Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology 1560–1775 9780567659514, 9780567351418, 9780567108685

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
List of Contributors
Introduction
Part 1: EARLY REFORMED ORTHODOXY (c. 1560–c. 1640)
CHAPTER 1: KNOX VERSUS THE KNOXIANS? PREDESTINATION IN JOHN KNOX AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FEDERAL THEOLOGY
CHAPTER 2: ANDREW MELVILLE AND CHRISTIAN HEBRAISM: THE HUMANIST LEGACY OF A RENAISSANCE SCHOLAR
CHAPTER 3: THE ETERNAL DECREE IN THE INCARNATE SON: ROBERT ROLLOCK ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHRIST AND ELECTION
CHAPTER 4: WHERE WAS YOUR CHURCH BEFORE LUTHER? HISTORY AND CATHOLICITY IN EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ABERDONIAN THEOLOGY
CHAPTER 5: SCOTTISH HYPOTHETICAL UNIVERSALISM: ROBERT BARON (c. 1596–1639) ON GOD’S LOVE AND CHRIST’S DEATH FOR ALL
CHAPTER 6: ALEXANDER HENDERSON: REFORMED ORTHODOXY AND CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS IN SCOTLAND
Part 2: HIGH REFORMED ORTHODOXY (c. 1640–c. 1690)
CHAPTER 7: SAMUEL RUTHERFORD’S EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA: A REFORMED PERSPECTIVE ON THE SCHOLASTIC NATURAL LAW TRADITION
CHAPTER 8: SAMUEL RUTHERFORD ON THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF POSSIBILITY
CHAPTER 9: CLAVIS CANTICI: A ‘KEY’ TO THE REFORMATION IN EARLY MODERN SCOTLAND?
CHAPTER 10: SCOTLAND AND SAUMUR: THE INTELLECTUAL LEGACY OF JOHN CAMERON IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
CHAPTER 11: JOHN CALVIN AND JOHN BROWN OF WAMPHRAY ON JUSTIFICATION
Part 3: LATE REFORMED ORTHODOXY (c. 1690 ONWARDS)
CHAPTER 12: THOMAS HALYBURTON AND JOHN LOCKE ON THE GROUNDING OF FAITH IN SCRIPTURE
CHAPTER 13: THE RATIONAL DEFENCE AND EXPOSITION OF CHRISTIANITY: THOMAS BLACKWELL AND SCOTTISH ORTHODOXY IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER 14: THE ACT OR HABIT OF FAITH? ALEXANDER COMRIE’S INTERPRETATION OF HEIDELBERG CATECHISM QUESTION 20
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

REFORMED ORTHODOXY IN SCOTLAND

REFORMED ORTHODOXY IN SCOTLAND

Essays on Scottish Theology 1560–1775

Edited by Aaron Clay Denlinger

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark



50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Aaron Clay Denlinger, 2015 Aaron Clay Denlinger has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePUB:

978-0-567-35141-8 978-0-567-66913-1 978-0-567-10868-5 978-0-567-61230-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reformed orthodoxy in Scotland: essays on Scottish theology, 1560–1775 / edited by Aaron Denlinger. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-567-35141-8 (hardcover) 1. Reformed Church–Scotland–Doctrines–History. 2. Calvinism–Scotland–History. 3. Scotland–Church history. I. Denlinger, Aaron C. (Aaron Clay) editor. BX9424.5.S35R44 2014 230’.52411–dc23 2014030974 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Abbreviations List of Contributors

vii viii ix

Introduction1 By Carl R. Trueman Part 1 EARLY REFORMED ORTHODOXY (c. 1560–c. 1640) CHAPTER 1  KNOX VERSUS THE KNOXIANS? PREDESTINATION IN JOHN KNOX AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FEDERAL THEOLOGY9 Donald John MacLean CHAPTER 2  ANDREW MELVILLE AND CHRISTIAN HEBRAISM: THE HUMANIST LEGACY OF A RENAISSANCE SCHOLAR27 Ernest R. Holloway III CHAPTER 3  THE ETERNAL DECREE IN THE INCARNATE SON: ROBERT ROLLOCK ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHRIST AND ELECTION  Brannon Ellis CHAPTER 4  WHERE WAS YOUR CHURCH BEFORE LUTHER? HISTORY AND CATHOLICITY IN EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ABERDONIAN THEOLOGY  Nicholas Thompson

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CHAPTER 5  SCOTTISH HYPOTHETICAL UNIVERSALISM: ROBERT BARON (c. 1596–1639) ON GOD’S LOVE AND CHRIST’S DEATH FOR ALL83 Aaron Clay Denlinger CHAPTER 6  ALEXANDER HENDERSON: REFORMED ORTHODOXY AND CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS IN SCOTLAND103 Donald Macleod

vi Contents

Part 2 HIGH REFORMED ORTHODOXY (c. 1640–c. 1690) CHAPTER 7  SAMUEL RUTHERFORD’S EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA: A REFORMED PERSPECTIVE ON THE SCHOLASTIC NATURAL LAW TRADITION  Simon J. G. Burton CHAPTER 8  SAMUEL RUTHERFORD ON THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF POSSIBILITY  Aza Goudriaan

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CHAPTER 9  CLAVIS CANTICI: A ‘KEY’ TO THE REFORMATION IN EARLY MODERN SCOTLAND?157 Guy M. Richard CHAPTER 10  SCOTLAND AND SAUMUR: THE INTELLECTUAL LEGACY OF JOHN CAMERON IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE175 Albert Gootjes

CHAPTER 11  JOHN CALVIN AND JOHN BROWN OF WAMPHRAY ON JUSTIFICATION191 Joel R. Beeke Part 3 LATE REFORMED ORTHODOXY (c. 1690 ONWARDS) CHAPTER 12  THOMAS HALYBURTON AND JOHN LOCKE ON THE GROUNDING OF FAITH IN SCRIPTURE213 Paul Helm CHAPTER 13  THE RATIONAL DEFENCE AND EXPOSITION OF CHRISTIANITY: THOMAS BLACKWELL AND SCOTTISH ORTHODOXY IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY231 Richard A. Muller CHAPTER 14  THE ACT OR HABIT OF FAITH? ALEXANDER COMRIE’S INTERPRETATION OF HEIDELBERG CATECHISM QUESTION 20 Gerrit A. van den Brink

253

Bibliography Index

271 287

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Acknowledgements are due first and foremost to the individual authors of the essays contained in this volume. Without their confidence in this project and willingness to contribute to it, this book – rather obviously, I suppose – would not have been. I also wish to thank David Gibson for his encouragement to pursue this project early on, as well as various friends and colleagues, first at Aberdeen University and then at Reformation Bible College, for occasionally asking how it was coming along, thereby reviving my own interest in its progress and spurring me on to see it to completion. Initial efforts to organize this volume, as well as my own contribution to it, were completed during my tenure as Hope Trust Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. I owe a significant debt of gratitude to the executors of the Hope Trust for taking an interest in my research and agreeing to fund the same from 2010 to 2012. On a more personal note, I wish to thank Merle and Ginny Denlinger for sustaining a level of interest in, and support for, this and all my other endeavours which only parents could possibly manage. Thanks are due also to Stephen and Betty West, my parents-in-law, for allowing me to move their daughter and granddaughters from home (north-eastern Scotland) to America with more or less good grace, and for supporting our family – and so indirectly my work – in more ways than I could possibly name. In a similar vein I wish to thank my wife Louise for her patience and her sense of humour, both of which I rely upon regularly. Thank you, finally, to my daughters, Kaitrin and Geneva, whose interest in ‘daddy’s work’ is, much to my joy, restricted entirely to the really significant matters, such as my mode of transportation from home to campus (‘daddy’s moto-bike’) and – most important to them as well as me – how much longer it will be each day before I’m able to return home to them and commence with the nonsense that somehow makes sense of it all.

ABBREVIATIONS AUR CTJ CH DSCHT ELH EQ HTR HWPH ICR ITQ IR MAJT NS PL PRRD SCJ SJT UEJ WTJ WCF

Aberdeen University Review Calvin Theological Journal Church History Nigel M. de S. Cameron et al., eds, Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). English Literary History Evangelical Quarterly Harvard Theological Review Roachim Ritter, et al., eds, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2007). John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (John T. McNeill, ed.; Ford Lewis Battles, trans.; 2 vols; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960). Irish Theological Quarterly Innes Review Mid-America Journal of Theology Northern Scotland Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia latina cursus completus (217 vols; Paris, 1844–55). Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, c. 1520 to c. 1725 (4 vols; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003). Sixteenth Century Journal Scottish Journal of Theology University of Edinburgh Journal Westminster Theological Journal Westminster Confession of Faith

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Joel R. Beeke (PhD, Westminster Theological Seminary) is President and Professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, and a pastor of the Heritage Netherlands Reformed Congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. Simon J. G. Burton (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw in Warsaw, Poland. Aaron Clay Denlinger (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Reformation Bible College in Sanford, Florida, USA. Brannon Ellis (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is acquisitions editor for Lexham Press in Bellingham, Washington, USA. Albert Gootjes (PhD, Calvin Theological Seminary) is a Research Fellow at the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. Aza Goudriaan (PhD, University of Leiden) is Assistant Professor of Church History at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Research Associate at the Jonathan Edwards Centre Africa, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Paul Helm (MA, University of Oxford) is a Teaching Fellow at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. Ernest R. Holloway III (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is Adjunct Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA. Donald John MacLean (PhD, University of Wales) is a Research Supervisor at Wales Evangelical School of Theology in South Wales, UK. Donald Macleod (DD, Westminster Theological Seminary) is Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology at the Free Church College in Edinburgh, UK.

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List of Contributors

Richard A. Muller (PhD, Duke University) is P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. Guy M. Richard (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Senior Minister of First Presbyterian Church in Gulfport, Mississippi, USA. Nicholas Thompson (PhD, University of Glasgow) is Lecturer in Church History in the School of Humanities at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. Carl R. Trueman (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA. Gerrit A. van den Brink (Drs, Utrecht University) is a PhD candidate in the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Leuven, Belgium, and a minister in the Hersteld Hervormde Kerk in the Netherlands.

I N T R O DU C T IO N

Carl R. Trueman The last 30 years have seen the scholarly understanding of the nature and development of Reformed orthodoxy transformed.1 Earlier scholars had told the story of the movement from Reformation to post-Reformation as one of decline from vibrant, exegetical theology into arid rationalism and dogmatic systems supported by blunt proof-texting.2 With the advent of the work of Richard A. Muller and the group of historians who followed his lead, that story was not simply modified but rather abandoned in its entirety. Where once Calvin had reigned supreme as the gold standard by which all subsequent Reformed theology was to be judged, both in form and content, now scholars understood that a network of Reformers helped to shape the Reformed theological tradition.3 Where once scholars paid no attention to the wealth of sophisticated linguistic and exegetical work of the seventeenth century, now these became subject to careful study. Where once 1. The literature reflecting the transformation of scholarly perspectives on Reformed orthodoxy is by now rather extensive, but see especially Richard Muller, PRRD; idem, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); idem, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012); Herman J. Selderhuis, ed., A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy (Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, vol. 40; Leiden: Brill, 2013). 2. For examples of such a narrative applied specifically to the development of postReformation Scottish theology see especially Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); idem, ‘From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell: A Reading of Scottish Theology’, in David Wright and Gary Badcock, eds, Disruption to Diversity: Edinburgh Divinity, 1846-1996 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); M. Charles Bell, Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1985). 3. On the ‘relativization of the status of Calvin’ and the corresponding ‘discovery of diverse trajectories within Reformed theology’ in recent scholarship, see Willem J. van Asselt, ‘Reformed Orthodoxy: A Short History of Research’, in Selderhuis, Companion, pp. 11–26 (22–4).

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scholars regarded the reappearance of medieval metaphysical and theological categories as a sign of theological regression, now these were understood as part of the broader elaboration of theology within ongoing conceptual paradigms. While continuity can be a troublesome philosophical concept when employed to describe the historical development of ideas, the term more closely captures and communicates what is now understood to be the abiding commonalities and concerns of Reformed theology from Calvin to the Enlightenment.4 Scotland played a significant role in the development of Reformed orthodoxy for a number of reasons. First, Reformed orthodoxy was an international movement and so significant theologians from a variety of European countries played key roles in developing its international profile. Switzerland, France, the Low Countries, Hungary, Poland, England, Ireland and Scotland all provided key figures in the movement. As this volume demonstrates, the theological life of Scotland during this time was vibrant and intimately connected to the wider European scene. Men such as Andrew Melville and Samuel Rutherford helped develop and articulate international Reformed positions on matters from Presbyterianism to providence. That Scotland boasted four universities, three with roots in the late Middle Ages, meant that the nation enjoyed a vibrant intellectual life, and this was reflected in her contributions to Reformed orthodoxy. Second, while Reformed orthodoxy was an international movement, it did exhibit distinctive shapes in its various local and national manifestations. In the political realm, the peculiarities of the British Reformations in general and the Scottish Reformation in particular generated perhaps more fertile discussion of church and state issues than anywhere else in Europe. This was the case already in the sixteenth century in the work of John Knox and George Buchanan on theories of just rebellion and the limits of the legitimacy of monarchical rule. Then, when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England in 1603 and subsequently engaged in a policy of moving his homeland in a more Episcopalian direction, this generated the rise of radical Presbyterian thinking which was to shape future political thought in profound ways. Scotland as a nation occupies a central place in the development of Reformed political theories. Third, Scotland is important for historiographical reasons. Scotland featured significantly in the older scholarship surrounding Reformed orthodoxy towards the end of supporting the thesis that orthodoxy represented a series of fundamental deviations from the thought of Calvin. The most articulate and influential 4. Regarding the issue of ‘continuity’ as applied to questions of theological development, see further Carl R. Trueman, ‘Calvin and Calvinism’, in Donald K. McKim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 225–44; see also van Asselt, ‘Reformed Orthodoxy’, pp. 12–14, in which three overarching ‘interpretive models’ for evaluating the relationship between the thought of the magisterial reformers and their theological descendants are defined: ‘the discontinuity theory’, ‘the negative continuity theory’, and ‘the positive continuity theory’. As van Asselt subsequently reminds us, ‘continuity is not the same as static reproduction’, and thus ‘the terminology of continuity and discontinuity should be used with great care’ (p. 18).

Introduction

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advocates of that thesis as applied to Scotland were the Torrance brothers, Thomas and James, both of whom operated within a theological framework broadly shaped by the concerns of Karl Barth.5 As a result, it is important to engage in close reading of Scottish Reformed orthodoxy as part of the wider task of revising perspectives on the relationship between earlier and later Reformed thinking. One of the key elements of the revision of our understanding of Reformed orthodoxy in general has been an increasing sensitivity to precise historical context. The days when scholars might blithely compare John Calvin with, say, Thomas Boston, without taking into account the fact that over a century and a half separated the respective heydays of the two men, are now over. It is no longer acceptable to engage in such historically insensitive comparisons. Of course, this point then raises a further issue. Historians need to generalize at some level. We do need to find ways and means of comparing thinkers from one era to those in another because, if we cannot do that, then the task of intellectual history – indeed, the task of history in general – simply becomes impossible. In this volume, the editor has chosen to divide the historical period under consideration into three broad epochs. Of course, all such periodizations are to an extent arbitrary. They need to be held loosely and not used as Procustean beds into which individual figures should be forced. Nevertheless, such a structure offers a heuristic approach which allows for the analysis of thinkers, texts and ideas in a helpful and historically sensitive way. The three periods used in this volume are ‘early orthodoxy’ (from the Reformation until c. 1640); ‘high orthodoxy’ (c. 1640–c. 1690); and ‘late orthodoxy’ (c. 1690 onwards). These three periods exhibit certain general characteristics which apply across the European movement of Reformed orthodoxy as a whole. Early orthodoxy is the period in which the Reformers made their breakthroughs on authority and on salvation, and proceeded to reconstruct the church and then university education accordingly. After the Council of Trent, a resurgent Rome, aided in large part by the missionary and then education endeavours of the Society of Jesus, forced the Reformed both to the consolidation of their institutional presence and to an increasingly sophisticated pedagogical and polemical approach to the faith. Further, the sharpening of Rome’s confessional identity at Trent led, in the 1560s and beyond, to a parallel movement among the Reformed. Finally, the rise of Arminianism and Socinianism, initially at least from within 5. Relevant works by Thomas F. Torrance are referenced above (note 2). With regard to James B. Torrance see ‘Covenant or Contract? A Study of the Theological Background of Worship in Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, SJT 23.1 (1970), pp. 51–76; idem, ‘The Contribution of McLeod Campbell to Scottish Theology’, SJT 26.3 (1973), pp. 295–311; idem, ‘Calvin and Puritanism in England and Scotland – Some Basic Concepts in the Development of “Federal Theology”’, in Calvinus Reformator: His Contribution to Theology, Church and Society (Potcheftsroom: Institute for Reformational Studies, 1982), pp. 264–77. ‘[H]istorians of theological ideas have often imposed the categories of modern theology onto early modern theologians, especially in viewing Calvin and other Reformed thinkers through a grid devised by Karl Barth’ (van Asselt, ‘Reformed Orthodoxy’, p. 13).

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the ranks of the Reformed, led to more sophisticated metaphysical reflection, and a reappropriation of medieval thinking as a means of grounding orthodoxy in a broader ontology. Scotland played a key role in this. Most notable as contributions in this regard are the Scots Confession of 1560, and the First and Second Books of Discipline, which mapped out not only a vision for the organization of the Reformed church but also for educational reform in Scotland. In addition, the increasing dominance of Reformed theology at the universities (Aberdeen perhaps being the most moderate) meant that the intellectual life of the Reformed faith began to prosper north of the border. Then, when England and Scotland were united under the House of Stuart in 1603, the stage was set for intense discussions on ecclesiology and worship. The essays in this volume dealing with this period offer a good overview of various points of interest. Ernest Holloway and Nicholas Thompson both address questions of the connection of Reformed orthodoxy to the wider intellectual context, something that has been a major theme in the wider scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy. Holloway examines how Andrew Melville contributed to Christian Humanism, while Thompson addresses the matter of the catholicity of Reformed thought, especially in the context of the city of Aberdeen. Donald Macleod takes on the matter of politics and theology, showing how Alexander Henderson’s thinking was both shaped by his times and offered an alternative model to that which triumphed, albeit briefly, under the Cromwellian Protectorate. Donald John MacLean, Brannon Ellis and Aaron Clay Denlinger pursue more strictly theological themes, exploring the Scottish contribution to Reformed thought on predestination, covenant theology and Christology, particularly in reference to the rise of federal theology as well as the emergence of debates about the nature and extent of the atonement. What emerges from these chapters is a picture of a Scottish church and theology which had its own distinctive history, but was connected both to prior tradition and to broader European debates. The period of high orthodoxy is generally characterized by the extensive elaboration of Reformed theological systems, and also by the development of a diversity of new theological issues which demanded responses. Thus, Arminianism and Socinianism remained significant but were now joined by Amyraldianism. While Amyraldianism did not enjoy quite the status of heresy of the other two, it was nonetheless a challenge to which the Reformed orthodox needed to respond. In addition, the emphasis on linguistics led to the rise of more critical approaches to the biblical text. These, in turn, required that the Reformed reflect more deeply on the origins, nature, authority and interpretation of scripture. In short, the period was marked both by confident articulation of elaborate systems of theology and also by an increasingly fine-tool and diverse polemic. The Scottish period of high orthodoxy was arguably dominated by Samuel Rutherford, a radical Presbyterian, a commissioner to the Westminster Assembly, and a man who married both an acute scholastic mind and thorough knowledge of dogmatic theology to an experiential piety often expressed through somewhat erotic language. Rutherford’s contributions to scholastic theology, such as his

Introduction

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works on providence and on Christology, to politics and ecclesiology, and to devotional literature through his extensive correspondence, make him perhaps the single most versatile and important Scottish theologian of all time. Rutherford’s importance is reflected here by the fact that there are two essays devoted to him. Simon Burton offers an account of Rutherford which connects him to the medieval natural law tradition, and thus to debates which have become very pressing within Reformed theology in our present day. Aza Goudriaan looks at Rutherford’s views on possibility, thus setting him within the context of debates about the doctrine of God in Reformed orthodoxy and its connection to late medieval paradigms, a matter of some controversy among scholars for over a decade now. In addition, Rutherford also features in Guy Richard’s essay on the significance of the Song of Songs in the context of seventeenth-century Scotland. Scotland produced a number of theologians whose language of piety one might describe as infused with eroticism drawn from the Song of Songs. Richard’s essay is broader than this, however, as he explores the use of the Song in the religious and religiopolitical polemics of seventeenth-century Scotland. Albert Gootjes and Joel Beeke round out the period of high orthodoxy by examining in turn the influence of the Scottish theologian of Saumur, John Cameron, on seventeenth-century French Reformed theology, and the reception of John Calvin’s doctrine of justification in Scotland, as considered through a comparison of Calvin’s teaching to that of John Brown of Wamphray. The final period, that of late orthodoxy, covers the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Reformed theology was undergoing a fundamental transformation during these years. Enlightenment thinking had slowly displaced older patterns of metaphysics that had dominated university education since the twelfth century. The inroads made by Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, and their various contemporaries and followers changed the academic game. Issues of critical epistemology came to the fore and placed the more traditional approaches to knowledge under tremendous pressure. Orthodox Reformed thinkers reacted in a variety of ways to these new challenges. Some sought to accommodate elements of the new thinking and thus to modify their Reformed systems. Others fought a rearguard action of resistance in what appears, in retrospect, to have been a valiant but ultimately futile effort to preserve the old paths. In this final section, Richard Muller argues convincingly that Thomas Blackwell represented a type of theologian who sought to ground the old orthodoxy on more enlightened foundations, steering clear of the excesses of both rationalists and enthusiasts. By way of contrast, Paul Helm presents Thomas Halyburton as a man who was able to defend the nature of certainty in a manner which took account of the epistemological contributions of John Locke, but still preserved the essential core of the older orthodoxy. Finally, Gert van den Brink looks at the interpretation of Heidelberg Catechism Question 20 by Alexander Comrie, illustrating in that process the surprising role that Scotland played in the transmission of ideas from seventeenth-century New England to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Holland,

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and thereby accenting one final time Scottish Reformed orthodoxy’s situation in, and significance for, a wider intellectual and geographic context. Taken together, these essays demonstrate both the importance of Scottish theologians and theology to Reformed orthodoxy more broadly, and offer examples of how individual theologians responded to their own contexts, political and intellectual, over the period from the Reformation to the Enlightenment.

Part 1 E ARLY R EFORMED O RTHODOXY ( c . 1560– c . 1640)

Chapter 1 K N OX V E R SU S T H E K N OX IA N S ?  P R E D E ST I NAT IO N I N J O H N K N OX A N D S EV E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY F E D E R A L THEOLOGY

Donald John MacLean ‘[T]here is no doubt that John Knox made a unique contribution to the character and shape of the theology of the Reformed Church of Scotland’.1 When explicating the exact nature of Knox’s theology, however, differences among scholars soon emerge. Those studying his doctrine of predestination face two significant challenges in particular.2 The first might be called the question of ‘Knox versus Knox’. The question is this: is the doctrine of predestination outlined in his treatise On Predestination consistent with the teaching discovered in Knox’s other writings?3 Dissonance in Knox’s writings on predestination has been posited by Charles Bell, who suggests that the Scottish reformer limited the extent of God’s love to the elect and held that God has not willed the salvation of all in On Predestination, but affirmed the universal character of God’s love in Christ and named Christ as the saviour of the world who, by his death, achieved reconciliation 1. Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), p. 1. 2. For studies of John Knox on predestination see Victor Edouard D’Assonville, John Knox and the Institutes of Calvin: A few Points of Contact in their Theology (Human Sciences Research Council Publication Series; no. 3; Durban: Drakensberg Press, 1968), pp. 33–63; Richard L. Greaves, Theology and Revolution in the Scottish reformation: Studies in the Thought of John Knox (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1980), pp. 25–43; Richard G. Kyle and Dale W. Johnson, John Knox: An Introduction to His Life and Works (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2009), pp. 124–30; Richard G. Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination in the Thought of John Knox’, WTJ 46.1 (1984), pp. 53–77; James McEwan, The Faith of John Knox (Richmond: John Knox, 1961), pp. 61–79; Michael T. Pearse, Between Known Men and Visible Saints: A Study in Sixteenth-century English Dissent (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), pp. 130–41. 3. Knox’s treatise on predestination, the full title of which reads An Answer to the Cavillations of an Adversary Respecting the Doctrine of Predestination, is included in The Works of John Knox (David Laing, ed.; 6 vols; Edinburgh, 1846–64), vol. 5, pp. 7–468.

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for all in statements scattered throughout his other works.4 According to Bell there were, then, two John Knoxes: Knox the reformer and preacher on one hand; on the other, Knox the author of On Predestination. There is, secondly, the issue of the reception of Knox’s teaching on predestination, particularly among the seventeenth-century ‘federal’ theologians. Much recent scholarship concerning theological development during the ‘long Scottish Reformation’ has argued that as Scottish theology matured after the Reformation, ‘a bifurcation developed between evangelical and rationalist forms of Calvinism’.5 This supposed ‘bifurcation’ is evident ‘in the difference between the federal Calvinism of Samuel Rutherford, George Gillespie (of Greyfriars and St Giles, Edinburgh), David Dickson (sometime Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh) and James Durham, and the teaching of Calvin and the Scots Confession’.6 Such a view represents the application of what has been termed the ‘Calvin versus the Calvinists’ interpretative thesis to historical perspective on the development of Scottish theology, and could perhaps be titled the ‘Knox versus the Knoxians’ thesis. There has been much debate in recent decades regarding the issue of continuity between the early reformers (especially Calvin) and later Reformed orthodox divines, but Scottish theologians and theology have rarely been the focus of such discussion. Fresh attention, therefore, should be given to the reception of Knox’s teaching by his successors. There are, then, two questions to be faced regarding Knox and his doctrine of predestination: first, is the Knox of On Predestination the real John Knox? And second, how was (or were) Knox’s doctrine (or doctrines) of predestination received by later Scottish theologians, particularly by the covenantal or federal theologians who participated in the Westminster Assembly and their contemporaries? In this essay these questions will be considered in turn.

On Predestination and the ‘Real’ John Knox As noted above, Charles Bell has argued that the doctrine expressed in the treatise On Predestination does not match the theology of Knox’s other writings. Knox himself, according to Bell’s interpretation, constitutes the first ‘Knoxian’ to depart substantially from Knox’s own teaching on predestination. Bell is not alone in advancing this claim. Richard Greaves similarly raises doubts about whether On 4. M. Charles Bell, Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1985), p. 46. 5. Thomas F. Torrance, ‘From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell: A Reading of Scottish Theology’, in David Wright and Gary Badcock, eds, Disruption to Diversity: Edinburgh Divinity, 1846–1996 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), p. 5. See also Bell, Calvin and Scottish Theology, passim; Torrance, Scottish Theology, passim. For critique of such a reading of Scottish theology see Donald MacLeod, ‘Dr T. F. Torrance and Scottish Theology: a Review Article’, EQ 72:1 (2000), pp. 57–72. 6. Ibid., pp. 5–6.



Knox versus the Knoxians?

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Predestination ‘represented either [Knox’s] inmost convictions or the teaching he expressed to his congregations’.7 In an essay exploring Knox’s treatment by modern historians James Kirk draws attention to the commonplace view that Knox ‘wrote a “dreary” book on predestination but supposedly did not really believe what he wrote’.8 Further instances of such a reading of Knox could be noted.9 The Case for Two John Knoxes From one perspective there is much to commend the thesis that Knox’s treatise sits uncomfortably with the rest of his corpus. There is, rather obviously, the a-typicality of the work itself.10 Its length alone is unusual, running to an estimated 170,000 words. Further, it is the only sustained theological treatise he produced of this nature, and it certainly gives a prominence to predestination not found elsewhere in his writings. But the uniqueness of this treatise should not be overstated. Andrew Woolsey attributes its singularity to Knox’s lack of time for writing. The pressing political and ecclesiastical needs of the day demanded his attention and he was therefore unable to produce more works of this nature.11 In any case, it is questionable how much credit should be given to Knox’s sustained portrait of himself as a ‘painful preacher of … [the] blessed Evangel’ rather than a theologian.12 Preachers, after all, have a profoundly theological message to convey. Torrance correctly comments that Knox ‘could not help being a theologian in the fulfilment of his vocation’.13 Knox, to be sure, repudiated himself as a writer, claiming a preference to use his ‘tong and livelye voice’ than to ‘compose bokes for the age to come’.14 Yet, as Farrow notes, ‘no British reformer of that period published so much in

7. Greaves, Theology and Revolution, p. 25. 8. James Kirk, ‘John Knox and the Historians’, in Roger Mason, ed., John Knox and the British Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 7–26 (16). 9. See, for example, McEwan, Faith of John Knox, pp. 64, 110; D’Assonville, Knox and Calvin, p. 42; Kyle and Johnson, John Knox: An Introduction, p. 122; Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 56. A smaller number of works treat the doctrine of predestination discovered in On Predestination as more straightforwardly representative of Knox’s doctrine; see Pearse, Between Known Men and Visible Saints, p. 135 (note, however, the qualification on pp. 138–9); W. Stanford Reid, Trumpeter of God: A Biography of John Knox (New York: Scribner, 1974), pp. 151­–2; Suzanne McDonald, John Knox for Armchair Theologians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), pp. 99–102. 10. See Torrance, Scottish Theology, p. 3. 11. Andrew A. Woolsey, Unity and Continuity in Covenantal Thought: A Study in the Reformed Tradition to the Westminster Assembly (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), p. 501. 12. Knox, Works, vol. 6, p. 559. Cf. Knox, Works, vol. 3, p. 10. 13. Torrance, Scottish Theology, p. 2. 14. Knox, Works, vol. 6, p. 229.

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the vernacular’.15 Knox, despite his protestations, then, was both a theologian and writer, and should be considered as such. It has also been argued that the specific form of On Predestination makes it unlikely to represent Knox’s balanced understanding. Those who make this assertion correctly observe that On Predestination is not a systematic statement of Knox’s views in a format of his choosing.16 Rather, it is a point-by-point rebuttal of an anonymously published book whose ‘manifest blasphemies’ so provoked Knox that when combined with ‘the earnest request of some godlie Breathren’ he felt compelled to reply.17 Knox, then, did not author a calmly considered dogmatic treatise; it was a fiercely polemical response to perceived error.18 He approached his task by quoting his opponent’s work extract by extract, and refuting every assertion. The effect of this method should be acknowledged; Knox himself stated that he had to ‘repeat [himself] oftner than [he] would’.19 It is not possible, of course, to reconstruct the form in which Knox would have cast the doctrine of predestination if left to his own devices, or to see where he would have placed his own emphases. The exegesis of Scripture he presents will also undoubtedly have been shaped to a degree by the adversarial manner of his treatise.20 Context, for the theologian as well as others, often determines what it is prudent to say. Thus, there is some truth to the suggestion that care must be exercised in automatically assuming On Predestination represents Knox’s definitive word on the subject. Moreover, it can be argued with some plausibility that Knox’s principal motivation for penning On Predestination was not a simple desire to vindicate truth, but rather a wish to restore himself to favour with John Calvin.21 Knox’s 1558 First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women did not meet with approval in Geneva. Calvin regarded the publication of Knox’s views ‘an evil which could not be redressed’, which ‘had better be hushed up than publicly canvassed’.22 On Predestination, published only two years later, contains repeated expressions of appreciation for Calvin.23 So, for instance, Knox begins his treatise 15. Kenneth Farrow, John Knox: Reformation Rhetoric and the Traditions of Scots Prose, 1490–1570 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), p. 155. 16. For example, McEwan, Faith of John Knox, p. 64. 17. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 25. 18. D’Assonville, Knox and Calvin, p. 43. 19. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 113. 20. For a similar phenomenon in Calvin’s writings see Calvin’s expositions of Ezek. 18.23 in John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God (J. K. S. Reid, trans.; Cambridge: James Clark, 1961), p. 105; idem, ICR, 3.24.15; idem, Calvin’s Commentaries (22 vols; repr.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), vol. 12, p. 246. 21. See principally Greaves, Theology and Revolution, pp. 27–9, 210, 219. Woolsey has argued strongly against this in Unity and Continuity, p. 501, n. 6. 22. John Calvin, Letters of John Calvin (Jules Bonnet, ed.; David Constable, trans.; 4 vols; Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1858), vol. 4, p. 47. 23. There is some debate over the time of composition, whether in Dieppe in early 1559 (see Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 15) or in Geneva in late 1558 (see Jasper Ridley, John Knox



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by asserting that ‘we dissent not from the judgment of the reverend servant of Jesus Christ, John Calvin’.24 However, the likely truth that Knox sought Calvin’s approval in his work on predestination need not imply that the views expressed by Knox in this work were not sincere. Seeking Calvin’s approval and presenting an honest articulation of his beliefs on predestination need not have been mutually exclusive tasks for Knox. The Case for One John Knox Several factors indicate that Knox’s views on predestination were in fact in line with On Predestination. These must now be considered. Predestination in Knox’s Writings before 1559 A survey of Knox’s references to predestination in writings prior to 1559 suggests that the views expressed in On Predestination were consistent with his understanding of that doctrine more generally. In his 1552 ‘Epistle to the Congregation of Berwick’ Knox states that there is no ‘other cause moving God to elect and choose us than his own infinite goodness and mere mercy’, thereby affirming the unconditional nature of election.25 His 1554 ‘An Exposition Upon the Sixth Psalm of David Addressed to Mrs Bowes’ affirms the certainty of the perseverance of the saints, noting that God’s elect can be sure that is it ‘impossible’ that God ‘shal leave his chosen’.26 Indeed whatever difficulties God’s chosen encounter in life, Knox wrote, there was ‘that leag [covenant] and felowschip that is betuene God and his elect’ which remains sure.27 There are also references to the reprobate in this work, although Knox does not present a detailed doctrine of reprobation.28 Knox’s 1554 ‘Comfortable Epistles to His Afflicted Brethren in England’ taught that God’s dealings in the world included the purpose to ‘suffre the reprobate to declare their owne impenitencie before the world’.29 His ‘Faithful Admonition to the Professors of God’s Truth in England’, also from 1554, was replete with references

[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968], p. 290). This seemingly inconsequential difference of at most six months is relevant for determining whether Knox was trying to appease Calvin with On Predestination. Calvin claimed not to have been aware of Knox’s First Blast until a year after its publication, i.e. early 1559 (Calvin, Letters, vol. 4, p. 47). If this is true, and if Knox had finished On Predestination before this date, it would be significant evidence against a purpose of writing to restore favour with Calvin. 24. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 31. 25. John Knox, ‘Epistle to the Congregation of Berwick’, in Peter Lorimer, John Knox and the Church of England (London: Henry S. King, 1875), pp. 251–64 (258). 26. Knox, Works, vol. 3, p. 123. The context is pastoral, see Knox, Works, vol. 3, pp. 124–5, 135, 137. 27. Ibid., p. 143. See also p. 147. 28. See, e.g. ibid., p. 122. 29. Ibid., p. 245. For references to the elect see pp. 245–6.

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to election.30 This same work articulated a stronger doctrine of reprobation. To the reprobate, Knox writes, the gospel was always a ‘very messenger of death’.31 The elect, by way of contrast, were ‘appointed to lyfe’ and drawn to God through his word.32 Knox’s interest in election is also evident in his letters during this time (1553–4) to Elizabeth and Marjorie Bowes. These letters are largely pastoral and focused on convincing Elizabeth that she had no reason to doubt her election.33 In a letter dated 26 February 1553 Knox writes that ‘For sic as be reprobate can never love God, nor the memberis of Chrystis bodie’, indicating again that a robust doctrine of reprobation was present in this thought well before 1559.34 Knox’s writings in 1555 and 1556 indicate a continued, but largely practical, interest in election and reprobation, with the certainty of the saints’ perseverance as a significant theme.35 His 1557 letter ‘To His Brethren in Scotland’ is noteworthy for its clear articulation of a doctrine of double predestination. He condemns the ‘sect’ of the Anabaptists for holding that ‘everie man may elect or reprobat himself be his awn frie will’.36 This was to teach ‘the rottin heresies of Arius and Pelagius’ and to ‘to destroy and call in dout his hale Godheid’, because to question God’s free sovereign election and reprobation was in effect to say he ‘lackit … wisdome and frie regiment’.37 Knox’s latest writing’s prior to the publication of On Predestination evidence continued interest in this doctrine.38 Thus, it cannot be said that prior to the publication of On Predestination Knox lacked interest in predestination. To be sure, there is no sustained focus on election or reprobation in his writings, and many of the references are incidental and simply echo biblical language. Nevertheless there is clear evidence for Knox’s belief in double predestination (undeniably by 1557) and concomitant doctrines

30. See ibid., pp. 266, 272. On the perseverance of the saints, see pp. 274, 324. 31. Ibid., p. 304. See also pp. 275, 285, 291, 293. 32. Ibid., p. 312. 33. See, for example, ibid., pp. 341, 356, 364–5, 367, 369, 377. The sovereignty of God working all things for the good of the elect is also affirmed, p. 386. 34. Ibid., p. 349. The assertion of the impossibility of the reprobate turning to God is significant. Although outwardly called the reprobate are not among the ‘few that ar chosin’, see p. 351. See also pp. 363, 367. 35. See e.g. Knox, Works, vol. 4, pp. 40, 76, 97, 114, 123, 124, 135, 171, 172, 188, 196, 199, 211, 213, 221, 223, 229–30, 242, 250, 251, 252. Contra Kyle in ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 61, Knox’s ‘An Exposition Upon Matthew IV’ in Works, vol. 4, pp. 85–114 does refer to predestination (pp. 97, 114). 36. Ibid., p. 270. Knox here intimates his intention to write in more detail on this subject. Ibid., p. 271. It is false, then, to say that with On Predestination Knox launched into a discussion of this doctrine ‘suddenly’ (Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 63). He was apparently planning the work for at least a year before beginning to write. 37. Ibid., p. 270. See also p. 273. 38. Ibid., pp. 401, 436, 455, 479, 527.



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such as the certain perseverance of the saints. In sum, there is a relatively consistent teaching on predestination throughout his early writings.39 Predestination in Knox’s Writings after 1559 A brief survey of Knox’s comments on predestination post the 1559 publication of On Predestination provides further evidence for the consistency of his views on the subject. So, for instance, he asserts in his 1562 ‘The Reasoning Betwixt the Abbot of Crossraguell and John Knox Concerning the Mass’ that God had a twofold purpose in publishing the gospel. For the elect the word is given to awake them from sin and to bring them into fellowship with God. For the ‘reprobate’ it brings ‘further condemnation’ inasmuch as they add to their existing sins the rejection of the revelation of God.40 Knox’s 1565 exposition of Isa. 26.13–21 contains many references to election and reprobation. In expounding verse 16 Knox outlines the difference between the elect and reprobate. God deals with both the elect and reprobate in this life in blessing and in trials. Yet these never bring the reprobate to a state of humility or penitence. God’s ‘chosen’, on the other hand, are induced to cry to him for mercy.41 Commenting on verse 20, Knox notes that as ‘God in his owne nature is immutable’ therefore ‘his love towards his elect [is] alwaies unchangeable’.42 As a consequence of this unalterable love, ‘in Christ Jesus he hath chosen his church before the beginning of al ages’.43 Other works written by Knox after 1559 contain similar references to predestination.44 It remains to discuss the Scots Confession, which Knox along with five other Scottish reformers penned in 1560.45 It has been alleged that the lack of a detailed statement on election and reprobation in the Scots Confession reflects a lack of strong conviction about the doctrine on Knox’s part. So, for example, Greaves writes that ‘Knox’s approval of a confessional statement lacking a specific chapter on predestination … indicates once again that Knox did not apparently accord a major role in his personal theology to the doctrine of predestination’.46 In evaluating this claim it is important to bear in mind two points. The first is the genre of confessional documents per se. By their nature confessions of faith are inclusive of views as much as they are exclusive; in other words, they seek to establish consensus among orthodox divines rather than defend the personal views of any given thinker. So, by way of illustration, various members of the Westminster 39. Contra Greaves, Theology and Revolution, p. 40, it is hard to see how Knox could have maintained the same degree of emphasis on election as in On Predestination without producing multiple 170,000-word treatises on the doctrine. 40. Knox, Works, vol. 6, p. 187. 41. Ibid., p. 256. 42. Ibid., p. 267. 43. Ibid., p. 267. See also ibid., pp. 270–1. 44. Ibid., pp. 308, 357, 364, 375, 483, 587. 45. Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom (3 vols; 1931; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), pp. 437­–79. 46. Greaves, Theology and Revolution, p. 43.

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Assembly held strong though differing views on the ordo decretorum Dei, but in their debates they agreed to leave the matter open, not wishing ‘disputes and scholastical things’ to become embedded in their confession of faith.47 Similarly, Knox might well have been content with a confessional presentation of predestination that was less robust than his own doctrine, without this indicating any lack of genuine belief in his own stated views. Secondly, it should be noted that the language of the Scots Confession on election is directly drawn from the first chapter of Ephesians: ‘God … of mere grace elected us in Christ Jesus his Sonne, befoir the foundatioun of the warld was laide’.48 Knox had clear convictions about what this language meant. He had made significant use of Eph. 1 in On Predestination, noting that there ‘the Apostle in expresse wordes affirmeth, that God hath chosen a certein nombre … and that before the foundations of the world were laid, so that we have God’s Election before all beginning planely proved’.49 This was ‘done once in his eternall and immutable counsell, without respect to be had to our merites or workes’.50 Thus, given his understanding of what the biblical language of Ephesians implied, Knox quite possibly recognized more substance in the Confession’s teaching on predestination than later scholars have perceived.51 Contra those, then, who have claimed that Knox ‘took little of these [continental] elaborations [on predestination] home with him’ when he returned to Scotland in 1559, it does not seem that Knox lost interest in predestination following the publication of On Predestination.52 Election and reprobation retained much the same status that they had in his writings prior to that publication. Predestination and Knox’s Doctrine of God It is important to note, moreover, that Knox’s doctrine of predestination was intimately connected to his doctrine of God, and flowed naturally from it. Indeed his doctrine of predestination was in some ways a practical outworking of his understanding of the nature of God.53 This is particularly true with respect to the divine attribute of immutability. As Richard Kyle has noted, ‘it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance that the concept of divine immutability played in John Knox’s thought’.54 From at least his 1553 ‘Declaration of the True Nature and Object of Prayer’ Knox felt that to deny divine immutability was in effect to deny 47. See Alexander Mitchell and John Struthers, eds, Minutes of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (repr., Edmonton: Still Water Revival Books, 1991), pp. 150–1. 48. Schaff, Creeds, pp. 444–5. 49. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 43. 50. Ibid., p. 43. 51. See also Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 77. 52. See e.g. Greaves, Theology and Revolution, pp. 25, 27, 210; Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 54. 53. See e.g. Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 64. 54. Richard Kyle, ‘The Divine Attributes in John Knox’s Concept of God’, WTJ 48:1 (1986), pp. 161–72 (164). See also Torrance, Scottish Theology, p. 8.



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God. He wrote that anyone who ‘calleth in doubt’ God’s immutability ‘maketh God a liar, and so far as in him lyeth, woulde spoyle God of his Godheid: For he can not be God except he be eternall and infallibill veritie’.55 Knox drew heavily on God’s immutability in On Predestination. He argued that God’s wisdom, will and counsels could not be subject to ‘mutabilitie, unstablenes, or change’, for if they were ‘then his godly will and counsels did not depend upon himself, but upon his creatures; which is more than absurd’.56 He explicitly stated that ‘God’s love and counsell towardes his Elect is stable, and that because it is grounded upon himself ’.57 God’s changelessness guarantees the certainty of the elect’s salvation. Immutability was not the only divine attribute Knox closely related to predestination. He allied immutability with divine omniscience, making it clear that God was capable neither of ‘repentance’ (mutability) nor ‘ignorance’ and therefore ‘what he once decreed, that he faithfully will perfourme’.58 Immutability was also combined with omnipotence and as such God ‘may and doth performe whatsoever he will in heaven and in earth’.59 Thus, as God in his wisdom has changelessly determined how to dispose all things, so he had the power to perform his will.60 Further, God’s wisdom meant for Knox that he would not create without knowing and determining the destiny of any creature. To assert otherwise was again to ‘deny his eternall knowledge, wisdom, and Godhead’.61 In view, then, of this intimate link between predestination and the doctrine of God there is no compelling reason to doubt the genuineness of Knox’s own statement on the significance of predestination: ‘the doctrine of God’s eternal predestination is so necessary to the Church of God, that, without the same, can Faith neither be truly taught, nether surely established.’62 Indeed, to Knox’s mind any recasting of the doctrine of election would necessitate a radical revision of the doctrine of God. Knox and the Western Theological Tradition Finally, it should be noted that Knox’s understanding of predestination was rooted in the Western anti-Pelagian tradition.63 He did not view himself as articulating 55. Knox, Works, vol. 3, p. 98. See also pp. 191–2, 196, 243, 247; vol. 4, pp. 108, 112, 266, 380, 478, 537; vol. 6, pp. 267, 408. 56. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 394. See also pp. 27, 50, 62. Knox mocked his ‘Anabaptist’ opponent, stating that his God must ‘daily and hourely change his purpose and counsell, as occasion is offered unto him by men and by their actions’, p. 145. 57. Ibid., p. 47. See also pp. 48–9, 108. 58. Ibid., p. 45. 59. Ibid., p. 62. See also p. 166. Kyle regards omnipotence as the second most important Divine attribute to Knox (‘The Divine Attributes’, p. 168). 60. Ibid., p. 166. 61. Ibid., p. 64. 62. Ibid., p. 25. See also p. 38. 63. Farrow is correct to note that Knox ‘was not an original thinker’ (Farrow, John Knox: Reformation Rhetoric, p. 153).

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a novel doctrine. He particularly looked to Augustine and Geneva for support in his teaching. There are at least ten references to Augustine in On Predestination.64 Calvin too is a recurring source.65 Beza as well is cited, suggesting Knox saw no radical difference of opinion between Calvin and Beza.66 Torrance has correctly summarized Knox’s understanding of predestination as ‘resolutely Augustinian … with help drawn from John Calvin’.67 The reality that Knox perceived his doctrine of predestination as perfectly in line with the Augustinian tradition reinforces the point that his own view very likely remained consistent; to alter the teaching of On Predestination would have been, to his thinking, tantamount to abandoning the Augustinian heritage. Concluding Comments on Knox’s Doctrine of Predestination Thus, considered as a whole the arguments that Knox, as he expresses himself in On Predestination, is the ‘real’ and only John Knox are more persuasive that those which suggest ambivalence in his thought. Unconditional predestination is affirmed in Knox’s writings both prior and subsequent to his treatise On Predestination, it is intimately connected to his understanding of the nature of God, and his views are rooted in the Augustinian tradition. Although the arguments against assuming On Predestination represents Knox’s definitive word on the subject have some merit and rightly caution us against thinking On Predestination tells the whole story about Knox’s beliefs, they fail to convince that Knox himself was, then or at any other time, uncomfortable with or uncommitted to the views expressed in that work.

On Knox and his Scottish Successors If the ‘Knox versus Knox’ thesis fails the test of historical credibility, what of that which pits ‘Knox versus the Knoxians’? Is it true that the theology of Knox and the teaching of seventeenth-century covenantal theologians radically differ, the latter constituting a ‘Calvinism more rigid than Calvin’s’ (or, in this case, Knox’s)?68 How was Knox’s doctrine of predestination received by the federal theologians of the seventeenth century in Scotland?69 Analysis of this question faces an 64. Knox, Works, vol. 5, pp. 32, 33, 39, 62, 77, 170–1, 326, 332, 333, 344. 65. Ibid., pp. 24, 31, 32–3, 38, 124, 126, 168, 169–78, 182, 217, 229, 326. In this work Knox most heavily reveals his indebtedness to Calvin; see D’Assonville, Knox and Calvin, p. 62. 66. Ibid., pp. 38, 184, 229. 67. Torrance, Scottish Theology, p. 16. 68. McEwan. Faith of John Knox, p. vii. 69. On the difficulties inherent in the notion of ‘reception’ with reference to Calvin and ‘Calvinism’, see Carl R. Trueman, Histories and Fallacies: Problem Faced in the Writing of History (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), pp. 183–9.



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immediate difficulty: there is a significant lack of specific citation by seventeenthcentury federal theologians of Knox’s teaching on predestination. This might be illustrated by taking stock of the writings of the seventeenth-century Scottish divine James Durham (1622–58). In the entire corpus of Durham’s writings there is but one reference to John Knox. Martin Luther merited thirteen references, Richard Baxter nine, John Calvin six, John Cameron five, George Gillespie three, James Ussher two, but John Knox only one.70 Durham is not unique in this. Indeed, David George Mullan notes that ‘in the Divinity of the first century of Anti-Pelagian Scottish Protestantism one finds … surprisingly few references to the older worthies; even John Knox is rarely mentioned’.71 The lack of references to Knox could be taken as prima facie evidence that some element of the ‘Knox versus the Knoxians’ thesis may be true. After all, Knox’s greatest theological treatise On Predestination covered a topic to which the ‘federal’ theologians devoted significant attention. It could be that seventeenth-century theologians were conscious of a divergence between their understanding of predestination and that of Knox, and therefore passed over his views in silence.72 Indeed, this is exactly how James Fraser of Brea’s references to older, continental theologians have been understood by Torrance and Bell.73 Between Knox and the federal theology of the mid-seventeenth century there was, admittedly, much development. The intervening century witnessed considerable theological reflection accompanied by significant ecclesiastical turmoil in the Scottish Kirk, as well as theological debate on the continent which influenced Scottish thought. The nature and significance of federal, or covenant, theology evolved dramatically, not least through Robert Rollock’s influence. However, a close examination of the teachings of the federal theologians on the core issues surrounding predestination reveals that there was no material difference between their understanding of the doctrine and that of Knox. Both stood in the ongoing Western Augustinian tradition. At the outset it is important to note the identical aims Knox and the seventeenth-century federal theologians had in formulating their soteriology. Knox’s goal was to formulate a doctrine of salvation which attributed ‘all praise and glorie 70. See Donald John MacLean, ‘Reformed Thought and the Free Offer of the Gospel, With Special Reference to the Westminster Confession of Faith and James Durham (1622– 1658)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wales, 2013), pp. 84–5. 71. David George Mullan, Narratives of the Religious Self in Early Modern Scotland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 114. See also Crawford Gribben and David George Mullan, Literature and the Scottish Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 26. 72. It is of course possible to overstate this neglect of Knox. See references to Knox in David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland (8 vols; Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842–9), vol. 8, p. 29; Robert Baillie, Operis Historici et Chronologici Libri Duo (Amsterdam: Joannem Jansonnium, 1663), 2:148. 73. Brea in his Treatise of Justifying Faith contrasted the ‘the good old Way, where Calvin, Luther, and the first Reformers walk’d’ with the divinity of his day. James Fraser, A Treatise Concerning Justifying or Saving Faith (Edinburgh: John Mosman, 1722), p. 63.

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of oure redemption to the eternall love and undeserved grace of God alone’.74 Similarly, David Dickson (1583–1662) believed that ‘The main thing we must take heed to in this work [of salvation], is to give to God entirely the glory of His Grace and Power and Wisdom, so that the glory of man’s regeneration be neither given to man, nor man made sharer of the glory with God, but God may have the whole glory of His free grace’.75 As will be seen, this overarching commitment worked itself out in the doctrines of reprobation, the gospel offer, and common grace, and in answering the question of whether there is in God a love for all persons without exception. The Doctrine of Reprobation Election for Knox was the ‘eternall and immutable counsell of God, in which he hath purposed to choose to life everlasting, such as pleased his wisdom in Christ Jesus his Son’.76 Even as Knox affirmed his belief in election, so he held that ‘from the same eternitie he hath reprobate others, whom for most just causes, in the tyme appointed to his judgement, he shall adjuge to tormentes and fier inextinguible’.77 God decreed to ‘leave in perdition’ the reprobate.78 Knox was clear that there was no strict symmetry between election and reprobation, especially in the manner of each decree’s execution. Indeed, he indignantly challenged his opponent: ‘Shew, if ye can, in any of our writings, that we affirm, that wheresoever there is Election there is also Reprobation of the same sorte.’79 This is not to deny Knox felt that election and reprobation were inseparable doctrines. But he did distinguish between them. This asymmetry between election and reprobation can be seen in Knox’s clear distinction between the cause of reprobation and the cause of condemnation. The reprobates’ ‘wickedness’ and ‘manifest rebellion’ was not the cause of their reprobation, but it was a ‘just cause of their condemnation’.80 Thus there are ‘degrees and just causes’ which come between the decree of reprobation and actual condemnation, which occurs on the basis of sin and guilt.81 God, for Knox, was ‘the cause of no man’s damnation, but sinne in which they are fallen, is the very

74. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 24. 75. David Dickson, Therapeutica Sacra (Edinburgh: Evan Tyler, 1664), p. 11. 76. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 204. See also pp. 53–4, 63, 79, 209–10. 77. Ibid., p. 61. There seems to be little ground for saying that Knox embraced double predestination ‘hesitantly’ (Greaves, Theology and Revolution, p. 31). Similarly, see McDonald, John Knox, p. 100; Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 71. 78. Ibid., p. 42. For other instances of language of the reprobate being ‘left’ in their sin, see pp. 112–13, 125–6, 135–6, 159. 79. Ibid., p. 124. Knox denied that reprobation was ‘of the same kynd’ as election; see p. 129. See also D’Assonville, Knox and Calvin, p. 54. 80. Ibid., p. 71. 81. Ibid., p. 105. See also pp. 110–11, 112–13, 160, 169, 200, 353.



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cause which all reprobates do find in themselves’.82 The decree of reprobation itself was a mystery hidden in the will of God which should not be searched into, for it was ‘incomprehensible to man’.83 However, Knox did not believe that God remains passive in reprobation. Reprobation, for Knox, is not merely an act of ‘permission’ but a ‘willing’ act of God.84 To deny that God ‘effectually worked’ in reprobation, for Knox, was to deny the plain teaching of Scripture in, for example, Isa. 45.7 and Amos 3.6.85 Knox was sensitive to the danger at this point of making God responsible for sin; thus he protested his agreement with Calvin that ‘sinne was ever hatefull to God’, noting also: ‘I utterly denie him to be the author of sinne’.86 God does not ‘move’ people to sin, rather the ‘moving’ agent was a combination of the Devil and a sinful and corrupt nature which delighted in sin. However, God does not simply give ‘ydle permission’ for sin, rather ‘God giveth over the wicked into a lewd and reprobate mynd’, and this is more than bare permission.87 Knox also laboured to refute the objection that: ‘Let the Reprobate do what they can, yet they must be damned’.88 This he regarded as a shameful parody of his position. He held that ‘whosoever declineth from evill, and constantly to the end doth good, shall most certenly be saved’.89 That the reprobate refuse to believe makes their damnation just. However, this should not be taken as a ‘softening’ of Knox’s position. Rather, Knox believed that reprobation served ultimately to magnify the glory of God in his justice.90 And, for him, God was more concerned with his glory than the fate of an individual impenitent sinner.91 This is reprobation at its starkest. It is not difficult to see the congruity between the teaching of Knox and the Scottish federal theologians. Durham too held that ‘the decree of Election doth necessarily infer the decree of Reprobation; for where there is an election of some, there is a preterition of others’.92 He also insisted that there was asymmetry between election and reprobation. While the elect are saved because of the decree of election, the reprobate are damned not because of the decree of reprobation but because of their own ‘impenitence’ and ‘guilt’.93 A similar doctrine of reprobation 82. Ibid., p. 284. 83. Ibid., p. 160. See also pp. 113–14. 84. Ibid., p. 331. 85. Ibid., p. 335. 86. Ibid., p. 170. See also pp. 113, 352, 359. 87. Ibid., p. 346. See also p. 351. Thus God’s relative actions in the hearts of the elect and reprobate were not to be regarded as identical. Cf. 135–6. 88. Ibid., p. 394. 89. Ibid., p. 394. 90. Ibid., pp. 161, 356. 91. Ibid., p. 41. See also pp. 80, 390. 92. James Durham, A Commentarie Upon the Book of the Revelation (Willow Street, PA: Old Paths Publications, 2000), p. 400. 93. Ibid., p. 946.

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is found in the Westminster Confession of Faith which came to define the faith of the Scottish Kirk from the late 1640s onward.94 Even the noted supralapsarian Samuel Rutherford, who participated in the Westminster Assembly, defined reprobation as an act ‘whereby he decreeth to pass by some and to leave them to the heardness of their own heart’.95 There appears to be no basis for positing difference between Knox and the federal theologians with respect to the doctrine of reprobation. The Gospel Offer, Common Grace, and God’s Universal Love Knox’s strong articulation of double predestination was accompanied by a belief in a gospel offer genuinely made to all who hear it, and a love and grace of God that was common to all. He clearly stated that the gospel offer extends beyond the elect.96 He noted that the word of God works ‘diversly in the heartes of those to whom it is offered’.97 God ‘of his great mercie’ had ‘of late yeares offered againe to the unthankfull world’ the ‘light of salvation’, but instead of being received that light had enflamed the hearts of men with ‘rage and crueltie’.98 The reprobate who had grace offered to them ‘oppugned and obstinately refused’ it.99 This gospel offer is to be identified with the ‘Generall vocation, by the which the world by some manor of meanes is called to the knowledge of God’. Knox distinguished this ‘generall vocation’ from the ‘vocation of purpose, which apperteineth to God’s children onely’.100 He acknowledged that while few were ultimately chosen, ‘many are called’.101 Nevertheless, there were qualifications Knox placed on the gospel offer. First, those who were within the visible church heard its teachings and exhortations in a degree those outside the Kirk did not.102 All within the visible church had the external call to salvation.103 Second, and perhaps somewhat inconsistently, Knox appeared to restrict the external call to the penitent. He held the gospel call in Isa. 55 was not to ‘all indifferently’ but only to ‘such as do thirst’.104 He limited the call to repentance to ‘those that thirst, that hunger, that mourne, 94. WCF 3.7. 95. Samuel Rutherford, ‘Rutherfurd’s Catechism’, in Alexander Mitchell, ed., Catechisms of the Second Reformation (London: James Nesbit & Co., 1886), pp. 161­–242 (163). 96. Macleod correctly notes that ‘Knox … regarded the Free Offer as an axiom’. Macleod, ‘Dr T. F. Torrance and Scottish Theology’, p. 58. See also McDonald, John Knox, p. 100. 97. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 21. 98. Ibid., p. 23. 99. Ibid., p. 42. See also pp. 45, 71, 164–5, 260, 330, 401. 100. Ibid., p. 117. 101. Ibid., p. 128. Knox simply responds to the charge that God, by outwardly calling to salvation those whom he does not intend to save, acts hypocritically by calling it an ‘impudent lie’ (p. 128). 102. Ibid., p. 270. 103. Ibid., p. 285. 104. Ibid., p. 118.



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that are laden with sinne’.105 There seems an undeniable tension, even disjunction, between this limitation and his clear teaching that the reprobate despise and reject what is offered to them.106 Knox ‘constantly denied’ that electing love was common to all.107 However, he also held that ‘God both blesseth and loveth in bestowing temporall benedictions, upon such as in his eternall counsell he hath rejected, and therefore hateth’.108 Allied to this was his clear teaching ‘that the most wicked men are participant of God’s mercie in temporall felicitie’.109 These ‘graces’ and ‘mercies’ which were ‘common to all’ had to be sharply distinguished from the mercy and grace that was shown only to the elect in Christ Jesus, but that was not to deny there was such a category as common grace and mercy.110 These temporal mercies included the restraining operations of God’s Holy Spirit.111 Knox argued that grace and mercy were shown to the reprobate for two reasons. The first was for the good of the elect. Common gifts, for example, however they were abused by the reprobate, ultimately produced some benefit for the Church. The second reason was for ‘God’s goodnes to be praised’. That God was good to even his enemies ultimately brought glory to his name.112 Again, Scottish federal theologians held similar views on these matters. So, for example, Rutherford articulated very clearly his belief in a common grace and a common love of God for all distinct from God’s electing love and grace. He held that ‘it is a state of common grace to be within the visible church’.113 Simply to be in an external covenant with God was a favour from God, expressive of his common grace and mercy.114 Rutherford also maintained a universal love for all. He believed

105. Ibid., p. 404. 106. This is perhaps the only ground for justification of Kyle’s exaggerated assertion that Knox was ‘by no means consistent with himself ’ in On Predestination; Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 56. 107. Knox, Works, vol. 5, p. 61. 108. Ibid., pp. 284–5. For other, slightly more oblique references to God’s universal love, see pp. 58, 151, 270–1. Thus it is incorrect to say without clarification, as Kyle does, that Knox ‘denied God loved all human beings’; Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 66. 109. Ibid., p. 86. See also pp. 86–7, 257. Ultimately the reprobate’s despising of the common grace and mercy of God undergirds the judgement of God on the reprobate. However, far from diminishing the reality of that goodness, it is only because genuine goodness, mercy and grace were shown to them that their condemnation is justly increased. See ibid., p. 262. 110. Ibid., p. 87. 111. Ibid., p. 255. 112. Ibid., p. 258. 113. Samuel Rutherford, The Covenant of Life Opened (Edinburgh: Andrew Anderson, 1655), p. 107. 114. Ibid., pp. 107, 340. He explicitly includes here ‘all within the Visible Church, whether Elect or Reprobate’.

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that God in some sense loved all his rational creatures, ‘yea, even his enemies’.115 One evidence of this love was that God ‘sends the gospel to many reprobates, and invites them to repentance, … with longanimity and forbearance’.116 But this love was not electing love and was not ultimately intended to secure the salvation of any.117 In regard to the gospel offer the federal theologians were, if anything, more expansive than Knox. They clearly held that, in Durham’s words, ‘where the gospel comes, it makes offer of Jesus Christ to all that hear it’.118 Such a belief was reflected in their preaching: ‘we earnestly exhort you … to receive this gospel, to submit to the righteousness of faith, to open to him that is knocking at the door, to yield to him, and to give him the hand, that bygone quarrels may be removed, and taken out of the way.’119 Indeed, while Knox appeared to limit the gospel offer to those who are ‘thirsty’ (Isa. 55.1), James Durham explicitly refused to follow suit. In his own comments on Isaiah he pointed out that God directly invites those ‘without money’ to come; if ‘thirsting’ were required before coming, he reasoned, that would imply the possession of some ‘money’ on the part of the sinner. Thirst, then, was better attributed to those likely to come, rather than identified as a prerequisite to coming.120 He noted further that no church could be as devoid of ‘preparations’ for grace as the Church of Laodicea described in Rev. 3, yet it received the full and free gospel offer.121 Just as Scottish federal theologians did not go beyond Knox in their teachings on reprobation, so they articulated a gospel offer, a common love and a grace that extended beyond the elect, and which was no less expansive than it was in Knox’s doctrine. Here again there is no evidence of a betrayal of his teachings or a hardening of earlier (Knoxian) predestinarian doctrine into something reprehensible and incompatible with his thought. Concluding Comments on Knox and His Successors Given the relative consistency of Knox’s doctrine of predestination with the teaching of the Scottish federalists, why the paucity of references to Knox in those later writers? The reason is probably much less sinister than ‘a bifurcation … between evangelical and rationalist forms of Calvinism’.122 The lack of references 115. Samuel Rutherford, Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself (repr., Edinburgh: T. Lumisden and J. Robertson, 1727), p. 550. 116. Ibid., p. 550. 117. Ibid., p. 550. 118. James Durham, Christ Crucified Or the Marrow of the Gospel in Seventy-Two Sermons on the Fifty-Third Chapter of Isaiah (Chris Coldwell, ed.; Dallas: Naphtali Press, 2001), p. 122. 119. Ibid., pp. 100–1. 120. Ibid., p. 80. 121. Ibid., p. 80. 122. Torrance, ‘From Knox to McLeod Campbell’, p. 5.



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to Knox most likely serves as simple testimony to the international character of seventeenth-century Reformed thought. It was more important to Scottish federal theologians to interact with, and situate themselves within, a wider spectrum of Reformed thought, encompassing England and the continent and ultimately extending to New England, than to self-consciously regurgitate the teachings of Knox, however influential a figure he had been in the reformation of their own Kirk.

Conclusion Several concluding remarks on the basis of this study are in order. First, the suggestion that On Predestination constitutes an aberration in Knox’s teaching is not supported either by his enthusiasm in undertaking the task of refuting his opponent or by the references to predestination in his other writings. To argue that the doctrine of predestination was unimportant to Knox is to misunderstand the role and function it performed in Reformed theology more broadly. It was never a ‘central dogma’ from which all others truths were deduced, and to which all other truths ultimately should return. It was, rather, an important truth which was emphasized as and when appropriate. To find a supposed lack of emphasis on election in Knox’s other writings and infer from this that Knox did not really believe in predestination is therefore inappropriate. The same relative lack of emphasis could easily be found in the sermons of James Durham and other Scottish federal theologians.123 Indeed, and second, it could be argued, contra suggestions that predestination was generally unimportant to Knox, that it played a vital part in his psychological make-up.124 It certainly gave him comfort in face of the smallness of the Reformation cause. So he counselled those of like faith to his own: ‘There is few that are chosen … and therefore ought you greatly rejoice, knowing yourself to be one of the small and contemptible flock to whom it has pleased God … to give the kingdom.’125 It also undoubtedly impacted his understanding of history. His assurance of God’s absolute sovereignty over all events led Knox to perceive the Scottish Reformation as a battle between the forces of good and evil, between elect and reprobate.126 Kyle correctly argues that Knox’s personality was profoundly impacted by his self-perceived status as an elect servant of God, and that, at least in part due to this perception, ‘the reformer’s prevailing mood became one of confidence, conviction, and also intolerance’.127 123. See e.g. James Durham, The Ten Commandments (Chris Coldwell, ed.; Dallas: Naphtali Press, 2002). 124. Reid believes that it was ‘the mainspring of much of his thinking and action’ (Reid, Trumpeter of God, p. 152). 125. Knox, Works, vol. 3, p. 35. 126. See e.g. Knox, Works, vol. 6, pp. 270–1. 127. Kyle, ‘The Concept of Predestination’, p. 57.

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Third, the reception of Knox in later Scottish theology, particularly mid-seventeenth-century theology, demands further study. While there is nothing to suggest a ‘Knox versus the Knoxians’ sub-plot in the narrative of theological development in Scotland, there is need for further study concerning the actual influence Knox had in Scottish thought, even when he was not explicitly cited. Further study is needed to clarify differences in emphasis and exegesis between his thought and later Scottish theology, and to explore the impact which evolving ecclesiastical and polemical circumstances had upon the content and presentation of Scottish Reformed theology. Freed from the constraints of artificial narratives of discontinuity, such study would enhance our understanding of the development of the theology of the Kirk through the long Scottish Reformation.

Chapter 2 A N D R EW M E LV I L L E A N D C H R I ST IA N H E B R A I SM : T H E H UM A N I ST L E G AC Y O F A R E NA I S S A N C E S C HO L A R

Ernest R. Holloway III No one did more to raise the standards of Hebrew learning in Scotland during the Jacobean era than Andrew Melville.1 Under his leadership the universities of Glasgow and St Andrews became important centres for the study of Hebrew in Scotland, attracting students from France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland.2 Melville’s determination to give Hebrew a foundational place within the university curriculum furthered and reinforced his European-wide public image as a Renaissance humanist, an erudite classical scholar, and devout supporter of Christian Hebraism. Moreover, his advocacy of the study of Hebrew and its ancient Near Eastern cognates, Aramaic and Syriac, marked a significant shift in Scotland’s engagement with Jewish language and culture in early modernity. Melville is best remembered today for the part he played in Scotland’s ecclesiastical struggles and his own peculiar conflicts with King James VI. But his impact upon university reform and the role he performed in the introduction of the New Learning in Scotland constitute an important aspect of his intellectual legacy. My aim in this essay is to explore 1. Educated at the Universities of St Andrews, Paris and Poitiers as well as the Academy of Geneva, Melville served as principal of the University of Glasgow and subsequently of St Mary’s College, St Andrews, as well as rector of St Andrews. From 1574 until 1606, Melville trained a generation of future scholars and clergymen. However, his services to the university and Kirk were brought to an unceremonious end when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Unable to return to Scotland upon his release in 1611, Melville relocated to France where he taught at the Academy of Sedan until his death in 1622. 2. Ernest R. Holloway III, Andrew Melville and Humanism in Renaissance Scotland 1545–1622 (Studies in the History of Christian Traditions Series, 154; Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 151–249; James Melville, The Autobiography and Diary of Mr. James Melville, (Robert Pitcairn, ed.; Edinburgh: printed for the Wodrow Society, 1842), pp. 49–50; H. M. B. Reid, The Divinity Principals of the University of Glasgow 1545–1654 (Glasgow: J. Maclehose and Sons, 1917), pp. 58–9.

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that legacy with particular regard to Melville’s identity as a Christian Hebraist. Towards that end I will briefly trace the course of Hebrew studies in Scotland’s ancient universities during the early modern period, examine the relationship between Christian Hebraism and European Humanism, and identify Melville’s distinctive humanist legacy as a Christian Hebraist.

The Study of Hebrew in Scotland’s Ancient Universities Prior to Melville’s return to Scotland in 1574, Hebrew had been taught at both St Andrews and Old Aberdeen (in both places by the scholar James Lawson), but its study in Scotland’s ancient universities was by no means extensive, and, in places like Glasgow, where the university in the early 1570s remained in a state of ‘suspended animation’, it was non-existent.3 To be sure, the university reforms which accompanied Scotland’s official embrace of Protestantism in 1560 had encouraged, particularly under the rubrics of ‘the necessity of schools’ and ‘the erection of universities’ in the First Book of Discipline (1560), instruction in Hebrew, but the gap between theory and practice during the subsequent decade was wider than what the authors of that text had envisioned.4 Melville’s impact, following his move from Geneva to Glasgow in 1574, was realized both through his own teaching and the reforms embodied in the 1577 nova erectio, a new charter for the university in Glasgow which came to serve both as a template for the reform of Scotland’s medieval universities in Old Aberdeen and St Andrews and as a model for her post-Reformation foundations in Edinburgh and New Aberdeen.5 The flourishing of the study of Hebrew and its ancient Near Eastern cognates in Scotland during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries must be traced 3. Peter John Anderson, ed., Officers and Graduates of University and King’s College Aberdeen (Aberdeen: printed for the New Spalding Club, 1893), p. 39; John Spottiswoode, The History of the Church of Scotland (3 vols; repr., Edinburgh: printed for the Spottiswoode Society, 1847–51), vol. 2, p. 319; David Stevenson, King’s College, Aberdeen 1560-1641: From Protestant Reformation to Covenanting Revolution (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990), pp. 25–6, 28; John Durkan and James Kirk, The University of Glasgow 1451–1577 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977), pp. 272, 285; Thomas McCrie, Life of Andrew Melville (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 2nd edn, 1824), p. 66; J. D. Mackie, The University of Glasgow 1451–1951: A Short History (Glasgow: Jackson, 1954), p. 63; Charles P. Finlayson, Clement Litill and his Library: The Origins of Edinburgh University Library (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 1980), p. 31. Principal and professor of theology John Davidson apparently owned a 1524–5 edition of Biblia Bombergiana, suggesting that there might have been some instruction in Hebrew, at some point, after the Reformation. 4. James K. Cameron, ed., The First Book of Discipline (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1972), pp. 138, 141, 143. 5. Durkan and Kirk, University of Glasgow, pp. 262–99; Holloway, Melville and Humanism, pp. 179–85.



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in part to Melville’s own remarkable linguistic abilities.6 Early in his academic career he had exhibited a facility for learning languages, studying ancient Greek for two years prior to university with the scholar Pierre de Marsilier.7 While the alleged absence of Greek study in Scotland during the sixteenth century has often been exaggerated, Melville’s knowledge of the language for one so young was both uncommon and remarkable.8 During his time at St Mary’s College in St Andrews he is reported to have established himself as ‘the best philosopher, poet, and Grecian, of anie young maister in the land’.9 This assessment is supported by the encomiastic Latin verse written in his honour by the visiting Italian poet Pietro Bizzarri.10 Much of Melville’s time on the continent in France and Switzerland was devoted to continuing his studies of classical Greek and Latin, as well as acquiring a thorough knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac. His studies in Paris under Jean Mercier and Jean Cinqarbres and in Geneva under Cornelius Bertram, combined with his natural linguistic aptitude, enabled him to achieve a proficiency and, eventually, to provide a level of instruction in the Scottish universities which was difficult to reproduce let alone surpass in late sixteenth-century Scotland. When Melville was incarcerated in the Tower of London in 1607 and subsequently banished to the continent in 1611, the intellectual trajectory he had established and the legacy of Christian Hebraism he had pioneered in Scotland was left for others to develop. While the personal and institutional footprint Melville left upon the Scottish universities is undeniable, there remain real questions surrounding the extent to which some of his university reforms were actually implemented.11 Neither his successor as principal at the University of Glasgow, Thomas Smeaton, nor his colleague at King’s College, Aberdeen, principal Alexander Arbuthnot, possessed his expertise in Hebrew and its ancient Near Eastern cognates. Unable to teach these languages themselves, Smeaton and Arbuthnot were forced to look to others to provide comparable linguistic instruction. Unfortunately their untimely deaths, both in 1583, brought their reforming efforts to an unceremonious end. In Glasgow, at least, the project for reform had been officially approved in the 1577 nova erectio, scholars had been personally trained by Melville, and a trajectory 6. Ronald Gordon Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, rev. edn, 1970), p. 52; Alexander Morgan, Scottish University Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 93, 135. 7. Melville, Autobiography and Diary, pp. 39–40. 8. John Durkan, ‘The Cultural Background in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in David McRoberts, ed., Essays on the Scottish Reformation 1513–1625 (The Innes Review: Scottish Catholic Historical Studies, 10; Glasgow: Burns, 1962), pp. 288–9. Cf. Holloway, Melville and Humanism, pp. 47–53. 9. Melville, Autobiography and Diary, p. 39. 10. Petri Bizzari, ‘Ad Andream Milvinum’, in Janus Gruterus, Delitiae cc. Italorum Poetarum, huius superorisque aevi illustrium (2 vols; Frankfurt, 1608), vol. 1, pp. 437–8. 11. Holloway, Melville and Humanism, pp. 151–249, 277–83, 306–15.

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of learning had been established which later scholars, such as Robert Baillie in 1642 and Gilbert Burnett from 1669–74, capably continued.12 Prior to Baillie and Burnett, Glasgow had briefly enjoyed the leadership of the classical scholars Robert Boyd of Trochrigg and John Cameron; however, the extent of their knowledge of Hebrew and its Semitic cognates is unclear.13 We know that Boyd had studied under Robert Rollock, who himself had learned Hebrew from James Melville, nephew to Andrew Melville, and taught it at Edinburgh.14 Cameron, an accomplished Greek scholar and confidant of the Hebraist Isaac Casaubon, spent two years studying at the Academy of Geneva, during which time he might have learned Hebrew. But even if he had, his tenure at Glasgow was so brief that he was unable to leave any lasting impact on the university.15 Following the Restoration of 1660, Glasgow University, in reaffirming its commitment to the nova erectio, declared that in addition to the study of Hebrew and Greek, provision should be made for the study of ‘Chaldaik and Syriak’.16 Following Burnet’s departure in 1674, John Tran taught Hebrew for several years, and when he died in 1704 the task fell to the polymath Professor of Mathematics Robert Sinclair.17 In 1709 the Chair of Oriental Languages, renamed in 1893 the Chair of Hebrew and Semitic Languages, was established at Glasgow, providing a permanent commitment, at least in theory, to the humanist values embodied in the nova erectio.18 The same progress did not initially occur at Aberdeen. Already in 1575 Melville and Arbuthnot had agreed upon a plan for the reform of the universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, and a comparison of their respective new foundations confirms their essential agreement.19 Arbuthnot’s death prevented the realization of his efforts to have the 1583 nova fundatio, which embodied the reforms he envisioned for King’s College, ratified by Parliament. It was not until November 1597 that the nova fundatio of King’s was officially approved, but even then 12. Cosmo Innes, ed., Munimenta Alme Universitatis Glasguensis. Records of the University of Glasgow from its Foundation till 1727 (Maitland Club Publications, 72; 4 vols; Glasgow, 1854), vol. 2, p. 466; James A. Coutts, A History of the University of Glasgow from its Foundation in 1451 to 1909 (Glasgow: J. Maclehose and Sons, 1909), pp. 105, 154; Reid, Divinity Principals, p. 59. According to Reid, Robert Baillie made the study of Hebrew and its cognates ‘the paramount concern of his chair’. 13. Mackie, University of Glasgow, pp. 81–4; Reid, Divinity Principals, p. 154. 14. Reid, Divinity Principals, p. 116; Melville, Autobiography and Diary, p. 86. 15. Mackie, University of Glasgow, p. 82; Coutts, History of the University, pp. 75, 87; Reid, Divinity Principals, p. 174. 16. Munimenta, vol. 2, p. 484. 17. Ibid., p. 368; Mackie, University of Glasgow, pp. 162, 168. 18. Ibid., 395; Mackie, University of Glasgow, p. 162; Holloway, Melville and Humanism, pp. 179–85. 19. Melville, Autobiography and Diary, p. 53; Anderson, Officers and Graduates, pp. 335–47; Stevenson, King’s College, Aberdeen, pp. 149–66; Durkan and Kirk, University of Glasgow, pp. 430–48.



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there were still those, such as James Elphinstone, who worked to stifle it and thus preserve the original foundation of Bishop William Elphinstone.20 Like its new sister foundations at Glasgow and St Andrews, Aberdeen’s nova fundatio made explicit provision for instruction in Hebrew and required the principal to be ‘knowledgeable and skilled … in Hebrew and Syriac’.21 These languages had, reportedly, already been taught to some extent at the College, though precise details about their instruction is uncertain. James Lawson had been appointed to King’s in 1569 based largely upon his ability to teach Hebrew, and when he left in 1572 to succeed John Knox in the ministry in Edinburgh, instruction in Hebrew might have continued under Thomas Ogston, who is reported to have known the language.22 Lawson is said to have taught ‘the Eastern languages publicy in Scotland’ and to have been one of the first to restore ‘Jewish learning’ in his native land.23 While Lawson’s teaching of Hebrew and its cognates in St Andrews and Old Aberdeen provides an important corrective to James Melville’s remark that Hebrew and Greek at this time ‘war nocht to be gottine in the land’, his work was far too brief in either university to have had lasting impact.24 It was not until the seventeenth century, during the time of Bishop Patrick Forbes of Corse and the ‘Aberdeen Doctors’, that the study of Hebrew began to flourish in Old Aberdeen. It is reported that Forbes, during his student days under Melville, became so accomplished in Hebrew and divinity that when James Melville in 1586 resigned his post at St Mary’s as regent in Hebrew, Andrew Melville himself offered Forbes the position.25 Although Forbes declined the offer, it became apparent when he came to Aberdeen that, despite his endorsement of 20. Anderson, Officers and Graduates, pp. 327–8; Stevenson, King’s College, Aberdeen, pp. 37–8. For a different interpretation of this act of Parliament see Jennifer J. Carter and Colin A. McLaren, Crown and Gown 1495–1995: An Illustrated History of the University of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1994), p. 20. 21. G. Patrick Edwards, trans., ‘The New Foundation’, in Stevenson, King’s College, Aberdeen, p. 153; Anderson, Officers and Graduates, pp. 337–8. 22. John Durkan, ‘George Hay’s Oration at the Purging of King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1569: Commentary’, NS 6 (1984), pp. 97–112 (103–4). It is quite possible that Lawson used Moses Kimchi’s Hebrew grammar in providing language instruction. His copy of Kimchi’s grammar was published in Basel in 1531 and is currently housed at the library of the University of St Andrews. Thomas Smeaton, Durkan notes, observed that Lawson ‘“gloried in” and “bragged about” his knowledge of Hebrew’. 23. Robert Wodrow, Selections from Wodrow’s Biographical Collections: Divines of the North-East of Scotland (Robert Lippe, ed., New Spalding Club: New Series, 5; Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1890), p. 194. 24. Melville, Autobiography and Diary, p. 30; Holloway, Melville and Humanism, p. 49. 25. Charles Farquhar Shand, ed., Funeral Sermons, Orations, Epitaphs and Other Pieces on the Death of the Right Rev. Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen (Edinburgh: Spottiswoode Society, 1845), p. xxxiii; W. G. Sinclair Snow, The Times, Life, and Thought of Patrick Forbes Bishop of Aberdeen 1618–1635 (London: SPCK, 1952), p. 30; Robert Pitcairn, ‘Prefatory Notice’, in Melville, Autobiography and Diary, p. ix.

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several elements of the old foundation, he had thoroughly embraced Melville’s humanist commitment to the study of ancient languages. In 1619, at the time of the royal visitation of King’s, Bishop Forbes found principal David Rait guilty of neglecting among other things his duty to teach Hebrew regularly and thoroughly. Under Forbes’s leadership strict requirements were placed upon Rait and his successor William Leslie to elevate Hebrew studies at the university. Leslie was specifically instructed to deliver two Divinity and four Hebrew lectures each week.26 Such requirements were a clear indication that Forbes remained resolutely devoted to the rigorous study of Hebrew. Forbes’s influence in the appointment of his son John to the Chair of Divinity at King’s in 1620 only reinforced his commitment to rigorous linguistic scholarship and the mastery of Hebrew.27 After completing his course of study at King’s in 1610, John Forbes had studied on the continent at Heidelberg, Sedan, and at other universities in Germany.28 During his time at Sedan it is quite likely that he received instruction, perhaps privately, from his kinsman Andrew Melville in Aramaic and Syriac. Melville himself had been privately tutored by Buchanan during his student days in Paris, and had in turn throughout his academic career tutored others, including his nephew James.29 It is perhaps from Melville, then, that John adopted the regular practice of reading both Buchanan’s Psalms paraphrases and the Psalms in Hebrew.30 There can be little doubt that the choice of Sedan was based largely, if not entirely, on the recommendation of his father Patrick, who had been profoundly shaped by Melville at Glasgow and St Andrews.31 The combined influence of Bishop Forbes and his son at King’s fostered the ideal that rigorous original language study should be an everyday part of university life in Old Aberdeen. However, despite these reforming efforts it was not until 1673 that a Chair of Oriental Languages

26. Stevenson, King’s College, Aberdeen, pp. 65–70, 78–9; Anderson, Officers and Graduates, pp. 25–6. 27. D. Macmillan, The Aberdeen Doctors. A Notable Group of Scottish Theologians of the First Episcopal Period (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909), p. 48. 28. George Garden, Reverendi viri Joh. Forbesii à Corse vita, in John Forbes, Opera Omnia (George Garden, ed.; 2 vols; Amsterdam, 1703), vol. 2, p. 7; Anderson, Officers and Graduates, p. 179; Henry R. Sefton, ‘Scotland’s Greatest Theologian’, AUR 45 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 348–52. 29. Thomas Ruddiman, ed., Georgi Buchanani … Opera Omnia (2 vols; Edinburgh, 1714–1715), vol. 1, p. 21; ‘Letter of Andrew Melville to Peter Young’, 14 April 1572, Bodleian, Smith MS. 77, pp. 27–8; Holloway, Melville and Humanism, pp. 97–8, 151–5, 213, 266, 282; Melville, Autobiography and Diary, pp. 46–7; Wodrow, Selections, p. 82. 30. John Forbes, Joh. Forbesii à Corse vitæ interioris sive exercitiorum spiritualium commentaria in Opera Omnia, vol. 1, p. 133; G. D. Henderson, The Burning Bush. Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1957), p. 90. Melville had used Buchanan’s Psalms paraphrases in tutoring his nephew James in 1574 and had composed his own Latin paraphrases of selected Psalms while in the Tower. 31. Garden, vita, p. 1.



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was founded at King’s, formally solidifying its commitment to the study of Hebrew and its cognates.32 The frustration experienced by some over the tardiness of university reform in Old Aberdeen may explain, in part, the founding in 1593 of Marischal College in New Aberdeen.33 Adopting much of the nova fundatio of King’s, Marischal’s foundation charter unequivocally declared its commitment to the study of Hebrew and Syriac, though, like King’s, there is no mention of Aramaic or the rabbinical dialects.34 The ability to provide a high level of instruction in Hebrew and its cognates was supplied by Marischal’s first principal, Robert Howie.35 Having been trained at Herborn in Hebrew and its cognates under Johannes Piscator, Howie was more than capable of discharging his linguistic duties as principal.36 However, like James Lawson at King’s, his service was brief, departing Aberdeen for Dundee in 1598 and leaving to others the task of establishing Marischal as a centre of Hebraist study in Scotland.37 It was not until 1642 that Marischal brought on to its faculty the Hebraist John Row and established itself as a centre for the study of Hebrew. Prior to assuming his post at Marischal, Row had written a Hebrew grammar which won him the praise and support of Alexander Henderson, Samuel Rutherford, and the faculty of St Leonard’s College.38 In 1644 he published the work under the title Hebrææ linguæ institutiones along with Χιλιας Hebraica, a Hebrew lexicon.39 Described as ‘the first work of the kind ever printed in Scotland’, Row’s publication solidified his reputation as a skilled Hebraist.40 In addition to these two works, Row also wrote ‘Praxis præceptorum Hebrææ grammaticæ’ in which he provided Hebrew versions of the Lord’s Prayer,

32. Cosmo Innes, ed., Fasti Aberdonenses. Selections from the Records of the University and King’s College of Aberdeen 1494–1854 (Aberdeen: printed for Spalding Club, 1854), p. lxxxix; Rait, Universities of Aberdeen, p. 165. 33. Leslie J. Macfarlane, ‘A Short History of the University of Aberdeen’, AUR 48 (Spring, 1979), p. 1. On the founding of Marischal College see G. D. Henderson, The Founding of Marischal College, Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1947); Steven John Reid, ‘Aberdeen’s “Toun College”: Marischal College, 1593–1623’, IR 58.2 (2007), pp. 173–95. 34. Peter John Anderson, ed., Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis (3 vols; Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1889–98), vol. 1, pp. 43, 63. 35. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 27. 36. See James K. Cameron, ed., Letters of John Johnston and Robert Howie (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), p. xxiv. 37. Anderson, Fasti Mariscallanae, vol. 2, p. 27; Cameron, ‘Introduction’, p. lxvi. 38. John Row, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, from the Year 1558 to August 1637; With a Continuation to July 1639, by his Son, John Row (David Laing, ed.; Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842), p. xlii. 39. John Row, Hebrææ linguæ institutiones (Glasgow, 1644); Χιλιας Hebraica (Glasgow, 1644); see Row, History, p. xlv. 40. Row, History, p. xlv.

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the Apostles’ Creed, the Decalogue, and the first two Psalms.41 Unfortunately for Marischal, Row’s tenure was short-lived, and by 1652 he was relocated to Old Aberdeen at King’s College as the new principal.42 When the study of Hebrew at Marischal was subsequently dropped from the university curriculum for approximately a century, Hebraist studies suffered a serious blow.43 It was not until 1732 that a Chair of Oriental Languages was established at Marischal, some 59 years after King’s.44 Aberdeen’s universities were theoretically committed to the teaching of Hebrew and its ancient Near Eastern cognates. Practically, at times, the quality of instruction at King’s and Marischal did not live up to the lofty ideals embodied in their foundation charters.45 With the founding of the University of Edinburgh in 1583, the study of Hebrew appeared promising under the leadership of Robert Rollock.46 Among the leading ministers involved in the founding of the university was the Hebraist James Lawson who persuaded the town council that Rollock should be appointed principal.47 While still at St Andrews, Rollock had probably attended Melville’s lectures on Aramaic, Syriac, and ‘the rabbinical dialects’ in addition to James Melville’s Hebrew lectures.48 When he assumed his post at Edinburgh, he employed the old system of regenting in which he took his students through the entire four-year arts course including instruction during the third year in Hebrew grammar.49 We know from Clement Litill’s library, which he donated in 1580 to 41. Ibid., p. l; See also Robert Sangster Rait, The Universities of Aberdeen: A History (Aberdeen: Bisset, 1895), p. 159. 42. Anderson, Officers and Graduates, p. 26. 43. John Malcolm Bulloch, A History of the University of Aberdeen 1495–1895 (London: Hodder, 1895), p. 129. 44. Anderson, Fasti Mariscallanae, p. ii, p. 57. 45. Stevenson, King’s College Aberdeen, p. 65; John Kerr, Scottish Education, School and University, from Early Times to 1908 (Cambridge: University Press, 1910), p. 136. 46. Michael Lynch, ‘The Origins of Edinburgh’s “Toun College”: A Revision Article’, IR 33 (1982), pp. 3–14; D. B. Horn, ‘The Origins of the University of Edinburgh’, UEJ 22 (1966), pp. 213–25; idem, ‘The Origins of the University of Edinburgh Part 2’, UEJ 22 (1966), pp. 297–312. 47. Alexander Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh During its First Three Hundred Years (2 vols; London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1884), vol. 1, pp. 104–5; Henry Charteris, Narrative of the Life and Death of Mr Robert Rollock of Scotland in Robert Rollock, Select Works of Robert Rollock, Principal of the University of Edinburgh (William M. Gunn, ed.; 2 vols; Edinburgh: printed for the Wodrow Society, 1844–9), vol. 1, p. lxiii. 48. Thomas Wilson, Vita Patrici Adamsoni, in Patrick Adamson, De Sacro pastoris munere (Thomas Wilson, ed.; London: G. Eld and M. Flesher, 1619), p. 4; Holloway, Melville and Humanism, p. 194. 49. James Kirk, ‘Clement Little’s Edinburgh’, in Jean R. Guild and Alexander Law, eds, Edinburgh University Library 1580–1980: A Collection of Historical Essays (Edinburgh: Friends of Edinburgh University Library, 1982), p. 25; Grant, Story of the University of Edinburgh, pp. 149–50.



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the town council, that when Rollock, the ‘custodian and reader’ of the collection, began his instruction in Hebrew he had access to the Biblia Bombergiana, which included an Aramaic paraphrase and rabbinical commentary.50 It is likely that Rollock consulted the Biblia Bombergiana in his teaching of Hebrew grammar. He might also have used it when he wrote his commentaries on the books of Daniel and selected Psalms.51 These commentaries, which more than likely were first presented to his students as lectures or sermons, might also have been used illustratively in his teaching Hebrew.52 It is surprising, given Rollock’s knowledge of Hebrew, that the language did not figure more prominently in the curriculum. The fact that the contemporary Henry Charteris omits any reference to Hebrew in his description of the divinity curriculum may suggest that Rollock provided only a cursory introduction to the language. In 1620 the newly created professor of divinity was required to provide a paltry one Hebrew lesson per week to the students. It was not until 1642 and the establishment of the chair of Hebrew and Oriental Tongues that the study of Hebrew was given the important place within the curriculum that it occupied in other Protestant universities throughout Europe.53 Although the study of Hebrew appears to have received a rather sluggish start at Edinburgh, the university led the way in Hebraist studies by being the first to establish a Chair of Hebrew in Scotland.54

Christian Hebraism and European Humanism The Scottish universities weren’t alone in finding it difficult to obtain Hebraists of Melville’s calibre. The universities of Wittenberg, Louvain and Leiden all struggled during the sixteenth century to find Hebraists for their institutions. In a letter to Casaubon in 1602, Joseph Scaliger lamented the deplorable state of Hebrew learning among his scholarly contemporaries.55 Notwithstanding this difficulty and the reportedly inauspicious beginnings of Hebrew studies in post-Reformation Europe, the seventeenth century has been called the ‘heyday of polymathy’ and 50. Finlayson, Clement Litill, p. 31; Kirk, ‘Clement Little’s Edinburgh’, pp. 22–4, 27, 34. Litill’s library was housed at the manse of St Giles and was under the care of Lawson until 1584. Shortly thereafter Rollock became the custodian of the collection. 51. Robert Rollock, In librum Danielis prophetae Roberti Rolloci Scoti, ministri Iesu Christi in ecclesia Edinburgensi Commentarius (Edinburgh: Robertus Waldegrave, 1591); In selectos aliquot Psalmos Davidis, Roberti Rolloci Scoti, ecclesiae Edinburgensis ministri, commentarius, nunc primum in lucem editus (Geneva: Franciscum le Preux, 1599). 52. Charteris, Narrative, p. lxxii. 53. Grant, Story of the University of Edinburgh, pp. 212–14. 54. Cant, University of St Andrews, pp. 73–4. 55. Stephen G. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Studies in the History of Christian Thought, vol. 68; Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 104–5.

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the ‘heyday’ of Christian Hebraism.56 Early modern Christian Hebraism – that is, the study of Jewish language, history, and culture by sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Christian scholars57 – involved the study of post-biblical Jewish literature as much as it did the Hebrew Bible.58 Christian Hebraists produced editions of the Hebrew Bible, frequently coupled with rabbinical commentaries, detailed studies of Jewish history in the ancient Near East, examinations of the Cabala, and contemporary accounts of Jewish life and ritual. Exponents of Christian Hebraism included grammarians such as Paul Fagius, Sebastian Münster, Johannes Buxtorf and Benito Arias Montano, Jewish convert scholars such as Elijah Levita and Johannes Isaac, scholars of the Jewish mystical tradition such as Johannes Reuchlin, Guillaume Postel and Pietro Galatino, and scholars of Jewish practices and institutions such as Joseph Scaliger and Petrus Cunaeus.59 In short, there was a wide variety of Christian Hebraists throughout Europe engaged in exploring the rich historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions of the Jews, and Melville’s Hebraism should be understood within this broader context. For Melville and his fellow Hebraists the study of Hebrew and Jewish scholarship more broadly was the natural and logical extension of the humanist approach to ancient texts. Melville’s approach to these ancient texts was firmly grounded in a historical method born out of the Northern European Renaissance.60 He applied the same method in understanding the ancient texts of the Greeks and Romans that he utilized in understanding the texts of the ancient Near East. And, with Scaliger and Casaubon, he firmly believed that a thorough knowledge of the languages, history, traditions, and customs of ancient Israel and Palestine was necessary to a proper understanding of Scripture. From the earliest days of the trilingual institutions at Alcalá (1508), Louvain (1520) and Paris (1529), humanists of the sixteenth century had set the ideal of Hebrew instruction on a par with that of Latin and Greek. Indeed, the effort to elevate the academic standing of Hebrew within the universities of Europe may be traced back as far as the Council of Vienne (1311–12) which called for the official recognition of Hebrew along with Latin and Greek.61 The humanist rationale for the study of Hebrew was obvious enough, though it was not universally endorsed by all. Erasmus, for instance, was ‘equivocal’ toward Christian Hebraism and 56. Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 27–8. 57. See Charles Berlin and Aaron Katchen, eds, Christian Hebraism: The Study of Jewish Culture by Christian Scholars in Medieval and Early Modern Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1988). 58. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies, p. 2. 59. Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), p. 29. 60. Anthony Grafton, Worlds made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 4. 61. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies, pp. 103–4.



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called Hebrew a ‘barbaric language’.62 Some humanists during the early sixteenth century avoided the study of Hebrew altogether, fearing that direct contact with Jewish teachers or immersion in rabbinic writings would lead them away from Christianity into Judaism.63 By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the publication of Johannes Buxtorf ’s works made Jewish learning ‘possible without any assistance from Jews’.64 Many Christian Hebraists studied rabbinic and Talmudic texts in an effort to understand better both Old and New Testaments. Scaliger, for instance, studied such texts under the Jewish convert Ferdinandus, and also utilized the work of the Jewish historian Josephus to demonstrate that the narrative of Herodias in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew was corrupt.65 Scaliger’s exegetical rule, wryly expressed by De Jonge, ‘that Ovid and the Talmud were both necessary for the explanation of the Bible’, encapsulates the typical approach of many Renaissance humanists in their use of Classical and Hebraic texts to understand Scripture. Similarly, Christian humanists such as Pico, Reuchlin and Postel had actively promoted the study of Cabala in Christian circles for the insight it offered. In fact, it was Postel who, in addition to urging the young Scaliger to study Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, more than likely prompted him to investigate the Cabbalistic text Zohar.66 So also Casaubon’s ‘sacred antiquarianism’ led him to explore the institutions, customs and world of ancient Judaism in an effort to explicate Scripture. In his 1587 notes on the New Testament, Casaubon utilized his knowledge of ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish customs in understanding Pilate’s washing of his hands and concluded that Pilate ‘deliberately followed Jewish custom’.67 Like Scaliger, Casaubon and other Renaissance humanists of the long sixteenth century, Johannes Drusius, Professor of Oriental languages at Oxford, Leiden and Franeker, gained new insights into the text of the New Testament by approaching it in light of his knowledge of rabbinical and Talmudic literature. By 62. Shimon Markish, Erasmus and the Jews (Anthony Olcott, trans.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 119. 63. G. Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 25–6; Markish, Erasmus and the Jews, p. 119. 64. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies, p. 5; Alastair Hamilton, ‘The Long Apprenticeship: Casaubon and Arabic’, in Grafton and Weinberg, ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’, pp. 305–6. 65. J. Brugman, ‘Arabic Scholarship’, in Th. H. Lunsing Scheurleer and G. M. H. Posthumus Meyjes, eds, Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning (Leiden: Brill, 1975), p. 203; H. J. De Jonge, ‘The Study of the New Testament’, in Scheurleer and Meyjes, Leiden University, pp. 82–3. Cf. Anthony Grafton, ‘Close Encounters of the Learned Kind: Joseph Scaliger’s Table Talk’, American Scholar 57 (1988), pp. 581–8 (588). 66. Grafton, ‘Close Encounters’, p. 582; De Jonge, ‘The Study of the New Testament’, pp. 82–5, 87. 67. Grafton and Weinberg, ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’, p. 128.

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immersing himself in the customs, traditions and history of the ancient Hebrews, Drusius and his fellow Hebraists discovered subtleties and nuances embedded in the New Testament hidden to those unfamiliar with Jewish lore.68

Melville’s Christian Hebraism While Melville’s efforts to place Hebrew and Jewish literature on a par with that of Latin and Greek in the great tradition of the trilingual institutions on the continent were never fully realized, his university reforms remain the clearest example of his work as a forward-looking humanist and Christian Hebraist of the Northern European Renaissance. His significance resides not in any native creative genius or revolutionary insight but rather in his resolve to bring the Scottish universities into conformity with the leading Protestant universities on the continent, and in his ability to incorporate and adapt creatively to the Scottish context the most recent advances in Hebraic and ancient Near Eastern studies. But Melville’s efforts to import the most recent learning of the ancient Near East in his university reforms were not as comprehensive as they might have been. In contrast to those scholars who learned Yiddish and Arabic for the value they offered in illuminating difficult passages in the Old Testament, Melville never learned either language, nor did he do anything to promote their study. In light of his thorough familiarity with the structure of Semitic languages and with Arabic’s utility for the fields of medicine, etymology, topography and biblical criticism, it is somewhat surprising that Melville never learned it. With the exception of scholars such as Postel, Scaliger and Thomas Erpenius, ‘the greatest Arabist of his generation’, very few Christian Hebraists of the sixteenth century could read Arabic.69 The obstacles to learning the language, while not insurmountable, were nevertheless formidable. In the late sixteenth century, adequate Arabic lexicons and grammars were not readily available, nor were Arabic texts in abundance in the West. If these initial difficulties were not enough to discourage Melville, the significant gap between Hebrew and Arabic made learning it challenging even for the most gifted polyglots and Classical philologians, as the example of Casaubon demonstrates. Moreover, native Arabic speakers in Europe were relatively scarce; only a limited number of Europeans had acquired a knowledge of the language from having spent time in Arabic-speaking countries.70 When these factors are taken into account, Melville’s omission of Arabic, while limiting his ability to make philological observations, appears to have been more circumstantial than anything else.71 68. De Jonge, ‘The Study of the New Testament’, p. 67. 69. Alastair Hamilton, ‘The Long Apprenticeship: Casaubon and Arabic’, in Grafton and Weinberg, ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’, p. 300; see Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies, p. 105. 70. Hamilton, ‘The Long Apprenticeship’, pp. 294–7. 71. See Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘The Renaissance Humanists and the Knowledge of



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In contrast to Lutheran Hebraism which tended to subordinate the Old Testament to the Gospels, and which at times could be wary of Jewish sources, Melville’s Reformed Hebraism mirrored that which had been developed at Basel, Zurich and Strasbourg, and which encouraged the consultation of post-biblical Jewish literature.72 Melville’s enthusiasm for Judaica was nurtured in Geneva as he studied under, and forged relationships with, Christian Hebraists such as Scaliger, who, as noted, found great value in post-biblical Jewish writings.73 Having been trained by scholars who firmly believed in the importance of the commentaries of Rashi, Kimchi, Ibn Ezra and other notable rabbis, it is understandable that Melville would consult these sources and incorporate this literature into his lectures, underscoring his conviction regarding its value for understanding the Hebrew scriptures.74 When Archbishop Patrick Adamson, in an effort to discredit Melville as one who favoured Jewish over Christian writings, labelled him a ‘Cabalist’ and ‘Talmudist’, he was exploiting Melville’s international reputation as a scholar skilled in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and the rabbinical dialects, and as one who, in the Genevan tradition, frequently consulted post-biblical Jewish literature in explicating Old Testament texts.75 Moreover, we know from Melville’s poetic exposition of Daniel 9.24–7, known as the Prophetiae Enarratio, that he had read Josephus’ The Jewish War and used it in supporting his own reading of that text.76 Throughout his academic career Melville’s knowledge of Hebrew and its Semitic cognates was widely recognized in scholarly circles and his skill in ancient languages acknowledged by even his most vociferous critics. In his History of the Church of Scotland Archbishop John Spottiswoode, formerly a student of Melville’s at Glasgow and subsequently a vigorous ecclesiastical opponent, acknowledged Melville’s mastery of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, describing him as ‘a man learned (chiefly in the tongues)’.77 Similarly, the Latin poet George Herbert in his Musae responsoriae, a reply to Melville’s Arabic’, Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955), pp. 96–117. 72. Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, pp. 25–6; Stephen G. Burnett, ‘Reassessing the Basel-Wittenberg Conflict: Dimensions of the Reformation-Era Discussion of Hebrew Scholarship’, in Allison Coudert and Jeffrey Shoulson, eds, Hebraica veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 188. Burnett has persuasively demonstrated that the Wittenberg Hebraists remained in touch with ‘the general discussion of Hebrew scholarship’, consulting the linguistic and exegetical works of Oecolampadius and Bucer, among others. 73. Grafton, ‘Close Encounters’, p. 588. 74. Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England, p. 27. 75. Patrick Adamson, Assertiones quaedam, ex aliis eiusmodi innumeris erroneæ, per Andream Melvinam, novam et inauditam theologiam profitentem, in suis praelectionbus de episcopatu in Patrick Adamson, Opera (Thomas Wilson, ed., London, 1620), no. 10. 76. Steven John Reid, ‘Andrew Melville, Sacred Chronology and World History: the Carmina Danielis 9 and the Antichristus’, IR 60.1 (2009), pp. 1–21 (7). 77. Spottiswoode, History, vol. 2, p. 200.

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Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria, revealed his awareness of Melville’s reputation as a Hebraist by disparagingly dismissing his preference for ancient Hebrew with insults and contempt.78 Thomas Wilson, one of Melville’s students at St Andrews and a son-in-law and biographer of Patrick Adamson, confessed as an eager and regular auditor of his lectures at St Mary’s that Melville flawlessly taught Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and the rabbinical languages. Wilson’s reference to ‘Rabbuinoru’ is probably a reference to the rabbinical dialects of Aramaic in the Talmuds.79 It is unclear in Wilson’s description whether Melville taught the Western Aramaic dialect, which was closer to the Imperial Aramaic of biblical times, or the Eastern dialect, which more closely resembled Syriac and Mandaic.80 He might very well have taught both. It is equally unclear in this reference to ‘rabbinical languages’ whether he taught from the Jerusalem or Babylonian Talmud. Of all the Talmuds of Late Antiquity which he might have consulted, the Babylonian Talmud remains the most likely rabbinical source he read and taught.81 Melville’s lectures in the rabbinical dialects of Aramaic in the Talmuds, as referenced by Wilson, would have mirrored the practice Melville himself had observed in Geneva under the instruction of Bertram.82 The practice of the Genevan professors of Hebrew was to consult the rabbinical commentaries while reading through a book of the Old Testament.83 Calvin himself had set the example of citing the rabbinical authors in his Old Testament commentaries, and in so doing had implicitly encouraged his readers to do likewise.84 In 1574 Bertram had published a comparative grammar of Hebrew and Aramaic entitled Comparatio grammaticæ Hebraicæ & Aramaicæ; Melville honoured the text with four Latin poems commending it to the world of ancient Near Eastern scholarship.85 As a devoted student of Aramaic, Melville immediately recognized its scholarly worth and was eager to promote it. Of course, prior to Melville’s study under Bertram in Geneva, he had studied under Jean Mercier, ‘a leading French Hebraist’86 whose 78. George Herbert, The Latin Poetry of George Herbert: A Bilingual Edition (Mark McCloskey and Paul R. Murphy, trans.; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1965), pp. 25–7. 79. Wilson, Vita, p. 4. Cf. also McCrie, Life of Andrew Melville, vol. 1, p. 165. 80. Lawrence H. Schiffman, ‘The Making of the Mishnah and the Talmud’, in Sharon Liberman Mintz and Gabriel M. Goldstein, eds, Printing the Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 2005), p. 16. 81. See Elisheva Carlebach, ‘The Status of the Talmud in Early Modern Europe’, in Mintz and Goldstein, Printing the Talmud, pp. 79–88. 82. Melville, Autobiography and Diary, p. 42; Holloway, Melville and Humanism, pp. 116–17. 83. Cameron, First Book of Discipline, p. 141. 84. Salo Wittmayer Baron, ‘John Calvin and the Jews’, in Salo Wittmayer Baron, Ancient and Medieval Jewish History: Essays (Leon A. Feldman, ed., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), p. 350. 85. Geneva, 1574. 86. Karin Maag, Seminary or University? the Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher



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knowledge of Hebrew language and literature led some Jews to audit his lectures in Paris and to acknowledge ‘that he understood Hebrew the best of any man of that age’.87 In 1560 Mercier had published a treatise on Chaldaic grammar entitled Tabulæ in grammaticen linguæ Chaldææ.88 In addition to Mercier, Melville had also attended the Hebrew and Aramaic lectures of Jean de Cinqarbres who had published in 1546 De re grammatica Hebræorum opus, a work exhibiting the author’s extensive knowledge of Hebrew grammar and syntax.89 Together Mercier and Cinqarbres constituted a formidable duo in laying for Melville an ancient Near Eastern linguistic foundation which would be built upon by Bertram in Geneva and which would serve him well over the rest of his academic career. When Melville many years later formed a relationship with Casaubon, it might have developed as much on the basis of their shared devotion to Hebrew and the ancient Near East as it did to Classical studies.90 Indeed, just as Casaubon had initiated contact with Erpenius, Scaliger, Adriaen Willemsz and William Bedwell on the basis of their common Semitic interests, so it is quite possible that it was Melville’s reputation as a Hebraist which led Casaubon to initiate correspondence with him in 1601, and to visit him in person during his incarceration in the Tower of London.91

Conclusion Melville lived during ‘the great age of Christian Hebraism’ and studied under and cultivated relationships with several of the leading lights of the movement.92 From Mercier, Cinqarbres and Bertram to Scaliger and Casaubon, his contact with these Christian Hebraists shaped his intellectual life and reinforced the humanist trajectory of his professional career. The place of Hebrew and its ancient Near Eastern cognates within his university reforms remains the definitive testimony to the importance Christian Hebraism occupied in his life as a Renaissance humanist. He elevated the place of Hebrew studies in Scotland during ‘the long sixteenth century’, and his advocacy of Christian Hebraism earned for him a unique place within the history of biblical and Jewish studies in Scotland. By providing a place for the study of Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac within the university curriculum, he Education, 1560–1620 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 13. 87. Israel Baroway, ‘The Hebrew Hexameter: A Study in Renaissance Sources and Interpretation’, ELH 2 (1935), pp. 66–91 (85). 88. Paris, 1560. 89. Iohanne Quinquarboreo, De re grammatica Hebræorum opus in gratiam studiosorum linguae sanctæ method quam facilima conscriptum authore Iohanne Quinquarboreo, Aurilacensi (Paris, 1546). 90. Holloway, Melville and Humanism, pp. 131–6, 225–7. 91. Isaac Casaubon, Isaaci Casauboni epistolæ (Rotterdam, 1709), p. 129; Hamilton, ‘The Long Apprenticeship’, pp. 303–4. 92. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies, p. 240.

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sought to restore ‘a usable Hebrew heritage’ within the broader framework of his humanist approach to education. Approaching Jewish literature in the same way he approached Classical literature, Melville used his knowledge of ancient Near Eastern history, culture and philology to provide a Christian understanding of Hebrew texts. Although Hebrew studies played a central role in his life and occupied a critical place within his scheme for university reform, Melville’s Christian Hebraism was not as robust as it might have been. While he taught Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac at Glasgow and St Andrews, and gave the study of Hebrew a foundational place within their respective curriculums, he never published anything in the Christian Hebraist genres. He wrote no Hebrew, Aramaic or Syriac grammar, and contributed nothing to understanding Hebrew abbreviations, catchword titles in the Talmud and Pentateuch, or even a bibliography of Yiddish and Hebrew books as other Christian Hebraists had done. His circumstantial neglect of Arabic and Yiddish limited his ability in making philological observations and in understanding Jews and Judaism. In contrast to those Christian Hebraists on the continent, Melville did not offer instruction in Hebrew composition or poetry. Even though his command of Hebrew and Aramaic grammar and vocabulary positioned him to cultivate the literary arts of Hebrew letter writing and poetry, he never practised either one to any significant degree nor did they figure in any way in his university reforms. Perhaps the reason Melville never cultivated these arts is simply that he himself never developed the literary skills necessary for Hebrew correspondence and poetry. In contrast to Reuchlin, Pico and Cardinal Viterbo, each of whom was tutored in Hebrew by a Jew, Melville learned Hebrew and its cognates from Christian Hebraists without any direct contact with Jews.93 Likewise, in contrast to Scaliger who conversed in Hebrew with masters of Cabala and the Talmud, there is no evidence that Melville participated in such interactions.94 In both cases, the unique demographics of sixteenth-century Scotland made the possibility of such tutoring and interaction unlikely if not impossible.95 Compared to Buxtorf ’s scholarly publications, Melville’s achievements as a Christian Hebraist were modest. Despite his pioneering efforts, Hebrew never achieved in Scotland’s universities an equal standing with either Latin or Greek. 93. Ibid., p. 5. 94. Jacob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1855), p. 139; Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (2 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 104, 275. 95. James M. Aitken, ed., The Trial of George Buchanan before the Lisbon Inquisition (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1939), p. 37. Buchanan famously said before the Lisbon Inquisition in 1550: ‘there are no Jews in Scotland’. Cf. Arthur H. Williamson, ‘British Israel and Roman Britain: The Jews and Scottish Models of Polity from George Buchanan to Samuel Rutherford’, in Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner, eds, Jewish Christians and Christian Jews from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), p. 100. Williamson observes that Scotland ‘never had a medieval Jewish community’.



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In all of Scotland’s ancient universities, chairs in Hebrew were not established until well into the seventeenth or, in some cases, the eighteenth century. In these important respects his advocacy of Christian Hebraism and his humanist ideals fell short of establishing Hebrew as ‘a full-fledged humanist language’ on a par with Latin and Greek.96 Although no one in sixteenth-century Scotland did more to promote the language and literature of the Jews than Melville, he has not played even a modest role in the historical accounts of Christian Hebraism. Nevertheless, Melville’s indefatigable labours to establish Hebrew studies as an academic discipline in Scotland’s universities deserve recognition. If anyone may be credited with elevating the study of Hebrew in Scotland’s medieval universities and bringing the same into relative conformity with the advances in Hebraic studies on the continent, it is Melville. His ground-breaking achievements, while not as comprehensive as some of his continental counterparts, nevertheless constitute an important chapter in the history of Renaissance scholarship in Scotland during the long sixteenth century.

96. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies, p. 134.

Chapter 3 T H E E T E R NA L D E C R E E I N T H E I N C A R NAT E S O N : R O B E RT R O L L O C K O N T H E R E L AT IO N SH I P B E T W E E N C H R I ST A N D E L E C T IO N *

Brannon Ellis Christ and Election: Through, Is, And, or In? A number of influential Reformed theologians during the last century or so – such as Scots Thomas F. Torrance and James B. Torrance – have staked out their theological positions in conscious criticism of their own tradition, often singling out the development of covenant theology or federalism as decisive for steering much post-Reformation Reformed theology and practice, in Scotland and elsewhere, in an unfortunate direction.1 James Torrance, for example, lamented federalism’s conflation of the biblical idea of covenant (a gracious relationship * I wish to thank Garry Deddo, Jonathan King, Mark Jones and David Congdon for their feedback in the development of this chapter. 1. Thomas Noble makes the important point that T. F. Torrance was much more a ‘ “historical theologian” interested in the profound convergence of thought’ (i.e. interested in engaging in the critically constructive appraisal and retrieval of historic Christian thought for contemporary faith and life) than a ‘ “theological historian” concerned with cultural relativities’ (i.e., concerned with offering a carefully nuanced, highly contextualized account of the content and rationale of the thought of Christians in previous eras understood in and for itself); see Noble, ‘Torrance, Thomas Forsyth (1913–)’, in DSCHT. For an overview of contemporary historical scholarship aiming to replace a popular older historiographical approach Torrance shared with many of federalism’s critics, which tended to pit Calvin against post-Reformation developments (by using him as something of a prescriptive template), see esp. the following works: Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); R. Scott Clark and Carl S. Trueman, eds, Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999); Willem van Asselt and Eef Dekker, eds, Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001). Muller and those referenced above are ostensibly working from the perspective of theological history (in the

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of unconditional love entailing obligations) with a sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury socio-political understanding of contract (a legal agreement based upon the fulfilment of mutual conditions). He argued that the development of a two-covenant theology – with its notion of a covenant of works in Adam that is original to humanity’s relationship with God prior to the introduction of a covenant of grace in Christ by faith – fostered a theological and pastoral priority of nature over grace, obedience over faith, justice over mercy, and repentance over forgiveness.2 However, Torrance’s chief theological criticism of Reformed federalism – ultimately entailing the above tendencies – is that in it the person and work of Christ are restricted to the sphere of the outworking of God’s grace among those particular individuals chosen to receive it. Christ himself is therefore simply the primary means to the end of God’s decree to elect some to redemption.3 Thomas F. Torrance shared his brother’s criticisms of federalism regarding the subordination of Christ to the (double-predestinarian) decree; both followed John McLeod Campbell and especially Karl Barth on this score.4 Bruce McCormack has recently repeated this assessment of traditional covenant theology’s approach to the relationship between Christ and election: ‘For classical Reformed theology, the decree to elect some human beings and to reject others … precedes the decree to effect election through the provision of a Mediator.’5 Each of these theologians makes Jesus’ instrumentality for accomplishing the divine decree the focus of their above sense), although of course virtually everyone on both sides is invested in historical and theological retrieval for informing contemporary faith and practice. 2. See e.g. J. B. Torrance, ‘Covenant or Contract? A Study of the Theological Background of Worship in Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, SJT 23.1 (1970), pp. 51–76; idem, ‘The Contribution of McLeod Campbell to Scottish Theology’, SJT 26.3 (1973), pp. 295–311. 3. J. B. Torrance, ‘Calvin and Puritanism in England and Scotland – Some Basic Concepts in the Development of “Federal Theology”’, in Calvinus Reformator: His Contribution to Theology, Church and Society (Potcheftsroom: Institute for Reformational Studies, 1982), pp. 264–77 (274). For a synopsis of Torrance’s criticisms of federal theology, see Donald Macleod, ‘Covenant Theology’, in DSCHT. 4. T. F. Torrance revisited the legacy of covenant theology throughout his Scottish Theology: from John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), e.g. pp. x–xi: ‘It was the imposition of a rigidly logicalised federal system of thought upon Reformed theology that gave rise to many of the problems which have afflicted Scottish theology.’ For McLeod Campbell’s view see The Nature of the Atonement and Its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life (London: Macmillan, 4th edn, 1874), cf. ch. 3. For Barth’s view see Church Dogmatics (G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, eds; 14 vols; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), vol. IV/1, pp. 54–66; note esp. p. 65: ‘this proposition of a covenant of works could obviously never have arisen if there had been a loyal hearing of the Gospel and a strict looking to Jesus Christ as the full and final revelation of the being of God.’ 5. McCormack, ‘Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology’, in John Webster, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 92–110 (97; see also p. 94).



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criticism. That is, they fault Reformed covenant theology for conceiving of the hidden, eternal electing activity of the Triune God as conceptually antecedent to, and pre-determinative of, the person and work of the incarnate Son, because this seems to imply that God’s character and will somehow lie behind or beyond his (limited) self-revelation in Christ. Seen in this light, the theology of Robert Rollock (1555–98) should represent nearly everything unfortunate in Reformed federalism. The first principal of the University of Edinburgh, a popular preacher and an internationally respected theologian, Rollock was also an important early proponent of covenant theology – indeed, David George Mullan has called him covenant theology’s ‘Scottish prophet’.6 Rollock not only advocated this tradition but shaped its future development both in Britain and on the Continent. Aaron Clay Denlinger has argued that Rollock’s influence was especially significant regarding the foundational role which the doctrine of the covenant of works came to play within federal theology – a theology elaborated by the generations after Rollock and enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) as well as such prominent Scottish works as The Sum of Saving Knowledge (c. 1650).7 The brief and clear Sum, bound with the Westminster Standards in Scottish printings for decades and thus becoming for many in the Kirk the Standards’ de facto interpretative framework, provides a classic example of the apparent subordination of Christ’s person and work to the decree and its outworking which concerns the critics of covenant theology named above.8 For these critics, the intrinsic relation between election and Christ, properly defined, is not through – with election itself being decretally primary – but is. In 6. David George Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 206. 7. Aaron Clay Denlinger, ‘Robert Rollock’s Catechism on God’s Covenants’, MAJT 20 (2009), pp. 105–29. See also David Dickson and James Durham, The Sum of Saving Knowledge (James Macpherson, ed.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886). For the historical development of the covenant of works and its doctrinal significance, cf. Robert Letham, ‘The Foedus Operum: Some Factors Accounting for Its Development’, SCJ 14 (1983), pp. 457–67; Muller, ‘The Covenant of Works and the Stability of Divine Law in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Orthodoxy: A Study in the Theology of Herman Witsius and Wilhelmus à Brakel’, in After Calvin, pp. 175–90. 8. See for example head 2 sect. 2 of the Sum: ‘The sum of the covenant of redemption is this: God having freely chosen unto life a certain number of lost mankind, for the glory of his rich grace, did give them, before the world began, unto God the Son, appointed Redeemer, that, upon condition he would humble himself so far as to assume the human nature, of a soul and a body, unto personal union with his divine nature, and submit himself to the law, as surety for them, and satisfy justice for them, by giving obedience in their name, even unto the suffering of the cursed death of the cross, he should ransom and redeem them all from sin and death, and purchase unto them righteousness and eternal life … This condition the Son of God (who is Jesus Christ our Lord) did accept before the world began …’ See further head 1 sect. 2; head 2 sect. 1.

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other words, Christ is not the primary instrument of eternal election’s temporal accomplishment (as seventeenth-century reformed divine Francis Turretin described him), but is himself its personal actualization.9 So Thomas Torrance, again closely following Barth’s language, claimed that ‘election is the person of Christ, true God and true man in one person, the union of the Father and the Son in eternal love incarnated in our flesh, bodied forth among sinners … In Jesus Christ, therefore, eternal election has become temporal event.’10 Both James and Thomas Torrance advocated a strict identification between Christ and election within a classical Trinitarian and Christological framework. McCormack takes a very different tack than the Torrances (and, perhaps, Barth), arguing for an identification of election with the incarnate Son which is ontologically constitutive for God – Christ is election as its personal actualization both for the being of humanity and for the being of God, with revolutionary implications for both.11 The more classically Reformed have pushed back on both fronts, on historical and dogmatic grounds. A growing body of scholarship, building on the work of Richard Muller, claims that these critics of traditional Reformed federalism – in Scotland or elsewhere – have often inaccurately represented its biblical and theological assumptions as well as its actual claims.12 From a historical perspective, Mullan has argued that there is very little hard evidence that seventeenth-century Scottish federal theology as such either took up or was conflated with Scotland’s older ‘religio-political’ covenanting tradition.13 Further complicating matters is the reality that there is disagreement over whether and to what extent any of these parties may claim Calvin’s support.14 The Torrances tend to see some discontinuity between Calvin and Barth on the present theme, and McCormack interprets Barth as making a decisive break with Calvin’s subordination of Christ to the decree. But according to Richard Muller, the relationship between Christ and the decree in Calvin’s own work might best be described 9. Turretin’s view is elaborated below. 10. T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), p. 180. See also J. B. Torrance, ‘Calvin and Puritanism’, pp. 271–3. 11. Christ is election in the sense that ‘the eternal being of God is constituted by His eternal act of turning towards the human race’ in the incarnate Son who is both electing God and the elect (and reprobate) man (‘Grace and Being’, p. 99). It is important to stress that in this programmatic essay McCormack is attempting to interpret Barth’s views and their implications, rather than offer his own constructive account. When I refer to McCormack’s views, therefore, I am doing so insofar as he advocates those views (and the implications he finds in them). 12. In addition to the works referenced in note 1 above (which often interact with Barth or the Torrances directly), see for Scottish federalism in particular Donald Macleod, ‘Dr T. F. Torrance and Scottish Theology: A Review Article’, EQ 72.1 (2000), pp. 57–72. 13. Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, ch. 6. 14. See Carl Trueman, ‘Election: Calvin’s Theology and Its Early Reception’, in J. Todd Billings and I. John Hesselink, eds, Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes, Developments, and New Possibilities (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), pp. 97–120.



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not as through or is, but and. Christ and election for Calvin are coordinate: as true God together with the Father and the Spirit, Christ decrees our election to redemption; as true human being, Christ is commissioned to be head of the elect who are given to him to redeem. Christ is both Lord and servant of the decree, so there is a sense in which Christ is the source of election, and another in which election is through him.15 My aim here is not to enter directly into the histor(iograph)ical fray just outlined, but to focus on a specific theme in one significant federal theologian’s oeuvre in light of what others might expect his stance to be, pointing out the surprises (for both parties to these debates!) along the way. In this essay I explore the relationship between Christ and election in Rollock’s work through the lens of disagreement between proponents of the covenantal Reformed tradition and evangelical Barthians about the nature of this relationship in historic Reformed teaching. As a key architect and disseminator of federal theology in its two-covenant shape, Rollock should be more vulnerable than most to the critiques noted above; yet I hope to demonstrate that Rollock is not as susceptible to these criticisms of federalism – nor does he sit so comfortably with typical covenantal Reformed views on Christ and election – as might be expected. The significance of Rollock’s approach hinges on what might be called the theological location of the decree. The relationship between Christ and election for Rollock is best characterized neither as through nor is nor even and; rather, both as an eternal decision and according to its temporal execution, election occurs in the person of Christ.16 In this view, both humanity’s participation in election and God’s eternal electing activity itself are first and foremost ‘in Christ’, because the integral person of Christ – the Son who elects from and with the Father, and the incarnate head of the elect chosen by the Father – is himself the ‘first decree of God’s free grace’, the true resting place for the coherence of both the divine and human, eternal and temporal poles of the decree.17 15. See Muller, Christ and the Decree: Predestination and Christology in the Reformed Tradition from Calvin to Perkins (repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), ch. 2. 16. I hope it is clear that parsing these several approaches according to these terms, and relating them in the way I do here, is not meant to suggest that they would claim such for themselves. I suggest this merely as a useful rubric for comparing alternatives to conceiving the relationship between Christ and election. In the same vein, I do not mean to suggest that the terms themselves – through, is, and in – uniquely belong to the several approaches. Election through Christ and election in Christ, in particular, are consistent Pauline turns of phrase that all approaches appeal to; my point is to distinguish the significance given to each approach’s language for joining Christ and election by naming a relative term that seems to get at the heart of each. 17. Rollock, A Treatise of God’s Effectual Calling, in Rollock, Select Works of Robert Rollock, Principal of the University of Edinburgh (William M. Gunn, ed.; 2 vols; Edinburgh: printed for the Wodrow Society, 1844–9), vol. 1, p. 266. Throughout this chapter, I have modernized Rollock’s spelling in works that were not reprinted in the Select Works, except for his Scots sermons, which I have not altered.

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Christ and the Covenants: Rollock on the ‘Two Words’ and the One Mediator Perhaps the best entry into Rollock’s approach to Christ and election is his most influential contribution to federalism, the covenant of works. Rollock likely imbibed the language and framework for the two-covenant scheme directly from Zacharias Ursinus, whose Heidelberg Catechism (1563) Rollock instilled in his Edinburgh students every Sunday after church. Rollock also probably used Ursinus’s exposition of the catechism, the Doctrinae Christianae compendium (first published 1585), in his theology lectures.18 Again, Rollock was not simply a popularizer of the conclusions of his predecessors; he appropriated the doctrine of a covenant of works, while playing a prominent role in developing and diffusing it in Scotland and elsewhere. According to Denlinger, ‘Rollock’s positive and extensive use of the covenant of works as a theological foil to the covenant of grace constitutes his primary contribution to the intellectual development of Reformed covenant theology’.19 The nature of the covenant of works and its relationship to the covenant of grace are important for understanding Rollock’s similarity to broader Reformed federalism as well as his differences regarding the way he relates both to the Mediator. Rollock defined a covenant from God most generally as ‘a promise under some one certain condition’, a definition broad enough to encompass both the covenants of works (the promise to humanity in Adam based on personal covenant faithfulness) and of grace (the promise of life to the unfaithful based on God’s faithfulness in Christ).20 God’s covenants are promises in this active sense, announced in viva voce to his image-bearers in various circumstances and evoking distinct responses, accomplishing his purposes in the world. This allowed Rollock to apply the covenant motif as comprehensively as possible, so that God’s covenant is effectively synonymous with his word: ‘We … speak of the Word, or of the Covenant of God, having first set down this ground, that all the word of God appertains to some covenant; for God speaks nothing to man without the covenant. For which cause all the Scripture, both old and new, wherein all God’s word is contained, bears the name of God’s covenant or testament.’21 The inspired speech of extraordinary prophets and apostles before the close of the canon, the inspired canonical scriptures, and the ordinary proclamation of ministers after the 18. See A. A. Woolsey, ‘Robert Rollock (1555–1598): Principle, Theologian, Preacher’, in a recently reprinted edition of the Select Works of Robert Rollock (2 vols; Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), pp. 5–6. Subsequent notes refer to the original edition. See further The Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism (G. W. Willard, trans.; repr., Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, n.d.). 19. Denlinger, ‘Rollock’s Catechism’, p. 106. 20. Rollock, Effectual Calling, p. 34: ‘The covenant of God generally is a promise under some one certain condition. And it is twofold; the first is the covenant of works; the second is the covenant of grace.’ 21. Ibid.



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canon’s close in conformity to the written word – each of these promulgate God’s covenantal promises and invoke human response.22 Such overarching employment of the language of a covenant of works and a covenant of grace functioned as an elaboration of the traditional Protestant distinction between law and gospel as those ‘two words’ which together comprise the word of God. Though they are intimately intertwined during the time between creation and consummation, the covenant of works per se is ‘merely legal’, the covenant of grace ‘merely evangelical’, so that these very different types of covenant represent two basic ways of relating divine promise and human response.23 Rollock did not merely flesh out the nature of the creational, prelapsarian relationship between God and humanity represented by Adam as a covenant; he consistently compared and contrasted this economy with the economy of grace, both running in parallel throughout the history of God’s loquacious dealings with humanity. God declares the covenant of works (law) to all human beings in Adam as the promise of life and blessedness upon condition of freely returning the perfect love they have been freely shown. This promise originally came in the context of humanity’s native uprightness and holiness in communion with God. Now, however, post lapsum, the loving proclamation of the covenant of works has the effect of calling all to account as responsible children of Adam who have spurned God’s fatherly care. The other word, the gospel, is the one God declares as the covenant of grace to these same sinful human beings as the promise of an unimaginably better life and blessedness upon condition of freely given faith in Jesus. Such faith, brought to fruition by the Spirit through the gospel announcement, turns from every failed attempt to gain the promise by works to the person and work of the faithful covenant-keeper. The effect of this declaration (in God’s elect) is Spirit-enabled faith that takes hold of the Last Adam and the promise of all grace and glory from the Father in him.24 Rollock’s approach to and description of the historical economy of works and grace is quite typical of developing Reformed covenant theology both in Britain and on the Continent, and is not overly susceptible to the conclusions of the Torrances and others suggesting socio-political rather than biblical roots for federal thought, or other special tendencies toward legalism. The covenant of works being legal just meant it was founded in love: ‘For in the creation we were

22. Ibid., pp. 274–88. 23. Ibid., pp. 33–51 (42); see also pp. 274–80. Rollock’s language is very similar to Ursinus, Commentary, pp. 2–3 (claiming that all the word of God is summed up under the doctrine of the law and the gospel), and pp. 104–5 (elaborating the differences and similarities between the law and the gospel). For an argument that the covenants of works and grace were an exegetical outgrowth of – and in turn a framework for interpreting with biblical and theological nuance – the Protestant law-gospel distinction, see Michael S. Horton, ‘Law, Gospel, and Covenant: Reassessing Some Emerging Antitheses’, WTJ 64.2 (2002), pp. 279–87. 24. Ibid., pp. 34–42, 175.

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God’s friends, and not his enemies’.25 And Rollock would hardly recognize his account or those of his Reformed peers as moralistic. The differences between the covenants of works and grace serve to subvert moralism – Christ is the end of the law’s condemnation for believers; his righteousness freely granted is the source of all the benefits of salvation in union with him; and in Christ the law itself is ‘renewed’ for believers, recast not as a condition for life but a trustworthy guide serving the purposes of grace.26 Although the covenant of grace is conditional for Rollock, then, its condition is identical with its ground; and although humanity is bound by the covenant of works in creation, the covenant of works is founded eternally (yet non-dualistically) as the foundation for the vicarious accomplishment of obedience by Christ who is himself the primary purpose of God’s decree. Yet this last consideration is the only one that really gets at the heart of contemporary evangelical and Reformed Barthian theological critiques of classical covenant theology (Christ is election versus election through Christ). While Rollock’s description of the covenants is fairly standard, the way he related them to one another and to Christ in eternity is particularly interesting in light of the critiques of Reformed Christological instrumentalism noted above. For Rollock both creation and redemption are subordinated in the decree to the person and work of Christ, so that election’s determination and execution are best understood as located in him. A key consideration in Rollock’s approach to the relationship between Christ and election is his supralapsarianism, in particular its stress on the decretal primacy of God’s grace and glory in the Mediator.27

Rollock’s Christological Supralapsarianism: Christ as the ‘First Decree of God’s Free Grace’ Though the divine decree concerning the person of Christ himself and his mediatorial work has been revealed subsequent to the promulgation of the economy of the covenants of works and grace, for Rollock Christ remains ‘first in decree and ordination’. Likewise, though the ‘execution’ of God’s decree to create the 25. Ibid., p. 35. 26. Ibid., pp. 42, 51. 27. For illustrations of Rollock’s supralapsarian approach to double predestination, see his In epistolam S. Pauli apostoli ad Romanos ... commentarius (Geneva: Franc. Le Preux, 1595), pp. 177–86, 189–94, 207–10; Effectual Calling, pp. 160–6, 266–8; In epistolam Pauli apostoli ad Ephesios ... commentarius (Edinburgh, 1590), pp. 7–16, 183–4. James Walker, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, described predestination as one of the peculiar preoccupations of historic Scottish theology. Interestingly, he also claimed that supralapsarianism became in some sense a dominant force in Scotland, at least during the era of the ‘second Reformation’; see James Walker, The Theology and Theologians of Scotland, Chiefly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2nd edn, 1888), pp. 49–66.



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world, enter into covenant with humanity in Adam, permit the fall, then promise salvation through a coming Saviour all came first in time, they are subsequent by ‘order of nature’. 28 While ‘what is last in execution is first in intention’ was axiomatic among supralapsarians, Rollock’s brand of Christological supralapsarianism diverged from most Reformed proponents of either supralapsarianism or infralapsarianism in two respects which are key for the relationship between Christ and election. The Metaphysical Pre-eminence of the gratia Dei The first key difference between Rollock and typical Reformed approaches to Christ and election is that he understood God’s essential graciousness, as a divine attribute, to have an overriding or governing role in determining the character and directing the aims of his decree. God’s grace is his ‘undeserved favour’, synonymous with his ‘good pleasure (eudokia)’ or freely shown love.29 With Reformed orthodoxy generally, Rollock heartily affirmed that this ‘special grace’ of God in itself and per se is the sole motive for predestining the elect and showering on them all the other blessings of redemption – ‘that all glory may be ascribed to him’.30 And like his infralapsarian counterparts, he did not place God’s election by grace and reprobation by justice over against one another as opposing poles of the divine purpose. He saw a clear biblical prioritization of the divine decree toward the manifestation of grace, such that ‘God, from and before all eternity, purposed to be glorified specially in his grace’.31 Yet Rollock took this divine bent toward grace further, prioritizing not only the display and outworking of God’s grace among creatures but the property of being gracious that God himself is. God’s righteousness and every other attribute of the divine essence is appropriately understood to ‘attend on’ or be ‘subordained to serve’ the motives and fruition of his grace. Though all God’s attributes qualify the others (so that righteousness is never without knowledge, wrath is always in harmony with goodness, and so on), all are especially summed up in, and together tend toward, his grace and his purposes in it.32 So not only did Rollock’s 28. Rollock, Effectual Calling, pp. 267–8. Herman Bavinck discusses this maxim in Reformed Dogmatics (John Bolt, ed.; John Vriend, trans.; 4 vols; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), vol. 2, p. 366. Bavinck provides a long list of representative Reformed orthodox supralapsarians, p. 365n. 73. 29. Mercy often means the same thing in scripture, according to Rollock, although more accurately it is both undeserved and ill-deserved; see Rollock, Effectual Calling, pp. 265–6. 30. Rollock, Effectual Calling, pp. 30, 271, and In Ephesios commentarius, pp. 14–16. 31. Ibid., p. 266, appealing to Rom. 11.32. 32. Ibid., p. 266: ‘God, from and before all eternity, purposed to be glorified specially in his grace, Rom. xi. 32. God hath shut up all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. In which place we may see the justice of God to attend on his mercy and grace. So, in like manner, all the other essential properties of God, as his power and wisdom, &c., all which he subordained to serve his grace and mercy.’

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supralapsarianism not lead him to make mercy and (retributive) justice eternally coordinate in God’s purposes for the created order; he also maintained that God’s gracious purpose in Christ was decreed ‘first’, and thus all things – election, reprobation, creation, fall, redemption, consummation – are ordered to this decision from and for grace.33 Understood in this context, the conditionality of the covenant of grace clearly is not based on its mirroring the conditionality of the covenant of works. Though Rollock described obedience and faith as the conditions for the covenants of works and of grace, respectively, neither should be taken strictly as such. Regarding obedience in the covenant of works, ‘Rollock explicitly denies that any individual – even Adam – in the covenant of works could properly earn or merit the reward of life proffered to him’. Humanity was not meant to earn favour from God which it did not yet enjoy, but to freely enter into the joyous rest held out before it in love.34 And regarding faith’s conditionality within the covenant of grace, Rollock more fully described the condition as ‘faith with Christ, that is, the faith that shall apprehend Christ, or Christ with faith, that is, Christ which is to be apprehended by faith’.35 Jesus is not only the personal ground of the gracious covenant, but also the reason why that word of grace is declared to and effectual in the elect through his Spirit. Faith is simply the elect’s clinging to Jesus himself as the personal fulfilment of all the promises of God. Therefore ‘these three are one in substance, the ground of the Covenant of Grace, the condition of it, and the cause wherefore God performeth the condition’.36 Jesus, God incarnate, is the gracious covenant’s basis as the one in whom God decrees grace and in whom humanity is clothed – by faith – with personal covenant faithfulness and its fruits. Before I take up more directly the person of the Mediator, there is one more aspect of this primacy of grace over law (in the sense unpacked above) that was key for Rollock’s Christological supralapsarianism. He closely joined the decretal priority of God’s grace in Christ with a repeated emphasis that even ‘very good’ humanity in Adam was nonetheless far short of perfect humanity in Christ. Adam in his integrity did not enjoy ‘spiritual’ knowledge of and communion with God (which, at least in its Pauline sense, is only found in Christ); he had no truly ‘supernatural’ illumination of the mind and heart (which are the gift of Christ’s Spirit through regeneration). Adam was a man glorious but not glorified: ‘The glory which Adam had, in that glorious and earthly paradise, was nothing in respect of that glory which we shall have, when we shall be lifted up in the heavens … So compare that glory of Adam’s, with the glory we shall have with Jesus Christ:

33. Ibid., pp. 266–71 (266, citing Eph. 1.6, 12); see also pp. 164–6. 34. Denlinger, ‘Rollock’s Catechism’, p. 112 n. 21; see also p. 108. Only Jesus as the incarnate Son properly earns the promised reward according to Rollock; see Five and Twentie Lectures upon the last Sermon and Conference of our Lord Jesus Christ, with his Disciples Immediately before his Passion (Edinburgh: Andro Hart, 1619), p. 195. 35. Rollock, Effectual Calling, p. 40. 36. Ibid., pp. 40–1.



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and look how far the Sun passeth in glory above a star, as far we shall pass that glory, and surmount above it.’37 Adam was created in the image of God, but the glory that Christ has gained in his humanity is nothing less than participation in the self-same glory that Father and Son share as God.38 Because Christ’s humanity participates completely in his personal glory as the Father’s Son in the Spirit, and the elect share fully in him – in the imago Christi­– Rollock could express the discontinuity between humanity’s natural character and aims, and humanity’s gracious exaltation in Christ, quite forcefully: ‘If Adam had kept his glory, yet it would have been nothing but an earthly paradise, that he would have been in: but all the earth is not capable of one glorified body in Christ.’39 The ordering of all God’s purposes to grace in Rollock’s covenant theology casts the relationship between creation and redemption in a different light than either a privileging of law over gospel (pace James Torrance’s critique), or an eternal collaterality between law and gospel, justice and mercy (pace Barth’s critique).40 Rollock certainly regarded the covenant of works as native to God’s relationship with the human race in its original creaturely integrity, and affirmed (following Ursinus and others) that the chief difference between the covenants was that in the unbroken covenant of works there was as yet no need of the reconciling work of Christ as Mediator.41 Likewise, being under the broken covenant of works remains the native state for those in Adam – that is, all who have not repented and believed in Christ. Yet it is crucial to place this within the context of Rollock’s conviction that Christ’s exaltation in and through his incarnation and redeeming work on behalf of the elect – and their glorification in him – are eternally God’s primary, gracious intention in and for the created order. This is not just true of the decree’s ultimate outcomes among creatures (‘the display of his glorious grace’); it has determinative priority. Rollock did not in fact treat ‘the grace of God [as] a second or a third thing, a wretched expedient of God in face of the obvious failure of a plan in relation to man which had originally had quite a different intention and form’.42 Muller’s description of ‘the permanence of 37. See e.g. ibid., pp. 200–2, appealing esp. to 1 Cor. 15.45, 48–49. 38. Rollock, Five and twentie lectures, pp. 199, 248. 39. Robert Rollock, Lectures upon the epistle of Paul to the Colossians (James Hamelton, trans.; London: Felix Kyngston, 1603), p. 299. It is important to note that many infralapsarians shared to some extent this conviction regarding the surpassing nature of the consummate state in Christ over whatever might have been gained if Adam were faithful in the covenant of works; cf. Ursinus, Commentary, pp. 65–6. 40. Richard Muller draws a similar conclusion; see PRRD, vol. 3, p. 570. 41. Ursinus, Commentary, pp. 77–102. 42. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, p. 64, describing the role and rationale for a covenant of works within seventeenth-century covenant theology. See also McLeod Campbell’s concern that classical Reformed accounts of particular election and definite atonement made God’s righteousness essential and his graciousness accidental, calling into question his nature as love (Nature of the Atonement, pp. 54–7).

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the divine promise of fellowship and the stability of the divine law’ as the reality which ‘relates the covenants’ of works and grace is a more charitable rendering of mainstream federalism – yet even this does not quite get at Rollock’s emphasis, since for him the covenants of works and grace are both grounded in the primacy of the person and work of the Mediator and ordered by as well as to redeeming grace.43 If anything, then, Rollock tended to treat the covenant of works as a necessary expedient in order to give way to mercy.44 Though the covenant of works belongs to humanity’s original constitution, therefore, and as a promise of God remains good and righteous per se, it does not determine the character of God’s decree for grace in Christ, or exemplify the elect’s redeemed relationship with God, because it was as such never God’s primary or his ultimate aim. The Decretal Primacy of the Person and Work of the Mediator A second key difference between Rollock’s account and typical covenantal approaches, as anticipated in various ways above, is that for him the content of God’s eternal decree from and for electing grace is logically subsequent to the integral person of the Mediator. If classical Reformed infralapsarianism understands the person and work of the incarnate Son as God’s primary means of accomplishing redemption for the elect, then classical supralapsarianism goes beyond even this subordination of Christ to the decree – it subordinates creation, fall, and Christ to God’s purpose to elect some to salvation and others to damnation. For Rollock, however, the ‘first decree of God’s free grace’ mentioned above does not immediately concern the election of certain persons to redemption, but before anything else has in view ‘the incarnation of his Son, and the glorifying of him, at the appointed time, unto the praise of his grace’.45 This first decree entails a ‘double grace’, the Son’s assumption of human nature into hypostatic union, and his joining of the elect personally and inseparably to God in him.46 The second decree of grace flowing from election in Christ concerns humanity’s creation in the image of God and, after the fall, salvation by Christ in whose image they are recreated. So for Rollock, the primary purpose of God in creation was redemption; the primary purpose of God’s self-revelation to Adam was God’s manifestation (and exaltation) in the flesh of the Mediator.47 43. Muller, ‘Covenant of Works’, p. 185. 44. See Walker’s apt (if overstated) description of this supralapsarian sensibility: ‘The “covenant of works” is a poor and transitory thing: all about it indicates that it is set up only to be taken down; it is no more than scaffolding for the erection of a nobler structure’; in Theology and Theologians, p. 51. 45. Rollock, Effectual Calling, p. 266, citing Acts 2.23, 4.28; Col. 1.19. 46. Ibid., p. 268. 47. Ibid., p. 267. At the same time, Rollock, like Calvin, never suggests that Christ’s incarnation is separable from his work of atonement. The Bible does not allow Christ’s identity as Mediator apart from his identity as Redeemer (even though he is Mediator of some, like confirmed angels, that need no redemption). See esp. Calvin’s arguments against



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With the broader Reformed tradition, Rollock shared Calvin’s conviction that Christ is mediator personally, according to both natures. As God, Christ is ordered to, yet one with, his Father in purposing grace; as a human being, Christ is the fulfilment of that grace, the once humbled and now exalted Lord. As one glorified Mediator, he is himself truth and life, the only way to the Father.48 Likewise in line with his Reformed peers, whenever speaking of election and of Christ’s mediatorial work Rollock maintained a careful order among the persons of the Trinity, both immanently and economically. The Son’s mission from the Father extends or enacts outwardly – in a thoroughly free and novel mode, in the context of creation and redemption – what is already always true of his procession from the Father inwardly.49 This careful distinction in order allowed Rollock to speak of the Son almost always from within his incarnate economy, as one who receives all things from the Father and refers all things to the Father in the integrity of his person, both as God the Son and as the faithful, representative human being.50 This order also allowed Rollock to emphasize unity just as strongly – the unity of Father and Son as one God, the unity of divinity and humanity in the one Son, and the unity of God with those elected to redemption as the ‘common property’ of Father and Son.51 Just as Rollock maintained a classical Reformed emphasis on the person of the mediator as informed by Trinitarian and Christological dogma, he also clearly conceived of the eternal ‘conditional promise’ founding the covenant of grace in Christ’s keeping of the covenant of works as being between the Father and the Son as Deus incarnandus. Christ is ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13.8), in order that ‘we should have him as our Mediator long before he was manifest in the flesh, in virtue of the human nature which he would assume’.52 Although I have not found any text where Rollock explicitly refers to an eternal ‘covenant’ between the Father and the Son undergirding the covenants of works and grace, Rollock does use his basic definition of covenant – a promise made under some condition – to describe the character of the Son’s commission Osiander’s view that Christ would have become incarnate even if the fall had not occurred, in ICR 2.12.4–7. 48. On the importance of Christ as Mediator according to both natures in the Reformed tradition, see e.g. Muller, ‘Toward the Pactum Salutis: Locating the Origins of a Concept’, MAJT 18 (2007), pp. 48–55; Joseph Tylenda, ‘Christ the Mediator: Calvin versus Stancaro’, CTJ 8.1 (1973), pp. 5–16. 49. Rollock, Five and twentie lectures, pp. 178–82, 185, 187–8. Cf. Ursinus’s discussion of why it is only God the Son who could be Mediator, in Commentary, pp. 89–90. See also Muller, PRRD vol. 4, pp. 267–74; idem, ‘Pactum Salutis’, pp. 29–31. 50. For example, reflecting on John 17.25, Rollock could describe the Son’s intimate knowledge of the Father as both belonging to their unity of essence and shared ‘eternal counsel’, and incorporating ‘that obedience and humble subjection the Son gave to the Father’ for the sake of the elect. See Rollock, Five and twentie lectures, pp. 260–1. 51. Rollock, Five and Twentie Lectures, pp. 181–2, 191–2, 216. 52. Rollock, In Ephesios commentarius, p. 11.

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from the Father in eternity. In his exposition of John 17.4, for example, Rollock explains: This argument leaneth to a promise, which the Father made to the Son, ere ever he was manifested in the flesh. As [if] he would reason thus, ‘Father, thou hast promised, that if I should glorify thee, thou shouldest glorify me: but so it is, Father, that I have glorified thee, therefore glorify me … Now, brethren, in very deed, the Son of God might have claimed justly that promise that the Father made to him, under the condition of obedience, because the obedience of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was perfect: which obedience being the ground of the promise, justly he might claim that glory, by reason that the promise was perfectly fulfilled.53

The covenants of works and grace, then, are rooted in and flow from the same eternal decree in Christ, since both the covenant of grace and the covenant of works are ultimately ordained to and fulfilled in the Mediator. This eternal purpose for the covenants lies behind, yet is inseparable from, their temporal execution. Christ is the foundation of the covenant of grace only as the one who undertook to perform the covenant of works on behalf of the elect from eternity. At the same time, Christ accomplished all righteousness when ‘born of a woman, born under the law’ (Gal. 4.4) as that very one who with his Father ordered all things toward grace from the beginning. Though the Father commissions his Son from eternity, this must be understood with a view toward, and in the theological location of, the incarnation. Considered simply as God the Son, after all, Christ is not subject to the covenant of works, since a relation of obedience and subjection is not fittingly applied to the Godhead.54 Likewise, though the obedience Jesus offers as a human being is owed to the Father as his God, he can justly claim the promised reward for himself and for his chosen people only because he is the perfect Son of God in the flesh.55 ‘Christ, therefore, our mediator, subjected himself unto the covenant of works, and unto the law for our sake, and did … fulfill the condition of the covenant of works … even in the highest degree of perfection, as being God and man – even that most Holy One of God – in one person.’56 In Christ’s person elector and elected co-inhere, since the agent of election (who has chosen the elect with the 53. Rollock, Five and twentie lectures, pp. 194–5, appealing to Ps. 110 as one example of ‘many places’ in the Old Testament testifying to this promise between the Father and the Son. For the doctrine of the covenant of redemption or pactum salutis in classical Reformed covenant theology, see Muller, ‘Pactum Salutis’; Bert Loonstra, Verkiezing – Verzoening – Verbond: Beschrijving en beoordeling van de leer het pactum salutis in de gereformeerde theologie (‘s-Gravenhage: Boekencentrum, 1990). 54. Rollock, Effectual Calling, p. 52. Cf. Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants between God and Man (W. Crookshank, trans., Edinburgh: s.n., 1803), p. 200. 55. See esp. Ibid., p. 52. 56. Ibid., p. 53.



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Father in the Spirit) and the head of the elect (appointed by the Father through the Spirit) is one. These several classical Reformed theological commitments – the whole person of Christ as Mediator, the ordered working of the persons of the Trinity in the one work of God, the Father’s commission of the Son with a view toward his incarnation – together with a conviction of the decretal primacy of God’s grace in the person of Christ, remove Rollock’s account somewhat from the realm of Barth’s concern that an eternal covenant between Father and Son seems to imply ‘a will of God the Father which originally and basically is different from the will of God the Son’.57 Barth’s concern is really another way of expressing the question of the relationship between Christ and election: is the character and will of God disclosed in Christ identical to the character and will of God in himself? Though working from notably different convictions and concerns from those of Barth, Rollock too views Jesus (whether incarnandus or incarnatus) as the sole location for true creaturely knowledge of and communion with the one true God – even for unfallen angels: That deepness of light which [the Father] dwelleth in, is wonderful, yea, incomprehensible: and there is no knowledge of the Father, without the Son … And there is no sight of that glorious person of the Son, who dwelleth in that light inaccessible: (as he is God, he is as incomprehensible as the Father:) he is not seen, I say, but under a cloud: we must see him through this nature of ours: there is no angel in heaven, that dare abide to look on the Son, but through a veil, and this is the veil of our flesh.58

It is in this deepest sense that ‘whatever grace hath been, and whatever shall come into the world, all hath been through Jesus Christ’.59

The ‘Primary Means’ of Election’s Execution: Turretin on the Subordination of Christ to the Decree At the same time as Rollock’s account of Christ and election shares many similarities with broader covenant theology, the character of his particular divergences also shows how the more recent critiques of covenant theology’s Christological instrumentalism from Barth, the Torrances and others in certain respects rings true on the Reformed’s own terms. That is, while the subordination of Christ to the decree usually found in federal theology has an intrinsic rationale, it does assume certain exclusive alternatives regarding the actions of the natures in the Mediator’s 57. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, p. 65. 58. Rollock, Five and Twentie Lectures, p. 190. See also pp. 4, 29, 185, 264. For Calvin’s similar teaching on all creaturely communion with God being mediated by the person of Christ, see ICR 2.12. 59. Ibid., p. 5.

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person that do not seem to be in opposition for Rollock. This requires us to delve more deeply into classical Reformed exposition of the nature and role of God’s decree. Francis Turretin’s discussion is not only a studious account of the state of the doctrine among the high orthodox, but an impressive example of a careful and deliberate subordination of the person of Christ to the decree of election. Turretin described the divine decrees as ‘acts immanent and intrinsic in God, but connoting a respect or relation (schesin) to something outside of God’.60 Since the divine will is simply ‘the essence itself willing’, God’s decretal will is ‘identified with’ his essence, so that ‘the decree is nothing other than God himself decreeing’ – although this identification of the decree with God himself does not make it absolutely necessary. It is necessary with respect to God, free with respect to its object.61 Defining the decree in this way serves to draw a strict distinction between the causal character of divine willing and purposing, on one hand, and the various effects accomplished by this activity in and through creatures, on the other. Within this framework, Turretin emphasized that God’s absolute and unconditional ‘good pleasure’ is the only principle and ground of his decree – an activity whose motive and determination lie wholly within God.62 This reasoning impinges upon the present discussion of the theological location of election when Turretin takes up the free unconditionality of the decree of God’s good pleasure specifically in relation to his electing activity in Christ. In Turretin’s view, Jesus the God-man is neither the ‘cause’ nor the ‘foundation’ of election, but ‘the primary means of its execution’. Indeed, for him this was the controversy regarding the doctrine of election ‘upon which all the others depend’.63 Christ cannot be the ground of election because ‘God, who decreed salvation to us, by the same act destined Christ, the Mediator, to acquire it for us’. Certainly the decree is the triune God’s activity in relation to creatures ad extra, from the Father in the Son and by the Spirit; but in freely willing the salvation of the elect, God’s extrinsic focus is not on the elect as ‘in Christ’ but on the elect as created, fallen, and chosen for redemption through Christ – a choosing rooted entirely within the immanent divine nature and will. The Son’s incarnate identity 60. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (J. Dennison, ed., G. Giger, trans.; 3 vols; Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992–1997), vol. 3, p. 311. 61. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 312–13, 321. Turretin distinguished God’s decretal activity both from his wholly immanent essential activity (the processions), and from his ‘transient’ extrinsic acts, which he brings about with and in spatio-temporal existence (such as creation and providence; Institutes, vol. 1, p. 313, p. 311). 62. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 316, appealing to the examples of God’s good pleasure (eudokia) variously described in Mt. 11.26, Eph. 1.5, and Rom. 9.11. Cf. Muller, PRRD, vol. 3, pp. 456–69. This good pleasure of course chiefly encompasses the decrees of predestination and (in view of sin) reprobation. Turretin defended the infralapsarian position that an elect remnant of humanity considered as ‘created and fallen’ – actually deserving reprobation – is the proper object of predestination through election in Christ, not humanity ‘creatable’ as such (see Institutes, vol. 3, pp. 341–50, esp. 347). 63. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 350; see also pp. 351–2.



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in his mission from the Father is the ‘primary means’ to save the elect, not the location or focus for God’s electing activity as such. In sum, the person and work of Christ does not ‘enter into the decree antecedently as the impulsive and meritorious cause, on account of which it was destined to us’.64 Nothing outside God can move God to grace. This impulse to ground God’s electing activity entirely and exclusively ad intra seems, at least in its high orthodox exposition, to have had much to do with polemics between the Reformed and Lutherans, Arminians, and Amyraldians regarding the universal – or hypothetically universal – intent and extent of the redemption accomplished by Christ. Though these alternative accounts offer a ‘pretext of extolling the glory of Christ’, Turretin surmises that their underlying aim is ‘to establish universal grace and destroy God’s absolute election according to good pleasure’.65 Turretin’s biggest concern regarding Christ and election, then, was to guard against Rollock’s contemporary Arminius’s ordering of the decrees (and those similar to it), which carried an underlying rationale of universally prevenient grace and particular election through foreseen faith. According to Arminius, ‘The first unconditional and absolute decree of God concerning the salvation of sinful man, is that by which he decreed to appoint his Son Jesus Christ for a mediator’.66 Turretin’s desire was to advocate a consistent monergism; each of the previously mentioned opponents of the Reformed, in their own way, argued for some constitutive cause or foundation for election in addition to or concurring with God’s own free good pleasure. Another of Rollock’s contemporaries (also a supralapsarian and a fan of Rollock’s exegetical work), Theodore Beza, had reasoned in the same way as Turretin, first in response to the Bolsec controversy and later in debates with Lutherans.67 64. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 351; see also p. 354. 65. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 351; cf. Muller, PRRD, vol. 3, p. 453. On the logical priority of Christ in the Amyraldian scheme, see Trueman, ‘Election’, pp. 115–17. 66. As quoted by W. Den Boer, God’s Twofold Love: The Theology of Jacob Arminius (1559–1609) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), p. 150. The final logical progression in Arminius’s order of decrees is that ‘by which God decreed to save and damn certain particular persons’, which ‘has its foundation in the foreknowledge of God’ regarding who would ultimately take hold of the grace held out to all in Christ by believing in him. 67. On Beza’s views vis-à-vis the Bolsec controversy see Donald Sinnema, ‘Beza’s View of Predestination in Historical Perspective’, in I. Backus, ed., Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605): actes du colloque de Genève (septembre 2005) (Geneza: Librairie Droz, 2007), pp. 219–39. Against Lutherans, see Beza’s arguments at the Colloquy of Montbéliard (1586): ‘On the one hand … Christ is considered as the efficient cause of predestination with the Father and the Holy Spirit; on the other as being the first effect of the predestination itself, on account of the servants mercifully elect in him.’ Quoted in Muller, Christ and the Decree, 2.4.1. For a full discussion see Jill Raitt, The Colloquy of Montbéliard: Religion and Politics in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 5. For Beza’s high praise

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On its deepest level, this polemic about the ground of election was about whether the purpose of God can be thwarted, which ultimately concerns the question of motive or impetus; i.e., the question is not only whom has God purposed to be gracious to in Christ and whether that purpose must necessarily stand, but what moves God to be gracious in the first place? Again, a commitment running throughout Turretin’s reasoning is that whatever is properly considered a cause of election must be attributed to the divine being, and anything which is an effect to the creaturely realm. This is strongly similar to what Donald Sinnema has described as Beza’s ‘decree-execution framework’, including strictly distinguishing the Son as author of election as God, from his divine and human person as the primary means of the decree’s execution.68 In this approach, removing consideration of the integral person of Christ entirely from the realm of causality – from God’s decretal impetus or motive – ensures that God’s redemptive purposes, because they do not depend on anything outside himself, will not change or fail. The primacy of Christ in the decree itself – that election is thoroughly in Christ – marks a critical difference between Rollock and both infralapsarian Reformed federalism (as represented by Turretin) and most other supralapsarian accounts. While Rollock would agree with a typical Reformed understanding that election is through Christ in certain important senses (that he elects from the Father in eternity, and that the elect are redeemed by him in time), for Rollock the person of Christ is not a means to the end of redeeming the elect – he is personally the Beginning and End of election, from his Father and in their Spirit. In Jesus, divine and human, the elect share in their glorious triune life, now in part in the covenant of grace by faith, and one day fully by communing with God in and through Christ’s exalted humanity face to face. Even Reformed supralapsarianism’s unrealized Christological potential (as Barth thought of it) was in Rollock’s case much more realized than Barth allowed.69 At the same time, it is necessary to keep in mind that Rollock maintained a classical Reformed affirmation of double predestination, particular election, and limited or definite atonement. God’s decree entails both election and reprobation; within Rollock’s ordering of the decrees, this means that universal creation and fall were intentionally ordained by God unto particular redemption and of Rollock’s works on Romans and Ephesians, see the 1596 letter from Beza to Scottish theologian John Johnston (professor at St Andrews) in Rollock, Select Works, vol. 1, pp. 7–12. 68. D. Sinnema, ‘God’s Eternal Decree and its Temporal Execution: The Role of this Distinction in Theodore Beza’s Theology’, in Mack P. Holt, ed., Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe: Essays in Honour of Brian J. Armstrong (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 55–78; and idem, ‘Beza’s View of Predestination’, pp. 229–35. 69. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), p. 143: ‘It is true that [supralapsarianism] did not and, on the basis of [classical Reformed] presuppositions, could not say what it can say when detached from those presuppositions – that Jesus Christ is the merciful and just God who elects from all eternity, and also homo labilis [the human being susceptible to the Fall] who is elected from all eternity.’



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preterition (though God is not morally responsible for freely chosen human sin that evokes his wrath as its consequence).70 The covenant of works along with its terrible transgression were ordered to its surpassing fulfilment by Christ. Rollock also maintained with the Reformed generally that Christ himself – both as God with the Father in the Spirit, and as head of the elect – intended salvation’s accomplishment and application only for those freely chosen in him. Christ had in mind from the beginning, by name, those particular people whom the Father had given him, and fulfilled all the promises of God strictly on their behalf.71 Rollock affirmed Christ as the ground of election, but he did not affirm universal grace because he did not affirm a universal intention by the Father and the Son for all humanity to be glorified in grace with them. Thus Rollock could be quite blunt, whether in his academic works or in his Scots-dialect sermons, in his conviction that the ‘necessitie laid on the multitude of this warld’ is that they should be ‘appointed to damnation fra all eternitie’.72 It seems Rollock’s answer to the pastoral conundrum of reprobation (especially in this supralapsarian cast) was simply to overwhelm it with the sheer gloriousness of grace in Christ for those who trust him: ‘So then, strive to believe in [Jesus], and certainly the fall of Adam shall be so far from thy heart, that thou shalt bless the time that he fell, if thou gettest this renewed creature in thee, through the Lord Jesus; otherwise thou shalt curse the time that he fell.’73

Conclusion: The Historical and Theological Significance of the ‘Location’ of Election As Rollock exemplifies, a focus on election’s location in Christ rather than Christ’s instrumentality for election can maintain a strongly covenantal Reformed complexion, even while reflecting several key commitments and conclusions shared by some of federalism’s most vocal modern critics. Indeed, despite the ostensibly settled reasoning both of Turretin and his peers and of Barth and his followers, this particular strand of three cords – the instrumentality of Christ in election, a decretal primacy of law over grace, and double predestination – is in fact breakable (though perhaps not easily!). Such a view certainly will not satisfy those Reformed who grant no entry to anything but God’s purely immanent good pleasure in election, or Barthians and others who would recoil at the apparent implications for God’s character of Rollock’s restriction of God’s (and Christ’s) 70. On God not being the author of sin (insofar as it is sinful), or culpable for it (insofar as he ordains and upholds it but does not perpetrate it), see Rollock, Effectual Calling, pp. 161–6. 71. See esp. Rollock, Five and twentie lectures, pp. 43, 213–15, 221–2, 242. 72. Rollock, sermon on 2 Cor. 4.3–5, in Select Works, vol. 1, p. 392: ‘That perditioun and destructioun quhairunto thou is appointed fra all eternitie, is the cause quhairfoir thou receives na consolatioun, na licht in thy saul throch the gospel of Jesus Christ.’ 73. Rollock, Lectures on Colossians, p. 299.

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salvific intention only to those created and redeemed to enjoy it.74 Nevertheless, Rollock demonstrates that it is entirely possible to advocate particular election and reprobation alongside the priority and ultimacy of grace over nature (and over condemnation) in God’s mysterious purposes, all within a commitment to the primacy of the person of Christ as first in the order of the eternal decree. This standpoint may also provide some insight regarding Calvin’s own approach to the relationship between Christ and election. As mentioned above, in Muller’s account, Christ and election are coordinate in Calvin’s thought: there is a ‘systematic relationship between Christ and the decree that lies at the heart of Calvin’s theology’, affirming both a kind of subordination of Christ to the decree (as chosen head of the elect) and a priority of Christ over the decree (as electing God). As far as it goes, this could be unpacked in the direction of any of the other approaches to relating Christ and election described above.75 Yet amid important differences – and recognizing that I do not have space here to explore this claim more fully – because of their shared focus on the integral person of Christ as Mediator, Calvin and Rollock seem to me to be largely in agreement in locating the decree of election most properly in Christ’s person. Perhaps most insightfully for the present discussion, Muller describes Christ’s eternal appointment as Mediator, grounded in his divine commission from the Father, to be at the root of Calvin’s conviction that God ‘does not go outside himself ’ for the source of the blessings of salvation.76 That the person of Christ is not ‘outside God’ seems to me a crucial point for understanding Rollock’s key difference from those like Turretin who advocate election through Christ in an instrumental sense; the person of the Mediator, even for supralapsarians like Beza and Perkins, is only the ‘foundation of the decree’ insofar as he is God. Thus it is hard to agree with Muller’s conclusion that, since these accounts ‘limit the subordination of Christ to the decree to his work as mediator’, they actually demonstrate a ‘metaphysical priority of Christology over predestination’.77 As Muller describes in many ways elsewhere, classical Reformed formulation has been wary of giving logical priority in election to the incarnate Son.78 This important difference is made clearer in light of contemporary 74. See McDonald, ‘Theology of Election’, pp. 129–30. 75. Muller, Christ and the Decree, 1.2.4. 76. Muller, Christ and the Decree, 1.2.4, quoting Calvin, ICR 3.22.6. At the very least, one could argue that the through and in approaches as I have described them may both legitimately appeal to Calvin’s direct influence. Sinnema notes an intriguing letter Beza sent to Calvin in 1555 wondering out loud whether election ‘in Christ’ in Eph. 1.4 refers to the decree’s execution being through Christ as one of its ‘secondary causes’, or whether it means that Christ’s person is considered in the making of the decree itself. Beza chooses the former; Calvin’s response has not survived. See ‘Beza’s View of Predestination’, p. 230. 77. Muller, Christ and the Decree, 2.4.1. 78. See esp. Muller’s discussion of Ursinus’s denial that Christ is the ‘foundation of election’ in Calvin and the Reformed Tradition, pp. 185–92, and the similar reasoning of Perkins, idem, ‘Pactum Salutis’, pp. 52–3.



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proposals from those who affirm Christ to be election (most emphatically in its strongest, McCormackian sense). Whether one holds that the person of Christ is the primary means of election’s accomplishment, or that he is the actualization of the decree – ontologically constitutive not only for humanity but for the Trinity – each approach, though with widely divergent results, ends up locating election immanently, within the Godhead, rather than holding immanent and economic together ‘without confusion, change, division, or separation’ (Chalcedon) in the person of Christ. That is, from a Rollockian perspective, it would seem neither stance possesses the ontological resources to avoid to some degree either confusing Trinity and economy (by folding the former into the latter), or separating them (by making God’s purposes in and of himself something prior to, and in some respects contrary to, God’s self-disclosure in Christ). Remarkably in this case, McCormack and Turretin appear much closer to one another than either is to Rollock (or the Torrances, despite a vast difference on matters like the nature of reprobation and the intended extent of redemption). Put simply, for Rollock to claim that election is grounded in the person of the Mediator is not to base the decree upon something outside of God; he is the one in whom all the fullness of God dwells (Col 1.19), in whom the freely given grace of the God who is grace is given to us (Eph 1.6).79 The exclusive alternatives presented by Turretin – election is grounded either in God’s immanent good pleasure or in the person of the Mediator; Christ is either election’s foundation unto universal grace or its primary means unto particular redemption – appear in this case to be philosophically and even soteriologically understandable, but Christologically problematic. As such, locating election in the person of Christ is perhaps the surest possible affirmation that the divine decree to save human beings finds its ground and motive expressed in the gracious character and activity of God himself, the electing God who is also God with us – God’s good pleasure manifest in the flesh. In the context of contemporary theological debates, Rollock’s account may or may not have the potential to cause more problems than it solves – his historic influence regarding the relationship between the covenants of works and grace was certainly much more significant than it was regarding Christ and election. At the very least, however, he should remind all sides to be careful – whether in interpreting classical Reformed covenant theology or seeking a faithful path forward for contemporary formulation – when deducing what must be the implications of any particular set of commitments about the relationship between Christ and election when such commitments are leavened throughout this complex cluster of doctrinal claims.

79. Rollock appeals to these verses in Effectual Calling, p. 266.

Chapter 4 W H E R E W A S Y OU R C H U R C H B E F O R E L U T H E R ? H I ST O RY A N D C AT HO L IC I T Y I N E A R LY S EV E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY A B E R D O N IA N T H E O L O G Y

Nicholas Thompson Where have you beene so long a tyme? To whom did your Light shyne? Where did your principall Pastor sit? Who kept your Keyes? Who fed your Sheepe? Show mee some Church, that you haue built. I can shew manie that you haue spilt. Were all damned eternallie Who were not of your Companie? How might a man have found you out; To haue tryall in matters of doubt; When no such Companie did appeare, for so manie hundreth Yeare? Till LUTHER, a lying Frier On whom the Devill had desire, Brake his vow and married a Nun: And then your Haeresie first begun.1

This extract from a recusant ballad entitled Catholicke Questions to the Protestant offers a fleeting glimpse of popular resistance to the Reformation in seventeenthcentury Scotland. The questions are similar to those deployed in formal Roman Catholic polemic, but the ballad reminds us that they were not confined to the conversation of the well-educated. According to Patrick Forbes (1564–1635), bishop of Aberdeen from 1618 to 1635, ‘ignorant souls’ misled by the ‘perverse sedulitie of seducing Priests’ had this ballad ‘continually in their mouthes, who 1. Quoted in Patrick Forbes, Eubulus, or a Dialogue, where-in a Rugged Romish Rhyme, (Inscrybed, Catholicke Questions, to the Protestaut [sic]) is Confuted, and the Questions there-of Answered (Aberdeen: Edward Raban, 1627), pp. 125–6.

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never had eyther read, or gotten by heart, anie one Psalme of David.’2 Ironically it is only thanks to Forbes’s publication of the ballad, otherwise circulated in manuscript, that Catholicke Questions has survived. In 1614 Forbes responded with Eubulus, a dialogue in which the central character Eubulus (clearly Forbes) dissected Catholicke Questions in conversation with two papists. Eubulus was offered to an unidentified ‘Philadelphus,’ whose kinswoman’s conscience was troubled by the ballad. It remained in manuscript until 1627, when Forbes had it printed in response to a new recusant pasquil (the Proper Ballad, which prophesied the restoration of Roman Catholicism within ‘three or four years’).3 Forbes regretted having to enter the public debate at such a low level; he preferred people to read his more respectable refutations of Roman Catholicism. However: Such is the miserable mishap of our tyme, or rather, of mad Humours in our time, that nothing is so bitterly, and with so great Heat, Passion, and damnable spyte, debated, as are poyntes of Divinitie. And, this intemperie, hath so farre, in common, taken all myndes, as that all Christianitie, is now turned in odious, and humorous Disputation: and all, both Men and Women, will be, for-sooth, of a partie, all-be-it the most part of them so ignorant, as they know neyther what they holde, or what they impugne; no more vnderstanding what they speake, than what they speake of, than do Pyots, or Parockets, those wordes which they are taught to prattle … Yet, they are incessantlie bolde, to moue Questions of Religion, who, being posed agayne, can not answere to the simple questions of the Childrens Catechisme.4

Recent scholarship on post-Reformation Reformed thought has explored the character of Reformed orthodoxy as an internationally conducted, learned exchange. The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the connection between that learned exchange and its local pastoral and political contexts: in this case the diocese of Aberdeen between c. 1600 and 1645. From the university colleges of Aberdeen emerged a theology that was undeniably part of the broader Reformed theological conversation in Europe, but was nevertheless heavily inflected by the locale that produced it. Bishop Forbes’s alarm at the hold that Roman Catholicism still had on his people led to a concerted attempt to revive the university colleges 2. Forbes, Eubulus, p. 5. 3. This has not survived either, but see ‘Annual Letter of the Scottish Mission of the Society of Jesus for 1628’, in William Forbes-Leith, ed. and trans., Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. Volume I: The Reign of King Charles I, 1627–1649 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), p. 20. See also Patrick Forbes, Eubulus, p. 6. Cf. Peter Hume-Brown, ed., The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland. Vol. 2: A.D. 1627–1628 (Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1900), p. 495, regarding the ‘exorbitant growth of Poprie’ within the diocese and the ‘pasquillis and infamous libellis made, printed and insolentlie affixed uppoun publict places’. 4. Patrick Forbes, Eubulus, p. 6.



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in the burghs of Old and New Aberdeen as centres of theological instruction and ministerial training. Forbes’s aim was to equip his diocese with ministers able to engage at parish-level in the kind of inter-confessional combat needed to wrest the North East of Scotland from the old religion’s ‘inchauntment’. The ultimate product of the bishop’s project was John Forbes’s compendious Instructiones historico-theologicae, first published in Amsterdam in 16455 and reprinted posthumously in Geneva in 1680 and 1699,6 and as part of John Forbes’s Opera omnia in Amsterdam in 1702.7 However, by the time Instructiones emerged in print, the threat of recusancy in the diocese of Aberdeen had been superseded by internecine disputes within the Reformed camp. Because of its Erastianism and liturgical adiaphorism, Aberdonian theology acquired the taint of Laudianism and Arminianism. In fact this is the direction in which some members of the Aberdonian school had begun to take their theology, even before the outbreak of civil war in 1641. However, this should not obscure the fact that in the lifetimes of Patrick and John Forbes, the aim of Aberdonian Theology had been to neutralize Roman Catholic claims to doctrinal continuity and universality, by defending a vision of the Reformed Kirk that was ‘catholic’ in terms of its fidelity to the historical tradition and its accommodation of Lutheranism, but ‘orthodox’ in terms of its adherence to the Reformed confessions and aversion to the ‘innovations’ of ‘papistry,’ Arminianism and Socinianism. The 1627 preface to Eubulus attributed the renewed ‘insolencie’ of local Roman Catholics to the ‘too great indulgence and connivence’ granted them.8 It was not the Aberdonian kirk that Bishop Forbes had in mind. Rather, as a memorandum from the Scottish privy council to James VI pointed out, Roman Catholic ‘pasquills and infamous libells’ went unpunished because: the magistracie, jurisdictioun and government in manie plaices ar in the hands of notouriouslie avowed papists who doe not execute the lawes aganis recusants and seminarie priests and who are so strong in power and meanes in the country as none others, though never so weill affected to the trew religioun darre or is able to execute anie of the saidis lawes aganis the saids offenders.9

In particular, the Council demanded that George Gordon (1562–1636), the first Marquis of Huntly, be compelled to arrest all excommunicated persons within his sphere of jurisdiction and that he dismiss any excommunicate individuals now 5. Instructiones historico-theologicae de doctrina Christiana et de vario rerum statu, ortisque erroribus, jam inde a temporibus apostolicis ad tempora usque seculi decimi-septimi priora (Amsterdam: L. Elzevirius, 1645). 6. Both by Jean Pictet. 7. As the second volume (pars altera) of George Garden, ed., Reverendi viri Johannis Forbesii a Corse … opera omnia (2 vols; Amsterdam: Henricus Wetsten & Rodolphus & Gerhardus Wetsten, 1702–3). 8. Patrick Forbes, Eubulus, p. 6. 9. Hume-Brown, Register, p. 495.

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holding public office under him.10 Here was the problem: the principal magistracy in the northeast of Scotland was held by a family that was at best Laodicean in its commitment to ‘trew religion’, though more often resolutely supportive of recusancy within the diocese.11 Moreover, although Bruce MacLennan has admitted the difficulty of assessing the total number of recusants in the diocese, his survey of those mentioned in church and other records indicates a ‘healthy, continuous and consistent recusancy among the rural and urban middle classes, as well as among the common people’.12 In 1629, however, the Marquis and his son were relieved of the sheriffdoms of Aberdeen and Inverness after the Marquis had been denounced as a rebel. Although the Marquis was remunerated for these lost offices, he was no longer able to protect recusants effectively.13 The political marginalisation of the Gordons coincided with a concerted attempt to enforce the laws against recusancy in the North East of Scotland. Searches of recusant houses, together with confiscations and evictions, were led by Bishop Forbes in person.14 This enforcement of these harsh legal measures can be seen as the culmination of a counteroffensive that Bishop Forbes had been planning since entering the ordained ministry in 1612. In 1613 he published An Exquisite Commentary upon the Revelation of Saint John, a work commended by Andrew Melville (1545–1622), Daniel Tilenus (1563–1633), Jacques Cappel (1570–1624), Pierre du Moulin (1568–1658) and Franciscus Gomarus (1563–1641).15 Forbes’s preface identified the same traditionalist challenges we have heard voiced in Catholicke Questions: ‘disdainefull demands, where our Church was before Luther, and whether we esteemed all our Forefathers so many ages past to be condemned, who liued and died all in the faith & Communion of the Church of Rome.’16 Forbes noted, too, the ‘daungerous doubtes’ these questions had raised in the ‘heartes of the weake’.17 10. Ibid., p. 496. 11. Bruce McLennan, ‘Presbyterianism Challenged: A Study of Catholicism and Episcopacy in the North East of Scotland, 1560–1630,’ (2 vols; unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Aberdeen, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 185–6. 12. McLennan, vol. 1, p. 217 and ch. 4. 13. McLennan, vol. 1, pp. 128–9. 14. See the Jesuit reports in Forbes-Leith, Memoirs of Scottish Catholics, pp. 41–113. 15. Patrick Forbes, An Exquisite Commentarie vpon the Revelation of Saint Iohn … (London: W. Hall, 1613). This was republished as An Learned Commentarie vpon the Revelation of Saint Iohn … (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1614), apparently through the offices of Patrick Forbes’s brother John (c. 1568–1634), an exiled minister of the Presbyterian party. At Melville’s urging, it was translated into Latin by John Forbes as Commentarius in Apocalypsin … (Amsterdam: L. Elzivirius, 1646). See fol. (a)2r-v for extracts from Melville’s letter and fol. (a)4r–(b1)v for commendatory letters by the above-mentioned theologians, all written between 1617 and 1618. It is not clear how the continental divines managed to read it in English. 16. Patrick Forbes, ‘To the Reader’ in An Learned Commentarie, fol. c1r. 17. Ibid., fol. c1v.



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Nevertheless, he argued, these demands were futile, because the true church was never co-extensive with the visible church. Just as there were members of the visible church who had the visible mark of baptism, but were not ‘sealed’ as members of the true church, so the visible church of Antichrist (i.e., the Roman Catholic church), had always included some that had received the ‘number’ of the beast, but never his ‘character’.18 Forbes compared the true church to the temple of God in the midst of the court ‘given over to the nations’ (Rev. 11.1–2). The temple was the ‘sacrament of Baptism in substance remayning, & the doctrine of the Trinitie’ while the encompassing court of the gentiles was the Roman Catholic church.19 However, in Forbes’s view, the existence of true Christians in the church of Antichrist was more a matter of faith than historical demonstration. In other words, there was no way of showing historically where the true church was before Luther. Yet, if the adversaries seemed to have history on their side, this was only because ‘the common Recordes bear but what obtained at the time; no Record remaining of these, who, though for feare they durst not contest, yet misliked and mourned for the iniquity’.20 Forbes did offer a brief nod to the ‘Waldenses, Albingenses [sic], Fraterculi, Beghardi etc.’, but they were historically visible only because they represented the birthing pains of a final stage in sacred history. Only with the Reformation had there been a clear separation between the visible churches of Christ and Antichrist as a prelude to Satan’s last defeat.21 At this point in his career Forbes was more interested in fortifying ‘weak’ hearts with eschatology than in joining battle with his adversaries on the field of church history.22 However, Patrick Forbes’s Defence of the lawful calling of the ministers of reformed churches (1614) and two appended tracts offered some concessions towards a historical defence of the Reformed church’s legitimacy.23 Forbes expressed dismay at the fact that his commentary on Revelation had not satisfied the doubts of ‘equitable and judicious readers’.24 Furthermore, the Romanists had persisted in their ‘insolent and high boasting’ with a new work ‘sparsed here in this part of the countrie (the chiefe stage of their peirt pride)’. 25 Its title was A litle treatise of the Protestants profane calling, wherein is proved how they have no true 18. Ibid. pp. 130–1. Cf. Rev. 13.16–18. 19. Ibid., p. 132. 20. Ibid., p. 134. 21. Ibid., p. 219. 22. In extensive annotations to the Commentarius in Apocalypsin and the appended tracts, John Forbes supplies much of the historical detail at which his father merely hinted. 23. These were annotated and translated into Latin by John Forbes as appendices to Patrick Forbes, Commentarius in Apocalypsin, pp. 279–402. 24. Forbes, Defence of the Lawful Calling of the Ministers of Reformed Churches against the Cavillations of the Romanists … Whereunto is Subjoined An Epistle to a Recusant … with A Short Discovery of the Adversarie His Dottage … (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1614), fol. A3r. See also ibid., p. 2. 25. Ibid.

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pastors, and consequently no true church at all.26 Much of Forbes’s answer to this challenge rehashed the arguments of his Revelation commentary: ‘truth is alwayes in the visible church, yea & no where els, but yet not always visible therein.’27 However, the second of the two short works appended to the Defence indicated that his adversaries, as well as the ‘weake ones’ of his diocese, were unpersuaded by such generalizations. After the manuscript circulation of his Defence, Forbes had been served with another Roman Catholic tract that asked: Seeing the Ministers of Scotland graunts the church of Rome to have been once the true Church of Christ, wee desire them to shew in what yeare of God shee made first defection from the true religion, and by whome shee was condemned for haresie. Likewayes, we desire to know the names of these who since the Church of Rome fell from the trueth, hes continually from time to time, and age to age professed this religion in all substantiall pointes of doctrine as they presently professe.28

This ‘impertinent demaund’ irritated Forbes. Although he continued to claim that the historical pedigree of Protestantism could not be fully demonstrated, he now felt obliged to describe what the visible succession of the true church in the midst of Roman harlotry might have looked like. The abuses of Rome had either been recently invented or ‘with time and by degrees’ grew up: from partly so laudable, partly so plausible, partly so tolerable, partly so small and insensible beginnings, as to men either not so circumspect as to perceave or of a more peaceable disposition then to contend about everie thing, gave not as they thought, at first, great occasion for contesting.29

He offered examples of this development, such as Purgatory and the veneration of the martyrs’ relics. He also claimed that he could produce ‘catalogues of men who in former ages had holden the truth and heavely lamented the prevayling corruptions of the tymes’.30 But he argued that this would be pointless. While it was surely the case that there had been witnesses to the truth, who in the midst of apostasy, ‘keeped the name of God, holding the substantiall foundation of salvation’, human weakness was such that the witness of men like Gregory the Great or Bernard 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 19. 28. Patrick Forbes, A Short Discoverie of the Adversarie his Dottage, p. 2 (an appendix to Forbes, Defence, but with separate pagination). 29. Patrick Forbes, Short Discoverie, pp. 7–8. 30. Patrick Forbes, Short Discoverie, p. 15. See also ibid., p. 23 where he suggests that his adversaries read Philippe du Plessis Mornay’s, Le mystère d’iniquité, c’est à dire l’histoire de la papauté … (Saumur: Thomas Portau, 1611) and Ecclesiastica historia, integram ecclesiae Christi ideam, quantum ad locum, propagationem, persecutionem, tranquillitatem, … attinet, secundum singulas centurias … (14 vols; Basel: Oporinus, [1560]–1574).



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would always be compromised by their imprudence, undue toleration, or defects in their knowledge.31 Despite Forbes’s preference for arguing from Scripture rather than history, his actions at the beginning of his episcopate suggest that he had become convinced of the need to take the battle to his adversaries on their own ground. In the preface to his Instructiones John Forbes recalled the circumstances that led to the work’s composition: In order to wrest divine scriptures from the hands of our compatriots with greater ease (for they cannot bear scripture’s light), certain men, who were secretly spreading modern Roman doctrine in Scotland, boasted to the uneducated that they were in wholehearted accord with catholic antiquity, which, they said, was completely at odds with the doctrine of the reformed churches, which in turn was at odds with the divine scriptures read and explained according to the mind of the orthodox fathers. In order to persuade the unwary, they used to present them with clusters of names and proof-texts, which, according to them, had been gathered, not fraudulently or absurdly, but truthfully and fittingly from Bellarmine and Gregorio de Valencia, and from other writers on the Roman side.32

According to John Forbes, his father and his father’s fellow pastors in the synod of Aberdeen set themselves the task of countering such claims. In 1619 they funded a Professorship in Divinity at King’s College to which John Forbes was called in 1620, and charged with the work that would culminate in the Instructiones.33 In the same year funding was found for the teaching of Divinity at Marischal College.34 For two years William Forbes (1585–1634), distant kinsman to Patrick and John, undertook this role in his capacity as principal. He was succeeded in 1625 by Robert Baron (1596–1639). In 1622 the English printer Edward Raban was persuaded to move his business from St Andrews to Aberdeen, and establish the first press in the region.35 Between 1622 and 1649, Raban published c. 165 works, of which c. 68 were

31. Patrick Forbes, Short Discoverie, pp. 16–18. 32. John Forbes, ‘Praefatio ad lectorem’ in Instructiones (Geneva: Jean Pictet, 1680), fol. b3v (my own translation). 33. The record of John Forbes’s public examination before the bishop, synod and university colleges can be found in Disputationes theologicae duae habitae in inclyta Aberdonensi academia … (Edinburgh: Andrew Hart, 1620). 34. On the rather complex arrangements, see Shona Vance, ‘A Man for All Religions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart Word’, in Allan Macinnes and Arthur Williamson, eds, Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 55–78 (58–62). 35. J. Edmonde, The Aberdeen Printers: Edward Raban to James Nicol, 1620–1736 (4 vols; Aberdeen: Edmond and Spark, 1884–6), vol. 4, pp. xii–xiv.

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devoted to religious topics.36 Of the religious works, eight recorded university disputations dealing with doctrinal questions at issue between Protestants and Catholics.37 A further seven works dealt with questions related to the Reformed Kirk’s catholicity.38 The distinctiveness of the Aberdonian focus on catholicity becomes apparent if one compares Raban’s press with the longer established presses of Edinburgh. During the same period (1623–49) these published nine works whose chief purpose was to attack Roman Catholicism.39 However, none

36. See Edmonde, vol. 1, pp. 1–64; vol. 2, pp. 65–82; vol. 4, pp. 186–206. The numbers are approximate because Edmonde lists items no longer extant. Among religious works I have numbered Bibles, psalters and catechisms as well as theological, devotional, sermon and controversial literature. 37. Robert Baron, Disputatio theologica, de formali objecto fidei … (1627); Alexander Scroggie, De imperfectione sanctorum in hac vita … (1628); James Sibbald, Theses theologicae de primatu B. Petri … (1627); William Leslie, Vindiciae theologicae pro perseuerantia sanctorum in gratia salvifica … (1627); Robert Baron, Disputatio theologia, de vero discrimine peccati mortalis & venialis deque impossibilitate implendi legem Dei … (1633) Andrew Strachan, Vindiciae cultus divini, ceu propositiones quaedam theologicae, de natura & objecto cultus religiosi, quibus accesserunt … propositiones pauculae de orationibus viventium pro defunctis … (1634); John Gordon, Confessio fidei in duobus capitibus de ecclesia, et reali praesentia in eucharistiae sacramento … (1635). Here I have also included Robert Baron, Ad Georgii Turnebulli tetragonismum pseudographum apodixis catholica … (1631) which develops arguments first advanced in Baron’s Disputatio theologica. 38. Andrew Logie, Cum bono Deo: Raine from the Clouds, vpon a Choicke Angel: or, A Returned Answere, to that Common Quaeritur of Our Adversaries, VVhere Was Your Church before Luther? (1624); William Guild, transl., Three Rare monuments of Antiquitie, or Bertram, Priest, a French-man, of the Body and Blood of Christ, (Written 800 Yeares Agoe) … AElfricus, Arch-bishop of Canterburie, an English-man, His Sermon of the Sacrament, (Preached 627 yeares agoe:) and Maurus, abbot, a Scots-man, his Discourse of the same (820 yeares agoe) … (1624); William Guild, Popish Glorying in Antiquitie Turned to their Shame ... (1626); Patrick Forbes, Eubulus (1627); William Guild, A Compend of the Controversies of Religion wherin the Trueth is Confirmed, and Errour Convinced, by Authoritie of Scripture, Witnessing of Antiquitie, and Confession of Partie … (1627); William Guild, Limbo’s Batterie, or, an answere, to a Popish Pamphlet, of Christs Descense to Hell … (1630); William Guild, An Antidote against Poperie Fit (God willing) to Preserue and Arme Everie One agaynst the Seduction thereof … (1639); William Guild, The Old Roman Catholik, as at First He Was Taught by Paul in Opposition to the New Roman Catholik, as of Latter He is Taught by the Pope … (1649). William Guild, ed., Trueth triumphant or the Late Conversion of a Learned Doctor of Sorbon, D. Francis Cvpif … from Poperie … (1637) probably belongs in this list as well, though it does not strictly deal with the question of the Reformed Kirk’s catholicity. 39. See A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad (3 vols; London: Bibliographical Society, 2nd rev. edn, 1986–91), no. 72; 6032; 14940; 18063; 20110; 20657; 22998.5; 24523; G2072A.



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of these was broadly concerned with the church’s catholicity, and only one was an academic work.40 The records of the public disputations held at King’s College were scholastic in method and deeply engaged with the Roman Catholic theologians, whose works they set out to refute. A short panegyric at the beginning of Robert Baron’s Disputatio theologica de formali objecto fidei (1627) praised its author as follows: Among the Romans Scotus is the ‘Subtle Doctor’, Aquinas ‘Angelic’ – great lights of their faith. Baron rivals Thomas in his angelic art, and has the subtle acumen of Scotus’s mind. They converge in much, but they differ in one thing: he has the faith the Romans feign.41

Contrary to what one might expect, given the prominence of historical questions in the Roman Catholic pamphlets, the academic disputations cited few patristic sources. Instead the fathers and historical argument assumed greater prominence in the vernacular works to which we shall return. The disputations focused on refuting the best arguments of the author’s Roman Catholic contemporaries. The medieval scholastics were also martialed on both sides of the disputation. Protestant authorities were rarely cited; though if Samuel Rutherford’s Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia (1649) is any indication, an author’s adversaries could be expected to feature far more prominently than his theological allies in a disputation of this kind.42 If we take Baron’s Disputatio theologica as an example, it begins with a distinction made by the Flemish Jesuit Martinus Becanus (1563–1624) between the ‘material’ and ‘formal’ objects of faith: the material object is believed on account of something else; the formal object is the reason for believing the material object. For example, what the scriptures teach about the creation of the world is an example of the material object of faith. It is believed on account of the formal object of faith: the authority of God revealed in Scripture.43 Baron used this distinction to draw attention to an apparent inconsistency in contemporary Roman Catholic theology: his adversaries agreed that divine revelation was the formal object of faith, and yet alleged that faith somehow depended on the infallible testimony of the church as its ‘condition.’ Here Baron cut to the heart of the questions raised in the recusant pamphlets: where were the institution, teaching 40. I.e., Samuel Rutherford, Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia … in qua adversus Jesuitas, Arminianos, Socinianos … contenditur & decertatur … (Edinburgh: heirs of George Anderson for Robert Brown, 1649), which, however, has a remit both wider and more narrow than Roman Catholicism, since it takes on only the Jesuit account of predestination. 41. Baron, Disputatio theologica de formali objecto fidei, fol. ¶2r (my own translation). 42. Rutherford, Disputatio theologica, cap. 29, pp. 478–523 defends Calvin, Beza and nostri, but even there pays far more attention to adversaries’ attacks than to Protestant authorities. 43. Baron, Disputatio theologica de formali objecto fidei, fol. Ar-v.

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authority and tradition out of which the faith of the Reformed Kirk arose? There is not room here to do justice to Baron’s full argument, but it is worth noting that, on the way, it attacked a wide range of Roman Catholic opponents, the principal of whom were Roberto Cardinal Bellarmine S.J. (1542–1621), Jacob Gretser S.J. (1562–1625), Gregorio de Valencia S.J. (1549–1603), Thomas Stapelton (1535– 98), Antonio Rubio S.J. (d. 1615) and Adam Tanner S.J. (1572–1632). William Whitaker was the only Protestant author cited specifically.44 Baron rejected Becanus’s accusation that, by rejecting the authority of the Roman church, the Protestants found themselves locked in a circulus Calvinisticus of theological subjectivism, the alleged internal witness of the Spirit demonstrating the authority of Scripture, which in turn affirmed the authority of the alleged internal witness.45 Baron argued that, although the Spirit was the ‘effective cause’ of assent to the authority of Scripture, the authority of Scripture itself was the objective cause of faith.46 There was thus no ‘Calvinist circle’, whereas his adversaries found themselves locked in their own circulus pontificiorum, insisting that the infallibility of the church was a doctrine derived from scripture, which they would only believe on the basis of the church’s infallible authority.47 That the audience for these Aberdonian academic works could extend beyond the North East of Scotland is evident from the 272-page reply to Baron’s disputation by George Turnbull S.J. (1569–1633), a Scots professor of theology at the Jesuit academy in Reims. Turnbull set out to ‘square the imaginary circle’ in which Baron claimed his adversaries were caught.48 Baron then replied with an 807-page refutation of George Turnbull’s ‘false squaring’ with a work dedicated to Bishop Forbes, and dealing in greater depth and latitude with the question of whether the authority of Scripture required the testimony of an infallible church (or, indeed, infallible councils, popes and miracles) as its prior condition. Baron now drew more heavily than before on the medieval scholastics and the fathers to demonstrate the ‘novelty’ of Jesuit theology: For after the rise of scholastic theology, it was not only the eastern bishops that consistently denied the infallible judgement of the pope and the Roman church, but many theologians of the Roman obedience, and interpreters of canon law 44. Baron, Disputatio theologica de formali objecto fidei, p. 29. 45. Cf. Becanus, ‘De circulo Caluinistico contra Paraeum’, in R. P. Martini Becani opusculorum theologicorum tomus primus (Mainz: Ioannis Albinus, 1610), opusculum 10, pp. 386–418. 46. Baron, Disputatio theologica, de formali objecto fidei, p. 37. 47. Ibid., pp. ‘40–33’ [i.e. 42–43]. 48. George Turnbull, Imaginarii circuli quadratura catholica de formali obiecto & regula fidei adversus calumniosam disputationem Roberti Baronis Neabredoniensis ministri & professoris (Reims: Simon Fognaeus, 1628). See also William Chalmers, Gvlielmi Camerarii Scoti, Fintraei … Disputationes theologicae de discrimine peccati venialis & mortalis, de perfectione diuinae legis … oppositae disputationibus Roberti Baronis … de ijsdem materijs (Paris: Denis Houssaye, 1639).



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held and wrote on the foundation and object of faith in a manner far removed from the dogma of your society today.49

Isolating Roman Catholic contemporaries from what was believed to be the genuinely orthodox theological tradition was also the project of the vernacular anti-Roman works emerging from Raban’s press. By far the most prolific author of these works was William Guild (1586–1657). But Guild’s output was not confined to the press of Edward Raban; his polemics found publishers in London, too.50 More than any of his peers, save John Forbes, Guild embellished his case with material drawn from the patristic and medieval churches. One of Guild’s tracts, Three rare monuments of antiquitie (1624), offered translations of three early medieval works on the Eucharist as a kind of case study in the Reformed Kirk’s historical pedigree. Guild found these works in the library of a George Ogilvie of Carnoustie. However, he was inspired to make them available by ‘the pennes of the godlie of our neighbour nation … in translating sundrie worthy Authors … as also finding how that glorious reformed and refined Church of France had not suffered the same to be hid from the eyes of their people’.51 As this comment suggests, some of Guild’s work was already done for him. His translation of a sermon by Ælfric (d. 1005), archbishop of Canterbury, came without attribution from Foxe’s Actes and monuments.52 However, although three variant translations of De corpore et sanguine Domini by Ratramnus (‘Bertram’) of Corbie (d. c. 868) were already in circulation, Guild provided a translation that appears to have been his own.53 He also translated what he called a ‘learned discourse’ of Rabanus Maurus (d. 856) on the Eucharist, because he had it on the authority of John Bale that the author was a Scot.54 Finally, Guild included the translation of 49. Baron, Ad Georgii Turnebulli tetragonismum pseudographum, p. 22 (my own translation). 50. Those published in London before 1645 were William Guild, Popish Glorying in Antiquity … (London: Robert Alot, 1627), first printed in Aberdeen, 1626 (see above); Ignis fatuus or the elf-fire of Pvrgatorie, wherein Bellarmine is Confuted by Arguments both out of the Old and New Testament, and by his Owne Proofes out of Scriptures and Fathers … (London: Augustine Mathews, 1625). 51. Guild, Three Rare Monuments, p. 17. 52. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of Matters Most Speciall and Memorable, Happenyng in the Church … (2 vols; London: John Daye, 1583), vol. 2, book 8, pp. 1169–70. Also reprinted as A Sermon of the Paschall Lambe (London: John Haviland for Henry Seile, 1623). 53. See The Boke of Barthram Priest Intreatinge of thee Bodye and Bloude of Christe … (London: in Saynt Andrewes parysche in the Waredropt by Thomas Raynalde and Anthony Kyngstone, 1548); A Booke of Bertram the Priest, concerning the Body and Blood of Christ … (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1582); A Booke of Bertram the Priest … (London: John Dawson, 1623). The authors of the 1581 and 1623 translations at some points drastically reworked or replaced the translation of their predecessors. 54. See John Bale, Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum … (Gippeswici in Anglia [i.e.

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Roman Catholic censures of Ratramnus, taken from Franciscus Junius’s Indices expurgatorii (1611) an annotated Protestant edition of works by various Roman Catholic censors, including an opinion from the College at Douai, concluding that ‘Bertram’ could be tolerated only if emended.55 As Guild’s translation of this material from the Roman censors suggests, he had a purpose larger than simply identifying a lineage of proto-Protestant predecessors. He also aimed to show that Bellarmine and other contemporary Roman apologists were selective, inconsistent and often fraudulent in their appeal to the antiquity for which they professed such reverence. Guild’s Popish glorying in antiquitie was a sustained dissection of these inconsistencies in a wide range of Roman Catholic apologists (though always chiefly Bellarmine). Again, there is evidence that recusant pamphlets had provoked Guild into writing. In discussing his adversaries’ selective preference for the variants of patristic texts that suited their case, Guild mentioned a Roman Catholic edition of Cyprian ‘adduced for the Pope’s Supremacie in a written Popish Pamphlet, sent of late to a brother of our Presbyterie, to answere vnto …’56 He noted that the pamphlet had used an edition of Cyprian edited and annotated by the Flemish Catholic Jacques de Pamèle.57 Guild argued that Pamèle’s version of the text was corrupt, appealing both to an earlier Catholic edition of Cyprian which he had in hand,58 and to the edition that Beza’s Genevan successor Simon Goulart (1543-1628) had published to counter the edition of Pamèle.59 Even where the two sides were not arguing over the authenticity of patristic texts, Guild was able to show that his adversaries were no less qualified in their Wesel]: John Overton, 1548), fol. 60r. In fact Rabanus was born in Mainz. The ‘discourse’ is a medley of three extracts from Rabanus, only one of which I have been able to identify. Guild’s marginal notes refer to De sermonum proprietate (i.e. De universo) book 5, c. 11. See PL 111, pp. 135D–136A. The other references are to a De eucharistia, c. 10 and 41, which I have been unable to identify among Rabanus’s opera or elsewhere. It is not Rabanus de sacramento eucharistae … (Cologne: Quentel, 1551) which, despite its title, is an edition of Paschasius Radbertus, De corpore et sanguine domini, together with other works. 55. William Guild, Three Rare Monuments, pp. 110–16. Cf. Franciscus Junius (ed.), Indices expurgatorii: Dvo testes fraudum ac falsationum pontificiarum … (Hanover: Gulielmus Antonius, 1611), pp. 54–7. 56. Guild, Popish Glorying, p. 96. Pagination in the Aberdeen and London imprints is identical. 57. Cyprian of Carthage, D. Caecilii Cypriani … opera…: Adnotationes Iacobi Pamelij … toti operi sparsim interiectae … (Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy, 1566). The work in question is Cyprian, De unitate ecclesiae 4, known to Erasmus and Guild as De simplicitate praelatorum. See PL 4, pp. 498–9. 58. Guild, Popish Glorying, p. 97 citing D. Caecilii Cypriani … opera (Lyon: Sebastianus Gryphius, 1537). 59. Guild, Popish Glorying, pp. 96–100 citing Cyprian of Carthage, D. Caecilii Cypriani … opera … Adnotationes I. Pamelij interiectae … cui accesserunt noua breuiaria & notae … (Geneva: Jean le Preux, 1593).



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acceptance of patristic authority than were the Protestants. For example, he noted the Jesuit Alfonso Salmeron’s recognition that the consensus of antiquity and the Middle Ages stood against the doctrine of the immaculate conception. Salmeron had therefore concluded that newer theologians were more perceptive than the older ones on this matter.60 Elsewhere Guild noted that at the end of a discussion of the way in which various fathers had erred, Salmeron quoted Quintilian: ‘neyther instantlie … let the Reader be assured, that all thinges which great Authors haue sayde, are everie way perfect, for they erre sometyme, and succumbe, and giue loose reines to the pleasure of their own wits.’61 Guild replied: ‘Now then, if any Protestant say farder … concerning the Fathers, eyther in exposition of Scripture, or other points of Faith, let the most malicious Adversarie instance …’62 It is clear that Aberdonian theology in the 1620s and early 1630s was almost wholly focused on the task of combatting Roman Catholicism, but the question perhaps left begging so far is the relationship of Aberdonian theology to the Reformed orthodoxy of the period. The General Assembly held at Aberdeen in 1640 established a committee to investigate the religious climate of King’s College, including those members of the professoriate who had refused to sign the National Covenant. Robert Baron had already died in self-imposed exile in England. William Guild had signed the covenant, though with written reservations regarding the legitimacy of the Five Articles of Perth, episcopacy, and loyalty to the king.63 A member of the investigating committee, Robert Baillie (1602–62), the minister of Kilwinning, had no doubt that William Forbes, formerly principal at Marischal College, and later bishop of Edinburgh, had left a baleful legacy among the students of the Aberdonian colleges, with his ‘popish tenets … intending directlie reconciliation with Rome, farther than either Montague, or Spalato’, and he worried that Baron, whom he otherwise admired, had also latterly been seduced ‘in multis’ by the ‘Canteburian way’.64 However, Baillie’s account of John Forbes was both ambiguous and ambivalent. According to Baillie, John Forbes answered the committee’s questions with such pleasing ‘ingenuitie’ that

60. Guild, Popish Glorying, p. 217. Cf. Alfonso Salmeron, Commentarii in omnes epistolas B. Pauli … tomus primus … (Madrid: Ludovicus Sánchez, 1602), p. 628. 61. Guild, Popish Glorying, p. 44. Cf. Alfonso Salmeron, Commentarii, p. 278 and Quintilian, Institutiones 10, c. 1. 62. Guild, Popish Glorying, p. 45. 63. See John Spalding, History of the Troubles and Memorable Transactions from M.DC. XXIV–M.DC.XLV (2 vols; Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1823), vol. 1, p. 58. 64. Robert Baillie, The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie A.M. Principal of the University of Glasgow (Bannatyne Club Publications; 3 vols; Edinburgh: printed for Robert Ogle, 1841), vol. 1, p. 248. Although, William Forbes only held the chair of Divinity at Marischal from 1620–22 (he served as minister of St Giles, Edinburgh from 1622–26) he was minister in New Aberdeen from 1626–33 before becoming the first Bishop of Edinburgh in 1634.

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they had chosen not to depose him immediately and had given him time for further ‘advysement’.65 Eventually, however, John Forbes was forced to relinquish his chair at King’s College. He left Scotland for the Netherlands in 1643 after refusing to endorse the Solemn League and Covenant. This might suggest that his theology was now suspect, but when he published the first part of the never completed Instructiones in 1645, it came with the endorsements of Reformed luminaries such as André Rivet (1572–1651), Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), Johannes Cocceius (1603–69), and the now Counter-Remonstrant Universities of Leiden, Utrecht and Groeningen.66 The Instructiones were also endorsed by Gerhardus Vossius, whose views on predestination were less orthodox, but the Instructiones politely distanced Forbes from Vossius’s views on this matter.67 The Instructiones’ record of what Forbes had taught in his praelectiones as Professor of Divinity at King’s College marshalled Scripture and Christian antiquity against sixteen centuries of heresies, including those of papists, Socinians and Arminians. It thus made in minute detail the historical case demanded by the recusant pamphlets. In 1645 Baillie wrote to his cousin William Spang (1604–64, minister at Veere in the Netherlands) to request a copy of this newly published work. Of its author, Baillie wrote: ‘I like his book very well, and the man much the better for the book’s cause.’68 Baillie could find fault only with Forbes’s failure to mention early Christian millennarianism. This was because Baillie found ‘Chiliast’ opinions too present among English Puritans such as William Twisse.69 As mentioned above, the Instructiones were republished in both Amsterdam and Geneva. In 1663 the Dutch author, Arnoldus Montanus published an abridged version, Forbesius contractus, as a response to the ‘harvest of heresies’ – including Arminianism – that had plagued the church from the outset. Montanus’s only criticism of the Instructiones was Forbes’s ‘Asiatic’ written style, which he had taken it upon himself to ‘laconize’.70 The reception of the Instructiones suggests that its author’s theology lay within the pale of Reformed orthodoxy (though further consideration no doubt needs to

65. Ibid. 66. See John Forbes, Instructiones, fol. d3r–d5r. 67. John Forbes, Instructiones, pp. 435–6 responded to Gerhardus Vossius, Historiae de controversiis quas Pelagius ejusque reliquiae moverunt libri septem … (Leiden: Joannes Patius, 1618) praising him as a theologian, but criticising him for interpreting Augustine in a manner favourable to the Remonstrants. See also Forbes’s tactful letter to Vossius, 17 January 1645 in Doctissimi clarissimique Gerardi Joannis Vossii et ad eum virorum eruditione celeberrimorum epistolae … (London: Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1693), epist. 402 [second sequence], pp. 268–9 [second pagination sequence]. 68. Baillie, Letters and Journals, vol. 2, p. 313. 69. Ibid. 70. Arnoldus Montanus, Forbesius Contractus sive compendium Instructionum historicotheologicarum … (Amsterdam: Aegidius Janssonius Valckenier, 1633), fol. (*)6r (my own translation).



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be given to its various loci before this conclusion can be drawn with certainty).71 Moreover, both David Mullan and Aaron Denlinger have questioned attempts by Covenanters and later Episcopalian scholars to depict Aberdonian theology as diverging substantially from Reformed orthodoxy.72 Certainly, the theology of William Forbes could be characterized this way, even if, as Mullan suggests, the accusations of Arminianism levelled against him were tendentious.73 However, a common thread united the theology of John and William Forbes: the perception that Roman Catholicism posed a greater threat to the Reformed Kirk than differences within Protestantism. As I have argued elsewhere, William Forbes assumed that a broad theological front was necessary to combat the Counter-Reformation.74 John Forbes worked from the same assumption, but he was more selective in his choice of allies. Unlike William, John never aimed for the ‘middle way’ between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism advocated by some Caroline Divines (and before them George Witzel [1501–73] and George Cassander [1513–66]). John Forbes argued that it was possible to remain loyal to the confessions of the Reformed Kirk, and to maintain unity in essentials with the Lutherans.75 In fact the Forbes’s Protestant opponents saw William’s accommodation of Roman Catholic moderates and John’s accommodation of Erastianism, adiaphorism and Lutheranism as fatal concessions to popery rather than as tactics for combating it. Better, they argued, to stand firm on Scriptural truth. Of course the Aberdonian theologians also accorded primacy to Scripture, but they also deemed reverence for the past and the corporate discipline of the church to be necessary restraints on theological subjectivism and anarchy. Protestant disunity, as John Forbes observed, was the fatal flaw on which Roman Catholic pamphleteers had always homed, presenting it as the inevitable symptom of Protestantism’s rupture with the past and the church’s legitimate ministry.76 In a letter to Charles I commending the reading of scripture, John Forbes contrasted 71. See towards this end Aaron Clay Denlinger, ‘Swimming with the Reformed tide: John Forbes of Corse (1593–1648) on double predestination and particular redemption’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (forthcoming). 72. See Aaron Clay Denlinger, ‘“Men of Gallio’s Naughty Faith?”: The Aberdeen Doctors on Reformed and Lutheran Concord’, Church History and Religious Culture 92.1 (2012), pp. 57–83; David Mullan, ‘Theology in the Church of Scotland c. 1618-c. 1640: A Calvinist Consensus?’ SCJ 26.3 (1995), pp. 595–617. 73. Mullan, pp. 601–12. 74. Nicholas Thompson, ‘Martin Bucer and Early Seventeenth Century Scottish Irenicism’, in The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain, pp. 167–91 (Patrick Collinson and Polly Ha, eds; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 184. 75. See Denlinger, ‘Men of Naughty Faith’, pp. 70–83, esp. 74, and John Forbes, Instructiones, pp. 724–5. 76. Ibid., p. 726 recalls the Scots Jesuit Archibald Hamilton’s Calvinianae confusionis demonstratio contra maledicam ministrorum Scotiae responsionem (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau, 1581) and the response it elicited from ex-Jesuit Thomas Smeton, Ad virulentum

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Roman Catholic appeals to antiquity with the counter-reaction of those who now claimed that catholic antiquity was: alien to the sacred scriptures, that it detracts from sacred scriptures, or that it is superfluous and useless. Such silly cheerleaders for scripture seem to be bent on subverting the pastoral and teaching ministry established by divine assistance; each person, confident in his own hermeneutical expertise, ignorantly and foolishly spurns the commentaries, discourses, sermons and synodical expositions of all the pastors and teachers that Christ has given the church for its edification.77

Faced with a diocese in which religious dissent had made the uncatechized ‘incessantlie bolde, to moue Questions of Religion’, Patrick Forbes sought to combat recusancy with a pro-active episcopate, a well-educated ministry, and loyalty to the religious policy of the crown. The nature of the challenge posed in the recusant tracts also convinced him of the need for sustained study of Christian antiquity. However, by 1637, what John Forbes called the ‘papist objection regarding hatred and dissension in the Reformed churches’ had acquired an uncomfortable verisimilitude.78 The priority Patrick Forbes had given to the fight with Roman Catholicism gave way to the priorities of factionalism within the Reformed Kirk. Aberdonian theology found itself thrust to the margins of Scottish church life by the narcissism of small differences.

Archibaldi Hamiltoni apostatae dialogum de confusione Calvinianae sectae apud Scotos … (Edinburgh: John Ross, 1579), which argued for Protestantism’s fundamental unity. 77. John Forbes, Instructiones, fol. a4r. See also, ibid., fol. b1v (my own translation). 78. John Forbes, Instructiones, p. 726 (my own translation).

Chapter 5 S C O T T I SH H Y P O T H E T IC A L U N I V E R S A L I SM : R O B E RT B A R O N ( c . 1 5 9 6 – 1 6 3 9 ) O N G O D ’ S L OV E A N D C H R I ST ’ S D E AT H F O R A L L

Aaron Clay Denlinger ‘Who is not familiar with Baron, whose praises have been sung by so many theologians and philosophers?’ So queried the author of the preface to the posthumous publication of Robert Baron’s Metaphysica generalis in 1654.1 The rhetorical force of the question is somewhat lacking in our day since Baron’s name has largely been forgotten, but in his own day Baron – lecturer in philosophy at St Salvator’s College in St Andrews (1613–19), minister in Keith (1619–24) and Aberdeen (1624–31), and professor of divinity at Aberdeen’s Marischal College (1624–39) – was in fact well known.2 Nearly all his works saw multiple editions in Britain and on the continent.3 The Metaphysica generalis formed part of the curriculum for students at Oxford University and Trinity College, Dublin, well into the eighteenth century.4 Baron’s Presbyterian contemporary Robert Baillie, though

1. Robert Baron, Metaphysica generalis (London: R. Daniel, 1658), 3r. The 1658 edition which I have had access to contains the preface from the first printing (Leiden: F. Moyard, 1654) of Baron’s work. Translations from Latin are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2. Ian M. Thompson, ‘Baron, Robert (c. 1596–1639)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For further biographical information on Baron see Donald MacMillan, The Aberdeen Doctors (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909), pp. 234–45. 3. Robert Baron, Philosophia theologiae ancillans (St Andrews, 1621; Oxford, 1641; Amsterdam, 1649; Oxford, 1658); idem, Disputatio theologica, de formali objecto fidei (Aberdeen, 1627); idem, Ad Georgii Turnebulli tetragonismum pseudographum apodixis Catholica, sive apologia pro disputatione de formali objecto fidei (Aberdeen, 1631; London, 1657) idem, Disputatio theologica, de vero discrimine peccati mortalis & venialis (Aberdeen, 1633; Amsterdam, 1649; Oxford, 1658); idem, Metaphysica generalis (Leiden, 1654; Leiden, 1657; London, 1658; London, 1670; Cambridge, 1685). 4. Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen: University and Society in Pre-industrial Britain, 1500–1700 (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 89, 164.

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disapproving of Baron’s episcopalianism and opposition to the National Covenant in 1638, did not hesitate to describe the man as ‘ane ornament of our nation’.5 Although Baron’s published theological works – each directed to the maintenance of Reformed doctrine over against Roman Catholic teaching – were generally applauded by contemporary Scottish divines, there existed some uncertainty among his contemporaries about the tenor of his theology as a whole. Samuel Rutherford, exiled to the north-east for non-conformity in 1636, expressed his negative view of Baron and Aberdeen’s other divines in no uncertain terms: ‘all are corrupt here’.6 This rather bleak assessment followed directly from Rutherford’s complaint that Aberdeen’s ‘great doctors’ persistently ‘troubled’ him with debates over ‘Arminian controversies’; Rutherford named Baron as his chief antagonist in such contests.7 Given the conviction common at the time that Arminianism, particularly in its British variety, was inchoatus Papismus, not to mention Baron’s support for the controversial Perth Articles of 1618, Rutherford probably had Baron in view again when he affirmed that Aberdeen ‘consisteth of Papists’.8 Rutherford’s testimony to Baron’s heterodoxy undoubtedly played a role in the decision of the 1640 General Assembly to review Baron’s doctrine, despite the fact that he had died one year earlier. Towards that end the Assembly organized a search of Baron’s private study, wherein were discovered several unpublished papers which, upon examination, ‘were not found sound’ – a rather obscure verdict to be sure, but one that seemingly confirmed Rutherford’s opinion that Baron and orthodoxy had parted ways.9 There are, of course, reasons to question the judgements of Rutherford and the 1640 Assembly regarding Baron’s theology. Rutherford was known to apply the Arminian tag rather liberally to individuals (for example, John Cameron) whose views differed from his own but were, in actual fact, not Arminian at all.10 And the divines at the Assembly had an obvious political interest in blackening the 5. Robert Baillie, The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie (David Laing, ed.; 3 vols; repr. Edinburgh: A. Lawrie, 1841–2), vol. 1, p. 248. 6. Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford (Andrew Bonar, ed.; 2 vols; repr., Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1863), vol. 1, p. 342. 7. Ibid., p. 341. See also ibid., pp. 293–4. 8. Ibid., p. 197. So also Rutherford deemed Baron and company’s efforts to establish concord between Europe’s Reformed and Lutheran churches a subtle move towards ‘reconciliation with popery’ (pp. 373–4). See Aaron Clay Denlinger, ‘“Men of Gallio’s naughty faith?”: The Aberdeen Doctors on Reformed and Lutheran Concord’, Church History and Religious Culture 92.1 (2012), pp. 57–83. 9. John Spalding, History of the Troubles and Memorable Transactions in Scotland, from the year 1624 to 1645 (2 vols; Aberdeen: printed for T. Evans, 1792), vol. 1, p. 245. See also James Gordon, History of Scots Affairs, from 1636 to 1641 (3 vols; repr., Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1841), vol. 3, pp. 235–9. 10. See John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolution: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 141. On the orthodoxy of Cameron’s views see Richard Muller, ‘Divine Covenants, Absolute and Conditional: John



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names of theologians who refused to subscribe the National Covenant; Baron’s surviving colleagues who maintained resistance to the Covenant were deposed by that Assembly on rather dubious grounds.11 Moreover, contemporary affirmations of Baron’s orthodoxy can be found to balance accusations of heterodoxy. So, for example, James Gordon (1617–86), minister of Rothiemay, insisted that Baron’s death ‘robbed the reformed church of one of her best championes that ever Scottland afoorded’, and implicitly dismissed any charge of doctrinal deviancy on Baron’s part by adding: ‘the worst that his most bitter enemyes, to this houer, can say against [him] is, that he was a great opposer of the Covenant’.12 Subsequent scholarship has merely aggravated rather than resolved the ambiguity concerning Baron’s theological orientation. In modern times Baron has been dutifully trotted out as proof of the inroads Arminianism made into Scotland in the early seventeenth century.13 Alternatively, his thought has served to demonstrate the existence of a ‘Calvinist consensus’ in Scotland in the years preceding civil war.14 Claiming Baron for team Arminianism most forcefully last century was Donald MacMillan, who pointed to Baron’s views on the atonement and divine election as definitive proof of Baron’s departure from the ‘strict Calvinist orthodoxy’ of his day. Baron, claims MacMillan, believed that ‘Christ died for all men’, and that ‘predestination was not absolute and arbitrary, but proceeded from [God’s] foreknowledge of the faith and repentance of some, and of the voluntary unbelief and impenitence of others’.15 So also Michiel Kitshoff, noting Baron’s affirmation of a universal atonement and a ‘conditional predestination proceeding from God’s foreknowledge’, names Baron’s doctrine ‘liberal Calvinism resembling in many respects that of Jacobus Arminius’.16 Most recently David Stevenson, citing Kitshoff, has affirmed that Baron was ‘undoubtedly … influenced by Arminian ideas’.17 G. D. Henderson, on the other hand, has maintained that ‘Baron was no Arminian’, and drawing attention to criticisms of the Remonstrants in Baron’s Philosophia theologiae ancillans of 1621, insists ‘Baron’s writings prove him Cameron and the Early Orthodox Development of Reformed Covenant Theology’, MAJT 17 (2006), pp. 11–56. 11. See Spalding, History, vol. 1, pp. 243–5. 12. Gordon, History, vol. 3, p. 90. 13. See especially Micheil Kitshoff, ‘Aspects of Arminianism in Scotland’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of St Andrews, 1967), pp. 132–5. 14. David Mullan, ‘Theology in the Church of Scotland 1618–c. 1640: A Calvinist Consensus?’, SCJ 26, 3 (1995), pp. 595–617 (606). 15. MacMillan, Aberdeen Doctors, p. 113. On the supposed Arminian character of Baron’s theology more broadly, see p. 58. 16. Kitshoff, ‘Arminianism in Scotland’, p. 135. In naming Arminius’s own thought as ‘liberal Calvinism’ Kitshoff follows Herbert Foster, ‘Liberal Calvinism: the Remonstrants at the Synod of Dort in 1618’, HTR 16, 1 (1923), pp. 1–37. 17. David Stevenson, King’s College, Aberdeen: 1560–1641: From Protestant Reformation to Covenanting Revolution (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990), p. 110.

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a Calvinist’.18 Elsewhere Henderson attributes ‘moderate Calvinism’ to Baron, noting his acceptance of ‘the Amyraldist doctrine that Christ died for all men’.19 George McMahon likewise affirms that Baron’s theology, as that of Aberdeen’s other Episcopalian divines, was ‘in fundamentals Calvinist’. Contra claims noted above that Baron understood divine election as contingent on foreseen faith; McMahon insists that he ‘was in agreement with the extreme Calvinists that divine election was unconditional – and thus [he] rejected the Arminian position’. McMahon credits an infralapsarian position on election to Baron, and identifies the same as the principal point of contention between him and the supralapsarian Rutherford.20 Most recently David George Mullan, in arguing the existence of a ‘Calvinist consensus’ transcending political and liturgical differences between ecclesiastical factions in early seventeenth-century Scotland, has reaffirmed Baron’s infralapsarian perspective on election and doctrine of a ‘general atonement’, concluding that ‘what Baron taught was not Arminianism’.21 Two common factors informing these disparate judgements regarding Baron’s thought should be noted. The first is a failure to reference – and so, presumably, a failure to examine – Baron’s own writings when passing verdict upon his doctrine.22 Lack of engagement with Baron’s works may stem from the relative inaccessibility of those works – namely, the manuscripts which ‘were not found sound’ by the Assembly in 1640 – which are, as will be seen, most pertinent to any consideration of his beliefs vis-à-vis Remonstrant doctrine.23 A second factor informing scholarly ambivalence regarding Baron’s thought is the rather unhelpful restriction of terms to assess his doctrine to that dubious pair of antonyms ‘Arminian’ and ‘Calvinist’, the latter term usually modified by some equally dubious adjective like ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ (thereby positioning Baron to the left, as it were, of more ‘rigid’, ‘strict’ or ‘extreme’ Calvinists/Calvinism). 18. G. D. Henderson, The Burning Bush: Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1957), p. 86; idem, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), pp. 81, 90. 19. Henderson, Religious Life, p. 50. 20. George McMahon, ‘The Scottish Episcopate, 1600–1638’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1972), pp. 251, 256. 21. Mullan, ‘Theology in Scotland’, p. 606. 22. Two exceptions should be noted. Henderson observes Baron’s interaction with Remonstrant doctrine in his published Philosophia Theologiae ancillans; see Religious Life, p. 87, and corresponding note 65 on p. 263. Mullan footnotes Baron’s unpublished Septenarius sacer de principiis et causis fidei catholicae; see ‘Theology in Scotland’, p. 606n. 76. He provides no quotes from that work. 23. Aberdeen holds in their Special Collections three Latin manuscripts by Baron which I believe to be the unpublished works examined by the Assembly. These are: Disputationes quaedam theologicae (Aberdeen University Library Special Collections MS136); Disputationes theologicae de triplici hominis statu (Aberdeen University Library Special Collections MS136); and Septenarius sacer de principiis et causis fidei catholicae (Aberdeen University Library Special Collections MS136).



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This is a problematic tendency found in scholarly assessments of early modern Scottish thought more broadly; it is a tendency I will address more thoroughly in conclusion to this essay. My aim in this study is to sketch a more informed and careful portrait of Baron’s beliefs than that discovered in earlier studies, focusing particularly on those aspects of his thought which seem to have engendered the most disagreement about him and underwritten divergent claims about his ‘Calvinism’ or ‘Arminianism’: his doctrines of predestination and atonement. For this I will rely principally upon Baron’s unpublished (and incomplete) Septenarius sacer de principiis et causis fidei catholicae.24 In a section of that work titled ‘Concerning the true sense of that statement “God wants all to be saved”’, Baron addressed two issues which shed considerable light upon his understanding of divine predestination (in relation to human faith) and (the scope of) Christ’s satisfaction for sin: first, ‘whether there is in God a certain will which is ineffective or conditional’; and secondly, ‘whether Christ was delivered unto death for everyone’.25 After exploring Baron’s treatment of these issues, I will conclude this piece by reflecting a bit upon where his thought properly lies on the map of theological opinions current in his day. In that process I aim to demonstrate that recent studies on the nature and characteristics of Protestant Reformed orthodoxy supply far better tools for naming Baron’s theology and placing it in relation to that of his contemporaries than is provided by those terms which have governed previous attempts to accomplish that task.

God’s Universal Will to Save Baron’s discussion of ‘the true sense of that statement “God wants all to be saved”’ occurs in the context of lengthy reflections about ‘whether God, who wants all to be saved (as the Apostle says in 1 Tim. 2), has denied the nations destitute of faith in Christ the means necessary unto salvation’.26 Having previously argued that explicit faith in Jesus Christ, who is revealed only in the gospel, is necessary for salvation, Baron notes ‘an infinite multitude in the New World and the more remote parts of Asia and Africa who lack the light of the gospel’.27 God’s 24. In the introduction to the work Baron promises a thorough consideration of the principia of saving faith (i.e. those realities ‘from which faith proceeds, or upon which it depends’ (Septenarius sacer, p. 1). At the time of his death Baron had not yet completed his treatment of the first principium of faith, divine revelation. 25. Baron, Septenarius sacer, pp. 49–72. Because only one manuscript copy of Baron’s work exists, I have adopted the less cumbersome practice of citing that manuscript’s page numbers (supplied by Baron) rather than the partes, quaestiones, articuli, sectiones, and paragrapha into which the work is divided. 26. Ibid., pp. 29–49. 27. Ibid., p. 29. For Baron’s argument regarding the necessity of explicit faith in Christ for salvation, see pp. 22–9.

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providential withholding of the gospel from so many persons seems hard to reconcile with God’s desire for their salvation. In formulating a response to this ‘serious and difficult question’ Baron takes his cues primarily from Augustine’s fifth-century disciple Prosper of Aquitaine, who ‘contemplated this mystery more than all the Fathers of the ancient church’.28 In his work De vocatione omnium gentium, Prosper advanced three assertions which, in Baron’s judgement, comprise the right theological response to the question at hand. ‘The first is that God wills all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.’29 With Prosper, Baron understands ‘all men’ in the apostolic affirmation quoted (1 Tim. 2.14) to mean every human person without exception; no one is excluded in the divine will to save.30 ‘The second is that no one is actually saved or comes to a knowledge of the truth by his own merits or abilities, but only by the power and operation of divine grace’.31 Third and finally, ‘no one in this life can know exactly why God does not administer means of grace equally to all, or why God, who wants all to be saved, does not save all’.32 Prosper’s assertions do not serve to alleviate the tension inherent to the question at hand; they serve to state it with greater force and clarity. His first and second assertions, in particular, establish an apparent contradiction between God’s sentiments and his actions towards humankind, or at least towards those who are not ultimately saved. God loves them and wills their salvation. God denies them a particular grace without which they will not be saved. His third assertion, far from serving to resolve this paradox, asserts the futility of attempting – at least ‘in this life’ – to reconcile these seemingly contradictory truths. According to Baron, then, the proper dogmatic response to the apparent contradiction between God’s universal will to save and God’s sovereign discrimination in the distribution of his saving grace is to assert both truths with equal rigour. Neither truth, in other words, should be watered down or washed away in service to the other. This, of course, requires a rather careful balancing act; Baron proceeds by identifying two categories of theologians who ‘shrink back from the moderation and modesty of St Prosper’ on this issue, exalting one dogmatic truth at the expense of the other. On one hand are ‘those who affirm that God’s grace for the obtaining of salvation is universal, so that its efficacy in some persons rather than others depends upon the freedom of man’s will’.33 Baron has in mind certain medieval scholastics as well as contemporary Jesuit thinkers who:

28. Ibid., pp. 29–30, 48. 29. Ibid., p. 30, citing Prosper of Aquitaine, De vocatione omnium gentium, 2.1 (PL vol. 51, p. 686). 30. See Prosper, De vocatione, 2.2 (PL vol. 51, pp. 687–8). 31. Baron, Septenarius sacer, p. 30, citing Prosper, De vocatione, 2.1 (PL vol. 51, pp. 686–7). 32. Ibid., p. 30, citing Prosper, De vocatione, 2.1 (PL vol. 51, p. 687). 33. Ibid., p. 31.



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explain and confirm their opinion with that well-known axiom facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam. If, they say, the nations were to make good use of those natural gifts and means of salvation originally distributed to them, then God, who does not deny grace to those who do what lies within them, would grant them fuller grace, … and lead them finally to a knowledge of Christ.34

Those advancing this position, Baron notes, deny that man can properly (or condignly) ‘merit grace through a good use of free will’. They affirm, however, that man might, ‘by virtue of his natural abilities’, render himself ‘disposed to grace’ – or at least ‘less indisposed to grace’ – which God in turn will grant according to his promise.35 In Baron’s judgement such doctrine ‘is clearly semi-Pelagian, and hence contrary to Scripture and the general consensus of the Fathers’. He rejects it on the grounds that it makes God a debtor to man in the distribution of his saving grace: ‘If God has regard to deeds performed by the virtues of [human] nature when he confers helping grace upon some and denies the same to others, then our calling unto salvation in some way depends upon our works, contrary to Paul’s teaching in Rom. 11.6, Eph. 2.8–9, 2 Tim. 1.9, and Tit. 3.9.’ Moreover, such a doctrine creates space for human boasting: ‘The one who is called has distinguished himself [by his proper use of natural gifts] from the one who is not, contrary to Paul’s teaching in 1 Cor. 4.7: “Who has set you apart from others? And what do you have that you have not received?”’36 While rejecting the positive assertion that man might elicit saving grace from God through the right use of natural gifts, Baron acknowledges some truth in the inverse claim that man’s abuse of natural gifts ‘provides a peculiar reason that he is denied grace’.37 ‘Sacred Scripture’, notes Baron, ‘clearly testifies that man’s prior rejection of God is a cause of divine dereliction: “Because you have forsaken Jehovah, he has forsaken you” (2 Chron. 24.20).’38 But two caveats are required. First, it should be noted that God also, and justly, denies men grace because ‘they have sinned in Adam’s loins’, regardless of their subsequent abuse of natural gifts.39 In other words, actual sins merely aggravate the culpability established by original sin. So ‘Thomas, following Augustine, says that grace is justly withheld from those

34. Ibid., p. 35. 35. Ibid., pp. 35–8. In addition to the medieval scholastics Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, Duns Scotus and Gabriel Biel, Baron names the Jesuits Luis de Molina and Leonard Lessius as representatives of the doctrine that man can, by virtue of his natural abilities, render himself ‘disposed or prepared for grace’ (pp. 35–7). He names the Jesuits Francisco Suárez and Diego Ruiz de Montoya as representatives of the doctrine that man can, by virtue of his natural abilities, render himself at least ‘less indisposed to grace’ (pp. 37–8). 36. Ibid., pp. 36–7. 37. Ibid., p. 45. 38. Ibid., p. 40. Baron also references Prov. 1.24. 39. Ibid., p. 45.

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to whom it is not given as punishment for previous sin, even original sin’.40 It should be noted, secondly, that human sin – whether original or actual – provides no ‘exact or adequate explanation for why certain men are denied grace, since … grace is given to other men who are no less unworthy’.41 Equally removed, on the other hand, from Prosper’s ‘moderation and modesty’ are those who ‘recklessly affirm that no divine grace whatsoever extends to those who have not received the gospel’, and that, ‘in the end, God in no way wants them to be saved’.42 Here Baron has in mind certain Reformed peers who, he says, interpret the biblical phrase ‘God wants all to be saved’ to mean not that God wants ‘every person’ to be saved, but that he wants ‘every kind of person, i.e. individuals from every nation, rank and position’ to be saved; thus they ultimately understand ‘all’ as a reference ‘only to the elect’, who in fact receive the means necessary to salvation. According to Baron, ‘the principal reason they cling so tenaciously to this stern doctrine’ is recognition that ‘if God wants some to be saved who are not actually saved, it follows that in God there is somehow an ineffective will, a desire for things to happen which never in fact occur, and this seems absurd’.43 In response to these theologians Baron argues that God has granted some grace even to those who are not ultimately elected to eternal life – ‘not only to the reprobate living within the church, but also to the nations’ – and has done so from a genuine desire that they seek him. Concerning ‘the reprobate within the church’: these ‘are granted certain gracious assistances, not only externally but also internally (Heb. 6.4–5)’.44 Baron appeals to those theologians who belonged to the British delegation to the Synod of Dort, who in their suffrage on the articles of that Synod affirmed that ‘God truly and earnestly calls and invites the reprobate within the church to faith and repentance, and neither deserts them nor desists from pushing them forward in the way of true conversion until they first desert him by voluntarily neglecting or rejecting his grace’.45 He anticipates an objection: ‘You will say it follows that the reason one rather than another is converted is to be found not in God, but in men themselves; one made good use, another bad, of that initial grace given to them.’ Baron unequivocally rejects such an implication, insisting that both ‘the elect who are actually converted’ and ‘the reprobate’ equally ‘abuse that initial grace’. Indeed ‘all [within the church] are called by God 40. Ibid., p. 46, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, 2, 5, ad primum. 41. Ibid., p. 41. 42. Ibid., p. 31. 43. Ibid., p. 31. 44. Ibid., p. 47. Baron does not define these ‘external’ or ‘internal’ graces specifically; presumably he has in mind the general call of the gospel and some internal promptings of God’s Spirit towards repentance. He distinguishes these ‘assistances’ from the God’s ‘efficacious call’ to the elect. 45. Ibid., p. 47, paraphrasing the delegates’ 3rd and 4th positions on the 3rd and 4th articles; see Anthony Milton, The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), pp. 253–4.



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in a certain manner which they resist’, but while God ‘justly deserts some because they have first deserted him’, others are ‘not deserted, but are led by an extraordinary and peculiar grace of God to genuine faith and repentance, and are saved’.46 Those outside the church have some grace and certain gifts entrusted to them as well; they have ‘the law of nature written on their hearts (Rom. 2.14–15)’ and some further ‘witness to God (Acts 14.17)’ through ‘the works of creation’. Baron quotes Rom. 1.19–20: ‘What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.’47 He discovers in Acts 17.27 a clear statement of the purpose for such divine self-disclosure: ‘It is said that God offers these means to them “in order that they might seek him”.’ Nevertheless some – Baron specifically names contemporary English divine William Twisse – discover in the ultimate clause of Romans 1.20 (‘so that men are without excuse’) a rather different purpose for God’s witness to himself in creation; they insist that ‘these means are imparted to [those who are not ultimately saved] merely in order to render them anapologia, that is, inexcusable before God’.48 Baron takes strong exception to this interpretation of the final clause of Romans 1.20: ‘These words should not be understood to indicate cause, but only consequence; in other words, they should not be read as naming the reason that God manifests his invisible qualities to the nations, but only as naming the actual outcome of that manifestation.’ It is man’s sinful response to God’s self-disclosure through ‘the works of creation’ that properly renders man anapologia in the judgement; thus ‘inexcusability before God’ is ‘only secondarily and per accidens, not per se, an end of God’s manifestation’.49 He highlights the support his reading of Romans 1.20 finds in the biblical commentaries of Reformed theologians Heinrich Bullinger, Martin Bucer, Augustin Marlorat, Wolfgang Musculus and David Pareus.50 And he discovers a further argument in his favour in the claim of Rom. 1.21 that ‘those who knew God’ through his self-disclosure in creation ‘did not give thanks to God.’ He explains: If God offered these means [of knowing him] to those who are perishing only to the end of rendering them inexcusable, then those means offered to them would not have the proper character of gifts, and consequently, those who abused those means and rendered themselves anapologia or inexcusable would be falsely accused of ingratitude towards God.51 46. Ibid., p. 47, referencing the British delegation’s 6th and 7th positions on the 3rd and 4th articles at Dort; see Milton, British Delegation, pp. 255–6. 47. Ibid., p. 31. 48. Ibid., p. 31. See William Twisse, Vindiciae gratiae, potestatis, ac providentiae Dei (Amsterdam: Ioannem Ianssonium, 1632), lib. 1, pars 2, sect. 12. 49. Ibid., p. 34. 50. Ibid., pp. 33–4. 51. Ibid., p. 33.

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The charge of ingratitude against those who squander the gift of God’s testimony to himself in creation assumes that such testimony flows from a genuine desire for their good and well-being. As noted above, Baron perceives the fundamental objection against a universal salvific will in God to be that it credits God, at least by implication, with an ineffective will; he tackles this problem in a discrete section titled ‘whether there is in God a certain will which is ineffective or conditional’.52 Baron answers ‘yes’ to that question. God genuinely wills the salvation of all, but all are not saved; something, therefore, renders that divine will ineffective. He recognizes, however, that ‘Arminians, Lutherans, and some Romanists’ also affirm an ineffective will in God, and he is keen to dissociate his view from: those who teach that God equally or indifferently seeks and intends the salvation of all, so that the reason one is saved rather than another is to be sought not in God’s eternal election or the measure and quality of grace which men in time receive, but in the free volition of men themselves, presupposing some grace.53

In contrast to any such scheme of grace and salvation, Baron affirms that: God generally wills all to be saved by his conditional or ineffective will, but he also specifically intends and seeks the salvation of certain men by his effective will, and he decrees the salvation of certain men prior to any foreknowledge of faith, repentance, or good works which they in time will perform.54

The arguments that Baron subsequently advances serve to demonstrate the reality of some ineffective will in God per se, regardless of its orientation towards the salvation of all. He notes, for example, that God ‘loves and prescribes many good works in his law’. If God loves certain works, he must genuinely desire their performance by men. But ‘many good works which God prescribes do not happen’. Thus, Baron reasons, ‘it is necessary to attribute to God a certain will or volition which is, in fact, ineffective’.55 Likewise, ‘God often, in sacred scripture, promises men good things, some temporal and some eternal, which in fact they never receive because they fail to fulfil some condition which is attached to the promise’. So, for example, ‘God promised Cain his favour and acceptance, adding the condition “if you do well” (Gen. 4); God promised the Israelites that he would dispel the remaining nations from the land, adding the condition “if you cling to Jehovah” (Josh. 23. 5, 8)’. Similarly, ‘Adam and his posterity were promised immortality on condition of obedience’. Such conditional promises, Baron reasons, require recognition of ‘a certain ineffective will in God’, for a promise made to man without

52. Ibid., pp. 49–54. 53. Ibid., p. 49 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., p. 50.



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some corresponding desire that man fulfil the prescribed condition and inherit that which is promised would be ‘false, deceitful, and hypocritical’.56 Baron also appeals to authorities in support of his doctrine: ‘A conditional or ineffective will in God for the salvation of all is acknowledged not only by the sacred Fathers, … but also by many orthodox theologians.’ Among the Fathers he names Chrysostom, Jerome, Prosper, John of Damascus, ‘and, indeed, Augustine himself ’ as supporters of his doctrine. Among orthodox Reformed theologians he names Jerome Zanchi, Amandus Polanus and Musculus.57 Lucas Trelcatius, he notes further, ‘distinguishes between an absolute and a conditional divine will, even if he does not explicitly say that God, by virtue of his conditional will, wants all to be saved’.58 Pareus, moreover, ‘not only acknowledges a conditional will (which he also calls “antecedent”) in God, but also asserts that, according to it, God wills all to be saved by faith, i.e., on the condition that they believe in the Son of God’.59 So also Daniel Chamier ‘distinguishes between … God’s will of approbation and his will of decree, and says that God, by virtue of the former, wills all to come to salvation’.60 Baron addresses, finally, two objections to the doctrine of an ineffective or conditional will in God. Some theologians, he notes first, refuse to attribute an ineffective will to God because they deem such ‘to be an imperfection’. He responds that ‘an ineffective will is only an imperfection when it exists in one who is unable to procure that which he wills’. God, of course, is able to accomplish whatever he desires. Hence his will for certain outcomes remains ineffective merely by virtue of his own free decision not to achieve his desire.61 In other words, what trumps God’s (ineffective) desire for some end is not a force or forces outside of God, but God’s own effective desire for some other end. ‘Some say’, secondly: that if God wants all to be saved on condition of faith and repentance, it follows that God’s decision concerning the salvation of men remains in suspense until he foresees who will fulfil that condition and who will not. Consequently, the reason he elects one man and not another lies in those men themselves; that is, 56. Ibid., pp. 50–1. 57. Ibid., pp. 52–3, citing Zanchius, De natura Dei (Heidelberg: Iacobus Mylius, 1577), lib. 3, ca. 4, q. 3; Polanus, Syntagma theologiae christianae (Hanau: Wechelianis, 1609), lib. 2, ca. 19; Musculus, Loci communes (Erfurt: Georgium Bauuman, 1563), ca. De volunte Dei, ca. De remissione peccatorum. 58. Ibid., p. 53, citing Trelcatius, Institutio theologiae (London: Iohannis Bill, 1604), lib. 1, disp. De Deo. 59. Ibid., citing Pareus, Roberti Bellarmini … de gratia et libero arbitrio libri VI... explicati et castigati studio (Heidelberg: Iohannis Lancelloti, 1614), lib. 2, ca. 3. 60. Ibid., citing Chamier, Panstratiae Catholicae, sive, controversiarum de religione advresus Pontificios corpus (Geneva: typis Roverianis, 1626), tom. 3, lib. 7, ca. 6, and tom. 2, lib. 3, ca. 9, para. 19. 61. Ibid., pp. 53–4.

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God foresees that one man and not another will fulfil that condition of faith and repentance under which he wants all to be saved.

Baron again rejects the claim that a doctrine of a divine, ineffective will only properly fits in such a heterodox scheme of election. He argues: ‘Just as God from eternity wills to grant men salvation on condition of faith and repentance, so also from eternity, and without any foresight of human volitional consent, he resolves to grant certain men the most effective resources to fulfil that condition, and denies the same to other men.’ God, in other words, also has an effective will, by which he determines without regard to future human decisions that some men will indeed be saved and others will not. Baron concludes his defence of God’s ineffective, universal will to save by stressing again the proper relationship between divine election and human faith: ‘God has not elected any man to glory because he foresaw that that man would fulfil the condition of faith and repentance. On the contrary, he himself causes the condition to be fulfilled in a man because he has elected that man to glory.’62

Christ’s Death for All Having distinguished God’s general desire for the salvation of all from his peculiar desire for the salvation of his elect, the question follows whether Christ’s redeeming work corresponds to God’s general (ineffective) will or his peculiar (effective) will. It must, in other words, be asked ‘whether Christ’s death, according to his own intention and that of his Father, was for each and every individual, or whether in truth it was only for the elect?’. On this issue, once again, Baron identifies ‘two extreme opinions’ and ‘a third, middle one which ought to be held’.63 On one hand are: the Remonstrants and others who teach that Christ died with equal intention for each and every man, so that the reason Christ’s death and satisfaction procured more for Peter or Paul than Judas the Traitor must be sought in each person’s own free choice, presupposing a common and sufficient grace, and not in the intention of God the Father who sent his Son into the world, or in that of the Son who was sent.

Baron rejects this doctrine in no uncertain terms: ‘We damn this opinion and confidently assert that Christ, according to the peculiar intention and love of God the Father, died for the elect, and only for them did his death procure, in and of itself and by an infallible consequence, remission of sins and eternal life.’ He cites a string of biblical texts which indicate the peculiar efficacy Christ’s death had for 62. Ibid., p. 54. 63. Ibid., p. 55.



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the elect; for example, Eph. 5.25–6: ‘Christ loved the Church and gave himself for it in order to sanctify it.’64 On the other hand are certain Reformed divines, ‘more rigid than necessary’, who rightly affirm that Christ’s death infallibly procured salvation for the elect, but wrongly conclude that it had no bearing – according to divine intention or actual outcome – upon the reprobate. ‘They think that God the Father’s intention or plan in sending his Son was only to redeem the elect; thus Christ rendered no [redemptive] payment to God for the reprobate.’65 Baron rejects this doctrine of certain Reformed thinkers in noticeably more moderate terms: ‘We cannot fully embrace this opinion.’ He advances four objections to this view, each revolving around a core of biblical texts. First, he observes, ‘the Holy Spirit testifies in Scripture that Christ died for “the world” (Jn 1.29, 3.16 and 4.42), for “all” (2 Cor. 5.15, 1 Tim. 2.6 and 1 Jn 2.2), and indeed, for the reprobate specifically (Heb. 6.6, 10.29 and 2 Pet. 2.1)’. There are, secondly, biblical texts which ‘place the benefit of redemption before the eyes of each and every person as an efficient motive or incentive … to glorify God in body and spirit.’ So Paul and Peter, in 1 Cor. 6.20 and 1 Pet. 1.17–18 respectively, impress upon their audiences the necessity of honouring God by appeal to the value of Christ’s blood shed for them. If the obligation of ‘holiness and gratitude towards God’ pertains to all, Baron reasons, the proper incentive to such – Christ’s redeeming work – must as well.66 Citing again Heb. 6.6 and 1 Pet. 2.1, Baron notes, thirdly, that Scripture charges the reprobate with ingratitude for ‘neglecting that benefit of redemption which Christ has procured for them’, a charge which loses all force if Christ’s redeeming work never actually pertained to the reprobate in any real way. Those, Baron adds, who make the redemption attributed to the reprobate in these texts ‘putative’ (rather than ‘real’) make the reprobate’s ingratitude merely ‘putative’ as well, ‘which is clearly adverse to the Holy Spirit’s intention in the places cited’.67 Baron notes, finally, passages of Scripture which command all to believe in Christ (Mk 1.15, 16.16, Jn 6.29), as well as some which condemn the reprobate for unbelief in Christ (Jn 3.18, 36). He reasons that no individual can be commanded or invited to believe in Christ – that is, to believe that Christ has died for him or her – unless Christ has in fact done so; otherwise the reprobate ‘are commanded to believe something which is false; indeed, they are damned for their failure to believe a lie’.68 A further argument against the doctrine that Christ’s death pertained only to the elect is discovered in ‘the testimonies of the Fathers, who frequently teach that Christ died for each and every man’. Baron quotes Gregory of Nazianzus, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Synesius, and Augustine – ‘even if, in many places, [Augustine] seems inclined towards that opinion which denies that God wants all 64. Ibid. Baron also cites Jn 2.51, Jn 10.15; Rom. 8.32 and Rom. 8.30, 34. 65. Ibid., pp. 56–7. 66. Ibid., p. 57. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., p. 58.

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to be saved’.69 More substantial patristic proof is provided again by Prosper, ‘who many times throughout his works openly professes and upholds the universality of Christ’s death’.70 ‘Rejecting, therefore, these two extreme opinions, we should hold to a third, middle one.’ Baron’s via media comprises two fundamental assertions, each one implicit in a ‘proper understanding’ of that ‘common and ancient distinction which says that Christ’s death was sufficient, but not efficient, for all’.71 The ‘sufficiency for all’ of Christ’s death, Baron explains, is no mere affirmation of the intrinsic value of Christ’s sacrificial offering, but a claim that Christ actually accomplished something ‘for all’ by his death. ‘Christ died for everyone to the end’, first of all, ‘that everyone might be reconcilable (reconciabiles) to God, and that everyone’s sins might be pardonable (condonabilia), on condition of repentance and faith in the gospel.’ Christ’s death, in other words, grounds and secures the genuine possibility of forgiveness and salvation for every individual. Baron finds biblical evidence for the real possibility that any person’s sins might be forgiven – a possibility, to his thinking, necessarily rooted in ‘some previous satisfaction for those sins’ – in the promise of Mt. 12.31 (‘any sin or blasphemy can be forgiven’). He presses his ‘adversaries’ to explain how the sins of the reprobate can properly be named ‘remissable (remissibilia) on condition of faith and repentance’ if Christ has not actually made satisfaction for the same.72 Further to the real possibility of pardon, Christ’s death secures for every person, secondly, a genuine invitation to forgiveness and eternal life.73 The gospel invites every sinner without discrimination to believe not merely that Christ has died, but that he has died for him or for her; an invitation to such faith can only be extended on the basis that Christ has in fact died for the one in question. Baron recognizes, of course, that Reformed thinkers who restrict Christ’s death to the elect also affirm the church’s responsibility to call all persons indiscriminately to faith in Christ. In his judgement, however, those who deny Christ’s universal satisfaction for sins cannot legitimately invite every sinner to saving faith – that faith which affirms the efficacy of Christ’s death not merely for sinners in general but for one’s self in particular. The ‘faith’ indiscriminately advocated by those who deny Christ’s death for all persons is really nothing more, he says, than intellectual assent to the data of the gospel – that ‘faith’ which ‘the demons themselves have’.74 69. Ibid., pp. 62–3. 70. Ibid., p. 63. See citations on pp. 63–4. On Prosper see especially Answers to the Gauls, Article 9, and Answers to the Vincentian Articles, Article 1, in Prosper of Aquitaine: Defense of St. Augustine (P. de Letter, trans., London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1963), pp. 149–50, 164. 71. Ibid., p. 64. 72. Ibid., pp. 65–6. 73. Ibid., pp. 64–5. 74. Ibid., p. 62, see also pp. 64–5. Citing George Garden’s early eighteenth-century summary of Baron’s thought, David Mullan identifies Baron’s doctrine that ‘anyone could believe his sins forgiven’ as ‘the substance of Baron’s disagreement with Rutherford, and the



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Baron advances an impressive array of ‘testimonies’ from orthodox Reformed thinkers in defence of his ‘middle’ position on Christ’s redeeming sacrifice. First in order are the British delegates to Dort, who – much like Baron – grounded the universal possibility and offer of salvation upon Christ’s universal satisfaction for sins, while maintaining a peculiar efficacy of Christ’s death for the elect. In their words: ‘Christ therefore so dyed for all, that all and every one by the meanes of faith might obtaine remission of sins, and eternall life by virtue of that ransome paid once for all mankinde. But Christ so dyed for the elect, that … they might infallibly obtaine both faith and eternall life.’75 More extensive quotes follow from the delegate to Dort from Bremen, Matthias Martinius, who prefaced his official comments on the scope of Christ’s satisfaction with a statement attributed to Ambrose that ‘Christ died for all, but he died especially for us’, and then advanced 33 theses detailing the distinction between the ‘death for all’ grounded in ‘God’s common philanthropy’ and the ‘death for us’ grounded in ‘the singular decree of election’.76 Baron acknowledges that ‘many other fathers at the Synod of Dort embraced the contrary view’, wholly restricting Christ’s death to the elect. But surely, he reasons, the fact that Martinius and company’s view was ‘publicly tolerated’ at Dort is sufficient to clear those embracing their doctrine ‘from any charge of Pelagianism or Arminianism.’ He observes that ‘nothing explicitly contrary to our doctrine was established by the canons of Dort’. ‘Indeed’, he argues, the canons of that synod … seem to favour our doctrine, for in the fifth canon on the second article (that concerning Christ’s death) the synod asserts that the promise of the gospel, which is forgiveness of sins and eternal life on condition of faith and repentance, can and should be proclaimed to each and every person, whether elect or reprobate.77

Baron’s recognition of the synod’s insistence upon indiscriminate gospel proclamation as confirmation of ‘our doctrine’ rests, of course, on his assumption that any legitimate invitation to faith and forgiveness of sins presupposes some real satisfaction for those sins. ‘To the suffrage and authority of the fathers at Dort we can add many other orthodox theologians who support our opinion.’ So, for example, Andrew Rivet, sole reason for his deposition from the ministry by the Covenanters’ (Mullan, ‘Calvinist Consensus?’, p. 606). In actual fact, Garden more properly identifies the issue of the ‘universality of Christ’s death’ as the point of conflict between Baron and Rutherford; the question of whether the reprobate are required or permitted to believe that Christ has died for them was merely one aspect of that larger contested issue. See Forbes, Opera Omnia, vol. 1, pp. 21–4. 75. Ibid., p. 66; quotation from Milton, British Delegation, p. 245. 76. Ibid., pp. 66–7; Baron cites theses 1, 2, 8, and 21 under the heading ‘De morte Christi pro omnibus’ from Martinius; see Acta Synodi Nationalis … Dordrechti (Leiden: Isaaci Elzevirii, 1620), lib. 2, pp. 103–7. 77. Ibid., p. 68.

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professor of theology at Leiden, while insisting upon a peculiar efficacy of Christ’s death for the elect, affirmed that ‘Christ voluntarily offered himself as a sufficient payment for the sins of the whole world’, with the result that ‘none will perish due to any defect in the sufficiency of his sacrifice’.78 So also ‘the Scot John Cameron, professor of theology at Saumur, … held to this opinion’, asserting that ‘Christ, though he died efficaciously only for the elect, died conditionally for everyone; that is, he died so that each and every person might be promised eternal life on condition of faith and repentance’.79 To these ‘recent testimonies’ Baron adds the witness of certain sixteenthcentury Reformed thinkers, namely John Calvin, Bullinger, Musculus and Rudolph Gwalther. Calvin’s support for Baron’s doctrine is elicited from the reformer’s affirmation that ‘Christ is offered (oblatus) and held forth (propositus) by the Father to all unto salvation, yet not all acknowledge and receive him’.80 Musculus, Baron notes, asserted that redemption was accomplished not for this or that ‘special people’, but for ‘all’, for ‘the whole world’, for ‘all men from first to last’. ‘Among the Jews’, Musculus wrote, ‘there was a general redemption of slaves in the year of Jubilee, even if many chose to remain in bondage, refusing the grace of freedom. So it is also with the redemption of humankind: the fact that certain ungodly, reprobate men do not accept redemption is not due to any defect in God’s grace.’ Redemption, Musculus insisted, ‘is provided for all, and all are called to it’.81 Bullinger, Baron continues, affirmed in his sermons on the Apocalypse that ‘our Lord died for all’, and explained: ‘the fact that some do not participate in that redemption must be credited to them. The Lord excludes no one except those who exclude themselves by their incredulity and perfidy.’82 So also Bullinger’s successor as Antistes of the Reformed church in Zurich, Rudolph Gwalther, understood the Johannine designation of Christ as ‘saviour of the world’ (1 John 4.14) to mean that Christ was sent into the world and suffered for the sins of ‘all men’, i.e. ‘the whole of humankind’. Gwalther deemed any attempt to restrict Christ’s death to certain persons as an evident step towards human despair, leaving individuals to speculate whether or not they were proper objects of Christ’s redeeming work.83 Baron concludes his treatment of the question ‘whether Christ was delivered 78. Ibid., p. 69, citing André Rivet, Disputationes tredecim de justa et gratiosa Dei dispensatione circa salutem generis humani (Leiden: ex officina Bonaventurae & Abrahami Elzevir, 1631), disp. 6, th. 19–20. 79. Ibid., p. 69, citing John Cameron, Praelectionum in selectiora quaedam Novi Testamenti loca, Salmurii habitarum (3 vols; Salmur: typis Lud. Guyoni, 1626–8), vol. 3, p. 196. 80. Ibid., p. 70, citing ICR 4.14.7. Baron presumably understands oblatus as a reference to Christ’s death in this statement from Calvin. 81. Ibid., citing Musculus, Loci communes, ca. De redemptione. 82. Ibid., citing Bullinger’s 28th sermon on the Book of Revelation (see Bullinger, In Apocalypsim … conciones centum [Basel: Regius, 1570], p. 78). 83. Ibid., pp. 70–1; citing Gwalther, In Ioannis Apostoli et Evangelistae epistolam canonicam homilae (Zurich: Froschauer, 1562), ca. 4, hom. 25.



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unto death for all’ by reiterating the main features of his doctrine. Christ’s death secures certain benefits for all men in common; ‘Christ died for all men so that all men might be reconcilable to God, so that all sins might be pardonable, and so that no one should have any reason to despair of salvation on account of the magnitude or multitude of his sins’. But ‘Christ did not die in the same way, or equally, for all’. Scripture asserts a peculiar efficacy of Christ’s death for the elect; ‘by Christ’s death and merit the elect are certainly and infallibly reconciled to God, and so are saved’. Baron ends on this note, seizing a final opportunity to clearly distinguish his notion of Christ’s universal satisfaction for sins from heterodox (Remonstrant) doctrine: In keeping with his peculiar love towards the elect, God has instituted and prepared certain means by which the elect are rightly and infallibly led to faith and repentance, and so at last to salvation. The preaching of the gospel is more effective unto salvation for the elect than the reprobate, not because of any free decision on the part of the elect, but because of the absolute decree of election and the hidden will of God, by which they are chosen unto salvation.84

Conclusion Having considered Baron’s views in some detail, we are better prepared to reflect upon where his teachings lay on the map of theological opinions current in his day. Some preliminary comments are in order regarding the terms employed to properly situate the doctrine of Baron and his contemporaries. As intimated in the introduction to this essay, I believe that meaningful assessment of Baron’s doctrine and placement of the same in relation to his contemporaries has, in the past, been crippled by over-reliance on the labels ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Arminian’ to name the theologies of seventeenth-century Scottish divines. The problems inherent to the use of these terms are several. Taken on its own the term ‘Calvinist’ perpetuates the myth that Reformed theology, in Scotland or elsewhere, was a monolithic reality which looked to Calvin’s teaching as the sole or principal standard of orthodoxy. That myth, in turn, tends to underwrite charges against later Reformed thinkers for departing from the standard on this or that matter; thus narratives pitting the ‘Calvinists’, or at least some of them, against Calvin are constructed – typically towards the end of promoting some present day doctrinal antidote to everything that went wrong in the Reformed theological tradition – while the fact that strict conformity to Calvin’s doctrine was no Reformed thinker’s goal is overlooked.85 84. Ibid., pp. 71–2. 85. Examples of such narratives, applied specifically to the historical development of Scottish theology, can be found in Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), and M. Charles Bell, Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1985).

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Coupled with its would-be antonym ‘Arminian’, the label ‘Calvinist’ assumes other problems. If taken to denote adherence to Calvin’s or Arminius’s precise teachings, these terms prove to be rather too restrictive to capture the diversity of orthodox, or even heterodox, views that existed in Reformed settings on any given theological subject. More often, of course, the terms are used as something like sloppy synonyms for ‘Reformed’ and ‘Remonstrant’, but then they foster the anachronistic tendency to project later, more developed theological concepts and notions on to Calvin and Arminius respectively. Indeed, the ‘looser’ the labels ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Arminian’ become, the more susceptible Calvin and Arminius become to misrepresentation. Qualifying these labels with adjectives like ‘moderate’, ‘liberal’, ‘rigid’ or ‘extreme’ subverts to some extent the problems just noted, but in the end, proves equally unhelpful, because it suggests that early modern Scottish theological opinions existed, and can be charted, on a straight line that begins with Arminianism on the left and ends with ‘rigid Calvinism’ on the right. The notion of a ‘line’ (or ‘spectrum’) of historical theological opinions fails only marginally less than the notion of two strict options to capture the diversity of actual opinions one encounters in early modern Reformed settings. A more significant problem with the use of such qualified labels is that they almost invariably function to name the historical interpreter’s theological opinions rather than his or her subject’s views. After all, there’s no clear reason why one historical theological position should be counted ‘moderate’ and another ‘rigid’ or ‘extreme’. Such descriptions typically reflect the interpreter’s preference for this position (generally the ‘moderate’ one since few individuals revel in being labelled ‘rigid’ or ‘extreme’) over that one. In sum, the adjectives ‘moderate’ and ‘rigid’ have, when applied to ‘Calvinism’ in particular as indicators of (historical) doctrinal perspective, become as vacuous as terms like ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ for mapping present-day theological (or even political) perspectives. An antidote to the various problems associated with the use of the terms ‘Calvinist’ and/or ‘Arminian’ for naming post-Reformation theological views is discovered in recent scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy. I suggest, in short, that the term ‘orthodoxy’, and its adjectival form ‘orthodox’, is far more helpful than the terms ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Arminian’ for naming someone like Baron’s theology and positioning it in relation to that of his contemporaries. On the surface, it may seem strange to suggest that ‘orthodoxy’ – literally meaning ‘right doctrine’ – might be a far less value-laden term than qualified variants of ‘Calvinism’ or ‘Arminianism’; but if ‘orthodoxy’ is properly understood as a historical denominator, and recent scholarship which details so helpfully the confessional boundaries and characteristics of Reformed orthodoxy in particular is taken into account, the term proves more satisfactory than its principal competitors.86 It is not possible to rehearse in this context all that recent decades of research into Reformed orthodoxy have taught us. With a view, however, towards this essay’s particular objectives, it’s worth rehearsing one important point, which 86. See Richard Muller’s explanation of the term ‘orthodoxy’ in PRRD, vol. 1, pp. 33–4.



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is that Reformed orthodoxy was a diverse, or variegated, reality. Recognition among scholars of considerable theological diversity among Reformed divines (who were committed, nonetheless, to common, core doctrines) has followed from recognition that no single individual – most obviously Calvin – ever served as the absolute measure of right or wrong doctrine.87 National confessions of faith, rather, provided boundaries to what was deemed doctrinally acceptable; and within those boundaries a variety of exegetically defensible positions could be adopted on a significantly large number of theological issues. Recognition of confessional ‘boundaries’ to orthodoxy fosters from the very first a more dimensional perspective on theological views existing in the period in question; a ‘map’ of opinions replaces the restrictive, if implicit, metaphor of a ‘line’ (or ‘spectrum’) of theological views. Recognition of the variegated nature of Reformed orthodoxy has an important bearing upon our task of defining Baron’s theology. Baron’s convictions regarding a twofold aspect to Christ’s sacrifice – rooted in his perception of a universal (salvific) love in addition to God’s peculiar love for his elect – were not unique. The position he advanced – generally labelled ‘hypothetical universalism’ – was shared by respected contemporaries, as reflected in his own rather accurate understanding of what certain English delegates and the Bremenese delegate Martinius had advocated at Dort. Early modern Reformed hypothetical universalism has been the object of some interest in very recent years.88 And, significantly, the upshot of research generated by such interest has been that hypothetical universalism represents, in Richard Muller’s words, ‘one significant stream’ of Reformed thought ‘among others, having equal claim to confessional orthodoxy’.89 In other words, Baron was correct to view his doctrine as consonant with the Canons of Dort. Those canons, in fact, had been very carefully crafted to reject the Remonstrant doctrine of a singular, indefinite atonement rendering salvation possible for each and every person contingent on the exercise of faith, but to allow Reformed divines – all of whom affirmed a peculiar efficacy of Christ’s death for the elect – to disagree on what if anything Christ’s death accomplished for the reprobate.90 Of course, it remains a moot point whether or not the Canons of Dort 87. For a fuller development of this point see Willem J. van Asselt, ‘Reformed Orthodoxy: A Short History of Research’, in Herman J. Selderhuis, ed., A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 11–26 (22–4). 88. See especially Jonathan Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007); idem, ‘The Extent of the Atonement: English Hypothetical Universalism versus Particular Redemption’, in Michael Haykin and Mark Jones, eds, Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 124–61; Richard Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012), pp. 126–60. 89. Richard Muller, ‘Diversity in the Reformed Tradition: A Historiographical Introduction’, in Haykin and Jones, Drawn into Controversie, pp. 11–30 (25). 90. Moore, ‘Extent of the Atonement’, pp. 144–8.

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held any official authority in Baron’s native Scotland. This point is clear: Baron’s views on God’s universal love and Christ’s universal atonement were deemed within orthodox boundaries by the international consensus of Reformed divines at the period in which Baron expressed them. This is not to minimize the significance, both historical and theological, of the disagreement between, say, an infralapsarian hypothetical universalist like Baron and a supralapsarian particularist like Rutherford. It is, rather, to properly categorize that disagreement. In his helpful taxonomy of differences among Reformed orthodox theologians, Muller places the controversy between Reformed particularists and Reformed hypothetical universalists on the extent of the atonement in the category of ‘debates that fall within the bounds of the major Reformed confessions and that, in some cases were debated in the process of framing confessions … but which did not rise to the level of causing further confessional formulation’. Muller adds: ‘These debates … manifest a kind of diversity and variety of formulation not suitably acknowledged in the older scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy’; nor, I would add, in scholarship which has sought to name the doctrine of Baron.91 Of course, some post-Reformation Reformed thinkers were less perceptive of, or at least less willing than others to acknowledge, the theological breadth that characterized orthodoxy. Rutherford’s dismissal of Baron and his Aberdonian colleagues as ‘Arminians’ and ‘papists’ serves as a powerful reminder of that point. One can only guess at what epithets Baron reserved for Rutherford – at least in the privacy of his own mind – though Baron as a rule refrained from name-calling or scoring cheap points by painting his Reformed opponents as heterodox in print. Scholars, in any case, should not let the rhetoric involved in early modern Reformed debates obscure the essential point that orthodoxy did admit of diverse views on important issues. That Baron, in conclusion, was no ‘papist’ is clear, though this would be more readily apparent from a consideration of his other writings, especially those on the authority of Scripture vis-à-vis tradition and ecclesiastical authority. That he was no ‘Arminian’ should be readily apparent from the exposition above – he unequivocally sided with Dort in rejecting the Remonstrant notion of a divine election contingent upon foreseen faith. He equally rejected the notion of an atonement which had the singular effect of making salvation possible for all, to be actualized by the free exercise of faith. Whether Baron was, as James Gordon put it, one of ‘the best championes that ever Scottland afoorded’ to the Reformed theological cause I leave for others to decide; he was, in any case, an orthodox divine, and that reality has a significant bearing upon questions concerning the actual level of genuine heterodoxy – whether recusant or Remonstrant in kind – that existed in Scotland as the period of early orthodoxy drew to a close.

91. Muller, ‘Diversity in the Reformed Tradition’, pp. 23–4.

Chapter 6 A L E X A N D E R H E N D E R S O N : R E F O R M E D O RT HO D OX Y A N D C O N ST I T U T IO NA L C R I SI S I N S C O T L A N D

Donald Macleod Alexander Henderson (1583–1646) was surrounded by colleagues who were erudite and prolific exponents of Reformed orthodoxy: Robert Boyd, Samuel Rutherford and David Dickson, to name but three. Even amid such luminaries, however, contemporaries saw Henderson as the star in the Scottish firmament. Yet his literary legacy was meagre. This was not due to any lack of academic ability: immediately after his graduation from St Andrews University in 1603 he was appointed regent (tutor) in philosophy. Nor did he lack leisure. Though he took a prominent part in the protest against the Five Articles of Perth (1618), this brief foray into public life was followed by nineteen ‘silent years’, during which he was free to devote himself to his Leuchars parish and, had he so wished, to theological writing. But nothing came from his pen. Even during the public years, his output was limited to occasional pamphlets and sermons; and the main collection of sermons was itself published only in 1867, following the accidental discovery of the manuscripts (notes taken down by a hearer) in 1865.1

The 1638 sermons These sermons are in the strictest sense homilies, content to expound the text (usually a short one), reflecting careful exegesis and following the divisions of the text itself. They also clearly reflect Henderson’s historical context, not because the texts were twisted to suit the circumstances, but because they suited the circumstances. Several were clearly preached as encouragements to sign the National Covenant of 1638 and, from that point of view, might well be described as ‘war sermons’, but they are far from inflammatory. Others were specifically connected to the administration of the Lord’s Supper, and reflect a pattern of ‘Communion Season’ already well established in Scotland by the 1630s. Scottish practice was 1. Sermons, Prayers, and Pulpit Addresses by Alexander Henderson, 1638 (R. Thomson Martin, ed., Edinburgh: John Maclaren, 1867).

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clearly doing full justice to Calvin’s insistence that ‘the mystery be well explained to the people’.2 Throughout the sermons there is a clear awareness of the pastoral needs of his hearers, and thus they give us a window into the spiritual preoccupations of the Scottish people at a time when the religious influence of Reformed orthodoxy was at its zenith. Henderson urges his congregations to seek full assurance of their salvation: ‘it is not enough for us to say that Christ’s blood was shed for sinners, but we must have our souls sprinkled with it; that is, when we believe in Christ and labour for a sure persuasion in our souls that his blood was shed for us, and for our sins, in particular, so as thou can say I know Christ’s blood was shed in particular for me.’3 At the same time he is aware of people’s liability to doubt, and he goes to the root of it: ‘for it is a very hard thing for the child of God, who has gotten a sight of his own sins, and of the deserving of them, to be assured of mercy.’4 The result, he says, is that believers may sometimes seem to have no faith at all. Yet even amid such fluctuations faith itself persists. ‘This,’ he declares, ‘is the case of the heart of man, but not the constitution; for under different cases there is but only one constitution.’5 Henderson is here invoking (though in different terminology) the scholastic distinction between the act of faith and the habit of faith: ‘For where there seems to be nothing but doubting, yet there is faith under that.’ Conversely, however, there is also a habit of doubt or infidelity: ‘when there seems to be no doubting at all, yet there is a root of infidelity in the heart.’ He concludes: ‘if there be any beginning of faith in thee, albeit it be but like a grain of mustard-seed, or like a smoking flax, beseech the Lord to breathe upon it and to waken it up: and go not to suppress it, although it only but smoke.’6 Sometimes he refers explicitly to ‘the schoolmen’ (and this from the pulpit), not in a derogatory tone, but because he clearly found their distinctions helpful. For example, in a sermon on Heb. 11.31 he commends Rahab for not only putting her faith in God but also for making practical arrangements with the spies to ensure her own preservation: for true faith, he says, is not only actus elictus (calling down divine help) but also actus imperatus (using the means God has commanded).7 The sermons also contain an intriguing passage on the spiritual equality of men and women. The text is Ps. 123.2, which speaks of both menservants and maidservants looking to their master for instructions. ‘This’, declares Henderson, ‘is to let us know that both sexes may be confident in God.’8 He still accepts, as was common in his day, the essentialist assumptions that women are by nature ‘more frail and feeble’ and that courage is not so ‘natural’ to them. But he also observes 2. John Calvin, Theological Treatises (J. K. S. Reid, trans.; Library of Christian Classics, vol. 22; London: SCM Press, 1954), p. 161. 3. Henderson, Sermons, p. 112. 4. Ibid., p. 223. 5. Ibid., p. 128. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 245. 8. Ibid., p. 335.



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that the women in the New Testament ‘are noted for their following of Christ; when Judas had sold him, Peter forsworn him, and when Pilate and the priests had condemned him to the shameful death of the cross – even when all fled from him, then they followed him.’9 There may be Christian courage in women as well as in men, he says; and they may adhere to Christ even when men forsake him. Such sentiments must have warmed the hearts of his female hearers. But they also contain a hint of prophetic foreboding. In the later years of the Covenanters’ struggle many women would pay for their faith with their lives. It is a tribute to Henderson’s hearers that he felt no need to confine them to the theological shallows. Take, for example, his discussion of the Mystical Union in the course of a sermon on Jn 15.7: ‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall seek what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’ ‘It is not enough for us to be with Christ,’ he proclaims, ‘but we must be in Christ … We cannot be partakers of his benefits except we be in him; nor does he communicate his goodness to us, except he dwell in us.’10 This was the theme which the Calvinist Episcopalian Henry Scougal would expound 40 years later in his classic, The Life of God in the Soul of Man.11 Henderson is at pains to underline the spiritual nature of this union, held together, he says, by three bands: first, the Holy Spirit, drawing our hearts to Christ; secondly, faith, running up to heaven and knitting Christ to us, ‘and so the one end of the chain is at our heart, and the other is knit to Christ’; thirdly, love, ‘that runs from both, and joins all together’.12 He then describes this as ‘one of the three eternal unions’: the union of the three persons in the one Godhead; the union of two natures in the person of Christ (‘albeit this union was not from all eternity, yet it remains to all eternity’); and the union of the believer with Christ, ‘als inseparable as either the persons of the Godhead, or the two natures in one person; for this is sure als any of them, if so be that we be in Christ by His Spirit, and we have apprehended him by faith, and ilk ane of us another by mutual love’. He takes leave of the theme by pressing home again the need to be assured: ‘since this union is of so high a strain, and is so excellent, and also so permanent, let us be earnest with God that this union be made sensible to us – that we are in Christ, and Christ is in us.’13

The Needs of the Nation By the time he preached these sermons, Henderson’s ‘silent years’ were over, and his ministry would no longer take its tone from the needs of his parishioners, but from the needs of the nation. The crown was shakily Protestant, but it was 9. Ibid., p. 336. 10. Ibid., p. 287. 11. Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man (London: printed for Charles Smith and William Jacob, 1677). 12. Henderson, Sermons, p. 288. 13. Ibid., p. 290.

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also absolutist, bent not only on unchallengeable civil power, but also on unquestionable ecclesiastical supremacy. In England, this policy was enshrined in the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy (1559), which proclaimed the Sovereign ‘supreme governor’ of the Church as of all else. In Scotland, however, men like Knox and Melville had insisted from the beginning that the Crown could have no jurisdiction within the church. This accorded ill with the aspirations of the Stuarts, who looked enviously at the English model, and introduced and re-introduced bishops whenever they saw a window of opportunity (Henderson himself had originally been a convinced Episcopalian and owed his presentation to the parish of Leuchars to the patronage of the Archbishop of St Andrews). What irked the Scots were not only bishops as such, but the fact that the bishops, being royal appointees, were sycophants of the Crown – an arrangement which effectively secularized the kirk, enabling the king to run it by personal decree, courtesy of ‘the lords of the clergy’. Matters came to a head when Charles I imposed what came to be known as ‘Laud’s Liturgy’ (the Scottish Prayer Book) without reference to either the General Assembly or the Scottish Parliament. When this was read in the High Kirk of Edinburgh (St Giles) on 23 July 1637 it provoked a tumult, and soon the whole of Scotland was in uproar. Henderson’s ‘silent years’ were over. He quickly realized that more was needed than Jenny Geddes’s legendary stool. The crisis called for constitutional, not violent, protest, and within a few months this had taken the form of the National Covenant. This was not an entirely new document, but an earlier document, the ‘King’s Confession’ (1581), adapted by Henderson to the current crisis (aided by the lawyer, Archibald Johnston of Warriston). At the heart of it lay the pledge: We promise and sweare, that we shall, to the uttermost of our power, with our meanes and lives, stand to the defence of our dread Soveraigne, the King’s Majesty, his Person, and Authority, in the defence and preservation of the foresaid true Religion, Liberties and Lawes of the Kingdome: As also to the mutual defence and assistance, every one of us of another in the same cause.14

Henderson’s role in drafting the National Covenant underlines the mystery of his lack of literary output. He was clearly seen as a brilliant wordsmith. Why, otherwise, would he have been chosen for this task when so many ‘published authors’ were already available; and why, later, was he also the main architect of the Solemn League and Covenant (1643)? By 1638 Henderson was already 55. Yet he never put pen to paper until a national emergency demanded it. The National Covenant also highlights a peculiarly Scottish understanding of ‘covenant’. By the time it was drafted, Covenant or Federal Theology, taking its initial inspiration in Reformed circles from Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Bullinger, was already well on the way to becoming itself the Reformed orthodoxy: so much 14. William Croft Dickinson and Gordon Donaldson, eds, A Source Book of Scottish History (3 vols; Edinburgh: Nelson, 2nd edn, 1961), vol. 3, p. 102.



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so that in 1646 the Westminster Confession would adopt its leading features.15 Scottish divines had played a significant role in this development, Robert Rollock being one of the earliest theologians to discuss at length ‘the covenant of works’, and Henderson’s own contemporaries, Rutherford and Dickson, being quick to adopt the three-covenant framework of the Covenant of Works, the Covenant of Redemption and the Covenant of Grace. Henderson shows little trace of the influence of such Covenant Theology. He does, indeed, use the word ‘covenant’ frequently enough, but what he has in mind is either a covenant between the signatories and God, or a compact between the signatories themselves, pledging to stand together in a common cause: ‘every one of us oblishes [obliges] ourselves for the defence of one another, only in maintaining the cause of true religion, according to the laws and liberties of this kingdom.’16 In this context, the word ‘covenant’ alternates with the word ‘band’. Even when preaching on the pact between Rahab and the spies, Henderson refers to her as taking a ‘band’ of them for her safety.17 The same word is used of the National Covenant. It is a ‘band’ in the service and worship of God.18 This was traditional Scottish usage. Indeed, according to G. D. Henderson there is no evidence of the word ‘covenant’ being used in a theological or ecclesiastical sense in Scotland prior to 1596, when John Davidson of Prestonpans urged the members of the General Assembly ‘to make solemn promise before the majesty of God and make a new Covenant with Him for a more reverent and careful discharging of their ministry.’19 Up to this point the prevailing Scottish usage had been to speak of a ‘band’. In December 1557, for example, leading Scottish nobles signed what John Knox called a ‘common Band’ pledging themselves to ‘apply our whole power, substance, and our very lives, to maintain, set forward, and establish the most blessed word of God and his Congregation’.20 It was to such solemn past precedents of a ‘general band’ that the national Covenant appealed. But Henderson (Alexander) also found warrant for it in the Old Testament, appealing, for example, to Psalm 110:3, ‘Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power’. Focusing on the phrase, ‘thy people’, he reminds his hearers that this is 15. On this development see William Klempa, ‘The Concept of the Covenant in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Continental and British Theology’, in Donald K. McKim, ed., Major Themes in the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 94–107 (96). On the early development of Covenant Theology see also Geerhardus Vos, ‘The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology’, in Richard B. Gaffin, ed., Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1980), pp. 234–67. 16. Henderson, Sermons, pp. 29–30. 17. Ibid., p. 245. 18. Ibid., p. 209. 19. G. D. Henderson, The Burning Bush: Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1957), pp. 61–2. 20. John Knox, John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland (William Croft Dickinson, ed.; 2 vols; Edinburgh: Nelson, 1949), vol. 1, p. 136.

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a note of distinction. God’s people are his because ‘in a special manner he enters in covenant with some’ and by doing so he obliges them to enter into a covenant with him: ‘therefore to the end that ye may be perfectly blessed, enter in a covenant with God; and without ye be in covenant with him, ye shall be in nothing but perpetual misery.’21 The covenant envisaged here clearly does not correspond to any of the covenants which provide the framework for Covenant Theology. In contrast to the Covenant of Grace it is a covenant in which human beings take the initiative. At one level, they are pledging themselves to God for the defence of the true religion, but they are also pledging themselves to one another, promising mutual defence and assistance, ‘So that whatsoever is done to the least of us for that cause, shall be taken as done to us all in general’.22 In effect, the stress falls not on the divine ḥesedh but on the human: their abiding loyalty to God and their fellow covenanters. Yet this ḥesedh was itself responsive. What persuades us to enter into covenant with God is the fact that he has first of all taken us into his bosom and told us: ‘I the Lord thy God enters in covenant with thee.’23 The national crisis set Henderson’s agenda for the rest of his life. His theology would have to be hammered out, not in classroom prelections, but in the trauma of public events which threatened both the constitutional rights of the nation and the liberties of the church.

Church–State Relations Henderson had to address, first of all, the question of church–state relations. Like Reformed orthodox divines more generally, he took for granted the idea of an official national religion and its corollary, a partnership between the civil and the ecclesiastical.24 The root of this lay in the fact that, as he declared in his sermon before the House of Lords on 28 May 1645, both are divine ordinances: ‘the one and the other is from God.’25 There was a difference between them, however. The precise form of the civil government (monarchy, aristocracy or democracy) was a matter of complete indifference. Magistracy was ordained by God, ‘but the particular different forms of civil government are from men, and yet all of them lawful’.26 This meant that the power of civil government was limited not only by 21. Henderson, Sermons, pp. 14–15. 22. Dickinson and Donaldson, Source Book, vol. 3, p. 102. 23. Henderson, Sermons, p. 14. 24. See, by way of comparison, Francis Turretin’s treatment of ‘Ecclesiastical Power’ and ‘The Political Government of the Church’ in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology (James Dennison, ed.; George Giger, trans; 3 vols; Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1992–7), vol. 3, pp. 274–336. 25. This sermon is reproduced in Thomas McCrie, Lives of Alexander Henderson and James Guthrie (Edinburgh: The Free Church of Scotland, 1846), pp. 103–38 (117). 26. McCrie, Henderson and Guthrie, p. 118.



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the will of God (since the magistrate was his servant), but also by the civil constitution under whose terms government held power. The government of the church, by contrast, was appointed by God, and its ministers derived their authority exclusively from him. They were answerable, therefore, to him alone, and were not subject in their own sphere to intervention or imposition by the civil power. What they preached, how they worshipped, and how they governed themselves were dictated by Christ alone.27 Just how far Henderson carried this had already been made plain at the beginning of his public life. He was Moderator of the 1638 General Assembly, held, as always in the presence of the King’s representative, the Lord High Commissioner. When the Assembly, determined to dismantle the pro-episcopal legislation of the previous twenty years, resolved to try the ‘pretended bishops’, His Grace protested that this was beyond their competence: ‘I stand’, he said, ‘to the king’s prerogative as supreme judge over all causes civil and ecclesiastic: To him the lords of the clergy have appealed, and therefore I will not suffer their cause to be further reasoned here.’28 He then, in the King’s name, tried to dissolve the Assembly. When Henderson refused, the Lord High Commissioner rose and left, assuming that the Assembly could not continue in his absence. But continue they did, their resolve strengthened by the words of the Moderator: ‘seeing we have perceived his grace my lord high commissioner to be so zealous of his royal master’s commands, have not we as good reason to be zealous toward our Lord, and to maintain the liberties and privileges of his kingdom?’29 Yet it was never Henderson’s view that the authority and responsibility of the civil power were strictly limited to temporal matters. ‘Civil powers’, he declared in a sermon preached before the House of Commons, ‘have great authority, not only in things civil, but in matters of religion.’30 Nor was he content to concede that they possessed such power. It was sinful for them not to use it: ‘they sin against God, if they use not the authority which God hath put in their hands for the good of religion.’31 Not only did the civil power have authority over ecclesiastical persons (ecclesiasticos), it also had a responsibility to keep watch over ecclesiastical affairs (ecclesiastica). Here Henderson recalls the words of Constantine to his bishops: ‘You are bishops in the church, I have been appointed by God a bishop outside 27. Cf. Turretin’s reference to ‘the sacred ministerial right granted by Christ, the head, to the church; of externally governing herself and her affairs for mutual edification and salvation’ (Institutes, vol. 3, p. 275). 28. Andrew Stevenson, The History of the Church and State of Scotland from the Accession of King Charles I to 1649 (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1840), p. 307. 29. Ibid., p. 308. 30. Alexander Henderson, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable the House of Commons, at their Fast, December 27, 1643 (repr., Glasgow: Collins, 1844), p. 13. Cf. Turretin: ‘the pious and believing magistrate cannot and ought not to be excluded from all care of religion and sacred things, which has been enjoined upon him by God’ (Institutes, vol. 3, p. 316). 31. Henderson, Sermon 1643, p. 13.

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the church.’32 He hastens to add, however, that this is no warrant for either the supremacy of the papacy or for the royal headship over the Church of England. No mortal man, whether Pope or Prince, can be properly head of the church or vice-gerent to Christ. Instead, they may exercise their care for the church only in a civil way. This brings us close to the distinction between the state’s power circa sacra and its power in sacris. The King had power with respect to sacred matters, but not in sacred matters. This meant in practice that the Crown has no authoritative voice in the counsels of the church. The king could observe and even advise, but he had no right, simply on the basis of his office, to participate directly in the church’s councils, far less to impose his will.33 Even with such safeguards, however, Henderson’s position will seem to modern Christians to concede far too much influence to the state. Americans regard their Constitution as requiring a radical separation between church and state; British Evangelicals take for granted that the state should take nothing to do with religion; continental theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann argue that the Constantinian Settlement led to a disastrous dilution of Christianity: ‘the more the church of the crucified Christ became the prevailing religion of society, the more it left the cross behind it.’34 Henderson belongs to a different world. In his view, it is the duty of civil government to defend religion (Christianity) against contempt, corruption and abuses; to give statutory sanction and protection to the church’s doctrine, worship and government; to ‘constrain’ their subjects to attend to their religious duties; and even, at times of crisis (as Constantine did at Nicaea) to convene synods and counsels to resolve critical issues. In sum, magistrates must use their power and influence for the spiritual, as well as the temporal, good of their people. It followed from this that church and state each owed each other mutual assistance: ‘there is nothing so ecclesiastical, but it belongeth some way to the magistrate, he being keeper of both tables; nor is there anything so secular, but it concerneth the ministry.’35 The reason for this latter point was that the whole of human life was subject to the authority of the word of God, which extends ‘to all causes, all powers, all conditions of life’. In practice this means (except on the premises of atheism) that politics can never be an autonomous sphere from which God is excluded. Legislatures are always subject to the law of God, and it is the duty of the church to admonish government as to what that law is. Yet, more is called for than mere admonition. The church must also speak in support of government as an institution, particularly at times when the whole political process is in danger of falling into disrepute. This is why Henderson was always careful to speak respectfully of both the King and the institution of monarchy. 32. Vos episcopi in ecclesia, ego extra ecclesiam seu templum episcopus a Deo constitutus sum. 33. Again, it is interesting to compare the words of Turretin: ‘The power of the magistrate is external; that of pastors internal’ (Institutes, vol. 3, p. 280). 34. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (London: SCM Press, 2001), p. 36. 35. McCrie, Henderson and Guthrie, p. 118.



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The risks involved in such a compact between church and state are clear. Each is tempted to encroach on the domain of the other. Henderson was fully aware of the danger, not least because he had personal experience of the determination of the Crown to govern the church as it did the state. But he also knew that there was an opposite danger. If on the one hand there was kaisaropapia (caesaropapism, as exemplified by Henry VIII), on the other there was papakaisaria (papocaesarism, the Pope claiming temporal supremacy). Nor was this tendency confined to Catholicism. Protestants, including Presbyterians, had their own delusions of grandeur, which is why Henderson gave a firm warning that no Presbyterian assembly should treat of matters pertaining to the civil jurisdiction. They must confine themselves to the spiritual and the ecclesiastical. Even on urgent political questions, their only sword was the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. The magistrate might not go to the pulpit to preach (and neither might the soldier), nor might they take it on themselves to administer the sacraments or interfere in the internal discipline of the church. But by the same token, bishops should not sit in Parliament, nor ministers on the judicial bench. So far as the administration of justice was concerned, their role was limited to exhorting ‘that justice be done to all’.36 It was not simply a matter of differing jurisdictions, however. The two spheres operated in very different ways. The state had the power of coercion; the church did not. Her weapons were ministerial and spiritual, not carnal. Yet Henderson ventured close to the position of the mediaeval papacy when he quoted the claim of Boniface VIII (in the Bull, Unam Sanctam, 1302) that the church had the two swords, the spiritual and the temporal.37 He immediately qualified this by adding, ‘in a different sort’: she has the use of the spiritual and the benefit of the temporal. But this is exactly the same distinction that was expressed by the Pope, who laid down that the spiritual sword was to be used by the church, the temporal to be used for her. This principle prepared the way for the practice so widely prevalent at the Reformation, whereby the church tried and condemned heretics, but entrusted the state with the duty of execution. The Westminster Confession (23.3) nodded in the same direction when it declared it to be the duty of the civil magistrate to ‘take order … that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed’. Fortunately, the Reformed church in Scotland never carried this to its ultimate logical conclusion. In the one tragic case where a man was hanged for blasphemy (Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead, in 1697) the charge was brought under an Act of Charles II, and the entire case was conducted under the criminal justice system. It is still to the church’s discredit, however, that she made little attempt to save him. Today, Henderson’s complex discussion of church–state relations seems almost bizarre. We prefer to treat religion as a purely private matter of no interest to the state. Seventeenth-century persons saw things very differently. Every state in Europe made religion very much its business; the truth of Christianity was 36. Ibid., p.119. 37. See Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1963), pp. 159–61. Henderson attributes the sentiment to Bernard.

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accepted almost unquestioningly throughout society, culture and politics; church and community consisted of the same people; the problem of privileging one church above others scarcely arose, since the idea of an internally competitive, multi-denominational Christianity was then inconceivable. Instead, Henderson could dream of one united Church of Great Britain and Ireland. At the same time, however, the times required the church to work out a clear theological framework for its relationship with the state. The Crown did seriously claim the right to determine the liturgy and governance of the church. It also assumed the right to suppress dissent, including Protestant dissent. In today’s multi-faith society, any claim that Christ’s headship extends to nations and their governments as surely as to private individuals smacks of Christian arrogance. To Henderson and his times that reality was self-evident, and to deny it would have been to deny Christianity itself. The Kingdom of God was not a limited monarchy.

Confrontation Events, however, moved Henderson from cooperation to confrontation. Outraged by the stance of the 1638 General Assembly, the King raised an army to invade Scotland and impose his liturgical policy by force. The Scots, committed by the National Covenant to stand together in defence of freedom and religion, made their own military preparations, and there followed the so-called Bishops’ Wars (1639– 40), ending in the defeat of the Royalist forces near Newcastle in August 1640. Not everyone in Scotland, however, supported the policy of armed resistance to the Crown. The King’s claim to reign by divine right was supported not only by some members of the nobility, but also by significant theological voices. Foremost among these were the ‘Aberdeen Doctors’, so called because they had all had received doctorates from King’s College in Aberdeen. Six in all, they included John Forbes, himself the son of a bishop, and described by Henry Sefton as ‘one of the greatest patristic scholars and theologians Scotland has produced’.38 The Doctors had opposed the National Covenant from the outset, arguing that the royal authority should be obeyed implicitly, and deploring any suggestion of a resort to arms. Even more significant was the position of John Cameron. Cameron, mentor of Moïse Amyraut at the Academy of Saumur, and briefly (1622–3) Principal of the University of Glasgow, was a determined advocate of passive obedience. In July 1622, fearing that his views had been misrepresented, he had even gone the length of writing a letter to the King (James VI) setting forth what Reid calls his ‘political confession of faith’ and declaring that ‘kings are subject only to God, and in no way to men’s judgement’.39 38. Henry Sefton, ‘John Forbes’ in DSCHT. 39. H. M. B. Reid, The Divinity Principals in the University of Glasgow 1545–1654 (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1917), p. 212.



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In 1623, at the request of the Senate, Cameron framed a prayer for daily use at the University of Glasgow. At the head of the prayer stood the supplication for His Majesty and the royal family. It asked God to confer long life on the King, ‘whom we own inferior on earth to thee alone’; it went on to request on behalf of the King’s subjects ‘an obedient and thankful spirit because it hath been our lot to be born in his happy reign’; and it concluded: To us also of both civic and ecclesiastical rank do thou graciously grant a spirit of reverence and deference, as we seriously bethink us that thou art the author of every rank, that if any order is contemned thou art thereby contemned, and that by such contempt of dignities nought either in kingdom or in kirk can be rightly done or administered.40

Cameron’s belief that royal authority was unchallengeable eventually cost him his life. By 1625 he was back in France, this time as Professor of Theology at Montauban. There, one day, he confronted a Protestant mob baying for recourse to arms, and when he defiantly bared his chest he was thrown to the ground, beaten and trampled. He never recovered from his injuries. Cameron is an interesting foil to Henderson. He was disdainful of many of his orthodox peers (‘the divines’, as he called them), and proud to be known as ‘Beza’s scourge’. Today, he is remembered mainly for his influence on the development of the doctrine of hypothetical universalism, but in the context of seventeenthcentury Scotland his political views (along with those of the Aberdeen Doctors) posed a real threat to the Covenanter cause by reinforcing the natural reluctance of subjects to take up arms against a king. Even Robert Baillie, a close ally of Henderson, admitted that he had been unsettled: ‘I had in my youth’, he wrote, ‘drunk in from Dr. Cameron that slavish tenet, that all resistance to the supreme magistrate, in any case, was simply unlawful.’41 The crisis forced him to ‘diligent reading and prayer for light in that question, which the tymes required peremptorily to be determined, without delay’. This reading included not only Bilson, Grotius and Rivet, but also the Aberdeen Doctors (but not, curiously enough, Buchanan’s De Iure Regi apud Scotos, published in 1579). The reading cleared Baillie of his doubts and he threw himself enthusiastically into the cause. It was in this context that Henderson was persuaded to write his Instructions for Defensive Arms (1639).42 He never intended it for publication: it was written in haste, its subject matter was explosive, and its purpose, as he saw it, was merely to serve as a form of pulpit intimation. It appeared in print only because a deposed minister, set on mischief, carried a copy with him when he fled to Ireland; and there he had it published (with an answer by himself).43 40. Ibid., p. 218. 41. The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie (David Laing, ed.; 3 vols; Edinburgh: Robert Ogle, 1841), vol. 1, p. 189. 42. The text is available in Stevenson, History, pp. 356–60. 43. Baillie, Letters and Journals, vol. 1, p. 190.

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Whatever the haste with which it was written, Henderson was very careful to define the precise question he was addressing. The issue was not whether the King ought to be honoured and obeyed. He was God’s deputy and vicegerent, ‘and we ought not only to fear him, but also to be afraid lest any hurt should come to him’.44 Nor was the question whether superiors should be disobeyed simply because they were wicked. ‘The wickedness of man’, wrote Henderson, ‘cannot make void God’s ordinance; and therefore though we had superiors wicked in themselves, yet obedience and honour is to be given to them.’45 Henderson also distinguished between private individuals rising in armed resistance, and the very different situation where magistrates, counsellors, nobles, peers of the land, ‘parliament-men’, barons, burgesses ‘and the whole body of the kingdom’ stand to defend their freedoms against an absentee king who was maliciously misinformed, was acting outside the law, and was ‘marching furiously against his loyal and well-disposed people’ to subvert laws, liberties and religious settlements he had solemnly sworn to uphold and defend. These were not rebels trying to free themselves from the yoke of their obedience, declared Henderson, but a people loyal in their allegiance to their sovereign and supplicating ‘in all humility’ for religion and justice: a people pleading not for innovations but for the maintenance of the religion which the nation had professed since the Reformation and which the King himself had vowed to uphold.46 Besides, the people were not a mob pleading their own fancies and inventions. They sought only that the controverted matters be referred to a ‘national assembly’.47 Henderson does not specify what precise kind of assembly he means (whether Parliament, the General Assembly, or both), but his language takes us back to the original grievance that the Prayer Book had been imposed without consulting either Parliament or the General Assembly. The King was seeking to govern Scotland without regard to Scottish institutions, and in violation of the terms and conditions upon which the Crown held power in Scotland. The question, then, was whether this people, in these particular circumstances, had the right to defend themselves ‘against extreme violence and oppression, bringing utter ruin and desolation on the kirk and kingdom, upon themselves and their posterity’. Henderson answered emphatically: ‘It is lawful for us to take arms for our defence against such unjust violence.’48 He then adduced no fewer than twelve arguments to justify his position. Though succinctly stated, they represent virtually the entire case for the legitimacy of armed resistance to tyranny. He points out, for example, the absurdity of the very idea of absolute royal power, implying as it does that kings may do what they please, even if it means the ruin of religion, the kirk, the kingdom and the lives and liberties of their subjects.

44. Stevenson, History, p. 356. 45. Ibid., p. 357. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., p. 358. 48. Ibid.



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Are the people then to do nothing? Or flee (which is impossible)? Or simply let themselves be massacred? He appeals, too, to the line of subordination in which magistrate and people are placed. The magistrate is under God, the Great Superior. The subject, likewise, is under God, but he is also under the magistrate, the lesser superior. However, if the magistrate violates this order, commands what is contrary to God’s law, and acts without the law by raising an army against his own subjects, then it is no disobedience for the people to defend themselves. In fact, it is obedience to God, the magistrate having forfeited his role, leaving subjects in the position where God is their immediate superior. Just as in the event of external invasion it is God’s ordinance that they defend themselves, so in the case of internal invasion (as when the King raises an army against his own people) the people may defend themselves. Henderson also presses into service Paul’s injunctions with regard to ‘the powers that be’ in Rom. 13.1–7. At first glance, this passage seems to command implicit obedience: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.’ Otherwise, we resist the ordinance of God. But tyranny, says Henderson, is not the ordinance of God. It is a terror to good works, not to evil. He concludes: ‘We must either acknowledge tyranny to be the ordinance of God, and for good, or exclude it from the apostle’s argument, admitting the resistance thereof to be lawful, at least by the shield for defence, if not by the sword for invasion’ (italics mine).49 The italicized words show how carefully Henderson chose his words. A people have the right to defend themselves against a tyrannical government, but this does not necessarily give them the right to invade another country simply because it has a tyrannical government (although a nation may, of course, offer assistance to another engaged in a struggle against tyranny). The same right of self-defence follows, according to Henderson, from the very nature and purpose of government. Princes exist for the people, not the people for the prince. Later (in his sermon before the House of Commons in May 1645), he would define this as the difference between a tyrant and a king: ‘a tyrant conceiveth the people to be for him and his ends; but a king knoweth that he is set over the people for their good.’50 In parallel with this, Henderson also invokes the Ciceronian principle that ‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’ (salus populi suprema lex). If so, then it would be a subversion of all the foundations of polity and government to prefer subjection to a prince to the preservation of the commonwealth. We cannot allow the public to become a prey to the fury of the prince. Instead, we must do all in our power to defend and preserve the common weal. Strangely, Henderson adduces little by way of directly biblical argument, limiting himself to references to a few proof-texts from the Old Testament. He does, however, claim that his position is supported both by divines of the Reformed churches (including strong pleaders for monarchy) and also 49. Ibid. 50. McCrie, Henderson and Guthrie, p. 113.

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by ‘judicious lawyers and learned men’. It was certainly supported by fellow countryman George Buchanan, whose De Iure Regni apud Scotos itself relied heavily on copious citations from ‘judicious and learned’ men among the classical authors of antiquity.51 The mature John Knox shared Buchanan’s outlook. Even though he subscribed to the position laid down in the Scots Confession (Chapter 24) that ‘those who resist the supreme powers, so long as they are acting in their own spheres, are resisting God’s ordinance and cannot be held guiltless’, he made clear in his later interviews with Queen Mary and in his debate with Maitland of Lethington in June 1564 that the people could resist the Prince.52 His friend, and fellow Marian exile, Christopher Goodwin, fully shared his point of view, arguing that where rulers become oppressors and murderers of their subjects they should no longer be regarded as magistrates but as private men, and should ‘be examined, accused, condemned and punished by the law of God, whereunto they are and ought to be subject’.53 In England, notables such as John Milton and John Locke were equally clear champions of the people’s right to resist tyranny. Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was written the very year (1649) that Charles I was executed, and probably with reference to Scottish Presbyterian scruples over Cromwell’s action. The title page contains the unambiguous statement: proving that it is Lawfull, and hath been held so through all Ages, for any, who have the Power, to call to account a Tyrant, or wicked King, and after due conviction, to depose and put him to death.54 Clearly, then, Henderson was covering ground already well traversed by others. But did these others include divines of the continental Reformed churches? Such divines were extremely sensitive to the charge constantly made by Roman Catholics that Protestantism subverted all law and order, and they were understandably reluctant to appear to countenance rebellion or subversion in any form, even where their co-religionists (as in England and France) were suffering horrific 51. See George Buchanan, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: De jure regni apud Scotos dialogus (Roger A. Mason and Martin S. Smith, trans. and eds; Edinburgh: The Saltire Society, 2006). 52. The debate is reported by Knox in his History of the Reformation in Scotland, vol. 2, pp. 108–34. His own position was clear: ‘that the Prince may be resisted, and yet the ordinance of God not violated, it is evident; for the people resisted Saul, when he had sworn by the living God that Jonathan should die’ (p. 117). 53. Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘Trumpeting Resistance: Christopher Goodman and John Knox’, in Roger A. Mason, ed., John Knox and the British Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 131–53 (151). See also, in the same volume, Roger Mason’s article ‘Knox, Resistance and Royal Supremacy’ (pp. 154–75). 54. John Milton: Selected Prose (C. A. Patrides, ed.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 249. Cf. John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government (repr., London: J. M. Dent, 1962), p. 219: ‘whosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law, and makes us of the force he has under his command to compass that upon the subject which the law allows not, ceases in that to be a magistrate, and acting without authority may be opposed, as any other man who by force invades the right of another.’



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persecution. This was particularly true of John Calvin, and Henderson seems to have been aware of this when, having referred to the support of Reformed divines, he can say of Calvin only, ‘neither is Calvin against us but for us’. Calvin’s default position was laid down in his commentary on Rom. 13. Those in authority have been placed there by the hand of God; consequently, even when the magistrate fails to rule in accordance with God’s mandate, ‘we must still render them the obedience which is due to rulers’.55 Yet, as he makes plain in his chapter on Civil Government in the Institutes, this could not mean that rulers were to be obeyed unconditionally: ‘such obedience is never to lead us away from obedience to him, to whose will the desires of all kings ought to be subject, to whose decrees all their commands ought to yield, to whose majesty their scepters ought to be submitted.’56 In his Commentary on Daniel (ad Dan. 6.22) he speaks even more strongly: ‘earthly princes lay aside all their power when they rise up against God, and are unworthy of being reckoned in the number of mankind. We ought rather utterly to defy than to obey them when they are so restive and wish to spoil God of his rights.’57 Calvin, like all Reformed (and other) theologians, is clearly taking his cue here from Acts 5.29, ‘We must obey God rather than men!’ In his tract Truth and Innocence Vindicated, written in 1669 when English Nonconformists were suffering under the oppression of Charles II, John Owen took exactly the same position: ‘if the supreme magistrate command anything in the worship of God that is idolatrous, we are not to practise it accordingly, because we must obey God rather than men.’58 But would such a situation, forcing people to worship in a way that violates their consciences, also justify active or even armed resistance? Not according to Owen. If the magistrate sees fit to ‘punish, destroy and burn them alive who shall not comply with his edicts’, our duty is ‘quietly and patiently to submit to the will of God in our sufferings, without opposing or resisting by force, or stirring up seditions or tumults, to the disturbance of the public peace’.59 In general, Calvin would have agreed. Private individuals (including persecuted believers) should not take the law into their own hands. However, the ‘magistrates of the people’ were in a different position. They were appointed specifically to restrain ‘the wilfulness of kings’ (1519).60 Calvin cites as examples of such constitutional guardians of civil liberties the ephors of Sparta and the 55. John Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and to the Thessalonians (D. W. Torrance and T. F. Torrance, eds; Ross Mackenzie, trans.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 282. 56. ICR 4.20.32. 57. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Daniel (Thomas Myers, trans.; Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1852), p. 382. 58. The Works of John Owen (William H. Goold, ed.; 16 vols; repr.; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), vol. 13, p. 490. 59. Ibid. Italics mine. 60. ICR 4.20.31.

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tribunes of Rome, but he probably has in mind also the Estates of France and the Netherlands, and the Parliaments of England and Scotland: I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings, that, if they wink at kings who violently fall upon and assault the lowly common folk, I declare that their dissimulation involves nefarious perfidy, because they dishonestly betray the freedom of the people, of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God’s ordinance.61

Whatever his later views, the earlier Owen must have agreed with this position. Otherwise it is difficult to explain his close relations with Oliver Cromwell, and even more difficult to explain why he agreed to preach before the Houses of Parliament on 31 January 1649, the day after the execution of the King. It was in precisely the situation envisaged by Calvin that Henderson found himself. The King had violated the terms on which he held authority, and he had raised an army precisely to attack ‘the lowly common folk’. The Scottish response, orchestrated by Henderson himself, had been entirely constitutional. The National Covenant was subscribed by the whole nation, the rejection of episcopacy was by formal decision of the General Assembly, and the Scottish presence in England after 1643 was in response to an invitation from Parliament, the constitutional guardian of England’s freedoms. Henderson could easily satisfy himself that everything was being done by the book. Yet his principles failed to carry the day, and he died a broken man.62 In the short term, his vision of a Presbyterian England (and United Kingdom) was doomed once Independents secured the backing of Cromwell’s New Model Army. In the long term, it was doomed because religious uniformity of any complexion was a pipe dream. As Owen recognized, denominations were the de facto reality, and it was not in the power of men to bring the whole world to one persuasion. The only way forward was mutual forbearance.63 But in the even longer term, Henderson’s political principles triumphed, though both England and Scotland had much to suffer before the Parliaments of both nations acted together in 1688–89 to replace the tyranny of James VII with the constitutional monarchy of William of Orange. A century later, the American colonies would likewise secure their independence by means of armed, though constitutional, resistance. The model cannot always work. In Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, as in North Korea today, there are no representative assemblies to organize resistance to ‘the fierce licentiousness of kings’. Nelson Mandela and Dietrich 61. Ibid. 62. Henderson died on 19 August 1646. Two weeks previously, Baillie had written to William Spang: ‘Mr. Henderson is dyeing, most of heart-break, at Newcastle … A truly pious and really publick man is a rare piece upon earth’ (Letters and Journals, vol. 2, p. 387). 63. Owen, Works, vol. 13, p. 458.



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Bonheoffer had no alternative but to act outside the law; Reformed believers should not lightly condemn them. After all, one of Reformed theology’s own sons, George Buchanan, even went so far as to endorse the idea that when a ruler became a wild beast, a private individual acting on his own was warranted to engage in single-handed tyrannicide.64 Henderson would never have been the man for that. But his life work is evidence enough that the thought and labours of Scottish Reformed orthodoxy were not confined to the pulpit and the classroom.

64. Buchanan, Law of Kingship, p. 141.

Part 2 H IGH R EFORMED O RTHODOXY ( c . 1640– c . 1690)

Chapter 7 S A M U E L R U T H E R F O R D ’ S E U T H Y PH R O D I L E M M A : A R E F O R M E D P E R SP E C T I V E O N T H E S C HO L A ST IC N AT U R A L L AW T R A D I T IO N

Simon J. G. Burton Samuel Rutherford represents a towering figure in the annals of Scottish Reformed orthodoxy. A thinker of international stature, he has been rightly called the ‘leading theologian of Scotland’s Second Reformation’.1 While best known for his affectionate Letters, often regarded as spiritual classics, and his daring Lex Rex, a seminal text in the development of European political theory, he was also the author of a series of important scholastic treatises, directed principally against the Arminians and Antinomians. Indeed, it was these, together with his role in the Westminster Assembly, which arguably did the most to establish his reputation as a leading Reformed theologian both in his native Scotland and Britain and further afield. Much of this influence remains to be charted but it is clearly registered, for example, in the writings of Richard Baxter and John Owen, in the circle of Gisbertus Voetius and the pioneers of the Nadere Reformatie, and, not least, in the dramatically conflicting views of his fellow Scots – largely hostile among the Aberdeen Doctors and the School of Saumur and positively reverent among the Puritan and covenanting elite.2 Yet it is only comparatively recently that Rutherford’s importance as a Reformed scholastic has begun to be rediscovered. Older studies of Scottish theology, like those of T. F. Torrance and James Walker, tend to be somewhat critical of Rutherford, viewing his thought as a scholastic degeneration of a purer 1. Guy M. Richard, The Supremacy of God in the Theology of Samuel Rutherford (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 1. 2. The best discussion of Rutherford’s life and thought is to be found in John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Rutherford’s international importance is highlighted in Matthew Vogan, ‘Introduction: Samuel Rutherford Redivivus’, in Matthew Vogan, ed., Samuel Rutherford: An Introduction to his Theology (Edinburgh: Scottish Reformation Society, 2012), pp. 7–11. For a preliminary discussion of Rutherford’s Dutch reputation and the Scottish exiles who promoted it see James Eglinton, ‘Scottish-Dutch Reformed Theological Links in the Seventeenth Century’, Dutch Crossing 37.2 (2013), pp. 137–45.

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Reformation theology.3 Indeed, as Matthew Vogan aptly remarks, Rutherford’s theology has often been ‘viewed as suspiciously marred by a quasi-Scotist scholastic speculative bent’.4 More recent studies by John Coffey and Guy M. Richard, following in the wake of the new scholarship on Reformed scholasticism, have done much better justice to Rutherford and his legacy. Recognition of the primarily methodological character of Rutherford’s scholasticism has led these scholars to a much more nuanced and sensitive appreciation of Rutherford’s debt to medieval and early modern Catholic thought.5 Nevertheless, Rutherford’s engagement with scholasticism remains an item of largely secondary interest to both Coffey and Richard, with neither offering an in-depth analysis of this dimension of his thought. Thus Coffey speaks very generally of a dual Thomist and late medieval character to Rutherford’s thought, without either isolating specific influences or attempting to interpret their relationship.6 Likewise, Richard’s interpretation of Rutherford’s scholasticism, while acknowledging an important Scotist dimension, still remains for the most part at the level of general scholastic paradigms.7 One area of Rutherford’s scholastic thought which has been particularly neglected is his ethics and natural law theory. Indeed, while both intellectualist and voluntarist currents have been identified in his moral theology, it is clear that scholars have little idea of how these can ultimately be reconciled, leaving us a somewhat confused, even schizophrenic, picture of Rutherford’s ethical thought.8 Yet Rutherford’s moral theology was clearly very carefully thought through. In his Disputatio Scholastica de Divina Providentia he sought to develop an innovative meta-ethics – a true metaphysics of morality – attentive not only to his Protestant convictions but also to the wider scholastic tradition. Moreover, significantly, Rutherford developed his own account of the foundations of ethics and the natural law in critical dialogue with John Cameron and the School of Saumur, whose positions he regarded as dangerously close to Arminianism. In this chapter, therefore, I will seek to trace the course of the debate between Rutherford and Cameron with the aim of both elucidating the scholastic contours of Rutherford’s natural law theory (and meta-ethics) and illuminating wider developments in Scottish Reformed thought, especially in the context of the ‘Arminian crisis’ of the 1630s and 1640s.9 3. See T. F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: from John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 93–7, 105–11; and James Walker, The Theology and Theologians of Scotland: Chiefly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1872), pp. 8–10. 4. Vogan, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8. 5. See Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, pp. 62–81, 114–45; and Richard, The Supremacy of God, pp. 234–8. 6. Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, pp. 74, 117, 129. 7. See, for example, Richard, Supremacy of God, pp. 77–115. 8. Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, p. 74. 9. David Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,



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Following Rutherford’s own presentation of the issue, my focus will be on an age-old philosophical and theological problem: whether God wills something because it is good, or whether it is good because God wills it. The roots of this question go back to antiquity, in particular to the famous dilemma posed in Plato’s Euthyphro,10 but it was also a prominent topic of discussion in scholastic ethics and theology. Indeed, the question was at the heart of an important medieval debate concerning the foundations of ethics and the contingency of the natural law, and it is on the basis of their answer to this question that medieval theologians have traditionally been divided into two opposing camps: intellectualists who grounded morality in divine intellect and natural law, and voluntarists who founded it in the contingent deliberations of the divine will.11 As such, a detailed examination of this question offers an important opportunity to place Rutherford’s debate with Cameron in an ongoing dialogue with a scholastic tradition stretching back to at least the fourteenth century, reinforcing our understanding of the profound debt of Scottish Reformed orthodoxy to the medieval schools.

Cameron’s Thesis John Cameron’s account of the foundations of the moral law, which so disturbed Rutherford, is found in his Praelectiones on the Gospel of Matthew. On reaching Mt. 16.20, where Jesus orders his disciples not to reveal his true identity as the Messiah, Cameron was confronted with a dilemma. Jesus’ command here seems to conflict with his own later commands to go out and preach the Gospel to all nations. This raises, for him, the question of whether all the commands of God are of equal authority, or whether in fact some exceed others in authority. As a good Protestant scholastic Cameron responds to this question with a distinction. According to their author all the commands are of equal authority, but according to the thing which is commanded they are able to be variously ranked. Moreover, distinguishing again, some commands are accounted as good and evil in themselves, while others are accounted as indifferent (adiaphora) in themselves. Cameron then argues that those commands which are good and evil 2000), pp. 208–43 has argued that the break-up of the Scottish Reformed consensus at this time was due primarily to fears about Arminianism. Significantly, he traces some of the first rumblings of discontent to the arrival of Cameron and Cameronianism in Glasgow. 10. Plato, Euthyphro, 10a. 11. While the terms intellectualist and voluntarist have recently been criticized as too vague, both Francis Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Ideas (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 63–83, and Tobias Hoffmann, ‘Intellectualism and Voluntarism’, in Robert Pasnau and Christina van Dyke, eds, Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (2 vols; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), vol. 1, pp. 414–27, have defended their application and relevance to questions of medieval and early modern ethics. Indeed, it is clear from many seventeenth-century sources that they viewed their ethics in continuity with this late-medieval dispute.

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in themselves are accounted such due to their relation to the moral image of God. By contrast adiaphora attain their moral status only in relation to a command of God, and as indifferent are able to be commanded or forbidden according to divine purpose. With these distinctions in place Cameron is able to resolve the issue by affirming that Jesus’ command to his disciples falls under the moral category of adiaphora and therefore only has binding authority as far as God commands it, i.e. for the disciples at that specific time and, by implication, not for them or us at a different time.12 Developing his distinction, Cameron is clear that things which are good in themselves have a much stronger binding authority than adiaphora. For since their moral status is connected directly to the image of God, it follows for him that God is not able not to command such per se goods or prohibit per se evils. Indeed, he even poses a direct connection between God’s essential and necessary love of himself and his essential and necessary love of his own image. Yet Cameron is also clear that not all per se goods rank equally. Instead he identifies a spectrum of authority related to the degree to which these moral commands image God’s own nature. Thus he claims that commands from the First Table of the Decalogue are of greater authority than those of the Second Table, since the image of God shines more clearly in them. Importantly, he extends such distinctions all the way down to the individual commands of the Decalogue, arguing, for example, that parricide was more severely prohibited than adultery as departing more from the image of God.13 Likewise, Cameron is careful to distinguish even the adiaphora among themselves according to both their proximity to an end good or bad in itself and the nature of this end itself. It is those moral commands which have the closest connection to the highest degree of per se goods which are therefore the most binding of the adiaphora. Such ends are also further distinguished into those which relate directly to obedience to God – such as the prohibition on Adam against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or God’s command to Abraham to kill Isaac – and those which have an intermediate relation to per se goods – such as the sacraments of the Old and New Testament. To the important theological question of whether things are good because God wills and commands them, or whether God wills them because they are good, Cameron therefore distinguishes explicitly between per se goods which are not good merely because God has commanded and willed them, and adiaphora which are indifferent in themselves and only good because God commanded and willed them.14

12. John Cameron, Praelectionum in selectora quaedam Novi Testamenti loca, Salmurii habitarum (3 vols; Saumur, 1628), vol. 2, pp. 139–43. 13. Ibid., pp. 140–1. 14. Ibid., pp. 141–3.



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Rutherford’s Rejoinder Rutherford’s earliest response to Cameron’s position is to be found in his Exercitationes Apologeticae of 1636, a work written against Jesuit and Arminian errors. Here, Rutherford showed himself particularly concerned with what he perceived as Arminian overtones in Cameron’s Praelectionum, significantly grouping his discussion of Cameron with that of the English Arminian Thomas Jackson and with Jacobus Arminius himself.15 Some years later, prompted by an anonymous manuscript of one of Cameron’s followers that had come into his hands, Rutherford resumed his discussion of the Cameronian position, issuing in his Disputatio Scholastica de Divina Providentia a sophisticated rejoinder to both Cameron’s own thesis and that of his follower.16 In doing so he developed further his own innovative account of the foundations of morality, placing this squarely within the context of late medieval metaphysics. Cameron’s anonymous follower, whom Rutherford refers to simply as the manuscriptor, puts forward the thesis that Cameron’s discussion of the natural law is articulated not in terms of God’s absolute power but his ordained power, i.e., according to the hypothesis of his decree. In other words, he claims that Cameron was making a statement not about what God was able to do according to his omnipotence but rather about what he had decreed from all eternity.17 In these terms the manuscriptor interprets Cameron as arguing that after God has decreed something to be good and holy then he loves it not because he wills to do so but because the thing has now been constituted good and holy in itself. Rutherford’s citation of the manuscript does not make it entirely clear, but it appears that what the manuscriptor is trying to do is to distinguish various logical stages in God’s willing. In the first stage God freely establishes things as good and moral and as standing in relation to his own image. In the second stage God loves these morally constituted goods in themselves for their relation to his own essential nature, and not according to his free will. Indeed, because they image his nature he is now unable not to love them. The manuscriptor does not further elaborate, or at least Rutherford gives no indication of whether or not he does, but it is presumably in this second stage, or perhaps even in a further unmentioned third stage, that God wills those moral goods which Cameron had classified as adiaphora.18 15. Samuel Rutherford, Exercitationes apologeticae pro divina gratia contra Jesuitas et Arminianos (Franeker: J. Dhüringh, 1651), lib. 2, ca. 3; pp. 312–23. 16. Ibid., pp. 317–25. 17. Ibid., p. 317. While not the only possible understanding of the distinction between absolute and ordained power, this was the mainstream interpretation among the Reformed. It was also Rutherford’s own understanding of it (Richard, Supremacy of God, pp. 97–9). For helpful discussion of the complex late-medieval background of this distinction see Hester Gelber, It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford, 1300–1350 (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 81; Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 309–24. 18. Ibid., pp. 317–18.

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What Cameron’s follower has effectively done is to enclose his master’s basic distinction between per se goods and adiaphora within a logically prior will of God establishing this to be the case. In effect he has given Cameron’s own essentialist account of the ground of the moral law a markedly voluntarist twist. According to Rutherford, however, this is a grave distortion of Cameron’s actual position. Evidencing this, he cites Cameron as saying quite explicitly that ‘things which refer to God as he is holy and just, or which refer to the image of God, are in themselves and by their own nature, without every act of the divine will, holy and just’.19 Likewise, Rutherford claims that Cameron’s disciple has missed the whole thrust of the identity that Cameron posed between the necessity of God loving himself and the necessity of God loving his own image. For Cameron’s argument that God loves his own image by ‘natural and immutable propension’ suggests that God is not free, even according to his absolute power, not to love his own image, just as he is not free according to his absolute power not to love himself. Indeed, Cameron wants to claim that for God not to love his own image would be as much of a contradiction as for God not to love himself.20 Therefore, as Rutherford interprets Cameron, God can change how something relates to the moral field according to whether he creates it as conforming more or less to his image, but he cannot change either his image or the direction of the moral field itself. It is just this claim that Rutherford finds to be so problematic. In order to show this he takes up again, as he had done previously in the Exercitationes, the classic biblical example of God’s command to Abraham to kill Isaac. From the premise, which he does not feel the need to prove, that not to kill one’s son is clearly part of the image of God, Rutherford argues that according to Cameron’s thesis it is as repugnant for God to command a father to kill his own son as it is for him to hate himself.21 Yet if this is accepted then it would follow that God’s command that Abraham should offer up Isaac as a sacrifice to him was impious and against the divine nature; a position which clearly runs contrary to Scripture. Moreover, not only is this against the Bible, but it also limits God’s freedom. In Rutherford’s judgement, Cameron’s claim that God is bound by the same absolute necessity to love his own image in creatures as to love himself implies that God’s act of love towards his creatures is entirely lacking in freedom. According to Rutherford, therefore, in Cameron’s schema God becomes constrained as to how he relates to creatures by his own act of creation – something which for him undoubtedly resembled Arminianism.22 19. Ibid., p. 318: ea quae referunt DEUM ut est sanctus et justus, seu quae referunt DEI imaginem, esse in se et sua natura, citra omnem divinae voluntatis actum, bona et sancta. Italics added in text for emphasis. 20. Ibid., p. 318; cf. Cameron, Praelectionum, vol. 3, p. 572. 21. Ironically, Cameron himself had classed this with the adiaphora. Rutherford was likely aware of this and simply seeking to expose an implicit contradiction in Cameron. 22. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 317–19, 325. Richard Muller identifies such divine self-limitation as a hallmark of Arminian metaphysics and theology (God, Creation and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic



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Significantly, Rutherford also found the manuscriptor’s own voluntaristic rendering of his master’s thesis equally problematic. As we have seen above, Cameron’s follower also recognized this constraint on God’s action, but he held it to be self-imposed and dependent on a (naturally) prior decision of God’s own will. Thus, to take his own example, while it depended on God’s will to establish human nature in such a way that to worship him is morally good and to commit idolatry is morally bad, following his decree these must be regarded as essential and per se goods and evils. Rutherford however remained entirely unconvinced by this line of argument, holding that the manuscriptor’s position was riddled with confusion. As he said rather contemptuously: No one, who has saluted philosophy or theology from the door, would say that to worship God is in its own essential form good because God decreed that for nature to worship God is in itself good; as if God freely decreed that what is essentially good is good, namely that God freely decreed that ‘God is good’ or that ‘man is a rational animal’.23

For Rutherford if something is essentially good it cannot be said also to be freely good. This is because everything that God freely decrees he is also able not to decree. Indeed, if it were true that what was essential could also be free then this would open up a whole field of contradictions. For it would then be possible for man not to be an animal, or God not to be good, or even God not to be God. Emerging out of his discussion of the Cameronian thesis, Rutherford’s own position, reiterating his earlier conclusion in the Exercitationes, is that the rectitude of Abraham’s intended act is dependent on God’s command. Indeed to the manuscriptor’s retort that ‘Rutherford has proved that God willed and loved that Abraham, putting aside every natural love, should contaminate cruel hands in the blood of his son’,24 his somewhat chilling counter was that if God had not retracted his command then the hands that slew Isaac would not have been cruel and bloody but just and obedient. As he reiterates, it is the command of God which determines the moral status of Abraham’s action. To have killed Isaac Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy [Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1991], pp. 233–4, 242). It is worth noting however that in ‘Divine Covenants, Absolute and Conditional: John Cameron and the Early Orthodox Development of Reformed Covenant Theology’, MAJT 17 (2006), pp. 33–5, Muller attacks such Arminian readings of Cameron. This raises the distinct possibility that Rutherford’s fear of Arminianism caused him to miss the complexity and subtlety of Cameron’s thought. 23. Ibid., p. 322: Nemo, qui philosophiam aut theologiam vel a limine salutarit, diceret DEUM colere, esse in sua forma essentiali bonum, quia DEUS decrevit ut natura colere DEUM sit in se bona; quasi vero Deus libere decerneret ut quod est essentialiter bonum sit bonum, nempe, libere decrevit Deus, ut DEUS sit bonum, homo sit animal rationale, at quod Deus libere decernit esse, potest decernere non esse. 24. Quoted in ibid., pp. 319–20: Reterfortis probaverit DEUM voluisse et amasse ut Abrahamus, deposito omni naturali amore, crudeles in sanguine nati commacularet manus.

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without the command of God would have been ‘horrendous naticide’, comparable to that of the pagan idolaters who sacrifice their own children to demons, but yet not to have killed Isaac when God commanded it would have been ‘horrendous rebellion’. His stark conclusion is therefore that it is by the command of God that something can cross from being a sin violating the divine image to an act of holy obedience which is part of his image.25 In effect Rutherford makes the constitution of the divine image dependent on the divine will. While this was in part the thrust of the manuscriptor’s revision, he had also tried to retain Cameron’s essential category of moral goods, which to Rutherford’s mind was attempting to have one’s cake and eat it. In a radical move Rutherford therefore swept away entirely what he called Cameron’s ‘most vain distinction’ between per se goods and adiaphora, replacing this with the categories of simple and complex acts. Taken over from logic, this distinction had been used by the late medieval scholastics to offer a sophisticated analysis of moral acts. In particular it was used to logically distinguish a physical act from its morally specifying features, such as its object, or the intention with which it was carried out. Illustrating this, Rutherford distinguishes the act of worshipping God into the act taken only in itself, which is the simple act, and the act taken as including God as its object and considered in relation to the divine law, which is the complex act. Crucially, according to Rutherford, only complex acts are able to have a moral status, while all simple acts must be regarded as morally indifferent, or in Cameron’s own terms adiaphora.26 Restated in these terms the vital question becomes what determines the moral status of these complexes. From what we have said so far it might appear that Rutherford would happily subscribe to the extreme voluntarist position that morality is solely grounded in the will of God. In fact, while he seems at times to approach this position, he importantly still retains a category for essential and unalterable moral norms. This may be seen, for example, from his implicit division of the divine image into things which are morally indifferent antecedent to the divine decree and things which are not morally indifferent.27 It comes out much more clearly, however, in his discussion of another Cameronian thesis. In his Miscellanea Cameron had objected to the claim made by a number of late medieval theologians that God by his absolute power was able to damn the innocent, absolve the guilty without satisfaction, or even – to take Ockham’s notorious example – command someone to hate him. In particular, he had rejected what he regarded as the sophistical claim of the Nominalist theologian Jean Gerson that things are good because God wills them to be good.28 Rutherford’s response to this is important, for in it we begin to discern the boundaries of his own moral voluntarism. Rutherford is clear that in impugning 25. Ibid., pp. 320–3. 26. Ibid., pp. 323, 325–7. The marginal note of p. 325 includes a whole series of medieval and early modern citations on this distinction. 27. Ibid., p. 323. 28. Cameron, Praelectionum, vol. 3, pp. 572–3; cf. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 324.



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such a position Cameron was also attacking the roots of his own Reformed faith. As he says: ‘For it is the true and healthy doctrine of Paraeus, Beza, Calvin and Dr Twisse, that things are good and just because God willed them to be, not the contrary, for a created object is not the measure or rule of the divine will.’29 Indeed, against Cameron, Rutherford sides with what he regards as the orthodox opinion of Jean Gerson and the late medieval scholastics that God is able by his absolute power to absolve the sinner without satisfaction. As he suggests, this was certainly not a position alien to the Reformed, for Twisse himself had argued this in his Vindiciae.30 Nevertheless, Rutherford stops short of the position, upheld by Ockham, Biel and others, that God was able to command someone ‘formally and complexly’ to hate him. Here he perceives a limit to the divine absolute power, arguing that for God to do this would be in fact to violate his most holy nature.31 In order to explain the essential moral difference between these acts, we need a much clearer understanding of how Rutherford construed the interaction between God’s nature and will in the founding of morality. Fortunately, we may gain important insight into this from his discussion of the vexed scholastic question of whether God is able to dispense with any of the Ten Commandments – something Aquinas had denied, but which Scotus and later voluntarists like Ockham had affirmed.32 Significantly, this discussion also sheds important light on Rutherford’s own complex discussion of the natural law, demonstrating his clever integration of a traditional (intellectualist) account of reason and the natural law into his own voluntarist ethics. In this we gain important insight into what John Coffey has identified as Rutherford’s dual scholastic heritage.33 Rutherford’s discussion takes its lead from the comparatively little known but influential Spanish jurist Fernando Vázquez Menchaca.34 Menchaca had interpreted Ockham’s position that God could dispense with the commands of the Decalogue in terms of God’s ability to create a race of men with contrary precepts and a different mode of reason to those we have now. Since according to Ockham natural law is the following of right reason, it followed for Menchaca that if God changes the pattern and working of human reason itself then he also changes the natural law. Indeed, against Domingo Soto, and following a clear Ockhamist

29. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 324: Est enim Paraei, Junii, Bezae et Calvini, et D. Twissi sententia vera et sana, res ideo esse bonas et justas, quia Deus eas esse voluit, non contra, nec enim objectum creatum mensura est divinae voluntatis, aut regula. 30. See William Twisse, Vindiciae gratiae, potestatis, ac providentiae Dei (Amsterdam: Joannem Janssonium, 1648), II digr. 8, pp. 253–64. 31. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 315–16. 32. See Thomas Williams, ‘Reason, morality and voluntarism in Duns Scotus: a pseudoproblem dissolved’, Modern Schoolman 74 (1997), pp. 73–94. 33. Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, p. 74. 34. For an illuminating discussion of his moral and political thought see Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 165–205.

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tradition, Menchaca had even claimed that God could have established human reason so that the hatred of God or of parents was a morally upright thing.35 Responding to Menchaca’s claim, Rutherford’s position is that God by creating rational creatures, whether angels or men, at once creates the common principles of the natural law. Since they are part of the very constitution of the rational creature these are unable to be effaced. Indeed, Rutherford emphasizes that without them man is unable to love himself at all. Rutherford further argues that these truths of the natural law are unalterable and essential to human nature. Just as God could not create a man who was not a rational animal, so he could not have created a man without such concreated principles of the natural law ‘insculpted on his soul’. However, taking up Menchaca’s own Ockhamist suggestion, Rutherford agrees that it would have been quite possible for God to have created another species of rational creature distinct from man to whom he gave a diverse natural law. Since this race would be created according to a different principle of reason it would follow that God could have given another set of Ten Commandments different from those which he gave to Moses. As colourful examples of what such an alternative natural law might look like he suggests that God could have created a cannibalistic race of ‘men’ permitted to devour each other, or, to go to the opposite extreme, he could have forbidden the eating of any animals and thus instituted vegetarianism.36 However, while Rutherford recognizes a possible diversity in the natural law he is clear that these alternative versions of the natural law have important constraints placed upon them. He therefore stops well short of Menchaca’s extreme moral voluntarism – from which, interestingly, he also dissociates Ockham – arguing effectively that God could never institute reason in such a way that hatred of him would be incorporated into the natural law. Indeed, the implication of Rutherford’s position is that the love of God and the subjection of the creature to the Creator is an essential part of any kind of natural law. Rutherford therefore concurs with the prominent Dutch Reformed theologian Gisbertus Voetius that the dependency of the rational creature on its Creator in morality and in order to right reason is so necessary that its opposite implies a contradiction.37 Thus in every conceivable moral order the rational creature remains subjected to God and obliged to obey him. Rutherford is therefore insistent that this law – that every rational creature must love and be obedient to God – is immutable and antecedent to every act of the divine will, forming the cornerstone of the natural law. What is left open to the divine decree is simply to select whether a particular act or its omission should be considered as due subjection and obedience to God, or not. 35. Fernando Vázquez Menchaca, Controversarium Illustrium (Frankfurt: Joannis Saurii, 1672), 1.29.11; cf. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 327. For the context of Menchaca’s claims see William of Ockham, Quaestiones in Librum Secundum Sententiarium (Gideon Gal and Rega Wood, eds; New York: Franciscan Institute, 1981), II q. 15, p. 352. 36. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 327–8. 37. Gisbertus Voetius, Selectarum Disputationum Theologicarum (Utrecht: Joannes a Waesberg, 1648), Pars. 1, pp. 365–6.



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Thus while the divine will establishes the moral status of a complex act, it always does so against the backdrop of God’s own nature.38 In expounding this complex interaction of divine will and nature Rutherford draws on two different scholastic models. The first is the distinction of Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, the controversial fourteenth-century theologian, between dispensable and indispensable acts. In his Sentences commentary Durandus had put forward an influential classification of moral acts according to whether or not their moral principle (ratio debiti) was able to be removed from them. Those whose moral principle could be removed from them he classed as dispensable and those whose principle could not be removed from them he classed as indispensable. Dispensable acts he suggested have their moral status simply because they are commanded – he offers the example of singing certain Psalms in Church – while indispensable acts have their moral status from themselves – he gives the example of loving God and honouring one’s parents. According to Durandus, it is these indispensable acts which constitute the universal and immutable principles of the natural law.39 Applying Durandus’s logic, Rutherford offers an analysis of the spoiling of the Egyptians, a famous biblical example where God seems to command theft. Here he suggests that since the precept not to steal is not a law founded in the ‘primacy, independence and supreme power of God’ it follows that it is dispensable. In fact even if the precept not to steal were a law founded in God’s own nature – as seems to have been Durandus’s own opinion – he suggests, following Aquinas implicitly, that it can still be understood as dispensable in this case, for God is able to take away ownership from the Egyptians and confer it on the Israelites – in other words, he can determine by his divine will whether the act of spoiling the Egyptians counts as theft or not.40 In a similar vein Rutherford argues that the duty not to kill one’s own son is not necessarily and immutably founded in God’s own nature before every decree of his will, and therefore it can be dispensed with by God, as we see from the example of Abraham. By contrast, Rutherford argues, the precept commanding the rational creature to love and obey God is indispensable as a necessary and immutable principle of the natural law, which can in no circumstances be dispensed with.41 Durandus’s distinction between dispensable and indispensable precepts, adapted to his own purposes, offered Rutherford an important means of tempering his own definite voluntarism. As such it confirms his connection to an important 38. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 328–9. This represents an important connection with Thomist thought, as in Exercitationes Apologeticae, 2 c. 3, p. 303, Rutherford draws on Aquinas to argue for an intimate link between divine wisdom and will. 39. Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, In Sententias Theologicas Petri Lombardi Commentariorum (Lyon, 1563), 1 d. 48 q. 4 nn. 9–10, pp. 104r-v; cf. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 329–30. 40. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 330–1; cf. Durandus, In Sententias, 1 d. 48 q. 4. n. 23, p. 105r and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae, 100, 8, ad. 3. 41. Ibid., p. 331.

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Thomistic strand of natural law thought, which he also found represented in Spanish second scholastics like Gregory of Valentia and Francisco Suárez.42 Yet, by the time of writing his Disputatio, Durandus had been clearly superseded by a more sophisticated model provided by Thomas Bradwardine.43 Indeed, Rutherford states quite explicitly that it was Bradwardine who provided him with the solution to the philosophical conundrum of the ground of ethics.44 Where Durandus had given only a twofold division of the moral field, Bradwardine offered a subtler threefold division, founded on a scholastic account of natural priority and posteriority,45 and better able to buttress Rutherford’s restrained voluntarism. Bradwardine’s basic distinction was between things which are reasonable naturally prior to the divine will, things which are reasonable naturally posterior to the divine will, and things which are said to be mixed. Within the first category are contained necessary truths about God, such as his being and goodness, which obtain prior to any act of his will. These are therefore in no way dependent on God’s will, and Bradwardine suggests that they are able to move the divine will. Within the second category are contained things which are reasonable posterior to God’s will, and which depend on God’s will for their reasonable status. These are therefore said to be caused by the divine will and can in no way move or determine it. In explaining this category Bradwardine likens it to the situation of someone choosing between two equal alternatives. For when someone chooses one of these, we say that this was a rational choice even though he could have also chosen the other. Within the third category are included reasonable things which are said to be conditionally rather than absolutely necessary. Thus while they do not themselves obtain naturally prior to the divine will, their reasonable status is crucially founded on truths which do obtain in this way. Significantly, the example that Bradwardine offers is that which we have already seen Rutherford employ as the cornerstone of the natural law: the creature’s duty to love and obey God. For although the creature’s existence is dependent on the divine will, with the supposition that this creature is in existence it is absolutely reasonable that he should love and obey God and indeed this reasonable status cannot be changed even by God himself. As he explains it: ‘that “God is Lord of this thing if this thing exists” is reasonable simply prior to the divine will, but “that this thing exists” is caused by and depends on the divine will and is therefore reasonable posterior to a will of this kind.’46 42. Ibid., pp. 331–2. 43. Bradwardine is cited briefly in Exercitationes Apologeticae, 2 c. 3, p. 305, but Durandus is much more prominent. 44. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 332–5. 45. For more on Rutherford’s deployment of this scholastic concept see the section ‘Rutherford’s Scotist Ethics’ below. 46. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 333–4; cf. Thomas Bradwardine, De Causa Dei contra Pelagium (London, 1618), 1 c. 21, p. 231: Quod enim DEUS sit Dominus huius rei, si haec res sit, est rationabile simpliciter prius voluntate divina, sed quod haec res sit, causatur et dependet ab ea, ideoque est rationabile posterius huiusmodi voluntate.



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While Bradwardine expounded this primary distinction in relation to ‘reasonableness’, it is clear that he also believed it to have an important ethical application. Following hints in his work Rutherford therefore had no difficulty transposing this into his own theory of moral complexes. Crucial to him was the subtle way in which Bradwardine connected divine nature and will with human reason and moral obligation.47 In this way he allowed Rutherford to retain a central role for natural reason – something which he importantly located not only in Thomist thought but also in the voluntaristic ethics of Ockham and Gerson48 – while affirming a voluntarism which went well beyond Aquinas or Durandus, but stopped short of Manchaca’s extremes.

Rutherford’s Scotist Ethics In Bradwardine and his subtle formulation of different ‘moments’ of divine action we therefore find the proximate source of Rutherford’s meta-ethics. Yet, importantly, underlying this elegant resolution of the Euthyphro dilemma is the contingency metaphysics of Duns Scotus. For Rutherford’s and Bradwardine’s attempts to identify different logical moments within the eternal and indivisible divine act – according to which the divine will could then be correlated with human reason and morality – clearly has its origin in Scotus’s groundbreaking treatment of contingency in Lectura 1 d. 39. In this text, as Antoon Vos and Simo Knuuttila have argued, Scotus inaugurated a revolution in modal theory, grounding contingency not in the possibility of future action, as Aristotle himself had done, but rather in the present moment of existence itself. Significantly, this breakthrough in understanding allowed Scotus to reconceive both a single instant of time and the single instant of eternity in terms of a series of logically connected ‘instants of nature’ – the ‘moments’ already referenced. As Vos outlines, this reconfigured temporal concepts of prior and posterior into a new systematic and structural context, allowing apparent temporal sequences to be re-expressed in terms of logically successive, but temporally synchronic, structural ‘instants’.49 Following in the footsteps of Bradwardine, Rutherford made extensive use of this 47. This was further elaborated by Bradwardine into a theory of obliging, preponderant and congruent reason (De Causa Dei, 1 c. 21, p. 232) which Rutherford also notes with approbation in Disputatio, p. 334. 48. In doing so Rutherford anticipates an important scholarly trend to reaffirm the importance of natural reason in voluntarist ethics. For more on this see Oakley, Natural Law, pp. 73–80. Indeed, there are marked resemblances between Rutherford’s and Ockham’s ethics deserving of further attention. 49. John Duns Scotus, The Examined Report of the Paris Lecture: Reportatio I-A. Latin Text and English Translation (Allan Wolter and Oleg Bychkov, trans.; 2 vols; New York: Franciscan Institute, 2004), d. 39 art. 3n. 39–44. For further discussion see Simo Knuuttila, ‘Time and Modality in Scholasticism’, in Simo Knuuttila, ed., Reforging the Great Chain of Being: Studies of the History of Modal Theories (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981), pp. 163–258, and

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new, Scotist concept of contingency in both his Exercitationes Apologeticae and Disputatio Scholastica, structuring his elaborate account of human freedom and divine concourse in terms of these ‘signs’ or instants of nature.50 Rutherford’s deployment of this Scotist metaphysics of freedom also had important consequences for his natural law theory. Indeed, the similarities between Rutherford’s natural law theory and that articulated by Scotus in the fourteenth century are profound. For Scotus, as for Rutherford, the highest principle of morality is that ‘God is to be loved’. Love of God and obedience to God therefore attain paramount status in his ethics, such that every other moral precept is defined exclusively in relation to this.51 What this means is that except for those acts with an intrinsic and necessary relation to the divine nature – that is, those with God as their immediate object – the moral status of all other actions is determined solely by the divine will.52 Moreover, in making this determination the divine will remains entirely free and is not necessarily bound by any considerations of human teleology or flourishing. Indeed, Scotus is clear – and here again we find definite echoes of his thought in Rutherford – that God does not necessarily have to act in accordance with what would be norms were he a moral agent.53 Such principles famously led Scotus to reduce the essential core of the natural law to only the First Table of the Ten Commandments. These alone he held to be absolutely necessary and unalterable. By contrast, the commandments of the Second Table were to be considered as contingent. Although chosen by God due to their congruence with the supreme principle of love, they are by no means intrinsically or necessarily connected to this principle. As such God can freely replace them with alternative, incompatible moral precepts, which yet remain equally congruous with the necessary commands of the First Table – something Scotus

Antoon Vos, The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 245–9. 50. See Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 44, 118, 124 and Exercitationes Apologeticae, 1 c. 4, pp. 112–15. Rutherford’s affirmation of this synchronic contingency becomes particularly explicit on p. 112 where he claims that in the ‘sign of reason’ antecedent to the futurition of an action (which he makes clear coincides with the will’s actualisation) the will remains indifferent disjunctively to will or nill. For Bradwardine’s similar use of the Scotist notion of synchronic contingency see Michael Sylwanowicz, Contingent Causality and the Foundations of Duns Scotus’ Metaphysics (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 51; Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 210–20. 51. John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, in Opera Omnia (Luke Wadding, ed.; 12 vols; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), 4 d. 46 q. 1n. 2, vol. 10, p. 238; cf. Richard Cross, ‘Natural Law, Moral Constructivism and Duns Scotus’ Metaethics: The Centrality of Aesthetic Explanation’, in Jonathan Jacobs, ed., Reason, Religion and Natural Law: From Plato to Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 183–6. 52. See Thomas Williams, ‘Reason, Morality and Voluntarism’, pp. 73–94. 53. Cross, ‘Natural Law’, pp. 183–6, 195.



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believed had actually happened in the biblical case of the patriarchs.54 Ultimately, therefore, as Richard Cross and Hannes Möhle suggest, Scotus conceived of the natural law in terms of different compossibility sets of moral precepts defined according to their relation both to the supreme principle that ‘God is to be loved’ and to the inscrutable choice of the divine will.55 In this way Bradwardine’s and Rutherford’s partition of natural law according to the complex relation of divine nature and will simply represents a codification of Scotus’s fundamental insight into the nature of morality. Rutherford’s Scotist affiliation also helps us to finally locate the crux of his difference from both the Thomistic theory of the natural law and from what we might now discern as Cameron’s modified Thomism. As Cross suggests, the greatest difference between Aquinas and Scotus lies in the latter’s unswerving commitment to divine freedom.56 In sharp contrast to Scotus – and Rutherford – Aquinas held that God necessarily acts towards his creatures as a moral agent, albeit without being a ‘debtor’ to them in any way.57 Moreover, for Aquinas natural law and human teleology are indissolubly bound. For him the highest principle of the natural law is expressed not primarily in terms of love and obedience but rather according to an objective basis of moral order: ‘good is to be done and evil avoided’. All the commandments of the Decalogue, not only the first four, can be inferred from this principle and all have a necessary connection to it.58 For Aquinas it therefore involves a contradiction for God to properly dispense with any command of the Decalogue. Thus, as Aquinas interpreted it, when God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac he did not command murder or dispense with the natural law – as Scotus and Rutherford held – but rather exercised his prerogative as judge of mankind, in effect bringing forward in time the inevitable death sentence on Isaac for original sin.59 Practically the result may not in fact be very different from the Scotist position, yet morally and theologically the two positions are markedly distinct. It is true that Cameron, especially as the manuscriptor interprets him, has definite voluntarist currents running through his theory of natural law. Yet in grounding the natural law on an imaging relation of the divine nature – reminiscent of Thomas’s account of the participation of natural law in divine eternal law60 – and in holding that God necessarily loves his own image in man, and thus necessarily acts as a moral agent towards him, he is ultimately positioned 54. Scotus, Ordinatio, in Opera Omnia, 4 d. 46 q. 1n. 8, Vol. X, p. 252. 55. Cross, ‘Natural Law’, pp. 186–97 and Hannes Möhle, ‘Scotus’s Theory of Natural Law’, in Thomas Williams, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 312–31. 56. Cross, ‘Natural Law’, p. 195. 57. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 21, 1, ad. 3; 1a, 103, 1; cf. Cross, ‘Natural Law’, pp. 177–83. 58. Ibid., 1a2ae, 94, 2; 1a2ae, 100, 2–3. 59. Ibid., 1a2ae, 100, 8, ad. 3. 60. Ibid., 1a2ae, 91, 2; 1a2ae, 93, 3.

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closer to Aquinas. For Rutherford, as we have seen, despite his evident sympathies for the Thomist model, such positions marked an unacceptable loss of divine freedom and smacked of Arminianism. For him God cannot be bound by his own creation and reason alone cannot offer an infallible guide to moral norms. This dialectic of reason and command comes out particularly starkly in his Lex Rex where he is explicit that ‘God may command against the law of nature, and God’s commandment makes subjection lawful’.61 In summary, for Cameron, as for Aquinas, the fundamental core of ethics chiefly concerned immanent structures of divine rationality. By contrast, for Rutherford, ethics was grounded in both human self-denial and subjection to God and the higher, transcendent and ultimately inscrutable rationality of the divine will.

Conclusion The repercussions of Rutherford’s dispute with Cameron are yet to be traced. Certainly the pages of the De Voluntate et Actionibus Dei circa Peccatum of John Strang, the famous principal of Glasgow University, bear witness to its lasting impact. While on this issue Strang in fact sought to reconcile Rutherford’s and Cameron’s views, the overall thrust of his work points to a wider division in Scottish Reformed theology and ethics between those like Rutherford who, following Twisse and Voetius, espoused a Bradwardinian account of the divine will and its relation to human actions and morality, and those like Cameron and Strang who pursued an alternative, although arguably equally Reformed, synthesis.62 Moreover, the discussion of Rutherford is also important on a wider canvas than that of Scottish Reformed orthodoxy. Study of Reformed ethics and natural theory still remains very much in its infancy. Important recent studies by Stephen Grabill and David VanDrunen have reaffirmed the scholastic character of Protestant natural law theory, tracing important connections between key Reformed thinkers and medieval thought. On the whole, however, they have tended to emphasize the ‘realist’ or intellectualist aspect of Reformed natural law theory and played down its voluntarism.63 It may be true, as Francis Turretin suggested towards the end of the seventeenth century, that Scotist and voluntarist 61. Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex, The Law and the Prince (London: printed for John Field, 1644), p. 200, quoted in David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 158–9. 62. John Strang, De Voluntate et Actionibus Dei circa Peccatum (Amsterdam: Apud J. & D. Elzevirios, 1657), pp. 87–9. Rutherford’s hero Twisse is clearly the main target of Strang’s work. 63. See Stephen Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 54–70, 87–91, 174, 190–1; David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, pp. 156–9.



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accounts were in a minority – although Rutherford’s own reading of the Reformed tradition would suggest differently.64 Yet the example of Rutherford and Cameron’s dispute suggests the need for a wider and more careful reassessment of this evident ‘voluntarist’ dimension of Reformed thought, as well as of the ways it might have contributed to the ultimate splintering of confessional orthodoxy.

64. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (James Dennison, ed., George Giger, trans.; 3 vols; New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 9–10.

Chapter 8 S A M U E L R U T H E R F O R D O N T H E D I V I N E O R IG I N O F P O S SI B I L I T Y A N D I M P O S SI B I L I T Y

Aza Goudriaan πρότερoν ἡ ἐνέργεια … δυνάμεως – Aristotle1 Deus ergo erit prior omni possibili – Rutherford2 In 1649 Samuel Rutherford published a book on God’s providence.3 As the full title indicated, this work was comprised of material he had taught his students at the University of St Andrews. The title stated, moreover, that its author had concentrated on ‘the main points of the matter’, that is to say, ‘the supremacy of God, His active engagement with respect to sin, the concurrence of the first cause, and predetermination’. All of this was discussed with a polemical focus on the refutation of ‘Jesuits, Arminians, and Socinians’. The volume concluded with an appendix consisting of ‘Metaphysical investigations [Disquisitiones metaphysicae]’. 1. Aristotle quoted by Rutherford, Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia, variis praelectionibus, quod attinet ad summa rerum capita, tradita S. Theologiae adolescentibus candidatis in inclyta academia Andreapolitana, in qua adversus Jesuitas, Arminianos, Socinianos, de Dominio Dei, actione ipsius operosa circa peccatum, concursu primae causae, praedeterminatione et contenditur et decertatur. Adjectae sunt Disquisitiones Metaphysicae de ente, possibili, dominio Dei in entia et non entia, et variae quaestiones quae ad uberiorem et exquisitiorem cognitionem doctrinae de providentia divina imprimis conducunt (Edinburgh: heirs of George Anderson, 1650), pp. 537–8; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1051a2–3, in W. Jaeger, ed., Aristotelis Metaphysica (repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Rutherford considered Aristotle ‘the flower of Nature’s wit’, as cited by G. D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 132. 2. Samuel Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 538. 3. John Coffey, ‘Rutherford, Samuel (c. 1600–1661)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/24364 (accessed 12 December 2012)]. On the publication of the Disputatio see John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions. The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 263.

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This appendix, as James Walker has put it, ‘contains questions that seem to carry you into very cloudland: “Is God the origin and cause of possibles and impossibles? Is this possible something real?” “Is there anything impossible save as it has its original impossibility from God?”’.4 This essay investigates Rutherford’s view on possibilities and impossibilities as articulated in the first seven quaestiones of these ‘Metaphysical investigations’.5 Four questions guide the historical analysis which follows. First, what position did Rutherford adopt concerning possibilities and impossibilities? Second, who were the opponents against whom Rutherford developed his view in the ‘Disquisitiones metaphysicae’? Third, was the fourteenth-century theologian and philosopher Thomas Bradwardine, whom Rutherford cites frequently,6 a positive source of Rutherford’s view on this particular issue? Finally, is it possible to trace an early reception history of Rutherford’s Disputatio scholastica? Are there, in other words, any indications that Rutherford’s theory on possibilities and impossibilities had an impact on subsequent theological thinking? Taken together, these four angles provide a variegated historical perspective into Rutherford’s theological and philosophical thinking. Since the metaphysical reflections were originally a part of Rutherford’s teaching at St Andrews, they also provide valuable insight into the content of theological education in Scotland in the 1640s.

Rutherford on Possibilia and Impossibilia In (late) medieval scholasticism, possibility and impossibility were important conceptual issues standing at the intersection between metaphysics and theology. Metaphysics touched on possibility in relation to being, with the question of what it is that makes a being possible or impossible. Theology touched on possibility and impossibility in relation to divine omnipotence, with questions about what God can do in His infinite power.7 In his ‘Metaphysical investigations’, Rutherford argues that God’s being is the 4. James Walker, Theology and Theologians of Scotland, 1560–1750 (repr., Edinburgh: Knox Press, 1982), p. 9. 5. These quaestiones can be found on pp. 531–61 of the Disputatio; cf. Aza Goudriaan, Philosophische Gotteserkenntnis bei Suárez und Descartes, im Zusammenhang mit der niederländischen Theologie und Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 128–9. 6. See Walker’s hyperbolical description in Theology and Theologians, p. 9: ‘Rutherford was somewhat of a hero-worshipper, and his heroes were the schoolman Bradwardine (Magnus Bradwardine he always called him) and the Puritan Dr. Twiss.’ 7. For fuller explanation of these issues, see e.g. L. Honnefelder, ‘Possibilien I. Mittelalter’, HWPh vol. 7, pp. 1126–35; H. W. Arndt, ‘Possibilien II. 17. und 18. Jh.’, HWPh, vol. 7, pp. 1135–9; see especially Jacob Schmutz, ‘La querelle des possibles. Recherches philosophiques et textuelles sur la métaphysique jésuite espagnole, 1540–1767’ (3 vols;



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first principle of all things. Accordingly, he corrects Aristotle who had famously established the law of non-contradiction as the first of principles (‘This is the first and strongest principle: it is impossible for one and the same thing to simultaneously be and be not’).8 He notes that Aristotle had stated elsewhere that being precedes non-being, and that the affirmative precedes the negative.9 If such is the case, Rutherford argues, the law of non-contradiction cannot be the very first principle. The law of non-contradiction is complex, not simple, and it involves the concept of being as well as the concept of non-being. However, since the simple is prior to the complex, the following principle is prior [to the law of non-contradiction, AG]: ‘The same is the same’. Yet, because identical predication does not teach anything, this is perhaps more truly the simplest supposition rather than a principle. Therefore, the more prior principle is: ‘God is’, ‘God knows’, ‘God wills,’ etc … Now, it is necessary that this [principle, namely that] ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time’, has its truth in Him who is the first same thing, whose sweetest name – and more than a name – is I am who I am, Yahweh.10

In this dense passage, a fundamental point is made that determines Rutherford’s view of possibility: God’s existence is prior to the law of non-contradiction. This metaphysical and logical principle has a theological foundation. The law of non-contradiction presupposes God’s existence: it is true in the first instance in God. Possibilia are grounded in God’s omnipotence. God likewise becomes the ‘Lord of impossibilities, by creating the specific forms of things from which incompossibilities result.’ Accordingly, it is important to note that ‘all possibilia are possible because God is omnipotent; God is not, conversely, omnipotent because they [i.e. the possibilia] are in themselves and intrinsically possible’.11 The Lordship of God concerns both created beings and that which is not created; this Rutherford considers to be expressed in several biblical passages.12 Rutherford gives an affirmative answer to the question ‘whether God is the origin and cause of impossibilia and possibilia’. The first reason is that the law of unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Brussels, 2003). I thank the author for providing me with a copy of this important dissertation. 8. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 531; quoting Aristotle, Metaphysica 4, 4. 9. Ibid.; quoting Aristotle, Analytica posteriora 1, 22. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 532: ‘Verum enimvero, cum Deus sit absolutus Dominus quasi amplissimae illius foeturae [sic] possibilium in Omnipotentiae thesauro reconditorum, aeque erit Dominus inpossibilium creando specificas rerum formas e quibus resultant incompossibilitates, atqui est possibilium. In possibilia autem dominatum Deus hoc modo obtinet, quod sit Omnipotens, et ideo quia Omnipotens, omnia possibilia sunt possibilia, non autem quia sunt possibilia in se et intrinsece, ideo Deus est Omnipotens …’ 12. Ibid., pp. 532–3, citing 1 Chron. 29.11–12, 14, 16; Deut. 10.14; Ps. 24.1, 15.5, 89.12, 115.16; Rom. 11.26; Prov. 16.4; Rev. 4.11.

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non-contradiction as he describes it (‘Idem simul esse et non esse, impossibile est’) is true in God before it is true in the things that He brought into being. It is impossible for an uncreated being not to be the same as itself. Since this is the case, it is also ‘impossible for a being by participation simultaneously to be a created being and not a created being’. The second argument Rutherford provides is Aristotle’s dictum that the act precedes the potency, and that, ‘therefore, the infinite active potency of God is prior to the passive and receptive [potency] in the creatures’. ‘God is, therefore, prior to everything possible.’ As his third argument, Rutherford offers the following: the starting point of a one-way sequence has priority over the sequence. The principle that ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time’ is true in God even if He had not created anything. Rutherford accordingly rejects the notion defended by several Jesuits that the intrinsic possibility of things makes it possible for God’s omnipotence to create them.13 In his mind, that amounts to inverting the sequence as well as the direction of dependence. The question concerning the impossible is ‘far more difficult’, according to Rutherford: ‘Is something impossible only because it is originally impossible for God?’ Rutherford responds in the affirmative. Creating the ‘possible or actual essences’ of things, God ‘with the same act creates the incompossibilities’ between the different natures of things. The impossible, as a contradiction between two different forms, is posterior to the possible and, just like the possible, it is dependent on God. According to Rutherford, impossibility in the created realm is always complex: there is no such thing as a ‘simple and non-complex impossibility in created things’. Rutherford mentions several reasons, one of which is that ‘every simple being can be created’ by God. Moreover, in a simple being ‘there are no two things of which one can be predicated of the other, there can be no affirmation of impossibility, no falsity, no negation, and therefore no incompossibility’. In one of his other arguments Rutherford mentions that the very first impossibility is for God, as the First Being, not to be identical with Himself; this is also the ‘origin of all impossibility in creatures’.14 Rutherford also raises the question whether, upon the ‘impious hypothesis’ that God did not exist, possibility and impossibility would still exist ‘in the nature of things’. Rutherford knows this atheist hypothesis from scholastic literature and links it especially to ‘the impiety of the Jesuits’ – although, in fact, late medieval theologians such as Gregory of Rimini and Gabriel Biel had already advanced atheist hypotheses in the context of moral norms.15 Rutherford observes a structural similarity between the theory of middle knowledge, in which it is assumed that future contingents have a determinate truth prior to the 13. Ibid., pp. 538–9. 14. Ibid., pp. 540–5. 15. See e.g. Isabelle Mandrella, ed. and trans., Gregor von Rimini, Moralisches Handeln und rechte Vernunft. Lectura super secundum Sententiarum, distinctiones 34-37 … Übersetzt und eingeleitet (Freiburg: Herder, 2010), pp. 32–42. The atheist hypothesis in Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis (Paris: N. Buon, 1625) likewise has an essentially moral context.



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divine decree, and the theory that possibilia are possible independently of God. The latter view is clearly contradictory on Rutherford’s premises: if something owes its possibility to the omnipotence of God, it implies contradiction to maintain one of these (i.e. the possibility of the thing) while removing the other (i.e. an existent omnipotence). Rutherford offers a radical critique of the atheist hypothesis by arguing that, ‘if there is no first cause (as is impiously supposed), nothing will be possible, no being whatsoever, and thus nothing will be true, nothing false …’.16 In such a fictitious scenario propositions will be ‘nonentities, neither true nor false, and perhaps both true and false and contradictory; since you suppose that there is no First Being, you suppose an infinite contradiction and it is not at all absurd that infinite contradictions follow from such a notorious contradiction’.17 Rutherford’s main argument seems to be that both possibility and impossibility are what they are in dependence upon God, His omnipotence and His free producing or non-producing.18 Therefore, if the atheist hypothesis attempts to sever possibility and impossibility from God, the result is a collapse of all possibility and impossibility as such.19 Another question that Rutherford addresses is ‘whether possibilia are something real’.20 They are not, according to Rutherford, since they are just called ‘possible’ by a merely external reference to God’s omnipotence. Possibilia are, as their name suggests, merely ‘in potency’, not actually existing. According to Rutherford, the Christian faith in creation is not compatible with the notion of eternal essences that are thought to exist independently from God Himself or eternally emanate from Him. The viewpoint of eternity leads Rutherford to a brief consideration of the issue of the so-called ‘eternal truths’:

16. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 553: ‘At vero repugnantia est vel incomplexa vel complexa, et supra dictum nihil esse simplex et incomplexum repugnans, quia Deo omnia sunt possibilia, nisi quae implicant contradictionem: at si non sit prima causa (ut impie supponitur) nihil erit possibile, nullum ens, nihil sic erit verum, nihil falsum, nihil erit, nihil non erit, ut hircocervus nec album, nec nigrum, nec vivens, nec mortuum quid erit.’ 17. Ibid. p. 553: ‘Si enim supponimus non esse primam causam, neque essent proprie entia, neque proprie non-entia, neque aliquid veri, neque falsi, neque quidpiam possibilis neque impossibilis continerent tales propositiones, sed essent plane nihila, nec vera, nec falsa, et forte et vera et falsa et contradictoria; quia tu supponens non esse primum ens, supponis infinitam contradictionem, et nihil absurdi est ex hac tam insigni contradictione sequi infinitas contradictiones.’ 18. Ibid., p. 554: ‘… si supponamus primum ens non esse, aïo tum non entia et impossibilia, ne quidem habere quod sint non entia, aut nihila, aut non repugnantiae objectivae. Quia si non detur primum efficiens, neque prima causa, neque possibile proprie aliquid esset, neque esset non ens proprie non ens, nam per liberam non efficientiam primae causae, proprie non ens est non ens, ut antea dictum.’ 19. Ibid., pp. 545–57. 20. Ibid., pp. 557–9.

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Neither would I dare to assert, with Aristotle and the Jesuits, that these propositions – ‘man is a living being’, ‘the rose is a flower’, ‘the eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge is sin’ – have eternal truth, since the connected parts (poles) of the propositions and the copula ‘is’ have been created in time. Now to me it seems incomprehensible for the entities of things to be eternal and the truths of things to have originated in time. Let the Jesuits understand it, who understand everything. However, that they are necessarily true and that their truths are abstracted from time and are always true I do admit in the sense that the concept of the attribute is included in the quidditative concept of the subject because of the identification of the attribute with the subject. For, whoever thinks of a human being thinks of a living being. A human being in potency includes a living being that is objectively in potency.21

Rutherford clearly wants to avoid the language of ‘eternal truths’, for the truths involved ‘have originated in time’. At the same time he admits that propositions attributing essential predicates to a thing are necessarily true, and in this sense are ‘always’ true or true ‘abstracted from time’. Rutherford’s emphasis on creation is one additional indication of his opposition to the assumption of any realm of truth or possibility that is independent from God. His position involves not so much a creation of eternal truths as such – i.e. the position taken in Descartes’s letters to Marin Mersenne in 1630 – but rather the view that necessary truths are about essences that have been created. Rutherford offers several thoughts about how possibilia relate to God’s knowledge and will.22 Here, too, possibilities are strictly conceived of as depending on God. By his scientia simplex intelligentiae God knows ‘which creature He could make in this or that order’. The scientia libera is concerned with the knowledge of ends and means, causes and effects that God chooses to realize. The practica scientia is the knowledge ‘by which God forms the ideas of the possibilia and future things’. Rutherford speaks very carefully about a scientia speculativa with 21. Ibid., p. 558: ‘Sed neque ausim cum Aristotele et Jesuitis has propositiones, (Homo est animal) (Rosa est flos) (Manducatio vetitae arboris scientiae est peccatum) asserere esse aeternae veritatis, quia extrema propositionum connexa et copula (est) in tempore creata sunt. At entitates rerum esse aeternas, et veritates rerum tempore ortas, mihi videtur ἀκαταληπτον. Videant Jesuitae, qui omnia vident. Sed necessario veras et earum veritates a tempore abstrahere, et semper veras hoc sensu largior, quod quidditativo conceptu subjecti includatur conceptus attributi, propter identificationem attributi cum subjecto, qui enim concipit hominem, concipit animal, homo in potentia includit animal objective in potentia, et homo in actua, animal in actu, quod agnovit adversarius Hurtado Jesuita. At quando concipitur homo, concipitur animal rationale et si tu ponis hominem ab aeterno, necesse est ponas animal rationale ab aeterno, quia essentia et essentiatum non possunt non semper identificari et tamen essentiatum est creatum in tempore sicut et essentia, et simul concreata est identitas inter essentiam en essentiatum, quando creatur res constans essentia.’ 22. Ibid., pp. 559–61.



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respect to God, because this is a knowledge that ‘presupposes the object’ and, accordingly, it presupposes that God has formed the ideas. God’s knowledge does not depend on anything outside Him: Nothing intelligible precedes in the proper sense the intellect of God, and it does not offer itself to the intellect of God as an object that is by its nature prior to Him. (1) For, it is an imperfection of the created intellect that it is chased by the object outside of itself as the cause of its intellection. (2) The infinite intellect either makes [an object] or wills permissively that it comes into being; the finite, however, presupposes its object. Therefore, there is no purely speculative knowledge in God that is separated from all praxis.23

As far as God’s will is concerned, ‘by loving His omnipotence, God necessarily also loves the infinite possibilia within’.24

Rutherford’s Opponents Rutherford’s exposition on possibilia had an obvious polemical character. It was explicitly aimed at the Jesuits, who are mentioned as a group on several occasions25 and at times also quoted individually. Not all of them held views that Rutherford disagreed with. Thus, the Jesuit Pedro Arrúbal (Petrus de Arrubal, 1559–1608) is cited – not entirely accurately – as saying that God’s omnipotence would be ‘equally infinite’ if no created being were possible at all or if all of them were to imply a contradiction.26 Rutherford agrees with this affirmation of God’s priority with respect to possibility and impossibility. As such, this represents a rather rare case of consensus in a debate which is emphatically directed against Jesuit thought. Several Jesuits argued that the inherent possibility of things is the reason why God can bring them about. Rutherford, who was convinced that possibility is 23. Ibid., p. 560: ‘Nihil intelligibile proprie praevenit intellectum Dei, neque offert sese intellectui Dei, tanquam objectum ipso natura prius. 1. Quia intellectus creati imperfectio est venari ab objecto extra se causam suae intellectionis. 2. Intellectus infinitus vel facit vel permissive vult fieri: finitus vero factum praesupponit objectum suum. Nulla ergo est in Deo scientia pure speculativa sejuncta ab omni praxi.’ 24. Ibid., p. 560. 25. Ibid., pp. 534, 535, 539, 542, 543, 545 (‘Jesuitarum impietatem’), 550, 551 (‘Jesuitae Philosophi insani’). 26. Ibid., p. 539; Petrus de Arrubal SJ, Commentariorum ac disputationum in primam partem divi Thomae tomus primus (Madrid: Thomas Iunta, 1619), p. 203b (disp. 29, c. 1, n. 17): ‘… perfectio omnipotentiae ita est in divina substantia, ut eadem aeque perfecta esset, quamvis nullae essent possibiles creaturae, aut quamvis omnes involverent contradictionem …’ (instead of ‘aeque perfecta’ Rutherford writes ‘aeque infinita’, which is something different but does not change the basic point here). Cf. Schmutz, ‘Querelle des possibles’, 1:430; 3:1210.

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founded in God’s omnipotence, considered the definition of Francisco de Oviedo (1602–51), according to which absolute omnipotence is based on the possibility of the effect, to be ‘absurd’.27 Rutherford also quoted Oviedo’s phrase that ‘the causality that we mean when we say “since the creature is possible, God is able to produce it” is, as it were, formal’.28 In a similar fashion, Martínez de Ripalda (1594–1648) stated that things have their possibility, defined as the ‘non-repugnance to exist’, from themselves and from nothing external. Rutherford cites him as saying that things ‘do not have their intrinsic non-repugnance to exist from another, but they are out of themselves non-repugnant to exist by another’.29 Rutherford observes that the Jesuit metaphysician Pedro da Fonseca (1528–99) took a different position by distinguishing between possibility, which he considered to be dependent upon God, and impossibility, which he considered to be rooted in the things themselves. Fonseca wrote that impossibility is founded in the ‘nature of contradictory terms’, but that possibility ‘belongs primarily to the first possible, that is, God, who is being itself from Himself, but to the other possibilia only by Him, or by essential dependence from Him’.30 On impossibility Fonseca took a position that was also defended by the Jesuit Girolamo Fasulo (1567–1639). Rutherford quotes him as saying that, ‘if it is contradictory for A to come into

27. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 539: ‘Licet Oviedo dicat Omnipotentiam dici absolute potentem a possibilitate effectus’; with reference to Franciscus Oviedo SJ, Integer cursus philosophicus, vol. 2 (Lyon: Prost, 1640), p. 421 (Controv. 10, punctum 5, § 2, n. 10): ‘Secundo potest omnipotentia considerari secundum alium conceptum extrinsecum, quem sumit a possibilitate effectus, per quem dicitur absolute potens …’ Biographical details on Francisco de Oviedo can be found in Schmutz, ‘Querelle des possibles’, 2:769–70. 28. Oviedo, Cursus philosophicus, vol. 2, p. 422 (Controv. 10, punctum 5, § 2, n. 10): ‘Ex quo inferes causalitatem, quam significamus cum dicimus, quia creatura est possibilis Deus potest illam producere, esse quasi in genere causae formalis, quia per ipsam creaturam quam instar causae significamus, ultimo, et formaliter constituitur omnipotentia …’; Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 546. 29. Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 545–6; Ioannes Martínez de Ripalda SJ, De ente supernaturali, disputationes in universam theologiam (Burdigalae: Guillelmus Millangius, 1634), p. 374a: ‘… res creatae, licet vere habeant existentiam ab alio, tamen non habent ab alio intrinsecam non-repugnantiam existendi, sed a se ipsis sunt non repugnantes existere ab alio.’ On Martínez de Ripalda, see Schmutz, ‘Querelle des possibles’, 3:1221. 30. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 539 (and 542); Petrus Fonseca, Commentaria in libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Stagiritae, vol. 3 (Ebora: Emmanuel de Lyra, 1604), p. 605 (liber 9, cap. 1, q. 3, sectio 3): ‘Alia enim ratrio est in impossibilitate, ut merito primum tribuatur ipsis rebus impossibilibus, seu involventibus contradictionem; alia in possibilitate, ut primum respiciat virtutem primae caesae, ex qua derivetur in rem possibilem.’ Rutherford quoted (p. 539) the following sentence: ‘At possibilitas, etsi primo, et immediate convenit primo possibili, quod est Deus, qui ex se est ipsum esse; tamen non convenit creaturis possibilibus nisi per illud, seu (quod idem est) per dependentiam essentialem ab illo.’ Schmutz, ‘Querelle des possibles’, 3:1215.



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being, it is, therefore, contradictory for God to be able to produce A’.31 Similarly, Francisco de Oviedo is reported to have stated that, ‘even though the power that must be supposed for the possibility of the chimera is not absent on the part of God, on the part of the chimera the intrinsic possibility is absent’.32 With respect to impossibility, Rutherford argued that ‘the Jesuits, and especially Fonseca’ taught the opposite of what Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus and Thomas Bradwardine had stated a few centuries earlier. They explained the impossibility of something by the impossibility for God to do that thing.33 In short, the Jesuits were the main front against which Rutherford emphasized the priority of God’s omnipotence vis-à-vis both possibility and impossibility. This is also evident in a short remark on Francisco Suárez, whom Rutherford criticizes for having rejected Cajetan’s view that ‘God necessarily loves the possible creatures as they are in God Himself, not as they are in themselves’.34

Bradwardine as Predecessor In questions 1 through 7 of the ‘Disquisitiones metaphysicae’ Rutherford quotes the fourteenth-century theologian Thomas Bradwardine several times. According to a recent interpretation of Bradwardine’s theory of possibility, ‘[r]ather than basing possibility and impossibility on repugnance and non-repugnance to being as such, Bradwardine based it on repugnance and non-repugnance to necessary being’.35 However, ‘while Bradwardine thought that God was the ontological 31. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 539; Girolamo Fasulo (Hieronymus Fasolus) SJ, In primam partem Summae D. Thomae commentariorum tomus secundus (Lyon: Prost, 1629) (q. 14, art. 5, dub. 3), pp. 29–30, there 29: ‘… quando absolute implicat, posse fieri A; necesse est ut partiter absolute implicet, posse facere A …’ On Fasulo, see Schmutz, ‘Querelle des possibles’, 3:1215. 32. Franciscus Oviedo SJ, Integer cursus philosophicus, vol. 2 (Lyon: Prost, 1640), p. 422 (Controv. 10, punctum 5, § 2, n. 11): ‘… Deus est potens illum producere per conceptum intrinsecum omnipotentiae, quia omnipotentia supponitur ut principium ad possibilitatem, quae per se ipsam formaliter est possibilitas, et non supponitur ad chimaeram, quia etsi ex parte Dei non deficiat virtus, quae debebat supponi ad chimaerae possibilitatem, ex parte chimaerae deficit intrinseca possibilitas, quae per se ipsam est possibilitas …’ 33. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 543. Rutherford probably took the references to Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus from Thomas Bradwardine; see below, n. 39. 34. Ibid., p. 560: ‘… an recte Suárez dicat, DEUM non posse esse omnipotentem, quin creaturae sint possibiles, non temere affirmarem, nisi sermo sit de possibilibus ad intra: Recte forte Cajetanus ait (quem immerito refutat Suárez) DEUM necessario amare creaturas possibiles, ut sint in ipso DEO, non ut sint in seipsis.’ Francisco Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae 30.16.42; Opera omnia (Carolus Berton, ed., 26 vols; Paris: Ludovicus Vivès, 1856–1878), vol. 26, p. 197. 35. Gloria Ruth Frost, ‘Thomas Bradwardine on God and the Foundations of Modality’, British Journal of the History of Philosophy 21 (2013), pp. 368–80 (378). Frost’s analysis

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source of necessity, possibility, and impossibility, he did not think that God freely decided the modal status of propositions’. According to this interpretation Bradwardine did not offer a voluntarist explanation of possibility and impossibility. Clearly, this position is very similar to the view that grounds possibilia and impossibilia in God’s omnipotence as Rutherford presented it in 1649 against several Jesuit thinkers of his day. Rutherford indicates his agreement with Bradwardine at the key points of his argument. On possibility, first of all, Rutherford cited Bradwardine regarding the possibility of the world being grounded in God’s power to create it before it exists. Bradwardine denied – like Rutherford after him – that this possibility is grounded in the world’s being inherently possible.36 With respect to impossibility, Rutherford likewise refers to Bradwardine’s view that the impossible is not inherently impossible, independently from God, but that it too is grounded in God.37 As Rutherford paraphrases him, Bradwardine argued that ‘If it is true that “it is impossible that the chimera is a goat-stag”, the cause of this truth is not the terms (‘chimera’ or ‘goat-stag’) alone, nor some non-being, because that which is absolutely nothing can cause absolutely nothing; therefore, some being is its cause, and this being is none except God.’38 Finally, Rutherford paraphrases Bradwardine with respect to the atheist is based on Bradwardine’s De causa Dei, a work republished in 1618 ‘as part of an antiArminian strategy’; see Luca Baschera, ‘Witnessing to the Calvinism of the English Church: the 1618 Edition of Thomas Bradwardine’s »De causa Dei adversus Pelagium«’, in Christian Moser and Peter Opitz, eds, Bewegung und Beharrung. Aspekte des reformierten Protestantismus, 1520–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 433–46 (446); James Tanis, ‘Abraham van der Heyden: A Seventeenth-Century Bradwardinian’, in Kenneth Hagen, ed., Augustine, the Harvest, and Theology (1300–1650). Essays Dedicated to Heiko Augustinus Oberman in Honor of his Sixtieth Birthday (Leiden: Brill, 1990), pp. 333–48, cp. 338–41. 36. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 535, quoting Thomas Bradwardine, De causa Dei contra Pelagium et de virtute causarum (Henricus Savile, ed., London: Officina Nortoniana, 1618), p. 202 (book 1, chapter 12): ‘quia ergo Deus prius potuit facere mundum, quam fieret, ideo est mundus, non quia mundus potuit prius esse.’ (Rutherford’s reference to book 1, chapter 4, seems to be a misprint.) 37. Ibid., pp. 542 and 543, quoting two passages from Bradwardine, De causa Dei, book 1, chapter 13. The references made by Rutherford to Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus are already found in Bradwardine, De causa Dei, book 1, chapter 13; Savile edition, p. 206. 38. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 542: ‘At vero incompossibilie privative probat Bradwardina non esse citra DEUM, quia si verum est hoc (impossibile est Chimaeram esse Tragelaphum) hujus veritatis causa non est soli termini, (Chimara) aut (Tregalphus), nec aliquod non esn, quia quod omnino non est, nihil omnino causare potest, aliquod ergo ens est illius causa, et non est ens praeter DEUM’. Compare the different formulation in Bradwardine, De causa Dei, p. 204 (book 1, chapter 13): ‘Item hoc est verum de negatiua de qua minus videtur, de tali scilicet cuius vtrumque extremum est impossibile esse, vt Chimera non est Tragelaphus; Haec enim est vera, ergo habet aliquam causam veritatis; sed illa non est soli termini, quia illi soli per se non magis redderent propositionem veram quam falsam; imo



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hypothesis, which he considered contradictory: ‘If God does not exist, this proposition would be true: “God is not”. There would be some truth, then, but not the first truth.’39 As a matter of fact, Bradwardine had argued before Rutherford that ‘if God were to cease to be, nothing would be past or future, true or false, possible or impossible, necessary or contingent …’.40 Both the repeated references and the material agreement between Bradwardine’s and Rutherford’s view on God as the ground of both possibility and impossibility and on the absurdity of the atheist hypothesis reveal that Rutherford deliberately followed Bradwardine, applying some of the latter’s fundamental insights in his own debate with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit thinkers. At this important point, Rutherford’s thinking stands in continuity with the medieval tradition of English theology.

On the Reception of Rutherford’s View In his monograph on Rutherford, John Coffey has listed a number of works by contemporaries or later authors that dwell at some length on Rutherford’s Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia.41 One of these is John Owen’s Diatriba de justitia divina from 1653. In this book, Owen defends punitive justice as an essential attribute of God. As the title page indicates, Socinianism is Owen’s main opponent, but Reformed theologians such as William Twisse, Gerardus Vossius and Samuel Rutherford are also attacked: Rutherford, Owen notes, had defended the view that ‘punitive justice … is not at all in God by the necessity of nature, but freely’.42 This discussion forms a component of the reception history of nec veram, nec falsam; Nec illa causa potest esse Chimaera, nec Tragelaphus; haec enim nihil sunt et per consequens nihil causant; est ergo aliquid existens causa veritatis illius …’ 39. Rutherford, Disputatio, p. 550: ‘Si DEUS non est, vera erit haec propositio “Deus non est”. Ergo est aliqua veritas, et non est prima veritas’, with reference to Bradwardine, De causa Dei, book 1, chapter 14. Bradwardine made the point but phrased it in a slightly different manner, p. 210 (book 1, chapter 14): ‘Praeterea, si Deus non est, vere Deus non est, aliqua ergo veritate Deus non est, est ergo aliqua veritas, quare et prima veritas, quae est Deus.’ Cf. p. 211 (ibid.): ‘Adhuc autem si Deus non est, nihil vere est nec vere non est; Nihil vere est hoc vel tale, nec vere non est hoc vel tale, quia nulla veritate secundum praemissa …’ 40. Bradwardine, De causa Dei, p. 209 (book 1, c. 10, corr.): ‘… si Deus esse desineret nihil esset praeteritum, nec futurum, verum, nec falsum, possibile vel impossibile, necessarium vel contingens, nec etiam posset esse: ex quo et oppositum sequitur euidenter, scilicet ipsum Deum, et sic aliquid praefuisse, esse, et fore, et similiter alia posse esse per omnipotentiam Dei magnam.’ 41. Coffey, Politics, pp. 272–3. 42. John Owen, Diatriba de justitia divina seu iustitiae vindicatricis vindiciae (Oxford: Thomas Robinson, 1653); the quotation here at p. 256, with reference to Rutherford, Disputatio scholastica, p. 345. Cf. Coffey, Politics, p. 129.

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Rutherford’s Disputatio scholastica, but it is less relevant for the reception history of Rutherford’s metaphysics of possibility. In 1657, John Strang, a professor of theology in Glasgow, published a work in Amsterdam entitled De voluntate et actionibus Dei circa peccatum.43 In a chapter on the question whether or not moral goodness depends on the will of God, Strang quoted Rutherford’s ‘Disquisitiones metaphysicae’. He commended Rutherford for having stated that there are certain things God cannot will because they are incompatible with His nature. He added a significant caveat, however, saying that Rutherford had added some other remarks that seemed to undermine his own claim, although Strang wished to interpret them as being consistent with what Rutherford had said before.44 In 1674 the Scottish theologian John Brown of Wamphray (c. 1610–79), who had been living in exile in the Netherlands since 1663, discussed the same question concerning the origin of moral good and evil.45 Noting Strang’s criticism of Rutherford he defended the latter, citing among others a remark in which Rutherford stated that God ‘cannot command that we believe contradictory things to be simultaneously true’ because He is identical with Himself: primum et infinitum idem est idem.46 The law of non-contradiction is founded in God. In quaestio nine of the ‘Disquisitiones metaphysicae’ this 43. John Strang, De voluntate et actionibus Dei circa peccatum, libri quatuor (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1657). If the index of proper names is to be trusted, this work contains some, but not many, criticisms of Rutherford (pp. 87–9), and further includes an approving quotation from ‘Rhetorfortis noster’ as well (p. 38). However, in his work De causa Dei contra antisabbatarios tractatus (Rotterdam: Henricus Goddaeus, 1674), John Brown of Wamphray noted that Strang criticized Rutherford ‘quite often without mentioning his name’ (‘quem [i.e. Rutherford] licet innominatum saepius sugillat, tum in hoc capite, tum alibi’; p. 27). Walker considered Strang’s book ‘a work of the same class as Rutherford’s De Providentia, to which indeed it is in part a reply’ (Theology, p. 18). 44. Strang, De voluntate et actionibus Dei, p. 88: ‘Item in disquisitionibus metaphysicis quaest. 9 agnoscit, quaedam esse justa et bona propter condecentiam (ut loquitur) et congruitatem divinam, quae Deus non potest non velle, et quibus opposita velle Dei naturae repugnat. Quod autem alia parum his consentanea ibidem adjungere videatur, non est nostri instituti hic examinare, sed benigne interpretari cupimus.’ 45. Brown, De causa Dei contra Antisabbatarios, book 1, chapter 3, deals with the question ‘An omnis bonitas et Malitia Moralis, in actionibus nostris, fit a Dei voluntate et constitutione?’ (pp. 18–39). On John Brown, see D. C. Lachman, ‘Brown, John’, in DSCHT, pp. 98–9; Walker, Theology, pp. 24–5, 107–9. 46. Brown, De causa Dei contra Antisabbatarios, p. 27, cites, with what might have been intended as one ‘correction’, Rutherford, Disputatio, pp. 569–70: ‘Quia contradictoria esse simul vera non potest Deus jubere ut nos credamus, quia (idem non esse idem) resolvitur in hoc (primum et infinitum idem [Brown adds: non] est idem) sicut negativum principium in creatis, resolvitur in affirmativum in primo ente. Quale est hoc (DEVS est) (primus idem est idem) propter illam suavissimam unitatem et harmoniam in Deo indecens est Deum posse velle, adeoque posse imperare ut homines credant verum esse, quod infinitae primae veritati (DEVS est) (DEVS est unus) (DEVS est infinitus) repugnat …’



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consideration is applied to the ground of morality, but Rutherford also mentioned it with respect to possibility. Insofar as the law of non-contradiction is founded in God’s identity with Himself, God cannot command humans to believe contradictory things. In July 1674 a Jena student named Henricus Valentinus Krauchenberg presided over a philosophical disputation on general concurrence that was aimed specifically against Rutherford’s Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia.47 Given the Lutheran context in Jena, Rutherford’s views on concurrence could not be expected to receive a warm welcome.48 For that reason, the disputation is an interesting indication of the fact that Rutherford’s 1649 book was still being read in Lutheran Jena in 1674. For the reception history of Rutherford’s theory of possibles and impossibles, however, this text is not relevant. The same applies to Richard Baxter’s Catholick Theologie of 1675.49 This work includes a chapter in opposition to Rutherford’s Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia. The main theme here is God’s providence with respect to sin; the ‘Disquisitiones metaphysicae’ are not discussed as such.50 Melchior Leydekker (1642–1721), a Reformed minister and prolific professor of theology at Utrecht, provides one of the clearest instances of a positive reception of Rutherford’s view of possibility and impossibility found up to now.51 In 1677 he wrote about the subject in a treatise intended to advocate common Reformed 47. M. Henricus Valentinus Krauchenberg (praes.)/Johannes Fabianus Hagen (resp.), Q.D.B.V. Dissertatio academica qua sententia communis ac recepta de concursu Dei generali a φλυαρίαις SAMUELIS RETORFORTIS simulque verae sententiae defensoribus ab eodem frustra intentato βλασφημίας crimine liberatur (Jena: Stannus Bauhoferianus, 1674); online at http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id326870911. 48. On philosophy in seventeenth-century Jena, see Walter Sparn, ‘Die Schulphilosophie in den lutherischen Territorien’, in Helmut Holzhey et al., eds, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. 4, Das heilige römische Reich deutscher Nation, Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), pp. 475–587 (522–31). 49. Richard Baxter, Catholick Theologie: Plain, Pure, Peaceable, For Pacification of the Dogmatical Word-Warriours (London: Robert White, 1675). Cf. Coffey, Politics, pp. 126–7. 50. Baxter, Catholick Theologie, (sect. 19) pp. 106–14 (there is, however, a passage on Rutherford’s discussion in chapter 22 with Cameron on eternal truths [ratio boni aeterna; including the related question whether things are good because God wills them, or whether God wills them because they are good], pp. 110–11). 51. On Leydekker, see W. J. van Asselt, ‘Leydekker (Leydecker, Leidekker), Melchior’, in J. van den Berg et al., eds, Biografisch Lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlandse Protestantisme, vol. 4 (Kampen: Kok, 1998), pp. 307–10; P. C. Hoek, Melchior Leydecker (1642–1721). Een onderzoek naar de structuur van de theologie van een gereformeerd scholasticus (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2013). For references to Leydekker’s reception of Rutherford on this point, see Goudriaan, Philosophische Gotteserkenntnis, pp. 128–9; idem, ‘Pelagianism and the Philosophical Orientation of Reformed Orthodoxy’, in Günter Frank and Herman J. Selderhuis, eds, Philosophie der Reformierten (Stuttgart/Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012), pp. 183–201 (189–92).

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positions over against the innovations of Cartesian and Cocceian theology.52 In that work Leydekker quotes Rutherford’s ‘Disquisitiones metaphysicae’ on possibility and impossibility. The Jesuits, he writes, typically locate the ‘root of the possibility or impossibility of things outside of God’, in the things themselves that involve no contradiction. He considers this to be in line with Jesuit theories of future contingents as being founded ‘not in God, but in the thing itself ’. Opposed to the Jesuits on this score are ‘all Reformed scholars…; see in particular Rutherford on divine providence, p. 538’.53 Leydekker summarizes the Reformed response to the Jesuits, which grounds both the possible and the impossible in God, in two points: 1) A thing is possible because God is able to produce it. It is not, conversely, because it is possible that God is able to produce it. This is proved by God’s priority and independence. 2) Intrinsic possibility is not prior in nature to

extrinsic possibility, nor is it the cause of the latter. On the contrary, since a thing can possibly be made by the truly and infinitely powerful God Himself, the source of all being, for that reason [the thing] is also intrinsically possible because the essence of God is the root and rule of all truth.54

Leydekker essentially assumes the same position as Rutherford on possibility and impossibility, although his argument does not pay specific attention to impossibility. Leydekker also shares the polemical focus against the Jesuits. Like Rutherford, moreover, he cites Bradwardine – but here a different appreciation reveals itself. While Rutherford in questions one to seven of his ‘Disquisitiones metaphysicae’ quoted Bradwardine without expressing any criticism, Leydekker distanced himself from what he considered to be Bradwardine’s voluntarism. According to Leydekker, Bradwardine grounded impossibility in the will of 52. Melchior Leydekker, Fax veritatis seu exercitationes ad nonnullas controversias quae hodie in Belgio potissimum moventur, multa ex parte theologico-philosophicae (Leiden: Daniel van Gaesbeeck and Felix Lopez, 1677), pp. 242–6. 53. Leydekker, Fax veritatis, p. 243: ‘Radicem possibilitatis rerum vel impossibilitatis solent Jesuitae quaerere extra Deum, in essentia rei, quae dicitur possibilis, casu quo existeret duo praedicata contradictoria non includente: quid mirum? Cum futuritionis ipsius hypotheticae fundamentum quaerant non in Deo, sed in re ipsa. Contra hosce disputant omnes Reformati Scholastici, vide inter in eos praecipue Rhetorf. de divina providentia, p. 538.’ 54. Leydekker, Fax veritatis, p. 243: ‘Optime radicem possibilitatis imo et impossibilitatis hactenus saniores Scholastici et Reformati posuerunt in ipso Deo. Sententiam ipsorum explicamus sequentibus conclusionibus. 1. Res ideo est possibilis, quia Deus eam potest producere, non contra, quia possibilis est ideo Deus eam producere potest. Probatur ex divina primitate et independentia. 2. Possiblitas intrinseca non est prior natura possibilitate extrinseca, nec illa hujus est causa: sed contra, quia res est possibilis fieri ab ipso Deo verace et infinite potente, omnis entitatis fonte ideo et intrinsece est possibilis, essentia enim Dei est omnis veritatis radix et regula.’



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God. Leydekker preferred instead to view the power of God, not His will, as the foundation of possibility and impossibility.55 Leydekker’s point is in line with thoughts that Gisbertus Voetius had expressed a few decades earlier, but Voetius had been more cautious about ascribing a voluntarist position to Bradwardine.56 Leydekker’s criticism of Bradwardine forms part of his opposition against the voluntarist view of possibility advocated by Cartesian theologians.57 Petrus Allinga, a Cartesian minister, wrote a book-length response to Leydekker. His chapter against the latter’s non-voluntarist theory of ‘the root of possibility’, however, does not discuss Rutherford’s position as such, although his name is briefly mentioned.58

55. Ibid., p. 244: ‘Nec enim placet 1. Bradwardinae et quorundam Scholasticorum, qui principium adaequatum et primum omnis saltem impossibilitatis statuebant solam Dei voluntatem, seu liberum ejus decretum; ita ut nihil foret impossibile, nisi per liberam et antecedentem voluntatem: hinc et thesis eorum, libera Dei voluntas est radix omnis rectitudinis et bonitatis vel malitiae moralis: Deus potest mandare odium sui etc. Cui sentententiae opponibus loca expressa Heb. 6.18, 2 Tim. 2.13.’ For a non-voluntarist interpretation of Bradwardine’s view on possiblity and impossibility, see Frost, ‘Bradwardine’, esp. pp. 376–8. On Leydekker and Bradwardine, see Hoek, Melchior Leydecker, pp. 230–3. 56. Giuliano Gasparri, Le grand paradoxe de M. Descartes. La teoria cartesiana delle verità eterne nell’Europa del XVII secolo (Milan: Leo S. Olschki, 2007), p. xxiii, with reference to Voetius, ‘De potentia Dei, deque possibili et impossibili, pars secunda’ [Iohannes Carré, 9 March 1644], Selectae disputationes theologicae, vol. 1 (Utrecht: Joannes à Waesberge, 1648), pp. 410–419 [409bis] (412): ‘An principium adaequatum et primum omnis impossibilitatis sit sola Dei voluntas, seu liberum ejus decretum: ita ut nihil sit impossibile, nisi per liberam et antecedentem Dei voluntatem. Resp. Ita quidem videntur velle nonnulli in controversia de jure Dei, an scil. possit mandare odium sui, blasphemiam etc. et in hunc finem allegatur Bradwardinus. Sed quidquid sit de illorum sententia, Nos Neg[amus]. Et distinguimus impossibilia seu contradictoria in absolute talia, et ex hypothesi tantum voluntatis seu liberi decreti divinia talia.’ 57. Leydekker, Fax veritatis, p. 242, mentions Frans Burman, Synopsis theologiae, et speciatim oeconomiae foederum Dei, ab initio saeculorum usque ad consummationem eorum, vol. 1 (Utrecht: Cornelius Jacobus Noenardus, 1671), pp. 117–18, 145; Christoph Wittich, Theologia pacifica in qua varia problemata theologica inter Reformatos theologos agitari solita ventilantur, simul usus philosophiae Cartesianae in diversis theologiae partibus demonstratur (Leiden: Arnoldus Doude, 1671), ca. 14. 58. Petrus Allinga, Fax dissidii extincta, seu exercitationes pacificae ad nonnullas quaestiones problematicas, quae hodie in Belgio potissimum moventur (Amsterdam: Henricus Wetstenius, 1682), pp. 106–8 (107): ‘An decrevit [Deus] ergo quicquam possibile esse, quod futurum nunquam voluit? Quidni? Ipse Professor hoc docet cum cl. Rhetorforte Pag. 231 n. 12’.

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Conclusion In his 1649 ‘Disquisitiones metaphysicae’ Samuel Rutherford argued that possibility and impossibility are ultimately founded in God rather than in the (non-contradictory) things themselves. He made this point specifically in opposition to contemporary Jesuit thinkers. In developing this argument, Rutherford’s thinking was guided by Thomas Bradwardine. He shared Bradwardine’s position on the foundation of both possibility and impossibility, and, like Bradwardine, he rejected the atheist hypothesis that things would be possible or impossible even if God did not exist. A direct reception of Rutherford’s theory of possibility and impossibility can be been found in the Dutch Reformed theologian Melchior Leydekker. In 1677 Leydekker took up Rutherford’s position in a different context, namely a debate against Cartesian voluntarism. Like Bradwardine before him, Rutherford endeavoured to think of God as the ultimate origin of possibility and impossibility. By rejecting the atheist hypothesis that considers possibility and impossibility to be radically independent from God, he also resisted an essentially secular view of reality.59 Rutherford’s metaphysical teachings on possibility, moreover, provide an illustration of how seventeenthcentury Scottish theology was connected both to medieval scholastic theology and to early modern continental discussions on philosophical theology.60

59. A claim to the contrary, that the Reformation contributed to ‘Secularizing Knowledge’, has been made by Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation. How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), chapter 6. 60. I thank Albert Gootjes for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Chapter 9 C L AV I S C A N T I C I : A ‘K EY ’ T O T H E R E F O R M AT IO N I N E A R LY M O D E R N S C O T L A N D ?

Guy M. Richard Very few books of the Bible received the attention that the Song of Songs did from the fifth century through the seventeenth century. Only the Psalms, the Pauline Epistles – taken together as a whole – and the Gospels garnered more attention than did the Song of Songs. George Scheper has estimated that the number of commentaries published during this 1,200-year period was well over 500, not including sermons, paraphrases, and other treatises derived from the text or theme of the Song. And such a number is not all that hard to believe, considering that there were between 60 and 70 commentaries on the Song published in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries alone. The abundance of published material in these two centuries has led some historians to claim that the High Middle Ages was ‘preoccupied’ with the Song and regarded it as the ‘pinnacle of Scripture’ and the ultimate expression of medieval spirituality.1 A similar point might be made with reference to England during the period of the Reformation. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were between 50 and 60 commentaries published in England on the Song of Songs.2 When we add in the number of sermons, paraphrases, poems and other treatises published in England just in the seventeenth century, the number reaches upwards of 150 published works. If these kinds of numbers were enough to warrant the assertion that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were preoccupied with the Song of Songs, then it would seem to apply in the case of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England as well. There would seem to be an equal preoccupation with the Song during the period of the Reformation in England as there was during the Middle Ages generally. 1. George L. Scheper, ‘Reformation Attitudes toward Allegory and the Song of Songs’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 89.3 (May 1974), pp. 551–62 (556). 2. Max Engammare lists 28 commentaries published in England in the sixteenth century (cited in Elizabeth Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in SeventeenthCentury England [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], p. 11). I have counted more than 20 published in the seventeenth century on www.worldcat.org

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But can the same thing be said about Scotland during the time of the Reformation? The number of published works on the Song was nowhere near as substantial in Scotland as it was in England. With the exception of a dozen or so sermons, several paraphrases, and no more than a handful of commentaries and treatises, there was relatively little material published in Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the Song of Songs. James Durham’s commentary, Clavis Cantici (1668), is by far the most significant literary contribution that Scotland ever made in this area. Indeed, when one considers John Macleod’s claim that ‘Durham on The Song of Solomon has long been looked upon as the standard Scottish work on the subject’, one cannot help but wonder if his evaluation stemmed more from the fact that there was so little to compare it to in the annals of Scottish history than from the merits of the work itself.3 If we allow the relative paucity of published material on the Song of Songs in Scotland to serve as an indication of whether or not the Scottish reformers were as ‘preoccupied’ with the Song as their medieval forebears or their English contemporaries, we will no doubt come to the conclusion that they were not. There is nothing in the quantities of published works that would tell us the Song was anywhere near as important to the work of the Reformation in Scotland as it was in England. But to conclude that Scotland was not ‘preoccupied’ with the Song of Songs simply because the quantity of published material falls short of the numbers we see in England or in the Middle Ages would be premature. Such a conclusion would overlook at least two factors. First, it would overlook the link between Scotland and the rest of the Reformed world at the time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Scotland was very much a part of a larger Reformed intellectual community, which especially included the Netherlands and England. Second, and perhaps most important of all, it would overlook the significance of the relatively few works that were published in Scotland more generally, and the nature of the historical/theological context in which they were published. This essay will argue that when these things are taken into consideration, it becomes quite plausible that the Song of Songs would have been at least as significant in Scotland in the seventeenth century as it was in England – if not more so. In order to demonstrate this, the current essay will look principally at three things: the use of the Song of Songs outside Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the significance of the works that were published within Scotland, most especially the Scottish magnum opus on the Song written by James Durham; and the specific historical context in early modern Scotland that would have elicited a preoccupation with the Song similar to that which apparently existed in England.

3. John Macleod, Some Favourite Books (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1988), p. 30.



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The Song of Songs outside Scotland According to George Scheper, the Reformation as a whole embraced the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs despite the fact that it was so vehemently opposed to the allegorical interpretation of the Bible in general. The reformers could hold this seemingly contradictory viewpoint because they believed that the literal sense of Scripture included such things as allegories, parables, types, and figures of speech. Thus, they did not consider it allegorical interpretation when they interpreted an allegory allegorically. This was part and parcel of what they believed it meant to interpret the Bible literally. Since the reformers were convinced that the Song of Songs was an allegory, they believed that it was necessary to interpret it allegorically. Indeed, to approach it any other way was to deny the literal interpretation of Scripture.4 We see this approach to the Song in John Calvin and in Theodore Beza, both of whom were persuaded that it was improper to interpret the Song according to the literal meaning of its words. Beza even went so far as to deny that the Song was historical in any way whatsoever.5 Those who interpreted it according to the literal meaning of its words were accused of acting in a carnal manner. Sebastian Castellio and Hugo Grotius both read the Song literally and were subjected to abuse for it. Castellio was expelled from Calvin’s Geneva for rejecting the allegorical interpretation of the Song and offering instead a lascivious view that was deemed too offensive to be held by a minister of the gospel; Hugo Grotius was roundly criticized in the seventeenth century for viewing the Song similarly.6 By interpreting the Song allegorically and using the rest of the Bible as their hermeneutical guide in doing so, the reformers saw a vivid depiction of what Reformed spirituality was all about in contradistinction to that of Roman Catholicism. Beza, for instance, specifically aimed his sermons on the Song against his Roman Catholic ‘adversaries’, as can be seen in the subtitle to his sermons and in the following purpose statement from the Epistle Dedicatory: And this is whereat principally Master Beza hath in these sermons of his aimed, namely, to the convincing of the adversary in the chiefest and most fundamentall pointes controversed betweene the Papistes and us, and especially touching the principall points concerning the true Jesus Christ … and the true Church … and the certaine and infallible markes both of the one and the other, which are the questions especially debated betweene our adversaries and us at this day. As in deede this is the principall ende and scope which Salomon himselfe respected in this song of his, namely, to paint forth unto us in most lively coloures, as well

4. Scheper, ‘Reformation Attitudes toward Allegory and the Song of Songs’, pp. 551–2. 5. Theodore Beza, Master Bezaes Sermons upon the Three First Chapters of the Canticle of Canticles (John Harmar, trans., Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1587), q3b. 6. Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs, p. 7.

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the true and essentiall qualities of this Bridegrome, as also the native and lively portraite of this spouse, which is his Church.7

Beza believed that the Song of Songs was intended by Solomon to present in the ‘most lively coloures’ possible the essence of biblical spirituality – which, for Beza and the reformers, was nothing more or less than Reformed spirituality – over against the errors of Roman Catholicism. When we turn to look at seventeenth-century England, we see this same basic approach to the Song of Songs. According to Elizabeth Clarke, early modern commentators in England typically acknowledged that the Song was inspired by God and, thus, an authoritative part of canonical Scripture. They perceived that its literal meaning was ‘unworthy of God’ and believed that this required the Song to be interpreted allegorically. And they aimed their allegorical interpretations at their political and religious adversaries.8 Even though the particular adversaries changed slightly over the course of the century, post-Reformation English divines stood in continuity with men like Beza with regard to their polemical use of the Song of Songs. In the 1620s, 1630s and 1640s, the particular enemies in focus in England were Roman Catholics and Arminians. Francis Rous, for one, saw that these two were related. He was convinced that the Arminianism coming into England was part of a Roman Catholic conspiracy to unseat the Reformation: ‘Whosoever will bring in Popery, into a country strongly fixed in the Protestant Doctrin, must not presently fly in the face of the whole Protestant Doctrine, but his onely way, is to worke into it by these degres of plausible Arminianisme.’9 Rous responded to this threat by seizing upon the imagery of the Song of Songs to portray as graphically as possible the true identity and character of the church in Calvinist terms. As Elizabeth Clarke has argued, this approach was typical in England through at least the early 1640s: ‘Interpretation of the [Song] was the province of the anti-Laudian, anti-Arminian constituency, who used its tropes and dynamics to affirm their own Calvinist spirituality, and define a transgressive Other that was explicitly Catholicism, but which could often be read as Arminianism.’10 The death of William Laud and the downfall of the monarchy brought about 7. The full subtitle of Beza’s work is as follows: ‘Wherein are handled the chiefest points of religion controversed and debated betweene us and the adversarie at this day, especially touching the true Jesus Christ and the true Church, and the certaine & infallible marks both of the one and of the other.’ The Epistle Dedicatory was written by John Harmar and can be found in Master Bezaes Sermons, q3. 8. Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs, pp. 6–12, passim. 9. Francis Rous, Testis veritatis, the doctrine of King James our late soveraigne of famous memory, of the Church of England, of the Catholicke Church: plainely shewed to bee one in the points of pradestination, free-will, certaintie of salvation: with a discovery of the grounds naturall, politicke of Arminianisme (London: W. I., 1626), pp. 86–7, cited in Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs, p. 51. 10. Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs, p. 62.



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a shift in the way that the Song of Songs was used polemically in England. The perceived threat of Roman Catholicism – coming in the garb of Arminianism – subsided and gave way to a variety of sectarian conflicts beginning in the later 1640s. Thus, the Presbyterians Edmund Hall and Thomas Watson used the Song to attack Cromwell and Independence, while, several years later, the conformist William Sherlock employed it to denounce nonconformists like Thomas Watson and John Owen regardless of their particular ecclesial perspectives. John Cotton believed that the Song prophesied the very near end of the papacy and decried the various sects of his day, while those among the sects, like Ranter Joseph Salmon, used the Song to assault Puritan spirituality as nothing more than ‘fornication with the Harlot’.11 In truth, sermons on the Song aimed against ‘popery’ did continue well into the 1670s.12 But the Roman Catholic Church was much less of a perceived threat in England in the latter half of the seventeenth century. And this was reflected in the general polemical use of the Song of Songs. As we will see, the same thing cannot be said concerning Scotland. The Roman Catholic Church would remain a perceived threat in Scotland well into the latter part of the seventeenth century. This dynamic represents one of the main differences between England and Scotland in the post-Reformation period. Before we consider that reality, however, we must examine the Scottish works that were published on the Song of Songs during this time.

The Song of Songs in Scotland As noted above, relatively little material was published on the Song of Songs in Scotland in the seventeenth century. But simply looking at the number of publications can be somewhat misleading. We know, for instance, that Samuel Rutherford preached at least seven sermons on the Song in his lifetime (he almost certainly preached many more than that; only seven are extant).13 But only one of these seven was published during the seventeenth century.14 Clearly the published record does not tell the whole story. Rutherford’s letters provide further illustration of this point. The letters demonstrate that the imagery of the Song of Songs was adopted by one of Scotland’s most significant and influential ministers to communicate Reformation spirituality in 11. See Ibid., pp. 124, 126, 127. 12. E.g. Thomas Tanner, A Sermon Preached near Exeter: On Cant. c. vi v. 13. Being an Exhortation to all Protestant Dissenters to joyn together against Popery (London: printed for Henry Brome, 1677). 13. Only a small percentage of Rutherford’s sermons are extant today – 76 out of what could be as many as 3,000 sermons preached over the course of his 34-year ministry. 14. Samuel Rutherford, Christ and the Doves Heavenly Salutations (n.p., n.d.). The publication date is generally regarded to be c. 1660, but some catalogues suggest a later date in the early eighteenth century. See John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), p. 268.

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all the vicissitudes of life to hundreds of men and women in Scotland from 1627 to 1661. The fact that Rutherford wrote these letters at all, saturated as they are in the language of the Song, is proof positive that the Song played a central role both in his own experience and in the experience of those to whom he was writing. According to one of Rutherford’s closest disciples and first biographer, Robert MacWard, many of Rutherford’s letters were copied by hand and circulated within Scotland long before they were ever published.15 Their publication thus only increased their already significant influence. But this influence is not apparent when one looks only at the record of published materials in seventeenth-century Scotland. The relative paucity of published material on the Song of Songs in Scotland is misleading for several other reasons as well. First, as we have already stated, Scotland was very much a part of a broader intellectual community which clearly included its southern neighbour. This link would have diminished the need for distinctively Scottish publications not just on the Song but on many topics, as there were frequently already first-rate resources coming from English publishers. Second, Scotland was much more sparsely populated than England in the seventeenth century. The population of the city of London by itself was almost as much as the entire nation of Scotland. By contrast, the largest city in Scotland, Edinburgh, was perhaps only one-twentieth the size of London.16 Third, Scotland was not only smaller than England; it was also considerably poorer. According to a church survey conducted in the city of Perth at the end of the sixteenth century, an astounding 25 per cent of the city’s population of 4,500 were quantified as poor. Things only got worse in Scotland as the seventeenth century progressed. Severe famine devastated the predominantly rural nation’s agricultural economy. According to at least one account, as much as 20 per cent of Scotland’s population was reduced to vagrancy as a result of the famine coupled with the financial burden of the Darien Disaster in the late seventeenth century.17 Fourth, the percentage of the population that was literate was unquestionably smaller in Scotland than it was in England. Rural populations tended to be far less literate than their urban counterparts in the seventeenth century – i.e. 10–20 per cent literacy for rural populations compared with roughly 50 per cent for urban populations – and

15. Robert MacWard, ‘Preface’ to Joshua Redivivus, or Mr. Rutherfoord’s Letters (Rotterdam: s.n., 1664), C5a. 16. R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte, ‘Introduction: Scottish Society in perspective’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte, eds, Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989), pp. 3, 5; and E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1981), pp. 66, 208–9, 571. Houston and Whyte estimate that Scotland’s population was between 800,000 and 1 million in the seventeenth century and that Edinburgh’s was between 30,000 and 50,000. Wrigley and Schofield place London’s population at between 500,000 and 600,000 and England’s at around 5 million. 17. Houston and Whyte, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.



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Scotland was far more rural than England.18 For all of these reasons, the market for published material would have been considerably smaller in Scotland than it was in its southern neighbour. To compare them on a one-to-one basis in regard to the quantity of published works on the Song of Songs would, thus, seem to be distinctly unfair. We should expect that the number of published works on the Song in Scotland would be fewer. Far more important for our discussion here is the significance of those works that were in fact published. One of the most significant works on the Song to come out of Scotland in the seventeenth century was James Durham’s Clavis Cantici, originally published in Edinburgh in 1668. We have already mentioned the admiration that John Macleod had for this commentary, calling it ‘the standard Scottish work’ on the Song of Songs.19 Durham’s English contemporary John Owen also had high praise for the Scottish minister’s work. When the English publisher of Durham’s commentary asked Owen to promote it for a southern constituency, Owen stated that such promotion was wholly unnecessary on account of Durham’s ‘Reputation’ within the Church and his ‘known Piety and Abilities’.20 The well-known nineteenthcentury Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon was also quick to offer high praise of Durham’s work on the Song of Songs: ‘Durham is always good, and he is at his best upon the Canticles. He gives us the essence of the good matter. For practical use this work is perhaps more valuable than any other key to the Song.’21 Durham’s approach to the Song of Songs in his commentary closely mirrored the approaches that we have already seen in the Reformation and in seventeenthcentury England. To begin with, Durham regarded the Song as an authoritative part of canonical Scripture. This meant that it had to be interpreted allegorically and not according to the literal meaning of its words. The mere fact that the Song was a part of canonical Scripture proved this for Durham: ‘There can be no edification in [interpreting the Song literally and, thus, in] setting out Humane Love … so largely and lively; and yet edification must be the end of this Song, being a part of Scripture; it must have therefore a higher meaning then the words at first will seem to bear.’22 To understand the Song according to the literal meaning of its words was ‘absurd and ridiculous’ and involved engaging in a ‘carnal terror’.23 Since the literal meaning of the Song could not be edifying in a spiritual sense, Durham believed the allegorical interpretation was the only possible alternative.24 18. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 25. 19. Macleod, Some Favourite Books, p. 30. 20. John Owen, ‘Preface’ to James Durham, Clavis Cantici (London, 1669), B1. 21. Quoted in John Macleod, Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History since the Reformation (Edinburgh: Publications Committee of the Free Church of Scotland, 1943), p. 94. 22. James Durham, Clavis Cantici: or, An Exposition of the Song of Solomon (Edinburgh: G. Swintoun and J. Glen, 1668), p. 7. 23. Ibid., pp. 7, 23. 24. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

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Like Beza, Durham rejected all historicity in the Song of Songs. Typology was not a valid mode of interpretation for the Song, because typology was tied to historical events and persons, which Durham was unwilling to acknowledge in any way. Rather than being historical, the Song was, in Durham’s estimation, ‘principally Doctrinal’. It was a compendium of all that the Bible taught concerning the Christian life. Not only were ‘almost … all conditions’ of the Christian life addressed in the Song at some point or another, but the ‘comprehensive sum’ of each believer’s relationship with Christ was ‘contained in this Song, and compended by the Spirit, for the comfort and edification of the Church’.25 The Song of Songs was, for Durham, more than simply a compendium of Christian doctrine, however. It presented the key doctrines of the Christian life, to be sure; but it presented them – to borrow the words of Beza’s Epistle Dedicatory cited above – in the ‘most lively coloures’. The figurative language and graphic imagery of the Song helped to make the same doctrines that were taught elsewhere in Scripture ‘better understood’ and worked to ‘more forcibly … convince’ people of their truth.26 The language and imagery of the Song also stirred the affections of God’s people by ‘warming the Believers heart the more to Christ’ and by giving Christians a ‘marriage-Song’, so that ‘every night may be to them as a marriage-night’.27 Thus, the Song prevented the Christian life from devolving into a mere external formalism; it motivated God’s people to an increased diligence in living the Christian life; and it exalted Christ to a place of obvious preeminence by referring to him as, among other things, ‘the chief of ten thousand’, the one ‘whom my soul loveth’, and ‘the Rose of Sharon’.28 The importance of reaching the affections and ‘warming’ them toward Christ cannot be overstated in Puritan thinking generally. According to David Como, all ‘orthodox puritans’ believed that the teaching of Scripture ‘needed to have a powerful effect’ upon the affections of those who heard it in order for it to be effectual. This idea, he says, was ‘central to puritan practical divinity’.29 Teaching that failed to reach the affections failed to have any real or lasting impact upon the individual. In a very real sense, therefore, the affections were the ‘key’ to the Christian life for the Puritans – which is precisely what Samuel Rutherford said so eloquently in a sermon on the Song of Songs in the seventeenth century: The affections are like the needle, the rest of the soul like the thread; and as the needle makes way and draws the thread, so holy affections pull forward and draw all to Jesus. The affections are the ground and lower part of the soul, and when they are filled they set all the soul on work; when there is any love in the affections, it sets all the rest of the faculties of the soul on work to duty, and 25. Ibid., pp. 2, 11. 26. Ibid., p. 9. 27. Ibid., p. 40. 28. Ibid., pp. 5, 32–3. 29. David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 231.



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when there is any corruption in the affections, it stagnates the soul, will, mind, and conscience. Affections are the feet of the soul, and the wheels whereupon the conscience runs. When a man is off his feet he cannot run or walk; so when the affections are lame, the soul moves on crutches.30

Durham himself clearly believed that the Song of Songs was intended by God and crafted in such a way so as to reach the affections. He plainly stated that the Song’s purpose was ‘to move … and affect’ people, to ‘warm’ their hearts to Christ, and to ‘move [their] affections’.31 The sensual imagery of the Song served to accomplish this feat. It drove home the same doctrines taught elsewhere in Scripture with a special force and clarity. Durham’s contemporary Rutherford regarded the Song in this same way, which is why his letters, written to strengthen the faith of his recipients and to point them to Christ, were filled with so much of the imagery of the Song of Songs. Both men saw that the vivid language of the Song pressed the truths of Reformation spirituality upon the souls of the Scottish people in a way that nothing else could. When seen in this light, it is easy to understand why Durham could claim that the Song of Songs was more than simply a ‘part’ of canonical Scripture; it was a ‘most excellent part’.32 It is not a stretch, therefore, to say that Durham and others of his Scottish Puritan contemporaries regarded the Song of Songs as a ‘key’ to the Christian life. Everything that characterized Reformation spirituality and distinguished it from Roman Catholicism was caught up in the Song of Songs. It was a compendium of doctrine presented in figures and word pictures and with the affective language of marriage-love – all of which made the doctrines contained within it more effectual. It gave preeminence to Jesus Christ and focused not on external formalism but on the heart-relationship that existed between the believer and Christ. And it was a ‘most excellent part’ of the book that, in Durham’s opinion and in Reformed conviction generally, was the ultimate authority in matters of faith and practice. What remains to be seen is whether or not the Song of Songs might have been viewed as a ‘key’ to the progress of the Reformation itself in early modern Scotland.

The Historical Context of the Reformation in Scotland It is not certain exactly when Arminianism first appeared in Scotland to challenge the Calvinist hegemony established with the onset of the Reformation in 1560. G. D. Henderson has argued that it was present in Scotland at least a year before the Synod of Dort (1618–19). He bases this claim on the Duplyes of the Aberdeen 30. Samuel Rutherford, Fourteen Communion Sermons, (A. A. Bonar, ed.; Glasgow: Glass & Co., 1877), p. 316. 31. Durham, Clavis Cantici, pp. 9, 10, 40. 32. Ibid., p. 3.

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Doctors.33 Shortly after Dort, more explicit accusations of Arminianism appeared in Scotland. David Calderwood, for instance, complained of the presence of Arminian sympathies within the Scottish church in 1619 and, just one year later, indicated that Arminianism had already made inroads into many Scottish universities.34 In 1624 the Scottish Privy Council passed a statute decreeing that Arminians were ‘enemyis to religioun, authoritie and peace’.35 But it’s not clear that these accusations and pronouncements speak to a genuine presence of Arminianism. They could easily be explained as anxious overreactions to the more overt controversies about Arminianism that had been raging south of the border since the 1590s. Scotland has no equivalent to these late-sixteenth-century English controversies. Instead, as Robert Baillie has stated, ecclesial issues were at the forefront of every dispute in Scotland from 1560 until the early 1630s. Baillie, whose work provides the closest thing to a contemporary account of Arminianism in Scotland, suggested that the movement existed only in seed form amongst the Scots until William Laud and the ‘Canterburians’ in England ‘began to blow upon these unhappie seeds of Arminius’ by lending protection and even favouritism to those who embraced Arminian tenets and by persecuting those who openly rejected them. It was when these ‘south-winds’ entered Scotland, according to Baillie, that Arminianism ‘began to spring amaine’ in all the universities.36 David Mullan has argued that very little actual Arminianism existed in Scotland in the first half of the seventeenth century. He has suggested that what was called Arminianism had no clear association with the errors of the Dutch Remonstrants. Charges of Arminianism served as a polemical ploy to denounce William Laud and his prelatic party wholly for their ecclesial agenda.37 While Mullan’s work represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the church in early modern Scotland, his claims about Arminianism are, nonetheless, rather unsatisfactory, if for no other reason than early modern accusations of 33. G. D. Henderson, ‘Arminianism in Scotland’, London Quarterly and Holborn Review (October 1932), pp. 493–504 (493). Henderson is referring to the Doctors’ claims that the Covenanters were accusing them of Arminianism before 1618. See The Generall Demands, of the Reverend Doctors of Divinitie, and Ministers of the Gospell in Aberdeene, Concerning the Late Covenant, in Scotland. Together with the Answers, Replyes, and Duplyes that followed thereupon, in the Year, 1638 (Aberdeen: John Forbes, 1663), p. 102. 34. David Calderwood, A Solution of Dr. Resolutus (Amsterdam: G. Veseler, 1619), p. 49; idem, The Speach of the Kirk of Scotland to her Beloved Children (Amsterdam: G. Thorp, 1620), pp. 47–8. 35. G. D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1937), p. 88. 36. Robert Baillie, Ladensium autokatakrisis, the Canterburians Self Conviction (London: printed for Nathaniel Butter, 1641), pp. 11–12, 21; idem, An Antidote against Arminianism (London: printed for Sa. Gellibrand, 1641), pp. 17–18. 37. David Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford: Oxford University, 2000), p. 227; idem, ‘Arminianism in the Lord’s Assembly: Glasgow, 1638’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 26 (1996), pp. 1–30.



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Arminianism were explicitly linked to the five articles of the Remonstrants. We see this plainly in Robert Baillie’s work against Arminianism.38 And we also see it in the proceedings of the famous General Assembly held in Glasgow in 1638. Many men closely associated with Laud were brought before this Assembly for trial.39 The most common charge levelled against them was that of Arminianism. In many of these cases, the charges were further expounded by reference to the errors of the Remonstrants in regard to the doctrines of grace. Some of the men coming before the Assembly were not charged with Arminianism but with episcopacy, popery or immorality instead. Thus, contra Mullan’s claims, we see clear evidence of Arminianism being tied to the five articles of the Remonstrants, and clear distinction between Arminianism, on the one hand, and episcopacy or popery, on the other.40 What Mullan has helpfully uncovered for us is the strongly ecclesial context of the seventeenth century in Scotland. To be sure, there was strong reaction in Scotland against Laud and his ecclesial agenda in the first half of the century. But the reason for this strong reaction was not simply because of Laud’s ecclesial practices but because his ecclesial practices combined with what was perceived to be genuine Arminianism to produce something far worse in the mind of every Scottish Puritan – a complete return to Rome. Arminianism as a theological system was perceived by Scottish Puritans to be closely associated with the theology of Roman Catholicism. This was largely due to Arminian beliefs in four main areas: the liberty of prophesying, grace and free will, scientia media, and justification. In regard to the first, the Arminian doctrine of the liberty of prophesying, the Scottish Puritans believed that this doctrine mirrored Roman Catholicism’s rejection of sola Scriptura. Although Arminianism was reputed to be a part of ‘Tradition I’ (Heiko Oberman’s category to describe those who believed in a single-source theory of doctrine), it actually rejected ‘Tradition I’, according to men like Samuel Rutherford, and adopted instead the Roman Catholic ‘Tradition II’ (or two-sources theory of doctrine) by introducing a second source of authority alongside the Bible – the interpreting individual.41 Insofar as Arminianism’s (perceived) challenge to sola Scriptura was coupled with apparent commitment to the sufficiency of Scripture, Scottish Puritans found it

38. Baillie, Antidote against Arminianism, pp. 22–3; idem, Ladensium autokatakrisis, pp. 8–32. 39. I.e., T. Sydserff, J. Crighton, J. Spottiswood, J. Maxwell, W. Whiteford and J. Wedderburn. See A. Peterkin, ed., Records of the Kirk of Scotland (Edinburgh: John Sutherland, 1838), pp. 163–73; G. Donaldson, The Making of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1954), pp. 41–59. 40. For more on this see the discussion in G. M. Richard, The Supremacy of God in the Theology of Samuel Rutherford (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), pp. 222–5. 41. See H. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (repr., Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1983), p. 371; and Richard, Supremacy of God, chapter 2.

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far more troubling than the Roman Church’s outright rejection of the Protestant principle of Scripture’s sufficiency. In regard to grace and free will, the Scottish Puritans linked Arminian theology with Roman Catholic theology by showing that the former’s understanding of the relationship between preparation and grace was drawn directly from the Jesuit doctrine expressed in the maxim faciendo quod in se est, Deus non denegat gratium.42 Both the Jesuit Luis de Molina and Jacob Arminius rejected the Reformation understanding of grace as the unmerited favour of God, viewing it rather as a ‘divine assistance’ granted to men and women generally and universally to enable them facere quod in se est and, thereby, gain for themselves the further grace requisite to obtain eternal life.43 The Arminian emphasis on faciendo quod in se est became even more problematic for Scottish Puritans, and even more like Roman Catholic theology, when viewed in conjunction with the Arminian doctrine of justification. Although there was much in the Arminian understanding of justification that the Scottish Puritans could embrace, the main source of their disagreement can be traced to the Arminian belief that the individual’s faith is reckoned as righteousness to him or her. When this idea is combined with the notion mentioned above of faciendo quod in se est, we come face to face with a doctrine that teaches that we are righteous in the sight of God as a result of a human action (faith), which is accomplished by the individual ‘doing what is in him’ to appropriate divine grace.44 Theoretically speaking, there is little that separates this understanding of justification from the Roman Catholic understanding of it. But when this understanding is placed alongside a view of conditional predestination that is derived from divine scientia media, the association with Roman theology becomes unavoidable – at least in the minds of the Scottish Puritans. This is so, first, because advocacy of a concept of scientia media by itself placed the Arminians squarely within a tradition that, according to Karl Barth, was articulated in direct opposition to Reformation theology.45 Arminius’s 42. See W. Lane Craig, The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), pp. 204–5; and Richard, Supremacy of God, pp. 180–1, 226. 43. ‘Doing what was in them’ did not directly gain salvation for men and women, in Arminius’s understanding. Instead, it gained God’s cooperating or saving grace. But, since there are necessary connections in Arminius’s thinking between faciendo quod in se est and saving grace, it can be said that by ‘doing what is in them’ individuals can and will receive eternal life. See Richard, Supremacy of God, pp. 177–85. 44. See Richard, Supremacy of God, pp. 194–200. 45. Barth states that ‘[i]t was the express intention of the Jesuits’ in developing the doctrine of scientia media ‘to aid a new semi-Pelagianism to gain its necessary place and right … in opposition to the Augustinian-Thomist teaching of the Dominicans, which they accused of being dangerously near to Luther and Calvin’. See Karl Barth Church Dogmatics (G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, eds; 14 vols; repr., Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), vol.



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contemporaries – both friends and foes alike – evidently perceived this link with the Roman Church and pointed to his reliance upon scientia media as an aspect of his theology which demonstrated ‘catholic influences’ most clearly.46 In the second place, and more significantly, the association with Roman theology is unavoidable because the Arminian view of scientia media unambiguously introduces an element of conditionality into the economy of salvation, one in which God bases his decision to predestine and then to justify in time upon the condition of faith in the individual. If we take into account the Arminian view of justification and its intellectualist understanding of faith, then this can only mean that the deciding factor that determines whether or not an individual believes – and, thus, is predestined by God and then justified in time and space – given the fact of his or her creation, is ultimately whether or not that individual chooses to believe. This is what led Robert Baillie to say that Arminius, like the papists, makes ‘Election and Justification to depend on Faith, not as it is an instrument applying Christ, but as … a saving quality of it selfe … a true worke’.47 And it is what prompted Samuel Rutherford to say: The Arminians answer right downe, the one [person] is converted [and, thus, predestined by God and justified in time], because he wills, and consents; whereas he might, if it pleased him, dissent and refuse the calling of God; and the other [person] is not converted [and, thus, not predestined and justified], because he will not be converted but refuses.48

The concern among the Reformed orthodox in Scotland in regard to the Arminian doctrine of conditional predestination was not, therefore, first and foremost a concern about predestination itself. It was first and foremost a concern about how that doctrine affected the cardinal doctrine of Protestantism – justification by faith alone. This was the case even before the Synod of Dort in the Collatio Hagiensis of 1611, as Louis Praamsma has shown.49 It was equally the case for William Twisse, when he took his fellow English Puritan John Cotton to task for what he perceived to be an Arminian view of predestination. David Como, who has examined Twisse’s treatise against Cotton, traces the crux of the issue between them to Cotton’s doctrine of conditional reprobation. Como explains:

II/1, p. 569. If Barth is right, then by embracing the Jesuit doctrine of scientia media, the Arminians would have been consciously adopting a position that was itself intended from its inception to be in opposition to the thinking of the Reformation. 46. E. Dekker, ‘Was Arminius a Molinist?’, SCJ 27.2 (1996), pp. 337–52 (350 n. 60). 47. Baillie, Antidote against Arminianism, pp. 35–6, 65. 48. Rutherford, Christ Dying, p. 311. 49. L. Praamsma, ‘The Background of the Arminian Controversy (1586–1618)’, in P. Y. De Jong, ed., Crisis in the Reformed Churches (Grand Rapids: Reformed Fellowship, Inc., 1968), pp. 22–38.

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By suggesting an intrinsic quality in man that caused God’s decree of reprobation, Cotton was in Twisse’s opinion slipping unwittingly into an argument that [ultimately] compromised the concept of justification by faith alone. To put the argument more simply: no absolute predestination, no justification by faith; no justification by faith, no Protestantism.50

Anyone who expressed misgivings about the doctrine of absolute predestination – whether an Arminian or a Puritan – elicited censure from more consistent post-Reformation theologians because, by casting suspicion upon absolute predestination, they were really calling into question the very underpinnings of Protestantism. By denying sola Scriptura and by embracing the Jesuit ideas of faciendo quod in se est and scientia media, Arminianism consciously took up positions that were perceived to be in direct opposition to Reformation thinking, and that threatened the very heart of Reformation theology. Arminianism logically endangered everything that the Reformation stood for. It was seen as a step onto the slippery slope that would plunge the kirk towards popery, and, as such, it had to be resisted. But not only was Arminianism perceived as Roman Catholicism, it also entered the nation of Scotland allied with an ecclesial agenda from William Laud that was itself perceived as Roman Catholicism. Andrew Cant, speaking at the 1638 General Assembly, summarized the sentiments of the Presbyterians in regard to ‘Laud’s Liturgy’ by saying: ‘I think the Booke of Canons full of Popishe and Pop-lyke tyrannie … [and] the Service Booke full of superstition and massing Poperie.’51 This reaction to the liturgy was typical for many Scottish Calvinists, who, as John Morrill argues, perceived that it was part of a ‘Popish Plot to subvert the Protestant identity of the Church of England as a prelude to the reclamation of [all of] Britain for Catholicism’. By imposing this liturgy on Scotland, Charles I and William Laud were seen as mere puppets in the hands of a ‘Catholic conspiracy’.52 In Samuel Rutherford’s words, the ‘Episcopacie, and humane Ceremonies’ exemplified in Laud’s Liturgy were ‘the gold ring’ and ‘love tokens’ left behind by ‘the Whore of Babylon’ when she ‘was cast out of the Church’ at the beginning of the Reformation. It was part of the Roman Church’s ‘policy’ to ‘leave a token behinde her, that she might finde an errand in the house againe’.53 Rutherford’s fear – one shared by Scottish Puritans in general – was that it was just a matter of time before this policy would be carried out and the Scottish kirk would fall prey to Rome’s counter-Reformation. Episcopacy with its 50. D. R. Como, ‘Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in P. Lake and M. Questier, eds, Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), p. 84. 51. Peterkin, Records of the Kirk of Scotland, pp. 164, 287–8. 52. John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (New York: Longman, 1993), p. 37. 53. Samuel Rutherford, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons, January 31, 1644 (London: T. B., 1644), p. 18.



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loathsome liturgy thus represented the final step on the slippery slope leading towards popery. When the ceremonies and traditions of Laud’s episcopacy were joined together with theological Arminianism in Scotland, the resulting union was, in Alexander Henderson’s words, ‘inchoatus Papismus’. The perception was that if the doctrine of the kirk (i.e., the Arminianism that was present within the church) reflected Roman Catholic theology, and the practice of the kirk (i.e., the liturgical episcopacy of Laud and his party) reflected Roman Catholic practice, then there was nothing left to differentiate the Scottish church from Rome except the Pope himself. This was Alexander Henderson’s precise warning to the Glasgow Assembly in 1638: If ye consider this, how our doctrine, and the particulars of our Confession of Faith, taught by the Ministers of the Kirk of Scotland since the Reformation, how thir pointes began to be depraved by Arminianisme, and poyntes of Poperie, joined with their poyntes of Arminianisme, and next consider how that the externall worship of God was in changeing by the Service Booke, I see nothing deficient for the whole bodie of Poperie but the Pope himselfe – Convertion of a Sinner – universalitie of the matters of Christs death – justification by workes – falling away of the saints; and then, if we had receaved the Service Booke, what difference had beene ’twixt the Romane faith and ours, if we had subjected ourselfes to the Pope?54

Whereas Francis Rous had previously seen the introduction of Arminianism into England as part of a Roman Catholic conspiracy to overturn the work of the Reformation in England, the Scottish Puritans perceived an even greater threat. Not only was genuine Arminianism being introduced into Scotland, but it was coming reinforced by what appeared to be a Roman Catholic ecclesial agenda. The Scots thus perceived a counter-attack by the Roman Church on not just one but two fronts. If the Scots perceived a stronger attack from Rome, they also perceived it for longer than did their southern neighbours. Whereas English fears of a Roman counter-Reformation died down considerably after the passing of William Laud and the monarchy, the same thing cannot be said for Scottish fears. The Scots remained extremely sensitive to the two-pronged attack of Roman Catholicism throughout the better part of the seventeenth century. Thus we see Samuel Rutherford continuing to write and lecture vigorously against Arminianism in Scotland until his death in 1661.55 Others of his contemporaries, David Dickson

54. Peterkin, Records of the Kirk of Scotland, p. 155. 55. See, e.g., S. Rutherford, A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (London: R. I., 1649); idem, Diputatio scholastica de divina providentia (Edinburgh: Roberto Brouno, 1649). Rutherford’s theology lectures at St Andrews were published after his death under the title Examen Arminianismi (Utrecht: A. Smytegelt, 1668), which, as the title suggests, is a diatribe against Arminianism, covering all the main loci of systematic

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for instance, joined in the fight well into the 1660s.56 One of Dickson’s works against Arminianism, Truth’s Victory over Error, was published in 1684, more than 20 years after Dickson’s death, and a second edition of his Therapeutica sacra (originally published in 1656) was published in 1695. No doubt the Restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 and the subsequent Act Rescissory in 1661 – which paved the way for the formal reestablishment of episcopacy in Scotland in 1662 – further confirmed or rekindled the Scots’ deepest fears that the Roman counter-attack had still not been defeated. The late 1640s and the 1650s might have given some Scots a false sense of assurance. But the Restoration put an end to that and brought a more unified resistance to the familiar two-pronged Roman threat that had been around since at least the early 1630s. It is not surprising that this is the period in which Rutherford’s letters (1664) and his Examen Arminianismi (1668) were published. It is also the period in which Durham’s Clavis Cantici (1668) was published, ten years after the author’s death. Certainly the historical situation at this time explains the nearsimultaneous publication of these important treatises, all of them posthumous. One hundred years after its inception, the Reformation was still hanging in the balance in Scotland. Everything the Scottish Puritans and their forebears had staked their lives and livelihoods on was still teetering on the edge long after the passing of William Laud and the fall of the monarchy. Roman Catholicism was alive and well and threatening Scotland on two fronts, Arminianism and episcopacy.

Conclusion Thus far in this essay, we have established that Durham and others of his Scottish Puritan contemporaries regarded the Song of Songs as a ‘key’ to the Christian life; they saw it as a compendium of Reformation doctrine that was presented in such a way so as to have the greatest possible effect upon people. It took the same doctrines taught elsewhere in Scripture and impressed them upon people’s affections, such that those doctrines were more likely to be understood, embraced, and put into practice. We have also established that the historical context in Scotland was one in which Roman Catholicism presented a greater and more persistent threat than it did in England. Whereas in England Arminianism was perceived as a Roman Catholic attack upon the Reformation, in Scotland it was joined by episcopacy and together with episcopacy formed a two-pronged attack upon the newly established Reformed kirk. This forceful duo threatened both the doctrine of the kirk and the practice of the kirk for the better part of the seventeenth century. theology. My own Supremacy of God in the Theology of Samuel Rutherford is a detailed examination of this treatise. 56. Dickson’s Therapeutica sacra was published in 1656 in Latin, and then in Edinburgh in 1664 in English.



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It elicited responses from the Reformed community, which included polemical diatribes against Arminianism and episcopacy and at least two significant works involving the Song of Songs – Rutherford’s letters and Durham’s Clavis Cantici. While both works on the Song were published after the Restoration, Rutherford’s work focused especially upon that period in his lifetime in which the perceived threat from Rome was the strongest, the early 1630s through the early 1660s. In light of the arguments presented in this essay, it is not a stretch to conclude that the Song of Songs was at least as central in early modern Scotland as it was in England, even though the number of published works is far less in the former than in the latter. It is also not a stretch to conclude that the Song of Songs functioned as an important tool – a ‘key’, as it were – to furthering the work of the Reformation in Scotland. Durham’s Clavis Cantici and Rutherford’s letters give testimony that supports this claim, especially when they are viewed in the light of the historical context of the seventeenth century. For Durham and for Rutherford, the Song of Songs was a specially designed book of the Bible, intended with one main goal in mind: to establish Reformation doctrine firmly in the hearts and minds of the people of Scotland.

Chapter 10 S C O T L A N D A N D S AUM U R : T H E I N T E L L E C T UA L L E G AC Y O F J O H N C A M E R O N I N S EV E N T E E N T H C E N T U RY F R A N C E *

Albert Gootjes From the moment the academy of Saumur opened its doors in 1599/1600, its founder and patron Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1549–1623) did everything in his power to make it the Protestant intellectual powerhouse of France. In his attempts to provide the faculty with first-rate scholars, the governor did not hesitate to extend his recruitment efforts beyond the borders of the kingdom. In 1602 he set his sights on the Netherlands, where he managed to convince no one less than the renowned theologian François du Jon (Franciscus Junius; 1545–1602) to leave the prestigious university of Leiden and to assume a post at his fledgling academy. As fate would have it, however, Junius was struck by the plague and passed away before he could take up his new office. After this, Duplessis-Mornay turned to Switzerland and succeeded in convincing another theologian of standing, Guillaume du Buc (Gulielmus Bucanus; † 1603), to come to Saumur; however, Bucanus passed away before he even set out from Lausanne. In spite of this inauspicious start, the young academy survived and the recruitment of high-profile theologians continued. In 1615, for example, the Dutchman Franciscus Gomarus (1563–1641) arrived – alive! – in Saumur. Like Junius, Gomarus had previously taught at Leiden, where the two had built a reputation for themselves as the foremost opponents of Jacobus Arminius. In addition to Switzerland and the Dutch Republic, Scotland too played an important role in the academy’s early recruitment efforts. The existence of such a Scottish connection is hardly surprising given the ancient ties between Scotland and France; the ‘Auld Alliance’ had been renewed by every Scottish and French king – with the exception of Louis XI – since its establishment in 1295. As Elizabeth Bonner has noted, even if the alliance was a military and political agreement in its * The substance of this article is based on conclusions developed in chapters 2, 3 and 5 of my Claude Pajon (1626–1685) and the Academy of Saumur: The First Controversy over Grace (Brill’s Series in Church History, vol. 64; Leiden: Brill, 2013). All translations of foreign language sources are my own.

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inception, and even if it is generally held to have ended in 1560 with the Treaty of Edinburgh and the passing of François II, husband to Mary Queen of Scots, it ‘gradually developed other familial, personal, social and cultural associations which did not die with François II, nor entirely disappear for several centuries’.1 Accordingly, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we see Scotsmen establishing themselves on the faculties of the French Protestant academies, and Saumur seems to have shown the greatest willingness to participate in the French– Scottish intellectual exchange.2 The list of its Scottish professors includes Robert Boyd (1578–1627), who taught philosophy and (later) theology over the course of a decade-long career at Saumur (1606–15), but who would go on to earn greater renown as principal to the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Of greater lasting significance for Saumur was Mark Duncan (1581–1640), whose reputation as a philosopher – in spite of his unpopularity among the students! – was inextricably tied to the academy where he taught for nearly three decades until his death. Yet there is no doubt that the most influential Scotsman ever to teach at Saumur was John Cameron (c. 1579–1625), who has correctly been identified as ‘the inspiration for, and father of, the distinctive teachings of the Academy of Saumur’.3 In fact, through the diffusion of his thought to several generations of students trained at the academy, the influence of Cameron would be felt in all corners of the kingdom throughout the seventeenth century. This influence was first manifested in the ‘Amyraldian controversy’ over the (hypothetical) universalism of Moïse Amyraut (1596–1664), which the Saumur professor laid out in his Brief traitté de la prédestination et de ses principales dépendances (1634), and whose structure he had taken over from his former teacher and mentor Cameron.4 While the universalism of Amyraut and his colleagues 1. Emily Bonner, ‘French Naturalization of the Scots in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, The Historical Journal 40 (1997), pp. 1085–115 (1086). 2. For the lists of professors, see Daniel Bourchenin, Étude sur les académies en France au XVIe et au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Grassart, 1882), pp. 463–8. For more on the Scots at Saumur, see David Murray, ‘Ninian Campbell, Professor of Eloquence at Saumur, Minister of Kilmacolm and of Rosneath’, The Scottish Historical Review 18 (1921), pp. 183–98. 3. Brian G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 42. See, similarly, Gaston Bonet-Maury, ‘Jean Cameron, pasteur de l’église de Bordeaux et professeur de théologie à Saumur’, in Études de théologie et d’histoire publiées [...]en hommage à la Faculté de théologie de Montauban à l’occasion du tricentenaire de sa fondation (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1901), pp. 77–117 (116): idem, ‘John Cameron: A Scottish Protestant Theologian in France’, The Scottish Historical Review 7 no. 28 (1910), pp. 325–45 (344); Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1965), p. 9; and François Laplanche, ‘Antiquité et vérité dans la controverse de Cameron’, in Conflits politiques, controverses religieuses: Essais d’histoire européenne aux 16e–18e siècles (Ouzi Elyada and Jacques Le Brun, eds; Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2002), pp. 131–42 (131). 4. For Cameron’s universalism, see his letters to L[ouis] C[appel] and the De ordine decretorum Dei in Τα Σωζομενα, sive Opera [...] (Louis Cappel, Moïse Amyraut, and Samuel



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first elicited enormous opposition, within France it slowly earned recognition as an acceptable view, and in the end even became the most common position on predestination held by Protestant theologians in France. Yet Cameron’s influence extended beyond la grâce universelle as well. This was pointed out by Walter Rex in an enlightening essay from 1965 in which he conceded that Cameron’s universalism may well have been his ‘most famous innovation’, but added that his view on the psychology of the act of faith was actually of greater impact and proved the impetus for what he termed ‘Calvinist rationalism in France’.5 The present article will build on Rex’s thesis and demonstrate, with attention to the ‘Pajonist controversies’, that Cameron was not only generally responsible for the intellectualist orientation of seventeenth-century French Protestant theology, but that his name and writings functioned as important authorities well into final decades of the Edict of Nantes (1598–1685). A first section will outline Cameron’s view on conversion and the circumstances in which it developed. Part two will give a brief summary of Pajon’s position on conversion, followed in part three by an examination of the role Cameron played in the controversies that broke out over Pajon’s teaching. Because the polemics in fact set one group of Cameronians over against another, the essay will close with an observation regarding our Scottish theologian’s place within the entire history of French Protestant theology.

Intellect and will: Cameron on Conversion Any study of Cameron’s theology and its legacy must be placed against the background of his biography.6 Born in Glasgow c. 1579, Cameron first entered the university there as a student and then briefly served it for one year as an instructor. In 1600 he traded Scotland in for France, and taught Greek and Latin at the collège of Bergerac (1600–2), and later philosophy at the academy of Sedan (1602–4). When the church of Bordeaux attributed a bursary to him for the study Bouhéreau, eds; Geneva: P. Chouet, 1642), pp. 529, 530–5; and A. Gootjes, ‘John Cameron and the French Universalist Tradition’, in The Theology of the French Reformed Church: From Henri IV to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (M. I. Klauber, ed.; Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, forthcoming). Among the large body of scholarship on the Amyraldian controversy, note especially François Laplanche, Orthodoxie et prédication: l’oeuvre d’Amyraut et la querelle de la grâce universelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy; and Frans P. Van Stam, The Controversy Over the Theology of Saumur, 1635–1650: Disrupting Debates Among Huguenots in Complicated Circumstances (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1988). 5. Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle, chapter 3, pp. 77–120 (89, 91). 6. For Cameron’s biography, see R. Wodrow, Collections Upon the Lives of the Reformers and Most Eminent Ministers of the Church of Scotland (3 vols; Glasgow: Maitland, 1834–48), vol. 2, pp. 81–223; Bonet-Maury, ‘Jean Cameron’; idem, ‘John Cameron’; and Henry Martyn Beckwith Reid, Divinity Principals in the University of Glasgow: 1545–1654 (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1917), pp. 170–251.

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of theology, Cameron spent four years at the academies of Geneva and Heidelberg (1604–8). Upon his return to France he was, as agreed upon, ordained as pastor to the church of Bordeaux alongside Gilbert Primrose (c. 1580–1641), another Scot. Cameron served this church as pastor for nearly a decade, until he found himself behind the lectern once again late in 1618 after winning the concours for the chair in theology at Saumur vacated by Gomarus. Cameron would teach at the academy for some three years and with great success, until religio-political circumstances forced him to flee France for his life in 1621 and to retreat to the other side of the English Channel. After spending time in London, he was appointed to replace Boyd as professor of divinity in Glasgow where he stayed until 1623, when the circumstances in France seemed ripe for his return. Yet his intentions were frustrated since, by the time of his arrival, a royal edict prevented him from taking up his old post at the academy. Instead, Cameron was resigned to giving private lessons in Saumur, which he did for about one year. But in the spring of 1624, he received royal permission to become professor of theology at the academy of Montauban. This too was short-lived. In the summer of 1625, Cameron suffered serious injuries in an attempt to calm a raging anti-Catholic mob, and died several months later. While Cameron’s life would seem to have suffered more than enough upheaval due to political circumstances alone, it was further complicated by the criticism which his theology aroused. For, although many within the Reformed camp saw him as a champion of their faith in face of the Catholic and Remonstrant threats, others questioned whether he really was that orthodox after all. While his universalism appears to have passed largely under the radar until the publication of Amyraut’s Brief traitté, Cameron’s denial of Christ’s active obedience as a part of justification, for example, ensured that his appointment to Saumur in 1618 did not pass uncontested. More significant were the suspicions that were aroused by his view on conversion as he first formulated it publicly while disputing for the Saumur chair. As was customary, the contest between the candidates – Cameron and a certain Louis de la Coste, pastor of Dijon – included two proof lectures on an Old and New Testament passage, as well as a disputation in which the candidate was to defend theses of his own composition. For his New Testament lecture, Cameron was assigned Philippians 2.12–13, which ends with the famous words: ‘For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good pleasure.’ The examiners’ choice for this passage is, of course, not surprising in light of its soteriological implications, especially with the Synod of Dort (1618–19) looming. One issue in the Remonstrant controversies, aside from but related to predestination, was the nature of the Spirit’s work in conversion. The orthodox party charged that the Remonstrants were too positive in their anthropology, as reflected above all in chapter 3/4 of the Synod of Dort’s iudicium. In article 11, the synod stated that God operates on the minds of the elect to illuminate them and make them receptive to the gospel, and further makes their wills alive, good, willing, and obedient. In article 12, as well as in error 7, the synod countered those who teach that God produces conversion by a ‘gentle suasion’ of a ‘moral’ nature alone. Briefly stated, the orthodox insisted that 1) God does not effect conversion



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by the ‘moral’ work of proposing the gospel as an object to the faculties of the soul alone, but first opens and heals these faculties; and 2) that this operation on the faculties includes both mind (or intellect) and will. At the end of his lecture on Philippians 2, Cameron appended two propositions in which he came dangerously close to the view that the orthodox party would very soon condemn. While affirming the efficacy and irresistibility of God’s work in conversion in the first proposition, Cameron betrayed his conviction that the will follows the intellect.7 In the second proposition he defined the manner (modus) of God’s irresistible work on the will as ‘persuasion’, and labelled it a ‘moral’ (or ‘ethical’) work rather than a ‘physical’ one, because the latter term conjures up images of non-rational creatures like animals or stones being moved.8 Cameron’s framing of conversion in terms of the regular psychology of the faculties was no doubt meant to escape the common Remonstrant accusation that the orthodox reduced human beings to stocks and blocks, but he was aware that his solution could trouble his Reformed compatriots. For that reason he insisted that his ‘moral persuasion’ differed from the ‘moral suasion’ of the ‘new Semi-Pelagians’: their ‘suasion’, he argued, either consists in the proposition of the objects alone, or else produces in people the will but not the act; yet his own concept of ‘persuasion’, entirely in line with Philippians 2:13, produces both the will and the act.9 In the disputation theses which he defended several days later, Cameron similarly insisted that the movement by which the free choice of those who are called is moved to accept what the Spirit offers is ‘ethical’ in nature, although it is just as efficacious as if it were ‘physical’.10 While Cameron’s defence of this position appears to have passed unchallenged at first, the alarm bells were sounded early in 1621 in relation to the ‘friendly conference’ (amica collatio) which he had held in 1620 with Daniel Tilenus (1563– 1633) to discuss the Arminian views the latter had recently adopted. Cameron had been asked to participate in this debate by members of the French churches, but his elaboration of the position on conversion that he had first laid out in 1618 caused the theological faculty of the university of Leiden to question his own orthodoxy when they saw a manuscript record of this conference. A letter which André Rivet (1572–1651) addressed to Cameron in the name of his colleagues

7. Cameron, Praelectio ad Philipp. Cap. II. Vers. 12. 13., in Opera, p. 343a–b. Elsewhere Cameron spoke more forcefully of the will necessarily following the intellect; Amica collatio, in Opera, 632a: ‘at certe illuminato intellectu necessario flectitur voluntas’. 8. Ibid., pp. 343b–344a. 9. Ibid., p. 344a–b. 10. Cameron, Theses de gratia et libero arbitrio, thes. 10, in Opera, p. 332a: ‘Satis haec evidenter ostendunt, Spiritus in vocatione partes esse dantis, hominis qui vocatur, accipientis duntaxat: nullamque in hoc negotio intervenire virium humanarum cooperationem, nullum gratiae & liberi arbitrii concursum, qui quidem possit efficere ut sociae causae locum obtineat, cum tamen moveri a gratia liberum arbitrium necesse sit, sed motu, ut ita loquar, Ethico, non Physico, qui motus tamen sit tam efficax quam si Physicus foret.’

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explains why they were refusing to give the manuscript their stamp of approval for publication: Although we will not enter into that physical controversy with anyone, namely, as to whether the determination of the will follows necessarily upon the last judgement of reason and of what they call the ‘practical intellect’ […]; nevertheless, we cannot approve the fact that you seem not to allow or require in your entire work any other change in the will aside from that moral change which occurs from the display of the object and the judgement of reason whether to choose, or to reject, or to prefer it, without any immediate influence of God on that will, especially in supernatural matters.

Rivet and company were thus concerned that Cameron’s insistence on the ‘moral’ character of God’s work in conversion, together with his position on the will necessarily following the intellect, implied for him that God did not need to operate on the human will, although that had been agreed upon at Dort as the orthodox position. They therefore demanded that Cameron add a preface explicitly stating his agreement with Dort, and further admit that God does act immediately on the will, not only ‘metaphorically’ but also ‘really’.11 In his response from February 1622, Cameron did not acknowledge an immediate divine operation on the will. Instead, he insisted that in his view God already does work to renew the will, even if that renewal passes through the illumination of the intellect. Moreover, he stated that in spite of his insistence on the role of secondary causes (i.e. the gospel object that is proposed to the intellect), he still did hold God to be the one who operates – through the intellect – on the will.12 Cameron’s letter seems to have succeeded in convincing the Leiden theologians that his view was at least acceptable within the bounds of orthodoxy. Nearly three decades later, Rivet would admit that he at first shared the suspicions of others regarding Cameron’s views on conversion, but added that he now no longer doubted the ‘soundness of his thought’ (sana mente). The first reason he offered for his change of mind was the same point which Cameron had made in his 1622 letter, namely, that the operation of grace in his view did extend to the will ‘properly and, as they say, “really”’ – although Rivet did not cite the letter, but rather Cameron’s 1624 response to the letter from the ‘vir anonymus’ (i.e. Simon Episcopius, 1583–1643). Rivet drew the other reasons for the easing of his concerns from this work as well, noting for example the qualifications and reservations the Scot had offered there about his use of the term ‘ethical’ movement.13 11. The faculty of theology of Leiden to J. Cameron, Leiden, 31 January 1622, in Cameron, Opera, p. 709a–b (709a); and in Eekhof, A., De theologische faculteit te Leiden in de 17 de eeuw (Utrecht: G. J. A. Ruys, 1921), pp. 15–17 (16–17). 12. J. Cameron to the faculty of theology of Leiden, London, [February 1622], in Opera, p. 710a. 13. A. Rivet, Synopsis doctrinae de natura et gratia [… ] (Amsterdam: J. Janson, 1649); reprinted in Opera theologica (3 vols; Rotterdam: Arnold Leers, 1651–1660), vol. 3, pp.



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Whatever efforts might have been made to continue the discussion would have been impeded by the course of Cameron’s life. As the brief biographical survey above reveals, he was forced to relocate on multiple occasions following his flight from France in 1621, only to pass away in 1625.

Pajon and the Denial of Immediate Grace Four decades later, the doctrine of conversion would become the subject of a new controversy, this time in France and as occasioned by the views expressed by Claude Pajon (1626–85). As we have seen, the Leiden theologians were troubled when they perceived Cameron to mention no more than a ‘moral’ act of renewal on the will, and to be silent about an act that passes outside of the intervention of the intellect. But Pajon went one step further. Early in the 1660s, when he was serving his first church at Marchenoir, Pajon composed ‘De natura gratiae efficacis ad amicum dissertatio’. The one goal of this treatise numbering nearly 30,000 words was to show that the Holy Spirit does not operate immediately on either the intellect or the will. According to Pajon, God not only renews the will mediately through the intellect (insofar as the will necessarily follows the judgement of the intellect), but he also acts mediately upon the intellect itself, making it capable of recognizing the truth of the gospel object – i.e. ‘illuminating’ the intellect – by the very proposition of that object, rather than by a direct act on the intellect that precedes and extends beyond this proposition.14 Pajon, who had studied theology at the academy of Saumur in the 1640s, was moved to write this work as part of an on-going discussion with an old classmate, Paul de la Fons (†1683), by then pastor to the town of Blois some 30 kilometres from Marchenoir. De la Fons was uneasy with the view Pajon developed in this work, and mentioned his concerns to Jacques Guyraut (fl. 1660–83), one of the ministers at Loudun. The first phase of the Pajonist controversies broke out in 1665 when the provincial synod of Anjou appointed Pajon to the newly reestablished third chair of theology at the academy of Saumur, and Guyraut, who was present as an outside examiner from the neighbouring provincial synod of Orléans and Berry, objected on the basis of what he had learned about Pajon’s doctrine from 828–77 (850), referring to Cameron’s Sententia aliquot ab hinc annis thesibus explicata and Responsio ad [...] epistolam, in Opera, pp. 720b, 737a and 737b respectively. 14. For Pajon, see especially Gootjes, Claude Pajon; and Olivier Fatio, ‘Claude Pajon et les mutations de la théologie réformée à l’époque de la Révocation’, in La Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes et le protestantisme français en 1685 (Roger Zuber and Laurent Theis, eds; Paris: Société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français, 1986), pp. 209–27. Also useful are E. André Mailhet, La théologie protestante au XVIIe siècle: Claude Pajon: Sa vie, son système religieux, ses controverses, d’après des documents entièrement inédits (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1883); and John M. Pope, ‘Aspects of Controversies Concerning the Doctrine of Grace Aroused by the Teachings of Claude Pajon’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, St Andrews University, 1974).

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de la Fons.15 The nature of Guyraut’s disagreement with Pajon is highly significant. While he agreed with Pajon that the Holy Spirit acts mediate­ly on the will by a purely moral act through the illumination of the intellect, he insisted that ‘it is not the same with the intellect. The Spirit acts immediately upon it in order to make it capable of the impression of the truth of God by an act that is neither moral nor physical, but supernatural and ineffable.’16 The position that Guyraut proposed as orthodox against Pajon was the very same view that had troubled the Leiden theologians in Cameron 40 years earlier. This demonstrates the extent to which Cameron’s legacy, and in particular his intellectualist view of faith, had established itself in France by the 1660s. Although the Leiden theologians might have hoped that Cameron’s view would die with him, not long after his hasty departure the Saumur academy could boast of no less than three professors of theology, all of whom were fervent Cameronians: Amyraut, Louis Cappel (1585–1658), and Josué de la Place (c. 1596–1655). Amyraut seems to have reflected more extensively on matters pertaining to grace than his colleagues did and is, of course, the best known universalist among them. Yet the others too clearly defended la grâce universelle.17 What is more, Amyraut taught the same view on conversion that the Leiden theologians had discerned in Cameron. He held a mediate operation to suffice for the will, but insisted – in contrast to Pajon – that an immediate work was necessary on the intellect.18

15. For the course of the first Pajonist controversy, see Gootjes, Claude Pajon, passim; and idem, ‘Un épisode méconnu de la vie de la communauté réformée au milieu du XVIIe siècle. La première controverse pajoniste sur la grâce’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français 156 no. 2 (2010), pp. 211–29. 16. Jacques Guyraut, ‘Objections d’un ami à son ami’, Geneva, private archives of the Fondation Turrettini (= Arch. Turrettini), 1st ms under the shelfmark 1/Gb.1.32.XIII, [pp. 1–5], §13: ‘Or pour ce qui regarde la volonté, il [= le Saint Esprit – AG] n’agit pas sur elle immédiattement, mais par le moyen de l’entendement […]. L’Esprit donc meut la volonté par une action purement morale; mais il n’en est pas de mesme de l’entendement. L’Esprit agit immédiattement sur luy pour le rendre capable de l’impression de la vérité de Dieu, par une action qui n’est ni morale, ni physique; mais surnaturelle et ineffable.’ For full bibliographical details on this and other manuscripts cited (including variant copies), see Gootjes, Claude Pajon. 17. Josué de la Place, Sententiae de ordine decretorum Dei defensio, thes. 17, in Opuscula nonnulla (Saumur: Jeans Lesnier, 1656), pp. 121–39; reprinted in Opera omnia (2 vols; Franeker: Johannes Gyzelaar, 1699), vol. 1, pp. 483–501; and Louis Cappel, ‘Theses theologicae de electione et reprobatione. Pars prior, κατασκευαστικὴ’, thes. 33–34, in Moïse Amyraut, Louis Cappel and Josué de la Place, Syntagma thesium theologicarum in Academia Salmuriensi variis temporibus disputatarum (4 vols; Saumur: Jean Lesnier, 2nd edn, 1664), vol. 2, pp. 102–10. 18. See especially Moïse Amyraut, Specimen animadversionum in Exercitationes de gratia universali (Saumur: Jean Lesnier, 1648), Pars tertia: Ad erotema V in tomo tertio, pp. 287–8.



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Guyraut, who like Pajon had studied at Saumur,19 had no doubt received this Cameronian tradition on the psychology of faith from Amyraut, and did not hesitate to point out to him that his doctrine conflicted directly with that of their great teacher.20 In spite of the concerns voiced by Guyraut, the 1665 synod of Anjou upheld Pajon’s appointment. Yet the conflict only escalated when Pajon was installed at the academy in the following months. This conflict, it should be noted, did not pass through the press; instead, Pajon and Guyraut, as well as other opponents, wrote numerous letters and manuscript treatises back and forth. While many of them appear to be lost, the records that do survive make it clear that Pajon’s opponents were above all concerned about a perceived over-estimation of the human condition in Pajon. In their minds, Pajon’s denial of the necessity of an immediate operation of the Spirit on either human faculty undermined the doctrine of original sin, or at least denied its effect on the human person’s ability to convert himself/herself. Accordingly, they launched accusations of Pelagianism and/or Remonstrantism against him. But even as official objections to Pajon’s appointment were registered, both the academy and the provincial synod of Anjou stood behind him. Even so, the threat posed by his continued presence to the academy’s (financial) well-being brought Pajon to the decision late in 1667 to leave the faculty. Thus, although his opponents had failed in their attempt to have the academy or synod remove Pajon from his post as professor, his decision meant that, from a practical perspective, the victory still was theirs. Once Pajon was no longer in a position from which he could influence the kingdom’s next generation of pastors, his opponents seem to have been by and large satisfied. For the first decade of his pastorate at Orléans, Pajon was left in peace.

The Battle over Cameron’s Intellectual Legacy The Pajonist controversy was above all theological in nature; the main concern was whether or not his views could be considered orthodox. Yet the extant documents also reveal that an important aspect of the polemics was a ‘battle over Cameron’s intellectual legacy’.21 Pajon himself supplied the occasion for this 19. Guyraut appears as respondent to the disputation ‘De inferioribus ministrorum ecclesiasticorum ordinibus’ in Amyraut et al., Syntagma, vol. 3, pp. 287–95. 20. Guyraut, ‘Remarques sur la confession de foi de Monsieur Pajon, sur la question de la grâce’, Arch. Turrettini, 2nd ms under the shelfmark 1/Gb.1.32.XIII, [p. 11]: ‘Il faut nécessairement, dit Monsieur Amyraut*, que Dieu agisse au-dedans de nous pour y ouvrir nos coeurs et pour y donner entrée à son Evangile. […] Mais cette doctrine et celle de Monsieur Pajon sont directement opposées l’une à l’autre.’ The asterisk (*) refers the reader to Amyraut, Sermons sur divers textes de la Sainte Ecriture. Prononcés en divers lieux (Saumur: Isaac Desbordes, 2nd edn, 1653), p. 357. 21. I have adopted this phrase from R. J. M. van de Schoor, The Irenical Theology of Théophile Brachet de la Milletière (1588–1665) (Studies in the History of Christian Thought

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debate when he boldly declared in his ‘De natura’ that ‘Cameron […] embraced our view almost everywhere’.22 Having himself been shaped in the Cameronian tradition of Amyraut and the other Saumur professors, Guyraut did not leave this claim unchallenged. He therefore sent Pajon a list of 19 objections to his doctrine, accompanied by numerous citations of which all but one were taken from Cameron’s opera.23 The import of these citations is clear; Guyraut was convinced that the Scot was in fact on his side. Pajon did not leave this challenge unanswered. For while his third and lengthiest work, the ‘Traité de l’opération de l’Esprit de Dieu en la conversion de l’homme’ (1666), might have been seen by scholars (esp. Mailhet and Pope) as the best source for reconstructing Pajon’s thought, the main goal of this text was to substantiate the legitimacy of his claim to be Cameron’s true theological heir and to undermine the validity of his opponents’ rejoinder. This is evident from the layout of the work. Pajon writes that he will lay out the state of the question in a first part; describe his own view in the second, with the specific goal of seeing whether Cameron’s expressions agree with it; and in the third and final part will comment on Guyraut’s objections, and examine whether the passages he had cited from Cameron do in fact support him.24 The largest part of the ‘Traité’ is therefore devoted to an examination of Cameron’s works, which Pajon examines with the kind of attention one might expect from an exegete working on a biblical text. It is not possible to examine Pajon’s treatment of Cameron at length in the context of this brief article, nor is it in fact necessary. In the greatest number of cases, he can simply – and convincingly – demonstrate that the passage cited by Guyraut is insufficiently specific and therefore compatible with both of their views. For example, when Guyraut cites Cameron’s insistence in his letter to the Leiden theologians that the depravity of the intellect can only be overcome by grace, Pajon points out this passage is inconclusive since it does not specify whether this operation of grace is mediate or immediate. He then turns this citation against Guyraut, asking why Cameron would admit an immediate act on the intellect if he denied it with regard to the will.25 The debate over Cameron in the ‘Traité’ reached its climax with Guyraut’s citation of thesis twenty from his 1618 disputation on grace and free choice, which reads as follows: 59; Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 67, who used it in connection with another debate involving various disciples of Cameron. 22. Claude Pajon, ‘N. N. De natura gratiae efficacis ad amicum dissertatio’, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson D. 840 no. 8, fols. 31r°–77r° (prima obiectio; p. 52): ‘Camero […] ubique ferè sententiam nostram amplexus est.’ 23. Guyraut, ‘Objections’, passim. 24. Pajon, ‘Traité de l’opération de l’Esprit de Dieu en la conversion de l’homme’, Arch. Turrettini, 1st ms under the shelfmark 1/Gb.1.32.XIII, non-paginated, [pp. 9–70], §§1–3. 25. Cf. Pajon, ‘Traité de l’opération’, §147 with Guyraut, ‘Objections’, §13, citing J. Cameron to the faculty of theology of Leiden, London, [February 1622], in Opera, p. 710a.



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However, that the ministers of the gospel are called God’s co-operators (1 Cor 3:9) applies in another way. For by it a comparison is established between the external preaching of the Word and its force and efficacy in the minds of men, the former of which is indeed from God but by the intervention of a human work, [while] the latter proceeds immediately from the Spirit of God alone.26

Of course, this citation looks to be detrimental to Pajon’s claim on Cameron, in that it speaks of a mediate as well as an immediate work on the human mind or intellect. Guyraut continued his assault by adding that, while he was aware that Cameron had said in his 1624 response to Episcopius that this work of the Spirit consists in a ‘persuasion’ effected by ‘reasons’ (which would suggest, of course, that it is ‘moral’), Cameron specified later on that the Spirit proposes those reasons internally.27 Again, Cameron would appear to admit an internal work that passes outside of the proposition of the gospel object, and thus to be in conflict with Pajon. Pajon acknowledged that this thesis was somewhat problematic for him: ‘It is more difficult than the other [citations]. I admit that it has sometimes given me difficulties, and I admit that it is somewhat obscure if it is not considered with sufficient attention.’28 Yet he proposed an alternative reading whereby the immediate operation to which Cameron refers is that by which the Spirit dispenses the circumstances leading a person to accept the gospel; it is thus ‘immediate’ in the sense that it passes outside of the ministers’ work in preaching the gospel, but not in the sense that it excludes all secondary causes as is the case in Guyraut’s view.29 Pajon prefaces this with some qualifiers, however, suggesting that the ambiguity of the thesis might have resulted from a hesitation on the part of Cameron to be open in 1618 when he was already suspected of Pelagianism, or else from an insufficient reflection on the matter at that early stage of his career. Most importantly, he adds: ‘Whatever may have been the case, even if Cameron had contradicted himself, a single passage could not legitimately overrule an infinity of others that we have seen where I think he is clearly on my side.’30 26. Cameron, Theses de gratia et libero arbitrio, thes. 20, in Opera, pp. 332b–333a: ‘Quod autem Evangelii ministri Dei cooperarii (1 Cor. 3.9) dicuntur, aliorsum pertinet, sic enim instituitur comparatio inter externam verbi praedicationem, eiusque in hominum animis vim & efficaciam, quarum prior a Deo quidem est, sed operae humanae interventu, altera immediatè à solo Dei Spiritu proficiscitur’ (cited in Guyraut, ‘Objections’, §13). 27. Cameron, Responsio, in Opera, p. 744b (cited in Guyraut, ‘Objections’, §13). 28. Pajon, ‘Traité de l’opération’, §151: ‘Le 5e. passage que vous citez de la p. 332. th. 20. est plus difficile que les autres. J’avoue qu’il m’a quelquefois donné de la peine, et j’avoue qu’il a de l’obscurité quand on ne le considère pas avec assez d’attention.’ 29. Pajon, ‘Traité de l’opération’, §§152–3. 30. Pajon, ‘Traité de l’opération’, §151: ‘Quoyqu’il en soit si Monsieur Cameron s’estoit contredit luy-mesme un seul passage ne pourroit légitimement prévaloir à une infinité d’autres, que nous avons veu, où je pense qu’il est nettement pour moy.’

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In order to establish that, with the possible exception of this one thesis, Cameron elsewhere clearly supports his view, Pajon draws his most conclusive piece of evidence from Cameron’s response to Episcopius’s anonymous letter – even though Guyraut had cited this same letter to bolster his reference to thesis twenty. Pajon points his opponent to the context, where Cameron was responding to the following observation of the Remonstrant theologian: ‘according to the hypothesis of Cameron, the objective revelation of the divine will alone suffices to convert man, without any other internal grace that is impressed immediately on either his mind or will’.31 Episcopius had given a decidedly ‘Pajonist’ reading of Cameron. Episcopius went on to argue in this passage that Cameron was therefore a Pelagian, notwithstanding the fact that he had debated Tilenus as a representative of orthodoxy. Just as significant is the way in which Cameron responded. He remarked that, had the Remonstrant read his writings more carefully, he would have noticed that he had never spoken of persuasion as a ‘moral’ movement in respect to the mind (but only the will).32 A little later he repeated that he had never called persuasion an ‘ethical movement’ in respect to the mind, although he now added that there would be good reasons to do so.33 Yet Cameron’s primary concern in this section is to challenge the conclusion Episcopius had drawn from his reading of Cameron, namely, that his doctrine made him a Pelagian. This circumstance is key for Pajon. He points out that the question between the two men was not the accuracy of Episcopius’s rendering of Cameron, but the legitimacy of the consequence he drew from it.34 Having sealed in his mind that Cameron like him denied immediate grace, Pajon returns to the 1618 thesis and notes that it should be explained in the same vein, unless of course contradiction in Cameron should be admitted.35 Guyraut appears to have left the ‘Traité’ unanswered, and the battle between Pajon and him over Cameron’s heritage subsided as the first Pajonist controversy fizzled out when Pajon decided to leave the academy of Saumur. But Cameron played an important role again a decade later in the second phase of the controversy as it broke out at the instigation of Étienne de Brais (1635–79), who became 31. Episcopius, Epistola viri docti ad amicum, in Cameron, Opera, pp. 724b–25a: ‘Efficitur itaque iuxta hypothesin Cameronis solam obiectivam divinae voluntatis revelationem ad convertendum hominem sufficere sine ulla alia interna gratia quae immediate aut menti, aut voluntati ipsius imprimatur’ (emphasis mine). This letter is also found in Episcopius, Opera theologica (The Hague: Arnold Leers, 2nd edn, 1678), second pagination, pp. 209–17 (211–12). 32. Cameron, Responsio, in Opera, pp. 743a–b. 33. Cameron, Responsio, in Opera, pp. 745a, 747a. 34. Pajon, ‘Traité de l’opération’, §155: ‘Si Monsieur Cameron eust esté de vostre sentiment, il eust respondu à l’Arminien, sumis quod non do, persuasionem fieri sine ulla gratia quae immediate menti imprimatur. Mais parce qu’il estoit du mien, au lieu de cela il respond, sumis is quod non do, persuasionem fieri per rationes utcunque propositas, etc.’ (referring to Cameron, Responsio, in Opera, p. 744b) 35. Pajon, ‘Traité de l’opération’, §156.



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professor of theology at Saumur in 1675.36 When Pajon discovered that de Brais was inciting the students against him in his lectures, he sought out Jean Claude (1619–87), the renowned pastor to the church of Charenton, in the summer of 1676 in order to justify his doctrine before him. Although this three-day discussion ended in Claude acknowledging the acceptability of Pajon’s view and vowing to communicate his judgement to others, over the course of the next twelve months he appears to have changed his mind. In the summer of 1677 he met with six other pastors and professors, including Pierre Jurieu of the academy of Sedan (1637–1713), at a secret conference in Paris to discuss Pajon’s views. And by the end of this meeting, each participant agreed to work in his province for their condemnation. Their efforts were quite effective; within two years, antiPajonist statements were adopted by at least half a dozen provincial synods, as well as the academies of Saumur and Sedan. The striking thing about the 1676 conference between Claude and Pajon is that the debate with Guyraut over Cameron’s theological legacy was replayed step by step. Much of the conference was devoted to a detailed theological examination of the Spirit’s work in conversion, original sin, and human inability, but the question of authorities was raised by Antoine Crosaz de la Bastide (1624–1704), an elder from Charenton and an able theologian in his own right, when he exclaimed that Pajon was in conflict with the great Amyraut. The conference record notes that Pajon responded rather boldly that Amyraut had simply been inconsistent, and then continues: After Mr. Amyraut, also Mr. Cameron came on the ranks, with each attempting to draw him to his side. Mr. Claude cited his inaugural theses on grace and free choice in his favour, and Mr. Pajon cited the same theses which he believed to favour his view, as well as the response to the ‘Letter to the learned man’, and in particular the fourth chapter, where he argued Mr. Cameron to be entirely for him.37

The record does not indicate which thesis Claude cited, but like Guyraut he will no doubt have found the strongest support for his view in the twentieth thesis 36. There is as yet no in-depth study of the second Pajonist controversy, but see Orentin Douen, La révocation de l’Edit de Nantes à Paris (3 vols.; Paris: Fischbacher, 1894), vol. 1, pp. 343–73; and Gootjes, Claude Pajon, ch. 7. 37. [Paul Lenfant?], ‘Relation de ce qui passa entre Monsieur Claude et Monsieur Pajon dans les conférences qu’ils eurent au mois de juillet 1676’, London, Library of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, University College Library Special Collections, R. 5 (= Charles le Cène Collection; henceforth cited as LC), vol. 6, pp. 111–38 (128): ‘Après Monsieur Amyraut, Monsieur Cameron vint aussi sur les rangs, chacun s’efforçant de le tirer à son parti; Monsieur Claude cita pour lui ses thèses inaugurales de grat. et lib. arb. et Monsieur Pajon allégua les mesmes thèses qu’il creût favorables à son sentiment, et la réponse ad Epistolam viri docti, et particulièrement le 4e. chap. où il soutînt que Monsieur Cameron est tout pour lui.’

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discussed above.38 Pajon will then have countered by citing Cameron’s unqualified description of the Spirit’s movement in conversion as ‘ethical’ in thesis ten,39 and sealed the deal – just as he had against Guyraut – by pointing to Episcopius’s ‘Pajonist’ reading of Cameron, and the nature of Cameron’s response to it.40 In spite of the fierce opposition he encountered during the second phase of controversy, Pajon was never removed as pastor from his church at Orléans; the measures taken by the synods and academies in 1677 and 1678 were aimed instead at keeping students who held his views from the ministry and thereby preventing the further spread of his teachings. Yet until the day of his death, Pajon continued to fight for the legitimacy of his doctrine, and to persist in his claim that he was the true heir to Cameron’s theological legacy.41

Cameron and the History of French Protestant Theology Because of its brevity, this essay remains unsatisfactory as an exposition of the views of Cameron and Pajon, and of the controversies they aroused both within and outside of France. What it does demonstrate is that Cameron was not only generally responsible for the intellectualist orientation of French Protestant theology as Rex has argued, but that his name also represented an authority of highest rank in the debates that pitted proponents of divergent streams within this one tradition over against each other. In the case of the Pajonist controversies, the weight of Cameron’s name is best demonstrated in that Pajon rarely mentioned the intermediary through whom he received his interpretation of Cameron. For, as I have argued elsewhere, Pajon was not original but actually received his view on conversion from Paul Testard (c. 1596–1650), pastor of Blois and a former student of Cameron at Saumur, under whose mentorship Pajon quite probably complemented the formal education he received at Saumur just prior to his installation as pastor at Marchenoir.42 Yet instead of appealing to Testard – he does so less than a handful of times in all the extant documents – in whose writings the denial of an immediate operation of grace on both intellect and will is unambiguously (albeit 38. See text in n. 26 above. 39. See text in n. 10 above. 40. The importance of the Episcopius–Cameron exchange is particularly evident from the other record of the 1676 conference; see [Antoine Crosaz de la Bastide?], ‘Conférence touchant la nature et la grâce, entre Messieurs Claude et Pajon, en présence de Messieurs de la Bastide, et Lenfant’, LC 6, pp. 99–107 (99): ‘Messieurs Claude et de la Bastide opposèrent les thèses de Cameron de grat. et lib. arb. où ils prétendent qu’il a parlé selon leur sentiment, ce que Monsieur Pajon a dit devoir estre interprété par les parolles de Cameron resp. ad V. doctum.’ (a marginal note specifies chapter four). 41. C. Pajon to the consistory of Charenton, Orléans, 2 February 1684, LC 6, p. 257: ‘il est facile de justifier que Monsieur Cameron étoit dans le sentiment où sont aujourd’huy les opposans à la nouvelle décision, et qu’il les a semez presque partout dans ses ouvrages.’ 42. See Gootjes, Claude Pajon, ch. 2.



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briefly) stated,43 Pajon chose to take refuge behind the authority of Cameron, even though his writings were at times sufficiently ambiguous to be problematic for him. The Pajonist controversies thus comprised two groups of Cameronians at odds with one another: the ‘moderate’ Cameronians represented by Amyraut and the majority of French theologians who followed him; and the minority ‘radical’ Cameronians, among whom we find Testard, Pajon, and their disciples. How these different interpretations of Cameron surfaced in the course of the seventeenth century, originating with two theologians – i.e. Amyraut and Testard – who had studied under him at Saumur at the same time, remains to be explored. Yet if, as Pajon argued, Cameron himself really did (over time?) dispense with the necessity of an immediate operation of grace on both will and intellect, there is every reason to believe that he would have disguised this after he narrowly escaped branding as a heretic by the Leiden theologians who were already concerned by his denial of such an operation on the will. Such a scenario is, in any case, entirely in line with the evidence of Cameron’s writings, and especially with his evasive and logomachical response to Episcopius’s ‘Pajonist’ reading of him in 1624. Furthermore, Testard boarded with Cameron during part of his studies at Saumur, and – according to Rivet, whose extensive correspondence network kept him well informed on the situation in France – received his doctrine ‘both from his writings as well as from private teaching’.44 Did Cameron dare to say more to his students at home than in the classroom or elsewhere in public? This remains pure speculation, of course. Yet it is important to recognize that the very reasons behind this speculation are indicative of Cameron’s place in the history of French Protestantism. Cameron was a brilliant thinker, a man of ideas, and an inspiring teacher who was somehow able to gain a large number of followers within a short amount of time and to leave a lasting impression on them. But Cameron made little effort to systematize his teaching; that task was left to his disciples. Furthermore, Cameron himself published very little during his lifetime, and in fact had an aversion to writing; the majority of his opera was put together by Cappel (together with Amyraut and Samuel Bouhéreau) from manuscripts he had left behind, or else reconstructed from lecture notes taken by his students.45 And, finally, the great turmoil of Cameron’s existence culminated with his death at the very prime of his life. When he passed away, he left behind an inspiring intellectual legacy, incomplete and in partly written, partly oral state, which motivated his followers to develop it. But the very nature of that legacy allowed for differences among them, regardless of their competing and persistent conviction that they represented his true heirs. 43. Paul Testard, Εἰρηνικόν seu Synopsis doctrinae de natura et gratia (Blois: Martin Huyssens, 1633), thes. 228–29. 44. A. Rivet to the faculty of theology of Leiden, The Hague, 22 April 1633, Leiden, UB, BPL 300, fol. 136r°: ‘[Testardum] fuisse discipulum et olim domesticum, D. Cameronis. Eius doctrinam imbibisse, tam ex scriptis, quam ex familiari disciplina.’ 45. See my ‘John Cameron and the French Universalist Tradition’.

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For the historian of early modern Reformed theology in France, then, all roads lead to Scotland. As the late François Laplanche observed in the twilight of a long career devoted to this field: ‘The more one reads of Cameron, the more one recognizes how much the pastors and professors of Paris and Saumur drew on his lectures and on his writings. Every history of French Protestant theology in the seventeenth century should begin with a systematic study of his work.’46

46. Laplanche, ‘Antiquité et vérité’, p. 131; cf. Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle, p. 89: ‘every important change which occurred in French Calvinism between 1634 and the Revocation can be traced eventually back to [Cameron].’

Chapter 11 J O H N C A LV I N A N D J O H N B R OW N O F W A M P H R AY O N J U ST I F IC AT IO N

Joel R. Beeke John Calvin (1509–64) called justification by faith in Christ alone ‘the main hinge on which religion turns’, the ‘foundation’ on which we must build our salvation and our piety toward God.1 A century later in Scotland, John Brown of Wamphray (c. 1610–79) signalled his recognition of the significance of the doctrine of justification by devoting a major treatise to the subject of how a sinner may obtain righteousness before the judgement seat of God. Philip G. Ryken has called Brown ‘an important figure’ in Scottish Reformed scholasticism, and said that his books on the Sabbath and justification ‘take their place among the more important Scottish theological works of the seventeenth century’ and to some extent ‘reveal traits characteristic of Reformed scholasticism’.2 How did Brown’s teaching on justification compare to Calvin’s? How did the mindset and characteristics of orthodoxy and scholasticism affect Brown’s treatment of this doctrine that was so central to the Reformation proclamation of salvation by grace? Was there a significant difference between Calvin’s doctrine and that of Brown? These questions will be the focus of this chapter. Justification remains a controversial topic today,3 and the discussions of the past have much light to shed on present debates. 1. J. Calvin, ICR 3.11.1. In addition to the ICR this chapter will draw upon the following sources by Calvin: Calvin’s Commentaries (repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996); Sermons on Genesis, Chapters 11:5–20:7 (Rob Roy McGregor, trans.; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2012); Sermons of M. Iohn Caluine vpon the Epistle of Saincte Paule to the Galathians (London: Lucas Harison and George Bishop, 1574); Tracts (Henry Beveridge, trans. and ed.; Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1851); and A Reformation Debate: Sadoleto’s Letter to the Genevans and Calvin’s Reply (J. C. Olin, ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1976). 2. Philip G. Ryken, ‘Scottish Reformed Scholasticism’, in C. R. Trueman and R. S. Clark, eds, Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999), pp. 202–3. 3. See J. K. Beilby and P. Rhodes Eddy, eds, Justification: Five Views (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2011).

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Calvin’s Teaching on Justification To set the stage for our consideration of Brown’s doctrine of justification, I will summarize Calvin’s teaching on justification.4 The great German Reformer Martin Luther, who arose a generation before Calvin, had proclaimed the justification of sinners by faith alone (sola fide). Luther’s gospel destroyed man’s righteousness and replaced it with an alien righteousness outside of himself and his own works, the infinite righteousness of Christ.5 The Roman church decisively rejected the teachings of the Reformers at the Council of Trent (1545–63). In contrast to sola fide, Trent said that the adult sinner who cooperates with prevenient grace and receives baptism is thereby justified, not merely in forgiveness of sins but also inward renewal, and begins a process of grace-empowered works by which he is still further justified until he truly merits eternal life.6 The doctrinal waters were further muddied by Andreas Osiander (1498–1565), a German Reformer who initially identified with Luther and Philip Melanchthon against the Reformed, but after Luther’s death promoted the idea that men are justified by direct union with God’s righteous essence. Osiander’s views were rejected by the Lutheran churches in the Formula of Concord (Art. 3). 4. The scope of this chapter limits my interaction with the vast literature on Calvin and justification. Studies cited here include S. Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); R. B. Gaffin, Jr., ‘Justification and Union with Christ’, in A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis (D. W. Hall and P. A. Lillback, eds; Calvin 500 Series; Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2008), pp. 248–69; Mark A. Garcia, Life in Christ: Union with Christ and Twofold Grace in Calvin’s Theology (Studies in Christian History and Thought; Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008); P. Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); A. N. S. Lane, Justification by Faith in Catholic-Protestant Dialogue: An Evangelical Assessment (London: T&T Clark, 2002); P. A. Lillback, The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001); A. E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (2 vols; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); W. Niesel, The Theology of Calvin (Harold Knight, trans.; London: Lutterworth Press, 1956); C. Partee, The Theology of John Calvin (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008); H. J. Selderhuis, ed., The Calvin Handbook (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); C. P. Venema, ‘Union with Christ’, in Calvin for Today (J. R. Beeke, ed.; Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), pp. 91–113; ‘Calvin’s Doctrine of the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness: Another Example of “Calvin against the Calvinists”?’ MAJT 20 (2009): pp. 15–47. 5. Luther’s Works (J. Pelikan and H. T. Lehmann, eds; 55 vols; St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86), vol. 26, pp. 126–7; vol. 31, pp. 297–9. See also McGrath, Iustitia Dei, vol. 2, p. 12. 6. ‘The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent’, session 6, ch. 5–7, 10, 16, January 13, 1547, in P. Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom (3 vols; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), vol. 2, pp. 92–4, 108.



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The Genevan Reformer recognized the importance of this matter and placed great emphasis upon a biblical understanding of justification as opposed to Rome and Osiander.7 Calvin said that ‘justification by faith’ is ‘the sum of all piety’.8 Ignorance of justification extinguishes the glory of Christ, abolishes religion, destroys the church, and overthrows the hope of salvation, but justification by faith abolishes the papal system, provides a foundation for true religion, and opens heaven to us.9 In asserting the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, Calvin presented many biblical texts,10 and marshalled the polemical weapons of logic,11 experience,12 answers to objections,13 historical theology of writers such as Ambrose, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Peter Lombard,14 and textual criticism of source texts.15 In many ways, the method of Calvin’s treatment of justification reflects a mixture of scholastic and humanist methods inherited from previous centuries. What did Calvin teach about the justification of the sinner in the sight of God? A concise statement of Calvin’s doctrine is: Man, accordingly, has no works in which to glory before God; and hence, stripped of all help from works, he is justified by faith alone. But we define justification as follows: the sinner, received into communion with Christ, is reconciled to God by his grace, while, cleansed by Christ’s blood, he obtains forgiveness of sins, and clothed with Christ’s righteousness as if it were his own, he stands confident before the heavenly judgment seat.16

Calvin’s doctrine of justification can be unpacked in ten principles drawn from various writings but principally from his Institutes.17 1. Divine justice and human guilt are the crucial context for justification. Calvin summoned men’s consciences to ‘the tribunal of God’ to face the stunning majesty of the divine Judge and the hopelessness of human guilt.18 Rather than comparing 7. For Calvin’s critique of Trent on justification, see Calvin, Tracts, vol. 3, pp. 108–62. Against Osiander, see Calvin, ICR 3.11.5–12. 8. Calvin, ICR 3.15.7. 9. Olin, Reformation Debate, p. 66; Calvin, Sermons on Genesis, p. 315. 10. Calvin, ICR 3.11.2–4, and many other places. 11. Ibid., 3.11.8, 19; 3.17.9; Commentaries, Gal. 3.10. 12. Ibid., 3.11.11. 13. Ibid., 3.11.12; 3.14.12–21; 3.16–18. 14. Ibid., 3.11.15, 22, 23; 3.15.2. 15. Ibid., 3.15.4. 16. Ibid., 3.17.8. 17. Richard Gaffin has said that Calvin’s treatment of justification in the Institutes ‘has few peers and arguably is unsurpassed’ in Reformed literature on the doctrine; Gaffin, ‘Justification and Union with Christ’, p. 248. 18. Olin, Reformation Debate, p. 66. For other references to God’s ‘tribunal’ in Calvin’s

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ourselves to other people, we must be dazzled by the justice of God, who must punish lawbreakers, and discover that ‘all human works, if judged according to their own worth, are nothing but filth and defilement’.19 Only when sinners receive such ‘a wound of the heart’ will they yield to God’s saving mercy.20 Therefore, an awareness of God’s justice and man’s sin is ‘how God prepares his elect to receive the free righteousness which is given to them by means of his Son’.21 2. Christ is the ground of justification, and union with Christ is the bond of justification. Christ, the God-man, saved sinners by His lifelong obedience that culminated in His death.22 Calvin said: ‘Accordingly, our Lord came forth as true man and took the person and the name of Adam in order to take Adam’s place in obeying the Father, to present our flesh as the price of satisfaction to God’s righteous judgment, and, in the same flesh, to pay the penalty that we had deserved.’23 Stephen Edmondson writes: ‘A fundamental theme that runs through Calvin’s discussion is the forensic notion of penal substitution—Christ is the one who was judged and punished in our place.’24 Thus, union with Christ by a Spiritworked faith is ‘most fundamental’ to Calvin’s doctrine of salvation; we must be engrafted into Him.25 Calvin did not envision a justification by the righteousness of One separated from us, but by the righteousness of One joined to us as head to body, dwelling in the hearts of men by ‘mystical union’.26 God justifies people by faith because faith ‘binds us to Christ, so that, made one with him, we may enjoy participation in his righteousness’.27 3. In Christ, sanctification is distinct but inseparable from justification. Calvin wrote: ‘Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by [his Spirit]28 we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.’29 Mark Garcia refers to this basic structure in Calvin’s thought as ‘Calvin’s unio Christi-duplex gratia soteriology’, proposing that union with Christ is ‘singularly determinative’ with respect to discussion of justification, see Commentaries, Rom. 1.17; 3.23 (2x); 4.2, 3, 8; 5.1; 8.33; ICR 3.12.1. See also God’s ‘judgment seat’ in ICR 3.11.2, 9; 3.12.1, 5; 3.14.15. 19. Calvin, ICR 2.16.1; 3.12.2, 4. 20. Ibid., 3.12.6. 21. Calvin, Sermons on Genesis, pp. 334–5. See Calvin’s treatment of this matter on pp. 331–6. 22. Calvin, ICR 2.16.5. 23. Ibid., 2.12.3; cf. Commentaries, Gal. 3.13. 24. Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology, p. 97. 25. Gaffin, ‘Justification and Union’, p. 258; Calvin, ICR 3.15.5. 26. Calvin, ICR 3.11.10, 23. 27. Ibid., 3.17.11. 28. On this correction to the translation, see Gaffin, ‘Justification and Union’, p. 252 n. 8. 29. Calvin, ICR 3.11.1. For a list of Calvin’s frequent references to the duplex gratia, see Lillback, The Binding of God, pp. 180–3.



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‘Calvin’s teaching on the application of redemption’ (though not a ‘central dogma’ controlling all his theology).30 Gaffin explains that the union or participation that believers have with Christ has ‘forensic (justifying) and nonforensic (sanctifying, renovative) dimensions or aspects, without any confusion or interpenetration of these two aspects’.31 Calvin denied that we are justified because we share Christ’s sanctifying Spirit, yet justification is as inseparable from sanctification as Christ is from His Spirit.32 He wrote: ‘Christ cannot be torn into parts, so these two which we perceive in him together and conjointly are inseparable – namely, righteousness and sanctification.’33 By subsuming justification and sanctification under union with Christ, Calvin answered the charge of the Roman church that sola fide promoted sin.34 Yet, though justification and the beginning of sanctification are simultaneous, he wrote that ‘reconciliation with him is the fountain from which all other blessings flow … The consequence of free forgiveness is, that God governs us by his Spirit.’35 4. Justification has a forensic and judicial character. This is implied in what has been noted about justification before the tribunal of the heavenly Judge, and the distinction between justification and sanctification. Calvin said that justification is the verdict from the divine Judge that a person is righteous in His judgement.36 Justification is ‘a legal term’ and is distinguished in Scripture from ‘regeneration’.37 He explicitly rejected the medieval definition of justification as forgiveness plus inward renewal by the Holy Spirit.38 In many ways, Calvin ‘underscores the forensic character of justification: according to Calvin, sinful humans are reckoned righteous, not made actually righteous’, as Barbara Pitkin notes.39 The rooting of justification in our union with Christ does not in any way imply that ‘there are both imputational and transformative dimensions to justification’.40 Calvin said that ‘righteousness and sanctification’ are ‘two kinds of grace’, bound together in Christ with ‘a mutual and indivisible connection’, but such that we cannot ‘transfer the peculiar qualities of the one to the other … To be justified means something different from being made new creatures.’41 5. Man’s goodness and works are excluded from justification by faith. Justification by works is based on ‘purity and holiness’ in a person’s life; a person is ‘justified by faith’ if he, ‘excluded from the righteousness of works, grasps the righteousness 30. Garcia, Life in Christ, pp. 3, 18; cf. Gaffin, ‘Justification and Union’, p. 253. 31. Gaffin, ‘Justification and Union’, p. 262. See Calvin, Tracts, vol. 3, p. 246. 32. Calvin, ICR 3.11.23; Olin, Reformation Debate, p. 68. 33. Ibid., 3.11.6; cf. Ibid., 3.11.14; 3.14.9; 3.16.1; Commentaries, 1 Cor. 1.30. 34. Randall C. Zachman, ‘Communio cum Christo’, in The Calvin Handbook, p. 371. 35. Calvin, Commentaries, Ps. 103.3. See Venema, ‘Union with Christ’, p. 107. 36. Calvin, ICR 3.11.2; cf. 3.12.1; Commentaries, Rom. 1.17; 3.23. 37. Ibid., 3.11.11. 38. Ibid. 39. Barbara Pitkin, ‘Faith and Justification’, in The Calvin Handbook, p. 295. 40. Partee, The Theology of John Calvin, p. 229. 41. Calvin, ICR 3.11.6.

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of Christ through faith, and clothed with it, appears in God’s sight not as a sinner but as a righteous man’.42 These two do not mix: ‘faith righteousness so differs from works righteousness that when one is established the other has to be overthrown’, Calvin declared.43 The works excluded in justification are any works done in obedience to God’s covenantal commands, not just ceremonial works.44 The law requires ‘perfect righteousness’, but ‘all are convicted of transgression’.45 ‘The door is shut against all deserving’.46 The Council of Trent fails to reckon on the corruption remaining to the works of even those united to Christ.47 God therefore justifies us by imputation, ‘so that we who are not righteous in ourselves may be reckoned as such in Christ’.48 We must be justified by ‘faith alone’.49 6. Good works have value when accompanied by justification by faith alone. Calvin placed his discussion of repentance and the Christian life before justification in order to counteract the Roman accusation that the Reformers portrayed faith as empty of good works.50 Good works confirm the believer’s assurance, for they are the brand by which God marks His sheep.51 Good works also are ‘means’ or a pathway by which the Lord leads His people closer to Himself, even the ‘inferior causes’ of salvation, though ‘sequence more than cause is denoted’.52 We must never rely on ‘the merit of works’ but ‘rely wholly on the free promise of righteousness’.53 Good works also please the Father because the Spirit of Christ gives believers a sincere desire to serve Him, and the imperfections of their works are forgiven by a reconciled and loving Father.54 Far from contributing to justification, the believer’s works please God only because they are ‘preceded by justification resting on faith alone’.55 7. Faith itself is excluded from our righteousness. Faith is no ‘meritorious act’ nor the righteousness of believers, but rather the open mouth or empty vessel – the ‘instrument’ – by which they receive Christ as their treasure and righteousness.56 At the heart of faith is the conviction that we have nothing in ourselves 42. Ibid., 3.11.2. 43. Ibid., 3.11.13; cf. Commentaries, Gal. 3.11–12. 44. Calvin, Commentaries, Rom. 3.27; 4.6; Sermons … Galathians, p. 82 [fol. L2r]. 45. Ibid., Rom. 2.13. 46. Calvin, Sermons … Galathians, p. 88 [fol. L8r]. 47. Calvin, ICR 3.11.16, 17; cf. Garcia, Life in Christ, pp. 115–17. 48. Ibid., 3.11.3. 49. Calvin, Commentaries, Gal. 2.16. 50. Gaffin, ‘Justification and Union’, pp. 254–5. 51. Calvin, ICR 3.14.18; 3.18.7; cf. Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas, pp. 405–6; Venema, ‘Union with Christ’, pp. 108–9. 52. Ibid., 3.14.21; 3.17.6; 3.18.1, 3. 53. Ibid., 3.14.18. 54. Calvin, Sermons on Genesis, p. 370. 55. Calvin, ICR 3.17.3; cf. 3.17.5; Commentaries, Rom. 4.6–8. 56. Ibid., 3.11.7, 10; Commentaries, Rom. 3.22; 4.5. See Niesel, The Theology of Calvin,



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to reconcile us to God, but run to Christ ‘empty and hungering’ and ‘deeply distrustful of ourselves’.57 We cannot have faith in our faith, but must have faith in Christ alone as our righteousness before God. By faith the believer receives the promise and embraces Jesus Christ as ‘the true link that joins us to and unites us to God’, Christ our reconciliation and the Mediator of life.58 Faith justifies as an act of receiving what we lack.59 Alister McGrath writes: ‘Indeed, faith may be said to play its part in justification by insisting that it does not justify, attributing all to Christ.’60 8. Justification is described as remission of sins and imputation of obedience. Calvin wrote of forgiveness and imputed righteousness as a double benefit within justification.61 This corresponds to the twofold work of Christ’s death and obedience.62 Calvin could sometimes say that all of justification lies in remission of sins, yet he did not oppose remission to imputation, but to infusion and works.63 A significant text that Calvin cited regarding imputation is Romans 5.19b: ‘by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous’. Calvin explained: ‘To declare that by him alone we are accounted righteous, what else is this but to lodge our righteousness in Christ’s obedience, because the obedience of Christ is reckoned to us as if it were our own?’64 Our righteousness before God must be a human obedience and a complete obedience to all of God’s law.65 Commenting on Gal. 4.4, ‘God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law’, Calvin explained that Christ ‘chose to become liable to keep the law’ as a ‘surety’ who ‘redeems a slave … by putting on himself the chains’.66 Christ saved us by ‘the whole course of his obedience’, from the moment ‘when he took on the form of a servant’.67 Therefore, later Reformed theologians rightly appealed to Calvin against the teaching of the Reformed divine Johannes Piscator regarding the imputation of Christ’s obedience.68 Calvin believed that Christ’s obedience to the law is imputed to believers, although he did not formulate it explicitly in terms of the later distinction of active and passive obedience.69 pp. 136–7. 57. Ibid., 3.12.8. 58. Calvin, Sermons on Genesis, p. 319. 59. Ibid., pp. 366–7. 60. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, vol. 2, p. 38. 61. Calvin, ICR 3.11.2, 16. 62. Ibid., 3.11.6. On Christ’s obedience as our righteousness, see also 3.11.8. 63. Ibid., 3.11.11, 21; Commentaries, Rom. 4.8; cf. Rom. 3.25. 64. Ibid., 3.11.23. Calvin also cited Rom. 5.19b in ibid., 3.11.4, 9, 12. 65. Ibid., 3.11.9; Commentaries, Rom. 4.8; 5.19. 66. Calvin, Commentaries, Gal. 4.4. 67. Calvin, ICR 2.16.5. 68. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (J. Dennison, ed., G. Giger, trans; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1994), 14.13.32, vol. 2, p. 454. 69. Calvin, Sermons on Genesis, pp. 321, 341; Venema, ‘Calvin’s Doctrine of the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness’, pp. 26–37.

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9. Justification aims at the experiential goal of peace and joy. Calvin was concerned about the truth regarding justification in part because false doctrine robs believers of ‘a lively experience of Christ’s grace’ in peace, joy, and freedom toward a reconciled God.70 The experience of justification is closely connected in Calvin’s thought with the experiential knowledge of ‘God’s fatherly love’ for His children.71 The gospel is the revelation of ‘God our Father in Christ’ and our adoption by spiritual union with Christ.72 Calvin spoke of ‘the kindly Father’ and ‘the paternal mercy of God, by which he forgives his people the infirmities of the flesh and the sins that still remain in them’.73 He taught justification that believers might taste ‘the sweetness of grace’ and approach the holy God under ‘that sweetest name of Father’.74 10. Justification serves ultimately for the glorification of God alone. Sensitive to biblical prohibitions against boasting (Jer. 9.23–24; 1 Cor. 1.30–31; Eph. 2.8–9), Calvin said that God has reserved all merit and righteousness to Himself so that He alone will receive the glory.75 God’s way of salvation is always to humble man for his sins and to save for His name’s sake (Ezek. 20.43–44).76 Justification by faith alone denies us any claim to ‘even a crumb of righteousness’, so that ‘the elect are justified by the Lord to the end that they may glory in him and in no other’ (see Isa. 45.25).77 We may sum up by noting that Calvin used the causal language of Aristotelian philosophy to describe justification. In this terminology, the efficient cause is the power or agent behind the change, the material cause is the substance with which he works, the instrumental cause is the tool he uses, and the final cause is the goal or purpose.78 Calvin said the ‘efficient cause’ is ‘the mercy of the Heavenly Father and his freely given love toward us’. The ‘material cause’ is ‘Christ, with his obedience’. The ‘instrumental cause’ is ‘faith’. Calvin found these three causes in John 3.16. The ‘final cause’ is the demonstration of divine glory, consisting simultaneously ‘in the proof of divine justice and in the praise of God’s goodness’. Interestingly, Calvin grounded this Aristotelian analysis of justification upon

70. Calvin, ICR 3.11.5, 11; Commentaries, Rom. 5.1. 71. Ibid., 3.11.6. 72. Ibid., 2.6.1; 2.12.2; 3.1.3; 3.11.6; 3.14.18; Commentaries, Gal. 4.6. 73. Ibid., 3.17.5; Commentaries, Rom. 8.15. 74. Ibid., 3.13.5. 75. Ibid., 3.13.1–2. See Pitkin, ‘Faith and Justification’, in The Calvin Handbook, 297. 76. Ibid., 3.13.1. 77. Ibid., 3.13.2; cf. ibid., 3.14.16; Sermons on Genesis, p. 340. 78. Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), p. 61.



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Rom. 3.23–6.79 He evidently did not see any necessary tension between Greek philosophical concepts and biblical exegesis.80 Having presented Calvin’s doctrine of justification, I turn to consider the teaching of a Scotsman who lived a hundred years later.

John Brown of Wamphray’s Treatise on Justification Though John Brown is little known today, he held a prominent place in early modern Scottish theology.81 James Walker wrote that ‘Brown of Wamphray was, without doubt, the most important theologian’ in Scotland during his time.82 John Macleod considered Brown to be perhaps ‘our greatest divine between Rutherford and Halyburton’, that is, in the latter part of the seventeenth century.83 Born around 1610, he graduated MA from Edinburgh in 1630 and settled some years later as the minister of the village of Wamphray.84 During his ministry there, Scotland and England entered into the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) to unify the kingdoms in a shared Reformed religion. In Brown’s view, ‘these lands did thus enter into covenant with the great God of heaven and earth’.85 The Westminster 79. Calvin, ICR 3.14.17; cf. 3.11.7; 3.14.21; Commentaries, Rom. 3.22, 24; Sermons on Genesis, p. 366. See Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas, pp. 399–403; Lane, Justification by Faith in Catholic-Protestant Dialogue, pp. 68–75. 80. Calvin once said that Aristotle was ‘a man of genius and learning’, but as a pagan unbeliever his ‘heart was perverse and depraved’, thus darkening his intellect (Commentaries, Ps. 107.43). 81. He must be distinguished from other theological writers such as John Brown of Priesthill (c. 1627–85), John Brown of Haddington (1722–87), the latter’s son, John Brown of Whitburn (1754–1832), John Brown of Edinburgh (1784–1858), and John Brown of Bedford (1830–1906). 82. James Walker, Theology and Theologians of Scotland, Chiefly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2nd rev. edn, 1888), p. 107. 83. John Macleod, Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History Since the Reformation (1946; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), p. 148. 84. Sources on John Brown’s life are few: Thomas Lockerby, A Sketch of the Life of the Rev. John Brown (Edinburgh: Thornton & Collie, 1839); Ian B. Doyle, ‘John Brown of Wamphray: A Study of His Life, Work and Thought’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1956). Some biographical information on Brown may also be found in William Crookshank, The History of the State and Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution (2 vols; Paisley: George Caldwell, 1789); Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford (London: Oliphants, [1904]); William Steven, The History of the Scottish Church, Rotterdam (Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes, 1833); Robert Wodrow, History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution (4 vols; Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1835). 85. J. Brown, An Apologetical Relation of the Particular Sufferings of the Faithful Ministers and Professours of the Church of Scotland, Since August. 1660 (n.p.: 1665), p. 63.

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Assembly put hands and feet on that covenant by drafting the Directory for the Public Worship of God, the Confession of Faith, and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. The restoration of King Charles II to the throne dramatically changed the status of Covenanters like Brown. On 6 November 1662, he was imprisoned and became ill almost to death.86 On 11 December the authorities released him, but only on condition of banishment from Scotland. Brown arrived in the Netherlands on 12 March 1663, where he lived until his death in 1679, writing actively for the Covenanter cause. Robert Wodrow (1679–1734) said in retrospect that Brown was ‘a man of very great learning, warm zeal, and remarkable piety’.87 His writings supported the Covenanter view of church and state,88 defended the Puritan view of the Sabbath and the moral law, opposed the teachings of the Quakers and Richard Baxter, and promoted experiential, Christ-centred Christianity. Copies of his scholastic defence of the Sabbath made their way into the libraries of Thomas Prince (1687–1758) in Boston and of Yale College.89 Brown addressed the subject of justification in The Life of Justification, a major theological treatise of 563 pages.90 Its preface was written by Melchior Leydecker (1642–1722), professor of theology at Utrecht, the Netherlands, who presented Brown as a defender of Reformed orthodoxy. This posthumous publication had been entrusted by the author to Jacobus Koelman, but he died in 1695 while it was at the press and Leydecker took it over.91 In Walker’s view, Brown’s The Life of Justification ‘stands by itself in our theological literature’, being ‘by far our most thorough exposition and discussion of the doctrine it handles’.92 Macleod believed that the book represented ‘the reaction of orthodox Scottish divinity to the innovating scheme which came over from the French schools of Saumur and Sedan’.93 English Evangelical minister Edward Bickersteth (1786–1850) listed it alongside other answers to Baxter’s view of justification written by Anthony Burgess, John Crandon and John Owen.94 Its title, The Life of Justification, is based upon its main Scripture text, ‘For the 86. Crookshank, History of the State and Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, vol. 1, p. 159. 87. Wodrow, History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, vol. 1, p. 304. 88. I. B. Doyle, ‘The Doctrine of the Church in the Later Covenanting Period’, in Reformation and Revolution (Duncan Shaw, ed.; Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1967), pp. 212–36. 89. Catalogue of the Library of Rev. Thomas Prince (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1846), p. 8; Catalogue of Books in the Library of Yale-College, New-Haven (New Haven: Oliver Steele, 1808), p. 52. 90. J. Brown, The Life of Justification Opened. Or, A Treatise Grounded upon Gal. 2:11 (N.p.: 1695). The title is in error; it should read Gal. 3.11. 91. Melchior Leydecker, preface to Brown, Life of Justification, fol. *2r–**1v. 92. Walker, Theology and Theologians of Scotland, p. 24. 93. Macleod, Scottish Theology, p. 148. 94. E. Bickersteth, The Christian Student (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1829), p. 319.



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just shall live by faith’ (Gal. 3.11). Brown’s treatise is a constant stream of Scripture quotations. In explaining New Testament texts, he sometimes makes reference to not only the Greek original, but also the Ethiopian, Arabic and Syrian versions.95 Most of his polemic is drawn directly from Scripture, but he also addresses logical and theological arguments.96 When Leydecker endorsed The Life of Justification, he praised it for its ‘efficacious arguments able to stop the mouths of all adversaries’, and noted that ‘it is written in the demonstration of the Spirit and power, profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness and consolation of penitent souls’.97 Brown himself shunned the use of ‘scholastic and abstruse terms’ and battles over semantics in controversies over justification, since people needed plain teaching, especially ‘when under the pangs of an awakened conscience’.98 Brown wrote with the Reformation controversy against the papists in the backdrop, making reference also to controversies with the Socinians and Arminians.99 He names his specific opponents as the great Roman apologist Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621),100 the English Arminian John Goodwin (c. 1594–1665),101 the English Presbyterian Richard Baxter (1615–91),102 and the exiled Scottish pastor of the English church at Middelburg, the Netherlands, John Forbes (c. 1568–1634).103 He also interacts extensively with a book recommended by Baxter that he calls ‘A Discourse of the Two Covenants’104 –  not the work of William Strong by that title,105 but actually A Discourse of the Nature, Ends, and Difference of the Two Covenants, attributed to William Allen (d. 1686).106 If Brown’s treatise is tediously long at 563 pages, it should be realized that he spends more than half of it answering point by point the Discourse of more than 200 95. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 73. 96. Ibid., chs 7–12. 97. Leydecker, preface to Brown, The Life of Justification, fol. *1v. 98. Brown, Life of Justification, pp. 4, 182, 346–7. For Brown’s criticism of Baxter’s use of obscure and technical terminology, see p. 201. 99. Ibid., p. 11. 100. Ibid., p. 283. 101. J. Goodwin, Impvtatio Fidei. Or, A Treatise of Justification (London: R. O. and G. D., 1642). 102. For an overview of Brown’s polemic against Baxter, see B. R. Backensto, ‘John Brown of Wamphray, Richard Baxter, and the Justification Controversy’, The Confessional Presbyterian 3 (2007), pp. 118–46. 103. J. Forbes, A Treatise Tending to Cleare the Doctrine of Ivstification (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1616). 104. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 383. 105. W. Strong, A Discourse of the Two Covenants (London: by J. M. for Francis Tyton and Thomas Parkhurst, 1678). 106. Anonymous, A Discourse of the Nature, Ends, and Difference of the Two Covenants: Evincing in Special, that Faith as Justifying, Is Not Opposed to Works of Evangelical Obedience (London: by J. Darby, for Richard Gloiswell, 1673). Baxter wrote the letter to the reader.

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pages, Goodwin’s work of more than 400 pages, and Baxter’s work of more than 900 pages. He devotes a section of 190 pages to refuting Goodwin and Baxter specifically on imputation (chs 7–16), and interacts with them throughout the book. Brown also referred to the works of ‘orthodox’ Reformed writers such as Calvin, Rudolf Gwalther, David Pareus, John Owen, John Norton and Samuel Rutherford, as well as the Westminster Larger Catechism.107

Brown’s Doctrine of Justification vis-à-vis Calvin I turn now to exposition of Brown’s view of justification, drawing primarily from his Life of Justification but also other writings.108 Like Calvin before him, Brown said that the doctrine of justification is ‘of great concernment’ for our eternal happiness, being the basis of religion, communion with God, peace, comfort, and hope of salvation.109 Rather late in his treatise (ch. 19, p. 262!), Brown defined justification as, ‘That change of state before God, which such are made partakers of, as lay hold on Christ by faith, through the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, whereby they are brought into an estate of favor and reconciliation with God, who were before under his wrath and curse’.110 I will expound Brown’s doctrine of justification under the same ten principles found in Calvin’s doctrine in order to compare them. 1. Divine justice and human guilt. Justification is not the realization that God has actually justified us in eternity or at the death of Christ; neither is it a grace granted in baptism.111 God’s ‘ordinary and usual method’ of justifying His elect is ‘first to convince them of their sin and misery, by setting home the law, and wakening their consciences’.112 Brown argued that man naturally exalts ‘self ’ in justification, resisting the doctrine of justification by faith by an inadequate 107. Brown, The Life of Justification, pp. 203, 204, 206, 283, 284, 297, 423, 486. He also quotes the Westminster standards on justification in Quakerisme the Path-way to Paganisme: Or, A Vieu of the Quakers Religion (Edinburgh: John Cairns, 1678), pp. 293–4. 108. John Brown, Christ, the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. Or, a Short Discourse. Pointing forth the way of making use of Christ for justification, and especially and more particularly, for Sanctification in all its parts, from Johan. XIV: Vers. VI (Rotterdam: by H. G. for John Cairns, 1677); An Exposition of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (Edinburgh: David Paterson, 1766); Quakerisme the Path-way to Paganisme; A Pious and Elaborate Treatise Concerning Prayer; and the Answer of Prayer (Glasgow: John Robertson and Mrs. M‘Lean, 1745), pp. 187–203. 109. Brown, The Life of Justification, pp. 1–2. 110. Ibid., p. 262. 111. Ibid., pp. 259, 260, 281. On the covenant of redemption, see p. 274. 112. Ibid., p. 22; cf. pp. 289–90, 357–8, 391; Christ, the Way, pp. 42–4; Romans, pp. 286–8 [Rom. 8.15–16].



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recognition of his inner corruption and God’s justice.113 But the gospel exalts mercy and justice: ‘Here is free grace triumphing; and yet justice declared and manifested’.114 Like Calvin, Brown believed that the crucial context in which justification by faith alone makes sense is that of God’s absolute justice and man’s total depravity and resulting misery under divine wrath.115 Otherwise, human pride blinds our minds against revealed righteousness with self-righteousness and the self-sufficiency of human rationalism.116 2. Christ, and union with Christ. The ‘ground’ of God’s judicial declaration of justification is not anything in mankind, who ‘are sinners and ungodly’. Yet God judges ‘according to truth’ (Rom. 2.2); therefore, ‘they must needs have a righteousness from some other; and this is a surety-righteousness, the righteousness of the Mediator and Cautioner, Jesus Christ, imputed to them and received by faith’; they are ‘clothed with this noble robe of righteousness, with Christ’ (Jer. 23.6; 1 Cor. 1.30).117 ‘Cautioner’ is a legal term referring to a ‘surety’ or guarantor, someone who has legally bound himself to fulfil the obligations and pay the debt of another.118 In this relation, Christ died for His own, ‘dying in their room, person, place and stead’, making His body the ‘bridge’ between God and us.119 Sinners are saved by union with a new Adam. Brown saw this legal relationship as one aspect of ‘mystical union’ with Christ, the ‘second Adam’ who acted as ‘a public person’ representing those united to Him.120 Thomas Torrance criticizes Brown on this score for losing sight of the universal implications of the incarnation for the atonement.121 However, Brown had a rich theology of divine love exhibited in the incarnation, saying that the ‘great love’ demonstrated in the incarnation ‘should also engage us to welcome the gospel’.122 Brown’s doctrine of Christ as the last ‘Adam’ makes the bond of saving union not merely physical but covenantal, for, like Adam, Christ stood as a ‘public person’ and covenantal ‘head’ of a new spiritual family.123 Thus, Brown joined the doctrine of the incarnation to particular redemption through the Pauline teaching of the two Adams. Like Calvin, Brown said: ‘Before we can have any right to anything in Christ, we must become one with him.’124 M. Charles Bell notes: ‘For Brown, our covenant 113. Ibid., ch. 2, pp. 9–14. 114. Ibid., p. 46. 115. Ibid., pp. 32–3 [Rom. 1.18]. 116. Ibid., pp. 13–14; Romans, p. 30 [Rom. 1.17]. 117. Ibid., pp. 30–1; cf. Quakerisme, p. 299. 118. Ibid., pp. 45, 202. 119. Ibid., p. 46; Christ, the Way, p. 32; Prayer, p. 199. 120. Ibid., pp. 43–4. 121. Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), p. 239; cf. p. 198. 122. Brown, Romans, p. 10 [Rom. 1.3–4]. 123. Ibid., p. 187 [Rom. 5.14–17]. 124. Ibid., p. 107 [Rom. 3.21–22].

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relationship with God can only be understood in terms of union with Christ.’125 Brown wrote that ‘the righteousness of their Cautioner, Christ’, is counted to believers because ‘by faith they are united unto Christ, and become members of His mystical body’, and so ‘He and they are one person in law, (being one Spirit) as the husband and wife are one person in law (being one flesh)’.126 Marriage is an especially apt metaphor for justification by union with Christ, for if a woman in debt marries a rich husband, he takes her debts and his riches become hers.127 3. Sanctification distinct but inseparable from justification in Christ. Brown rejected the Roman and Quaker views of justification as ‘an inward renovation, or infusion of holiness’.128 Justification and sanctification are bound together as benefits of union with Christ by faith, yet they remain distinct.129 Sanctification is distinct yet inseparable from justification because faith receives Christ in all His offices, yet approaches Him at times as priest for reconciliation and comfort, or as king for strength, according to its immediate need.130 Brown offered a thorough comparison of sanctification and justification. His teaching can be summarized under the following points of contrast between the two realities: 1) Justification entails a change of the sinner in relation to God and His law; sanctification entails a change in the nature of the sinner as such. 2) Justification is a judicial act by which God acquits sinners; sanctification is God’s act of continually building up sinners. 3) Justification is complete and admits not of various degrees; sanctification is a growing work which admits of many degrees. 4) Justification is perfect from its beginning; sanctification is not perfect until death. 5) Justification is equal in all believers; sanctification is not equal in all. 6) Justification cannot be lost; sanctification can be lost in degree(s). 7) Justification is instantaneous; sanctification is progressive. 8) Justification removes the guilt and liability of sin; sanctification destroys the power and being of sin. 9) Justification entails the imputation of righteousness and the acceptance of man; sanctification entails the infusion of righteousness and the impartation of the Spirit. 10) Justification gives man the right to life; sanctification makes man fit to share in the inheritance of life.131 4. Forensic and judicial justification. Justification is ‘in the sight of God’ (Gal. 3.11; Rom. 3.20). It is ‘justification before God’s tribunal, in his court, who is the supreme and righteous judge’.132 Brown said that ‘justification in Scripture, is expressive of a juridical act of a just judge, absolving a person from guilt laid to

125. M. Charles Bell, Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1985), p. 131. 126. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 37; cf. pp. 51, 100, 263; Christ, the Way, p. 50. 127. Ibid., p. 101; cf. p. 152. 128. Ibid., p. 5; Romans, p. 103 [Rom. 3.20]; Quakerisme, pp. 294–7. 129. Ibid., p. 62. 130. Ibid., pp. 255, 285–6, 394–6; Romans, p. 32 [Rom. 1.17]; Christ, the Way, p. 61. 131. Ibid., p. 268. 132. Ibid., p. 6.



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his charge, and from the sentence of the law’.133 Justification is ‘a great change in a man’s law-state’.134 The forensic quality of justification also appears in Brown’s doctrine that Christ was ‘a public person, standing in the place and room of the chosen ones’, a ‘surety, as to that which law and justice required of them’.135 5. Justification by faith apart from works. The law demands ‘perfect obedience’ before it will justify a man.136 Justification cannot be by faith plus works: ‘justification cannot be by both together, faith and works conjoined; because what is of faith cannot be of works’.137 Paul’s exclusion of works from justification applies not just to works before conversion, but to works done in love, humility, and faith by believers such as Abraham and David, and not just to ceremonial works but ‘obedience to the moral law’.138 He explicitly denied the ‘Papist’ doctrine of double justification, in which God infuses a ‘habit of grace’ and then men perform good works as an ‘effect’ of infused love, incrementally increasing their justification or righteousness.139 Brown argued that the apostle James did not speak of ‘faith’ and ‘justification’ in the same senses that Paul did.140 This was precisely Calvin’s argument against the Roman church.141 Brown also rejected as an exaltation of self the scheme in which ‘inherent righteousness is but a subordinate righteousness, whereby we have right unto the merits of Christ, which are the principal righteousness, answering the demands of the law’.142 Here, at first glance, one might think that Brown was rejecting a view held by Calvin, for the Genevan Reformer said that the ‘righteousness’ of a believer’s works is ‘subordinate’ to ‘the righteousness of faith’.143 However, Calvin did not teach that works are a subordinate righteousness whereby we have a covenantal right to the perfect merit of Christ; he rejected that proposal from certain medieval ‘Sophists’ as a delusion.144 Rather, Calvin used the word subordinate to indicate that the works of a believer have value in God’s sight only because believers are justified and accepted into God’s fatherly kindness, for ‘as righteousness of works depends on righteousness of faith, it should be made subordinate to it’.145 6. Value of works by those justified. Justification by faith alone in no way undermines the pursuit of holiness. The apostle Paul consistently rejected works as any 133. Ibid., p. 30. 134. Ibid., p. 262. 135. Ibid., p. 112. 136. Brown, Romans, p. 62 [Rom. 2.12–16]. 137. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 7. 138. Ibid., p. 16. 139. Ibid., p. 268. 140. Ibid., p. 491. 141. Calvin, ICR 3.17.11–12. 142. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 19. 143. Calvin, Tracts, vol. 3, p. 128; cf. Lillback, The Binding of God, pp. 188–9. 144. Calvin, ICR 3.17.3. 145. Calvin, Tracts, vol. 3, pp. 128, 247.

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contributor to our justification before God, and yet consistently pressed believers to pursue holiness.146 Indeed, justification by faith alone motivates holiness.147 Brown said that God still sees the sins of the justified, but no longer views the justified as liable to punishment for those sins.148 Their justification then makes way for their works to be acceptable: ‘They must be first accepted through Christ, before their works of holiness can be accepted’.149 This gives believers freedom to serve God, for example, in prayer, trusting that though we and our prayers are unworthy they are accepted because of Christ’s merits and ‘perfumed with Christ’s incense’.150 7. Faith excluded from our righteousness. Brown went to great lengths to refute the doctrine that ‘both Socinians and Arminians do plainly assert, that our faith, or that grace of faith is the very thing, which is imputed to the believer for his righteousness’.151 If our faith were our righteousness, then ‘self ’ would have cause to ‘lift up its head, and boast’– even if it recognized that faith is a gift from God.152 Faith does not justify as an act of obedience but as an act of laying hold of a righteousness outside of us, ‘the righteousness of Christ imputed’.153 Faith, he said, ‘is as the eye of the soul, that, seeth not itself, but looketh out to another’.154 Brown affirmed as Calvin did that faith is ‘an instrumental cause’ of justification, not the righteousness imputed to us ‘ex pacto’ (by covenant), but only the ‘hand and mouth’ for receiving righteousness.155 As Calvin did before him, Brown warned against having faith in our faith as our righteousness, for it is ‘most weak and imperfect’, but said that the believer ‘layeth hold on Christ, with the trembling and weak hand of faith’.156 Brown rejected Baxter’s doctrine that Christ obeyed and suffered to pay the price to establish a new covenant wherein faith itself is the righteousness required of us, ‘our gospel righteousness’. In Baxter’s scheme, Christ’s righteousness is not immediately our righteousness, but rather the basis of the covenant by which our faith, repentance, and sincere obedience are accepted as our righteousness.157 Brown believed that ‘by Mr. Baxter’s way, the whole frame of the gospel is 146. Brown, The Life of Justification, pp. 56–7, 252. 147. Ibid., ch. 18, pp. 254–8. 148. Ibid., p. 54. 149. Ibid., p. 23. 150. Brown, Prayer, pp. 120, 216–17. 151. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 296; cf. chs 22–25, pp. 296–335. 152. Ibid., p. 17. 153. Ibid., pp. 17–18; Romans, p. 119 [Rom. 3.25-6]. See Torrance, Scottish Theology, p. 239. 154. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 58. 155. Ibid., pp. 20, 50, 339, 353–4. However, he qualified this causal language by saying theologians are not strictly following philosophical categories (pp. 347–9). 156. Ibid., p. 24. 157. Ibid., p. 198; cf. ch. 26, pp. 335–9. See J. I. Packer, The Redemption and Restoration of Man in the Thought of Richard Baxter (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2003),



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changed’ and the correspondence between Adam’s fall and Christ’s redemption is lost.158 J. I. Packer points out that the difference between ‘orthodox Calvinism’ and Baxter was that for the former, God satisfied the law by uniting sinners to the Son and His merit, whereas for Baxter, God changed the law by the work of His Son so that sinners could meet His new demands.159 8. Remission of sins and imputation of obedience. Believers are forgiven of their law-breaking and declared righteous by union with Christ, who endured the curse against sin to make ‘perfect satisfaction unto the sanction and threatening part of the law’ and gave ‘perfect obedience to the law’ to make ‘righteousness’ to clothe His people.160 The guilt of elect sinners was imputed to the sinless Christ, and the sufferings and obedience of Christ are imputed to the elect as their righteousness.161 Christ did obey His Father’s command in suffering death (‘which is commonly called Christ’s passive obedience’), but He also had to obey ‘the moral law, prescribed unto man’, throughout ‘His state of humiliation’.162 Our Mediator and Surety must address our twofold need in Adam: ‘we are both guilty of the broken law, and also notwithstanding obliged to perfect obedience’. Christ’s satisfaction frees believers from punishment, and His obedience wins for them the eternal reward.163 9. The experiential goal of peace and joy. Brown wrote theology in an affectionate manner, making exclamations of joy in the midst of dogmatic theology.164 Experiential and practical application is not a mere appendage to sound doctrine. Brown said, ‘It will not be enough for us, to know the theory, and to be orthodox in our judgments’, but instead ‘we must also practice them’ and ‘believe them with the heart; and this will be the best way to be kept orthodox, and steadfast in the truth’.165 Though justification ‘in God’s court’ is not the same as justification ‘in the court of man’s own conscience’, and truly justified people can walk in darkness, still the Lord often enables His people to rejoice in their God and inheritance.166 As Calvin did, Brown also saw justification as bringing the privilege of adoption into the family of the Father.167 Their new relation to God brings the inexpressible pp. 251–2, 258; R. Baxter, A Treatise of Justifying Righteousness (London: Nevil Simons and Jonathon Robinson, 1676), pp. 66, 70, 82. Interestingly, Baxter believed that his view was ‘in the main’ the same as Calvin’s, but that Calvin’s choice of words was ‘not so clear, distinct, and orderly’ (3rd pagination, p. 227). 158. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 199. 159. Packer, Redemption and Restoration, pp. 261–2. 160. Brown, The Life of Justification, pp. 36–7, 40. 161. Ibid., p. 91. 162. Ibid., pp. 41, 75; cf. Romans, p. 192 [Rom. 5.18–19]. 163. Ibid., pp. 38–9. 164. Ibid., pp. 28–9. 165. Ibid., p. 247. 166. Ibid., p. 261; Romans, pp. 171, 180 [Rom. 4.2; 5.11]. 167. Ibid., p. 53.

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experiential blessings of the earnest of the Spirit, ‘free access to the throne of grace with boldness’, ‘the Spirit of adoption’ breathing into them ‘the reverential fear of children, which doth not hinder, but encourage them to approach’, and the providential care and leading of the Father.168 10. The glorification of God alone. Brown wrote that Paul was careful to teach justification in such a manner ‘as may most emphatically exclude man, and all his pains, and set free grace on high, that God alone may be exalted’ by proclaiming ‘Christ as all, and free grace as beginning and carrying on all’. Like Calvin, Brown cited Isa. 45.24–5 to show God’s determination that He alone will be glorified as the ‘righteousness’ of His people.169 The main reason why works play no part in our justification is that they rob Christ of His glory as our righteousness, and give men a reason to boast in themselves.170 To sum up, Brown also used the causative language of Aristotelian philosophy to describe justification. He said that with respect to justification, the ‘principal cause’ is the purpose of God, the ‘inward moving cause’ is the free grace of God, the ‘external moving cause’ or ‘meritorious price’ is Christ’s redemption and propitiation, the ‘only condition requisite’ is faith in Christ, ‘that which some call the formal cause’ is the forgiveness of sins, and the ‘final cause’ is the glorification of God’s goodness and justice.171 Elsewhere, Brown explained that we may speak of faith being the ‘condition’ of justification only as an ‘instrument, or instrumental means’.172 So there is a striking similarity in how both Calvin and Brown used classic causal terminology to describe the interplay of various factors in the justification of the ungodly. That Brown did so in his exposition of Romans suggests that he might have had Calvin’s Romans commentary open before him.

Conclusion John Calvin and John Brown operated in significantly different contexts. It is not surprising, therefore, that they presented the doctrine of justification by different methods and manners. When Calvin wrote on justification, his polemical opponents were the dogmatic Roman Catholicism that expressed itself at the Council of Trent and the ‘essential righteousness’ view of the apostate Lutheran Osiander. As a result, his presentation of the doctrine of justification emphasized that justification is sola fide and solus Christus, and does not consist of sanctification or stand upon good works. Brown wrote with the Reformation debates in the background, but his 168. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 169. Ibid., pp. 15, 59, 87; cf. Calvin, ICR 3.13.2; 3.14.16. 170. Brown, Quakerisme, p. 307. 171. Brown, Romans, pp. 109, 114 [Rom. 3.24, 25–26]. 172. Brown, The Life of Justification, p. 339.



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primary opponents were Socinians, Arminians, and especially Neo-nomians (such as Baxter). Therefore, he laid the greatest stress on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness by faith, versus the imputation of faith as our righteousness. He also wrote his Life of Justification with a more polemical thrust and scholastic methodology than Calvin used in his Institutes, devoting much larger portions to point-by-point debate with his theological adversaries. However, there is a remarkable continuity of message between the two men. We have seen that the same ten points observed in Calvin’s doctrine of justification also appeared in Brown’s doctrine. The Scottish defender of Westminster theology did not lose sight of vital union with Christ, but rather asserted it, used it to keep justification and sanctification distinct yet inseparable, and celebrated it as glorifying God alone in justification. As Calvin did before him, he taught that works do not contribute to justification, but instead have the potential to please God because of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Faith is not our righteousness before God, but faith is the empty hand by which we receive Christ. And the Father counts to believers both remission of sins based on Christ’s sufferings and accursed death, and the positive status of righteousness based on Christ’s lifelong obedience to God’s law. Brown’s doctrine of union with Christ clarifies some matters of recent controversy in historical theology. T. F. Torrance has claimed that the Westminster ‘Confession did not take the line of Calvin and Scots Reformation theology in which justification and union with Christ are held inseparably together’.173 Brown was an heir and defender of Westminster theology, yet he emphasized union with Christ as God’s way of justifying sinners. Robert Letham also notes that Torrance has misread Westminster itself, failing to consider the Westminster Larger Catechism, questions 65–90: ‘The Catechism considers the whole of the application of salvation to us by the Holy Spirit – the ordo salutis, as it is called – to be an aspect of union with Christ’.174 Insofar as John Brown represents Scottish theology during the late seventeenth century, we may say that Reformed orthodoxy in Scotland drew from the same vital root as Calvin, was pollinated by the broader Reformed tradition in Britain and on the Continent, and bore fruit and scattered seeds that germinated as far away as the New World.

173. Torrance, Scottish Theology, p. 144. 174. Robert Letham, Union with Christ: In Scripture, History, and Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2011), p. 76.

Part 3 L ATE R EFORMED O RTHODOXY ( c . 1690 ONWARDS )

Chapter 12 T HOM A S H A LY BU RT O N A N D J O H N L O C K E O N T H E G R OU N D I N G O F F A I T H I N S C R I P T U R E

Paul Helm Thomas Halyburton (1674–1712) was Professor of Divinity in the University of St Andrews from 1710 until his death. Halyburton has been chiefly known and admired in Scotland for his posthumously published Memoirs (1714).1 His principal theological work was Natural Religion Insufficient, and Reveal’d Necessary … or, A Rational Enquiry into the Principles of modern Deists (1714). Appended to this when published was another work of interest for our theme, An Essay on the Nature of Faith.2 Living at the turn from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, Halyburton, who was at one stage in life attracted to Deism, was active during the early stages of the Enlightenment in Britain, and so engaged the writings of John Locke on religion, including The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), especially the chapters ‘Of Faith and Reason and their Distinct Provinces’ and ‘Of Enthusiasm’ from the Essay. What principally interested and concerned Halyburton was Locke’s view of the relation between reason and the authority of Scripture. His treatment of this issue provides us with a window into how Reformed orthodox thinkers could and did react to the onset of Enlightenment ideas. Very little academic work has been done on Halyburton. In his essay ‘Science and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Roger Emerson briefly discusses Halyburton along with his contemporary Thomas Wodrow (1637–1705) and earlier Scottish figures such as Samuel Rutherford (c. 1600–61) and Henry Scougal (1650–78), in connection with a more general discussion about the relation between morality and the law and grace of God.3 Emerson sees these figures, quite naturally, as proponents of traditional Calvinistic orthodoxy. He 1. Thomas Halyburton, Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Thomas Halyburton (Edinburgh: printed by the Heirs and Successors of Andrew Anderson, 1714). 2. References to Halyburton’s writings in this essay are from The Works of the Rev. Thomas Halyburton, with an Essay on his Life and Writings by Rev. Robert Burns (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1833). 3. Roger I. Emerson ‘Science and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment’,

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highlights Halyburton’s characteristic concern for certainty, reflected not only in his personal pilgrimage (as recorded in the Memoirs), particularly so in his analysis of and quest for personal assurance, but also in his interest in how the divine authoritativeness of the Bible is to be understood.4 In his remarks on Halyburton in his Scottish Theology John Macleod, the only other modern author to consider Halyburton that I have been able to discover, focuses almost exclusively on the theme of personal assurance as this expresses itself in the famous Memoirs.5 In order to appreciate the nature of Halyburton’s interaction with Locke’s teaching and the insight this provides into early eighteenth-century Reformed orthodoxy, it will be useful to review both John Calvin’s position on the grounds for Christian assurance that the Bible is the word of God, as well as the developed teachings of high Reformed orthodox divines Francis Turretin and John Owen. We will then be in a better position to appraise Halyburton’s reaction to the famous pupil of Owen, John Locke.6

The Authority of Scripture in the Reformed Tradition In order to gauge the significance of Halyburton’s teaching on the authority of Scripture it is necessary to view it against the backdrop of traditional Reformed teaching on the subject, beginning with Calvin, and then moving into the seventeenth century. John Calvin on the Authority of Scripture According to Calvin: in M. A. Stewart, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 4. Incidentally, Emerson does not make it clear whether, in his judgement, Halyburton’s appeal to revelation in relation to moral philosophy played a chiefly epistemic role, or whether it is evidence of a voluntaristic view of morality, that is, a view which deems actions good purely because God has commanded them. 5. J. Macleod, Scottish Theology in relation to Church History since the Reformation (1943, repr. Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), pp. 117–30. An earlier Scottish commentator, James Walker, refers to Halyburton’s stress on the internal indicia of Scripture in establishing its authority; The Theology and Theologians of Scotland Chiefly Of The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1872), p. 68. There is also a passing reference to Halyburton’s views in William Cunningham, Theological Lectures (London: James Nisbet & Co. 1878), p. 342. 6. Halyburton greatly admired Owen; ‘Rabbi’ Duncan referred to Halyburton as ‘an Owenian’, a label whose meaning will, I think, become clear as we proceed; Colloquia Peripatetica, being notes of conversations with the late John Duncan (W. Knight, ed.; Edinburgh: David Douglas, 5th edn, 1879), p. 163.



Thomas Halyburton and John Locke on the Grounding of Faith in Scripture 215 If we desire to provide in the best way for our consciences – that they may not be perpetually beset by the instability of doubt or vacillation, and that they may not also boggle at the smallest quibbles – we ought to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgments, or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.7

The conviction which, according to Calvin, the Spirit confers is a conviction about the truth of something distinct both from the Spirit and the person to whom the Spirit testifies. What the Spirit testifies to, or illumines, are certain features of Scripture, and such illumination, providing the certainty ‘which piety requires’, does not need any rational or empirical considerations external to Scripture to add further support to it. In other words, the testimony of the Holy Spirit is, in Calvin’s view, modelled on direct sense perception rather than on an inferential process using the data of Scripture, or data external to Scripture, as premises. Let this point therefore stand: that those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated (autopiston); hence, it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning. And the certainty it deserves with us, it attains by the testimony of the Spirit … Therefore, illumined by his power, we believe neither by our own nor by any one else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but above all human judgment we affirm with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God himself) that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men. We seek no proofs, no marks of genuineness, upon which our judgment may lean; but we subject our judgment and wit to it as to a thing far beyond any guesswork! … By this power we are drawn and inflamed, knowingly and willingly, to obey him, yet also more vitally and more effectively than by mere human willing or knowing!8

Human judgments, which are opinions, stand in contrast to the ‘utter certainty’ which the Spirit’s testimony, a testimony ‘above all human judgment’, regarding Scripture establishes. By human judgments Calvin has in mind what he otherwise calls ‘external proofs’. In the business of establishing the divine authority of Holy Scripture such proofs play a subsidiary role; they are (at best) ‘aids’ in fortifying the authority of Scripture.9 Not all these proofs are strictly speaking ‘external’ to the Bible, 7. Calvin, ICR 1.7.4. 8. Ibid., 1.7.5. 9. Calvin is at this point endorsing a long tradition. Duns Scotus, for example, advances some of the very same arguments regarding Scripture that Calvin uses, e.g. the internal concordance or consistency of Scripture, and the fact that Scripture contains divinely attested miracles. Like Calvin, Scotus thinks that such arguments are rationally compelling, but that they fall short of a proof; on this point see, for example, R. Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 12.

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though they are distinct from its unique material content, its distinctive ‘message’. Among ‘external proofs’ are, for example, Scripture’s truthfulness, as seen in the frankness of the human authors of Scripture, who often testify to their failures and shortcomings to their own disadvantage. Scripture is confirmed by miracles, just as Moses’s own word was confirmed by publicly witnessed miracles. Prophesies prove their genuineness by being against expectations, and by their preservation over many centuries. The style of the evangelists, and Paul’s remarkable conversion, also testify to the genuineness and authority of the New Testament. Such data, Calvin thinks, offer cumulative evidence supporting the ‘opinion’ that Scripture is credible. Throughout the discussion of the authority of Scripture, Calvin repeatedly contrasts ‘opinion’ with ‘certainty’.10 The use of the word ‘opinion’ (opinio) may be somewhat misleading to modern ears, but in the late medieval world which Calvin inhabited and which exercised considerable influence on him, an opinio is a belief that does not rest on true knowledge. In making this contrast, then, Calvin was simply taking up and endorsing the view that Christian theology is not a set of opinions but has Scripture as its first principle, and that both its certainty and its scientific character derive from this fact. Francis Turretin on the Authority of Scripture Calvin’s contrast between internal and the external testimonies to Scripture’s authenticity became standard fare among the Reformed orthodox of the seventeenth century. In his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Francis Turretin mentions this distinction in two places, first when discussing the authority of Scripture,11 and again when discussing the same topic in more explicitly epistemological terms in answer to the question ‘From what source does the divine authority of the Scriptures become known to us?’12 In the first context he is concerned with how the Scripture ‘proves itself ’ per se, and his answer is that it does so by ‘the marks that God has impressed upon the Scriptures and which furnish indubitable proof of divinity’.13 Like Calvin, Turretin divides these marks into external and internal. The external are distinct from the unique cognitive content of the Bible; these are marks such as Scripture’s antiquity, preservation and duration, the candour and sincerity of the biblical writers, and the testimony to Scripture by the blood of martyrs. The internal marks are ‘the most powerful’.14 These include the sublimity of the mysteries Scripture discloses; Scripture’s majestic style; the consistency and harmony of its doctrine; the paramount importance that it gives to the glory of

10. E.g. Calvin, ICR 1.7.4 11. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (J. Dennison, ed., G. Giger, trans., 3 vols; Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1992–7), vol. 1, p. 63f. 12. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 88. 13. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 63. 14. Ibid.



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God, holiness, and the salvation of men and women; and the enlightening and convicting character of its message.15 In the later discussion Turretin is concerned with how Scripture is validated to us, and his answer in general is that this is not through the church recognising its validity (contra Rome), but by ‘the marks impressed upon Scripture itself ’.16 Turretin explains that Scripture has an axiomatic character; ‘Scripture, which is the first principle of the supernatural order, is known by itself and has no need of arguments derived from without to prove and make itself known to us’.17 He uses the analogies of light, and of smell, which the Bible also uses of itself; Scripture ‘may easily be distinguished … by the senses of the new man as soon as it is presented to them and makes itself known by its own light, sweetness and fragrance’.18 Thus Turretin makes the point that the axiomatic character of Scripture is not disclosed to a merely casual reader, but requires the exercise of a ‘spiritual sense’. The identification of Scripture as ‘self-evident’, then, is not meant to suggest that its truth is obvious to anyone, as the truth that 2+2=4 is obvious, but rather that the Bible has its authority from itself, and not from the church or from any naturalistic source, and is recognized for what it is by the ‘new man’. John Owen on the Authority of Scripture What Turretin discusses in a few terse and condensed paragraphs John Owen treats at much greater length. Beginning in 1674 Owen published an interlocking series of studies on the work of the Holy Spirit, the second of which is The Reason of Faith; or, the Grounds whereon the Scripture is Believed to be the Word of God with Faith Divine and Supernatural (1677).19 Owen makes the distinction, customary by then, between external and internal arguments for the authority of Scripture, first discussing the external. External arguments are rational arguments for Scripture’s divine authority. Owen thinks that such arguments are ‘necessary unto the confirmation of our faith herein against temptations, oppositions, and objections’,20 and so they are undoubtedly useful to ‘level the ground, and to remove the rubbish of objections out of the way’.21 Although he says that it is beside his purpose to treat these arguments at length, he touches on what he regards as the most cogent of them. These are remarkably similar to Turretin’s list: Scripture’s antiquity and preservation, its design to reveal God and bring men and women to him, the testimony of the 15. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 64. 16. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 88. 17. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 89. 18. Ibid. 19. Reprinted in John Owen, Works (W. H. Goold, ed., 16 vols; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), vol. 4, pp. 1–115. 20. Ibid., p. 20. 21. Ibid., p. 21.

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church, the manner of the writing, etc. These testimonies remain at the level of moral persuasion, and inform a confidence in Scripture which is wholly the work of reason.22 Owen, then, does not disparage either innate principles or human reason. But to move beyond this the internal grounds or arguments or Scripture’s authenticity are necessary, and faith in response to them, for divine revelation itself is the only foundation of faith. Only by the internal means may infallible certainty (or theological certainty, as Turretin puts it) be granted. What are these internal arguments? First is the exceedingly great power of Scripture to convert sinners. ‘Therein, in an especial manner, is the divine authority of the word evidenced, by the divine power and efficacy given unto it by the Holy Ghost.’23 Owen particularly stresses the conviction of sin that Scripture brings.24 In addition, Scripture induces awe in human minds, even in the minds of those who hate, despise and abhor it, for they dare not absolutely refuse or reject it.25 Finally, it has the power to bring great consolation in times of great personal distress. Yet in these and the like distresses doth the word of God, by its divine power and efficacy, break through all interposing difficulties, all dark and discouraging circumstances, supporting, refreshing, and comforting such poor distressed sufferers, yea commonly filling them under overwhelming calamities with ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory’.26

Scripture is, then, ‘self-evidently’ the word of God. But Owen is careful to state what he does and does not mean by this. It is not said that this [viz. ‘Scripture is the word of God’] is a first principle of reason, though it be of faith, nor that it is capable of mathematical demonstration … It is by faith, that we are obliged to receive the truth of this proposition, which respects the power of our minds to assent unto truth, infallibly on that which is infallible.27

In emphasizing the self-authenticating nature of Scripture we should, according to Owen, be emphasizing Scripture’s power to authenticate itself (through the Spirit’s enlightening) when properly understood and weighed, rather than Scripture’s potential to be authenticated by sources other than Scripture, whether the Church or unaided human reason. Self-authentication, in other words, is not to be understood as meaning ‘obviously true on the most cursory inspection’. 22. Ibid., p. 54. 23. Ibid., p. 95. 24. Ibid., p. 97. 25. Ibid., pp. 98–9. 26. Ibid., p. 99. 27. Ibid., p. 105.



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Summing up, orthodox Reformed teaching on the authority of Scripture, as reflected in the teaching of Calvin, Turretin and Owen, had the following features. There are two categories of arguments for Scripture’s authority, both of which are evidentialist in character. External arguments for Scripture’s authenticity are of value, but at best yield only the moral certainty of an opinion. Much greater weight is placed on internal arguments, by which is meant the material or cognitive content of divine revelation, and on the illumination of the Holy Spirit in making the force of this evidence apparent. Within the category of ‘internal arguments’ some Reformed thinkers gave more weight to the creedal element in Scripture, others to the unique impact of that content on the individual. Faith in its fullest flower yields infallible certainty – what Turretin calls ‘theological certainty’. The effect of the Holy Spirit’s work is not experienced principally or in the first instance in the human will – this certainty or persuasion is not fideistic in character28 – but on the intellect or reason as, through the senses, these come to identify the evidence, gain some understanding of it, and by the Spirit’s illumination to appreciate its attractiveness and force, thereby judging Scripture to be words coming from the mouth of God and having his distinctive authority, even when conveyed through human instruments.

John Locke on Faith and Reason John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, but continued revising it throughout his lifetime, ultimately publishing five further editions.29 Book four of the Essay includes extensive discussions about knowledge and faith. Most relevant to our theme our Locke’s discussions about intuitive knowledge (‘The Degrees of Our Knowledge’, ch. 2), faith (‘Of the Degrees of Assent’, ch. 16), and the relation between faith and reason (‘Of Reason’, ch. 17; ‘Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces’, ch. 18; ‘Of Enthusiasm’, ch. 19). Locke’s general position was that the texts of Scripture are to be received as the word of God, his revelation, only because they meet certain criteria, which closely resemble some of the external indicia we have noted. All claims that God has spoken, whether in Scripture or in direct revelations, are to be subject to such tests. Locke’s aim, using epistemology as a tool, was to strike a via media on questions concerning the authenticity of revelation between the Church of Rome on one hand and the Quakers and other sectaries who flourished in the Commonwealth period on the other.30 28. For an interpretation of Calvin’s position as fideistic, see J. Beversluis, ‘Reforming the “Reformed” Objection to Natural Theology’, Faith and Philosophy, 12.2 (1995), pp. 189–206. 29. References here are to the Everyman Library edition, introduced and edited by John Yolton (London: J. M. Dent, 1961). 30. See the interpretation of Locke’s epistemology by N. Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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In his chapter on ‘Degrees of our Knowledge’ Locke distinguishes between intuitive and demonstrative knowledge. Intuitive knowledge follows from ‘the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately themselves, without the intervention of any other’; examples of intuitive knowledge would be propositions such as ‘a circle is not a triangle’, and ‘three is equal to two and one’. According to Locke, knowledge of such matters is ‘immediate and irresistible’ and ‘leaves no room for hesitation, doubt or examination’. ‘On this intuition’, moreover, ‘depends all the certainty and evidence of all our knowledge’.31 In his chapter on ‘Degrees of Assent’ Locke is concerned with degrees of belief, including belief which is based upon the testimony of others, and has this to say about divine testimony: There is one sort of propositions that challenge the highest degree of our assent, upon bare testimony, whether the thing proposed agree or disagree with common experience and the ordinary course of things or no. The reason whereof is because the testimony is of such an one as cannot deceive or be deceived, and that is of God himself. This carries with it assurance beyond doubt, evidence beyond exception. This is called by a peculiar name, revelation; and our assent to it, faith; which as absolutely determines our minds, and as perfectly excludes all wavering as our knowledge itself; and we may as well doubt of our own being as we can whether any revelation from GOD be true. So that faith is a settled and sure principle of assent and assurance, and leaves no manner of room for doubt or hesitation. Only we must be sure that it be a divine revelation, and that we understand it right; else we shall expose ourselves to all the extravagancy of enthusiasm and all the error of wrong principles, if we have faith and assurance in what is not revelation.32

This, succinctly, is Locke’s position, which he develops further in chapters on the relationship between faith and reason and on enthusiasm. Confidence that something ‘be a divine revelation’ is based entirely upon external signs. Internal indicia unsupported by external signs are given no place, and are relegated to the category of ‘enthusiasm’. In the chapter ‘Of Reason’ Locke argues that it is the task of reason to establish certainties (where possible), and probabilities (where not), on the basis of the evidence of our five senses and the testimony of others. Anything claiming to be revelation must be considered by reason, and no revelation can be more certain than the probabilities that support it. Where truth gained by revelation overlaps with intuitive or demonstrative knowledge, more certainty should be ascribed to the latter. So, for example, we might conclude from the New Testament that there is a Sea of Galilee, but we shall be more certain that there is such a sea by the direct evidence of our senses than by consulting the Bible. In Locke’s words, ‘whatsoever truth we come to the clear discovery of, from the knowledge and contemplation of 31. Locke, Human Understanding, p. 138. 32. Ibid., p. 261.



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our own ideas, will always be certainer to us than those which are conveyed to us by traditional revelation’.33 Noah was more certain that there was a flood because he saw it, than we are by learning about it from the Bible. In distinguishing faith and reason it was not Locke’s intention to disparage the possibility of divine revelation. Locke’s intention, rather, was to let reason function like a barrier to claims of having divine authority. Only if the arguments for authenticity are reasonable and good is the barrier lifted and the proposition or propositions in question received as revelation. Though Locke takes a view distinct from that of the Reformed orthodox, in many respects he holds a conservative attitude towards the Bible. By implication Locke was in agreement with orthodox divines that Scripture’s authority does not derive from the church, and like them he was an opponent of enthusiasm. Also like the Reformed he believed that genuine revelation will not contradict our intuitive knowledge;34 he would, in other words, have agreed with Turretin that revealed truth will not contradict intuitively-based knowledge such as the principle that ‘no body can be everywhere’.35 As far as religion was concerned Locke’s Essay sought to make a path between the authority of the Church of Rome on the one hand and the radicalism of the Quakers and other similar sects. Calvin and the Reformed orthodox thinkers cited above discussed the authority of Scripture primarily vis-à-vis the authority of the church (contra Rome), with a sidelong glance at the dangers of ‘enthusiasm’ and rationalism. Locke, by way of contrast, approached the question of Scripture’s authenticity and authority primarily in the context of examining the powers and limitations of the human mind. Locke’s questions are: What is our intuitive knowledge? What are the powers of human reason to acquire knowledge of the external world? What authority does Scripture have as a result of this kind of reasonable investigation into it? These questions reflect epistemological, rather than ecclesiastical, concerns. Thus, in terms of our earlier discussion, Locke focused almost exclusive attention on the external indicia, on what sense and reason can, independently of the meaning and impact of the content of God’s self-disclosure, identify as criteria of authoritativeness. Reason and faith constitute, for Locke, ‘two distinct provinces’. Reason functions to establish the certainty or probability of propositions deduced from our ideas. ‘Reason, therefore, here, as contradistinguished to faith, I take to be the discovery of the certainty or probability of such propositions or truth, which the mind arrives at by deduction made from such ideas which it has got by use of its natural faculties viz. by sensation or reflection.’36 Faith – that is, true religious faith – is reliance upon propositions that testify that such and such is the word of God, coming to us in some extraordinary way. So a ‘reasonable’ attitude to Scripture is

33. Ibid., p. 282. 34. Ibid., p. 283. 35. Turretin, Elenctic Theology, vol. 1, p. 32. 36. Locke, Human Understanding, p. 281.

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one that grants probability to certain propositions as revelation by virtue of their being accompanied by miracles. The ‘faith’ thus described by Locke corresponds to that ‘faith’ which the Reformed identified as answering to ‘external’ arguments. The effect of Locke’s position is to collapse the distinction between internal and external evidence for the authority of Scripture, and to approve only of such evidence which is reasonable in Locke’s sense, that is external evidence. So far as the actual content of faith goes, Locke writes: But … there being many things wherein we have very imperfect notions, or none at all; and other things, of whose past, present, or future existence, by the natural use of our faculties, we can have no knowledge at all: these, as being beyond the discovery of our natural faculties and above reason, are, when revealed, the proper matter of faith. Thus, that part of the angels rebelled against GOD and thereby lost their first happy state, and that the dead shall rise and live again; these and the like, being beyond the discovery of reason, are purely matters of faith, with which reason has, directly, nothing to do.37

We do not need revelation where we have truth based upon intuitive knowledge, or upon the everyday workings of our senses, or upon deductions from the same. Nor can any revelation contradict such truth. Reason must judge that there is a special revelation; revelation, in turn, concerns matters which are above reason.38 Though faith be founded on the testimony of GOD (who cannot lie) revealing any proposition to us: yet we cannot have an assurance of the truth of its being a divine revelation greater than our own knowledge: since the whole strength of the certainty depends upon our knowledge that GOD revealed it; which, in this case, where the proposition supposed revealed contradicts our knowledge or reason, will always have this objection hanging to it, (viz.) that we cannot tell how to conceive that to come from GOD, the bountiful Author of our being, which, if received for true, must overturn all the principles of knowledge he has given us; render all our faculties useless; wholly destroy the most excellent part of his workmanship, our understandings; and put a man in a condition wherein he will have less light, less conduct than the beast that perisheth.39

Locke is not overly fond of full stops/periods. Still, his meaning is clear. In his chapter on ‘enthusiasm’, an addition to the 1700 edition of his Essay, Locke applies his views on reason and experience to contemporary claims of receiving divine revelation. The question that Locke poses to the supposed recipients of divine revelation is this: How does one know that God is the author of a revelation, that an impression made upon one’s mind is from the Holy Spirit, 37. Ibid., p. 285. 38. Ibid., p. 283. 39. Ibid., p. 284.



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and not from some other influence, and that therefore it ought to be received as divine?40 If they say that they know it to be true because it is a revelation from God, the reason is good; but then it will be demanded how they know it to be a revelation from God. If they say by the light it brings with it, which shines bright in their minds and they cannot resist, I beseech them to consider whether this be any more than what we have taken notice of already, viz. that it is a revelation because they strongly believe it to be true … In what I have said I am far from denying that GOD can or doth sometimes enlighten men’s minds in the apprehending of certain truths, or excite them to good actions by the immediate influence and assistance of the Holy Spirit, without any extraordinary signs accompanying it. But in such cases too we have reason and Scripture, unerring rules to know whether it be from GOD or not.41

Thus Locke provides a method of testing one’s claims to be imbued with the Spirit of God; such claims must be evaluated by certain criteria, namely, those provided by reason and revelation, revelation itself being grounded in reason. Genuine revelation is distinguished from the spurious inward impressions of the enthusiasts. Locke’s criticisms of enthusiasm rest on his conviction that reason plays a vital role in the Christian religion, and reason operates discursively, that is, by the consideration of the arguments and the evidence that people offer in making religious claims. The trouble with the sectaries was, in a nutshell, that they claimed to hear the voice of God, but they had no arguments to support their claims. Mainstream Christians accepted genuine, divine revelation from God (i.e., Scripture) on the basis of arguments. Locke believed it was impossible for the Quakers, to use Thomas Hobbes’s example, to distinguish ‘I met God in a dream’ from ‘I dreamed that I met God’.

Thomas Halyburton’s Engagement with John Locke Thomas Halyburton does not tell us the circumstances in which he read Locke’s Essay, not even in his Memoirs. There is evidence that in certain matters other than those under discussion here Halyburton had a high opinion of Locke. So, for example, in his work against Deism he more than once shows his approval of the cogency of Locke’s arguments in The Reasonableness of Christianity against innate ideas, and Locke’s teaching on the insufficiency of natural light.42 The arguments against innate ideas in particular provided ammunition to undercut the Deists’ 40. Ibid., p. 292. 41. Ibid., pp. 293, 296. 42. Halyburton, Works, pp. 321, 323, 357–8.

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claim that the principles of natural religion were innate and so required no source in special revelation. Halyburton refers to Locke as ‘the ingenious Mr Locke’.43 When Halyburton criticised Locke, then, we can be sure that it was not merely the pique of party spirit at work, but that he was judging Locke’s arguments on their merits. With regard to the subject of divine revelation, Halyburton sees Locke’s exclusive appeal to rational, external arguments for Scripture’s authenticity as a species of externalism. He responds by upholding the legitimacy and strength of the internal indicia, without denying the place of external indicia. He sets out to show that Locke’s appeal to reason is insufficient to support revelation, and that internal arguments of an Owenian kind (Owen is cited), are not jeopardized by anything that Locke claims. According to Halyburton the ‘authority, truth and veracity of God … is the ground whereon we receive and assent to propositions of truth therein [i.e., in Scripture] revealed’.44 But this by itself does not get us very far. Halyburton agrees with Locke that the issue is an epistemological one: ‘The knot of the question lies here, What is that evidence of God speaking or giving testimony to truths supernaturally revealed, whereby the mind is satisfied that God is the revealer.’45 It is a striking feature of Locke’s procedure that for all his talk of ‘reason’, he is distinctly unforthcoming as to what this means to those, like ourselves, who are in receipt of a putative traditional revelation. Halyburton takes Locke’s insistence on miracles accompanying revelation to mean the accompaniment by miracles of the putative revelation when originally given. But it is not until the added chapter on enthusiasm, which in effect concerns the veracity or otherwise of contemporary claims of ‘original revelation’, that Locke’s approach become explicit.46 In the case of contemporary claims, original revelation must be accompanied by miracles, in the case of traditional revelation, the documents must reliably report miracles. (Locke’s largely unspoken hermeneutical principle is that the Bible must be interpreted as a straightforward historical document, and a reliable one, on the basis of which the attestation to revelation it reports must be accepted as equally reliable. David Hume had not yet arrived on the scene.) Halyburton distinguishes between those to whom Scripture was originally given, those to whom they immediately proposed what had been revealed to them, and ‘we who live now; who have not had such revelations, nor heard them from those who had’.47 He is chiefly concerned with the latter two categories, though he vigorously dissents from Locke’s view that those who received revelations directly

43. Ibid., p. 393 (see also pp. 289, 477). 44. Ibid., p. 511. 45. Ibid. 46. Wolterstorff comments: ‘And what, finally, is Locke willing to accept as evidence for the occurrence of revelation? The inner experience of the enthusiasts will not do. What will? Locke gives the matter lamentably short shrift; nonetheless the answer is clear: miracles.’ (John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, p. 131). Halyburton would have agreed. 47. Halyburton, Works, p. 511.



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from God needed to have (and were uniformly granted) some external sign accompanying it.48 Locke had argued that: the holy men of old, who [had] revelations from GOD, had something else besides that internal light of assurance in their own minds to testify to them that it was from GOD. They were not left to their own persuasions alone that those persuasions were from GOD, but had outward signs to convince them of the author of those revelations.49

Halyburton retorts that to insist on a uniform requirement of miracles as Locke does is ‘highly injurious to the honour of divine revelation’. 50 To start with, Locke has no evidence from Scripture for such a uniform connection between evidential assurance and outward signs. It is mere supposition that the one was always accompanied by, and partly generated by, the other. And even where there were outward signs, as with Moses and the burning bush (cited by Locke in the chapter ‘Of Enthusiasm’), there are alternative explanations available for why the miracles occurred; for example, many matters revealed were things ‘at a distance’, requiring God’s extraordinary power, and so external signs were given not so much to assure and remind the people that God was speaking as to reaffirm that God’s power was sufficient to bring about what he had promised. Recalling the Reformed distinction between external and internal proofs, we might conclude that Halyburton sees Locke, in his defence of the authority of revelation, as relying solely on a version of external proofs to authenticate revelation. Locke, in other words, sets the standard too high for authenticating revelation, since the evidence of apostolic testimony and practice, which Locke wishes to endorse, demonstrates that revelation is not always uniformly accompanied by external (miraculous) evidence. Of course, the terminology of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ needs to be handled with care in reference to Locke’s argument, because to us who read the Bible today, since the closure of the canon, the record of miraculous signs that Locke emphasizes are physically present in the Bible, and in this sense they are a part of the document which is the Bible, internal to it. But according to Halyburton they are not internal to the words of God as such, to the salvific ‘message’ of the prophets and apostles, for in many instances that message is given without miraculous accompaniment. Halyburton makes this criticism of Locke obliquely by considering the case of another ‘rational divine’ besides Locke, Jean Le Clerc,51 from Le Clerc’s commentary on Henry Hammond’s Paraphrase and Annotations upon the New 48. Ibid., citing Locke’s Essay IV.19.15. 49. Locke, Essay, p. 295. 50. Halyburton, Works, p. 518. 51. J. Le Clerc (1657–1736), educated at various Reformed seminaries, became a Remonstrant, and was Professor of Philosophy and Belles-Lettres, and then of Church History, at Amsterdam. He wrote emendations and additions to Henry Hammond’s 1653 Paraphrase and Annotations upon the New Testament.

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Testament. According to Halyburton, Le Clerc judged that ‘the evidence whereon the writers of the New Testament assented to what they delivered as the mind of God, consisted in, or did result from, the miracles they wrought, and other external signs or proofs, which they gave of their mission from God.’52 Le Clerc had claimed that: Paul would have the Corinthians believe him, not as a philosopher proposing probabilities to them [opinions], but as the messenger of God, who had received commandment from him, to deliver to them those truths which he preached. And that he thus received them, he did show by the miracles which he wrought.53

But Halyburton argues that such a claim was an imposition on the text. ‘How Monsieur le Clerk came to dream of miracles, and fetch them in here, while the scope and every circumstance of the text stood in the way of this exposition, I cannot divine; for nothing is more alien and remote from the sense of this place.’54 His criticism of Le Clerc is also a criticism of Locke. It becomes evident from this that what concerned Halyburton was the general requirement that assurance of something received as an authentic divine revelation absolutely required ‘external signs’ in the form of publicly witnessed miracles or reliable records of such. Halyburton maintains that faith is assent to a proposition as revealed, and in the case of an original revelation the recipient must have evidence which bestows the highest degree of assurance that the revelation is from God. In other words, Halyburton does not think that revelation is simply a case of relations between ideas, nor simply a proposition whose God-given character as a divine revelation is rendered probable by its miraculous accompaniments. Rather, one’s certainty of Scripture being revelation may be as great as the certainty of intuitive knowledge. Such certainty need not rest upon an experience of miracles. This is the nub of Halyburton’s quarrel with Locke. As we have seen, according to Locke, faith must be based either upon the light of self-evident truths, or upon rational light (arguments), or upon the light of sense.55 There is no other source of objective light or evidence.56 So faith must be founded on one of these three grounds for belief. ‘Light, true light, in the mind is, or can be, nothing else but the evidence of the truth of any proposition; and if it be not a self-evident proposition, all the light it has or can have is from the clearness and validity of those proofs upon which it is received.’57 Locke rejected the possibility of an ‘inner light’, or truths comprised in 52. Halyburton, Works, p. 512. 53. Ibid., pp. 512–13. 54. Ibid., p. 513. The ‘place’ referred to is I Cor. 2.5. 55. Locke, Essay, p. 288. 56. Halyburton, Works, p. 517. 57. Locke, Essay, p. 294.



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the same, that did not rest on one of these three grounds for belief.58 ‘If this internal light, or any proposition which under that title we take for inspired, be conformable to the principles of reason or to the word of GOD, which is attested revelation, reason warrants it and we may safely receive it for true and be guided by it in our belief and actions.’59 Halyburton is unwilling to abandon the possibility of an ‘inner light’ which is at least as certain, if not more certain, than Locke’s light of intuition, light of reason, and light of sense perception. To start with, he argues, the fact that Locke and millions more don’t experience such light neither proves that it is not possible, nor that Locke might not have had such an experience while failing to identify it for what it is. It surely cannot be doubted that God might produce such a sense, which does not contradict the working of the other human senses. If we grant, as Locke does, that God may sometimes by his Spirit illuminate the minds of men, why may there not be evidence of a different sort from that provided by the five senses, resulting from such extraordinary productions, amounting to evidence of the highest degree?60 Halyburton goes on to claim that there are in fact such cases of inward, objective light, providing the highest assurance that the truths impressed upon the mind are from God.61 The prophets would be a case in point. They were convinced (but not by argument, nor of course by sense-experience, or by miracles), that they had received truth from God by an immediate impression made on their minds. This is objective evidence that makes itself evident in the same sort of way in which other kinds of intellectual light do.62 Such impressions which this light imparts have distinctive, characteristic effects. To further elucidate all this, we may note that a better account can be given of this subjective enlightenment which serves to ground assent to the Scriptures than can be given of the visibility of objects to those who have no natural sight. Further, the fact that a phenomenon may not be intelligibly articulated by everyone who experiences it does not mean that there is no such thing. A writer’s characteristic style, or a person’s face and facial expressions, may be clearly recognized, but they are notoriously difficult to describe. Yet this limitation does not undermine their reality. Something similar holds with the impressions of divinity in Scripture. ‘And where one has an understanding given to know him that is true, and is made thereby to entertain any suitable notion of the Deity, upon intuition of this objective evidence, without waiting to reason on the matter, his assent will be carried, and unavoidably determined to rest on it as the highest ground of assurance.’63 Those who because of their circumstances are not able to follow arguments may nonetheless recognize the divine imprint in the Scriptures. Halyburton was a definite egalitarian on this score: 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., p. 295. 60. Halyburton, Works, pp. 519–20. 61. Ibid., p. 520. 62. Ibid., p. 521 63. Ibid., p. 522.

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This theopneustia or God-becoming impress of Majesty, Sovereignty, Omniscience, Independence, Holiness, Justice, Goodness, Wisdom and Power, is not only sufficient and real, but in very deed, the greatest objective light and evidence imaginable … [T]his assent, founded on this impress of the Deity in his own word, is indeed an assent of the highest degree. And thus far faith resembles our intuitive knowledge, with this difference, not as to the manner of the mind’s acting, but as to the ability whence it acts; that in our intuitive knowledge, as Mr Locke, and those of his opinion restricts it, the evidence or objective light is such, as not only is immediately without reasoning discerned, but such as lies open to, and is discernible by our understandings, without any subjective light, any work of the Spirit of God either repairing or disabled faculties, or elevating, and guiding them to a due observation, or fixing their attention, or freeing their minds of the power and present influence of aversion of will, disorder of affections and prejudices that obstruct the discerning power.64

Halyburton sees this sense to be like intuitive knowledge in that it may produce a very strong conviction. And because it has effects on the soul, this makes it possible to reason about the intuition, even when the one who has it may not be able to articulate these effects. [T]hough our conviction neither needs nor is founded on reasonings; yet from those effects ground is given, and matter offered for a rational and argumentative confirmation of our assent, and the grounds thereof and the validity of it for our own confirmation, when that evidence which first gave ground for our faith, and wherein it rests, is not actually under view, as also for the conviction of others.65

Is this not a case of enthusiasm? Halyburton offers a number of reasons to think not. He argues, for example, that the conviction he describes is not a persuasion without reason; it does not contradict the findings of our faculties, but influences them; it is not a persuasion apart from the word, but it is from evidence in the word.66 But is it not a decisive argument against such an objective experience that not everyone has it? Halyburton demurs. Again, many arguments are offered: many lack the ability by which Christ’s sheep hear his voice; many have perverse notions of God; many have unsuitable dispositions; many never make any attempt to do the will of God; and so on.67 Halyburton concludes that Locke cannot be claiming that no proposition can be a revelation from God unless it was explicitly testified to be such, otherwise he would be overthrowing the Christian religion entirely.68 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., p. 523. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., p. 524. 68. Ibid., p. 525–6.



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Conclusion John Locke made a varied impact on the thought of the Reformed community at the end of the seventeenth century. After orthodox Dissent was tolerated in England, that is from 1688 onwards, Locke’s reasonableness contributed strongly to the latitudinizing tendencies of English Presbyterians and Independents, leading ultimately to the abandonment of the orthodox understandings of the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and so paving the way to the adoption of Unitarianism and Deism. Matters were clearly somewhat different in Scotland. Reformed theology was adhered to more tenaciously. Halyburton was one notable example among the Reformed who raised objections to Locke’s rationalizing tendencies, being concerned at their implications for the acceptance of the authority of Scripture. Of course, insofar as Locke discussed faith and reason from the standpoint of English politics, with the aim of disenfranchising both Roman Catholics and the enthusiastic sectaries, it would have been difficult for him to be persuaded by Owen’s and Halyburton’s appeal to ‘inward spiritual sense’ while still objecting to enthusiasm. For him the enthusiasts’ inner light and ‘inward spiritual sense’ were positions in the same boat. But Halyburton himself had no such ambition. He worked in a period when many were tempted to separate theology and religion from the issues and methods of philosophy and natural science on the one hand, or to think of theology as a branch of science, physico-theology, on the other. He resisted both compartmentalizing and reductive tendencies and was willing to examine philosophical proposals, in this case epistemological proposals, critically, on their own grounds. He was confident that his theology was not capable of philosophical rebuttal. He believed, furthermore, that we may have our understanding deepened by reflecting on the false polarities of not totally unsympathetic critics. Locke’s approach was one such case, as can be seen by the polarity between rationalism and enthusiasm as made evident in his discussion of the relation between faith and reason. Halyburton was able to re-state, and to reaffirm with arguments, the Reformed position on the internal indicia of Scripture, and the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, and the separate and subordinate place held by the external indicia, doing so in language that took account of Locke’s views. So, during a period in which the influence of Reformed orthodoxy had peaked and was waning, Thomas Halyburton nevertheless defended in a new voice positions that were characteristic of the mainstream of Reformed Orthodoxy in its hey-day. In his magisterial survey of post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics, Richard Muller notes the continuing Reformed tradition of distinguishing between the internal and external indicia of the God-givenness of Scripture, but identifies an eventual waning in the willingness to ascribe theological certainty to them.69 69. PRRD, vol. 1, pp. 283–4. See also the discussion of the grounds of the authority of Scripture in Reformed orthodoxy by H. van den Belt, The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2008), ch. 4.

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Although Halyburton does not use this terminology, nevertheless in his insistence on the fact that men and women are able to receive the highest assurance from the coming together of Word and Spirit in the production of an assured faith in Scripture, we see in the period of late orthodoxy a view that closely approaches the earlier insistence on theological certainty, and which may be equivalent to it.70

70. Thanks to Oliver Crisp, whose comments on a draft of this essay enabled me to clarify the arguments at various places.

Chapter 13 T H E R AT IO NA L D E F E N C E A N D E X P O SI T IO N O F C H R I ST IA N I T Y : T HOM A S B L AC K W E L L A N D S C O T T I SH O RT HO D OX Y I N T H E E A R LY E IG H T E E N T H C E N T U RY

Richard A. Muller Thomas Blackwell (1660–1728) and the Scottish Church Thomas Blackwell, Professor of Divinity in Aberdeen and Principal of Marischal College in the early eighteenth century, has been largely neglected in the historiography of the Scottish church and theology in the early modern era.1 Blackwell was born in Glasgow. His father, also Thomas Blackwell, described as a ‘vehement covenanter’,2 was imprisoned in 1676 for participating in conventicles and died in prison. The younger Blackwell received his early education in Glasgow. After being licensed to preach on 23 February 1693, he served as a minister in Paisley (1694–1700) and later in Aberdeen at St Nicholas Kirk (1700–10).3 The year 1710 saw the publication of two of Blackwell’s major works, the Ratio Sacra and Schema Sacrum, the former an apologetic treatise, the latter a 1. Blackwell is not mentioned at all by James Walker, The Theology and Theologians of Scotland chiefly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1872) and receives scant mention in John Macleod, Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History Since the Reformation (Edinburgh: The Publications Committee of the Free Church of Scotland, 1943), p. 145, and T. F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: from John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), p. 229. The most extensive presentation of his theology to date can be found in D. C. Lachman, The Marrow Controversy: An Historical and Theological Analysis (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1988), pp. 177–84. 2. Scottish Notes and Queries, 3/3 (August, 1889), pp. 35–6. 3. Cf. the reference to the act of the General Assembly ‘transporting’ Blackwell from Paisley to Aberdeen in The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh, February. 2. 1700, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: George Mosman, 1700), fol. I1v.

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positive doctrinal work on natural and revealed religion, both intended to offer a rational defence of Christianity against the major ‘errors’ of the day.4 Both works were dedicated to the city of Aberdeen and received by the city council on 24 May 1710.5 The Schema Sacrum, recognized as an important treatise in its time, saw further British editions in 1753, 1781, 1786, 1800 and 1841, and was republished in Boston in 1774.6 With the publication of these two volumes, Blackwell was appointed to succeed James Osborne as Professor of Divinity at Marischal College in Aberdeen (1710) and, after 1717, served as Principal of Marischal College, remaining in these positions until his death. Blackwell’s third major theological work, Methodus Evangelica, was published in 1712, shortly after his appointment as professor of theology at Marischal.7 The volume is dedicated to ‘the Venerable General Assembly of the Church of Scotland’. The coincidence of the first two works with Blackwell’s appointment to the professorship should not be underestimated: both supported the theological orthodoxy of the era and the first, the Ratio Sacra, was directed against significant theological and spiritual problems plaguing the Scottish church in the period just prior to the Marrow Controversy, namely the atheism and deism associated with the new philosophies of the era and, perhaps more importantly, the influx of Quietist mysticism based on the writings of Antoinette Bourignon and her British followers.8 Bourignonism in particular had begun to flourish in Scotland in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and by the first decade of the eighteenth century had become a significant element in Scottish popular religion. 4. Thomas Blackwell, Ratio Sacra, Or, an Appeal unto the Rational World, about the Reasonableness of Revealed Religion containing a rational as well as scriptural confutation of the three grand prevailing errours of the present day, to wit, atheism, deism, and Bourignonism (Edinburgh: Heirs of Andrew Anderson, 1710); idem, Schema sacrum, or, a sacred scheme of natural and revealed religion: making a scriptural-rational account of these three heads: As first, of creation … secondly, of the whole complex eternal scheme of divine predestination … and thirdly of the wise divine providence in accomplishing the whole parts of the aforesaid scheme (Edinburgh: Heirs of Andrew Anderson, 1710; Belfast: Robert Johnston, 1753; Glasgow: John Bryce, 1781; Paisley: for J. Davidson, 1786, 1800; Aberdeen: King, 1841). 5. Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1643–1747 (Edinburgh: Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1872), p. 351. 6. The American edition altered the title of the work: Forma sacra, or, A sacred platform of natural and revealed religion; exhibiting, a scriptural and rational account of these three important heads … (Boston: William M’Alpine, 1774). 7. Thomas Blackwell, Methodus evangelica: or, a modest essay upon the true scripturalrational way of preaching the Gospel (London: for N. Cliff and D. Jackson, 1712). 8. See A. R. MacEwen, Antoinette Bourignon, Quietist (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910); J. Irwin, ‘Anna Maria van Schurman and Antoinette Bourignon: Contrasting Examples of Seventeenth-Century Pietism’, CH, 60/3 (1991), pp. 301–15; P. McDowell, ‘Enlightenment Enthusiasms and the Spectacular Failure of the Philadelphian Society’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35/4 (2002), pp. 515–33; and R. M. Jones, ‘Quietism’, HTR, 10/1 (1917), pp. 18–20.



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Ecclesiastical condemnations began in 1701 and culminated in a series of decisions of the General Assembly: in 1709 the Assembly warned of the ‘dangerous errors of Bourignonism’; in 1710 the Assembly identified Bourignonism as prevalent in several of the synods and as embodying ‘gross heresies and errors’ and published an act for suppressing it; and in 1711 Bourignonism was placed on a level with the errors of the Papists, Arians, Socinians and Arminians in a formula of subscription for all new ordinands.9 In 1711, Blackwell went to London as a member of a Scottish commission to protest patronage in the church as well as an act introducing toleration of Episcopal clergy in Scotland.10 It was in London that he completed his Methodus Evangelica.11 In the following year he co-authored, with William Carstares and Robert Baillie, a Representation against the restoration of patronage in the Church of Scotland.12 There is a slight irony in Blackwell’s protest against ecclesiastical patronage inasmuch as he was appointed professor by the Marischal family, the patrons of Marischal College; and, after the patronage passed to the crown in 1715, was appointed principal of the College and reaffirmed as professor by George I. There is also a bit of irony in the publication of Blackwell’s three major works at the very beginning of his tenure as professor, only to be followed by some 16 years of teaching without further major publication. Blackwell’s theology, then, 9. The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh, the 14th Day of April, 1709, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: Relict of George Mosman, 1709), xii (p. 20); The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh, the 26th Day of April, 1710, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: Relict of George Mosman, 1710), ix (pp. 11–12); The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh, the 10th Day of May, 1711, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: Relict of George Mosman, 1711), x (p. 19); and cf. MacEwen, Antoinette Bourignon, pp. 14–16; ‘Bourignon De la Porte, Antoinette’, s.v., in New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia. Also see Bayle, Dictionary, II, s.v. ‘Bourignon’ (pp. 108–14); and note Henry Grey Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1906), p. 395. 10. See the account of Blackwell’s life s.v., in Dictionary of National Biography; also, Scottish Notes and Queries, 3/3 (August, 1889), p. 36; and cf. the biographical note on Blackwell in The Correspondence of the Rev. Robert Wodrow (T. MCrie, ed., 2 vols; Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842), vol. 1, p. 137; and the materials in The Miscellany of the Spalding Club (5 vols; Aberdeen: for the Club, 1841–1852), vol. 1, pp. 55–7, 61; and Blackwell’s letters, ibid., pp. 195–223. 11. Mr. Blackwell to Provost Ross, April 8, 1712, in Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vol. 1, p. 217. 12. Representation by Mr. William Carstairs, Thomas Blackwell, and Robert Bailie, Ministers of the Church of Scotland, offered by them in the name and by the appointment of the General Assembly against the bill for restoring patronage, in Tracts concerning Patronage by some eminent Lairds; with a candid enquiry about the constitution of the Church of Scotland in relation to the Settlement of Ministers (Edinburgh: W. Gray, 1770), pp. 1–4.

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stands at some distance from the Marrow Controversy and adumbrates little of the argumentation that would eventually emanate from the pen of his associate, James Hadow. Blackwell may also, however, be the author of a very brief piece, Some Queries occasioned by a paper lately written about the observation of Christmass.13 Blackwell had preached a sermon on the Sunday before Christmas in 1721 in which he argued against the celebration of Christmas as a ‘high and holy Feast’ on grounds of the uncertainty of the date of Christ’s birth and the absence of any ancient practice of observance. His sermon, or at least a report of it, angered a citizen of Aberdeen, William Gordon, who wrote a letter arguing the antiquity of Christmas celebrations. The letter, together with a series of ‘queries’ impugning its arguments (perhaps by Blackwell), a response to queries with further justification of Christmas celebration by Gordon, all followed by a rather scurrilous letter to Blackwell impugning his intellectual and linguistic abilities, was published in Edinburgh in early 1722.14 In 1717, Blackwell was appointed Principal at Marischal and attended the General Assembly that condemned Auchterarder Presbytery’s addition of a proposition denying the necessary forsaking of sin prior to coming to Christ to its standards for ministerial candidates. The so-called Auchterarder Creed was a rather blunt condemnation of a nomistic priority of repentance over faith, offered in reaction to the problem of attributing too much ability to ‘natural Reason’ and ‘corrupt Nature’ ‘to the Disparagement of … efficacious free Grace’ that had led to the rebuke of John Simpson earlier in that year.15 The General Assembly condemned the proposition as a violation of church order inasmuch as it was not a formula agreed upon by the Assembly, and then took the further steps of declaring its ‘abhorrence’ of an ‘unsound and most detestable’ formulation and requiring the Presbytery to explain itself before the Assembly’s Commission on doctrine.16 As Thomas Boston indicated, the legalistic implications of denying the 13. Some queries, in William Gordon, A Letter to Mr. Thomas Blackwell: Professor of Divinity in the Marishal-College of Aberdeen. With Other Papers, Concerning the Observation of Christmass, and Other Festivals of the Church (Edinburgh: s.n., 1722). 14. After a series of rhetorical denials that Blackwell could possibly be the author of the queries, Blackwell’s authorship is confirmed in Gordon’s response: see A Letter, p. 31. 15. The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh, the 2nd May, 1717, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: Heirs and Successors of Andrew Anderson, 1717), viii, x (pp. 17, 18–19); after subscribing to the church’s Confession, the candidate was required to swear, ‘And further, That I believe that it is not Sound and Orthodox to teach, That we must forsake Sin in Order to our coming to Christ, and instating us in Covenant with GOD’ (pp. 18–19). Cf. Macleod, Scottish Theology, pp. 156–57; and W. VanDoodewaard, The Marrow Controversy and Seceder Tradition: Marrow Theology in the Associate Presbytery and Associate Synod Secession Churches of Scotland (1733–1799) (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2011), p. 24. 16. Principal Acts (1717), p. 19.



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proposition and the accusations of antinomianism against its apparent upholders lay at the root of condemnations of Edward Fisher’s Marrow of Modern Divinity as a work with antinomian and universalist tendencies, first in overtures to the General Assembly, and subsequently in an act of the Assembly in May 1720, condemning the book and its use in the church.17 In 1722, Blackwell sat with James Hadow and other opponents of the Marrow of Modern Divinity on the Commission appointed by the General Assembly and on the Committee for Purity of Doctrine as they examined the Representation and Petition presented to the General Assembly of 1721 in defence of the Marrow and its use in the church.18 Blackwell can therefore be considered to have played a fairly significant role in the Marrow Controversy and in the promulgation of the Acts in 1722 that affirmed the earlier decision of the General Assembly and offered a further refutation of the doctrines in the Marrow as well as a lengthy response to the Representation and Petition.19 As far as can be ascertained, Blackwell contributed nothing to the book and pamphlet war that took place between the opponents and proponents of the Marrow, although it has been argued that aspects of the theology of his Methodus Evangelica can be taken to illustrate what have typically been identified as the legalistic or neonomian tendencies of the opponents of the Marrow, and indeed,

17. Thomas Boston, Memoirs of the Life, Time, and Writings of the Reverend and Learned Thomas Boston … to which are added, some original papers, and letters to and from the author (Edinburgh: A. Murray and J. Cochran, 1776), pp. 330–1, 362; cf. The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh, the 12th Day of May, 1720, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: Successors of Andrew Anderson, 1720), pp. 8–12. Also see Macleod, Scottish Theology, p. 157; VanDoodewaard, Marrow Controversy, pp. 25–6. A broader background to the Marrow Controversy, including the English debates over antinomianism and nomism is argued in C. L. Moffatt, ‘James Hog of Carnock (1658–1734), Leader in the Evangelical Party in Early Eighteenth Century Scotland’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1960), pp. 228–80. 18. The Representation and Petition of Several Ministers of the Gospel, to the General Assembly, met at Edinburgh May 1721. With the 5th. Act of Assembly May 1720, to which it relates (Edinburgh: s.n., 1721); cf. The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh, the May 11th, 1721, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: Successors of Andrew Anderson, 1721), p. 10. The most extensive analysis of the controversy remains Lachman, The Marrow Controversy. The framework of Lachman’s analysis needs, however, to be considerably modified: see A. T. B. McGowan, The Federal Theology of Thomas Boston (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1997), pp. 200–2. 19. The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh, the 10th day of May, 1722, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: Successors of Andrew Anderson, 1722), pp. 13–26; cf. VanDoodewaard, Marrow Controversy, pp. 27–8, 42.

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of the acts of the General Assemblies of 1720 and 1722 in which the Marrow had been condemned.20 Despite the rather scant scholarship on Thomas Blackwell, there is some fairly significant disagreement concerning the direction of his thought, as also the thought of other opponents of the Marrow. In the context of questions concerning the relationship of the controversy and of the two parties involved to later developments in Scottish theology, it has been argued that just as the theology of the Marrow-men points toward the doctrines of the Secession churches,21 so does the highly rational character of Blackwell’s work offer adumbrations of the ethos of the unevangelical Moderatism of the mid-eighteenth century Scottish church.22 A rather different perspective looks to Blackwell’s focus on Christian obedience to the ‘law of faith’ and his less than prominent approach to the free offer of the Gospel but nonetheless reads his thought as ‘not … unevangelical’ and as quite ‘orthodox in the Reformed Faith’, albeit tending toward Hyper-Calvinism.23 He 20. VanDoodewaard, Marrow Controversy, pp. 44, 46–7. 21. Cf. Macleod, Scottish Theology, pp. 160, 167–8; Lachman, Marrow Controversy, p. 485; with McGowan, Federal Theology, pp. 45–6; see also William J. U. Philip, ‘The Marrow and the Dry Bones: Ossified Orthodoxy and the Battle for the Gospel in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Calvinism’, Scottish Bulletin of Theology, 15/1 (1997), pp. 27–36; and Donald Beaton, ‘The “Marrow of Modern Divinity” and the Marrow Controversy’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 1 (1926), pp. 112–34. 22. Cf. VanDoodewaard, Marrow Controversy, pp. 44–5; on Moderatism, see P. Hume-Brown, History of Scotland to the Present Time (3 vols; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902–1909), vol. 3, pp. 363–71; W. Garden Blaikie, Preachers of Scotland from the Sixth to the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1888), pp. 216–46; J. R. McIntosh, Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740–1800 (East Linton: Scottish Historical Review and Tuckwell Press, 1998); and I. D. L. Clark, ‘Moderatism and the Moderate Party in the Church of Scotland, 1752–1805’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1964). 23. Macleod, Scottish Theology, p. 145; ‘Hyper-Calvinism’ has been variously defined: see Peter Toon, The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism in English Nonconformity, 1689–1765 (London: The Olive Tree, 1967), pp. 80–3; also note the definition in George Croft, The Christian Instructor; containing a brief but comprehensive view of the evidences, doctrines, duties, external economy, and prospects, of the Christian Religion (London: for Francis Westley, 1825), pp. 169–71. The defining characteristic of Hyper-Calvinism is an insistence on rejecting all ‘invitations’ or ‘offers’ of grace and salvation on account of the doctrine of a limited divine intentionality in Christ’s satisfaction. Associated teachings not uniformly found among those identified as Hyper-Calvinists are justification from eternity, a tendency toward antinomianism, and various forms of supralapsarianism. Donald Macleod argues that the term is properly applied to a group of English Dissenting theologians – notably Joseph Hussey, John Brine and John Gill – and rather improperly extended to Scottish theologians: cf. MacLeod, ‘Dr. T. F. Torrance and Scottish Theology: a Review Article’, EQ, 72/1 (2000), pp. 57–8; cf. idem, ‘Reformed Theology in Scotland’, Theology in Scotland, 17/2 (2010), pp. 13–14.



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has also been identified as evidencing ‘the increasing impact of rationalism’, albeit without specification of the concept or indication of Blackwell’s opposition to Deism.24

Ratio, Schema and Methodus: Blackwell’s Theological Project Blackwell’s theological project, as developed in the Ratio Sacra, the Schema Sacrum and the Methodus Evangelica, stood on the principle of the unity of truth. Indeed, the three works, written so close together in time, evidence a significant interrelationship and argue a single foundational theological model. The first two volumes, the Ratio and the Schema, were specifically identified by Blackwell as two portions of a rational defence of ‘the Faith once delivered to the Saints’ against the two major enemies of the day – ‘Carnal Reason’ and religious enthusiasm, the former denying revelation, the latter claiming ‘New Divine Inspirations’.25 In his preface to the Ratio Sacra, Blackwell comments on the publication of his two volumes, indicating that the value of books is always judged by ‘the Genius of the Reader’ – but that his work, set against ‘the Atheistical, Irreligious, Subtile, Reasoning and Disputing Genius of the Day’, should fulfil a need, specifically by ‘shewing the World that the DEITY never did, nor possibly can, contradict the Noble Perfection of Solid Reason (a Beam from Himself) by any Principle or Precept in Revealed Religion’.26 The need is clear, Blackwell continues, inasmuch as the ‘Great Cry of the present Generation’ is that ‘Sense and Reason’ be the standards for the evaluation of all truths; and inasmuch as reason or, as he comments, pretended or ‘carnal’ reason, has been set against the teachings of ‘Reveal’d Religion’.27 Carnal reason suffers from an incapacity to assess the ‘Mysterious Truths and Doctrines of Revealed Religion’.28 It suffers, in other words, from presumption. Such truths as the doctrine of the Trinity are not accessible to reason and therefore are not capable of being judged by it. There cannot, in fact, be a rational account of revealed religion in the ‘Demonstrative Sense’ even though natural reason understood in and of itself and revealed religion are both from God. What Blackwell proposes, then, is not a demonstration of the truths of revealed religion but a rational discourse in which the harmony between all of the doctrines of revealed religion and ‘the solid Principles and Dictates of true and Genuine Reason’ is to be set forth.29 The Ratio Sacra and Schema Sacrum form two closely related parts of this theological programme; the former an apologetic treatise, the latter a positive exposition. The arguments found in the Ratio Sacra were to be directed toward 24. Torrance, Scottish Theology, p. 229. 25. Blackwell, Ratio Sacra, p. vii. 26. Ibid., fol. ¶1r–v. 27. Ibid., p. i. 28. Ibid., p. ii. 29. Ibid., p. ii–iii.

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three goals. Blackwell proposed, first, to show that all of the heresies and errors opposed to true religion are rooted in ‘the Imperfection & Corruption of Knowledge and Reason in fallen Man’; second, to show that this general problem underlay the errors of contemporary atheism, Deism, and Bourignonism; and third, to confirm ‘the two Grand Principles of Revealed Religion’, namely, the existence of God and the identity of Scripture as the Word of God.30 Reason and revelation must cohere inasmuch as both come from God and God is incapable of contradicting himself.31 The exposition of doctrine found in the Schema Sacrum took as its task the positive declaration of ‘the whole Complex Divine Scheme of Revealed Religion, as comprehending the Angelical and Humane Creation; The Divine Eternal Predestination with respect unto both; together with the gradual & wise Accomplishment of the several Decrees, contained therein’.32 By the accomplishment of the decrees, Blackwell meant the entire history of salvation doctrinally expressed from the covenant of works and the fall to the covenant of grace, to the incarnation and the work of redemption, all considered from the eternal decree through time to eternity in final communion with God. He was concerned to identify the ‘Eternal Causes & Springs’ of the whole order followed by the ‘High Glorious Designs & Ends’ appointed by God.33 The whole exposition would oblige ‘Solid Reason’, manifest the infinite divine wisdom in and through all of God’s works, and manifest God as the ‘Fountain of All True Light … whether Natural or Supernatural’.34 The Methodus Evangelica, albeit written separately and not as a formal part of Blackwell’s earlier project, occupies a third and fairly integral part of Blackwell’s theological programme. The Methodus Evangelica was, for the most part, a manual for preachers as described in its subtitle, ‘Discourses upon the Homiletical, Textual, and Occasional Method of Preaching, together with an Appendix concerning Lecturing, and an Account of the Matter, Dialect, and Frame conceived to be the most proper for Gospel-Sermons’. Although not specifically conceived as a third part following from the Ratio Sacra and Schema Sacrum, it stands in clear relation to the previous project. Here Blackwell assumes the model of natural and revealed religion that he had set forth in the earlier works, specifically reiterating his assumption that, given the fall and ‘the Glory of Redemption work being far greater than that of Creation, Natural Religion must quickly give way unto Revealed’.35 The Methodus’ place in Blackwell’s larger theological project is indicated in an introductory theological chapter that describes the task of preaching the gospel as an exposition of God’s ‘first and last Project’ or God’s

30. Ibid., p. ix. 31. Ibid., p. 2. 32. Ibid., p. ix. 33. Ibid., p. x. 34. Ibid. 35. Blackwell, Methodus, I.i (p. 1).



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‘unalterable Dispensation’.36 Blackwell implies two distinct orderings of God’s will. There is an ordering corresponding to the temporal order from creation, to redemption, to the consummation in which ‘the Perfections proper to Creation, must precede those adjusted unto Redemption, and those relative to Grace, must go before those concerned in the Perfection of Glory’.37 Once the fall occurred, however, in order to the ‘vindication’ of the glory of his wisdom, power and goodness, God revealed a ‘Scene of Redemption, infinitely more glorious than their highest Actings and Appearances in the Matter of Creation. Accordingly, the eternal Secret of Redeeming Counsel is proclaimed, first by God Himself unto trembling Man in the Garden: This Revelation the Apostle most justly and remarkably termeth the Glorious Gospel.’38 The task of the preacher is to instruct in this gospel, having fully apprised himself of the greater body of doctrine, particularly as framed in terms of the grand design of God’s work from eternity, through time, to eternity, and the apologetic needs of the church. The focus of the preaching would necessarily be Christ crucified.39

The Ratio Sacra and the Defence of Christianity From Blackwell’s perspective, the errors of Atheism and Deism, mentioned with Bourignonism as present dangers to Christianity, could be dispensed with rather summarily. These were older Satanic attempts to tear down the ‘pillars’ of religion, belief in the existence of God and in the truth of Scripture. Failing in his more rationalistic assaults, even in the modern revival of atheism and Deism, Satan had ‘next dispersed the artificial Composition of all Errours together; made up of gross and poisonous Principles, alluring Fancies, and bewitching Fooleries of Bourignonism’.40 The focus on Bourignonism, thus, evidences Blackwell’s concern for problems directly affecting the life of the church in his time, specifically for the effects of what James Hog called ‘enthusiastical delusions’ that were plaguing the Scottish church in the first decade of the eighteenth century.41 Given that Blackwell and Hog would be on opposite sides in the Marrow Controversy, the common enemy is of interest, as is their common intention to maintain confessional orthodoxy. 36. Ibid., p. 7. 37. Ibid., p. 3. 38. Ibid., p. 5. 39. Ibid., fol. A3r–v, A4v. 40. Blackwell, Ratio Sacra, p. 23. 41. J. Hog, Notes about the Spirit’s operations, for discovering from the Word, their nature and evidence. Together with diverse remarks, for detecting the enthusiastical delusions of the Cevenois, Antonia Bourignon, and Others (Edinburgh: John Moncur, 1709); also note, Andrew Honyman [Honeyman], Bourignonism displayed in a discovery and brief refutation of sundry gross errors maintain’d by Antonia Bourignon (Aberdeen: John Forbes, 1710). Also see Moffatt, ‘James Hog of Carnock’, pp. 153–71.

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As Pierre Bayle remarked, if Bourignon, who died in 1676, ‘was predestinated to be the Instrument of some Revolution of Religion, that Lot was not assigned to her Person, nor to the Ministry of her Voice: It will rather be an effect of her Writings; for during her Life she had but a very small number of Followers, who after her Death decreased every day in the Countries where she was most admired’ during her life. By contrast, he continues, it is not the same in Countries which were never honoured with her Presence: Her books have fructified beyond the Sea; some Persons in Scotland like her Doctrine, and have undertaken the Propagation of it. They have made themselves formidable; and it was thought necessary to take Pen in Hand in order to stop their Progress. They have taken the same Weapons to defend themselves; and that conflict of Books continues still.42

In Bayle’s assessment, Bourignon was ‘one of those devout Maids’ who claimed to have ‘particular Inspirations’ and was therefore ‘called a Fanatic’.43 As indicated by Bayle, the mystical doctrines of Antoinette Bourignon caused considerable controversy in Scotland as they spread not only among the laity but also among the clergy, both Presbyterian and Episcopalian, and even to the faculty of King’s College, Aberdeen, where James Garden, professor of divinity, was implicated as a follower of Bourignon. He was ejected in 1696 on grounds of failure to subscribe to the Westminster Confession.44 In 1700, a pamphlet written by George White, minister in Maryculter near Aberdeen, wrote of the many ‘well-meaning Persons, (and some of them not Unlearned)’ who had ‘vented many Errours, concerning the Holy Scriptures, the Gospell-Sacraments, Church-Government, the Pastorall-Office, and other most Sacred Establishments of the Christian Religion, which they had pik’t out of the Pamphlets that are said to be written by A. B. a Flandrian’.45 Of the clergy deposed in 1701, George Garden, younger brother of 42. Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr Peter Bayle (5 vols; London: J. J. and P. Knapton, et al., 2nd edn, 1734), vol. 2, s.v., ‘Bourignon’ (p. 114). 43. Ibid., p. 108. 44. Garden subsequently published his theology as Theologiae Purae ac Pacificae Vera ac solida Fundamenta sive Theologia Comparativa (1700; Amsterdam: Wetstenius, 1702; in translation, Comparative theology, or, the true and solid grounds of pure and peaceable theology, a subject very necessary, tho’ hitherto almost thoroughly neglected: proposed in a university discourse and now translated (London: s.n., 1700; 3rd edn, Edinburgh: T. and W. Ruddimans, 1735). Garden later edited a compilation of the works of Pierre Poiret, to which he also appended his own theology: Petri Poiret Bibliotheca Mysticorum Selecta: tribus constans partibus … praemittitur praeparationis loco Jac. Garden (Amsterdam: Wetstenius, 1708). On Poiret, see Richard A. Muller, ‘Found (No Thanks to Theodore Beza): One “Decretal” Theology’, CTJ, 32/1 (1997), pp. 145–51. 45. George White, D. D. An Advertisement Anent the Reading of the Books of Antonia Borignion (Aberdeen: John Forbes, 1700), p. 1; cf. MacEwen, Antoinette Bourignon, pp. 7–8, where the quotation is rather mangled.



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the ejected professor, was the author of an apology for Bourignon’s doctrines and the probable translator of her Light of the World.46 In the Apology, he argued that ‘all her Writings have no other Tendency but to awaken in Mens Hearts a Sense of those Divine Truths … that they cannot be saved without the Love of God [and] that their corrupt Nature now leads them only to love themselves and the Creatures’.47 Garden was deposed in 1701. Blackwell’s response to Bourignonism rested on the assumption that, given the divine origin of both, revelation rightly understood and reason rightly employed would not contradict one another.48 Paralleling this basic assumption, Blackwell also held, in accord with the older orthodoxy, that reason and natural religion ceased, at the moment of the fall, to have any value in the establishment of a right relationship with God. Reason, corrupted by the fall and beset by sights of the suffering of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked, turns fool and claims that there is not God. The various heresies, similarly, are wrought by corrupted reason bent toward folly by the temptations of the Serpent. Indeed, ‘Satan’s Improvement of corrupt Reason’ is the source of all such errors.49 Blackwell’s approach, therefore, was not a full blown rationalism and did not arise out of an espousal of rationalist philosophy – but it did contain what can be identified as rationalizing tendencies that proposed to save the mysteries of the faith by arguing their ultimate agreement with principles of natural reason. And in this approach he stepped beyond the typical sense of the limits of reason characteristic of the older orthodoxy. Bourignonism, in Blackwell’s view, is the ‘grand Project’ of Satan in the early eighteenth century inasmuch as its ‘contradictory and wild Composition of Tenets’ run counter to both ‘Divine Revelation’ and ‘solid Reason’.50 The danger of Bourignon’s ‘Extraordinary Thoughts and Fancies … especially being given out as the Product of Divine Inspiration’ is that they prey on unsuspecting minds and lead them away from the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture into one extravagancy after another.51 Her notion of the utter freedom and independence both of God and of human beings led her to proclaim that human freedom is God himself – a claim curiously juxtaposed with her assumption that God, who could foresee all 46. George Garden, An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon: in Four Parts (London: for D. Browmn, 1699); and see The Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Conveened at Edinburgh February 19. 1701, collected and extracted from the records, by the Clerk thereof (Edinburgh: Successors of Andrew Anderson (Edinburgh: George Mosman, 1701), p. xi, condemning the brothers (pp. 16–17) and deposing Garden (pp. 17–19); cf. Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vol. 1, p. 68; Graham, Social Life of Scotland, p. 395. 47. Garden, Apology, p. 9 48. Blackwell, Ratio Sacra, fol. ¶1v–¶2r (pp. i–viii); and idem, Schema Sacrum, fol. ¶1r–¶2r (pp. i–iii, 2, 5–6). 49. Blackwell, Ratio Sacra, pp. 8–9, 12. 50. Ibid., p. 26. 51. Ibid., p. 28.

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things, nonetheless willingly set aside his foreknowledge of future human acts. All of these claims are contrary to Scripture and reason: Scripture clearly states that God foreknows all things including human acts; reason bars the way to any identification of powers belonging to created beings with God himself. God is neither an ‘Idle Spectator’ nor somehow dependent on the will of creatures.52 Bourignon also made a whole series of ‘blasphemous’ assertions, including the claim that Christ has a ‘two-fold Body; the one Glorious, and the other Mortal’, the former drawn from Adam prior to sin, the other from the Virgin Mary. She also claimed that by becoming incarnate Christ took on ‘corrupt Stock’ and experienced rebellion against the will of God. With reference to Christ’s death, she claimed ‘that the Innocent cannot suffer for the Guilty’, that Christ did not fully satisfy for sin, that Calvin’s doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction came from Hell, and that the doctrine of the Trinity was a ‘Romish Error’.53 All of these claims, Blackwell argues, ‘overturn the very Foundation of the Christian Faith and Hope’ by opposing both the testimony of Scripture and the conclusions of ‘solid Reason’.54 Accordingly, the remedy for Bourignonism and other heresies lies in the right use of reason in relation to revelation. Blackwell identifies four steps to be taken by natural reason. First, natural reason properly exercised can recognize that God knows himself and his counsels perfectly and that, given this knowledge and the identity of God, God cannot be deceived and will not deceive others. This recognition on the part of reason provides such a solid foundation for faith in divine revelation ‘that Reason ever after this Principle, proclaimeth, that every Divine Sentence and Word ought to be unto Rational Man, as a Demonstration, and accordingly imbraced by him’.55 Sound reason will, therefore, approve divine revelation in its entirety – a point against the Deists, who reject some of the biblical revelation. Second, reason rightly exercised will also recognize that truths confirmed from beyond the powers of nature by miracles are divine truths. Specifically reason must concede the divine truth of the fulfilled prophecies of Scripture. Further, reason must accept as miraculous the conversion of human beings from corruption to true holiness. Inasmuch as both of these miracles belong to the testimony of Scripture, its authority ought not only to be accepted by reason, but reason ought also to acknowledge that this authority does not depend on reason but on God alone. Thus, ‘solid reason’ will recognize the ‘rational evidences of the Divinity of the Scriptures’, the consistency of reason with faith and ‘revealed religion’, and the proper place of reason ‘in its own Sphere’ attesting to God’s truth.56 A third step is the recognition that reason is an ‘Instrument in the Hand of the Spirit of God, for discovering and finding out, what Doctrines are truly revealed in the Holy Scriptures, together with the literal Import and Sense of 52. Ibid., pp. 30–1. 53. Ibid., pp. 36–8, 41. 54. Ibid., p. 39. 55. Ibid., p. 100. 56. Ibid., pp. 100–1.



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the same; and their consistency with one another’.57 This, Blackwell adds, is the Berean approach to Scripture recounted in Acts 17.10–12, which compared the truths of the Old Testament to the teachings of the Apostles. Once the Berean step has been accomplished, reason can move on to the fourth and final step, recognizing its limitations and therefore the impossibility of discerning unaided ‘the high Mysteries of the Adorable Trinity, the Incarnation and Death of the Son of God; together with the Glorious Effects of the same in Relation to the elect of the World’, and accept these mysteries as true on the ‘most rational and solid Grounds’. Specifically, reason can recognize that these mysteries do not contradict rational principles known to nature and that there is a ‘proportion’ between these mysteries and what reason knows of the ‘Infiniteness and Incomprehensibility of the Divine Nature and Perfections’.58

The Schema Sacrum and the Exposition of Positive Doctrine The introductory paragraphs of Blackwell’s Schema Sacrum indicate its connection with the Ratio Sacra. There, he indicates, he had declared ‘the Reasonableness of the Doctrines of Reveal’d Religion; Together with the Unreasonableness of all the opposite Heresies and Errours’.59 This next part of his work, the Schema Sacrum, would ‘descend from the more General and Abstract Reasonings … unto a more particular and close Opening up of the Several Parts of the Complex Divine Scheme of Reveal’d Religion’.60 Blackwell’s approach in the Schema Sacrum, despite the possible implication of the work’s promise of a ‘sacred scheme of natural and revealed religion’, was not to produce a two-fold theology, first laying out the naturally or rationally accessible doctrines concerning God and his works and then presenting the body of doctrine available to revelation alone – an approach evidenced in the works of such Reformed writers of the era as Van Til, Van den Honert, and the younger Turretin.61 His actual intention, rather, as also indicated in his title, was to present ‘a scriptural-rational account’ of theology, based on Scripture but argued in such a way as to be ‘equally agreeable to Divine Revelation and Reason’.62 The result is 57. Ibid., p. 101. 58. Ibid., pp. 102–3. 59. Blackwell, Schema Sacrum, p. 2. 60. Ibid. 61. Salomon van Til, Theologiae utriusque compendium cum naturalis tum revelatae (Leiden: Jordan Luchtmans, 1704; 3rd edn, Leiden: Samuel Luchtmans, 1719); Taco Hajo van den Honert, Theologia naturalis & revelata per aphorismos delineata, exs commentario de veris Dei viis (Amsterdam: R. & G. Wetstenius, 1715); Jean-Alphonse Turretin, Cogitationes et dissertationes theologicae. Quibus principia religionis, cum naturalis, tum revelatae, adstruuntur & defenditur; animique ad veritatis, pietatis, & pacis studium excitantur (2 vols; Geneva: Barrillot & Filii, 1737). 62. Blackwell, Schema Sacrum, p. 6.

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a rationally-argued body of revealed doctrine in accord with the rationalizing project proposed in the Ratio Sacra. Still, the rational character of the work fits well into the context of the early eighteenth century and the decline of traditional theological and philosophical models. If Blackwell’s rationalistic approach is not the rationalism of the Deists whose views he opposes, neither is it the traditional logic, tightly framed definitions, and neat scholastic formulae of his seventeenth-century orthodox forebears. Blackwell’s style is a rather flowery rhetorical prose, couched in the third person as directed toward an audience, and filled with metaphors and similes designed to persuade. Thus, for example, his initial critique of possible opponents is that they fail to consider the entirety of ‘this glorious Scheme; without considering its Connection or Proportion’ they look: upon this and the other part of Reveal’d Religion, without any serious Consideration of the whole; They instantly thereupon, with the base spirited unbelieving Spies (who scarce well viewed the Borders of the promised Land, but looked only upon the walled Cities and the Giants therein) presently take up an evil Report; Affirming that Reveal’d Religion, is a most Unaccountable, Contradictious and Impossible Systeme.63

The point has affinities with various forms of theodicy, but it also still fits within the traditional sense of revelation being above reason but not unreasonable. As to Blackwell’s doctrine, once his flowery rhetoric has been suitably digested, the formulations themselves are rather unremarkable in content, although clearly framed by his sense of the necessity of argument against the rationalist and materialist philosophies of his day. He begins his doctrine of God with emphasis on God as the creator of the world, ‘secure’ in his ‘Eternity, Independency, and Self-sufficiency’ from the vicissitudes of the world order.64 There is no extended exposition of the divine essence and attributes. Blackwell identifies God, by way of the doctrine of the Trinity, as not only Creator but also Redeemer and passes on to a prospectus of his theology in terms of a working-out of the eternal decree of God in creation. The creation of human beings receives its own chapter and prepares the way for a chapter dealing with ‘inferences from the Doctrine of Creation’.65 Here Blackwell treats various philosophical falsehoods of the time – the eternity of matter, the world order as a ‘fortuitous Concourse of Atoms’, and the impossibility of ‘Inanimate Matter’ causing anything.66 Arguably, it is this anti-rationalist and anti-materialist approach to God as Creator, specifically, to the argument that true religion is founded on the rationally accessible doctrine of a transcendent Creator and Redeemer, that provides the starting point for his theology. The doctrine of divine decrees that follows from the chapters on the Creator and creation focuses 63. Ibid., p. 3. 64. Ibid., p. 1. 65. Ibid., p. 37. 66. Ibid., pp. 38–9.



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on the identification of God as ‘Alwise Governour’ of the universe who preserves, rules, and redeems.67 Blackwell accepted the doctrine of an intra-trinitarian covenant of redemption, located it as one of the ‘gradations’ or degrees of the divine decree, and understood the covenant as the foundation of his doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction, but devoted little space to its exposition in his Schema Sacrum or in his Methodus Evangelica – a point of significant comparison to the approach of Thomas Boston.68 Whereas Boston identified the covenant of grace as the eternal covenant of redemption and argued that the parties in the covenant were God and Christ,69 Blackwell distinguished the two covenants and placed his systematic or dogmatic emphasis (in contrast to his homiletical emphasis) on the historical economy of the covenant of grace – with the implication that the parties in the covenant were God and God’s elect throughout history. In other words, Blackwell held to a three-covenant scheme, while Boston argues two covenants only, although the two agreed that Christ’s atoning work was to be grounded in an eternal covenant.70 The conditions required of the elect in the covenant of grace, love and gratitude to God, are ‘freely wrought in them by supernatural Grace’.71 Blackwell’s approach looked in two directions: on the one hand, it mirrored the economic emphases of seventeenthcentury federal thought as found in Cocceius’s and (even more in) Witsius’s approaches to the doctrine; while, on the other hand, its focus on the concreteness of the biblical history suited the rational tone of his argumentation. Significantly, Blackwell did not view these or, indeed, other differences between his approach and that of other Reformed writers to be a matter for contention.72 Blackwell also, not all that different from the ‘Marrow’ theologians, linked his covenantal approach to a soteriological particularism at the same time that he understood the role of Christ as the Mediator of the covenant of grace who

67. Ibid., pp. 55–83. 68. Ibid., pp. 117, 242; Blackwell, Methodus Evangelica, pp. 175–6; cf. T. Boston, An illustration of the doctrines of the Christian religion, with respect to faith and practice, upon the plan of the assembly’s shorter catechism. Comprehending a complete body of divinity. Now first published from the manuscripts of … Thomas Boston (3 vols; Edinburgh: John Reid, 1773), vol. 1, pp. 429, 431, 433, etc. (hereinafter cited as Body of Divinity); also, idem, A view of the covenant of grace from the sacred records. Wherein the parties in that covenant, the making of it, its parts conditionary and promissory, and the administration thereof are distinctly considered (Glasgow: for William Walker, 1767), pp. 21, 22, 30–1, 33–6, 53. A similar stress on the covenant of redemption can be seen in J. Hog, The Covenants of Redemption and Grace Displayed (Edinburgh: John Monour, 1707). 69. Boston, Body of Divinity, vol. 1, pp. 439–48, 455. 70. Cf. VanDoodewaard, Marrow Controversy, p. 44, who perhaps over-stresses the difference between Blackwell and Boston on the issue. 71. Blackwell, Schema Sacrum, pp. 229–30; cf. pp. 220–40, 240–65 on the eternal foundation of the covenant and its dispensations. 72. Ibid., p. 294; cf. Lachman, Marrow Controversy, p. 180.

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rendered an all-sufficient satisfaction for sin.73 He clearly stated that the covenant of grace, unlike the covenant of works, is not ‘Universal, respecting all Mankind’,74 but corresponds with the divine will to elect some to salvation. Nonetheless he associated the ‘External Dispensation’ of the covenant with the ‘Visible Church’ and argued that God, throughout the history of the administration of the covenant, had removed temporal obstacles to the progress of ‘His Church and Gospel’.75 In other words, there is, in the temporal order, a series of secondary causes and means that are an ‘effectual Provision … for the External Dispensation of the Covenant of Grace’, namely, the Word, the sacraments, and prayer.76 Blackwell does not appear to have taken up the question of hypothetical universalism and the limitation of efficacy of Christ’s satisfaction, although he consistently refers to Christ’s sacrifice as ‘all-sufficient’, ‘full’, ‘suitable’, ‘compleat’, of ‘infinite value’, and necessary to be held forth as Saviour to ‘lost Sinners’, albeit saving or effective only for the elect.77 Boston, Erskine and Fisher are far clearer on the issue that Christ satisfied for the elect alone, arguing that Christ’s satisfaction and his intercession for the elect are equal in extent.78 Blackwell is also rather vague about the structure of the ordo salutis, an issue that would become a primary source of contention after the Auchterarder Creed in the debate between Hadow and the Marrow-men. Blackwell begins his approach to the application of the covenant of grace by identifying Word and sacrament as visible or external means by which the Spirit communicates spiritual life, conforming believers gradually to the ‘Knowledge, Righteousness, and Holiness’ to be perfected in heaven.79 This new life begins with regeneration. Regeneration yields a new frame of mind, will and affections, open to God’s truth, accompanied by a new spirit of love to God and hatred of sin, leading toward sanctification.80 Equally, perhaps more significantly, Blackwell does not argue a temporal sequence in the order of salvation and, at least in the order of his argument, places faith prior to repentance: Faith, Repentance, and a new Obedience … are the immediate necessary native Product of the … Principle of spiritual Life, which Three being the great Pre-requisites, qualifying the Elect for the actual Reception of the Blessings of the Covenant; accordingly the Persons so qualified are thereupon immediately Justified, Adopted, Sanctified, and in due time Glorified.81 73. Ibid., pp. 13–132, 160–2, 229, 231, 233; cf. Ratio Sacra, pp. 164, 167–8. 74. Ibid., p. 227; so also Boston, Body of Divinity, vol. 1, p. 460. 75. Ibid., p. 273. 76. Ibid., pp. 274–5. 77. Cf. Ibid., pp. 142, 262, 265; Methodus Evangelica, pp. 172, 175, 176–7, 178, 184. 78. Boston, Body of Divinity, vol. 2, pp. 13–16; E. Erskine and J. Fisher, The Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism Explained, by Way of Question and Answer (2 vols; Falkirk: Patrick Mair, 11th edn, 1792), Q. 25, q. 39 (vol. 1, p. 153). 79. Blackwell, Schema Sacrum, p. 279. 80. Ibid., pp. 279–80, 282–3. 81. Blackwell, Schema Sacrum, pp. 283–4; on the issue of the ordo salutis in the Marrow



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Even so Blackwell, writing before the outbreak of the Marrow Controversy, also did not debate the issues of the free offer of grace and assurance of salvation: he neither broadens nor restricts the offer of grace and he does not argue against a subjective assurance – indeed he appears to favour the latter, as is fairly evident also in his Methodus – and he does not press the issue of the relationship of repentance to justification that lay at the heart of the debates over Simpson’s theology, the Auchterarder Creed or the Marrow. He argued that reason could not fairly object to the understanding of salvation as an impartation of the ‘Principle of spiritual Life’, yielding ‘Faith, Repentance and new Obedience’,82 nor could a reasonable person doubt that these effects of the gracious work of the Spirit were the ‘Scripture Pre-requisites, on the Part of elect sinners, in Order to the great Salvation design’d in [the] Covenant’.83 Blackwell emphasized the inward life of grace as necessary to salvation, but he concluded with what is not only a rather rationalistic but also perhaps a somewhat legalistic stress on personal holiness in one’s nature, disposition and conduct, evidenced in performance of the personal and public duties of religion, and obedience to the law as necessarily belonging to the accomplishment of salvation.84 Still, one may ask just how different this approach is in its implications from the stress of the Boston and the Marrow theologians on objective and subjective assurance: as Macleod argued, ‘those who opposed the Marrowmen accepted the legitimacy and urgency of the gospel call: they questioned only the terms in which that offer was expressed.’85

The Methodus Evangelica and the Task of Preaching After a substantial discussion of the theological framework of preaching and the ‘scriptural qualifications’ for ministers, Blackwell’s Methodus introduces ‘the right method of preaching’ with more than 20 pages of comment on ‘unfaithful Ways and improper Methods of Preaching the Glorious Gospel’.86 The conjunction of revelation and reason argued in his previous works remains the premise of his Methodus, where he proposes to present ‘the True Scriptural-Rational Way of Preaching the Gospel’. Blackwell evidences a deep sense of the problem of overly generalized preaching, whether by explaining the truths of Christianity without application, examination, reproof, consolation or exhortation. Gospel truth must be brought ‘close home to Conscience’.87 Similarly, a sermon that instructs in the Controversy, see McGowan, Federal Theology, pp. 175–81. 82. Ibid., pp. 283–4. 83. Ibid., p. 287. 84. Blackwell, Schema Sacrum, pp. 302–11, 317. 85. Macleod, ‘Dr. T. F. Torrance and Scottish Theology’, p. 63; cf. Lachman, Marrow Controversy, pp. 179–81, 183–4, arguing clearer precedent for Blackwell’s later opposition to the Marrow; and note the analysis of Boston in McGowan, Federal Theology, pp. 194–6. 86. Blackwell, Methodus Evangelica, II.i (pp. 28–46). 87. Ibid., p. 31.

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marks or signs of grace but fails to instruct in the meaning of ‘true Obedience’ or ‘how the Soul must solidly assent’ to the biblical truths of human sin and ‘Christ’s Fulness’ is also unsuitable to the preaching of the gospel.88 In sum: a general superficial Way of preaching the Gospel, allows all sorts of Hearers carnal Ease and Security; no ways alarming the Profane, nor discovering the Unsoundness of the Hypocrite, nor stirring up the slothful and decayed Christian. And therefore considering the Import of the foresaid Commandment of our Lord’s, to compel Sinners to come in; it must certainly still be the Ministers Duty … by the clearest and closest Gospel-Sermons and Arguments, to strive with their Hearers, and that whether a Sovereign God condescend or not, to strive with them by his Spirit.89

Inasmuch as the ‘Preaching of Christ’ is ‘the Grand Design of the Gospel’, sermons ought to press the point that ‘Believers Choice of [Christ] … must be the wisest and best Choice of all others in the World’.90 There are, accordingly, two aspects to the ‘Gospel-Dispensation’ that occurs in Christian preaching – namely, an address to believers that enjoins them to rejoice ‘in their Choice’ through an ever increasing love and enjoyment of Christ and an address ‘to Unbelievers, towards compelling them to come in’ and to fall in love with Christ and embrace him.91 Blackwell offers six points to be used to motivate unbelievers: 1. The great Glory and Excellency of Christ’s Person. 2. The Greatness of his Love to Sinners. 3. The alluring Fulness and Suitableness of his Mediatory Offices. 4. The obliging Methods and Ways of his executing the same. 5. The Greatness of the Salvation, which he brings alone with him. And, 6. The absolute Necessity of coming to Christ for this Salvation, there being no other Name under Heaven given among Men for that end.92

The reasonableness of this approach, he continues, ought to be evident. The rational mind needs to be given a clear sense of its proper object and of the effects of choosing it. All human beings have an ‘innate Desire toward Happiness’ and operate on the basis of a ‘Principle of Self-Preservation’.93 Far from disdaining a universal preaching and a free offer, Blackwell appears to point rather far in the opposite direction, interpreting the offer of salvation as a rational incentive. His advice to preachers consists in presenting truths that offer motivations and

88. Ibid., p. 33. 89. Ibid., p. 34. 90. Ibid., p. 72. 91. Ibid., pp. 72, 73. 92. Ibid., p. 74. 93. Ibid., p. 75.



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rational persuasions: Christ is to be manifest in preaching as the one whose power enlivens and converts the sinner.94 Of course, once past this nearly-Arminian statement of homiletical motivation, Blackwell makes clear that the ‘grand Designs of a Gospel-Ministry’ conform to the confessional assumptions of the Reformed as well as to the details of his covenantal theology and his doctrine of particular redemption. We notice here a distinct shift in emphasis from what was seen in the Schema Sacrum: the preaching of covenant, in Blackwell’s view, ought to stress the eternal covenant of redemption and the ground of salvation in Christ as the divine-human Mediator constituted to perform the work of satisfaction for sin.95 There are three goals of Gospel-preaching: the conversion of the elect, the edification of the elect, and ‘the rendering of the remaining unbelieving impenitent part of the Gospel Hearers, to the Praise of Glorious Justice, greatly inexcusable beyond all others in the World’.96 Those unbelievers who will respond to the incentives and motivations of rational preaching are the as yet unconverted elect. Blackwell concludes that preachers need to recognize that their congregations include the unconverted elect, the converted, and ‘rebellious Sinners, who obstinately refuse to be reclaimed by any means whatsoever’.97 Just as the Marrow-men easily vindicated themselves of accusations of antinomianism, Blackwell, despite his rationalistic approach, can fairly easily be cleared from charges of nomism and of leaning toward the Moderatism of the mid-eighteenth century.98

Conclusions Blackwell’s threefold effort in the Ratio, the Schema and the Methodus was not appreciated in all circles. William Gordon, his opponent in debate over the dating of Christmas, commented sarcastically that ‘having in [his] Ratio sacra defeated all the Rationalists, and unfolded the mysterious Decrees of Heaven, and the whole Oeconomy of divine Providence in [his] Schema sacrum’, Blackwell had gone on in his Methodus Evangelica to show ‘how far [he was] superior to the whole Kirk of Scotland, by prescribing Methods to her by which she is to preach the Gospel’.99 Of the three works, only the Schema saw more than one edition, and it achieved a certain popularity as an exposition of basic Christian doctrine. 94. Ibid., p. 81. 95. Ibid., pp. 172, 175–9. 96. Ibid., p. 147. 97. Ibid., p. 147. 98. Cf. Philip Ryken, Thomas Boston as Preacher of the Fourfold State (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1999), pp. 43–9; differing with VanDoodewaard, Marrow Controversy, pp. 44–5. Note that this reading of Blackwell’s theology indicates a distinction between his teaching and that of James Hadow, the latter’s theology exhibiting fairly clear nomist or legalist tendencies: see McGowan, Federal Theology, pp. 17, Philip 7–82. 99. Gordon, A Letter to Mr. Thomas Blackwell, p. 33.

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The rationalistic mode of Blackwell’s thought was neither a sign of a declining interest in confessional orthodoxy nor an indication that reason provided a foundation for theological exposition. Blackwell’s approach tended, instead, to minimize the mysterious and to offer an overtly reasonable statement of what many of his Reformed predecessors would have identified as truths beyond reason, albeit not unreasonable. In other words, Blackwell did not use rational argumentation either to derive or to demonstrate the truth of his doctrinal assumptions. His rather flowery expositions, moreover, neither borrowed on the older scholastic forms of quaestio and disputatio nor employed the logical apparatus of the older scholasticism, nor evidenced significant interest in the technical terms and distinctions used by the older scholastic theology. For Blackwell, not only was the necessity of supernatural revelation a rational truth, but even what he identified as ‘the eternal Secret Redeeming Counsel’,100 once proclaimed, was to be treated as eminently reasonable. The irony embodied in his efforts is that his intention to oppose the rational philosophy of the Deists led to a form of doctrinal rationalism in his own formulations. The boundary between the rational and the supernatural, so evident in Reformed orthodoxy, is blurred and Blackwell’s approach evidences the demise of scholastic method at the same time that it evidences the intention to maintain and safeguard a form of confessional orthodoxy. Still, despite his rationalistic tendencies, the larger portion of Blackwell’s argumentation hardly points in the direction of the rationalistic latitudinarianism of the mid-century Moderates. Unlike them, he held to the three-covenant structure of high orthodox federal theology, albeit without great emphasis on the eternal covenant of redemption.101 He also pointedly argued the satisfaction theory of Christ’s atonement against the ‘Socinians and Bourigonists’.102 As for Blackwell’s relationship to later Hyper-Calvinism – to the extent that he held to a strongly enunciated doctrine of double predestination, he conforms to the model of the orthodox eighteenth-century ‘Calvinist’, but his doctrine of election and reprobation was formulated in a generally infralapsarian manner,103 and his covenantal schema, unlike that of many of those labelled Hyper-Calvinist, concentrated on a temporal two-covenant model in which human beings are parties to the covenants, whether of works or of grace. His method of preaching intended not only the display of the gospel and of Christian doctrine but also direct address to sinners for the sake of inculcating faith, sincere repentance, and moral amendment of life. The refusals of invitations or offers of grace characteristic of what is usually identified as Hyper-Calvinism are absent. In addition, both his scheme of preaching and the doctrinal model pursued in his Schema Sacrum assume the distinction between the eternal decree and its temporal execution 100. Blackwell, Methodus Evangelica, p. 5. 101. Blackwell, Schema Sacrum, pp. 117–18, 175 (covenant of redemption), 160–86 (covenant of works), 220–65 (covenant of grace). 102. Ibid., pp. 93, 172–7. 103. Ibid., pp. 94, 100–5.



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and place considerable emphasis on the temporal execution, specifically in faith, repentance, justification, and the inculcation of ‘true holiness’ as characteristic of right religion – in other words the notion of eternal justification, also a characteristic doctrine of Hyper-Calvinism, is absent from Blackwell’s theology as well.104 From a methodological and stylistic perspective, Blackwell’s theology stands in considerable contrast to the sparser prose and more clearly outlined and arranged (even scholastic) argumentation of Boston’s Body of Divinity or the terse definitions found in the Erskine-Fisher Catechism Explained. The point can be made, then, that the style and method of Marrow-men and of the later Secession theology echoed more clearly that of seventeenth-century scholastics, however difficult it may be to assess which side of the debate was closer doctrinally to the older tradition of Reformed orthodoxy. Of course, the fact remains that Blackwell stood, ecclesially, on the side of Hadow and the majority of Scottish clergy against the supporters of the Marrow. Given the narrow date-range of his theological publications (1710–12), the absence of pointed address in those works to the issues that would be taken up in Marrow Controversy, the generally irenic tone of his comments on differences among Reformed theologians, and the absence as well of any further doctrinal pronouncements from his pen, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assess Blackwell’s precise theological relationship to the controversy or, indeed, his motivations for voting to suppress the Marrow, other than the presence of what several of his associated identified as problematic expressions in the book and worries about antinomianism in the wake of the incident of the Auchterarder Creed.105 From his published writings, Blackwell appears as a rationalistic or rationalizing supporter of the broad outlines of a traditional orthodoxy, lacking both the technical language of the older scholastics and the passion either of the older Puritan and Presbyterian piety or of the homiletical works of the Marrow-men and the Secession, and attempting to find a rational ground for revealed theology in order to preserve it both from the religious enthusiasts of the day and from the full-blown rationalism of the Deists.

104. Cf. Ibid., pp. 286–99, 306–10; with Blackwell, Methodus Evangelica, pp. 9–10. 105. On these expressions, see VanDoodewaard, Marrow Controversy, pp. 57–8.

Chapter 14 THE ACT OR HABIT OF FAITH? ALEX ANDER C OM R I E ’ S I N T E R P R E TAT IO N O F H E I D E L B E R G C AT E C H I SM Q U E ST IO N 2 0

Gerrit A. van den Brink Since the famous synod of Dort (1618/19) the Reformed Church in the Netherlands has accepted three national confessional documents: the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort. Of these the Heidelberg Catechism is perhaps the most well-known. One of the many ministers who published a commentary on this Catechism was Alexander Comrie (1706–74).1 Born in Scotland, Comrie relocated to the Netherlands in his early twenties, and eventually received his doctorate in theology at Leiden University. In 1735 he accepted a call to the pastorate in Woubrugge, where he remained for nearly four decades. In his congregation in Woubrugge, Comrie preached on Lord’s Days 1–7 (questions 1–23) of the catechism over a period of about 15 months. In 1753 he reworked and published these sermons in a book of more than 500 pages.2 Unlike most other published commentaries on the catechism, this one provoked considerable controversy. University professors Joan van den Honert (1693–1758) and Jan Jacob Schultens (1716–78), among others, felt it necessary to express their concerns over points which Comrie made. Especially controversial was Comrie’s explanation of question and answer 20, belonging to Lord’s Day 7. The question reads: ‘Are all men, then, saved by Christ, as they have perished by Adam?’ The 1. On Comrie see especially J. R. Beeke, s.v. ‘Comrie, Alexander’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); A. G. Honig, Alexander Comrie (Utrecht: Honig, 1892); G. A. van den Brink, ‘Comrie en het antinomianisme’, Documentatieblad Nadere Reformatie 30.2 (2006), pp. 112–56; G. A. van den Brink, ‘“Elke daad is een werk”, Alexander Comrie (1706–1774) over de verschillen tussen de remonstrantse en de gereformeerde rechtvaardigingsleer’, Theologia Reformatia 55.2 (2012): pp. 146–64. 2. A Comrie, Stellige en praktikale verklaaringe van den Heidelbergschen catechismus, volgens de leere en de gronden der reformatie (Leiden and Amsterdam: Hasebroek & Byl, 1753). In this chapter, I refer to the 1938 edition: Alexander Comrie, Stellige en practikale verklaring van den Heidelbergschen Catechismus (Rotterdam: De Banier, 1938).

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Answer: ‘No, only such as by true faith are engrafted into him, and receive all his benefits.’3 The controversy over Comrie’s treatment of this question revolved around his interpretation of ‘faith.’ According to Comrie, the word ‘faith’ in question 20 of the catechism had to be read in a specific sense: it is not meant to refer to the act of faith, but to the habit of faith. It is not the human deed of believing (actus) which is in view here; rather, ‘faith’ has reference to the potency, ability or faculty (habitus) which makes the act of believing possible.4 To be sure, it was not the distinction itself which engendered opposition.5 Schultens and Van den Honert likewise differentiated between the habit and act of faith. Against Arminianism, the distinction between habit and act helped orthodox Reformed thinkers stress that faith is not a capacity of natural man, but a gift of God.6 The distinction also helped make clear that one does not need to believe uninterruptedly in order to be a believer. When one sleeps, or even when one falls into sin, one continues to be a believer by virtue of the habit of faith.7 What caused conflict was the way in which Comrie related this distinction to the doctrine of union with Christ. In his view, not the act but the habit of faith is the instrument by which the believer is united with Christ.8 He argues that the authors of the catechism ‘place the engrafting of the elect into Christ by infused faith [i.e., the habit] before that faith [i.e., the act] can be found in them, demonstrating itself by works or effectual deeds’.9 Van den Honert and Schultens did not agree. In their opinion, Heidelberg 3. P. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes (3 vols; repr., New York: Harper & Brothers, 1919), vol. 3, p. 313. 4. Comrie, Catechismus, pp. xxviii, 430, 432. 5. M. Wisse, ‘Habitus Fidei: An Essay on the History of a Concept,’ SJT 56, 2 (2003): pp. 172–89. Cf. C. Graafland, De Zekerheid van het geloof (Amsterdam: Bolland 1977), p. 234. 6. Locus probans is Eph. 2.8. Cf. Canons of Dort, I.5 in Schaff, Creeds, vol. 3, pp. 552, 582. See also Wisse, Habitus fidei, p. 180: ‘… in regeneration, the habit of faith was given to the elect and encompassed the gift of being able to believe.’ 7. For example Nationalis Acta Synodi Dordrechtanae (Leiden: Elsevir, 1620), p. 155 (third pagination): ‘Itaque fides, qua primum convertimur, & a qua fideles nominamur, non est actus, sed habitus, a Deo infusus […] Denique sine fide nemo placere potest Deo […] Atqui sine actu fidei Deo nihilominus placuere dormientes, aut aliud quam Euangelium meditantes, fideles universi, ut Noachus in Arca, Petrus in carcere […] aliorumque fidelium est ratio: & eorum etiam qui Lethargo immoriuntur: qui sine fide & gratia Dei alias perirent.’ Wisse, Habitus fidei, p. 187. 8. Comrie, Catechismus, p. 426. 9. Comrie, Catechismus, p. 412: ‘[De opstellers van de HC] zeggen niet: die Christus en al Zijn weldaden door een oprecht geloof aannemen en dus door dat geloof Hem ingelijfd worden, maar juist anders om: die Hem door een oprecht geloof worden ingelijfd en al Zijn weldaden aannemen. Stellende dus de in­lijving van de uitverkorenen in Christus door het ingestorte geloof, eer dat dat geloof in hen kan bevonden worden, zich in werkzame of uitwerkende daden te vertoonen.’ See also pp. 416–17.



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Catechism q. 20 has to be interpreted as follows. God grants the habit of faith to the elect, which enables them to believe. Next, they actually believe in Christ, by which act of faith they are united with him. Thanks to this union they receive all his benefits. So, to have the habit of faith is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition, of union with Christ. Within Comrie’s eighteenth-century Dutch context, his interpretation of Heidelberg Catechism q. 20 was a novelty. The view of his opponents can be regarded as the mainstream view within Dutch reformed orthodoxy. The famous Leiden professor Herman Witsius (1636–1708), for example, had stressed: ‘none will deny, that in the matter of justification “faith” very frequently, if not for the most part, denotes some act of the man who is justified and by which he is justified.’10 However, it is not likely that Comrie came to his particular view wholly independently. Until now, little investigation has been done into possible sources of Comrie’s view. Comrie’s contemporary opponents provided no explicit help in determining influences upon Comrie. They simply insinuated that Comrie had succumbed to antinomianism.11 Although (of course) Comrie rejected this accusation vehemently, it may provide a clue about where to search for possible sources which shaped Comrie’s conviction on the act/habit of faith and union with Christ.

John Cotton on Faith in Relation to Union, Justification and Imputation Antinomianism appeared several times within Reformed circles of the seventeenth century. The first and the most vehement controversy occurred in Massachusetts in New England during the years 1636–38.12 The three central antinomian figures in this controversy were the laywoman Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643), the politician Henry Vane (1616–62) and the minister John Cotton (1585–1652).13 In 10. Witsius, Animadversiones Irenicae, pp. 105–6; in G. A. van den Brink, Herman Witsius en het Antinomianisme (Apeldoorn: PIRef 2008), p. 300: ‘Sed & nemo inificiabitur, fidem in justificationis caussa saepenumero, si non plerumque, denotare actionem aliquam hominis qui justificatur, & qua justificatur, Rom.1.17. iii.22. iv.3.5 Gal.ii.16. & innumeris aliis locis.’ 11. Brief van een Vrient uit Utrecht aan een Vrient te Zwolle wegens de beschuldiging van J. v. d. Honert tegen N. Holtius en A. Comrie (Amsterdam: Byl, 1756), p. 3, 44; and in Comrie, Brief over de Rechtvaerdigmakinge (Amsterdam: Byl, 1761), p. 71. See also J. J. Schultens, Uitvoerige Waarschuuwinge (Leiden: Kallewier, 1755), p. 495. 12. D. D. Hall, The Antinomian Controversy 1636–1638 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990); Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts 1636–1641 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 1. 13. On Cotton see E. H. Emerson, John Cotton (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965); E. J. Battis, Saints and sectaries, pp. 18–36; Bremer, s.v. ‘Cotton, John’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); J. R. Beeke and R. J. Peterson, ‘John Cotton’, in Meet the Puritans (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books 2006),

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the end, the controversy became so serious that it brought the young colony to the brink of destruction.14 For our purpose, John Cotton is especially important. Though an internationally renowned figure, Cotton became more and more suspected by his colleagues, Thomas Shepard (1605–1649) and Peter Bulkeley (1584–1659). Their central concern in the antinomian controversy revolved around the issue of union with Christ vis-à-vis faith. Hutchinson’s view of union as ‘an union with Christ by the Spirit giving Faith, as did precede the acting of Faith upon Christ’ was, in their view, ‘the Trojan Horse, out of which all the erroneous Opinions and differences of the Countrey did issue forth’.15 In what follows, I shall give an overview of Cotton’s views on the relation of faith (1) to union with Christ, (2) to justification, and (3) to imputation.16 Cotton describes his position on the believer’s union with Christ with the use of Aristotelian categories of causality: ‘The spirit of God is the principall and next Efficient cause [of union with Christ], the worke of Grace the Instrumentall Cause: The humbled Sinner, the materiall Cause: The Grace (or Habit) of Faith the Formall Cause. The Glory of Grace, and the Salvation of the Sinner, the finall Cause.’17 What does Cotton mean when he identifies the habit of faith as the formal cause of union with Christ? A few things must be noted before answering that question. First, Cotton refuses to label faith as the instrumental cause of union with Christ. Considering that causa instrumentalis is a subcategory of causa efficiens, it is clear that he does not allow faith to play any preparatory role in the process of union with Christ. Elsewhere, he states: ‘Faith is an instrument to receive the righteousnesse of Christ applyed to us of God, for our Justification: but not properly an instrumentall cause.’18 Although ‘this Doctrine is opposite unto the streame of all the Learned’ who ‘doe generally make Faith an instrumentall cause of our justification’, Cotton refuses to join them.19 Second, Cotton explicitly distinguishes between the act and habit of faith. When he discusses the role of faith for union with Christ, he gives the act of faith no role at all; it is only the grace or habit of faith which is a cause. The kind of causality which Cotton grants to the habit of faith is the formal pp. 153–63; Winship, Making Heretics, pp. 28–37; T. D. Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain, Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 211–305. 14. Winship, Making Heretics, 144. 15. Cotton’s assessment: John Cotton, ‘The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, pp. 396–438 (414). 16. See also William K. B. Stoever, ‘Nature, Grace and John Cotton: The Theological Dimension in the New England Antinomian Controversy’, CH 44.1 (1975), pp. 22–33. 17. J. Cotton and P. Bulkely, ‘Peter Bulkeley and John Cotton: On Union with Christ’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, pp. 34–42 (39). 18. Cotton, ‘The Way Cleared’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 402. 19. J. Cotton, ‘A Conference … Held at Boston’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, pp. 173–98 (195).



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cause. In the Aristotelian scheme, the forma or the formal cause is, roughly put, the essence of something, i.e. that which makes something what it is. Cotton tries to explain his view as follows: Faith in union is […] not [effectual] as an efficient Cause to Effect the union, but as a Formall cause to constitute the union: which it doth not by Acting upon christ unto union, but by acting upon the Matter, as a consentany Argument, consenting to dwell in the humbled soule where it is, as a forme in the Formatum, so making the soule alive in christ. 2. as a Consentany Argument unto Christ, as consenting to union with christ, as an Empty vessel is a consentany Argument to receive Oyle poured into it. […] As Forma dat Esse formato, So doeth Faith to a true Faithfull christian making him alive in Christ, and so a member of him.20

Cotton further elucidates his view on the relation of faith and union with Christ by drawing an analogy to the way in which human beings are united with Adam.21 Every individual is united with Adam, the head and principal of the human race. This unity stems from the essence of humanity, that is, it stems from being an animal rationalis as such. It is, however, not any rational act which makes somebody a human being; the potency or habit to act rationally is constitutive. The implications of Cotton’s analogy for the theological question at hand is clear: Anima rationalis makes a man to be what he is, a man, and so united to Adam, as a member and Hayre [heir] of his, though he have not yet putt forth any Rationall act upon Adam, but upon it owne Body, consenting to dwell in it, and so making it a man. So Faith maketh a christian man that which he is, a true christian and so united to christ as a member and Hayre of his [though] he have not yet putt forth an Act of Beleiving upon christ, but the Act of a Consentany Argument upon the person in whom it is and consenteth to be.22

To summarize, the essence of a Christian is that he is united with Christ. Being a Christian means to have the habit of faith. Therefore, the habit of faith is the formal cause of union with Christ.23 Cotton understands faith ‘as a fit disposition 20. Cotton, ‘Bulkeley and Cotton on Union’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 38. 21. Cf. J. Rosenmeier, ‘New Englands’s Perfection: The Image of Adam and the Image of Christ in the Antinomian Crisis, 1634 to 1638’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 27 (1970), pp. 435–59. 22. Cotton, ‘Bulkeley and Cotton on Union’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 39; see also p. 38: ‘As Anima rationalis giveth being to a man and so union with the first Adam: so doeth Faith give Being to a christian and so union with Christ.’ See also Cotton, The Covenant of Grace (London: Eglesfield 1655), pp. 32–3. 23. Cotton, ‘Bulkeley and Cotton on Union’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 38: ‘It is true, Faith doeth not give the forme to this union: for it self is the forme.’

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of the subject to be justified, then as a proper instrumentall cause of our justification’.24 Cotton draws several doctrinal consequences from these premises. First, acts of faith are in no way constitutive of mystical union with Christ. This union is completed before any human act of believing takes place.25 Second, there is no structural difference between regeneration and unity with Christ: these terms are in Cotton’s view equivalent.26 What Cotton states about the relation between faith and union with Christ is mutatis mutandis applicable to the relation of faith and justification. Cotton often speaks of ‘passive faith’.27 It is not the act but the (passive) habit of faith that justifies. Otherwise, young children could not be saved, for they are not able to produce the act of believing. However, because they can have the habit of faith, elect children will be justified if they die in a young age.28 ‘We are justified as soone as by an habit of faith we are alive in Christ; in the first moment of our conversion, before Faith hath put forth any act: as children also are justified by the habit of faith.’ During the synod Cotton initially went even further than this, making justification prior to both the act and habit of faith: ‘God may bee said to justifie me before the habit, or act of Faith, and the habit is the effect of my Justification.’29 A full day of discussion followed. The gap between Cotton and his fellow ministers seemed unbridgeable.30 However, the next day Cotton declared that he had changed his mind. Although the elders accepted his change of mind gladly, Thomas Shepard at least was not convinced. 31 Cotton’s position remained difficult. He knew that his doctrine (the precedence of justification to faith) was 24. Cotton, ‘The Way Cleared’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 402. 25. On the question ‘Whether our Union with Christ be compleat before and without Faith’, Cotton responded: ‘Not without, nor before the habit (or gift) of Faith, but before the act of Faith.’ Cotton, ‘The Way Cleared’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 401. 26. Cotton, ‘The Way Cleared’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 401: ‘For indeed I looked at Union with Christ, as equipollent to Regeneration. And looke as in Generation we are in a passive way united to Adam: so in Regeneration wee are united to Christ. And as the soule habet se mere passive (in the judgment of our best Divines) in Regeneration, so also in union.’ 27. Cotton, ‘Bulkeley and Cotton on Union’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 45; idem, ‘Mr Cottons Rejoynder’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, pp. 78–151 (143); idem, ‘Conference’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, pp. 195–8. 28. Cotton, ‘Conference’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, pp. 195–6. 29. Cotton, ‘The Way Cleared’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 411; in this passage Cotton refers to the ‘dispute in the Synod’. 30. Winship, Making Heretics, p. 160. 31. Winship, Making Heretics, 161; Cotton, ‘The Way Cleared’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 411: ‘I the next morning did of my self freely declare to them publikly, my consent with them in the point, which (as the professed) they gladly accepted’; cf. Robert Baillie, A dissuasive from the errours of the time vvherein the tenets of the principall sects, especially of the independents, are drawn together (London: S. Gellibrand 1646), p. 28. A



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typically associated with antinomianism.32 To defend his view, Cotton referred to authoritative theologians: William Twisse (1578–1646), Daniel Chamier (1564– 1621), William Ames (1576–1633) and William Pemble (1591–1623).33 The third point worthy of attention (next to union and justification) in Cotton’s views is the relation between faith and imputation. Does the imputation of Christ’s righteousness precede the gift of faith, or follow? The common Reformed view was that faith precedes imputation. God grants the habit of faith, from which stems the act of faith, and by the act the believer closes with Christ. By virtue of this union, God imputes the righteousness of Christ to the believing sinner. In this view, imputation is (like union) logically dependent on the act of faith. The imputation of righteousness is mediate, not immediate, for the act of faith is the means of imputation.34 Therefore, imputation has an analytical character: Christ’s merit is imputed to believers, not in order to become theirs, but because it is theirs.35 Cotton, however, differed from this view: ‘Giving is the cause of taking; unless wee take a thing by stealth.’36 According to Cotton, the object of faith is Christ’s righteousness as imputed; faith therefore necessarily follows imputation.37 Cotton adds: ‘Whether our Faith bee active to lay hold upon Christ for his righteousnesse, before the Lord do first impute the righteousnesse of Christ to us; we conceive no.’38 Once again, Cotton makes a comparison with the imputation of Adam’s sin. As soon as one is in Adam, he is an heir of Adam’s transgression, wherefore God year later Shepard wrote in his diary: ‘Mr. Cotton repents not, but is hid only.’ Cf. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. xvii; Winship, Heretics, p. 222. 32. Winship, Making Heretics, pp. 159–60. 33. Cotton, ‘Bulkeley and Cotton on Union’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 37 (referring to Ames); Cotton, ‘Conference’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 197 (referring to Chamier and Ames); Cotton, ‘The Way Cleared’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, pp. 409–10 (referring to Twisse, Chamier and Pemble). Cf. Winship, Heretics, pp. 255–6. 34. For a clear exposition of the common view, see Witsius, Animadversiones; in G. A. van den Brink, Herman Witsius. Cf. van den Brink, ‘Elke daad is een werk’. 35. See John Owen, The Works of John Owen (16 vols; London: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–4), vol. 5, p. 209: ‘[T]he foundation of this imputation, is that [union] whereby the Lord Christ and believers do actually coalesce into one mystical person.’ Cf. George Hunsinger, ‘Justification and Mystical Union with Christ: Where Does Owen Stand?’, in K. M. Kapic and M. Jones, The Ashgate Research Companion to John Owen’s Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate 2012), pp. 199–214; and Thomas Boston, The Whole Works of the Late Reverend Thomas Boston of Ettrick (12 vols; Aberdeen: King, 1848), vol. 7, p. 97: ‘Christ’s righteousness, then, is not therefore ours, because it is imputed to us: but therefore it is imputed to us, because it is ours.’ 36. Cotton, ‘Conference’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 194. 37. Ibid., p. 194: ‘In the order of nature, the object is before the act that is conversant about it: but the imputation of Christs righteousness is the object of faith: and Therefore it is in the order of nature, before the act of our Faith.’ 38. Ibid., p. 193.

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imputes him the guilt unto condemnation. Likewise, Christ’s righteousness is imputed as soon as one is in Him, the last Adam.39 Cotton’s rationale for this view was his concern not to mingle the covenant of grace and the covenant of works.40 In his view, if the act of faith precedes union, imputation and justification, then salvation is essentially secured by one’s own work.41 When grace is said to be without works (Rom. 4.4; 11.6), not only meritorious works but works in general are to be excluded.42 The difference between Law and Gospel is that with the former the promises are conditional, with the latter they are unconditional. A promise is only evangelical, then, when the promise is related to Christ, when He has fulfilled all conditions, and when the elect person possesses everything in Him.43 Even God’s promise to fulfil the required condition (faith) in man is not sufficient to render the promise evangelical.44 In short, grace excludes not only meritorious works, but every human activity.45 It is for this reason that Cotton regarded his fellow ministers as crypto-papists.46 In conclusion, when the sovereign God grants the habit of faith, in one and the same unconditional act of God, many things occur simultaneously: regeneration, union with Christ, imputation and justification. Every human act, even the act of faith, is rendered subsequent to this event.

Comrie and His Interpretation of Heidelberg Catechism Q. 20 Returning to Comrie, is it probable that he was inspired by Cotton? In order to arrive at an answer, we must analyse Comrie’s views on the relation between faith and (1) union, (2) justification, and (3) imputation. First of all, Comrie states that both in Scripture and the confessions the word ‘geloof ’ (faith) should not be confused with the word ‘geloven’ (believing): 39. Ibid., p. 192. 40. Winship, Heretics, pp. 31–3. 41. Cotton, ‘Conference’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 194: ‘If our Faith be first active to lay hold on Christ for his righteousness, before God impute his righteousness unto us: Then wee are righteous in an act and work of our own righteousnesse, before we be righteous, by the imputed righteousness of Christ.’ 42. Cotton, ‘Mr Cottons Rejoynder’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 98. 43. Ibid., pp. 98–9. 44. Ibid., p. 98: ‘In the Law, the promise is made to the Condition or qualification of the creature, though given him of God.’ 45. Cotton’s doctrine meets the criteria to be considered antinomianism; see Van den Brink, Herman Witsius, pp. 48–65. Cf. J. Flavel, The Whole Works of John Flavel, Late Minister of the Gospel at Dartmouth, Devon (6 vols; London: W. Baynes and son, 1820), vol. 3, pp. 419–24; vol. 3, pp. 551–91; and esp. vol. 6, pp. 348–55. 46. Winship, Making Heretics, p. 151.



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We do not have here [in Heidelberg Catechism q. 20] the word ‘geloven’, which is an act, but the word ‘geloof ’, which means the grace or habit of faith, from which acts of believing flow forth; you should understand your own language, and recognize that there is a difference between ‘geloof ’ and ‘geloven’. Remember it in the future: ‘geloof ’ means the grace of faith or the infused habit, but ‘geloven’ means the working acts stemming from that ‘geloof ’. Never forget this distinction.47

In Comrie’s view, the union with Christ by faith about which the Catechism speaks takes place at the moment of regeneration.48 More precisely, the habit of faith serves as the means by which Christ enters the heart of the elect.49 Faith is the ‘imparted faculty and habit, wrought in the elect by the Holy Ghost with recreating and irresistible power, when they are incorporated into Christ’.50 Like Cotton, Comrie sees a parallel between this reality and union with Adam. Just as we are united with Adam by our nature, so are we united with Christ by the new nature he grants us in regeneration.51 Faith is the first and principal part of the new nature, and it is by this faith that we are united with Christ.52 Indeed, union itself takes place by the granting of the new nature.53 The parallel with Cotton is striking here. There are more similarities. As we saw, Cotton stated that faith is the forma or the formal cause of union with Christ. Forma dat esse formato: the forma gives being to the formed.54 The same line of reasoning is present in Comrie. He criticizes the common view of the actus formalis fidei, i.e., the formal act of faith 47. Comrie, Catechismus, p. 427: ‘En dit blijkt vooreerst, vermits wij hier niet hebben het woord gelooven, dat is een daad, maar het woord geloof, dat die genade of de hebbelijkheid des geloofs te kennen geeft, waaruit de daden van het gelooven voortvloeien en uitgeoefend worden; gij be­hoordet uw eigen taal te verstaan en te begrijpen dat er onder­ scheid is tusschen geloof en gelooven. Onthoudt het in het vervolg: Geloof geeft te kennen de genade des geloofs of de ingestorte hebbelijkheid, maar gelooven geeft te kennen de werkzame daden, uit dat geloof voortkomende. […] Vergeet toch dit ons onderscheid nooit.’ 48. Ibid., p. 438: ‘…de inlijving geschiedt door een ingestorte hebbelijkheid des geloofs of door een ingewrocht geloof, dat als het zaad Gods blijft.’ 49. Ibid., p. 430. Cf. idem, p. 437: ‘… de inlijving in Christus door het ingewrochte geloof.’ 50. Comrie, Catechismus, p. 450. Kuyper cites this passage in Kuyper, The Work, p. 393. 51. Ibid., p. 425: ‘Zonder onze werkelijke daad, als reeds bestaande in onszelven, sterven wij in Adam, daar wij in hem gezondigd hebben en met hem gevallen zijn in zijn eerste overtreding; en aldus plant hij, zoodra wij bestaan, alhoewel hij lang dood is, in ons die oude natuur over; hoe veel te meer ­de tweede Adam, die een levendmakende Geest is, 1 Cor. XV vers 45 en vervolgens.’ 52. Ibid., pp. xxviii, 422, 428. 53. Ibid., p. 424. 54. Cotton, ‘Bulkeley and Cotton on Union’, in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, p. 38.

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which unites to Christ and hence justifies. Comrie regards such a view as being essentially semi-pelagian: ‘… this definition may favour the semi-Pelagians …, who hold that faith is an act, and that it receives its formal being by an act: Forma dat esse rei (the form gives existence to the matter).’55 The forma of faith lies not in any temporary act, but in ‘its ingrafting by the Holy Spirit’.56 Regarding the relation between faith and justification, the parallels between Cotton and Comrie are obvious. Comrie states that it is not the act but the habit of faith which is the means of justification.57 Those who state the opposite are essentially Roman Catholic.58 The exclusion of works from justification can only occur by stating that not the act but the habit of faith is the instrument by which God justifies.59 Therefore, faith is, in justification, only ‘a passive, receiving instrument’.60 Though an instrument, faith is not an instrumental cause, for that would imply that faith precedes justification, whereas Comrie holds that faith is a consequence of justification. He adds: ‘Faith is an effect of justification, for the object has to exist before the deed; actus non facit sed ponit suum objectum. Faith is with regard to justification not a causa efficiens.’61 Stating it succinctly, in Comrie’s view the habit of faith is an instrument, but not an instrumental cause; it is an instrument, but God’s and not ours.62 Like Cotton, Comrie defends his view by referring to elect children who die in infancy. They have the habit of faith, but are not able to actually believe. Nevertheless they are justified in the same way as adults. Therefore, both children and adults are justified by the habit of faith.63 Another interesting similarity between Cotton and Comrie is found in their references to other theologians. As we saw, Cotton referred to Ames, Twisse, Pemble and Chamier in support of his doctrine. Comrie refers to the same passage in Ames in order to defend the passivity of faith.64 And the citations from Chamier are identical.65 In another work, Comrie refers to the same passage in

55. Comrie, Catechismus, p. 454. 56. Ibid., p. 455. 57. Ibid., pp. 435–6. Cf. idem, pp. xxix–xxx. 58. Ibid., p. 436: ‘Zoo wij deze dingen niet vasthouden en gelooven, zoo zijn wij midden in het hart van de Roomsche kerk, zonder het te weten.’ See also Van den Brink, ‘Elke daad is een werk.’ 59. Ibid., pp. xxx, 428. 60. Ibid., pp. 415, 440. 61. Ibid., p. 446: ‘Het geloof is een ge­wrocht van de rechtvaardigmaking, vermits het voorwerp voor de daad zijn moet actus non facit sed ponit suum objectum. Het geloof is, met betrekking tot de rechtvaardigmaking, niet de causa efficens.’ 62. Ibid., p. xxx. 63. Ibid., pp. xxviii–xxix, xxxi, 449–50. 64. Ibid., p. 446; cf. Hall, Antinomianism Controversy, pp. 37, 197; and Ames, Medulla Theologiae, I.26.21–22. 65. Ibid., p. xxx; cf. Hall, Antinomianism Controversy, pp. 197, 410; and Chamier,



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Twisse that Cotton used.66 Only Pemble, so far as I can determine, is not referred to in Comrie’s works. Finally, how does Comrie articulate the relation between faith and imputation? Here too he agrees with Cotton. He stresses that imputation precedes any inner change within man.67 Imputation happens immediately (without the means of faith).68 Here again the parallel with Adam proves theologically decisive.69 In the aftermath of the publication of his commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, Comrie stated that in his opinion, the difference between him and his opponents revolved around the question of whether imputation is mediate or immediate: Our difference is whether our justification by God happens through the immediate, direct, and preceding imputation of Christ’s surety unto righteousness; from which imputation, being the only ground suitable for God, flows the gift of the Holy Spirit who in the inner and efficacious calling engrafts us into Christ by working faith in our hearts, by which faith we apprehend Christ and all his benefits and trust in Him unto salvation; or is faith a requisite which is necessary prior and preceding, before God imputes unto us the righteousness of Christ unto justification, in such a way that there is no justification of God before our believing, but only a justification from and by, even from and following our believing?70

Comrie regards those who disagree with his schema as crypto-papists. Incessantly they are confronted in his writing with the accusation that they are Arminian, Papist or Socinian. For ‘it is as clear as the sun in the sky’ that whosever places the act of faith antecedent to union, imputation, and justification, returns to the view that man is justified by his own works.71 Just like Cotton, Comrie’s doctrine Panstratiae Catholicae Tomus Tertius (Geneva: Rover, 1626), p. 413 (III.13.6.4), p. 960 (III.22.12.5,9). 66. Comrie, Brief over de Regtvaardigmaking des zondaars (Amsterdam: Byl, 1761), p. 147. The reference is to Twisse, Vindiciae gratiae (Amsterdam: 1648), 252/2GH-253/1AB. 67. Comrie, Catechismus, p. xxx. 68. Ibid., pp. 440, 493. 69. Ibid., pp. 139–56. 70. Comrie, Brief, p. 73: ‘[O]ns verschil is of onze rechtvaerdigmaakinge van de zyde Gods geschiedt door onmiddelyke, directe en voorafgaande toereekeninge van Christus Borggeregtigheit tot regtvaerdigheit, uit welke toereekeninge, als den eenigen Gode betaamelyken grondt, voortvloeit het geschenk van den H. Geest, die in de inwendige en kragtdadige roeping, ons Christus inlyft door inwerkinge van ’t geloove in onze herten, door het welke wij Christus en alle zyne weldaden aanneemen, en op Hem ter zaligheid betrouwen? Dan of het Geloove als een voorvereischte eerst en voor af gevordert wordt, voor dat Godt ons de geregtigheit van Christus tot regtvaerdigheit toerekene, zodanig dat ’er geen regtvaerdiginge Gods zoude zyn voor ons gelooven, maar alleen uit en door, ja op en na ons gelooven.’ 71. Comrie, Catechismus, p. 426; see also pp. vii, xxi, xxxvi, 427, 436.

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is connected at this point to his understanding of the covenant of grace: the acceptance of any conditionality in the covenant of grace means, in his view, the utter loss of God’s grace.72

John Baillie’s criticism of Cotton In the New England antinomian controversy, it was Peter Bulkeley who wrote the most extensive rebuttal of antinomianism. In Bulkeley’s book on the Covenant of Grace he explicitly rejected the idea that the habit of faith constitutes union with Christ. It is not enough to have the habit; God demands an act of faith unto justification.73 The habit is graciously given in order to enable to believe. Bulkeley writes: ‘the habit is freely given us, and wrought in us by the Lord himselfe, to inable us to act by it, and to live the life of faith; and then we having received the gift, the habit, then (I say) the Lord requires of us that we should put forth acts of faith.’74 The beggar needs to use his hand: ‘A man may have an hand and yet not have the gift which is offered him unlesse hee put forth his hand to receive it; faith is the hand of the soule, and the putting of it forth is the act by which wee receive Christ offered.’75 So, the habit of faith is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of justification. Criticisms of Cotton came from Europe as well as New England. The main response from across the Atlantic came from the Scottish professor Robert Baillie (1602–62).76 As a Scottish delegate to the Westminster Assembly, Baillie was a fervent defender of Presbyterianism. Like his colleague Samuel Rutherford (1600–60) he published several books against Independency, the form of church polity which Cotton famously advocated. In 1646 Baillie published A dissuasive of the errors of this time, relying upon information from persons who had been present at the New England synod.77 72. Ibid., pp. 284, 366. 73. Bulkeley, The Gospel Covenant, or the Covenant of Grace opened (London: B. Alten 1646), p. 298: ‘But whereas in speaking of faith, wee speak sometimes of the habit, sometimes of the act of it; It may be demanded which of these is the condition of the Covenant? Whether it is the habit or the act of faith which is required of us? Answ. It is the latter, that is, the act, faith acting and working towards the promise, and from the promise, and causing us to live by faith in the promise.’ See also p. 321. The foreword to Bulkeley’s book is written by Thomas Shepard. 74. Ibid., p. 298. 75. Ibid., p. 298. 76. On Baillie see J. Reid, Memoirs of the Lives and Writings of those Eminent Divines, who Covened in the Famous Assembly at Westminster (Paisley: S. & A. Young, 1815) vol. 2, pp. 270–8; F. N. MacCoy,  Robert Baillie and the Second Scots Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); D. Stevenson, s.v. ‘Baillie, Robert (1602–62)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 77. Robert Baillie, A Dissuasive from the Errours of the time Wherein the Tenets of the



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He hoped that the views he expressed in that work might garner the support of Dutch theologians like Voetius, Spanheim and Apollonius.78 Baillie made a point of noting that Cotton held antinomian views and was connected with Anne Hutchinson.79 Baillie’s ultimate strategy was to discredit Cotton’s views on church polity (independence) by noting the role that Cotton had played in the antinomian controversy.80 Cotton responded to Baillie with the book The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648), in which he tried to refute Baillie’s charge of antinomianism against him.81 In 1655 Baillie responded to Cotton with a ‘vindication’ of his earlier Dissuasive.82 In this later work Baillie remarked that Cotton’s view, placing union with Christ prior to and independent of any act of faith, was a gross error which even Anne Hutchinson had rejected.83 He denied that the distinction between the habit and act of faith served to vindicate Cotton’s doctrine. Although the habit of faith provides the power and faculty to believe, the habit as such has no operation at all. Thus it cannot unite the soul to Christ.84 Christ does not dwell in the believer without and before the act of faith which is wrought by his grace: What M. Cotton cites of Christs abiding in us, proves not his point; for Christ abides not in us before and without the act of faith wrought in us by his grace: by this act of believing in Christ we receive him. John 1.12. by this act of faith Principall Sects, Especially of the Independents, are Drawn Together (London: S. Gellibrand, 1646), p. 58; confer Winship, Making Heretics, p. 160. 78. Baillie, The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie (Edinburgh: Ogle, 1841), vol. 2, p. 327: ‘I have sent yow seven of my Dissuasives only one for yourself, the rest with my service to Thomas Cunninghame, Mr Strickland, Apollonius, Spanheim, Dr Stewart and Voetius.’ 79. Baillie, A dissuasive, p. 57. 80. Hall, Antinomianism Controversy, p. 397. 81. Cotton, The way of Congregational churches cleared in two treatises: in the former, from the historical aspersions of Mr. Robert Baylie […] (London: J. Bellamie, 1648). The part of The Way Cleared which refers to the antinomian controversy is present in AC, pp. 396–437. 82. Baillie, The dissvvasive from the errors of the time, vindicated from the exceptions of Mr. Cotton and Mr. Tombes (London: S. Gellibrand, 1655). Initially, Baillie decided not to react to Cotton, but taking advantage of a long vacation, he responded and published his response in 1655; see Baillie, The letters and journals of Robert Baillie (Edinburgh: Ogle, 1842), vol. 3, p. 227. 83. Baillie, The Dissuasive vindicated, p. 26: ‘this is one of the grosse errors, even the eighteenth which in M. Cottons own presence in the congregation of Bonstone was laid to Mistresse Hutchesons charge, and which she at last under her hand did professe to renounce.’ 84. Ibid., p. 26: ‘Mr. Cottons distinction of the habite and act of faith, does not serve here for any purpose; for the habite of faith (opposite and contradistinct to the act) does not, nor cannot unite the soul to Christ, hath no operation at all, whatever power or faculty it may give to operate.’

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the Apostle expressely tells us, that Christ abides and dwells in our hearts, Eph. 3.17. by an act of this faith, John affirmes God to dwell in men, and men to dwell in God.85

It is true that man is passive in his receipt of the habit of faith from God. But, according to Baillie, man is not passive in union: ‘and however in the act of regeneration and infusion of habits, the soul be but a passive subject; yet before our union with Christ be compleat, we by an act of our faith apprehend him who apprehended us; and we by his grace love him next who loved us first.’86 Of course the habit does have logical priority over the act. But is it the habit or the act of faith which unites the sinner with Christ?87 Baillie also criticizes Cotton’s view of the relation of faith and justification. In his judgement, denying faith to be an active instrument in the application of Christ’s righteousness to the sinner is to overthrow the Protestant doctrine of justification.88 ‘That all application of Christ righteousness for our justification is the act of God alone, without all operation of our faith, [is] contrary to the stream of Scripture, and Protestant writers, who ascribe justification to faith laying hold on, apprehending and applying Christs Justice for remission of sinnes.’89 In regard to God’s act of justification, man’s faith is not passive but active.90 Baillie ultimately fears that Cotton’s doctrine destroys the assurance of faith. If faith plays no active role in justification itself, it cannot function in the manifestation or knowledge of justification either. Baillie reasons that Cotton’s view, by implication, makes assurance, like justification, the fruit of an immediate work of the Holy Spirit who directly applies (without the instrumentality of faith) the promise of free grace to the conscience.91 Baillie also challenged Cotton’s citation of Reformed orthodox contemporaries 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid.: ‘The debate of the natural priority of gracious habits unto gracious acts, is not to this question.’ 88. Ibid.: ‘Mr. Cotton in his answer to the Synods second question does change and overthrow the Protestant received doctrine of Justification; he affirmes faith to be only a passive receiving vessel of Christs righteousness, but no active instrument to apprehend or apply any thing.’ 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid.: ‘… in the act of justification he will have faith to act nothing at all, but to be meerly passive, a receiving vessel which acts nought, not so much as to apprehend or apply Christs righteousness.’ 91. Ibid., p. 27: ‘… that the spirit […] before faith have any being, doth himself immediately apply the promise of free grace to the soule, and becomes ever the first evidencer of justification by himself immediately and alone. If so, then we are not only justified, but our justification is abundantly evidenced to our soul without our faith, without any application of any word of God to us by any act of our understanding or will, but alone by the acts of the holy Ghost.’ Cf. Winship, Making Heretics, p. 30.



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and predecessors in defence of his doctrine. With regard to Twisse, for example, he argued that while Cotton read Twisse as affirming eternal justification, Twisse’s comments actually pointed to God’s eternal purpose to justify his elect, not to an eternal act of justification as such.92 Baillie’s criticism of Cotton received approval broadly within the Scottish church. Samuel Rutherford similarly criticized the opinion that faith is a passive instrument in justification, and insisted that it is the act of faith, rather than the habit, which unites the sinner to Christ.93 In the eighteenth century Thomas Halyburton (1674–1712) reiterated this judgement.94 So also did Thomas Boston (1676–1732) – evidence, perhaps, that accusations of antinomianism against him were false. According to Boston, ‘It is not the habit of faith, but the actual believing by which the Spirit unites us to Christ … And by that actual believing also we are united to Christ, inasmuch as thereby we apprehend Christ, and knit with him.’95 In the beginning of the nineteenth century the Glasgow minister Thomas Bell (1733–1802) translated Herman Witsius’s Animadversiones Irenicae; in his notes on the text he too made this point.96 On the continent, the Dutch theologian

92. Ibid., p. 29: ‘In that large citation from Dr. Twisse a line is omitted, the bringing whereof had been a key to have opened the whole or the most of the difficultie, to wit, that the Justification which Twisse makes eternall, is nought but dei Justificandi propositum ab aeterno fuit.’ For Twisse’s view on justification from eternity see G. A. van den Brink, ‘Johannes Maccovius (1588–1644) en de rechtvaardiging van eeuwigheid’, Theologia Reformata 51.4 (2008), pp. 336–53; G. van den Brink and M. Jones, ‘Thomas Goodwin and Johannes Maccovius on Justification from Eternity’, in J. Beeke and M. Jones, eds, A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), pp. 133–48. Baillie does not make special mention of Cotton’s view on the relation between faith and imputation. Perhaps he regarded this point as refuted by his other comments. 93. S. Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist … in Two Parts (London: Andrew Crooke, 1648), vol. 2, p. 113. Rutherford refers quite often to Cotton’s doctrine, always critically. 94. T. Halyburton, A Modest Inquiry whether Regeneration or Justification had the precedency in order of nature, in Halyburton, The Works of the Rev. Thomas Halyburton (R. Burns, ed., London: Thomas Tegg, 1835), pp. 547–67. Schultens, one of Comrie’s opponents, refers to this book in Schultens, Uitvoerige Waarschuuwinge, p. 841. J. Macleod makes a comparison between Halyburton and Comrie in Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History Since the Reformation (Edinburgh: Publications Committee of the Free Church of Scotland, 1943), pp. 127–33. 95. T. Boston, Works, p. 82. Cf. n. 35. 96. T. Bell, ‘Notes’, in H. Witsius, Conciliatory or irenical animadversions on the controversies agitated in Britain under the unhappy names of Antinomians and Neonomians (Glasgow: M. Ogly, 1807), p. 199: ‘Christ’s righteousness is ours, in the order of nature at least, before it be imputed to us, viz. ours by virtue of our faith in him, and our union to him. It is not imputed, and therefore ours; but ours, and therefore imputed’; see also pp. 220–1.

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Voetius explicitly rejected Cotton’s idea that faith can be regarded as the forma of union with Christ.97

Some Conclusions Given the similarities between Cotton and Comrie in doctrine, it is possible that Comrie was influenced by Cotton.98 Coming from Scotland, Comrie was undoubtedly familiar with the seventeenth-century debates between the Scottish Presbyterians and the New England Congregationalists. That Comrie does not name Cotton is easily explainable, since both in Holland and (especially) in Scotland Cotton’s view on the forma and function of faith was commonly regarded as tending towards antinomianism. In the Dutch context, Comrie was, indeed, the first to express the Cottonian view on faith. The criticism by his opponents that Comrie disseminated antinomian opinions is likewise easy to understand. Being professors in theology, Van den Honert and Schultens were well aware of the antinomian controversies of the seventeenth century. Two final remarks are in order. First, this case study of the Scottish theologian Alexander Comrie shows that Scottish Reformed theology during the era of orthodoxy was far from monolithic in nature. One might expect that Comrie would conform to the pattern among Scottish theologians (Baillie, Rutherford, Boston) of making the act of faith the instrumental means by which sinners lay hold of Christ and his benefits. The opposite is true. Second, it would seem to be Comrie’s influence that secured acceptance for the Cottonian view on faith in modern Reformed dogmatics. Comrie had a major influence on both Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. In his Work of the Holy Spirit, Kuyper suggested that ‘Following the line of Augustine, Calvin, Voetius, [and] Comrie, one goes safest.’ 99 Bavinck expressed some hesitancy regarding 97. Voetius, Disputationes Selectae (Utrecht: Smytegelt 1669), vol. 5, p. 294: ‘Improprie aut absurde & falso, dicitur, fidem consistere in unione cum Deo, hoc est, formaliter esse unionem cum Deo: cum unio non sit forma aut differentia fidei, immo ne quidem genus: unio enim toto praedicamento differt a fide; cum illa sit relatio, haec actio aut qualitas.’ 98. Unfortunately, there is no auction catalogue available of Comrie’s library; see Honig, Comrie, p. 179n. 1. Maybe, the Scottish independent and antinomian Isaac Chauncy (1632–1712) was a means in the influence. Chauncy cites Cotton in order to prove that not the act but the habit of faith is the means of union, Chauncy, Neonomianism Unmask’d (London: Harris, 1692–3), p. 225; he refers to Cotton, ‘Conference’, pp. 38–41; in AC, pp. 193–4. Chauncy, in his turn, was a major influence on Comrie. Comrie even copied several pages of Chauncy’s book right down into his own commentary on the HC. Compare Comrie, Catechismus, pp. 346–8 with Chauncy, Neonomianism Unmask’d, pp. 107–11. See also G. A. van den Brink, ‘Comrie en het antinomianisme’, p. 139. 99. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900), p. 396. See also p. 336, where Kuyper notes that it is ‘in the very moment of completed regeneration that union becomes an internally accomplished fact’. Cf. p. 402. Kuyper also repudiates the



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Comrie’s view of the relation between union with Christ and the habit of faith,100 but he accepted Comrie’s doctrine of immediate imputation,101 as well as Comrie’s position on the order between faith and justification.102 Some scholars suggest that John Cotton’s impact was rather limited, reaching no further than ecclesiastical matters.103 The fierce opposition he received from Scotland no doubt impeded his influence. However, if the analysis in this essay is right, and if one acknowledges the increasing reputation and international influence of Kuyper and Bavinck in the Reformed churches today, one might conclude that Cotton has made his mark not only in the area of ecclesiology, but also soteriology, thanks especially to the Scotsman Alexander Comrie.104

actus formalis fidei with refererence to Comrie: Kuyper, The Work, p. 395. See also Macleod, Scottish Theology, pp. 127–33. Cf. n. 50. See also Kuyper, E voto Dordraceno (Amsterdam: Wormser 1893), pp. 404–5. 100. H. Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek (Kampen: Kok, 1906–11), vol. 4, pp. 90–1 (English Translation, p. 114). 101. Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 185, 199–200 (ET, pp. 203, 217–28). 102. Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 203–4 (ET, pp. 220–1). 103. Emerson, Cotton, p. 132. 104. Many thanks to Willem J. van Asselt and Mark Jones for their helpful remarks on earlier versions of this chapter.

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INDEX Aberdeen 67–82, 83, 84–5, 86, 231–2 Universities of 4, 30–4, 68–9, 73, 79, 83, 112, 231–2, 240 Aberdeen Doctors 112, 113, 123, 165–6 act (versus Habit) 104, 254–5, 265–6 Adam see also Covenant of Works 54–5, 261, 263 Aikenhead, Thomas 111 Allinga, Petrus 155 Amyraldianism see also atonement 4, 61, 176–7 Amyraut, Moïse 112, 176, 178, 182–4, 187, 189 Anabaptism 14 Antinomianism 235, 255–9, 268 Arabic 38 Aramaic 40 Arbuthnot, Alexander 29, 30 Aristotle 143 Arminianism 61, 80–1, 84–6, 94, 100–2, 127, 160–1, 165–72, 254 Articles of Perth (1618) 79, 103 assurance (of Salvation) 14, 104, 105, 214, 266 atonement extent of 9, 61, 62–3, 87, 94–9, 101–2, 245–6 nature of 94–9 Auchterarder Creed 234 Augustine 18, 89, 93, 95, 193 Baillie, Robert 80, 113, 166–7, 264–8 Bayle, Pierre 240 baptism 71 Baron, Robert 73, 75–7, 79, 83–102 Baxter, Richard 153, 200, 206–7 being 142–3 Bell, Charles 9, 10 Beza, Theodore 18, 61–2, 159–60, 164 Blackwell, Thomas 231–51 Boston, Thomas 234–5, 245, 267 Bourignon, Antoinette 232–3, 239–42 Bowes, Elizabeth 14 Bowes, Marjorie 14 Boyd, Robert 30, 176 Bradwardine, Thomas 134–7, 147, 149–51, 154–5 Brais, Etienne de 186–7

Brown, John (of Wamphray) 152–3, 191, 199–209 Bucanus, Gulielmus 175 Buchanan, George 2, 32, 113, 116, 119 Bulkeley, Peter 264 Bullinger, Heinrich 98 Cabala 37 calling 22 Calvin, John on atonement 98, 242 on Christ as mediator 57 continuity with calvinism 2–3, 10, 48–9, 99–100 and John Knox 12–13, 18, 21 on justification 191–202, 208–9 on predestination 48–9, 64 Political Theology 117–18 on Rabbinical scholarship 40 on Scripture 214–16 on Song of Songs 159 Cameron, John 30, 112–13, 124–31, 137–9, 176–90 Casaubon, Isaac 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41 Castellio, Sebastian 159 Catholicity 69, 74, 81–2 Chamier, Daniel 93 Charles I 106, 112, 116, 170 Charles II 172, 200 church invisible 71–2, 246 visible 22, 71–2 Christ person of 105, 194, 242, 248 union with 105, 194–5, 198, 203–4, 209, 254–68 work of 94–9, 194, 197, 203, 242, 248 Civil Government see political theology Clerk, Jean Le 225–6 Clarke, Elizabeth 160 Claude, Jean 187–8 Coffey, John 124 Como, David 169–70 Comrie, Alexander 253–5, 260–9 conversion 177–87 Cotton, John 169–70, 255–60, 268–9

288 Index covenant conditionality 54 definition of 45–6, 106–8 of Grace 46, 50–2, 54–9, 107, 203–4, 238, 245–6, 264 of Redemption 57–8, 59, 107, 245–6 of Works 46, 50–2, 54–9, 63, 107, 238 covenant theology see federal theology Covenanters 105, 108, 113, 200 Cromwell, Oliver 116, 118, 128, 161 Cyprian 78 Deism 223, 229, 237, 238, 239 Dickson, David 20, 171–2 Drusius, Johannes 37–8 Duncan, Mark 176 Duns Scotus 131, 135–7, 149 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe 175 Durham, James 19, 21, 24, 158, 163–5, 172–3 Edinburgh 74–5 University of 28, 34–5 election see predestination England 4, 106, 116–18, 157, 160–1 Enlightenment 5, 213 Episcopius, Simon 186 Erasmus, Desiderius 36–7 Eucharist 77–8, 103–4 faith 51, 54, 75–6, 87, 93–4, 96, 104, 168–70, 191–209, 219–22, 226, 253–69 Fasulo, Girolamo 148–9 federal theology 10, 18–25, 45–65, 106–8, 245–46 First Book of Discipline 4, 28 Fons, Paul de la 181 Fonseca, Pedro da 148 Forbes (of Corse), John 32–3, 69, 79–82, 112 Forbes, Patrick 31–3, 67–73, 82 Forbes, William 73, 79, 81 France 175–7 Fraser (of Brea), James 19 Garden, George 240–1 Garden, James 240 Gerson, Jean 131 Glasgow 177 University of 27–30, 177, 178 God decree(s) of 46–9, 52–65, 127, 238, 244–5 freedom of 136–8, 244 grace of 22, 23, 53–6, 88–9, 90–4, 168 immutability of 16–17 knowledge of 146–7, 241–2

love of 22, 23, 101 omniscience of 17 power of 127, 131, 133, 142–4, 154–5 relation to Sin 21 trinitarian life of 57–9, 65 wisdom of 17 will of 90, 92–4, 146–7, 152, 154–5, 239 Gomarus, Franciscus 175 Goodwin, Christopher 116 Gordon, George (Marquis of Huntly) 69–70 Gordon, William 234 grace see God Grotius, Hugo 159 Guild, William 77–9 Guyraut, Jacques 181–6 Gwalther, Rudolph 98 habit (versus act) 104, 205, 254–5, 265–6 Hadow, James 234, 235 Hall, Edmund 161 Halyburton, Thomas 213–14, 223–30 Henderson, Alexander 104–19, 171 Henderson, G. D. 85–6, 107, 165–6 Holy Spirit author of Scripture 95 illumination of 54 influence of 23, 178–79, 181–8, 194, 195 witness to Scripture 76, 215–19, 223, 227, 229–30 Honert, Joan van den 253–5 Howie, Robert 33 Humanism 35–8 Hyper-Calvinism 250–1 hypothetical universalism see atonement James VI/I 2, 27, 69, 112 Junius, Franciscus 175 justification 168, 178, 191–209, 258, 262, 266–7 Knox, John 9–26, 31, 107 on atonement 9 on divine attributes 16–17 on predestination 9–26 pastoral practice 14 political theology 2, 106, 116 prophetic self-image 11 reception of 10, 18–19, 24–5, 26 writings 11–18 Knuuttila, Simo 135 Krauchenberg, Henricus 153 Laud, William 160, 166, 170, 171, 172 Lawson, James 28, 31 Leydekker, Melchior 153–5, 200

Index Locke, John 116, 219–30 Luther, Martin 192 Lutheranism 39, 61, 69, 81, 92, 153, 192–3 Marrow controversy 234–6, 246–7, 251 Mary, Queen of Scots 176 McCormack, Bruce 46 Melville, Andrew 2, 27–43, 106 Menchaca, Fernando Vázquez 131–2 Mercier, Jean 40–1 merit 89 middle knowledge 144–5, 168–9 Milton, John 116 Morality, basis of 125–39 Mullan, David George 19, 86, 166–7 Muller, Richard 1, 48–9, 55, 64–5, 102, 229 Musculus, Wolfgang 98 National Covenant (1638) 79, 84, 85, 103, 106–7, 112, 118 natural law 125, 127, 131–8 New England 255–6, 264 non-contradiction, law of 143, 152–3 Osiander, Andreas 192–3 Oviedo, Francisco de 148, 149 Owen, John 118, 151, 163, 217–19 Pajon, Claude 181–90 Pareus, David 93 perseverance (of saints) 13, 15 political theology 105–6, 108–19 Predestination 9–26, 169, 178–79 and Christ 46–9, 52–65 and divine foreknowledge 92, 93 and God’s Universal Love 22, 87–94 and reprobation 13–16, 20–2, 53, 62–3, 90–1, 169–70 Presbyterianism 2, 264 Prosper of Aquitaine 88, 96 Raban, Edward 73–4 Rationalism 203, 221, 229, 237, 241 Recusancy see Roman Catholicism Regeneration 54, 246, 258, 261 Remonstrants see Arminianism Reprobation see Predestination Rex, Walter 177 Richard, Guy 124 Ripalda, Martínez de 148 Rivet, André 80, 97–8, 179–80 Rollock, Robert 19, 30, 34–5, 47–65 Rous, Francis 160 Row, John 33–4

289

Roman Catholicism 3, 67–82, 84, 160–1, 167–73, 192 Rutherford, Samuel 2, 14–15, 75, 102, 107, 170, 173 on Aberdonian theology 84 on affections 164–5 on Arminianism 169 on common grace 23 ethical theology of 124–39 on faith 267 on God’s love 23–4 on (im)possibilities 142–7 influences upon 123–4, 134–7, 149–51, 156 on providence 141 on reprobation 22 on Song of Songs 161–2, 164–5 reception of 151–7 Salmeron, Alfonso 79 Salmon, Joseph 161 Sanctification 194–5, 204 Saumur, University of 175–90 Scaliger, Joseph 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42 Schultens, Jan Jacob 253–5 Scots Confession of Faith 4, 10, 15–16, 116 Scripture authority of 75–7, 167–8, 213–30 interpretation of 4, 159–60, 163–4 Second Book of Discipline 4 Sherlock, William 161 Smeaton, Thomas 29 Society of Jesus 3, 144, 147–9 Socinianism 3, 4, 151, 206, 209, 250 Solemn League and Covenant 80, 106, 199 Song of Songs 157–73 Spurgeon, Charles 163 St Andrews University of 27, 29, 83, 142 Strang, John 138, 152 Suárez, Francisco 149 Synod of Dort 90, 97, 101–2, 253 ten commandments 126, 131–2 Testard, Paul 188–9 Thomas Aquinas 89–90 Tilenus, Daniel 179 Torrance, James 3, 45–6, 48, 55 Torrance, Thomas 3, 19, 46, 48, 123–4, 203, 209 tradition 167–8 Trelcatius, Lucas 93 Trinity see God Turnbull, George 76–7 Turretin, Francis 59–62, 216–17 Twisse, William 131, 169–70, 267

290 Index Ursinus, Zacharias 50 vocation see calling Voetius, Gisbertus 155 Voluntarism 124–25, 128–39, 150, 154–5 Vos, Antoon 135 Vossius, Gerhardus 80

Walker, James 123–4, 142, 199 Watson, Thomas 161 Westminster Assembly 10, 22, 123, 199–200, 264 Westminster Confession of Faith 21–2, 47, 107, 111, 200 Woolsey, Andrew 11