The Religious Formation of John Witherspoon

Calvinism, Evangelicalism, and the Scottish Enlightenment

Kevin DeYoung

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367350895
• eBook ISBN: 9781000044959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early American History

This book explores in unprecedented detail the theological thinking of John Witherspoon during his often overlooked ministerial career in Scotland. In contrast to the arguments made by other historians, it shows that there was considerable continuity of thought between Witherspoon's Scottish ministry and the second half of his career as one of America's Founding Fathers.

The book argues that Witherspoon cannot be properly understood until he is seen as not only engaged with the Enlightenment, but also firmly grounded in the Calvinist tradition of High to Late Orthodoxy, embedded in the transatlantic Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth century, and frustrated by the state of religion in the Scottish Kirk. Alongside the titles of pastor, president, educator, philosopher, should be a new category: John Witherspoon as Reformed apologist.

This is a fresh re-examination of the intellectual formation of one of Scotland's most important churchman from the eighteenth century and one of America's most influential early figures. The volume will be of keen interest to academics working in Religious History, American Religion, Reformed Theology and Calvinism, as well as Scottish and American history more generally.

1
‘The sound, Calvinistic, reformation divinity’

Witherspoon’s debt to Late Reformed Orthodoxy

As a delegate to the Constitutional Congress at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, John Witherspoon was easily recognizable. His Scottish brogue was thick, he had a noticeable habit of fiddling with his overgrown eyebrows, and he was always conspicuously dressed in Genevan bands. The two strips of white cloth hanging from the collar owed their name to Calvin’s Geneva where they were worn by Reformed clergy. Whatever Witherspoon’s involvement in revolutionary politics, he never intended to leave behind his pastoral vocation in general or the Reformed tradition more specifically. Any honest assessment of Witherspoon as an ecclesiastical or political leader must take into account his background in and lifelong commitment to the theology of evangelical Calvinism.

Even among the best scholarship, previous assessments of Witherspoon’s theology have often been marred by a superficial—and usually unsympathetic—understanding of the Reformed tradition. Calvinism is presented as something dark and mysterious, oppressive and unbending. For example, Jack Scott, in his annotated edition of Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy, claims that covenant theologians of the seventeenth century like William Ames did away with ‘the austere, unknowable Almighty’ of earlier Calvinism in favor of a God who contracts with his people.¹ Likewise, Scott sees Witherspoon as maintaining the façade of orthodox Calvinism but undermining the original article because he rejects ‘the arbitrary Deity portrayed by ultra-Calvinists’ and goes against ‘Pure Calvinism’ in teaching, for example, the efficacy of prayer.² All this despite the fact that Calvin emphasized God’s covenant relationship with his people, rejected the notion of ‘absolute might’ and a ‘lawless god who is a law unto himself’, and opposed any notion that personal pleading in prayer and a high view of divine providence were incompatible.³ Scott works with a caricatured Calvinism such that any perceived doctrinal ambiguity or finely tuned nuance must be explained as an Enlightenment modification.

Similarly, Anne Skoczylas describes the trial of Glasgow professor John Simson as a conflict between middle-of-the-road, enlightened Calvinists and their ‘ultra-conservative opponents’ from the ‘ultra-orthodox evangelical wing’ of the Kirk, who sought to take ‘extremist action’ against those who espoused a broader and more inclusive from of Calvinism.⁴ While this is certainly one way to view the Simson affair, Skoczylas’s assessment not only relies on an outdated ‘Calvin against the Calvinists’ paradigm, but it also suffers from fundamental misunderstandings about doctrinal controversies in the Reformed tradition.⁵ She sees the development of Scottish theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a self-absorbed faith marked by sterile logic and rigid inflexibility: ‘Such a theology had fewer doctrinal ambiguities and less of the inner fire of the first Reformers: it appealed to the mind rather than the emotions. Where Calvin had focused on how a biblical God revealed himself to mankind, Calvinist scholastics speculated on the nature of God, on predestination, and on the exercise of the divine will’.⁶ With such a harsh view of Calvinism, it is not surprising that many scholars would do little to explore the fine intricacies and careful distinctions so important to the Reformed tradition.

For those concerned about Witherspoon’s place in the Reformed tradition, three interpretive approaches have been typical. Some, like Scott, see Witherspoon as having enough Enlightenment sensibilities to profitably deviate from the starker realities of ‘Pure Calvinism’. Other scholars like Mark Noll view Witherspoon’s alleged departures from Calvinist orthodoxy more negatively, arguing that Witherspoon imbibed an implicit naturalism and unwittingly compromised the robust Augustinian tradition that other Calvinists theologians (read: Jonathan Edwards) were right to maintain.⁷ In the third category are those like L. Gordon Tait who are more sympathetic to Witherspoon and want to believe that Witherspoon could not have been as bad as a full-blooded Calvinist.⁸ None of these approaches does justice to Witherspoon’s theology, because all fail to recognize its deep continuity with the Reformed tradition he inherited and meant to promote. When historians do venture a more sympathetic account of Witherspoon’s Calvinism, they are often more intent on connecting Witherspoon forward to Old Princeton than looking backward to see his dependence on the theologians of High to Late Reformed Orthodoxy.

Post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics

In the last 30 years, thanks in large part to the pioneering work of Richard Muller, there has been a profound reassessment of the post-Reformation Reformed tradition. Muller has labored tirelessly to overturn the ‘Calvin against the Calvinists’ approach to Reformed historiography which blames the followers of Calvin for distorting and compromising their founder’s vision and emphases.⁹ This older methodology found articulate expression in Brian Armstrong’s influential work, Calvin and the Amyraut Heresy (1969).¹⁰ Armstrong argued for essential discontinuity between Calvin’s thought and that of his followers. Owing in large part to Calvin’s successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, Reformed theology lost its Christocentric moorings, wed itself to Aristotelian philosophy, became fixated on predestination, and devolved into a soulless scholasticism. According to Armstrong, Beza’s whole theological program—with its supralapsarianism, limited atonement, and immediate imputation of Adam’s sin—represented a distortion of Calvin’s teaching, leading to the rigid and speculative theology that would dominate international Calvinism in the seventeenth century.¹¹

Against this view, Muller has made a number of convincing points.¹² First, we must not make John Calvin the benchmark or the sole fountain-head for the whole Reformed tradition. Undoubtedly, he exerted profound influence through his writings and the informal power he exercised in and through Geneva, but the Reformed tradition was also shaped by an impressive list of Calvin’s contemporaries, including Huldryich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Vermigli, Wolfgang Musculus, Zacharias Ursinus, and Girolamo Zanchius. And this is to say nothing of the early confessions and catechisms, only some of which had explicit antecedents in the work of John Calvin. Although the term ‘Calvinism’ was nearly synonymous with Reformed theology by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Reformed tradition has always been broader than just one man. So to judge the ‘purity’ of one’s Reformed credentials—be it from Beza, Perkins, Turretin, or Witherspoon—by comparing and contrasting with Calvin’s Institutes is methodologically lazy and historically reductionistic.

Second, scholasticism by itself does not require Aristotelian philosophy or metaphysical speculation, let alone lifeless rigidity. The term scholastic refers to method, without direct implications for content.¹³ Since the twelfth century, theologians and philosophers from a wide diversity of perspectives have relied on scholastic methodology in making clear distinctions concerning parts and divisions of topics.¹⁴ Even Calvin—who had nothing kind to say about the scholastic sophistry he saw from the Sorbonne, frequently made use of scholastic distinctions.¹⁵ In short, scholastic indicates ‘an academic style and method of discourse, not a particular theology or philosophy’.¹⁶

Third, while there are important differences between the early Reformers and later Reformed theologians (as we would expect in any multinational movement spread across multiple centuries), there is much more continuity than the older ‘Calvin against the Calvinists’ school, with its primitivist assumptions, allowed. At the very least there is a shared confessional and exegetical tradition that can be traced throughout the development of Reformed dogmatics from the second half of the sixteenth century well into the eighteenth century. Once these contours and continuities are better understood, we will see that Witherspoon did not depart—either for good or for ill—from some ‘purer’ form of Calvinism; in fact, his method and content were remarkably similar to those of his theological mentors.

What’s in a name?

A few words about definitions are in order.¹⁷ Although the term ‘orthodox’ most generically means ‘right teaching’ or adherence to correct doctrine, as an historical term it can also refer to the time following the Protestant Reformation in which doctrinal formulations developed and were codified in the Lutheran and Reformed traditions. Reformed orthodoxy speaks of the theology and theologians connected to the Reformed confessions in the period from the sixteenth century into the eighteenth century. Scholasticism, as we have seen, can be used negatively (and often has been in the Reformed tradition) as a reference to the speculative content of late medieval theology, but can more accurately be considered a method of teaching and investigation which employs a recurring system of distinctions, definitions, and disputational questions. Reformed scholasticism, then, refers to the theology practiced in the period of orthodoxy, whose method is scholastic and whose content is bound (sometimes closely, sometimes more loosely) to the doctrine of the Reformed confessions. Although the term ‘Calvinism’ is not, from the historian’s perspective, the best shorthand description for a broad movement of theologians and centuries of theological development, it became virtually synonymous with the Reformed confessional tradition by the eighteenth century, and thus will be used in this work interchangeably with the word ‘Reformed’.

The two centuries of Reformed orthodoxy are typically divided into three time periods.¹⁸ Early Orthodoxy (1565–1640) is the era of confessional solidification. By 1565, many of the second-generation Reformed theologians had passed away (e.g. Calvin, Musculus, Vermigli), marking the beginning of a new phase in Reformed thought. The time period is marked by codification, as well as elaborations and developments in covenant theology.

High Orthodoxy (1640–1725) is the era of confessional summation. Theology in this time period—enmeshe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Other notes on sources
• Introduction: John Witherspoon as Reformed apologist
• 1 ‘The sound, Calvinistic, reformation divinity’: Witherspoon’s debt to Late Reformed Orthodoxy
• 2 ‘A little tinctured with fanaticism’: Witherspoon and the rise of Evangelicalism
• 3 ‘How is the gold become dim!’: Witherspoon’s ministry in the Church of Scotland
• 4 ‘An age in which infidelity greatly prevails’: Witherspoon and the Enlightenment
• 5 ‘The Calvinist doctrines in popular form’: Witherspoon’s work in America
• Conclusion: ‘The infinite importance of the salvation of your souls’
• Appendix: Satirical poem to the Presbytery of Paisley (c. 1764)
• Bibliography
• Index