A Question of Consensus

The Doctrine of Assurance after the Westminster Confession

Jonathan Master

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781451469417
• eBook ISBN: 9781451472356
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

From the very earliest days after its completion in 1646, the Westminster Confession's position on assurance has been a subject of controversy. In this exciting new work, Jonathan Master considers the Westminster Confession's statements on assurance as a position of consensus among a diversity of viewpoints. Master traces how from this one position, the idea was expanded and modified—even by the document's own authors!—just years after its reception, in very distinct ways. Each of these expansions on what was intended to be a consensus document forms the basis for later traditions regarding assurance within the Reformed and Evangelical traditions. To date, few studies have examined these expansions as a united whole, and Master's work highlights the ways in which the streams of thought flowing out of Westminster are as important as those flowing into it, raising as they do questions about confession and doctrinal freedom in the growing Reformed tradition.

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Moving beyond Westminster

Anthony Burgess’s Framework for Assurance

If Barth found the verbosity of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) statement on assurance to be an indication that something was “not quite right,” then surely the later writings by some of the Westminster divines would strike him as presenting an even greater problem. Anthony Burgess, for instance, expanded upon the WCF, filling in its gaps and silences, while staying within its basic framework. And he was not alone in these efforts. John Owen and Thomas Goodwin also considered the topic worthy of further verbosity.

Our method in this next section will be to examine the ways in which three key figures expanded upon the Westminster consensus, particularly in giving a framework for understanding true faith and genuine assurance. Examining these three will illustrate the fact that, while Westminster settled several issues with regard to the topic of assurance, it also left many significant things unsaid or unresolved. Anthony Burgess gives perhaps the most comprehensive answers to the questions raised by Westminster, so we will begin with him in this chapter. But he does not give the only answers, and his answers will have to be seen in the context of others,’ which we will discuss in chapter 5. In fact, when we examine these others, who approached the question of assurance in ways that would become highly influential, looking in particular at John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, we will see that their approach differed from Burgess’s in quite significant ways.

These differences cannot merely be explained in the same way as the differences between Calvin and the later Puritans on assurance are explained—as stemming from pastoral needs or the peculiar contexts of national and religious life. Their differences stem from a different source. In fact, part of the historical methodology behind our selection of these three figures is precisely to control for possible differences in background, nationality, time period, and most importantly, familiarity with and adherence to the WCF. Though faced with the same kinds of pastoral challenges and gaps in the Westminster consensus, each of these three men expanded on the WCF in fundamentally different ways. These differences are surprising, given the overall agreement these figures would have shared with the WCF. Burgess, Owen, and Goodwin are roughly contemporary with one another; each would be considered a Puritan; each would agree with the Westminster consensus. Yet we will see in them different emphases with respect to the assurance of faith, providing us with different perspectives on the development of this important doctrine in the context of Reformed theology. We will begin in this chapter with Anthony Burgess and with the categories that apply equally to him, to Goodwin, and to Owen.

Anthony Burgess: Life and Background

Anthony Burgess’s life and ministry took place at a significant moment, both in the history of England and in the history of doctrine in the English-speaking world. Richard Muller has referred to this period as that of “the rise and development of Reformed orthodoxy.”^[1] This description makes several important assumptions. First, it assumes that the Reformation was itself a watershed period in the history of Christian doctrine—an assumption that cannot reasonably be challenged. Second, it assumes that there are some basic structures to Reformed or Protestant thought that make up the core of its teaching. That is, whatever variants exist in the theology of Protestantism, they are precisely that—variants in an otherwise coherent system of thought. Notwithstanding this, Muller assumes that, within this basic framework, the period of 1520 to 1725 was one of development and codification within the basic tradition of Reformed or Protestant thought. Anthony Burgess (d. 1664) falls within this important developmental period.

In looking at Burgess and his contemporaries, we will contend that the contributions made to the doctrine of assurance must be understood within the framework of three categories. First, Burgess and the others must be understood as part of a movement within seventeenth-century England best labeled Puritan. Though defining this term precisely is notoriously difficult, it nonetheless provides useful shorthand for understanding the exigencies of the era and movement of which Burgess, Owen, and Goodwin were a part.

Second, each of these men must be understood in light of his pastoral calling. As we will see, the ways in which each expanded upon the Westminster doctrine of assurance are directly relatable to pastoral experience and needs. Indeed, for Burgess, his treatises on assurance arise from a pastoral context. To ignore this is to ignore the driving force behind all that Burgess, Goodwin, and Owen write on assurance, and perhaps much of what they write on any theological topic at all. On this, those who have argued for comparing Calvin and the later Calvinists are quite correct: pastoral context makes a difference.

Finally, Burgess, Goodwin, and Owen must be understood broadly in light of a distinctive educational background. For Burgess, both his education in grammar school and his undergraduate and graduate education at Cambridge prepared and perhaps even predisposed him to particular ways of thinking and arguing. In fact, it could be argued that the distinctive education Burgess received during his formative years was actually the high-water mark for a peculiar kind of Scholastic method. Regardless, Burgess, as we will see, was a product of a distinctive training, and it is this training that shows us most clearly what he is doing methodologically as he expands upon the Westminster doctrine of assurance in his own distinctive way.

Puritanism

To begin our understanding of Burgess’s contribution to the Westminster doctrine of assurance, we must first consider the term Puritan. Because of the scholarly debate regarding the meaning and usefulness of this term, it is perhaps the vaguest of the three designations we will use for description in this chapter.^[2] But it is nonetheless important. Though the term Puritan itself needs some definition (it was used in different ways even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), it appears to coalesce around certain shared emphases. Both Hill and Spurr agree, for instance, about the Puritan emphasis on the preaching of the Bible, Sabbatarianism, a particular view of home life, and in many cases, a willingness to emphasize these things even when it put those called Puritans on a crash course with the monarchy and the established church.^[3]

One way to approach the problem is to see how the term Puritan was used when it first emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It appears most likely that the term began as a term of approbation. Udall writes in 1588, “I know no Puritans but Satan taught the papists so to name the ministers of the gospel.”^[4] In 1641, Henry Parker wrote that those criticizing Puritans are “papists, hierarchists, ambidexters and neuters in religion . . . court flatterers, time-serving projectors and the rancorous caterpillars of the realm . . . and the scum of the vulgar.”^[5] Parker also insisted that there were types of Puritans: church policy Puritans, religious Puritans, state Puritans, and moral Puritans.^[6] And Parker again wrote, “Those whom we ordinarily call Puritans are men of strict life and precise opinions, which cannot be hated for anything but their singularity in zeal and piety.”^[7]

Writing somewhat later, Richard Baxter described the Puritans as “religious persons that used to talk of God, and heaven, and Scripture, and holiness.”^[8] A more comprehensive definition appears in the historical writings of Thomas Fuller from 1837:

The English bishops, conceiving themselves empowered by their canons, began to shew their authority in urging the clergy of their diocese to subscribe to the liturgy, ceremonies, and discipline of the Church; and such as refused the same were branded with the odious name of puritans. . . . Puritan here was taken for the opposers of the hierarchy and church-service, as resenting of superstition. But profane mouths quickly improved this nickname, therewith on every occasion to abused pious people . . . that . . . labored for a life pure and holy. . . . These . . . were divided into two ranks: some mild and moderate, contented only to enjoy their own conscience; others fierce and fiery, to the disturbance of church and state.^[9]

Fuller’s description suggests that the term Puritan eventually came to describe a political movement. This does not seem to take into account the fundamentally religious character of the Puritan cause, though it does show that the movement came to have profound political implications. However, Fuller seems to create an artificial separation where none exists. Broadly speaking, in the sixteenth century, Puritanism described a group of people who wanted to promote the Protestant Reformation in England; in the seventeenth century, it became a party that tried to extend liberty and freedom against the British monarchy.

Although Puritanism was seen at the time and shortly after as a term that could be described with some coherency, it would be a mistake to think of it as a highly organized system or network. Brown, writing slightly later than Fuller, said Puritanism “was not so much an organised system (political or theological) as a religiou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• Setting the Stage
• The Westminster Consensus
• Moving beyond Westminster
• Further Development
• The Danger of False Assurance
• Conclusion
• Index