this volume, only
after extensively covering Grace, Faith, Regeneration, Justification, Assurance,
the Christian Life, and Christian Liberty.
It is very much a subordinate doctrine, that he derives from the sovereignty,
omnipotence, and omniscience of God, but without the puerile manner in which
some who bear his name today taunt those who do not believe exactly the way
they do with the accusation that they preach too small a God, then wonder why
nobody else is impressed with their “my God is bigger than your God” type
arguments that sound like nothing so much as a boy in the schoolyard telling
his playmates “my dad can beat up your dad”.
He expresses the same concerns about the abuse of the doctrine as Luther
and from his Institutes it appears
that his pastoral counsel to someone troubled by an undue fixation on
predestination was almost identical to Luther’s, that is, look to Christ as
revealed in the Gospel, not to the hidden councils of God. Later Calvinists had trouble doing this because
of their doctrine that Jesus died only for the elect. The closest Calvin came to teaching this
doctrine was in his remarks on 1 John 2.2 in his Commentary on the Catholic Epistles. That was published in 1531. In his Commentary
on the Gospel of John, published two years later, his remarks on the most
beloved and comforting words in all of Scripture, the familiar sixteenth verse
of the third chapter, exclude all possibility of a Limited Atonement
interpretation: “And he has employed the universal term whosoever, both to invite all indiscriminately to partake of life,
and to cut off every excuse from unbelievers.
Such is also the import of the term World,
which he formerly used; for though nothing will be found in the world that is worthy of the favour
of God, yet he shows himself to be reconciled to the whole world, when he
invites all men without exception to the faith of Christ, which is nothing else
than an entrance into life”.
Article
XVII, both as Cranmer had originally written it in the Forty-Two Articles, and
in the slightly edited form in which it stands in the Thirty-Nine Articles,
speaks of predestination only in reference to the saved not the lost. In this, it affirms what the larger Lutheran
tradition affirms, without affirming what appeared to have been Dr. Luther’s
position in 1525 but what the Lutheran tradition and possibly Dr. Luther
himself in his later years moved away from, and what the Lutheran tradition
would explicitly reject in the Formula of Concord six years after the Thirty-Nine
Articles were adopted by the Church of England, that is double
predestination. Double predestination
is rejected in paragraphs three and four of Article XI of the Formula of
Concord, the only Article in all of the Lutheran Confessions on the subject of
Election. There is no Article on election or
predestination in the Geneva Confession of 1536, or the Gallican (French)
Confession of 1559, the only Confessions written in whole or in part by John
Calvin himself. It appears in the
Second Helvetic Confession, however which was written by Heinrich Bullinger,
Zwingli’s successor, shortly before Calvin’s death, and published shortly
after. In the Three Forms of Unity of the
Reformed Church, the Heidelberg Catechism written by Ursinus in the same year
that Parker was revising the Articles of Religion makes no mention of
predestination, unsurprisingly perhaps in that it is a Catechism, that is to
say, intended to be introductory and basic.
In the other two, however, Article XVI of the Belgic Confession (1561)
is on Election, with the weak form of the doctrine of reprobation affirmed and
the Canons of Dort (1619) are entirely in defense of the doctrine of Double
Predestination. This shows how the
doctrine became much more important in the Calvinist tradition as it developed.
The
Anglican Article XVII neither affirms reprobation like the Calvinist tradition,
nor positively rejects it like the Lutheran tradition in the Formula of
Concord. What it does affirm about
predestination is much more Lutheran than Calvinist though. The second paragraph begins by saying that
it is a comfort for the godly. This,
however, is only true if we heed the advice of the final paragraph. Here, Parker’s revision of Cranmer’s
original, was perhaps unfortunate.
Cranmer wrote “Furthermore, although
the Decrees of predestination are unknown unto us, we must receive God’s
promises in such wise as they are generally set forth to us in Holy Scripture,
and in our doings, that will of God is to be followed which we have expressly
declared unto us in the word of God.”
The italicized portion was removed in the Thirty-Nine Articles. It is stronger in the original wording, but
the meaning still stands in the revised version, and it is identical to the
advice given by Dr. Luther in his Lectures
on Genesis, that we should not concern ourselves with what God has not
revealed to us, His secret counsels from all eternity, but with what God has
revealed to us in the Gospel.
Cranmer in 1553 and Parker ten years later could not have
known the direction that the Reformed tradition would take after Calvin’s
death, but they seem, like Dr. Luther, to have recognized that predestination
is a doctrine that can easily take someone who runs with it into any number of
ditches, and to have written Article XVII to guard against this
possibility. The Most Reverend and
Right Honourable John Whitgift would have been well-advised to follow the lead
of these his predecessors. He seems to
have attempted to do so at first but in 1595 committed the blunder of signing
off on a document that, had it received final approval, would have imposed an
interpretation of predestination on Article XVII that was more extreme than
could be found in any then-extent Calvinist Confession. Ironically, his intent in so doing was to
restore peace to the campus of Cambridge University, where he himself had been
a professor earlier in his career at the beginning of the Elizabethan Age.
The man who had upset the peace at Cambridge was William
Barrett, who was the chaplain of Caius College at Cambridge University. On 29 April, 1595, Barrett gave a sermon
from the pulpit of St. Mary’s Church, in the course of which he blasted the
Calvinist doctrine of predestination and asserted that predestination and
reprobation were based on human holiness and sin respectively. The main target of his attack, however, was
the more basic doctrine of assurance of salvation. He denounced as arrogance, the confident
assurance of one’s salvation. This
raised a ruckus and he was immediately brought before the Vice-Chancellor of
the University, who chewed him out.
Unrepentant, the heads of the various colleges were brought in, and they
joined in denouncing him, so he was forced to make a retraction on 10 May. He came across as somewhat less than sincere
in his retraction which did not satisfy the academic authorities. As a matter of fact the heads of the colleges
went to the Vice-Chancellor demanding his expulsion. At this point the affair was brought by both
sides to the attention of Archbishop Whitgift who asked Hadrian Saravia, a
prebendary at Gloucester Cathedral and a member of Cambridge’s rival Oxford
University, and Lancelot Andrewes who was his personal chaplain at the time,
for their opinions on the matter. Their
opinion was that while Barrett wasn’t entirely in the right, the Cambridge
authorities had gone too far in forcing that retraction on him. The Archbishop, satisfied with this opinion,
sent a message to the Cambridge authorities dressing them down and reminding
them that they could discipline a chaplain for speaking against the Articles of
Religion but not for speaking against whatever was currently in vogue in
Geneva. He then made the grave mistake
of assigning further investigation to William Whitaker, Regius Professor of
Divinity at Cambridge.
This was a mistake because Whitaker was the man against whom Barrett’s sermon
had been directed in the first place.
Whitaker had himself given a sermon on 27 February against “those who
assert universal grace” by which he meant Peter Baro, who was Lady Margaret
Professor of Divinity. Baro was
originally from France, like Calvin he had studied law and then he went to
Geneva to study theology under Calvin.
He was ordained into the ministry by the Reformer himself. When the Huguenots (French Calvinists) faced
persecution in France in the 1570s, he fled to England where he was appointed
to one of what were then the only two endowed professorships of divinity at
Cambridge, which he had held for twenty one years at the time this controversy
broke out. In the meantime, like Beza’s
student Arminius, he had moved away from the strict view of predestination that
Beza had been working to make stricter.
Whitaker had held the other endowed professorship in divinity for almost
as long, having been appointed to the post in 1580. He had also been appointed Master of St.
John’s College in 1586, and about the time Archbishop Whitgift asked him to
look into the Barrett case, was made a canon of Canterbury. He very much seemed to be a man on the rise
at the time of this controversy. In
part this was due to his scholarly achievements. His scholarship was acknowledged, even by
Cardinal Bellarmine against whom his magnus opus, Disputations on Holy Scripture, was written, to be second to none. The other part was due to his being protégé
of both Whitgift and Lord Burghley (William Cecil – Elizabeth I’s Lord High
Treasurer, spymaster, most trusted adviser, and basically, although the office
was not yet created, Prime Minister).
He was also, however, the most extreme Calvinist among the Church of
England’s clergy at the time, outside of the Puritan faction. Needless to say, the theological differences
between the Regius and the Lady Margaret Professors of Divinity, had led to the
formation of bitterly rival factions in the school of divinity. Whitaker accepted the task of investigating
Barrett from Whitgift but, although he himself had been the target of Barrett’s
sermon, it was not Barrett he was interested in so much as Baro.
Whitaker gave Barrett a questionnaire full of questions
designed to elicit answers from the man which would enable Whitaker to accuse
him to Whitgift, not just of Arminianism, a word that had barely made it to the
English shore at this point in time, but of the far more serious charge of
popery. Usually Calvinist accusations of
popery against those who did not agree with their view of predestination were
nonsensical slurs but in this case it seems to have been justified. After these events he left England and joined
the Roman Church. Whitaker sent
Barrett’s answers, with his own commentary, to the Archbishop and then, in
September, the Vice-Chancellor and college heads wrote to Whitgift asking for a
final ruling, and permission to discipline Barrett. Whitgift, wanting neither to let Barrett off
on the points where he seemed to be supporting Romanism nor to force him to
agree with the entire recantation that the Cambridge authorities had drawn up,
asked Barrett to give an account before him at Lambeth Palace in November. The
other members of the tribunal were Richard Fletcher, Bishop of London, and
Richard Vaughan, who had been chosen as the next Bishop of Bangor but would not
be consecrated and installed until the following year. Whitaker and Humphrey Tyndall, the President
of Queen’s College and Dean of Ely, were sent along as the representatives of
the Cambridge authorities. The matter
of Barrett was fairly easily disposed of – he agreed to another
recantation. Then Whitaker handed the
Archbishop a set of nine Articles, clarifying in the sense of significantly
narrowing, the Church’s position on predestination, and asked him to make it
binding on the clergy. This would have
opened the door to his having Baro ejected from his seat at Cambridge.
Whitgift, after consulting with the Archbishop of York, made
with the other bishops on the tribunal a few revisions to the Articles and then
signed them on 20 November. One
consequence of this has been that Archbishop Whitgift, the staunch
anti-Puritan, has ever since had a reputation for being a far stricter
Calvinist than he actually was. Here
are the Articles in the form in which they were signed:
1.
God
from eternity hath predestinated certain men unto life; certain men he hath
reprobated.
2.
The
moving or efficient cause of predestination unto life is not the foresight of
faith, or of perseverance, or of good works, or of any thing that is in the
person predestinated, but only the good will and pleasure of God.
3.
There
is predetermined a certain number of the predestinate, which can neither be
augmented nor diminished.
4.
Those
who are not predestinated to salvation shall be necessarily damned for their
sins.
5.
A true,
living, and justifying faith, and the Spirit of God justifying [sanctifying],
is not extinguished, falleth not away; it vanisheth not away in the elect,
either finally or totally.
6.
A man
truly faithful, that is, such a one who is endued with a justifying faith, is
certain, with the full assurance of faith, of the remission of his sins and of
his everlasting salvation by Christ.
7.
Saving
grace is not given, is not granted, is not communicated to all men, by which
they may be saved if they will.
8.
No man
can come unto Christ unless it shall be given unto him, and unless the Father
shall draw him; and all men are not drawn by the Father, that they may come to
the Son.
9.
It is
not in the will or power of every one to be saved.
Whitaker returned to Cambridge to prepare for the
prosecution of Baro. He caught a cold
on the way home, however, which developed into a fever, and two weeks after the
publication of he Lambeth Articles he died.
Before he died he met with his other patron, Lord Burghley, who among
his many other duties was Chancellor of the University, and discussed the
matter, most likely expecting Cecil’s support.
The Lord High Treasurer, however, recognized immediately the threat to
the peace of realm and Church that the “Lambeth Articles” posed and went
directly to Queen Elizabeth with the news that Whitgift had essentially held an
unofficial Convocation behind her back in which he had added to the Articles of
Religion in such a way as to force a narrow interpretation of a contentious
point on them. Queen Elizabeth summoned
Whitgift to appear before her and her Privy Council to answer for this illegal
behaviour, for which he could do nothing but apologize and beg her pardon. Whitgift received her pardon – but the
Lambeth Articles were vetoed. Baro was allowed to finish his term and retire
peacefully, and the queen appointed John Overall to the Regius Professorship
vacated by the death of Whitaker.
Overall was a young clergyman, born the year of the queen’s accession, and
ordained only four years prior to his appointment to Cambridge. Later he would work with Lancelot Andrewes
on the translation of the Authorized Bible, a few years after which he was
consecrated Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield before being translated the very
end of his career and life to the See of Norwich. He was already known to be a moderate on the
matter of predestination in 1595, however, and it was for this that he was
chosen as the replacement of Whitaker.
The Lambeth
Articles, although originally drafted to narrow Anglican orthodoxy to a
strictly Calvinist position on predestination, in the modified form in which
Whitgift signed them, still left room for non-Calvinist interpretations. The second Article, while affirming “the
good will and pleasure of God” as the sole cause of predestination to life,
makes no such statement about reprobation and, indeed, the fourth Article by
asserting that those not predestinated to life will be damned “for their sins”
places the cause of their damnation, and hence their “reprobation”, in
themselves rather than God. The ninth
Article, of course, can be affirmed by any Augustinian, for not only is it true
that “it is not in the will or power of every one to be saved” it is actually
“not in the will or power of any one to be saved” because salvation does not
come from the will or power of the one saved but from God Who does the
saving. “With man it is impossible, but
not with God, because all things are possible with God” as our Lord put
it. None of the Lambeth Articles asserts
the most problematic of the doctrines that would be adopted by the Synod of
Dort in response to the Arminian Articles of Remonstrance in 1619, the
anti-Scriptural and blasphemous doctrine of Limited Atonement, that Jesus died
only for the elect. This is why the
fifth Article can assert “A man truly faithful, that is, such a one who
is endued with a justifying faith, is certain, with the full assurance of
faith, of the remission of his sins and of his everlasting salvation by Christ.” This assertion is inconsistent with the idea
that Jesus died only for he elect.
Justifying faith is faith in Jesus Christ as He is revealed in the
Gospel. The Gospel is not a revelation
of what God has done in secret, into which category fall election and
predestination. It is a revelation of
what God has done for mankind out in the open for everyone to see, by the
giving of His Son Jesus Christ, Who made Atonement for dying for the sins of
the world, then rose again from the dead.
The difference between “historical faith”, which does not justify or
save and “saving faith” or “justifying faith” is that the person with
“historical faith” sees in the Gospel only events that are some place, some
time, distant and unconnected to himself, while the person with justifying
faith sees in the Gospel the message that “Jesus died for me” which information
is absent from the Gospel if Jesus died only for the elect, and indeed, if
Jesus dies only for the elect, the information about whether Jesus died for any
particular individual will not be available this side of the Last Judgement, so
what is asserted in the fifth Lambeth Article is utterly impossible if Jesus
died only for the elect. Indeed,
assurance is difficult to square with the concept of double
predestination. The early Dr. Luther
managed to do so, as did John Calvin, but this was because both men recognized
that it was unwise to dwell on what God has not revealed, His secret counsels,
but must direct our faith towards what God has revealed in Jesus Christ.
One who did not follow them in this was William
Perkins. Perkins was born in the last
year of the reign of Mary, studied at Cambridge University, and remained a
fellow of Christ’s College at Cambridge until the year before the controversy
that produced the Lambeth Articles. He
was a Puritan, considered a moderate in that he was neither a separatist nor a
rebel, but was very severe in his Calvinism.
He died almost twenty years before Limited Atonement was formulated but
he accepted Theodore Beza’s supralapsarianism, the form of extreme Calvinism
that started the chain of events that led to Dort. He developed the doctrine of “experimental
predestination” for when his obsessive preaching on predestination caused
people to ask the question “am I one of the elect”. In this he advised people to make use of a
practical syllogism – everyone who believes is a child of God, I believe,
therefore I am a child of God – that separated assurance from the direct look
of faith. Worse, he told them to look
for evidence for the second premise, if they doubted their faith was the saving
kind, by looking inward for the fruit of sanctification. This didn’t work out too well in his case. His biographer Thomas Fuller records that he
died “in the conflict of a troubled conscience”. Perkins’ writings were more influential than
any other Puritan of the Elizabethan Age on subsequent generations of Puritans
and this problem of dying in the conflict of a troubled conscience recurred
over and over again. There were also
cases of people living in the conflict of a troubled conscience because of this
doctrine and being driven mad by it.
William Cowper, the Olney poet and hymn writer, is a classic example of
this, although to be fair, the evidence suggests that given his extremely
melancholic temperament he might have ended up the same way no matter what doctrine
he had been taught.
The example of Perkins, and the subsequent generations of
Puritans who followed him in this, if not in his moderation with regards to
making further reforms to the Church, demonstrates how an overemphasis on
predestination undermines in practice the assurance of salvation that it is
supposed to bolster. For a good example
of how the doctrine can be taught without having this negative effect see the
second to last chapter in Getting Into
The Theology of Concord (1977) by
Robert D. Preus. The book is a
commentary on the Lutheran Confessions and under the heading “Predestination
and the Election of Grace” Preus, who was president of Concordia Theological
Seminary at the time, explained that it was a doctrine that was only to be
introduced after one had already been assured of salvation through faith in the
revealed Gospel, in order “to give him even greater certainty and assurance of
God’s grace”. Preus recounted his own
professor’s explanation of predestination as meaning merely “everything God has
done in time to save us and make us His children and preserve us in the faith,
He determined in Christ to do for us in eternity.” Understood this way, the doctrine is not the
threatening source of uncertainty that it has been when overemphasized as it
has been in much of the Calvinist tradition.
In the Canons of Dort (1619) Perkins’ view of assurance replaced that of
Calvin (found in Article XI of the Geneva Confession of 1536, Articles XVIII,
XIX, XX and XXII of the Gallican Confession of 1559, and the Institutes of the Christian Religion,
Book III, chapter xxiv, paragraph 5) as the official Calvinist doctrine in the
twelfth article under the first head (Divine Election and Reprobation – in
Dort, the points are ordered ULTIP rather than TULIP):
Assurance of their
eternal and unchangeable election to salvation is given to the chosen in due
time, though by various stages and in differing measure. Such assurance comes
not by inquisitive searching into the hidden and deep things of God, but by noticing within themselves, with
spiritual joy and holy delight, the unmistakable fruits of election pointed out
in God’s Word—such as a true faith in Christ, a childlike fear of God, a godly
sorrow for their sins, a hunger and thirst for righteousness, and so on.
The Lambeth Articles were brought to the Synod of Dort and
read out in the deliberation there.
Although they affirm a strong view of assurance of salvation, and the
occasion of their drafting was Barrett’s sermon attacking assurance – Saravia
and Andrewes advised Whitgift that Barrett had only denied the impossibility of
those justified by faith falling from grace, asserted by Calvinism but not in
the Articles of Religion, rather than their present assurance of forgiveness
and justification, while his accusers maintained he had denied both - they can therefore be regarded as a step in
the direction in which Calvinism was moving, away from the solely outward look
to the objective truth of the Gospel of Lutheranism and early Calvinism to the
inward look of Puritanism/Dort. It is
therefore, most merciful indeed, that by the grace of God, Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth I prevented them from becoming an official addendum to the Articles
of Religion.
Those who wish it were otherwise often claim that the
Lambeth Articles represented a consensus of the leading clergy of the Church of
England at the time. This is hardly the
case. Archbishop Whitgift was by no
means as harsh a predestinarian as his signature on these Articles might
suggest to some. It is now time to
consider another protégé of Whitgift’s who the year before this controversy had
published the first four volumes in a defense of the Elizabethan Settlement
against those who wished to reshape the Church entirely in the image of Geneva,
a defense that gained such wide acceptance that Anglicans of all parties would
in the future claim its author as one of their own.
Richard Hooker was born five years before the accession of
Elizabeth I and through the patronage of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury and
author of an Apology which defended
the reformed Church of England against Romanist attacks on the grounds of
arguments drawn from the Church Fathers, studied at Corpus Christi College in
Oxford. He became a fellow of the
College in 1577 and was ordained a priest two years later. In 1585, Elizabeth I, on the advice of
Archbishop Whitgift appointed him Master of the Temple, an unusual title for
the senior priest of an unusual Church, the Temple Church, which ministers to
the Inner and Middle Temple Inns of Court, in what was originally the headquarters
of the Knights Templar. The Reader of
the Temple, that is to say, the assistant clergy, was at the time, Walter
Travers. Hooker and Travers were kin by
marriage – Travers’ brother was married to Hooker’s sister, the relationship
between the two clergy is usually, if not entirely accurately, described as
that of cousins-in-law – but in very different places theologically. Travers was a Calvinist of the type who
thought that every Church everywhere needed to resemble in theology, practice,
and order the Church in Geneva, in other words, a Puritan. He had been ordained in Antwerp by Thomas
Cartwright, who unlike his contemporary William Perkins was not a moderate, as
evidenced by a) his ordaining someone without the episcopal authority to do so,
and b) his doing so abroad where he was living in semi-exile (he returned the
same year Hooker was appointed Master).
Indeed, his Puritanism was so extreme that even Edmund Grindal, the most
Puritan-friendly of the Elizabethan Archbishops of Canterbury, denounced him as
a nut. Archbishop Whitgift, correctly
insisted that Travers needed to be re-ordained, but Travers refused. He then wondered why the queen passed him
over for the senior position at the Church and gave it instead to his in-law
who already had something of a reputation as an opponent of Puritanism. Why, indeed.
The arrangement at the Temple was that the Master, Hooker,
would preach in the morning, and the Reader, Travers would preach in the
afternoon. Travers’ sermon would take the
form of a rebuttal of the sermon given in the morning. While this would have been inappropriate
anywhere else, it does seem sort of fitting in a parish where the congregation
was made up mostly of lawyers. Indeed,
they managed to carry on in this way without it disturbing their personal
friendship. Then, a year later,
Archbishop Whitgift finally had enough and ordered Travers to cease and desist. Travers appealed this decision to the Privy
Council and as part of his appeal accused Whitgift’s protégé, his own cousin,
Hooker of heresy.
The basis of the accusation was a series of three sermons on the book of
Habakkuk that Hooker had delivered in March of either 1585 or 1586 – there is
conflicting evidence as to which year – that he later published as a pamphlet
under the title “A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works, and How the
Foundation of Faith is Overthrown”. In
these sermons, Hooker articulated the doctrine of justification by faith on the
basis of Christ’s merits alone and identified several errors of the Church of
Rome in relation to this subject. He
distinguished between justification and sanctification, and defended the
Protestant position that the former, the righteousness of Christ imputed to the
believer, is not based upon the latter, the righteousness that manifests itself
in the believer as faith works through love.
The faith that justifies, however, is faith in Jesus Christ, not faith
in the doctrine of sola fide, and since the Roman Church confesses faith in
Jesus Christ as expressed in the orthodox Creed, neither that faith nor the
justification that comes through it is necessarily overthrown by the errors of
Rome. It was this last point that
twisted Travers’ knickers in a knot. It
translates into the idea that somebody is not necessarily going to Hell just
because they are a member of the Roman Church.
To the twisted and paranoid mind of the Puritan that was tantamount to
saying the Reformation was a mistake and we should all bow before the Roman
Patriarch.
Archbishop Whitgift, although unwilling to openly endorse
the idea that not everyone in the Roman Church is lost, tacitly did so by
sticking to his guns on Travers, and not disciplining Hooker. In this he was supported by the Privy
Council which removed Travers from the position of Reader altogether. Hooker continued as Master of Temple until
1591 when, seeking a less public position so as devote time to writing his
treatise, he became rector of the small country parish of St. Andrew’s in the
village of Boscombe, again through the patronage of the Archbishop. The first four volumes of his Of The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie
were published about a year before the controversy in Cambridge. Eventually the work would include four other
volumes, bringing the total to eight.
Hooker’s Lawes are
best thought of as being to Puritanism, what his first patron, Jewel’s Apology was to the Church of Rome, that
is to say, an answer to their attacks on the Church of England and the status
quo of the same that had been established in the Elizabethan Settlement that
employed the language of the attackers.
Jewel had defended the orthodoxy and Catholicity of the Church of
England, including her Protestant positions, with citations from the Church
Fathers. Hooker defended the Anglican
Church from the very Scriptures the Puritans claimed as their sole authority. While Hooker also appeals to tradition and
reason, these are very much subordinate lower rungs on his hierarchy of
authority with Scripture clearly at the top.
Hooker uses tradition and reason very effectively in support of his main
argument which over and over again is that the Scriptures do not support the
radical changes the Puritans were demanding because the Scriptures do not say
what the Puritans think and claim they say.
The Lawes are not
an eight volume takedown of the doctrine of predestination. It is not the Puritans’ soteriology that is
Hooker’s focus but their ideas concerning Church Government. This ought to be evident from the title of
the work. Ecclesiastical Politie
(Polity) means Church Government. It is
not William Perkins whom Hooker is concerned with so much as Thomas Cartwright,
the arch-presbyterian mentor of his relative Travers. Specifically, it is the Puritan claim that
the Scriptures contain not merely everything necessary for salvation, as
Article VI declares, everything necessary to answer any question that might
arise, including the one true model of Church government and organization (the
Genevan, even though this could be found nowhere on earth before the sixteenth
century) and a complete set of instructions as to what can be done in Christian
worship to which nothing can be added that is not sinful, idolatrous, and
blasphemous, that he systematically dismantles. He patiently makes his case, first laying
the foundation with a discussion of the nature of laws in general in the first
volume, which leads into a refutation of specific Puritan claims that occupies
the rest of the first four books, the ones published before 1595. In the fifth book, published in 1597, which
is as long as the first four combined, as he examines Scripture readings,
sermons, music, Sacraments, liturgy and basically everything that is today
summed up in the word “worship” and demonstrates through an extended defence of
the normative principle that the established Anglican way of doing these things
is not contrary to Scripture, he begins to segue from answering the claims of
the Puritans into setting forth the positive case for the status quo of the
Elizabethan Settlement of Religion that will occupy the remainder of the work. In making that case, while he rests
ultimately upon the authority of Scripture, he does not do so in the same
manner as his opponents, he does not mirror their attitude of thinking there is
only one way of doing everything.
Instead, having shown that episcopal polity, liturgical worship, royal
patronage, etc., not to be in violation of Scripture but to be positively
beneficial, he argues that all these should be retained unless their opponents
can meet the burden of proof in arguing for their elimination, which they have
failed to do.
Although it was the Puritans’ demand for changes in the
structure, organization, and practices of the Church that Hooker answered in
his Lawes rather than their narrow
doctrine of predestination, the basic conservatism of his arguments provided
the Church with an alternative path to that which Whitaker wished her to take
with the Lambeth Articles. Just as the
Puritans insisted that there was only acceptable form of Christian worship, the
Genevan, the stricter school of Calvinists, Puritan or not, insisted that there
was only one way of understanding the doctrine of predestination, that which
they attempted to impose on the Church in the Lambeth Articles, and which would
eventually narrow further in the continental Reformed tradition into that
espoused at Dort. The Articles of
Religion, to which clergy of the Church were required to subscribe, affirm
predestination, but only in a more general way. They do not exclude an Anglican clergyman
from holding to the narrower view of Whitaker’s Articles, but neither do they
require it. There was no need to impose
a narrower view. Predestination is
mentioned in the Scriptures, but only on a few occasions, and not in such a way
as to justify the claim that only the strict Calvinist interpretation is
acceptable. In the book of Romans, for
example, St. Paul brings it up in precisely the way Dr. Preus talked
about. First he shows that all people,
Jew and Gentile alike, have sinned and therefore cannot be justified before God
by their own works, then he talks about how God has justified by His Grace
those who believe in Jesus on account of the redemption He accomplished by His
propitiatory death. Having established that
believers have peace with God through their Saviour Jesus Christ, he urges them
to live righteously because through their union with Christ in baptism, they
died to sin with Him in His death, and now live to God and righteousness in the
newness of His resurrection life. This
leads into an acknowledgement of the ongoing struggle with sin, which the Law
is powerless to assist the believer in, which is followed immediately by the
encouragement that the Holy Ghost provides what the Law cannot, and it is only
then, in this context that predestination is raised to strengthen this
assurance and encouragement, by telling the Roman believers that what God is
doing in them He will see through to completion because He planned it from
before the world and that no power exists that break our union with Jesus
Christ. The idea of predestination, in this context,
should not give rise to speculation about God arbitrarily deciding so-and-so
will be saved and so-and-so will be damned, and the language that some might
take in this sense in the following chapters is clearly talking about the
present state of nations, Jews and Gentiles, rather than the final destiny of
individuals. Indeed, as if to avoid
dogmatic speculation about the nature of predestination, the Apostle places
foreknowledge before predestination.
This does not have to be taken in the Arminian way – I do not understand
it that way myself – but it is a good reason to be careful in flinging the word
“heresy” around about views other than strict Calvinist double
predestination. Heresy is a departure
from the basic truths of the faith, primarily those confessed in the ancient
and universal Creed, and these are truths that are clear and open revelation in
Scripture, central to the message of Scripture, and not things that get a mention
in Scripture but with the details left to the unrevealed secret things of God,
into which it is unwise to pry.
Therefore, from Hooker’s basic conservative principles, we can deduce
that it was very wise indeed of Elizabeth I, to not allow a narrow formulation
of the doctrine of predestination to become official doctrine in the
Church. In taking the path represented
by Richard Hooker, rather than that represented by the Lambeth Articles,
Anglicanism made the right choice at the crossroads of 1595.
