LONG BEFORE ANYONE was being called a Puritan in sixteenth-century England and Scotland, there were people who, when pressed to name themselves, would have used the newly coined word “Protestant.” By the 1530s, men and women of this temperament were eagerly reading the Bible in English, using copies printed overseas and smuggled into their countries, where Catholicism remained the official religion. Encountering Scripture in the vernacular was transformative, as it also was to hear preachers who promised the “Pure Gospel.” At a church trial in 1530s England, a fifteen-year-old boy who was caught owning a primer and a New Testament recalled how “divers poor men in the town of Chelmsford . . . bought the new testament of Jesus Christ and on Sundays did sit reading [aloud] in lower end of church, and many would flock about them to hear their reading then I came among the said readers to hear them . . . then thought I will learn to read English, and then I will have the new testament and read thereon myself.” Scenes of this kind were becoming more frequent as the years passed, the less audacious gathering in the privacy of household-based communities to converse about the Christ whose death on the cross freed them from unrelenting penance and the “tyranny” of a sacerdotal priesthood.1 Thus, step by step, did the Reformation emerge in England and Scotland alongside the Reformation in Europe initiated by Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli.
Everywhere, these Protestants celebrated the Word, with its revelation of “the great and ineffable omnipotent power, promise, justice, mercy and goodness of Almighty God.” Everywhere as well, the same people likened it to a “light” that eliminated the “darkness” of Catholicism and its “dumme and dead idoles.” So declared the English ministers who, living in exile in the safety of Protestant Geneva, prepared a fresh translation of the Bible into English (1560), telling its prospective readers that they would experience the “unspeakable mercy” of being recalled to the truth by the “marvelous light of his Gospel.” Catholics mocked these evocations of Scripture as mere “Bible-babble,” and Protestants mocked Catholics in return for introducing practices and rites without warrant in the Word.2 In his Apology of the Church of England (1562), the English minister John Jewell challenged Roman Catholics to refer all disputes “to the trial of God’s word.” Protestants were also insisting that the Bible become available in “such a tonge as we can and do understand,” a practice resisted by the Catholic hierarchy. William Tyndale, who made the earliest translation to reach British Protestants, argued that “it was not possible to stablish the laypeople in any truth, except the Scripture were so plainly laide before their eyes in their mother tongue.”3 “Christ never spoke in English,” a Catholic official interrogating a Protestant pointed out, only to be told that “neither spoke he any Latin; but always in such a tongue as the people might be edified thereby.” With Catholic assumptions about the authority of priests and tradition thrust aside, Scripture became the doorway to knowing God and the most important source of rules for Protestants to follow as they organized churches, ministry, and worship.4
This lesson learned, Protestants in England and Scotland turned it against the “human inventions” they saw everywhere. A much-repeated phrase, human inventions captured an understanding of Christian history as it had unfolded from the times of the apostles to the beginning of the sixteenth century—in essence, a history of “idolatry” and “superstitions” overtaking the “primitive” perfection of the apostolic period. Now, with the Word to guide them, Protestants were restoring that perfection. Theirs was a movement of reform as a return to or reappropriation of the past, a regaining of the “primitive” as original or first: “We have searched out of the Holy Bible, which we are sure cannot deceive, one sure form of religion, and have returned again unto the primitive church of the ancient fathers and apostles.” In the long run, this confidence in the principle of ad fontes, or returning to what came first, could not forestall various interpretations of Scripture. What exactly did the church fathers and apostles teach about worship and the nature of the church? As the leaders of the Reformation in Scotland and England learned to their dismay, it was possible to answer such questions in different ways.5
Everywhere as well, Protestants celebrated the message of sola gratia: by (free) grace we are redeemed from our sinfulness, not, as Catholicism maintained, by some combination of grace and our own efforts. Emphasizing the gulf between “law” or “works” and “Gospel,” Martin Luther called on Christians to recognize the new freedom that became theirs in the aftermath of Christ’s death on the cross. The law that bound the Jews was no longer binding now that the Gospel was available to everyone. Eager to remove any uncertainty about the saving effects of grace, Luther emphasized Christ’s love for the redeemed, who had only to respond in faith. To this argument he added an understanding of the church as a community of the faithful existing apart from the unredeemed world, a theme he owed in part to St. Paul’s evocation of Christ as the “corner stone” of a “holy temple” of people who, in the aftermath of being transformed by the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:20; 1 Cor. 6:19–20; 2 Cor. 3:3), practiced “love” (charity), “peace,” and “edification,” or a mutual commitment to enhance the holiness of those who came together in fellowship. Luther and other Protestants drew on early Christianity for another motif, the church as a community that, here on earth, suffered at the hands of its enemies. To suffer as outcasts was a fundamental aspect of the Christian condition until the arc of Christian history was completed with the return of Christ and the final restoration of his kingdom.6
The authority of the word, or regulative principle, the gift of grace from a merciful God, the imperative of eliminating idolatry, and the special liberty Christians would enjoy within the fellowship of a purified church—these themes were shared by everyone who turned away from Catholicism and became Protestants. As the rest of this book will indicate, these same motifs defined the movement that became known as Puritanism. To them the British reformers added others fashioned by the intellectual and cultural movement known as Christian humanism, which contributed an “activism and . . . reformist ethic” to the intellectual climate of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Humanists drew on classical, pre-Christian writers as well as on the Christian tradition for an understanding of the common good and the virtues that would promote it. Imagining an active citizenry prompted by ethical ideals to attempt a new kind of society, humanism overlapped with aspects of the social ethics that Luther and other early leaders of the Reformation were articulating.7
While sharing so much, Protestants on the Continent and in Britain were at odds on other issues. Bitter words were exchanged and violence erupted when a coalition of Lutherans and Catholics in Germany went to war with local Anabaptists in the 1520s and early 1530s. Nonetheless, Protestants had good reasons for uniting. The more divided they were, the more vulnerable they became to the Catholic assertion that any questioning of Rome’s authority opened the floodgates to heresy. The implications of division and disagreement prompted Protestants in Switzerland to fashion a compromise theology of the Eucharist and baptism. Lutherans spurned the Consensus Tigurinus (1549), as this agreement was named, although its carefully balanced view of the sacrament reappeared in major creedal statements of the Reformed tradition. By the 1560s, hopes for a more unifying faith had given way to lasting division into three major families or traditions: the Lutheran, the Reformed, and the Radical or “Free.” During the same decade, Reformed churches on the Continent fashioned statements of doctrine and reemphasized the principle of “discipline” (see below). Simultaneously, some leaders of the Reformed began to insist on a “presbyterian” system of governance.
The Reformed tradition (or, alternatively, “Calvinism”) played a singular role in the making of the Reformation in England, Ireland, and Scotland and the development of New England.8 As early as the 1530s, Luther’s theology, although available in translation, was giving way to connections direct and indirect with the Reformed international, connections nurtured by Thomas Cranmer, who became Archbishop of Canterbury (the highest clerical office in the Church of England) in 1533. When Protestantism resumed its advance in England after the death of Henry VIII in 1547, Cranmer invited Reformed theologians such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer to take up posts at Oxford and Cambridge. Simultaneously, he allowed refugees from continental Europe to organize congregations of their own in London. Thereafter, anyone interested in Reformed modes of worship and governance could ponder the example of these “stranger” churches.9
The influence of the Reformed arose as well out of the experience of Protestants who, for safety’s sake, left England and Scotland for the Continent. In the early 1540s, when Henry VIII was retreating from his Protestantism and James V, the Catholic ruler of Scotland, was suppressing dissent, exiles from both countries settled in cities sympathetic to the Reformed—for example, John Hooper in Zurich and John Knox in Geneva. A more consequential exodus from England occurred after Mary Tudor came to the throne in 1553 and restored Catholicism as her country’s official religion. The clergy who fled to Europe settled in cities under the sway of the Reformed tradition, places such as Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Zurich, Emden, Basel, and especially Geneva, where as many as a fourth of the exiles ended up. When these men returned after Elizabeth I became queen in 1558 and the Church of England reverted to Protestantism, they had an important voice in debates about worship and ministry, with several becoming bishops. A smaller number of Scottish exiles or Scots who went abroad in search of academic training settled or taught in Geneva or other Reformed centers and, after returning to their homeland, became influential advocates of Reformed practices. Another wave of repression in 1570s England propelled a handful of reformers across the Channel to Geneva and Heidelberg and subsequently to the Netherlands, where some of them found positions within churches set up for and by soldiers and merchants. “Separatists” sought refuge in the same country in the 1580s and beyond. Although differing among themselves, the great majority of these exiles admired the Reformed understanding of the church.10
Books were another means of communicating the themes of the Reformed tradition. After 1560, the London book trade issued translation after translation of texts by Continental theologians and church leaders and imported other copies, some of them in Latin, to sell to the English reading public. A careful count of both kinds of evidence demonstrates that, where printed books are concerned, John Calvin was “the dominant theological influence in Elizabethan England,” published and republished more times than any native theologian. His one serious rival was William Perkins of Cambridge, but the writings of Theodore Beza, who assumed the leadership of the Geneva church after Calvin’s death in 1564, rank third in a tabulation of editions, with Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich in sixth place, just after Luther.11 Scottish Protestants read the same books in Latin, English, or, by 1567, in Scots Gaelic12 and formed close ties with the French Reformed community, which recruited students and faculty from Scotland for its seminaries. The seven provinces (soon to be known as the Low Countries or Netherlands) that broke off from the Spanish empire after 1581 became another major source of theological and biblical scholarship. There, English and Scottish refugees found printers willing to publish tracts and manifestos that could not be issued in their home countries. Meanwhile, well-placed patrons of learning such as Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, were encouraging translators to make Continental polemics available in English and backing local writers who supported the Reformed tradition.13
The grandest publishing project of the Marian exiles was the English-language Geneva Bible. William Whittingham, who initiated this project, relied on that city’s printers to issue the New Testament in 1558 and, two years later, the entire Bible. Under Henry VIII, the Church of England had already authorized the Great Bible (1539);14 a revised version known as the Bishops Bible was published in 1568. Both were designed for display in parish churches. Once the Geneva Bible began to be printed in England, the number of editions far surpassed those of the Bishops Bible: at least seventy-seven between 1560 and 1611, as contrasted with twenty of the Bishops Bible, with another twenty or so issued after the appearance of the “authorized” or King James version of 1611. Eventually published in sizes compact enough to suit households and solitary readers, the Geneva Bible included an apparatus of summaries and commentary designed to make the text more intelligible. In the course of time, other documents were appended and the marginal comments revised. After 1579, some printings included a catechism headed “Certain Questions and Answers Touching the Doctrine of Predestination.” The commentary on Romans 8:29 and 9:15 and Psalm 147:20 also called attention to this doctrine. As well, after 1599 some printings included “completely new, and very full, notes on Revelation” prepared by Franciscus Junius (François du Jon), a French Protestant. According to his commentary, Revelation told the story of God’s people as they passed from tribulation to a culminating “freedom and immunity from all evil.”15
The community of exiles in Geneva reshaped another book that, like the Geneva version of the Bible, acquired a remarkable importance within British Protestantism, The Whole Booke of Psalmes (1562), a much expanded version of Thomas Sternhold’s Certayne Psalmes chose[n] out of the Psalter of David (London, 1547). With the energetic London printer and fervent Protestant John Day in charge and John Hopkins and Thomas Norton serving as translators, The Whole Booke of Psalmes rapidly became the psalter of choice in English congregational worship and household devotions, as evidenced by the 186 printings (at a minimum) by 1609 and another 294 by 1640, with other copies printed in Scotland, where some of the same translations were incorporated into the Scottish psalter. Especially after 1600, many of these editions were in smaller formats that suited individual purchasers.16 Wherever it came into use, The Whole Booke of Psalmes nurtured the communal singing that Calvin had introduced in Geneva. Like the Geneva Bible, moreover, the psalter in some of its editions included prose instruction in theology, one of them “The confession of Christian faith” borrowed from another product of the exile community: the Anglo-Genevan Form of Prayers, a devotional text that become the official order of worship in Scotland. Much favored by groups that regarded themselves as “godly,” the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter remained nonpartisan, as demonstrated by the fact that copies were frequently incorporated into printings of the official liturgy of the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer.17
To these influential books we must add one more, a collection of martyr stories assembled by the Marian exile John Foxe. Initially published in Basel (1559), the first English-language printing of Actes and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching matters of the Church, or, to use its colloquial title, the Book of Martyrs (London, 1563; revised in three subsequent printings) recounted the history of Christianity as an ongoing struggle between true Christians and their enemies within the church. Foxe began with the earliest Christian martyrs, although the women and men of special interest to him were those who died for their Protestantism under Henry VIII and Mary Tudor. Some, like John Bradford, became household names because of the power of the stories he told about them. As he explained on the title page as well as in a preface he added to the 1570 edition, the “true church” was not the corrupt and tyrannical “church of Rome” but the church of the “poor oppressed and persecuted.” It was their story he wanted to update, a story of “horrible troubles that have been wrought and practiced by the Romish prelates.” With the coming of the Reformation, these people were awaiting their moment of triumph even as they continued to suffer. Foxe reiterated a commonplace of English thinking, the fable that true Christianity had persisted longer in his native country and recovered earlier from corruption than elsewhere in Europe. (Scottish Protestants made the same assumptions about their national church.) But by dedicating the edition of 1563 to Elizabeth I and hailing her as another Constantine, the emperor who installed Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, Foxe tweaked the meaning of his book. Now, the church of the suffering few became the church of an entire nation. For the moment, Foxe allowed these two versions of past, present, and future to exist side by side in his pages.18
Via this traffic in books and people, Protestants in England and Scotland became familiar with the distinctive features of Reformed theology and practice. And distinctive the Reformed tradition was, although faithful to the core Protestant principles of free grace and the primacy of Scripture. What made it singular were six arguments or assumptions, all of which shaped the reformations underway in England and Scotland.19
1. A critique of “idolatry” that encompassed the whole of Catholic worship. John Calvin regarded man-made images of God and the worship of them as idolatry. He based this reasoning on the second commandment, which, in the version of the Decalogue he and the Reformed preferred, emphasized the prohibiting of “graven images” once this was detached from the injunction to “have none other gods before me” (Deut. 5:7). In his hands and those of British reformers, the category of idols encompassed freestanding statues, representations of God or Christ in stained glass, and images of any kind; as was argued by the English reformer William Fulke, “there is no difference between idol and image.” This outcry against idolatry became a distinctive feature of the Reformed tradition and, in Britain, of the more radical advocates of Protestantism. John Hooper was unflinching in his Declaration of the ten holy commandments (1549/1550): “every man in England knoweth praying to saints and kneeling before images is idolatry, and instruments of the devil to lead men from the commandments of God.” For Hooper as for Calvin, the outward practice of idolatry was paralleled by “mental images” that substituted mere “imagination” for the reality of God as known from Scripture.20 Armed with this broad understanding of idolatry, Reformed communities throughout Europe engaged in spasms of iconoclasm. Similar outbursts occurred in mid-sixteenth-century Scotland and England, and again during the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution.21
Calvin extended his critique of idolatry to the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. According to Catholic doctrine, the sacrament involved the miraculous transformation of wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ. This, the “real presence,” dictated how those who participated in the mass should behave—kneeling to adore the presence of Christ and receive the consecrated wafer, with the wine reserved for the priest whose sacred (or “sacerdotal”) powers enabled transubstantiation to occur. Calvin exalted Christ’s spiritual presence and its consequences for believers, but he insisted that Jesus was speaking symbolically when he offered his body and blood to the disciples and asked them to remember him—“do this in remembrance of me”—and, as Calvin and his colleagues insisted, remember him by receiving the bread and the wine in their seats, not by coming forward to kneel at an altar. No miracle of transubstantiation happened, if only because the resurrected Christ was beside the Father in heaven and nowhere else: present in the sacrament, but present “spiritually.”22
The reformers in mid-sixteenth-century Scotland and England shared Calvin’s interpretation of the Catholic mass as idolatrous. Whenever they opened their Bibles, they came upon story after story in the Old Testament of righteous kings and prophets who, in the spirit of God’s command in Deuteronomy 12:3, punished idolaters by “overthrow[ing] their altars, and . . . hew[ing] down the graven images of their gods.” It was axiomatic that Catholics were idolaters and also axiomatic that all Christians were tempted by this sin which, as Paul pointed out in his letter to the Colossians, also encompassed “fornication, uncleanness . . . , and covetousness”—that is, any and all moral behavior at odds with the ethics of “mercies” and “meekness” he extolled in the same epistle (Col. 3:5, 12). Hence the imperative to realign worship with Scripture and initiate a moral or spiritual cleansing of self and community. In Strasbourg and Geneva, the first part of this program prompted a radical reorganization of Sunday services around sermons, prayer, the communal singing of psalms and hymns, and a sharply revised mode of participating in the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion. Argument persisted on the meaning of Holy Communion, with moderates wanting to sustain the spiritual presence of Christ and others arguing for a “memorialist” understanding of the sacrament.23
2. An understanding of divine revelation as fixed or constant, and therefore a reverence for the Bible as a “completely reliable” record of sacred history and God’s plans for humankind. The Word was always “plain and infallible,” its purity impossible to corrupt, whereas history or tradition were virtually synonymous with “innovation” and decline. The authority of the Bible (or “the Word”) encompassed not only matters of faith or belief but also worship, ministry, and church order. Granted, the Bible mixed specific rules with more general principles that the church on earth had to interpret. Nonetheless, Scripture was normative. No other rules or traditions had any merit: “no doctrine, no ceremony, no discipline can be attributed to Christ the King and to his Kingdom . . . except what has been instituted and come forth from the Holy Spirit,” a point reiterated by the Scottish reformer John Knox, who identified idolatry as the willful refusal to obey Scripture: “Vaine religion and idolatrie I call whatsoever is done in Goddes service or honour, without the expresse commaundement of his owne Worde.” This argument empowered the reformers to renounce the authority of tradition that Catholics claimed for themselves.24
The importance of Scripture to the reformers was strengthened by its connections with the Holy Spirit, which pulsated through the Word. No mere printed book, Scripture came to life thanks to the presence of the Spirit. Joined together, Word and Spirit could overturn any kind of oppression. This was a lesson the reformers learned from the apostolic letters, which provided example after example of the Spirit at work within the earliest communities of Christians. The stories of suffering and deliverance in the Old Testament also confirmed the master narrative on which Protestants depended to justify the rupture with Catholicism. Like the people in ancient Israel and the earliest communities of Christians, they were overturning oppression and tyranny for the sake of free access to the Word.25
3. High praise for the church on earth—the “visible” church—as God’s instrument of grace and His means of bringing Christians together in a special kind of community where they would sustain each other. So important was the church as means of grace that no one could be saved who remained outside it; in Calvin’s telling phrase, the church was “Mother” of all the faithful, an assertion directed against the much more stringent practice of the Anabaptists, who substituted a visible church of adults who had been properly baptized for the territorial or inclusive church that Calvin was endorsing. Now, with the Reformation, the church was reclaiming the authority it received directly from Christ—and, in the eyes of the Reformed, reclaiming something almost as important: the rules that could be found in the apostolic letters of the New Testament, seconded by the Gospels and portions of the Old Testament.26
Searching these texts, the leaders of the Reformed came upon a form of ministry they regarded as Christ’s own counsel to the church: no longer the “extraordinary” offices of apostle and prophet but an “ordinary” ministry of pastors and teachers (“doctors,” charged with defending true doctrine), together with those of elder and deacon, an argument grounded on Ephesians 4:11–13 and other references in the New Testament.27 This cluster of ministries received its authority from the Holy Spirit and secondarily from the people of God, not, as in Catholicism, from an apostolic succession. Once the concept of the priesthood as a sacred order was abandoned, the reformers were free to eliminate a cluster of Catholic practices: ordination ceased to be a sacrament, clerical celibacy fell by the wayside, and congregations “consented” to the naming of their ministers.28
The organizers of the Reformed tradition also did away with most aspects of hierarchy in church governance. Their reading of Scripture taught them that no civil or ecclesiastical office rivaled Christ’s authority as “king” of the visible church. This assumption disposed of the tyranny that Protestants attributed to the papacy. Another principle known as “parity” got rid of differences of rank and thus of bishops, although Calvin acknowledged the role that bishops of a certain kind had played in church councils of the post-apostolic centuries.29 Simultaneously, the Reformed introduced a system of collective responsibility centered on inter-parish synods, assemblies, and eventually local associations known, in late sixteenth-century Scotland, as presbyteries—hence the term “presbyterian.” Partly to guard against an overly authoritarian leadership and partly out of sympathy for the visible church as a community of the faithful, the leaders of the Reformed encouraged congregational participation in church government. But Calvin and Bullinger did not want laypeople to go off on their own and create quasi-independent congregations, as happened with the Anabaptists. Instead, unity was imperative, a unity sustained by the authority of ministers and the Christian magistrate.
4. “Discipline” as a necessary feature of the Christian community. As well as wanting to free the church from Catholic-style tyranny, the leaders of the Reformed aspired to enhance its holiness. Calvin in Geneva, Bucer in Strasbourg, and the makers of the Reformation in Scotland shared what has been termed a “dualist” understanding of the church: open to everyone, but also a righteous or sanctified community not of profane persons but of “saints” who were “citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem.”30 In Bucer’s words, the church was “the Kingdom of Christ,” where, as indicated in places such as Isaiah 11:4, a “severity of judgment against sins” must be practiced so that all within the church were challenged to repent. Even so, Calvin and Bucer rejected Anabaptist-style exclusivity. For them and the Reformed tradition in general, the visible church was more inclusive than the invisible church of the elect, if only because the earth-bound church would always contain many who, in outward appearance, were Christians. One way of reconciling the “incompatible” goals of exclusion and comprehensiveness was to bar the “scandalous” from Holy Communion, a sacrament reserved in principle for the “worthy” who met certain criteria. Another was to emphasize ecclesiastical discipline, which encompassed the penalties of admonition and excommunication (or being excluded from Christian fellowship) the church could impose on the unrighteous. Calvin took for granted that the progress of reform depended on these penalties and, especially, excommunication, which he regarded as the church’s most effective means of preserving a semblance of purity.31
Whether discipline should be considered one of the “notes” of the true church was a question some, such as Calvin, answered by saying no and others, such as the leaders of the Scottish Reformation, answered by saying yes. Yet all agreed that discipline had a high importance alongside the two notes on which Lutherans and the Reformed concurred, correct preaching of the Word (i.e., proper doctrine) and proper administration of the sacraments (i.e., not the Catholic version).32
Less obviously but of deep importance, the meaning of discipline grew out of the doctrine of election and its consequences for the Christian life. As was argued by all Reformed theologians, God had chosen (elected) some people to be redeemed. Here on earth, the elect were actively pursuing a distinctive phase of their life with Christ, a phase Calvin characterized as an “actual holiness of life,” or sanctification. Attempting to define the visible church, the sixteenth-century Scottish minister John Craig responded, “The whole companie of Gods elect called and sanctified,” or a people participating in the process of becoming righteous, aided in doing so by the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Word as preached, and the disciplinary consequences of divine law (see chapters 4 and 5). In the most important English catechism of the Elizabethan period, Alexander Nowell also tied the doctrine of election to the being of the visible church as a group of “godly . . . knit together in community of spirit, of faith, . . . and . . . sharing the benefites that God gives his Church through Christ.” As Calvin pointed out in the Institutes, “the church makes progress from day to day” toward a “holiness [that] is not yet complete.” Slowly but surely, a fuller righteousness was emerging within this body, a righteousness expressed in the willingness of the elect to observe the “great commandment” (Matt. 22:36–40) of mutual love and embedded in an apparatus of discipline—which, as John Craig recognized, was the church’s means of sustaining the process of sanctification.33
5. An evangelical and social activism predicated on transforming self, church, and society into a “new order” approximating the kingdom of Christ. Made in the image of a God ever active in the world, Protestants were employing their new-found freedom to reclaim what had been lost with Adam’s fall. This process of renewal and transformation was ongoing, never fully accomplished within church or world or even within the self, but certain to culminate in the renovation of all three, for God was enabling the faithful to emancipate church and society from the corruption introduced by Roman Catholicism. Looking back to the perfection of the “first” or apostolic period and imagining a restoration of what had been lost under Catholicism, Calvin and the Reformed also looked ahead to the emergence of a community in which coercion gave way to “free” or voluntary practices, with congregations electing their ministers and “equity” or fairness installed as the core principle of social ethics. The benefits of this new order were many—in Calvin’s words, “injustice made just, weakness made virtuous, . . . debts paid, labors lightened, . . . division unified.” Looking back and looking ahead was also a matter of practicing biblical rules like those found in the Ten Commandments. Even though much of Jewish law was no longer binding, Calvin and many others argued that some moral rules were everlasting, as much a part of the new covenant with Christ as they had been of God’s covenant with ancient Israel. Bucer incorporated this emphasis on Old Testament law into a book he completed shortly before his death in 1551, De Regno Christi (On the Kingdom of Christ). In its pages, he foregrounded an evangelical ministry as the agency that would renovate church and civil society.34
For Calvin and Bucer, civil society (or “the world” outside the church) was never going to be as free as the church. Nonetheless, civil governments should serve as allies and agents of a properly reformed church and its program of evangelical and moral reform.35 As leaders of the Reformed were quick to recognize, any wholesale transformation of church and society was impossible without such support. This was a lesson the two men learned the hard way in the Rhineland city of Strasbourg when the civil elite turned against them, and a lesson Calvin learned anew in Geneva, where a divided and sometimes hostile civil leadership dragged its feet.36 He believed that rulers were responsible to Christ for seeing that idolatry was suppressed and righteousness enforced, an assumption he validated by citing the Old Testament kings who stamped out idol-worshipping, the Emperor Constantine, and Romans 13:1–2, which described civil officers as commissioned by God. Now, with reform beckoning, leaders of the Reformed called on the Christian ruler to restore “the true, pure, and sincere Christian religion” and to “destroy . . . all false worshipping and superstitions, contrary to the Word of God.” Francis I, the ruler of Calvin’s native France, was Catholic, yet Calvin appealed to him in the preface of the initial printing of the Institutes (1536) to support the Protestant cause. If kings and magistrates respected Scripture or, as Calvin said in his 1535 preface and subsequently in a letter to Edward VI of England, “subject[ed]” themselves “in all humility and reverence under the spiritual scepter of” the “gospel,” “there could be no questioning of the ruler’s authority.”37
What a civil state could undertake was also limited. Calvin and his fellow reformers worried about giving the civil state or Christian prince any substantial authority over religion or the church any direct role in affairs of state. Fiercely critical of the papacy in Rome for the claims it was making to authority in the sphere of the state, the reformers wanted to protect civil governments from the church but, above all, the church from the state. Echoing Luther, they endorsed a “two kingdoms” approach to church and state: the new order of the church could not employ “temporal” authority, nor the temporal kingdom the “spiritual” authority of the church. This distinction evolved into a set of rules designed to prevent each from trespassing on the other, one of them a rule prohibiting the civil state from telling the church what doctrines it should teach and another, prohibiting church officers from holding positions in civil government.38
Alongside the two-kingdoms framework, Calvin and other Reformed leaders articulated a “constitutional” approach to civil governance. Civil rulers had to acknowledge the superior authority of divine law. The office they held, although of divine origin, was curtailed on its civil side by the imperative of securing the consent of some of the people. Advocated at a moment when civil and ecclesiastical realms were entangled throughout Europe, the constitution-alist implications of two-kingdoms theory were not welcomed by the Protestant rulers of Scotland and England. And, as the more ardently Reformed discovered to their dismay, these same rulers were reluctant to enforce a wide-ranging program of religious and social reform. Conflict was inevitable given the emphasis upon the special freedom of the church, conflict that persisted into the seventeenth century.39
6. Divine providence and apocalypticism (but not “millenarianism”)40 as ways of understanding the divine-human relationship and the history of the church. Calvin began the Institutes with the doctrine of providence, or the principle that God was actively guiding the visible church through stress and storm. Opening the Old Testament, the reformers came upon scene after scene of His interventions among the people of Abraham, sometimes to punish and other times to sustain them. The emergence of Protestantism was another chapter in the recurring drama of divine interventions to punish the disobedient and reward the faithful, or so the reformers believed. When they turned to the prophetic books of Isaiah, Daniel, and Revelation or consulted verses in the Gospels and apostolic letters that seemed of the same tenor, the leaders of the Reformed also encountered a story of ongoing warfare between the “true” followers of Christ and the many hypocrites who, although ostensibly Christians, were aiding the Antichrist or “man of sin” (1 John 2:18, 22; 2 Thess. 2) in his campaigns against the saints. True faith was always under siege from forces allied with the Antichrist, as evidenced by the many episodes in the Old Testament when people had succumbed to idolatry. Now, with reform underway again, the most dangerous enemy of the true church was the papacy, which Protestants regarded as the institutional presence of the Antichrist.41
The prophetic books contained a more hopeful message. As had happened in ancient Egypt to the Jews, who awaited deliverance from captivity, the faithful few were awaiting the moment when Christ would return in triumph, release the saints from their suffering, and restore the true church to a state of perfection. At the climax of that event, “Babylon” would give way to “the holy city, [the] new Jerusalem,” which descends from the heavens as God declares, “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:2–5). The church was at the heart of this transformation in the making, a church burdened by the deceptions of the Antichrist yet also “fulfilling itself in a voluntary, harmonious community.” John Knox summed up this mixture of militancy and optimism by imagining two armies “betwixt [whom] there continueth a battell, which never shalbe reconciled until the Lord Jesus put a finall ende to the miseries of his Church.”42
This scenario of ongoing conflict deflected a question Catholics pressed again and again on Protestants. Where were the reformers during the many centuries when Catholicism had flourished? What did Protestants have that matched the antiquity of Rome? The English Protestant John Bale believed he knew the answer to this question. Writing in the 1540s, he argued that the titanic struggle between the saints and the Antichrist, the core narrative of Revelation, was manifested in the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. In The Image of the Two Churches (1545?) he foregrounded the Christianity that had been preserved by a “saving remnant” that fled into the wilderness (Rev. 12:6) in the fourth century CE at a moment when corruption was beginning to overtake the Church.43 Bale’s concept of two churches, the one true but hiding in the wilderness, the other false but immensely powerful, appealed to English and Scottish Protestants as they began their own struggle against Catholicism. It explained how the true church had survived during the many centuries of Catholic ascendancy, and it linked the Reformation with the scenarios that conclude Revelation and Daniel. John Foxe went further in attempting to align biblical prophecy and the history of the Christian church, using the seven seals mentioned in Revelation 6:1–17 as his starting point. Treating them as symbolic markers of key moments in the history of the world or, as he preferred to say, the history of the church, he argued that the reign of the Antichrist was coming to an end (the breaking of the fifth seal) and the saints were beginning to enjoy the fullness of the Gospel (the sixth seal). He slotted other parts of Revelation into the same general sequence—the seven trumpets, the seven vials, the seven beasts—in ways that allowed him to include both Islam and the papacy as enemies of Christ. One lesson of this exegesis was the great danger of allowing the church to usurp worldly power. Another was a point made by Bale, that Rome and the Antichrist were one and the same. Where Foxe hesitated was in specifying when the seventh trumpet would be sounded and the last judgment take place.44
Be it via Foxe and Bale or various Continental writers, the process of interpreting biblical prophecy nourished a great deal of speculation about the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 and the four monarchies or kingdoms Nebuchadnezzar had seen in a dream (Dan. 2). One after another, the four kingdoms had risen and been destroyed, whereupon God set up a fifth kingdom to “stand for ever” (Dan. 2:44–45). How better to understand the situation of Protestants in the sixteenth century than to represent them as a martyr-like people who, in the larger workings of God’s providence, would eventually be raised up as the fifth and final kingdom? And how better to sustain moral activism of the kind that Calvin was expecting of all Protestants? Perpetuated in the Book of Martyrs and its many spinoffs, a historical imaginary of the suffering few struggling against the corruption introduced by Catholicism would have long-lasting consequences in Britain, as would the possibility of imagining the visible church as a community of the few, not of the many. Another aspect of Reformed commentary on the Bible, the assertion that God would pour out His wrath on those who violated divine law, would also reemerge as the framework for understanding certain events. The translators of the Geneva Bible turned this premise into the argument that the Catholicism imposed on England by Mary Tudor was an appropriate punishment of the English people for having allowed such a “horrible backsliding and falling away from Christ to antichrist.”45
No inventory of Reformed themes and practices is complete if it fails to mention the theological argument that God “predestined” (decided on His own) who would saved or, to use the formal language of theology, who was “elected” to salvation. Based on Romans 8:29–30, “For whom he did foreknow he did predestinate . . . [and] them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified,” the doctrine of election (or predestination) has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. Given the confusion that surrounds the doctrine, I defer this motif to chapter four, which covers theology.
Wherever the Reformed tradition emerged and began to flourish, as was happening in Western Europe by the 1550s, its program was controversial. As the chapters that follow will indicate in more detail, the goal of restoring the independence of the church clashed with what monarchs and the nobility or social elites wanted. Rarely, if ever, did those elites welcome a church capable of supervising everyone’s moral behavior, their own included. For them, one of the benefits of the new religion was the transfer of authority from Rome to civil governments those of high social rank would control. In parts of Europe as well as in Scotland, rulers and elites also held at arm’s length the ferocious anti-Catholicism voiced by so many within the Reformed. Better a de facto tolerance than coercion or a bloodbath, they reasoned, if the country’s Catholics remained loyal to the civil state and practiced their religion privately. Most of the time, the same leaders wanted reform to unfold in an orderly manner. The outbursts of popular violence that erupted in the Netherlands and Scotland at mid-century prompted second thoughts among civil leaders about appealing to the people to overthrow false gods.46
Thanks to these reactions, what was accomplished often diverged from what Scripture or church history prescribed. Inevitably, hopes for a thorough-going transformation of church and society in the name of true religion ran up against the obstacles of local custom, entrenched privilege, and the reluctance of civil governments to forfeit social peace or accept the authority of the clergy. Such was the fate of the Reformation in Scotland and England and especially of the people who wanted a fullblown reformation along Reformed lines.
A major impediment to reform was the economic situation of the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the Church of Ireland, where Protestantism was also being introduced in the sixteenth century. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religious reformers and the civil state in Britain were at odds on the finances of each national church. The reason was simple. Except for Mary Tudor, the sixteenth-century monarchs of England used their powers of office to seize and put to other uses the wealth of monasteries, abbeys, chantries, guilds, parishes, and bishoprics. Appropriating these revenues and church lands was already underway in Catholic Scotland and Ireland, with Catholics participating in the scramble. Although Protestant reformers tried to reverse this process, the gains they made were modest; the Book of Discipline (1561) drafted by the reformers in Scotland envisioned redirecting the wealth of the state church to meet the needs of ministers and the poor but, as a Scottish historian has pointed out, “how could they hope to enforce such a transference of wealth” against the wishes of the nobility?47 Nor was Mary Tudor able to restore properties to the church during her brief reign as head of the English state. In the 1580s, a small group of Puritan-affiliated activists proposed that the Church of England free itself from lay patronage, an argument endorsed by some in the Church of Scotland, but for obvious reasons never acted on by those who benefitted from that system. Hence the reality that monarchies, social elites, and others who aspired to wealth and power controlled much of the revenues that otherwise would have sustained a comprehensive program of evangelical preaching. Although the chapters that follow omit most of the details of this story, it must always be kept in view as an irritant in the relationship between religious reformers and the wealthy or privileged elites on whom they were depending.48
International rivalries caused other difficulties. In late sixteenth-century Europe, the great antagonists were Spain and France, each of them predominantly Catholic and far stronger militarily than any Protestant city, state, region, or country. Nonetheless, the two empires formed alliances with Protestant regimes when doing so was to their advantage, and vice versa. England did so with Spain in 1559 at a moment when French troops were supporting a Catholic ruler in Scotland. Simultaneously, the rulers of Spain and France wanted to aid Catholics in England, Scotland, and Ireland, as Spain was hoping to do in 1588 when Philip II dispatched the Armada. Or could local Catholics be encouraged to resist a Protestant government?
One way or another, confessional identity and foreign policy were rarely aligned. The simple rule would have been for Protestants to aid Protestants. Indeed, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England became a player in the wars of religion that pitted Catholics against Protestants on the Continent, doing so indirectly by allowing English soldiers to aid the provinces of the Low Countries in their revolt against Spanish rule and providing financial support for German soldiers aiding the Huguenot during episodes of civil war in France. Subsequently, Scottish soldiers served various masters on the Continent. During the reign of Elizabeth I and in the early stages of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), which was fought largely along confessional lines, some officers of state and many in Parliament urged the English government to become much more active in behalf of international Protestantism. Instead, James I encouraged one of his sons, the future Charles I, to seek a royal bride in Catholic France, and, at a moment of peacemaking with Spain in 1604, contemplated using English troops against Dutch Protestants. These situations—alliances made or broken, invasions expected or deterred, national fervor aroused or blunted—alternately weakened and enhanced the connections between religion and foreign policy. As the historian Anthony Milton has pointed out, “supranational confessionalism” was always at odds with “nationalist pragmatism.” When Catholicism was at its most threatening, militant Protestantism became more appealing and therefore more politically successful. When the game of international alliances muted the division between Catholic and Protestant, as it frequently did, militant Protestantism fell out of favor.49
All this is to say that civil governments had more pressing concerns than to expend their political capital and financial resources on religious crusades. For the rulers of England and Scotland, the foremost goal was to extend and deepen their own authority, a project aided by the coming of Protestantism, which enabled the English monarchy to expand its role in matters of religion. As these rulers knew better than anyone else, their authority was jeopardized by fractures—between Catholic and Protestant, or within the social and political elite, a feature of Scottish life from the mid-sixteenth-century onward. Thanks to these situations, armed revolts erupted from time to time, as did civil war in Scotland. When a king or queen had no obvious successor or an heir not yet old enough to take charge—Edward VI of England was nine years old when he succeeded his father Henry VIII in 1547, and James VI of Scotland a mere infant when his mother, Mary Stuart, was deposed—the regents or deputies who ran the government were especially vulnerable to plotting by their rivals. Little wonder, then, that the leaders of England and Scotland put their own interests first when the church called on them to promote true religion. This they did under certain circumstances, but only if such a program strengthened their rule. In England, Henry VIII completed the break with Roman Catholicism by having himself declared “Supreme Head” of the Church of England. The Church would do his bidding, not vice versa, a policy favored by Elizabeth I in England and James VI in Scotland. The English Parliament also wanted a role in deciding how the state church was administered. Assertions of this kind were nothing new. Long before the Reformation, church elders and political leaders had disputed their relationship, each claiming an authority of one kind or another over the other. By the early seventeenth century, the policy favored by Henry VIII had become known as “Erastianism” in the wake of assertions by Thomas Erastus (born Lieber; 1524–1583), a Swiss physician and Protestant theologian, that the civil state should administer the process of church discipline. To rulers such as Elizabeth I, a tempered Eras-tianism was far more appealing than the two-kingdoms theory of the Reformed. Theoretical support for it was also provided by the commonplace that religious unity and nationhood were one and the same.50
Monarchs wanted an all-inclusive state church in which everyone was required to accept the faith of the sovereign and participate in the same church services. It was no accident that the title page of the English “great bible” of 1540 featured an image of Henry VIII handing a bible to two figures and a group of people exclaiming “Vivat Rex.” If the king had his way, Protestantism was going to enhance royal authority. Yet Henry and his successors in England knew that their subjects—Catholics as well as Protestants—were aware of the argument that God summoned them to disobey an unlawful ruler, a scenario enacted numerous times in the Hebrew Bible. Princely rule thus rested on a contradiction, the difference between lawful and unlawful versions of civil authority.
A Protestant country led by a Protestant prince was plagued by other contradictions. Uniformity as a political ideal was never matched by uniformity in practice. It was relatively easy to deny a Catholic minority the freedom to observe its faith in public and execute a handful of dissidents but impossible to enforce any general conversion to Protestantism, and just as impossible to drive the laggards out of the country. Nor could the Protestants who questioned the monarch’s version of uniformity—in this book, most of them come under the heading of Puritans or Puritan-Separatists—be suppressed. As the literary historian Debora Shuger has pointed out, the larger issue was as old as Christianity itself, “the problem of the relation between temporal institutions and divine presence.” In 1530s Strasbourg, 1540s Geneva, and recurrently in Protestant Scotland and England, tensions became acute when the policies of a would-be Christian prince diverged from the making of true religion as imagined by the more ardently Protestant. To add paradox to paradox, no one believed in the toleration of religious dissent, not even those who were being punished for refusing to conform. Agreement prevailed on the principle that defending the one true religion was a “charitable” means of saving people from heresy. Nonetheless, religious dissent never disappeared from England, Scotland, and especially Ireland, where most people were Catholics. At certain moments, therefore, the authority of a monarch was severely challenged when its agenda in matters of religion became implausible. For the godly who play such a large role in this book, this was both good news and bad, though mostly bad because their program depended on state support to succeed.51
One other circumstance qualifies as bad news, the condition of “the people.”52 Could they be counted on to embrace a Reformed-style program bent on imposing moral discipline and high standards of belief and piety? Ardent reformers on the Continent and in Britain were of two minds. On the one hand, many clergy painted an unflattering portrait of widespread illiteracy, fickleness, and amoral behavior. It was disheartening that most of the people in England had acquiesced in the transition from the Protestant Edward VI to the Catholic Mary Tudor and, in Scotland, did so little to encourage the coming of Protestantism. Longer term, it was just as disheartening that they disdained a rigorous Protestantism. A late sixteenth-century English theologian divided laypeople into categories that began with “unbelievers who are both ignorant and unteachable” before moving upward to a somewhat more sympathetic grouping of those who were “teachable, but yet ignorant.” About the same time, the ultra-Protestant John Penry disparaged the people of his native Wales for resorting to “southsaiers, and enchanters”; by his (prejudiced) estimate, the Welsh “have not one in some score of our parishes, that have a saving knowledge” of Christ.53 Penry may have overstated the problem, but he was basically correct in suggesting that large numbers of people knew little and seemed to care less about Protestant doctrine and practice. As historians of sixteenth-century England have pointed out, the rapid transition from Protestantism to Catholicism and again to Protestantism within the space of six years (1553–1559) may have convinced lay women and men that the wise course of action was to hedge one’s bets and lie low.54
Hence the irritation of ministers in England such as Arthur Dent. In his best-selling manual of religious devotion, The Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven (1601), he created a fictional character who typified the people of very modest expectations. After listening to Dent’s description of the new birth, this man responded,
Tush, tush: what needs all this adoe? If a man say
his Lord’s praier, his ten Commandments, and his Beliefe,
and keepe them, and say nobodie no harme . . . , and doe as hee would
be done too, have a good
faith to God-ward, and bee a man of Gods beliefe, no doubt
he shall be saved, without all this running to Sermons
and pratling of the Scripture.
In numerous towns and villages, people of this temperament overlapped with men and women who preferred the sociability of the alehouse to the more demanding fellowship of their parish church. Meanwhile, Catholicism persisted in part because of the acute regionalism of Scotland, where the Gaelic-speaking Highlands remained Catholic, and a similar regionalism in England, where the northern counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire were much more Catholic than the rest of the country.55
Another aspect of the problem of the people concerned social rank and privilege. Did some groups become especially active on behalf of Protestantism (or Puritanism) while others dragged their feet? In sixteenth-century England and Scotland as in Germany, the Protestant message was welcomed by people of middling and upper social status and especially by people living in cities and towns, who appreciated a more participatory form of religion that reduced the distance between clergy and laypeople. This was not the reaction of the people of aristocratic or noble rank whose well-being was linked to owning land and securing favors from the monarch. Once those of this status realized that the reformers were insisting that everyone was subject to social and moral discipline, they recoiled from allowing ordinary people or parish clergy to supervise their behavior. As Alexander Nowell pointed out in his Catechism, “the rich and men of power” wanted “impunity and most free liberty to sin” and would not accept an effective mode of “ecclesiastical discipline.” Accustomed to deference from others and benefitting from privileges that included membership in the House of Lords (England) or other governing bodies (England and Scotland), men and women of this kind were also unlikely to welcome a more participatory form of religion that curtailed their special status. Nor could they be expected to challenge the policies of the reigning monarch. In a social world marked by entrenched forms of privilege and differences of power, did evangelical Protestantism have a chance?56
Yet the leaders of the Reformation in England remained hopeful. Soon after returning from exile in 1558, John Jewell traveled around England as part of a campaign to curtail or eliminate Catholic practices, an experience that led him to believe that “the people everywhere [are] thirsting after religion”—meaning the Protestantism he himself espoused. Reports of this kind were probably flavored by Jewell’s debate with an English Catholic about the legitimacy of the English Reformation, a debate in which he argued that “husband-men and ditchers and herdsmen” could reason more wisely about religion than the Catholic clergy. Others during this period were reporting that a “numerous audience eagerly flocked” to hear them preach, an optimism buttressed by the fact that, during the reign of Mary Tudor, dozens of ordinary women and men had died at the stake because they felt so strongly about their new faith. During those same years, laypeople had formed covert congregations and, as John Knox noted about his homeland, Protestant mobs had ransacked Catholic shrines and churches. Indeed, the process of reform in both countries relied on the fervency of laypeople, as did regional or national reformations on the Continent. By the middle of the sixteenth century in Scotland and England, and continuing into the next century, some laypeople were exceptionally active on behalf of Protestant principles.57
The most exciting possibility was the suggestion that, thanks to their simplicity, common people were more discerning of spiritual truth than the Catholic clergy under whom they suffered. Well before the coming of the Reformation, religious reformers had employed the figure of the plowman as “most nearly the servant of God,” someone of the same wise innocence as the fishermen who became the earliest of Jesus’s disciples. Now, with the coming of Protestantism, the early reformers imagined every plowman perusing the Bible as he worked his fields. A useful fiction, this figure of “the people of God, redeemed by the bloud of his sonne, unto whom the Gospell doth belonge” and therefore with “as great interest and full right” in matters of religion as anyone else, enjoyed a long life within English Protestantism. Foxe, for one, depicted laypeople as wiser than the clergy in “seeing through the corruptions of popery” and therefore the saving remnant who preserved true religion. Women had a place in this story, especially martyrs such as Anne Askew, whose meditations became something of a model for proto-Protestants in England. For the moment, no one worried about putting the genie of an activist laity back into the bottle of a state church, perhaps because, by the close of the century, the reform-minded knew that their program was gaining adherents within urban elites, middling social groups, and a portion of the gentry or landed class.58
The problem of the people was more than a matter of overcoming custom, illiteracy, and indifference. In Bucer’s vision of the kingdom of Christ, the people could be won over if two conditions were met: the Christian prince gave wholehearted support to preaching as the crucial instrument of evangelization, and the universities began to produce zealous ministers who would do the preaching. What if neither happened? And what if, as he himself recognized, the imperative of securing everyone’s repentance was possibly asking more of the people than was realistic. Setting aside coercion, which Bucer regarded as less effective than persuasion, could Protestantism as defined by the Reformed tradition become the faith of a nation as a whole? Or was this project destined to become a Christianity for and of a spiritual elite? There were moments when the makers of the Reformed international and, in England and Scotland, the leaders of the Reformation in those countries, had to wonder which of these alternatives was more likely.59
These contingencies and circumstances dogged the reformers in sixteenth-century England and Scotland, and even more so in Ireland, where Protestants were a tiny minority. The “gross darkness of popery” was beginning to recede, but Satan was still at work in the world, “sometimes by bloody death and cruel torments, other whiles imprisonments, banishments and other hard usages; as being loath his kingdom should go down, the truth prevail and the churches of God revert to their ancient purity and recover their primitive order, liberty and beauty.”60
Nonetheless, the influence of the Reformed tradition in sixteenth-century England, Scotland, and, by the early seventeenth century, a few parts of Ireland, was palpable. Because of local circumstances, this program enjoyed less success in England than in Scotland. In the first of these countries the rupture with Rome began as an affair of state and unfolded as a top-down process orchestrated by Henry VIII. Via his authority, Protestantism of a limited kind was imposed on the English people, followed by a more emphatic Reformation imposed during the reign of his son Edward VI, followed (after 1558) by a more tempered Reformation that suited the tastes of Elizabeth I, who cared a good deal about outward conformity but distanced herself from the agenda of the Marian exiles. The rupture with Rome that drove the Scottish Reformation was resisted by James V (1512–1542) and the two queens who succeeded him, Mary of Guise (d. 1560) and Mary Stuart. Consequently, Protestantism became something of a movement from beneath—not a popular movement, since it relied on members of the aristocracy and landed classes, but nonetheless a movement of outsiders who came to power only after having precipitated a civil war and chased Mary Stuart from the throne. This political situation, with monarchs too weak to impose their will on the country, worked in favor of those Protestants who admired the Reformed tradition.61 Again by way of comparison, uprisings but no sustained warfare linked to confessional and dynastic fault lines broke out in sixteenth-century England. Notably, conflict was averted in 1553 thanks to the collapse of a plot to substitute a Protestant noblewoman for Mary Tudor, who inherited the monarchy after Edward VI died in 1553. Of more significance in the long run was the fact that Protestantism was endorsed by a significant portion of the clerical elite, including the long-serving Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Unlike what happened in Scotland, the higher clergy and the monarchy collaborated in the process of reform—or, from the point of view of radical Protestants, thwarted a more comprehensive renovation of the state church.62
In summary, the English Reformation sidestepped three accomplishments or principles that were typically Reformed. Instead of shifting to a polity in which all ministers held the same rank, the Church of England preserved a hierarchical structure centered on the office of bishop. Instead of embracing a spare, biblically grounded mode of worship, it preserved some aspects of the Catholic mass and liturgy. And, instead of proclaiming Christ as sole king and ruler of the visible church, the Church of England acknowledged the monarch as its Supreme Head or Supreme Governor, the term Elizabeth I preferred. The leaders of the Scottish Reformation were far more daring. By the 1570s they had embraced each of these principles and aligned the Church of Scotland with the Reformed international.
Yet in neither country did reformation achieve closure or completion; in both, its development was punctuated by spasms of intense feeling about “idolatry” as well as by a process that scholars of Christianity in Western Europe have named “confessionalization.” Gradually, the possibilities for compromise between Catholic and Protestant or Lutheran and Reformed that marked the opening phases of the Reformation gave way to a consolidation of doctrine and worship, a process signaled by a burst of Reformed creeds (chap. 4), firmer definitions of church government (chap. 2) and programs for training the right kind of minister (chap. 4). It was symptomatic of this process that the 1570s saw the emergence of “presbyterians” in England and Scotland, with consequences that reverberate in the chapters that follow.63
Always, however, the dynamics of reform were checked or contested. By the 1580s, the stability of the Scottish Reformation was being disrupted by divisions within the political elite, most of them unwilling to endorse a full-blown presbyterianism that transferred authority over major aspects of religion from the civil state or nobility to the clergy. Crucially, a Protestant king shared these misgivings, a king too young to exert his authority in the 1570s but, after 1585, insisting on greater control of the church. James VI of Scotland endorsed several aspects of Reformed Protestantism, but he also liked being in charge. Because Elizabeth I was indifferent if not hostile to Reformed principles, in both countries the Reformed ideal was deeply contested—resisted by some, advocated by others. And in both, this struggle persisted well into the seventeenth century, to the point of provoking a civil war that broke out in 1642 among English Protestants, a war touched off by an insurgency in Scotland. Within a few years the promise of a perfect reformation of both national churches gave way to internal divisions and, by the 1650s, to the collapse of the Reformed project.
The planting of Protestantism in New England followed a different path. Leaving England at a moment when the state church was suppressing Reformed-style Protestantism, the emigrants brought with them strong hopes for enacting the reformation that, from Henry VIII onward, had been thwarted in their mother country. Now, in the “free air of the new worlde” (as the Scotch Presbyterian Robert Baillie put it), they could do as they wished. And, since the society they set up was spared the trauma of civil war and the fracturing of Protestantism in mid-seventeenth-century England and Scotland, the colonists were able to sustain a more homogeneous system. Here, on the periphery of the English empire, the principles of the Reformed tradition were fulfilled in both expected and unexpected ways.
These are stories I tell in the rest of this book. They owe some of their richness and complexity to the ever-present difference—as much a part of our world as of theirs—between Christianity as an ideal and Christianity as embodied in an institutional church closely allied with the civil state. Before I tell those stories, it will help to set the stage if I underscore the importance of four dilemmas or predicaments that recurred throughout the longer life of the Puritan movement. The first of these arose out of the Reformed principles of obedience to both divine law and the Christian prince. Regarding God as lawgiver and Scripture as a demonstration of what God expected of his true followers, the Reformed counted on civil rulers to observe divine law. As voiced by the English martyr John Rogers, who died at the stake in 1555, “Unto it [God’s word] must all men, king and queen, emperor, parliaments and general councils obey—and the word obeyeth no man.”64 Inevitably, this assumption ran afoul of a Catholic ruler such as Mary Tudor who, in Protestant eyes, was defying divine law or a ruler who, although Protestant, disdained much of the Reformed program. These possibilities prompted John Knox, living in exile from his Scottish homeland at midcentury, to pose the question, “Whether obedience is to be rendered to a Magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion?” to which his answer was, “The history of Daniel, and the express command of God, Matt. 10, and the examples of the apostles in Acts 4 and 5, as also that of many of the martyrs . . . teach us that we must not obey the king or magistrates when their commands are opposed to God and his lawful worship, but rather that we should expose our persons, and lives, and fortunes to danger.” Well before Knox began to ponder the contradiction between the authority of civil rulers and the authority of the Word, Lutherans in Germany had argued that, although God ordained civil rulers as lesser “gods” and made obedience to them a moral law—a line of reasoning based on Romans 13—this obedience was contingent on whether those rulers supported the Protestant cause. If not, Lutheran political theology acknowledged the possibility of resistance to such persons. Together with the English refugee Christopher Goodman, Knox endorsed this line of argument at a moment when Mary Tudor was on the throne, although the two men shied away from the extremes of “tyranicide” (assassination) or popular revolt. In general, Knox, Goodman, Calvin, and the theologians of Zurich insisted that religious minorities must limit themselves to passive resistance and, within the limits of what was possible, to practicing their own version of Protestantism.65
Adhering to this theology tested every Reformed community on the receiving end of state-endorsed violence. An extreme example was the St. Bartholomew Day massacre of 1572. A French Catholic king (or his apologists) justified the massacre on the grounds of self-defense against a presumed Protestant conspiracy. No massacres of this kind occurred in England and Scotland, but their monarchs sometimes used the same argument to justify the repression of the more aggressive Protestants and, after 1570, of Catholics. Situations of this kind made it difficult to reconcile loyalty to divine law with loyalty to civil rulers. Forcefully present within the Huguenot version of the Reformed tradition in a country where no king ever endorsed the Protestant cause66 and again in England during the reign of Queen Mary, a crisis of authority reemerged in the closing years of the sixteenth century and persisted throughout much of the seventeenth. Christian prince or servant of the Anti-christ? Unquestioning loyalty or defiant conscience? Out of these antitheses emerged the quintessential Puritan dilemma, the challenge of reconciling loyalty to the civil state with loyalty to Christ as the true head of the church.67
The core principles of the Reformed tradition prompted a second tension, the scope of what was meant by idolatry. A master word among the reformers in Scotland and England, idolatry was ostensibly about visible aspects of worship. But what if it signified inward or spiritual idolatry, as when someone turned aside from wholehearted worship of God and listened to Satan?68 And did some forms of social behavior also qualify as idolatry? The answer to these questions was yes, an answer that made it increasingly difficult to know when the endpoint had been reached—that is, when church, society, and people had actually been purged of corruption, or sanctified. Iconoclasm, with mobs destroying the Catholic apparatus of relics and altars, was a step in the right direction but never sufficient. Witch-hunting was another possibility, a means of exposing a half-hidden version of idolatry. For other Protestants, however, iconoclasm was too extreme a response to a problem that was not all that troubling. Longer term, therefore, the Puritan movement was not of one mind about what it meant to eliminate idolatry.69
The principle of obedience to the Word generated a third problem, the question of what Christ had mandated. Did Scripture contain a comprehensive, explicit answer to this question? Early on, Calvin and other early leaders of the Reformed acknowledged that the Bible spoke more clearly on some matters than on others. Moreover, Calvin was willing to acknowledge the merits of local variations: one size did not fit all. For these reasons he refused to denounce the episcopal structure of the Church of England. But how were reformers to know when and how the Word was normative? This was no casual question, for any decision that contradicted the Word was, in effect, a decision tilted toward idolatry—and in the ethos of the Reformed tradition, slippage of this kind was akin to betraying divine law. Reasoning of this kind explains the fervency of the more daring reformers about ending episcopacy and restoring “discipline,” a fervency that prompted others to recommend compromise or moderation.
Tension also arose around a fourth aspect of reform, the relationship between the economy of redemption and the boundaries of the church. At the outset of the Reformation, Protestants were akin to a rare species of fish swimming in a vast lake filled with other species. With confessionalization came a sociology of state or territorial churches that, by definition, included everyone: in principle, all fish shared the same religion. The transition from small-scale communities identifying themselves as the “few” who fled into the wilderness to churches defined by territory and political rule was bound to raise questions about the benefits of inclusion versus selectivity. Was Calvin wrong in suggesting that the visible church—the church on earth—should be generously inclusive? For many Protestants, the imperative was to tighten the boundary between the wheat and the chaff. In them, the “latent sectarianism” of Calvin’s understanding of the church rose to the surface.70
The unfolding of the Reformed tradition in England, Scotland, and New England was deeply marked by these issues. In my telling of this story, I make room for those Protestants more willing than some others to blur the hard edges of reform. Moderation and compromise may not seem as authentically Reformed as the zeal of a John Knox, but in Knox’s Scotland as in Elizabethan England and, several decades later, in New England, both were widely practiced. Within the Continental Reformation, Melanchthon had been the quint-essential moderate who tried to reconcile different understandings of the Eucharist. He was criticized for doing so, but others followed in his footsteps—men in England who doubted episcopacy but became bishops in the hope of using their office to promote some aspects of reform; men in Scotland who supported the authority of a Christian prince although preferring the two-kingdoms theory of church and state; men and women in New England who relished the purity of the gathered congregation but wanted it to incorporate their children. As these examples suggest, moderation was inherently precarious, its emphasis on unity and compromise threatened by aggressive kings and a fervently evangelical clergy and laypeople. The history of the Reformed or, as I shall begin to say, of Puritanism in England, Scotland, and New England was never free of pressures that worked against the goals of the movement.