What is a Puritan?

Question 1

How did the term “Puritan emerge”?

Answer 1

Perhaps very first use in Catholic pamphlets, 1565 and 1566
1565: Stapleton in passing alludes to the “Puritans of our country”
1566: John Martial in a defencce of the cross : ‘whote [hot] Puritanes of the new clergie’ and ‘a plaine, puritaine, and notorious protestant’

1567: John Stowe : referring Anabaptists of London : who cawlyd themselves Puritans or Unspottyd Lambs of the Lord’.

Their critics see them as ‘precise men’, ‘our owne Preachers in England, of the Disciplinarian consort’, ‘our English Genevians’, ‘our English Disciplinarians’, ‘our pretended English reformers’. Puritans are commonly accused of calling themselves : “unspotted congregation”; “purest”, “cleanest” and thus seen as ‘vain glorious men’.

Their tendency towards separating themselves from the rest of the Church and community is also highlighted when they are accused of being “factious”, “Brownyngs/ Brownists” and ‘schismatics’.

Question 2

Connotations of the term ‘Puritan’

Answer 2

schismatic groups which had separated from the Church : novatians ( 3rd century); Donatists (3rd century);

heretics with claims to purity such as Cathares (katharos= pur); Albigenses/ Albigensians

other dangerous heretics: Arians ( 4th century : denied that the Son and Spirit were of equal status with the Father) Anabaptist (16th cent. Siege of Münster)

Question 3

Main opponent of the Puritans in the 1580s-1590s who refers to them as “precisians”.

In his notorious sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in February 1588 […]‘schismatics’, ‘those of the new humour’, ‘the factious of our age’, ‘our new reformers’, ‘our new men’. In A survey of the Pretended Holy Discipline : he denounced them as “presbyterial” Collinson, p. 21

Answer 3

Richard Bancroft

Question 4

Collinson on plosives and their use in invectives

Answer 4

the ‘paraperopandectical doctor’ in Thomas Middleton’s play The Family of Love was noted for ‘his precise, Puritanical, and peculiar punk, his potecary’s drug’.” (p. 21)

Source: Collinson, Patrick. «Antipuritanism». The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Ed. John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Question 5

What do Puritans call themselves ?

Answer 5

godly, professors of truth, true protestants, professors of the gospel, professors

Nehemiah Wallington: holy people of the Lord; dear children of the most high God; god’s saints and servants; holy and faithful ministers, true Christians

Question 6

What language should be used to talk about Puritans and puritanism?

Answer 6

This is a very old problem : John Ley, A discourse concerning Puritan:

Tending to Vindication of those who unjustly suffer by the mistake abuse and misapplication of that name, 1641: “[anti-puritans] accuse all good men for precisians, and all precise men for puritans, and all puritans for the only firebrands of the world”.

Question 7

The term Puritan was criticized and rejected by some historians in the 1960s-1970s ( ex. from Durston and Eales, Introduction, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700)p. 1-2

Answer 7

Christopher Hill commented in the 1950s that the word was ‘a dragon in the path of every student of this period’, and a few years later he described it as ‘an admirable refuge from clarity of thought’ (1956 & 1964)

Basil Hall remarked that it was ‘originally a useful coin of some value’ which had ‘become overminted and ended in headlong inflation’ (1965)

C. H. George: an analytical concept which obscures the realities and significance of differences of ideas, ideals, programmes and class affinities is a bad concept. Puritanism is such a concept and should be abandoned (1968)

Patrick Collinson has likened it to ‘a debate conducted among a group of blindfolded scholars in a darkened room about the shape and other attributes of the elephant sharing the room with them’ (1980)

Question 8

The merits of term ‘Puritan’

Answer 8

“I believe that the word Puritan remains and indispensable to the description and analysis of this state of affairs (i.e. early modern social conflict at the parish level), and I shall no longer attempt to avoid it. I shall use Puritan and (less frequently) puritanism in subsequent pages to denote the aggressive, reformative and hence socially disruptive aspects of zealous Protestantism.

Puritan, as I understand the term, implies a will to impose certain standards upon society as a whole.

Puritanism entails hostility to the traditional culture as well as enthusiasm for sermons and predestinarian theology.

A man of irreproachable personal piety who nevertheless has no objection to his neighbors’ boozing on the Sabbath or fornicating in the haylofts is not a Puritan.

A puritan who minds his own business is a contradiction in terms”. W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of the Revolution in an English County, 1983, p. 146)

Question 9

Naming non-puritans

Answer 9

“Non-Puritans” initially referred to those who were

(1) satisfied with the Elizabethan settlement
(2) who attended Book of Common Prayer services and
(3) adhered to the keeping of the liturgy as it was.

Question 10

How did Puritans name non-Puritans?

Answer 10

Puritans called them: “ungodly”; “carnal men”; “atheists”;

William Perkins: the multitude, our common sort of Protestant ; the common people (Haigh 2004)

George Clifford, A briefe discourse of Certaine Points of the Religion whiche is Among the Common Sort of Christians: Which may be Termed the … (1582) and Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Pathway to Heaven (1601) mocked them for being:

ignorant (rural) folk who more or less believe that neighborliness and charity are more important than religious rectitude and that such attitudes would get them into heaven (= good works).

Historians called them “Anglicans” (until 1970s) but this term is for the most part rejected as teleological and retrospectively projecting a reality that only emerged in the 1650s.

Question 11

Conformists

Answer 11

Non-puritans are now called “conformists”;

When viewed negatively “parish Anglicans” (C. Haigh, The English Reformations 1993);

When viewed positively “Prayer Book Protestants” ( Judith Maltby, Prayerbook and People in Early Modern England, 1998).

Other terms can also be used:
High Church men, churchmen, mainstream Protestants, conformable Protestant, mainstream conformist and Calvinist conformist.

In the last few years, historians have started to work on such figures as John Prideaux and Daniel Featley, referring to them as “reformed conformists” or “Calvinist conformists”

cf Hampton, Stephen. Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church. Oxford : Oxford UP, 2021
Salazar, Greg. Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England: The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2022.

Question 12

Which people rarely attended church?

Answer 12

There is a historiographical discussion about this group : Keith Thomas and C. Hill have hypothethized that a significant portion of the population, and especially among the poorer sort skipped church. R. Marchant’s study of the diocese of York has estimated that there might be 15% of people who did not attend and even formed a subculture of “ethical disssenters” who basically rejected religious values, discipline and conventional morality.

Recent work is a bit more skeptical of the existence of a vast group of irreverent English subjects and have focused on the generational divide : there was a subcultre of disorderly youth (Paul Griffiths and Martin Ingram)

Question 13

The group who started defending the status quo as a positive good, arguing that the structure of the church was god-given/ divinely ordained (1580s forward); they started moving away from belief in predestination (1590s forward)

Answer 13

Anglicans/Anti-Calvinists/Laudians

They also used to be called Anglicans and are now referred to mainly as “Anti-Calvinists” (1590s-1620s) and “Laudians” (1620s forward)

In reference to Richard Hooker, who defended the CofE as “divinely ordained,” and Lancelot Andrews, who pursued the same agenda, provides a link between Hooker and Laud. So, Peter Lake and Nicholas Tyacke have started using “avant-garde conformists (1580s and 1590s).

Question 14

Stereotype and reality: to what extent does Puritanism exist ?

Answer 14

Collinson in his most “nominalist” moments has argued that Puritanism was created by polemic in the 1590s in the aftermath of the MarPrelate controversy. Collinson has retreated somewhat from this more radical position but still sees Puritanism as something that exists chiefly in the eye of the beholder.

Question 15

Debate on Gifford’s dialogues : to what extent are the characters described in the text related to “reality”?

Answer 15

Haigh has used these categories of Gifford and Dent ( A Plain Man’s pathway to Heaven) to explore the archives and identified many of these “characters” in church court records. (See « The Character of an Antipuritan ». The Sixteenth Century Journal 35.3 (2004) 671-688) + The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven : Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570-1640. Oxford UP, 2007.

Question 16

Why do historians agree that there is such a thing as a “Puritan”?

Answer 16

1) For a caricature to work it needs to be related to a recognizable reality.
2) Puritans are referred to in multiple and very diverse sources, not only theater and polemic (cf Haigh mentioned above)
3) The godly identified themselves as a group which was distinct from the rest.

Question 17

“This book, then, works with a definition of puritanism as that which puritans saw in each other. It recognizes that the term puritan was dynamic, changing in response to the world around it and applying to several denominations; but it also claims that the term denotes a cluster of ideas, attitudes and habits, all built upon the experience of

Answer 17

justification, election and regeneration […]

Puritans exhibited a ‘style of piety, a mode of behaviour; a set of priorities, which contemporaries were capable of recognizing when they say them’ (qu.Peter Lake). The idea that the puritans could recognize each other as brethren is fundamental to this book. I want to show how they recognized each other”

Spurr, English Puritanism, 1998, p. 7-8.

Question 18

“…while it is undoubtedly true that much separated these men, they nonetheless shared something very important that justifies grouping them together under the label puritan, namely a common spiritual and cultural outlook. Above all else, puritanism was a movement grounded in a highly distinctive

Answer 18

cast of mind – or to use a more fashionable term, mentalité – which displayed itself in the individual puritan as a peculiarly severe yet vibrant spirituality, and within groups of puritans as a unique and dynamic religious culture. For this reason, we would argue that it is through the study of this culture that puritanism is most fruitfully approached, and that it is around those who shared in it that the boundaries of the movement should be drawn.” (Durston & Eales, “Introduction: The Puritan Ethos”, p. 9)

Question 19

Stripped of its pejorative rhetoric, there was a remarkable fit between the characteristics attributed to the godly by Laudian anti-Puritans and the distinctive forms of Puritan voluntary religion described in Clarke’s lives and analyzed by Pr. Collinson and others. Viewed both from inside and outside, then, there was considerable agreement about what

Answer 19

Puritan godliness looked like, accompanied, of course, by complete disagreement about what it meant.

P. Lake, « Defining Puritanism, again », Puritanism: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, Francis Bremer (ed.). 1993. P. 21-22

Question 20

From the inside, Puritans are about as factious and subversive as the homily of obedience. From the outside looking in,

Answer 20

From a Laudian viewpoint, they represent a sinister threat to order and obedience.

Agreement about what constituted the defining marks of the godly “provides telling evidence of the existence of a stable entity, style or position which we can legitimately call PN. On the other, the very different versions of what it meant serve as a crucial index of just how divisive that Pn style could be” (p. 22)

Question 21

The best way of thinking of Puritanism is as a reality shaped through confrontation with anti-Puritanism. Both realities are brought into existence dialogically (through dialogue/controversy) and dialectically (they evolve through confrontation and escalation; the one shaping the other).

Answer 21

Reversing Collinson’s position, Lake argues that Puritan ideas about theology, their sense of election, the disruptive effects of their modes of religious expression triggered a reaction which he calls “conformist differentiation” (anti-puritanism) (p.22-26).

He describes the process by which the ideas of each side are shaped as “an almost classically dialectical process” (p. 26). This will be explored in Chapters 3 and 4 of the Lecture.

Question 22

Calvinists

Answer 22

Puritans as reformed Calvinists

Question 23

John Calvin

Answer 23

French Protestant who implemented radical Reforms in Geneva.

Question 24

What beliefs did protestants share?

So BASIc !

Answer 24

1. Sola gratia (grace not acts save us)
2. Biblicism
3. Anti-Catholicism (i.e. rejection of pope + sacramental system as conveying grace)
4. Sacrifice of the mass is idolatry
5. Iconophobia (much weaker in Lutheran tradition )+rejection of the very idea that objects, places are holy. Only God is holy.

Question 25

Distinctive character of Calvinism / the Reformed faith

Answer 25

Liturgy is minimal and partly de-ritualised: no blessing on people or objects; religious services follow a pattern but it is not entirely set or fixed, importance of ex-tempore prayers
Emphasis on preaching the word of God: sermon
Doctrine of the Eucharist : spiritual presence only + worthy reception +
Soteriology : emphasis on the majesty and mystery of God and the sinfulness of man; predestination of the elect and thus necessarily predestination of the reprobate = double predestination

Question 26

“This they do ignorantly and childishly [= those who oppose double predestination] since

Answer 26

there could be no election without its opposite reprobation. God is said to set apart those whom he adopts for salvation. It were most absurd to say, that he admits others fortuitously, or that they by their industry acquire what election alone confers on a few. Those, therefore, whom God passes by he reprobates, and that for no other cause but because he is pleased to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines to his children.”

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.1.

Question 27

Theodore Beza emphazised which aspects of Calvin’s theology?

Answer 27

1) Church structure: presbytarian (congregation/ elders/ preachers/ministers; gather in synod to make decisions)

2) Strong emphasis on discipline and social control: consistory in charge of enforcing moral life based on the Ten Commandments

Question 28

What will divide puritans as it will later divide puritans and Anglicans?

Answer 28

Calvin identified the “marks of a true church” ( applied to a visible church not the invisible church of the elect/the saints):

1. The word of God is purely and faithfully preached, proclaimed, heard and kept
2. The sacraments are “properly administered”

Why?
Because it raises the question of whether the CofE a true church.
And whether the Catholic church a true church.

So protestants/those sympathetic with the reformation split over the Church of England and the Catholic Church…

Question 29

Puritans seek to further reform the church

Answer 29

For the most part the church of England is also “Calvinist” but clearly the church has a number of shortcomings that explain why strict Calvinists would argue that the Church was but “half-reformed”.

Question 30

The deficiencies of the liturgy which is “popish”

Answer 30

Vestments
Collect (=prayer) for grace
Physical attitudes in church
Baptism
Burial service
Form of solemnization of matrimony
Churching of women
Commination of sinners
Confirmation
Church music
Church setting
Royal chapel

Question 31

Vestments:

In the Act of Uniformity and 1559 BCP, full traditional attire (cope, chasuble, rochet…) ref. to 2nd year of Edward VI’s reign.

Injunctions 1559: Surplice
Ref to last year of Edward VI’s reign.

NB. Attachment to ornaments more about authority than about theology.

Answer 31

Why puritans disapprove:

– reminiscent of the sacrifice of the mass + traditional conception of the ministry

– Puritans wished to wear their academic robes (“a badge of their University training”, Bremer, Puritanism AVSI, 2009, p. 8)

“a rag of the pope and a mighty heresy and he who maintains it can not be saved”
“a polluted and cursed mark of the beast” ( quotes in Spurr)

Appointments to lectureships made it possible for PN clergy to eschew the surplice.

Question 32

Why Puritans disapprove of the place of the communion table (altarwise when not in use for communion service)

Laudian policy of restoring altars + altar rails

Answer 32

reminiscent of the sacrifice of the mass

= an abomination ! popery !

Question 33

Collect (=prayer) for grace

Answer 33

The title of the prayer is problematic since praying for grace is inconsistent with Prot soteriology.

Question 34

1) Type of bread used for communion (1559 Injunctions): small round bread
2) Communion formula
3) Kneeling at communion (a major preoccupation for the Puritan laity)

Answer 34

Reminiscent of real presence

Question 35

Physical attitudes in church
– Standing at the reading of the gospel
– Bowing to the name of Jesus

Answer 35

Superstitious and ritualistic/ceremonialistic

Question 36

Baptism:
God-parents (gossips): make statements and promises on behalf of child
Signing the child with +
Prayer saying that the child was now regenerate
Location: around the font
Private baptism including by mid-wives

Answer 36

– Dilutes the resp. of parents for spiritual welfare of their children + some godparents are not adequate (children)

– Power of the minister to convey grace + ritual reminiscent of popish past (sacramentals)

– Suggests God’s grace is accessible to all

–Should be in the front of the church

– Baptism always to be held on Sundays or even better certain feast days + with a sermon

–There is no need to rush to baptize children since it does not guarantee salvation and does not convey grace

• Lay puritans would also have strategies for avoiding signing

-Some puritan ministers refused to baptize children in private even if dying. While others used private baptism to baptize without using surplice of sign of cross !

Question 37

Burial service:
Prayers said over the dead body
1 Cor xv “death where is thy sting”
Committal to the ground : “in sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ”

Answer 37

Could easily be misconstrued as prayers for the dead

Suggestion that everyone might be saved

Some PN ministers were very reluctant to use these words when burying notorious sinners. Or doing so

Question 38

Form of solemnization of matrimony
1) Announcing the bans
2) Vows: “with my body I worship thee”
3) Ring given to the woman

Answer 38

1) Marriage is not a sacrament
2) Idolatrous
3) Reminiscent of the traditional sacrament ( in which there was always an outward sign) and of sacramentals (blessed objects which have apotropaic=magical powers

marriage abolished by radical puritans in the CW

Question 39

Churching of women
(after giving birth this was a ritual by which the woman was welcomed back into the congregation) also called the «purification of women»

Answer 39

Seen as a jewish/popish tradition + encouraged to think that a ritual could effect a form of purification (exactly what Christ had abolished in the Jewish tradition)

1630s : Laudian policy : women must kneel and wear a veil.

Question 40

Commination of sinners
To be used several times in the year
Cursing people for a list of specific sins

Answer 40

Did not name sinners (“particularize” as in the Scottish Church) publicly but denounced sins
Not an efficient discipline

Question 41

Confirmation
Supposedly children are confirmed at about 8 and their knowledge is checked before the bishop imposes his hands on their heads.

Answer 41

Ritual is reminiscent of the past + it is performed by the bishop (suggesting he has a specific role in the church hierarchy and can convey the Holy Ghost) + suggestion that baptism is incomplete and needs to be confirmed

Question 42

Church music: organ and polyphony in cathedrals mainly

Answer 42

Only congregational psalm singing
A tradition created under Ed 6 (Metrical Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins)

Question 43

Church setting

Answer 43

Emphasis should be on the Word of God (Bible + pulpit) and not on the communion table and liturgical paraphenalia

Question 44

Square hat to be worn by clergy (1559 injunctions) for good order and decency

Answer 44

Reminiscent of the traditional idea of ordained ministry (men set apart)

Question 45

Saint days

Answer 45

Superstitious, should be abolished (Xmas was abolished in the Civil War)

Question 46

More generally the language used in the BCP presumes that everyone (within the Church) is saved, regenerated and in a state of grace (Spurr p. 36).
+ puritans considered some readings to be apocryphal.

Answer 46

apocryphal = of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true: an apocryphal story about a former president. ;
* (also Apocryphal) of or belonging to the Apocrypha: the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

Question 47

“vestarian controversy” of the 1560s

Answer 47

The vestments controversy or vestarian controversy arose in the English Reformation, ostensibly concerning vestments or clerical dress. Initiated by John Hooper’s rejection of clerical vestments in the Church of England under Edward VI as described by the 1549 Book of Common Prayer and 1550 ordinal, it was later revived under Elizabeth I. It revealed concerns within the Church of England over ecclesiastical identity, doctrine and church practices.

Question 48

Other problems Puritans had with the BCP

Answer 48

1) laity only communicated once a year, a pre-Reformation use which again suggested a traditional view of the sacrament.

2) Not sufficient restriction for communion

Spurr, p. 31 “This pastoral work was as much designed to dissuade the unworthy as to prepare the worthy. It was a way of making good the lack of discipline within the Church of England. (…) Puritans lived in fear of the ‘promiscuous’, ‘mixed” communions of the national church, of receiving the sacrament side by side with notorious evil livers, who because they were unworthy to eat at the Lord’s supper, were eating to damnation (I Corinthians xi. 29)”

Question 49

The episcopalian structure of the church (this second claim will emerge from the failed battle to reform the liturgy)

Answer 49

The office of bishop is not scriptural + the idea of having separate “orders” and episcopal pomp is Romish

Later argument evolved in the course of the vestarian controversy: bishops abuse their power and do not promote a preaching ministery

Question 50

“admonition controversy” of the 1570s

Answer 50

he admonition controversy of the early 1570’s marked the first systematic attack against the government of the established church.

1570: Thomas Cartwright claimed that presbyterianism was the form of Church government obtained by God in Scripture.

1572: an “Admonition to Parliament” called for the episcopal hierarchy of the Church of England to be abolished and replaced with the system of a church government ordained by God, presbyterianism. With the publication of this, the “first open manifesto of the puritan party,” the stage was set for the ‘most important literary and religious dual in the Elizabethan period”

Question 51

“MarPrelate controversy”

Answer 51

Marprelate Controversy, brief but well-known pamphlet war (1588–89) carried on by English Puritans using secret presses; they attacked the episcopacy as “profane, proud, paltry, popish, pestilent, pernicious, presumptious prelates.”

The tracts, of which seven survive, never had the support of Puritan leaders and ceased when the presses were discovered by government agents.

The identity of the author, who signed himself “Martin Marprelate gentleman” and “Martin junior,” is still a mystery, but the case for Job Throckmorton as at least the principal author has now been widely accepted.

Anonymous replies appeared in 1589, and in February of that year Richard Bancroft delivered a sermon against the tracts at Paul’s Cross, London, which is considered the first statement of the “divine right” of episcopacy in Anglican apologetics.

Question 52

adiaphora

Answer 52

designates indifferent things, that is, what is not formally prohibited nor formally prescribed by the law of God. For Christians, these delineate a gray zone.

Question 52

adiaphora

Answer 52

designates indifferent things, that is, what is not formally prohibited nor formally prescribed by the law of God. For Christians, these delineate a gray zone.

Question 53

Conformist position on adiaphora?

Answer 53

The latitudinarian Anglicans of the seventeenth century built on Richard Hooker’s position, in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, that God cares about the moral state of the individual soul and that such things as church leadership are “things indifferent”. However, they took the position far beyond Hooker’s own and extended it to doctrinal matters.

Question 54

Puritan position on adiaphora?

Answer 54

William Bradshaw, English Puritanism (London, 1605).

In primis, they hold and maintain that the word of God contained in the wiritngs of the Prophets and Apostles is of absolute perfection, given by Christ the head of the church, to be unto the same, the sole canon and rule of all matters of religion, and the worship and service of God whatsoever. And that whatsoever done in the same service and worship cannot be justified by the said word, is unlawful. And therefore that it is a sin, to force any Christian to do any act of religion or divine service, that cannot evidently be warranted by the same.

Sir Robert Harley described a puritan as “one that dares do nothing in the worship of God or course of his life but what God’s word warrants him, and dares not leave undone anything that the word commands him” , Jacquie Eales, “SIR ROBERT HARLEY, K.B., (1579-1656) AND THE ‘CHARACTER’ OF A PURITAN”, The British Library Journal 15.2 (1989) p. 150)

Question 55

In what way does the doctrine of double predestination lack clarity?

Answer 55

The 39 Articles written in 1563 and endorsed by Convocation in 1571
Article on predestination

Article 17 is quite vague + no mention of the reprobate + idea that dwelling too much on predestination could lead to despair.

William Perkins, A Golden Chain, Or the Description of Theology, 1590.
Election is God’s decree “whereby on his own free will, he hath ordained certain men to salvation, to the praise of the glory of his grace.” Reprobation is “that part of predestination, whereby God, according to the most free and just purpose of his will, hath determined to reject certain men unto eternal destruction, and misery, and that to the praise of his justice.”

Question 56

Covenant theology or federal theology

Answer 56

1590s-1620s, Crisis in Reformed Protestantism in 1620-1620s : a Dutch theologian

Question 57

The spiritual experience of Puritans as the “hotter sort of Protestants”

Answer 57

Credal predestinarians (non-puitans, e.g. Whitgift, who believe in predestination as a theological doctrine)

vs

experiential predestinarians (puritans)

The stages of the spiritual drama that take place within the soul of the elect Christian (Pauline concepts, cf. reading below + not necessarily in sequence)
Ref: Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, 2014

cf W. Perkins, The Golden Chain, 1590

Question 58

stages of the spiritual drama of experiential predestinarians

Answer 58

Conversion, Repentance and sorrow, Calling, Justification, Sanctification, Glorification, Adoption

Question 59

Justification

Answer 59

“Justification, which alone makes possible the sinner’s salvation, is also God’s gift; for the Protestant it involves forgiveness of his sins by Christ’s satisfaction for them, and the imputing of God’s righteousness to him as a cloak or covering to hide his true filthiness and wickedness.” (Lewalski 17)

The believer/elect : Understands that the promise of God’s salvation applies to him/herself

Perkins : Nowe, after these desires and prayers for Gods mercie, ariseth in the heart a liuelie assurance of the forgiuenesse of sinne

Question 60

Calling

Answer 60

“God’s awakening at whatever time God has appointed and by whatever means” (Lewalski 16)

God executeth this effectual calling by certain means. The first is the saving hearing of the word God… The second is the mollifying of the heart, the which must be bruised in pieces, that it may be fit to receive God’s saving grace offered unto it… The third is faith, which is a miraculous and supernatural faculty of the heart, apprehending Christ Jesus, being applied by the operation of the Holy Ghost, and receiving him to itself (John 1:12; 6:35; Romans 9:30)”… (Perkins, A Golden Chain

Question 61

Sanctification

Answer 61

consequence of election

“the actual but gradual repairing of the defaced image of God in the soul.”

By performing good works, esp. obedience to the Ten Commandments, which are evidence of salvation not a means to salvation

Described by Calvin as a constant spiritual battle which will only end at death

Cf Perkins, on the effects of sanctification

Sanctification is a consequence of election, and therefore can serve to a certain extent as a sign of election.

Question 62

Adoption

Answer 62

“as a son of God and heir of heaven with Christ” (Lewalski 17) > new relation to a loving father

Question 63

Conversion

Answer 63

Awareness of abject sinfulness, total depravity followed by the sense of having received God’s grace (can be described as an overwhelmingly sweet spiritual experience : “God’s caress”).

The Christian is not an agent in this conversion which is achieved by God.

Some terms that are used to describe it “regeneration”, “new creation”, “rebirth”.

Question 64

Repentance and sorrow

Answer 64

may verge on despair

Question 65

Glorification

Answer 65

“The perfect restoration of the image of God in man and the enjoyment of eternal blessedness, may begin in this life but is fully attained only after death” (Lewalski, p. 18)

Question 66

Puritan forms of pastoral care

Answer 66

1) “practical divinity” (théologie pratique)

2) searching for assurance and self-fashioning narratives

Question 67

“practical divinity” (théologie pratique)

Answer 67

manifested in sermons and in written works of pastoral advice and casuistic (what to do when faced with specific cases)

Create the anguish necessary for hearing calling

Question 68

Searching for assurance and self-fashioning narratives

Answer 68

1) Starting point is awareness of one’s sinfulness
2) Self-examination and the search for the signs of salvation
3) Diverse literary genres : diaries ; conversion narratives; meditations

e.g. Samuel Ward, Lady Margaret Hoby, & Nehemiah Wallington (who wrote more than 50 notebooks over the course of his life).

Question 69

Eales and Durston:

“Wallington grew up in one of the capital’s many puritan families during the reign of James I. His adolescent years were marked by a deep spiritual crisis during which he was consumed by…

Answer 69

…intense feelings of shame and despair over what he called his ‘most vile and sinful corruption’. These difficulties centred on a growing conviction that he was destined for hell, a belief which appears to have been fuelled by his inability to come to terms with his emerging sexuality. Successive bouts of depression and anxiety brought him to the verge of a complete mental breakdown and to several attempts at suicide. After 1618 he found some relief from his psychological torment by dedicating his life to God, and thereafter he was driven by a compulsive urge to record in writing the details of what remained an often agonised pilgrim’s progress.” (p. 12)

Question 70

The lived experience of puritanism

Answer 70

Sermon centered faith, Styles of preaching, “sermon gadding”

Question 71

Sermon centered faith,

Answer 71

the word of God preached (rather than merely Bible reading by individuals)
Relying on the minister’s rhetorical talent and his ability to convince
Effects of the sermon on the hearer : go through conversion/ spiritual drama

Question 72

Styles of preaching

Answer 72

Durston and Eales : “The main vehicles for puritan socialisation were sermons and fasts.

“It was of vital importance to puritans that they should have frequent access to ‘painful’ preachers whose sermons could provide them with the encouragement, admonition and edification which they regarded as the essential elements of a healthy spiritual diet.

“They considered preaching to be an indispensable ingredient of Sunday worship, and many of them also regularly attended four or five weekday sermons; on one occasion Nehemiah Wallington notched up the impressive total of no fewer than nineteen in seven days!’ (p. 20)

Question 73

“sermon gadding”

Answer 73

Durston and Eales: “ In the first instance, they looked to find such suitable sermons in their local parishes, but if their minister proved ‘a dumb dog’ who neglected preaching, they were prepared to travel considerable distances to attend them elsewhere.

“Over time, this travelling - or ‘gadding’ - became an important spiritual activity in its own right. Groups of travelling puritans often walked together for several hours on their way to and from worship, discussing sermons, singing psalms, and cementing the ties that linked them together as ‘friends in the Lord’.

” As a result, gadding played an important part in fostering the social cohesion of local puritan networks and providing them with opportunities for the defiant flaunting of their lifestyles before their ungodly neighbours.”
(Introduction, The Culture of English Puritanism p. 20

[Anti-Puritans denounce this practice as disorderly and factious]

Question 74

Exercises in prophesyings in the 1570s

Answer 74

Religious training exercises favoured by Puritan clergy in England, significant during the 1570s. For a given Biblical text, a number of sermons would be given, which were then analysed by those present, under the guidance of a moderator.[1] Proponents would cite a biblical passage in 1 Corinthians 14 to support of the practice: “let the prophets speak two or three”

Cf below John Earle, Microcosmographie (1628), “The She-Puritan”: satire but brings out key feature :

“She overflows so much with the Bible that she spills it upon every occasion, and will not cudgel her maids without Scripture.”

Question 75

Bible centered piety

Answer 75

Most Puritans owned a Bible or had access to one. The Puritans who could not read seized every opportunity to have the Bible read to them.
The Puritans’ favourite Bible was the Geneva Bible with its Calvinist marginal notes. It was first published in 1560 and published many times over. Bible reading and interpretation was a private as well as a collective activity

(Durston & Eales p. 16)

Question 76

Sabbatarianism : strict reading of the 4th Commandment (Biblicism)

Answer 76

See Winship reading below.
the intensity of sabbatarian practices evolved over time (Collinson)

These practices both individual and collective shaped a distinctive Puritan culture or habitus

Question 77

Fast Days

Answer 77

Durston & Eales: “to inculcate an individual and collective sense of humiliation by providing puritans with an ideal opportunity for lengthy meditation upon the insignificance and depravity of humankind and the power and justice of God - perspectives which, as we have seen, were at the very core of the puritan mental outlook. Puritans also saw fasting as a particularly effective means of assuaging or diverting God’s wrath, in that it could make reparations for past sins and remove these obstacles to the advancement of the godly cause” (Durston & Eales, Introduction, The Culture of English Puritanism, p. 22)

Question 78

counterpart to puritan fast days

Answer 78

Patrick Collinson : “Evidently, the puritan fast day was a rather exact counterpart, antitype, and even parody of the festive day, and particularly of the wake, or church ale. Let us exercise our imaginations. People set out in groups early in the morning to travel as many as 10 or 12 miles, disorderly groups in that they consisted indiscriminately of both sexes and all ages and they returned, exhausted, late in the evening. At St Albans it was noted that ‘this gadding people came from far and went home late, both young men and young women together’. A shared meal before the homeward journey must have been a necessity. The end-product, at one level, as with a church ale, was a sum of money collected for a charitable purpose. We should not assume that everyone present was engaged for all the long hours of the fast in spiritual exercises. There may have been some foundation to the anti-puritan slander that there were some sexual shenanigans on the side. More legitimately, the godly sometimes found their spouses in these circumstances, just as defenders of country dances justified them for the same reason.” ( “Puritanism as Popular Religious Culture,” in Durston and Eales, p. 52).

Question 79

Instruction in the godly household

Answer 79

Godly masters and mistresses would lead prayers, repeat the head of sermons, instruct and teach their children and dependants.
Here women could play an important role as religious instructor.

Question 80

Puritan leisure

Answer 80

Major clash between Puritans and the regime of James I := 1618 “The Book of Sports” ( see chapter 4)

Question 81

“Reformation of manners”

Answer 81

It was a way for the Puritans to be a visible church, to show to the world signs of their election. This was part of the duty of “sanctification” for themselves and “charitable hatred” for their neighbours. Watch Alex Walsham video on moodle

Puritans were harsh critics of recreations and pastimes, i.e. what was commonly called “merry (old) England”: dancing, playing cards, football and other games (bowling), any game involving betting), cock fighting, bear baiting and of course opposed drunkenness and all forms of sex outside marriage.

The Puritans’ desire for moral reform was rooted in their radical biblicism and reflected their strong desire to follow the Old Testament commandments to the letter: to sanctify Sunday, to forbid blasphemy, and to prohibit adultery in a broad sense (Winship 51-54; Lake 1993, 11).
Essential reading : Ten Commandments + Winship, Hot Protestants, p. 51-54)

Question 82

Is the desire for social control specific to the Puritans ?

Answer 82

Several historians have connected the desire for social control to the elite/middling sort’s desire for “social differenciation” in a context of economic or social pressure.
Keith Wrightson ; David Underdown

However these attitudes can be found in non-puritan contexts: forms of social control can be found in all of Europe + long before the Reformation and in areas of England that are not dominated by Puritans (M. Spufford, M. Todd; M. Ingram)
AND Puritans were not all from this social group
AND These attitudes were mainly driven by religious beliefs

Question 83

Finally, historiographical middle ground is: desire for social control is not exclusive to the PNs however :

Answer 83

Peter Lake : “Even where the ends of order and discipline pursued by the godly were in themselves uncontroversial, the intensity with which they pursued those ends was not” “Defining Puritanism, again”, Puritanism: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, edited by Francis Bremer. 1993.

David Hall (The Puritans. A Transatlantic History, p. 9) maintains that he can “identify a cluster of assumptions that differentiate the Puritan version of a reformation of manners from its near neighbor [mainstream Protestants].”
Certain inflexions are distinctive (the exact form of Sabbatarianism) but there is much overlap and much debate, which is connected to the difficulty in drawing the line between devout, pious conformists and “moderate puritans”.

Question 84

Difficulty in defining puritanism for three main reasons :

Puritanism must be defined as a cluster of features and in terms of intensity

Answer 84

Peter Lake : “I would wish to see Puritanism as a distinctive style of piety and divinity, made up not so much of distinctively Puritan component parts, the mere presence of which in a person’s thought or practice rendered them definitely a Puritan, as a synthesis made of strands most or many of which taken individually could be found in non-Puritan as well as Puritan contexts, but which taken together formed a distinctively Puritan synthesis or style.” « Defining Puritanism, again », p. 6

Question 85

Puritanism and Protestantism exist on a spectrum of intensity which is measured subjectively by historians, hence disagreements on whether one person is a puritan or not.

Answer 85

Desire to reform liturgy, biblicism, search for the signs of grace, desire for personal sanctification, participation in the puritan sociability, desire for a church of visible saints, desire for a holy city, desire to abolish the episcopacy, preference for presbyterianism, preference for congregationalism/separatism

Question 86

Puritanism is essentially contextual: it meant different things at different moments ; it is shaped by circumstances, particularly by the opposition it encounters.

Answer 86

Eales and Durston : A second reason for the definitional inexactitudes which have plagued the study of puritanism is that the movement never really existed as an independent free-standing entity. For much of its history it was an oppositional, agitator movement, frequently in conflict with the secular and ecclesiastical authorities or with those many sections of local society which did not share its ideals. As such it was only one component of a set of fluid an dynamic polarities, a fact which has prompted Patrick Collinson to warn that ‘there is little point in constructing elaborate statements defining what in ontological terms Puritanism was and was not, when it was not a thing definable in itself but only one half of a stressful relationship”. […]To a very large degree, therefore, both the nature and extent of puritanism were determined by the changing environment within which it existed […]. Introduction, p. 3-4