Practical Predestinarians in England, c. 1590–1640

Leif Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317076711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The belief that God eternally and unalterably decrees the election of one part of humankind and the reprobation of the rest has not aged well, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the doctrine of predestination was publicised and popularised to an extent unparalleled in the history of Christianity. Why was this? How successfully was the doctrine able to mix with other ideas, and to what effect? And did belief in predestination encourage confidence or despair? Practical Predestinarians is a study of the ways in which the doctrine of predestination was understood and communicated by churchmen in late Tudor and early Stuart England. It connects with debates about the 'popularity' of Protestantism during England's 'long reformation', as well as with the question of whether predestination tended toward inclusive or divisive, and conformist or subversive, applications. Intersecting with recent debates about the popular reception of Protestant preaching, this book focusses upon the pastoral message itself - it is therefore an investigation into the public face of English Calvinism.

CHAPTER 1
Predestination in Early Modern Culture: Contexts and Concepts

Predestination: a Brief History and Some Common Misconceptions

It would not be an understatement to say that predestination has, historically, received a terrible press: it has, in fact, been the history of a ‘desperate doctrine’. One Victorian cleric, Charles Aked, summed up a common view in a particularly forthright manner. To be a Calvinist,

you would have to combine in one villainous nature all the grossest and most abominable instincts of a Nero, a Caligula, and a Heligabalus before you produced a monster such as a Calvinist would be who believed his creed and married and brought children into the world.¹

His short book, Calvin and Calvinism: A Lecture, was aimed against ‘the injustice, the cruelty, and the wickedness of Calvinism’, and most particularly against its eponymous originator, who was ‘one of the most hateful characters who have played an important part in the history of the world’. Aked’s dilemma, though, was that of all who have offered similar analyses, why did so many people adhere to such an apparently repugnant faith? His solution was perfectly simple: they didn’t. He says that ‘many still, and especially in Lancashire and Yorkshire, persuade themselves they so believe: but their lives, beautiful and good, give the lie to it every day’.²

The view that the logic of predestination runs in only one direction is commonplace. Although modern scholars write about the matter in a neutral tone, it is still often possible to discern an underlying set of assumptions: that predestination must mean divisiveness, exclusion, a sense of smugness in the elect and an equivalent disdain for the reprobate. In an influential work, penned during the Second World War, Erich Fromm argued for a linkage between the ‘us and them’ predestinarian beliefs of Luther and Calvin – two of ‘the greatest haters among the leading figures of history’ – and the authoritarian and supremacist character of Nazism.³ This was an extreme interpretation, although it was also written at an extreme moment in world history. Neither was Fromm’s view especially unusual – one of the leading Nazi’s defence lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial argued that ‘Hitler and Nazism were not solely the result of Versailles and economic hardship, but ... were a culmination of the flight from God begun in the Renaissance and Reformation’.⁴ Fromm made significant mistakes both in conception and detail, but this should not detract from the value of his morally serious, psychologically acute and conceptually ambitious book.⁵ The great strength of Fromm’s work lay in its recognition that predestinarian belief was not a purely intellectual matter, but was founded on a response to a series of psychological and social uncertainties. While I disagree with the details of Fromm’s account, I agree that it is necessary to think about the issue beyond the narrow frame of the history of doctrines. Shailer Matthews once observed that, ‘in order to understand a doctrine one must know not only the time and place of its formulation, but also the social and religious tensions which gave rise to [it]’.⁶ The present subject is especially ripe for this approach. As Heiko Oberman has remarked, ‘predestination is an excellent example of a teaching which, however well and extensively documented with precise quotations, cannot be grasped unless one has an eye for its social and psychological roots’.⁷

Predestination became a particularly important and popular doctrine during the period of the Reformation. This is well known. The reason why significantly more Europeans subscribed to the doctrine in 1600 than in 1400 or 1800 will be discussed shortly. But first we need to establish that there was a degree of continuity: that the doctrine did not, as undergraduates sometimes assume, appear ex nihilo in the thought of Martin Luther.

The doctrine of predestination is, in fact, as old as Christianity, and arguably almost as old as monotheism itself. It is clearly articulated in the epistles of Saint Paul, and was a constant theme in the writings of the Ancient Fathers, particularly those of Augustine of Hippo (354–430AD). Augustine, although not always entirely consistent on the point, argued that God not only actively chose the elect, but also likewise rejected the reprobate. Augustine’s main emphasis was on the deeply fallen nature of man and his consequent inability to cause his own salvation. Like Paul, Augustine was a convert to Christianity, and sought an unalterable source of power and forgiveness which could over-ride (although in effect also subtly accentuate) his personal sense of worthlessness and guilt for his previous iniquity. Because nobody deserved to go to heaven, and because all human efforts look bad to God, predestination was the only way of preserving the dignity of good works. ‘Predestinarianism did not, in the case of Augustine, lead him to religious passivity, but the active pursuit of a God who had made humanity for Himself’.⁸ Augustine’s position was contested by Pelagius, who argued for a less damning assessment of man’s spiritual condition and for a degree of free will over one’s own ultimate fate. Although their famous dispute concerned apparently obscure doctrinal issues, what underlay their debate ‘were the major issues of the relation of the created being to the creator, the virtue of humility [and] man’s place in God’s creation’.⁹ It was Augustine’s view that was adopted as the official policy of the Catholic Church – although with a degree of hedging and warnings not to pry too deeply into the matter. Together with Augustine, the central figure in the history of Catholic theology is Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). Aquinas is often boxed as a proponent of free will, and it is certainly true that he had a somewhat more optimistic view of human nature than did Augustine. He also used a language of ‘merit’ in his discussions of good works which made him anathema to the Protestant reformers.¹⁰ Despite this, though, he was also predestinarian in his theology. For him, this doctrine was not necessitated by the awfulness of man, but instead was a logical consequence of his understanding of God’s omnipotence. Predestination was a necessary sub-category of providence.¹¹ To Aquinas, it was inconceivable that God could not know the future of His creation, because the concept of linear time is a function of finitude; as such, God certainly foreknows who will be saved and who will be damned, and furthermore must be the constant mover of all of the secondary causes which shape the lives of His creation. In general, pre-Reformation Catholicism tended to promote a doctrine of single predestination – in other words, that God pre-selected those who would go to heaven, with the remainder not actively reprobated but instead left to slip (perhaps inevitably) to perdition through their own sinfulness.

Some important points have already become apparent. First, that predestination was not anathema to Catholic doctrine before the Reformation, even though the practical emphasis was always on justification by works, sacramentalism and repentance through the confessional. Indeed, it could be argued that (logically at least) ‘predestination and monotheism go hand in hand’, and that ‘the primary use of predestination in pastoral care has always been to comfort the afflicted’.¹² Second, that belief in predestination could derive from different motivations – from, for instance, a view of God’s greatness, or man’s baseness. And third, that predestination and free will were not necessarily antithetical. This last point is particularly important, because it is one of the more common misconceptions about predestination.

The Reformation revived and reinterpreted predestination, but it did not invent it. For Luther – very much an Augustinian – humanity was comprehensively fallen, and he reacted to a late medieval Church policy of indulgences and works-orientation which struck him as being the enemy of salvation. Predestination – joined with the radical assertion of justification by faith alone – offered a decisively different vision. Martin Luther’s peculiar – indeed, rather spectacular – psychology is too well known and expertly researched for me to dwell much upon it here. Suffice to say that his own sense of profound and utter wretchedness led him to believe that the works-oriented formulae advocated by the papacy would result simply in his damnation. He could do nothing to please God of his own volition. The idea that saving faith is imputed into a sinner, who could not choose otherwise, represented a revelatory thunderbolt for Luther. His consequent emphasis upon ‘God alone’, ‘Christ alone’, ‘Scripture alone’, the ‘word alone’ and ‘faith alone’ in each case rejected the role of man in creating meaning or causing outcomes: Luther’s ‘recurrent use of the word “alone” expresses [his] fundamental theological understanding that ... one must exclude everything which prevents God from being God’.¹³ Within the – as it were – psychological theology of his new perspective, a revamped and strongly emphasised doctrine of predestination represented a perfect partner. Where justification sola fide told the sinner that he was saved despite himself, predestination provided the added bolster that the decision had its root in eternity, and was founded upon the unchangeable will of God. Desperate for certainty, this doctrinal blending was well suited to Luther’s own distinctive needs. By the same token, though, Luther described predestination as ‘a very strong wine’ and was at once allured and repelled by its potency. His sense of the doctrine’s practical importance was similarly inconsistent.

Predestination is most associated with the thought of John Calvin, who came to public prominence shortly before Luther’s death. Calvin, writing mainly in the 1540s and 1550s, approached predestination in a completely different way. While Luther’s emotional nature inclined him to make trenchant truth-claims ‘on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays’, Calvin sought to forge a theological framework which applied to every day of the week.¹⁴ In his seminal Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin espoused a very pure and logical doctrine of double predestination, which went beyond any of his predecessors in terms of rigour. As Jaroslav Pelikan put it, ‘what set [Calvin’s] doctrine of predestination apart from most others in the [previous] millennium ... was the candid acknowledgement that “reprobation” could not merely be the absence of positive election to salvation, but must itself be a positive act of the divine will predestining to damnation’.¹⁵ Furthermore, Calvin differed from Paul, Augustine and Luther – his three most famous predestinarian predecessors – in that he did not, as far as we can tell, undergo any sort of an emotional and sudden conversion experience. As such, he did not think about predestination in spectacularist terms, but instead as a matter which touches upon all aspects of the Christian’s journey through life. While he discouraged speculation over who was elect and who was reprobate, he was also clear that these categories were fixed and ubiquitous, and had implications for the ways in which individuals experience (or do not experience) God’s grace. Predestination, therefore, became a practical as well as a theoretical issue: it gained the potential to spill over, as it were, from the theological into the sociological.

Scholars sometimes make the mistake of assuming that Calvin was interested only in theory, and criticise English predestinarians for using voluntarist rhetoric – the idea being that, by urging people to reform their lives, these ministers were betraying the logic of predestination, for the latter stated that human effort can achieve nothing. H.C. Porter, for instance, famously wrote that ‘however Calvinist in the study, the preacher must be Arminian in the pulpit’.¹⁶ D. Jason Slone’s recent study of the cognitive science of religion investigates why people hold to precepts which nakedly contradict the formal tenets of the belief system that they profess. This the author calls ‘theological incorrectness’. He picks predestinarianism out as a case in point. He argues that, ‘orthodox Calvinism should have ... little [practical] potential’ – because it ‘removes agency entirely from the human world, it would most likely not be invoked in [day to day] thinking’. He adds, ominously, that ‘evidence confirms this prediction’. Apparently predestinarians, ‘despite their efforts at theological correctness ... were not strict theological determinists’. Because they believed that humans were providentially ‘punished for misdeeds of their own doing’ and wished to enact ‘strict laws ... as a deterrent to immoral behaviour’, they therefore functioned ‘as if humans could control themselves’.¹⁷ Slone’s error, though, is to fashion a model of ‘theological correctness’ of his own making: predestinarians who try to change anything – implicitly, try to do anything – are guilty of being theologically incorrect on the grounds that they supposedly believe that predestination is anathema to action. This is a fundamental misunderstanding, stemming from a traditional scholarly tendency to think about systematic and pastoral theology in comparative terms. The approach of this book, though, is to think about the two existing in a connective relationship. The one should not be judged against the other: instead, we need to think of formal and pastoral theology as deeply related, indeed virtually inseparable, parts of a wider whole.

Calvin – like all of the reformers – was not a writer of ‘abstract theology’ as an isolated discipline. He was deeply concerned with objective truth, but only insofar as that knowledge could be applied to real lives and situations. Even Porter’s contrast be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Predestination in Early Modern Culture: Contexts and Concepts
• 2 William Perkins and the Search for Certainty
• 3 God and Godliness in the Thought of Richard Greenham and Richard Rogers
• 4 Thomas Wilson: An Impractical Predestinarian?
• 5 Robert Sanderson and the Politics of Predestination
• 6 Preaching Predestination, c. 1603–c. 1625
• 7 The Theology of Death and Dying: Predestination Versus the Ars Moriendi?
• Bibliography
• Index