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Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Michael P. Winship
Michael P. Winship
Affiliation:
Michael P. Winship is an associate professor in the department of history at the University of Georgia
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Abstract

The great pearl of Reformed piety, assurance of salvation, eluded Richard Rogers, Essex presbyterian activist, in theearly 1580s. Rogers “languished long” in “unsettledness in my life” “untill wofull experience” drove him to search out a more reliable method of obtaining a steady assurance. He decided that only a steady, highly reflective, and rigorous course of life could keep assurance constant. To that end, Rogers devised “a more certain manner of direction for me through the daie and the weeke.” His new method combined continual selfreminders of God's blessings with strict activities of piety and selfscrutiny, and through it, he found the settled peace he had been seeking.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , September 2001 , pp. 462 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2001

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References

1. Rogers, Seven Treatises (London, 1603), 572. For Rogers's life see M. M. Knappen, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries (1933; reprint, Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1966), 17-35. For the chronology of writing Seven Treatises see Knappen, Two Elizabethan Diaries, 69, 71, and Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises, sig. B3 v. These chronologies roughly coincide, as do the chronologies of Rogers's piety given by Rogers and Ezekiel Culverwell in their prefaces to Seven Treatises, B2r, A3v, if Rogers's preface, along with the body of Seven Treatises, is assumed to have been completed somewhat over five years before Seven Treatises was published. Irvonwy Morgan discusses Rogers at length throughout The Godly Preachers of the Elizabethan Church (London: Epsworth, 1965).

2. This article follows the customary practice among English historians of lowercasing “puritanism,” since the term, as it is customarily used, refers to tendencies within the Church of England rather than to a clearly delineated movement.Google Scholar

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4. The scholarly literature on the relationship of puritanism, and of second- and thirdgeneration Reformed orthodoxy in general, to the first generation of Reformed divines is vast. For recent discussions and bibliographies, see Muller, Richard A., “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’: Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities between the Reformation and Orthodoxy,” Calvin Theological Journal 30 (1995): 345–75 and 31 (1996): 125–60,Google Scholarand Coffey, John, Politics, Theology and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 117–22. This scholarship sometimes suggests that the shift to introspection was a result of the pastoral need to offer comfort to anxious believers, as the example of Rogers above suggests. The early literature of puritan practical divinity certainly supports this claim, but it also suggests a far broader web of motivation.Google Scholar

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32. The unconscious hypocrite was a structural necessity in Reformed doctrine, needed for explaining the gap between theoretical perseverance of the saints and the reality of backsliding. It can be found roughly as Perkins described it, albeit not in such an elaborated fashion, in continental theologians on whom Perkins built, such as Calvin, Beza and Ursinus. For the terrifying potential in Calvin's scattered remarks on unconscious hypocrites see Foxgrover, David, “Temporary Faith' and the Certainty of Salvation,” Calvin Theological Journal 15 (1980): 220–32.Google ScholarUrsinus, Zacharius, The Summe of Christian Religion (Oxford, 1587), 287.Google ScholarFor Beza on hypocrites, see A Brief Declaration of the Chiefe Points of Christian Religion (London, 1575).Google ScholarAndrews, , Certaine … Sermons, 260; Chaderton, Sermon, sig. EIr;Google ScholarGifford, George, A Sermon on the Parable of the Sower (London, 1582), sig. Bv iiir.Google Scholar

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