Abstract
One of the most important developments in early Stuart religious culture was the general decline in “exegetical optimism” that it witnessed, the fading conviction in the simplicity of the bible. Tracing major examples of this development, this chapter compares Lancelot Andrewes’ and Richard Sibbes’ sermons on the “mystery of godliness” (1 Tim. 3:16) with John Calvin’s discussions of the same text. In doing so, Kuchar shows how Herbert’s contemporaries often qualified claims to assurance through faith alone with an emphasis on assurance through love, thereby qualifying strong claims to personal certainty with an emphasis on wonder and mystery. Parallel with this development in biblical hermeneutics was a developing awareness that exaggerated expectations of assurance often inadvertently result in despair.
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Notes
- 1.
For the use of the phrase “exegetical optimism” to describe post-reformation exegetical developments, see Susan E. Schreiner, “‘The Spiritual Man Judges All Things’: Calvin and Exegetical Debate about Certainty in the Reformation” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation eds. Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 189–215, 197 and David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), 96.
- 2.
John Hales, Sermon … Concerning The Abuses … of holy scripture (Oxford: 1617), 36–37.
- 3.
See Thomas Cranmer, Certayne sermons, or homelies (N.P. 1547), B2v-B3r and The seconde tome of homelyes (London: 1563) Fol. 159v-160, 169.
- 4.
See Susan Schriener Are You Alone Wise? and “The Spiritual Man Judges All Things”; Richard H. Popkin The History of Skepticism From Savonarola to Bayle revised and expanded edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003); Barbara Pitkin, What Pure Eyes Could See: Calvin’s Doctrine of Faith in Its Exegetical Context (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999); J.P. Callahan, “‘Claritas Scripturae’: The Role of Perspicuity in Protestant Hermeneutics” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. 39.3 (1996), 353–372; Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of Faith; Edward A. Dowey, Jr., The Knowledge of God; and T.H. L Parker, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969). I draw heavily on Schreiner in the following sequence.
- 5.
On this point, see Pitkin, What Pure Eyes, 36. For a discussion of medieval concepts of faith as a voluntary certainty (voluntaria certitudo), see G.R. Evans, Getting it Wrong: The Medieval Epistemology of Error (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 166–176.
- 6.
Luther, Pagan Servitude, 296.
- 7.
Luther, Bondage of the Will, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation eds. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 109. See Popkin, History of Skepticism, 9–10.
- 8.
Cited in Schreiner, Are You Alone, 97.
- 9.
See Ibid., 37–130.
- 10.
Beeke, Assurance of Faith, 13.
- 11.
Luther, Bondage of the Will, 108. See Schreiner, “The Spiritual Man Judges,” 189.
- 12.
As cited in Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 60.
- 13.
Schreiner, “The Spiritual Man,” 190 and Are You Alone, 84–129, esp., 103.
- 14.
Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 50.
- 15.
Martin Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert, (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2003), 137–138.
- 16.
Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 103.
- 17.
Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John trans., William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker Books), 17:254.
- 18.
See Pitkin, What Pure Eyes, 40; T.H.L Parker, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 5; and Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 66.
- 19.
Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.15 as cited in Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 66.
- 20.
Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 67.
- 21.
Sermons of M. John Calvin on the Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy and Titus (London: 1579), 321. Subsequent references are given in text.
- 22.
T.H.L Parker, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries 2nd edition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 102. See also Muller, After Calvin, 164–165, and Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 91. This attitude is perhaps even more true of William Tyndale for whom the Word, as John Bossy notes, was “addressed to no one and everyone, like the Ten Commandments which were to replace statues and images behind the altars of English churches.” John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 99. For a strongly stated view of the interpretively reductive and socially divisive aspects of this kind of early reformation hermeneutics, see James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge: The Belnkap Press of Harvard UP, 2007). For a related set of conclusions arrived at from an entirely different methodological standpoint, see Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven
- 23.
John Calvin, Concerning Scandals trans. John W. Fraser (William B. Eerdmans Grand Rapids Michigan 1978), 7–22.
- 24.
Schreiner, “Spiritual Man Judges,” 193.
- 25.
Bossy, Christianity in the West and McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England. For a strongly worded but by no means devastating revisionist critique of McGee, see Nicholas Tyacke’s review of The Godly Man in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 20.1 (January 1978), 123–124.
- 26.
Bossy, Christianity in the West, 120.
- 27.
My discussion of Herbert’s and Andrewes’ use of Johannine concepts of assurance is informed by Paul Cefalu’s magisterial study The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Religion and Literature (Oxford UP: Forthcoming) and from personal conversation with him.
- 28.
Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, Appendix Two, 446–459 and Cefalu, Johannine Renaissance, Chap. 4.
- 29.
Pitkin, What Pure Eyes Could See, 91.
- 30.
Ibid., 83–97.
- 31.
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 108.
- 32.
Bossy, Christianity in the West, 140.
- 33.
For a fuller elaboration of this thesis, see Cefalu’s The Johannine Renaissance (Forthcoming). For a broadly related approach to Herbert, see Terry Sherwood, Herbert’s Prayerful Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
- 34.
Beeke, Assurance of Faith, 24; H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1958), 319.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
See Cary, Inner Grace, 119.
- 37.
The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker Volume 3 3rd edition ed. John Keeble (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1845), 470. Subsequent references to this sermon are given in text by page number.
- 38.
See Michael MacDonald, “The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England” Journal of British Studies 31.1 (Jan. 1992), 32–61, 38. The following discussion of Spiera leans heavily on Macdonald’s article.
- 39.
For the ubiquity of the Spiera case in Tudor England, see Erin E. Kelly, “Conflict of Conscience and Sixteenth-Century Drama” ELR 44.3 (2014), 388–419, 391–392.
- 40.
For Spiera’s Italian reception, see M.A. Overall, “The Exploitation of Francisco Spiera” The Sixteenth Century Journal 26.3 (1995), 619–637.
- 41.
Ibid., 631.
- 42.
Matthew Gribaldi, A Notable and Marveilous Epistle (London, n.d.), Aiii; cited in MacDonald, 46.
- 43.
See Wulfert De Greef, The Writings of John Calvin: An Introductory Guide trans. Lyle D. Bierma (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2006), 118–126.
- 44.
Hugh Latimer, The Works of Hugh Latimer Volume 1 ed. George E. Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1844), 425.
- 45.
See Overall, “The Exploitation of Francisco Spiera,” 634.
- 46.
See W. Speed Hill’s, “The Evolution of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity” in Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary To an Edition of His Works ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1972), 117–158. The following two paragraphs reiterate and try to build on Hill’s reading of Hooker.
- 47.
For a summary of the Barrett controversy along with his retraction of the nonextant sermon for which he was censored, see John Strype, The Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift (London: 1718), 4.443–459.
- 48.
Lancelot Andrewes, “A Review of the Censure passed upon Dr. Barrett’s Opinion concerning Certainty of Salvation” in J. Ellis, Defence of the Thirty Nine Articles (London: 1700), 121. For the original, see Andrewes, “Censura D. Barreti De Certitudine Salutis” in A Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1846), 301.
- 49.
Cummings, Literary Culture, 288. For an account of how the articles came into being, see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans in Elizabethan Church, 201–242. For competing views see Peter White, Predestination, policy, and polemic, 101–109 and H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 344–390.
- 50.
Lake, Moderate Puritans, 239.
- 51.
Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 37–130. For a related account of the Barrett affair, see Cummings, Literary Culture, 290.
- 52.
William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference … at Hampton Court (1605), printed in E. Cardwell ed. A History of Conferences and Other Proceedings connected with the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer, 1558–1690 3rd edition (Oxford, 1849), 178.
- 53.
Ibid., 180.
- 54.
Ibid., 181.
- 55.
Usher, Reconstruction of English Church, 336. For an important account of James’ shifting views of Calvinism and puritanism and for his probable strategy at the Hampton Court Conference, see Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I,” Journal of British Studies 24.2 (April 1985), 169–207.
- 56.
‘Venice: April 1603’, in Calendar of State Papers … Venice, Volume 10, 1603–1607, ed. Horatio F Brown (London, 1900), 2–16.
- 57.
For a subtle account of why the king came to endorse Montague’s works, see Fincham and Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I,” 202–207.
- 58.
Robert Sanderson, “Pax Ecclesiae” in The Works of Robert Sanderson: Six Volumes (Oxford: 1854), 5.256. The work was first printed in Izaak Walton’s 1678 Life of Sanderson.
- 59.
Peter Lake, “Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson” Journal of British Studies, 27.2 (April, 1988), 81–116, 104.
- 60.
Compare, for example, Sanderson’s 1625 Pax Ecclesia with his more partisan 1639 court sermon on 1 Timothy 3.16 delivered at Berwick, July 16 collected in XXXVI Sermons (London: 1689 8th edn.), 479–491.
- 61.
David Novarr, The Making of Walton’s Lives (Ithaca: Cornell, 1958), Chap. 11, especially 412–430.
- 62.
John K Stafford, “Scripture and the Generous Hermeneutic of Richard Hooker” Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (2002) 915–928 and Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church, 260.
- 63.
In the preface to his commentary on Romans, Calvin echoes Augustine’s claim that some disagreement over scripture among the truly faithful is to be expected (Commentaries, 19. xxvii).
- 64.
Van Geest, Incomprehensibility of God, 75.
- 65.
Chretién, Under the Gaze of the Bible trans. John Marson Dunaway (New York: Fordham, 2015), 53.
- 66.
My formulations here are inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 2nd Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222. What Hooker may not have fully appreciated was the paradoxes involved trying to control the framework of religious tradition while writing from within it. It would require a Shakespeare to see that problem. See Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” Monist 60.4 (October 1977), 453–472.
- 67.
See Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 145–252 and “The Anglican Moment? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590’s” in Anglicanism and the Western Catholic Tradition (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2003), 90–121. See also, Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology.
- 68.
William Perkins, A Golden Chain (Cambridge: 1600), 478.
- 69.
Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977), 69–70.
- 70.
W.K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (1603–1640) (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 358–361, 446–453.
- 71.
C.J. Betts, Early Deism in France: From the so-called ‘déistes’ of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire’s ‘Lettres philosophique’ (1734) (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 31.
- 72.
See Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), 385.
- 73.
See Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 139.
- 74.
Harold R. Hutcheson, Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s De Religione Laici (New Haven: Yale UP, 1944), 59.
- 75.
King James I, Meditation Upon the Lord’s Prayer (1619), 10.
- 76.
Fincham and Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I.”
- 77.
Ibid.
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Kuchar, G. (2017). The Critique of Certitude in Seventeenth-Century England. In: George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44045-3_3
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