The Seventeenth Century

During the seventeenth century, the massive theological and ecclesiastical shifts hammered out during the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation were solidified and codified. This was the era in which some of the greatest Reformed confessions and catechisms were written and in which Puritanism began to exercise a decisive influence in England and in North America. Denominations as we know them today began to develop and there was much conflict between church and state regarding the state’s role in the life of the church.

While the Magisterial Reformers of the sixteenth century were united in opposition to Roman Catholicism, agreeing on the five solas and the need for ethical living based on Scripture, internal disagreements eventually led to the formation of different Protestant traditions, including Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and the Reformed. During the seventeenth century, these groups would further define themselves by writing distinct confessions of faith and forming ecclesiastical assemblies. At times, these churches and assemblies operated independently from civil governing authorities, and at other times they operated under the direction of those governing authorities, whether they wanted such supervision or not. Other reform movements that did not share the theological commitments of the Reformers or the support of civil authorities continued as well, most notably the Anabaptists.

The Church of England—having officially severed ties with Rome in the early 1530s under King Henry VIII—eventually took a via media (middle way) between the form of Rome (episcopal polity, the wearing of vestments, kneeling at the altar, etc.) and the theology of the Protestant Reformers. Not all were happy with this “partial” Reformation. As the chief proponents of a more thorough Reformation in England, the Puritans sought to purify the Church of England from its remaining Roman Catholic vestiges. A Puritan was one who politically reacted against the via media of the Elizabethan Settlement; who theologically held the Reformed views of the five solas and (generally) the doctrines of grace summarized by the acronym TULIP; and who promoted discipleship, evangelism, an experiential faith, communion with God, and personal piety. During the 1640s, the Puritan movement also produced the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechism, and the Directory of Public Worship. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Puritans had achieved freedom to worship from the specific liturgical confines of the Anglican Church and its Book of Common Prayer.

On the European Continent during the latter half of the sixteenth century, tensions had mounted within the Dutch Reformed Church between two professors at the University of Leiden, Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) and Franciscus Gomarus (1563–1641). Arminius maintained that God had supplied sinners with a “prevenient grace” that enabled individuals to choose salvation but did not guarantee that anyone would actually make that choice. God’s election was therefore conditional on their free choice, enabled by this prevenient grace. Arminius argued that this grace enabled sinners to exercise faith leading to regeneration. Gomarus, on the other hand, in agreement with John Calvin (1509–64), maintained that regeneration preceded faith and that God’s election is unconditional—not conditioned upon anything in the sinner. The debate spilled over into the seventeenth century when Arminius’ followers issued the Five Articles of Remonstrance in 1610 against Calvin’s view of predestination as expressed in the Belgic Confession. The Synod of Dort (1618–19) was called to respond to the Remonstrance, which included voting representatives from Reformed churches in eight foreign countries. The synod rejected the Remonstrance and affirmed five Calvinistic articles, frequently referred to today as the five points of Calvinism or by the acronym TULIP. This document aided the Dutch Reformed Church in a second Reformation during the seventeenth century.

Other notable developments in Europe furthered defined and codified the Reformation principles. The seventeenth-century theological heirs of the Reformers—including Francis Turretin (1623–87) of Geneva—wrote organized systematic theologies as a continuation of the scholastic method of the later medieval period. Their starting point in this theological development was not Aristotelian philosophy, however, but rather a firm belief in sola Scriptura. In addition, proponents of Reformed theology further clarified and defined Reformed teachings over and against the threat of what they saw as unbiblical variants. In his 1634 Brief Treatise on Predestination, the French Reformer Moïse Amyraut (1596–1664) challenged the orthodox view by arguing that God purposed to send His Son to save all humanity. Most Reformers outside of France (notably, Turretin) rejected Amyraldianism, for Amyraut’s teaching was regarded as a close cousin of Arminianism’s doctrine of universal atonement.

In an attempt to cultivate spiritual renewal, the Pietist movement also began during the seventeenth century in the German Lutheran churches. Pastors such as Johann Arndt (1555–1621) and Philip Jacob Spener (1635–1705) pioneered the movement through their writings and preaching, which sought to promote an active ministry among the laity, to emphasize Christian love over mere head knowledge, to favor small groups over public Word and sacrament ministry, and to elevate spiritual formation and an ethic patterned after the life of Christ. The movement took on an anti-intellectual cast, leading to its initial rejection by a majority of the Reformed community. Eventually, however, Pietist ideas and practices would influence the Reformed churches.

In the New World, English Protestant settlers established new colonies, including Jamestown, Plymouth, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Many of these early settlements maintained a Puritan character, not only in church life, but also in the colonies as a whole. Their Bible was the Genevan Bible, with its Reformed notations. During the period of the Great Migration, some twenty thousand individuals left England for New England to establish a “city on a hill,” governed according to the Bible (including the observance of the Christian Sabbath). These noble ideals, however, met with mixed results.