Puritans and Anglicans

“For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. “(Acts 20:27)

As Christians we are to think God’s thoughts after him (and, of course, obey them). And we are to put the same emphasis on God’s Word that God does. To reverse God’s order, or to ignore it, is to disobey God. To have a plan for life other than God’s plan, is to hate God.

Now, to be sure, to differ about such things will be seen, by some, as so-called “inside baseball,” something that is utterly irrelevant to real life, something that is gratuitously quarrelsome, something that is akin to arguing about those angels and how many of them can fit on a pinhead. But, this is a serious and dangerous mistake. The difference between preaching and living God’s Word—in the way and in the order God graciously gives it to us—is the difference between preaching and living the true Gospel or “another gospel” (Gal. 1:6).

Puritans versus Anglicans

A vital and crucial case in point is the fight between Puritans and Anglicans. In his wonderful book The Godly Man In Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, And the Two Tables, 1620-1670 (Yale University Press, 1976)—meaning the Ten Commandments, the Two Tables of His Law that God gave to Moses, Commandments One through Four, and Five through 10—J . Sears McGee who, at the time, was an assistant professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, begins by quoting a sermon by Thomas Case to the House of Commons on May 26, 1647. Case, a prominent member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, asks his audience if they had seized the moment “which God hath fashioned and prepared by His own hand, for the accomplishing of the great work of the reformation, wherewith God hath entrusted and honored you?” He asks, specifically, what they had done both as individuals and as Parliament-men in reference to the First Table of the Law?—the duties of man towards God—adding that those members who were guided by both Tables were godly men who had, like “so many Joshuas gone about the work in God’s strength, God’s methods and to God’s ends.”

Now, Thomas Case’s inquiry was an excellent question then. And it remains a most relevant question for Christians today. Noting, correctly, that Puritans saw in Anglicanism not English Protestantism but, instead, Arminianism and Roman Catholicism, McGee quotes the Puritan Richard Sibbes as saying that true doctrine and errors, “whether Popish or Arminian,” could no more be mixed together “than oil with water, iron and steel with clay” and that such mixtures “cease to be religions in God’s account.”

A quick definition here regarding Puritans. McGee, again correctly, says that they were those whose highest priority was the dissemination of “Godly preaching,” their vision being that England could, thus, move toward complete reformation, meaning the establishment of “a piety and a moral order” which was distinctive.

In the troubled times of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in England, McGee says the question all men were asking was the crucial question: “What should we do?” He says they wanted concrete, practical answers as to what their conduct ought to be. For example. Sir Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, an Anglican, wrote that “it is not our being in adversity, but behaving ourselves well under it, that will hasten our deliverance.” Thus, the questions for the statesman and his contemporaries were: How do we act so as to gain God’s favor and support? What particular acts are particularly pleasing to Him? What, specifically, is a godly man’s “carriage” and “conversation” while he is in the world? And, again, these are questions that are crucial to our lives today and which are being talked about in our churches, homes, schools, by our elected officials, and in the media, daily.

The presupposition underlying the Puritan emphasis on these questions was that man was to fulfill God’s plan for man by obeying God’s instructions. Failures of obedience would, sooner or later, be punished in the ungodly and chastised in the godly. It was therefore of the highest importance to know about sin in a practical, concrete way.

The Root of the Disagreement

But, despite their many agreements, there was a serious and substantive disagreement between Puritans and Anglicans regarding the Two Tables of God’s Law—as there is today among Christians. Indeed, McGee says it is no exaggeration to say that “the most prominent theme” in Puritan exhortations was “the fundamental necessity of scrupulous obedience to the First Table.” The Anglicans, however, generally speaking, but with certain exceptions and overlapping views, tended to emphasize the Second Table since most Anglicans had what McGee calls a more optimistic—I would say un-Biblical—view of human nature and reason. For example, in a funeral sermon in 1649, the Anglican Thomas Pierce said plainly: “The Second Table is the touchstone to our obedience to the First [Table].”

But, as the Puritan Richard Sibbes succinctly put it, reversing Pierce’s emphasis: The “rise of all sin against man is our sinning against God first.... The breach of the First Commandment is the ground of the breach of all the rest.” His argument was that if God were accorded His proper place in the heart of the Christian, to the exclusion of all false gods and improper desires, then sins of all kinds would be avoided as a consequence. And the term which summed up all those iniquities which were proscribed by the First Table was “idolatry.”

Sibbes adds: “Beloved, here is the bane [or the source of evil or curse] of men’s souls, that they will be their own carvers and take of the Gospel what they list [desire].” His point being that this would not do because truly converted men strove to obey God fully, that “partial obedience is indeed no obedience at all.” He who hates sin hates all sin.

And, as the late Richard Weaver noted in that well-known saying—“ideas have consequences”—the Puritan emphasis on the First Table of God’s Law resulted in their history-changing protest against the refusal of the authorities, Elizabeth and her bishops, to rid the Church of England of what they called “the dregs of popery” which the Puritans charged, correctly, remained in its liturgy and government. By emphasizing the First Table, by claiming God’s priorities as their own, the Puritans insisted that God should never be worshipped except by the methods prescribed in the Scriptures, period.

The Puritan goal was freedom, a true Christian liberty, from what seemed a vast, thick, suffocating fog of superstition which had enveloped Christendom for many centuries. Whereas, as McGee notes, many Anglican/Arminians regarded themselves as engaged in a counter- reforming movement dedicated to undoing what they considered to be the Protestant damage of the Reformation.

Godly Political Heritage

And the Puritans left us a godly political heritage as well—though we have frittered it away. As even David Hume, an atheist, acknowledges in his History Of England: “So absolute was the authority of the Crown at that time that the precious spark of liberty had been kindled and was preserved by the Puritans alone; and it is to this sect that the English owe the whole freedom of their Constitution.”

The Episcopal clergy preached the doctrine of non-resistance, and upheld the royal prerogative and the most tyrannical exercise of kingly power. As Thomas Macaulay said of the Episcopalians, they “were never weary of repeating that in no conceivable case, not even if England were cursed with a king…. who, in defiance of law, and without the pretense of justice, would daily doom hundreds of innocent victims to torture and death, would all the estates of the realm be justified in withstanding his tyranny with physical force.”

The Puritans, on the other hand, both wrote and struggled for constitutional government. They sought to have the representative principle of their own church government reproduced in the government of the state. And how this worked itself into the British Constitution is demonstrated by Dr. J. F. Bright in his book The History of England. He writes that when Henry Grattan said in the Irish Parliament, “The Presbyterian religion is the mother of the free Constitution of England,” he was stating a simple fact. And S. R. Gardiner, in his History Of England, says: “Under the watchwords of faith and duty our English liberties were won; and however much the forms of Puritanism may have fallen into decay, it is certain it is under the same watchwords alone that they will be preserved as a heritage to our children.”

Speaking of Puritanism in his Short History Of England, J. R. Green observes: “It saved Scotland from a civil and religious despotism, and in saving the liberty of Scotland it saved England as well....In the revolution of 1688 Puritanism did the work of civil liberty it had failed to do in 1642... slowly but steadily it introduced its own seriousness and purity into English society, English literature, English politics. The whole history of English progress since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual side, has been the history of Puritanism.”

But, Puritanism’s influence went much farther than England. The great Dutch jurist Groen Van Prinsterer, says: “ In Calvinism lies the origin and guarantee of our Constitutional liberties .”And our great historian of the last century, George Bancroft, declared: “He that will not honor the memory and respect the influence of Calvin knows but little of the origin of American liberty.”

In 1625, a leader of the Puritans, John Preston, said—in a statement that reminds us of many who call themselves Christians today, and even have the Christian name in the name of their organization—that the reason “that religion suffers an eclipse in any place” is that the people are not sufficiently chagrined [mortified or disappointed] and angered by dishonor falling upon “the things that belong to God.” As an example to illustrate his call for a “holy anger” against those dishonoring God, Preston cited Moses whose “zeal was kindled in his breast when he saw the idolatry of his people,” and he also noted the “superstition and idolatry of the people” as first among the causes for the plague which afflicted the Israelites, as mentioned in Numbers 25. Another Puritan preacher, Robert Bolton, was a little less subtle, referring to those attacked by Preston as “profane Esaus, swinish Gadarenes, senseless earthworms.”

Preaching

The program of another Anglican leader, William Laud, also demonstrates this important confrontation over the Two Tables of God’s Law. Laud ordered several un-Biblical innovations in worship. His reissue of the so-called “Book of Sports” which licensed Sunday recreations directly breached the Fourth Commandment regarding Sabbath observance. And his enforcement of this program led to the suspension, silencing and ejection of Puritan preachers and Puritan attempts to install “Godly preachers.” Says McGee: These requirements were to the Puritans “a calculated plot to undermine their attempts to obey the first Four Commandments.”

And the Puritans reacted to this plot in no uncertain terms. When the Long Parliament opened, the previously mentioned Thomas Case preached powerfully on the text from Ezekiel 20:25 regarding God’s judgment on and the hideous consequences of the actions of the sinful Israelites who disobeyed His Word. Not only did the authorities then fail to execute God’s Commandments, Case pointed out, but they dishonored and despised God—and here one thinks of our Congress and Supreme Court, particularly on the so-called legalization of abortion—by defiling “God’s ordinances with ingredients and mixtures of their own inventions.”

The Confrontation

Preaching all of God’s Word, and urging obedience to all of God’s Word, in the order in which God has graciously given it to us, was what distinguished the Puritans. They published their sermons as sermons, as treatises, and as commentaries, and also urged their parishioners to read them. The mark of even the lay Puritan was his demand for constant preaching. As John Winthrop said, in his spiritual diary in 1616 and 1617, expressing the theme which underlay all his own efforts: “Oh I see, if we leave, or slightly exercise ourselves in the Word, faith will starve and die and our hearts will l embrace any dotages [senilities] of man’s brain sooner than God’s eternal truth, as I found by dangerous experience.”

The Contrast

McGee says that for both the clerical and lay Puritans, “the sins against the First Table of the Decalogue and the duties of worship which it required formed a consistent, coherent, incessantly reiterated theme”—that which is precisely lacking in any major Christian group today. In sharp contrast to those coalitions today who call themselves “Christian,” McGee adds that for the Puritans, “the fountain of all truth was the Bible and it provided warrants for all that men ought to do and injunctions against all that they ought not to do.” Indeed, today, in the so-called “Christian Coalition,” its leaders say that they are only “people of faith” out to change “public policy.”

And the Puritan preacher John Benbrigge addressed himself to just such individuals. In a 1646 work titled God’s Fury and England’s Fire, he denounced the “civil man” who he described as “a Second Table man” who “made it his whole religion to be just and true in all his dealings with men, not once thinking of giving God His due” (emphasis mine), whereas the First Table man quite reversed these priorities. And another Puritan preacher, Thomas Hooker, denounced “civil righteousness” only as one of the “false shadows of the state of grace.”

McGee writes that all of this no doubt is in agreement with Archbishop Ussher’s observation, in his Principles of the Christian Religion, that in Scripture “breaches of the First Table are to be more severely punished, than the breaches of the Second,” and that men who believed that “the works of the Second Table, [such as] charity, alms deeds, and the like” were “the most meritorious works of all” had been duped by “the crafty practices of papists.”

The Anglican Approach

In contrast to the Puritans, McGee says that the Anglicans, among other things, believed that the mark of a good Christian was avoidance of theological controversies—we’ve certainly heard that one, ad nauseam, haven’t we?—and concentration on Second Table duties. And that an acceptable measure of perfection in those Second Table duties was attainable by using Christ as an example.

Puritans and Anglicans also disagreed about how, exactly, and/or when, to disobey the civil government. All agreed there were some situations where obedience could not rightfully be demanded. But, Anglicans such as Robert Sanderson and the already mentioned Clarendon, limited men to a passive disobedience. Puritans such as Oliver Cromwell urged a more active resistance. In this view they were echoing John Calvin who had written that while obedience to higher powers must be performed, this must always be with “this exception...; that it not be incompatible with obedience to Him to whose will... kings should be subject,... [that is, God]. And indeed how preposterous were it, in pleasing men, to incur the offence of Him for whose sake you obey men!”

Citing the “lamentable example” in Scripture of the men of Ephraim who had obeyed their king’s command that they worship calves in Bethel instead of Jehovah in Jerusalem, the Puritan preacher William Fenner pointed out that these men were “utterly destroyed for obeying their king rather than their God... Beloved, God’s commandment is sovereign.... Whatever commandment is repugnant to God’s Word, woe unto us if we do it.” McGee notes that this Puritan view was very different from the Anglican view that if the higher powers erred in some indifferent matter, God would judge only them.

Not so, said Puritan Richard Sibbes. Using the example of Meroz, who was cursed for “not helping the Lord against the mighty,” Sibbes said that this proved that the man who “suffers evil to be done which he might have opposed and hindered, brings the guilt thereof upon his own head.”

McGee says that “the whole weight of the Puritan rhetoric of obedience depended not upon an obedience to princes which issued in civil peace, but upon the primacy of obedience to God, whatever might become of the civil peace” [emphasis mine]. Paul Seaver, in his book The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics Of Religious Dissent, 1560-1662, says: “Preaching the saving Word was more important than preserving the public peace.” And the Puritan Thomas Hooker said, defending proper obedience to the first Four Commandments: “For shall it be a good plea for a traitor against the state to pretend his righteous dealing with his fellow-subjects? No more will l God accept of such a service, where there is high treason against His Majesty, though there be some petty duties performed to men.”

One of Cromwell’s chaplains, Nicholas Lockyer, also explicitly rejected the notion that peace with one’s fellow man could be treated as an indication of true faith, observing: “Peace may be in a sinner’s mouth, and wrath in God’s,” and a soul given over to the devil might be as quiet as anyone could ask. A good, true peace, Lockyer believed, came from true faith and true obedience to all God’s commandments against sin. And John Preston, already mentioned, defined an “unsound peace” as that of a man “secure and at rest,” his mind not “occupied about sin, or about matters of salvation.” This kind of peace, he said, is one that God hates.

When asked, not long before his death, what saints should be doing to demonstrate their true love for God—considering that it was time for men to be working more than ordinary—Preston replied: “Contend for the faith once delivered to the saints... you must be men of contention.” Thomas Hooker agreed, noting that “contention implies opposition... when love is in most opposition, it is most violent in resolution.” And John Owen declared that “great works for God will cause great troubles among men.”

The Divinely Chosen

The Puritans were also very confident who were “the people of God,” “honest Godly men,” “the saints,” “the Godly party.” They were, as John Winthrop insisted, not like “our common Protestants... who in the depths of their devise, will be wiser than Christ and His Apostles” by trying to love both the world and Christ. Cromwell charged those who had been chosen for membership in the Parliament of the Saints with the duty of “bearing good fruits to the nation, to men as men, to the people of God, to all in their several stations.”

Assisting the Saints

McGee says the first and highest charitable responsibility of the Puritan saint in this life lay in service to the spiritual estates of his fellow saints. The one central thread connecting all Puritans was the duty of each member of this earthly communion to do all he could to help his fellow saints to stay on the narrow path which leads to heaven, to persevere in the way, and not be drawn off by worldly persecutions.

Attacks on the Puritans

When John Winthrop was criticized for trying to suppress gambling by others so far as he could, McGee says he knew that, as Thomas Hooker had said, “the strongest bones need sinews,... so in the church, the strongest members in the same need advice. “To those who objected that offering such counsel was “to play the bishop in another man’s diocese and to row in another man’s boat,” Hooker replied that “every saint hath to do withe one another, we are our brothers’ keepers, except we be Cains and will have Cain’s wages.” The Puritan Sir Richard Baker put it this way: “Let a friend strike me, and it shall be a balm to my head.... The striking of a friend is out of love, and intends amendment.” And Robert Coachman, a lay Independent Puritan, said “it is no small privilege for [the godly] to live in such a society, as where the eyes of their brethren are so lovingly set upon them, that they will not suffer them to go on in sin.”

McGee says that it is this advising, counselling, admonishing, proselytizing, exhorting, praying communion of individuals, with higher ends and intentions than the mere performance of Second Table duties among men, that lies at the heart of Puritan practical theology and their differences with Anglicans. And, of course, as we have seen, the Puritans were, because of their zeal in these matters, denounced as a faction who lacked charity. One Anglican preacher, Humphrey Sydenham, referring to the Puritans’ “oral vehemence [which] hath more tongue than heart,” calling them “brainsick” and “discontented neoterics”—phraseology the charity of which is not immediately self-evident, and odd, to put it, well, charitably, since “neoteric” meant given to modern innovations, something which does not ordinarily come to mind when one hears the word “Puritan.” And the Latitudinarian Anglican, Benjamin Whichcote, assailed those men, Puritans, whose “finding fault with others, . . . backbiting, busy meddling in other men’s affairs, lives and judgments,... [and controlling] others’ liberty was reckoned by them to be reproof of sin.... endeavor for reformation,...advancement of religion,...[and] a care for souls.” “Talk not of a visible, infallible, or a Reformed church,” thundered the Anglican preacher Anthony Farindon, “God send us a compassionate church!”—as if there is no connection one with the other.

And in another often-heard refrain today, the afore- mentioned Anglican Mr. Sydenham gave his doctrine, in a sermon, an explicitly political application castigating those Puritans, “which turn Gospel into law” by, among other things, refusing to pay so-called ship money. In other words, as McGee puts it, charity to the prince, in this case, according the Anglicans, required the payment of a tax not required by law.

As they painted their portraits, McGee writes, we must remember that Anglicans tended to squeeze dry the tubes labelled “obedience to crown and mitre,” “material charity,” and other Second Table duties, whereas, the Puritans used up tubes of “obedience to God first,” “spiritual charity,” and “First Table duties.” For Puritans, what caused trouble was disobedience to God; for Anglicans, outward civil peace and religious unity were sacred. Loss of peace and unity were, of course, regrettable to Puritans but hardly unexpected casualties of the struggle to complete the Reformation begun so long before.

And at least one Puritan, Jeremiah Burroughs, recognized that ordinary men might have difficulty understanding what the Puritans were concerned about. He wrote: “Godliness makes men zealous in such things as others see no reason why they should. They think... that the ground of their zeal is vanity and turbulency of spirit.”

The Puritans were deeply convinced, regarding the Anglicans—as I am deeply convinced regarding much of what passes for Christianity today—that the Anglican methods for achieving a fully Christian society were tragically wrongheaded and that they led away from fulfillment of God’s plan instead of toward it.

The Battle Lines

The Puritan/Anglican fight, in many ways, was a battle between Anglicans who stressed the necessity to be “moral” and “civil” by doing good to one’s fellow man, whereas the Puritans stressed God’s Law, all of it, in the order in which God has given His Law to us. This, again, is most relevant to what’s going on among Christians today.

McGee notes that while Anglicans also desired godly rule and moral reformation, “they did so within a framework of essentially melioristic assumptions about the means of achieving their goals.” And here, from our theological and eschatological perspective, McGee says something very significant. He writes: “Anglicans did not expect that the world would ever be greatly different from the world they knew. Their characteristic tone is fatalistic, stoical, worldly-wise, even occasionally blase. There is in their writings a persistent notion that human history is cyclical, and that the cycle will continue to go around and around until the world ends” [emphasis mine].

For example, in a truly astounding assertion, in that it contradicts so many Scriptures , the Anglican John Bramhall said, in 1661 , that “no sublunary thing [meaning, that is, nothing under the moon, a peculiar phrase, nothing on earth, in this case] is stable,” that “the whole world is a restless whirligig,... a tottering quagmire, whereupon it is impossible to lay a sure foundation”—except, of course, that God tells us that such a foundation has already been laid, that this foundation is the Lord Jesus Christ, and He has all power in heaven and on earth!

Puritan Optimism

By comparison, McGee notes, even the most moderate Puritans were visionaries with glowing hopes of the way God would be glorified by moral reformation when true godly rule was instituted. As good Calvinists, he adds, these Puritans were thinking of the beneficial results of proper godly leadership at all levels of society. McGee says the fervent hope that England could be a better place, that moral reformation was possible, that there was a way out of the tawdriness and turpitude of things was characteristic of Puritanism. And they had long been united in their conviction that obedience to the First Table of God’s Law was the touchstone of the godly man’s obedience to God.

And though persecution and civil war came, McGee says the Puritan saints persevered, with exhortations like this one from Richard Sibbes ringing in their ears: “Our glory tends to [Christ’s] glory; shall we not glorify Him all we can here by setting forth His truth, by countenancing His children and servants... Let men be as unthankful as they will, we look not to them but to the honor of God.” Amen.