Puritan

Gallery of famous seventeenth-century Puritan theologians: Thomas Gouge, William Bridge, Thomas Manton, John Flavel, Richard Sibbes, Stephen Charnock, William Bates, John Owen, John Howe, Richard Baxter.
A Puritan of 16th and 17th century England was an associate of any number of religious groups advocating for more "purity" of worship and doctrine, as well as personal and group piety. Puritans felt that the English Reformation had not gone far enough, and that the Church of England was tolerant of practices which they associated with the Church of Rome. The word "Puritan" was originally an alternate term for "Cathar" and was a pejorative term used to characterize them as extremists similar to the Cathari of France. The Puritans sometimes cooperated with presbyterians, who put forth a number of proposals for "further reformation" in order to keep the Church of England more closely in line with the Reformed Churches on the Continent.

Background History of the Puritans

The Puritans' movement can be traced back to Edward VI, although the term "Puritan" was not coined until the 1560s, when it appears as a term of abuse for those who proposed further reforms than those adopted by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement of 1559. Throughout the reign of Elizabeth I, the Puritan movement involved both a political and a social component. Politically, the movement attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to have Parliament pass legislation to replace episcopacy with presbyterianism, and to alter the 1559 Book of Common Prayer to remove elements considered odious by the Puritans. Socially, the Puritan movement called for a greater commitment to Jesus Christ for greater levels of personal holiness. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, the Puritans constituted a distinct social group within the Church of England who regarded themselves as the godly, and who held out little hope for their neighbours who remained attached to "popish superstitions" and worldliness. Most Puritans were non-Separating Puritans who remained within the Church of England, and only a small number of Puritans became Separating Puritans or Separatists who left the Church of England altogether. Although the Puritan movement was occasionally subjected to suppression by the bishops of the Church of England, in many places, individual ministers were able to omit disliked portions of the Book of Common Prayer and to be especially attentive to the needs of the godly.

Conflicts with Anglican Church

The Church of England as a whole was Calvinist,[citation needed] as seen in the 39 Articles, the Anglican Homilies, and in John Calvin's correspondence with King Edward VI and Thomas Cranmer. The Puritan movement was distinctive from the rest of the church in theology more prescriptive[jargon] than Calvinism, in legalism, theonomy[jargon], and especially – congregationalism. Charles I became king and was determined to eliminate the "excesses" of Puritanism from the Church of England. His close advisor, William Laud, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, moved the Church of England away from Puritanism, rigorously enforcing the law against ministers who deviated from the Book of Common Prayer or who violated the ban on preaching about predestination.

Puritans opposed many of the traditions of the Church of England, notably the Book of Common Prayer, but also ceremonial rituals such as the use of priestly vestments (cap and gown) during services, the use of the Holy Cross during baptism, and kneeling during the sacrament.[1] Puritans rejected anything that was reminiscent of the Pope, and many of the Roman Catholic rituals preserved by the Church of England were not only considered to be objectionable, but were believed to put one's immortal soul in peril. While the Puritans under the rule of King James I of England attempted to make peaceful reform of the English church, James viewed their religious beliefs as little more than heresy, and their denial of the Divine Right of Kings as little more than treason. Nevertheless, the size of the Puritan population continued to grow under the reign of King James.

James I was succeeded by his son Charles I of England in 1625. In the year before becoming King, he married Henrietta-Marie de Bourbon of France, a zealous Roman Catholic. She was so extreme in her devotion to the Pope that she refused to attend the coronation of her husband, which took place in a non-Catholic cathedral.[2] She certainly had no tolerance for Puritans. At the same time, William Laud, at the time Bishop of London, was becoming increasingly powerful as an advisor to Charles. Laud also hated the Puritans and viewed them as a threat to the church. With the Queen and Laud among his closest advisors, Charles pursued policies to eliminate the religious practices of Puritans in England.

Charles relied largely on the Star Chamber and Court of High Commission to implement these policies. Although these institutions had existed for some time, Charles adapted them as instruments to persecute the Puritans. They were courts under the control of the King, not the Parliament, and were therefore capable of convicting and imprisoning people who had not violated any law passed by Parliament, but were nevertheless guilty of displeasing the King.[3]

As a result, a large number of Puritans were motivated to leave for the American colonies, resulting in the Great Migration, the founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other settlements. The Puritan movement in England allied itself with the cause of "England's ancient liberties"; the unpopularity of Laud and the suppression of Puritanism was a major factor leading to the English Civil War, during which the Puritans formed the backbone of the parliamentarian forces.

Fragmentation

The Puritan movement inside the Church began to fracture with the calling of the Westminster Assembly in 1643. Before that it had been associated with Presbyterians and others who sought further reforms in the Church of England; at the Westminster Assembly, it became necessary to work out the details. Doctrinally, the Assembly was able to agree to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and it provides a good overview of the Puritan theological position. Some Puritans would have rejected portions of it, e.g. the Baptists rejected its teaching on infant baptism. The Westminster Divines were, however, bitterly divided over questions of church polity, and split into factions supporting moderate episcopacy, presbyterianism, congregationalism, and Erastianism.

Although the Assembly eventually decided on presbyterianism, the fact that Oliver Cromwell was an Independent who favoured religious toleration meant that presbyterianism was not imposed on the Church of England. The result was that the English Interregnum was a period of religious diversity and experimentation. At the time of the English Restoration (1660), the Church of England was also restored to its pre-Civil War constitution and the Puritans were again forced out of the Church of England, in the Great Ejection of 1662. At this point, the term Dissenter replaces "Puritan". It more accurately describes those who "dissented" from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Now outside the Church of England, the Dissenters established their own denominations in the 1660s and 1670s. The government initially attempted to suppress these organizations by the Clarendon Code. The Whigs argued that the Dissenters should be allowed to worship outside of the Church of England, and this position ultimately prevailed when the Toleration Act was passed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution (1689). As a result, a number of denominations were legally organized in the 1690s. The term Nonconformist generally replaced the term "Dissenter" from the middle of the eighteenth century.

Terminology

Originally used to describe a third-century sect of strictly legalistic heretics, the word "Puritan" is now applied unevenly to a number of Protestant churches (and religious groups within the Anglican Church) from the late 16th century to the present. Puritans did not originally use the term for themselves. It was a term of abuse that first surfaced in the 1560s. "Precisemen" and "Precisions" were other early antagonistic terms for Puritans who preferred to call themselves "the godly." The word "Puritan" thus always referred to a type of religious belief, rather than a particular religious sect. To reflect that the term encompasses a variety of ecclesiastical bodies and theological positions, scholars today increasingly prefer to use the term as a common noun or adjective: "puritan" rather than "Puritan."

The single theological momentum most consistently defined by the term "Puritan" was Reformed or Calvinist and led to the founding of the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Independent or Congregationalist churches;[citation needed] In the United States, the church and religious culture of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony formed the basis of post-colonial American Congregationalism, specifically the Congregational Church proper. The term Puritan was used by the group itself mainly in the 16th century, though it seems to have been used often and, in its earliest recorded instances, as a term of abuse. By the middle of the 17th century, the group had become so divided that "Puritan" was most often used by opponents and detractors of the group, rather than by the practitioners themselves. As Patrick Collinson has noted, well before the founding of the New England settlement, “Puritanism had no content beyond what was attributed to it by its opponents.”[4] The practitioners knew themselves as members of particular churches or movements, and not by the simple term.

Puritans who felt that the Reformation of the Church of England had not gone far enough but who remained within the Church of England advocating further reforms are known as non-separating Puritans. (The Non-Separating Puritans differed among themselves about how much further reformation was necessary.) Those who felt that the Church of England was so corrupt that true Christians should separate from it altogether are known as separating Puritans or simply as Separatists. Especially after the Restoration (1660), non-separating Puritans were called Nonconformists (for their failure to conform to the Book of Common Prayer) while separating Puritans were called Dissenters.

The term "puritan" is not normally used to describe any religious group after the 17th century, although several groups might be called "puritan" because their origins lay in the Puritan movement. For example, in the late seventeenth century, those Dissenters who had separated from the Church of England organized themselves into separate denominations (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists), particularly after the Act of Toleration of 1689 made it legal to worship outside the Church of England. The non-separating Puritans who remained within the Church of England had by the early eighteenth century come to be known as the Low Church wing of the Church of England.

The term "puritan" might be used by analogy (usually unfavorably) to describe any group that shares a commitment to the Puritans' strong commitment to the purity of worship, of doctrine, or of personal or group morality.