Predestination “before the foundations of the world were laid”?
After FitzSimon’s Allison, what? Someone once told me that Fitz’s book, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter, is the most underrated and unacknowledged book on this topic. I think it’s true, and I have wondered ever since reading it if there are corroborating sources for the unfortunate theological departures that Bishop Allison discusses. It turns out that many historians have written on the same time period between the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement - between Edward VI and Charles 1 (the English Civil War). Those were enormously eventful and important years for defining the newborn Church of England.
This is my recent obsession: How is it that the Church of England started with a firm commitment to moderate Calvinism (Calvin before Calvinism that is the expression of the Anglican formularies), but after Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I the colors of the church changed to Arminianism (often called Pelagian, see Article 9)? By 1630s-40s the church became anti-Calvinist and has remained largely that ever since, and I wonder why and how it happened? Does this explain the hair-shirt relationship Anglicans sometimes have with its Calvinistic formularies (the Thirty-nine Articles, the Homilies, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer)? And what explains the shift from the high christology of salvation by grace through faith alone, to the high anthropology (moralism) of Laud, Hammond, and Taylor in the next 100 years - that then led to the holiness movement of John Wesley - and on to modern expressions of Arminianism that are found in forms of pietism, mysticism, the spiritual disciplines movement, and the invention of such things as “three-streams”? And the bedrock theological question that underlies all is this: Is Jesus the Savior of all who choose to choose him, or is our eternal destiny predestined, individual, and absolute from “before the foundations of the world were laid” (Article 17)?
There are a number of books in addition to Fitz Allison’s that I have found very helpful addressing my questions about predestination. One of the most notable is Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640, by Nicholas Tyacke. Tyacke attacks the false narrative that there has always been some form of Arminianism in the Church of England and the mistaken view that there was always been a spectrum of views in the English church on the doctrine of Predestination. He uses a number of sources, including William Prynne’s book Anti-Arminianisme (1630) and his primary research on the St. Paul’s Cross sermons, and he concludes that the Church of England was almost entirely predestinarian in its theology through the end of the sixteenth century, and that Calvinism remained significantly unchallenged in England in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. He explores the introduction of English Arminianism starting in the universities, first at Cambridge and then at Oxford, and the crisis of self identity caused by the rise of anti-Calvinism. I have learned that the different scholars differ, not so much in their agreement of early Calvinism, but in the weight each gives to the Lambeth Articles (1595), the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, and the Synod of Dort (1618-19), all of which Tyacke takes as additional signs that the English reformers and the Anglican formularies were significantly settled in a Calvinistic view of divine election until the Ariminian assault on the Church of England (Peter White’s phrase). I found Tyacke’s discussion of William Laud especially helpful (Appendix II). Laud first expressed his opposition to Calvinism in 1615 and he was largely responsible for the rise of the 17th century high church movement that tended away from the centrality of preaching towards a communion table ecclesiology.
Another extremely helpful book for me was William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England by W. B. Patterson. Gerald Bray recommended this book to me (I’m sure because he saw that I was having trouble keeping my head above water!). Reading Patterson has convinced me that Perkins was a top-tier scholar, in every way equal to his contemporaries, John Jewel and Richard Hooker, for the grounding of the Elizabethan church in Protestantism. Although he was a prominent Cambridge scholar, he has been mostly ignored as a “puritan” - a pejorative term for many people then and today. Patterson shows that Perkins was not a puritan at all if that term means a dislike for the Elizabethan Settlement (as Peter Lake defines “puritan”), but he was in fact England’s Calvin with a very high appreciation for the biblical doctrine of predestination. Perkins also had a settled appreciation for the Articles of Religion and episcopal (not presbyterian) authority. He defined predestination as “the decree of God by which he hath ordained all men to a certain and everlasting estate, that is either to salvation or condemnation for his own glory.” He made his contributions to predestinarian theology first by The Golden Chain (translated in 1591), and after he died A Christian and Plain Treatise of Predestination translated in 1606 was published. Interestingly, Patterson shows how Perkins might not have agreed completely with the narrow Calvinistic Lambeth Articles, while at the same time being completely convinced of the doctrine of divine election. Perkins was more popular in his lifetime than John Jewel and Richard Hooker, and for someone who died at the age of forty-four, having written forty-eight books (21 published in his lifetime), he deserves a whole new appreciation, the kind this monograph provides. This is a wonderful and important book!
And mentioning Peter Lake, his Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church is much more limited in scope, but also helpful. He seeks to redefine “puritan” to include all anti-papists that represented a spectrum of opinions about whether or not to leave the Church of England. His pool of study is Laurence Chaderton and a small group of his friends at Cambridge University between 1560 and 1600. Unfortunately, Lake intentionally does not include the one person he should have, William Perkins! He states that Perkins is the obvious “moderate puritan” and argues that he is so important as to warrant his own separate book (a weak excuse!). Most helpful to my interests is his Chapter 9, “The Theological Disputes of the 1590s.” He argues that the second generation Calvinists sought to systematize the protestant case into a coherent and self-consistent whole, even if it meant answering questions on which Calvin chose to be silent (where Scripture is silent). This tendency to be better Calvinists than Calvin distinguishes the puritans from moderate puritans. With our tendency to throw every Protestant under the bus as a puritan, Lake helped me understand the Calvinist thread that united all the Protestants in Elizabeth’s reign, and the differences between moderate puritans who had allegiance to the Anglican formularies and episcopal form of government, and the other puritans who wanted to move beyond Anglican strictures.
A friend recommended that I read Peter White’s Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War, and I did! White gets the prize for the longest title with the weakest argument. He is not shy in stating his thesis up front: to refute the overwhelming majority opinion (Allison, Tyake, Lake, Null, MacCulloch, Ryrie, Collinson and others) that Calvinism dominated the newly formed church in England from Cranmer and the English reformers up until the ant-Calvinist movement in universities in the late 1590s and well into the 17th century. He is adamant that there has always been a “spectrum of views on the doctrine of predestination” in our Anglican heritage, and he wants us to be open to the possibility of Arminian interpretations of the historic Anglican formularies, and he suggests glimmers of Arminianism in John Jewel and Richard Hooker which are not visible to the modern eye. White wants us to make Anglicanism into a kind of “decaffeinated Catholicism” (Alec Ryrie’s pejorative term that he does not use specifically of White). Tyacke calls White’s book “a piece of ultra-revisionism.”
Reformation Anglicans are obviously “reformed.” Calvinism and Arminianism are not two views of a car accident that eventually meet up at some evangelistic crusade in Minneapolis. They are mutually exclusive teachings. Arminianism was invented to combat the teachings of Calvinism. Patrick Collinson calls Arminianism the worm in the apple: “belief in the potential universality of divine redemption and in the capacity of man’s freewill to appropriate God’s grace or to spurn it” (From Cranmer to Sancroft). And despite the chummy relationship between the two that Robert Prichard wishes for in the Episcopal Church (The Nature of Salvation: Theological Consensus in the Episcopal Church 1801-3), the two systems are plainly incompatible. And even though Charles Simeon’s sentiments are pastoral, that it’s good to preach both Calvinism and Arminianism depending on the day “just as the text happens to be,” the historic formularies recognized by Anglicans through the centuries have no room for the tentacles of Arminianism in any form (decisionism, revivalism, moralism, progressivism, and a generally sunnier outlook on human capacity).
The psychology of Arminianism appeals to the most core elements of human nature - on some level we all love the idea that performance and self-righteous advancements contribute to our salvation. This love affair has its earlier expression in fifth-century Pelagianism and the semi-pelagianism of the Medieval Catholic Church. But as a brand, Arminianism was born in Holland at the turn of the 17th century in reaction against Calvinism. It was repudiated by the reformed world, including the Church of England, at the Council of Dort (1618), but it lives on to see another day.
Arminians and Calvinists both believe in predestination; they have to, the Bible teaches it! Arminians teach that predestination is corporate and not individual (Israel and the new Israel, the church). Calvinists, on the other hand, believe that “predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honor” (Article XVII). J. I. Packer said, “Arminians praise God for providing a Savior to whom all may come for life; Calvinists do that too, and then go on to praise God for actually bringing them to the Savior’s feet.” Reformation Anglicans don’t believe that God’s love stops at the point of politely inviting, but that God takes the additional gracious action to ensure that the elect respond. Jesus said, “No one comes to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (Jn 6:44). Arminians say that personal faith is the ground of justification; evangelical Anglicans say that justification is the ground of our faith.
Both Armenians and Calvinists believe in God’s righteousness for salvation - they have to, it’s in the Bible! Arminians believe that Christ’s death and atonement made salvation possible “for all who will receive him,” and that God’s righteousness (his grace) is distributed incrementally over time so that we will become acceptable to the groom as his bride. High Church Arminians came to believe, as Roman Catholics do, that this infused righteousness is automatically delivered in the sacraments. Reformation Anglicans also share the belief that it is God’s righteousness that saves, but they see it as God’s very own righteousness that is imputed to undeserving sinners - the robe of God’s righteousness, his garment of salvation so completely covers our unrighteousness that God sees us forever as the righteousness of God (Isa 61). “We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.”
Since Arminians focus on our personal decision for Christ (that awful song, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus”), they have a very different view of assurance and heavenly security than do Reformation Anglicans. They are in and out of grace depending on their faithfulness to trust in God for salvation (that horrible song, “Trust and Obey”). This “led inevitably to a new legalism of which the key thought was that the exerting of steady moral effort now is the way to salvation hereafter” (Packer). On the other hand, Reformation Anglicans believe that eternal security is about God’s faithfulness, not ours, and since God and his promises are absolutely trustworthy, we can have absolute assurance. “For I am convinced . . .” “And I am sure of this . . .” (Rom 8:38-39; Phil 1:6).
William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury under King Charles I, helped open the door to Arminianism and all its iterations and complications, including the high church movement. He gave the preferred episcopal positions to Arminian cronies. Under him, worship in the Church of England was embellished with ceremonial and ritual that, for theological reasons, was not permitted after the Reformation. The Laudians brought back altars to supplant pulpits in liturgical importance, and Holy Communion became a priority over the preached word. Laud infamously said, “in all ages of the Church the touchstone of religion was not to hear the word preached but to communicate” [receive Holy Communion].
The battle continues today. It’s evident in the “Yeah, but . . .” way some Anglicans respond to the formularies. And it is evident in the manipulated commentaries on the Articles of Religion, many of them written to justify preexisting theological preferences rather than “taken in their literal and grammatical sense” (ACNA’s Constitution and Canons) - for example Edward Harold Browne’s treatment of Article 17 as “ecclesiastical election,” not individual. What is at stake is our core Anglican identity, but more importantly, the glory and sovereignty of God. Either we are capable of reaching up to God in our own strength and choosing and we just need a coach, or we are dead in our trespasses and sins and we need a Savior who has already defeated death. Either the responsibility falls on us to raise our hand with all heads bowed and eyes closed, or God chose us from before the foundations of the world to be his children. Reformation Anglicans see that salvation is wholly of God from beginning to the end - a free gift of sovereign mercy for people who don’t deserve it, who haven’t done enough to earned it, and who would never have eternal life had God not supplied what is needed in the life and death of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.