Church History Since the Reformation CH507 …...invasions of the 1650s, and finally the witch...

Church History Since the Reformation

Transcript - CH507 Church History Since the Reformation © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 08 of 24CH507

The Age of Puritanism, Part 2

Church History Since the Reformation

Lecture 8—The Age of Puritanism, Part 2. Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me invite you to join me in prayer as we begin. Let us pray. Good and gracious God, we come to you today once again recognizing our own weakness and in need of your strength and your understanding. Guide us now as we talk together that all that we say would be honoring to you. For Christ’s sake. Amen.

In our last class we began talking about the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This remarkable group of people, those who felt that they were especially called of God as His new Israel to carry on an errand here in the wilderness of the New World, an errand of establishing a model Christian community, a biblical commonwealth, that could reform not only the Church of England but hopefully beyond the Church of England to other churches as well, and to the communities that surrounded them by the very example which they were producing here in the City on the Hill.

They didn’t come, as we’ve discovered, for religious freedom as we understand it today. That is, they did not advocate in any way a sense that all folk were free to worship God and to practice the faith as dictated by their own conscience. The Baptists are going to later give us that gift as part of our heritage in their deep commitment to what is called “soul liberty.” We’ll talk more about that later in this lecture. These folk, however, focused their attention upon a kind of uniform practice of the faith, because it was absolutely essential that everyone play by the same rules.

The vision of this biblical commonwealth did not succeed, and it failed, I think, among a variety reason, for two basic causes. The first was their inability to pass along their faith to their children and to their neighbors and to the newcomers who were entering the colony. This is a problem that we all understand, and I think we can identify with in various ways, the yearnings that we have

Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History

and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary



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to pass along a lively, biblical faith to our children and to other around us. That’s not an easy thing to do, and eventually revival is going to emerge as the dominant pattern or way of doing that.

The other basic problem is a problem of uniformity, but in their zeal to establish a model community, they forced people to live by the same rules. It’s difficult in any society, certainly among fallen, sinful people, to get everybody to play by the same rules all the time. In fact, it may not be an altogether good thing even if we were able to achieve it. Aldous Huxley has a marvelous quote that I enjoy passing along. He says something to the effect that although neatness is good, it’s always surrounded by a tolerated margin of mess. And it’s that margin of mess that the Puritans were not able to abide in these early years, and which got them increasingly into difficulty. And we see that maverick quality, that dissenting quality within the society very early on and carrying through the first century of their existence.

Let me give you three examples of that: the Anne Hutchison case, the Antinomian Controversy of the 1630s, and then the Quaker invasions of the 1650s, and finally the witch trials in Salem of the 1690s. These events, I think, illustrate for us some of the breakdown of that interesting uniformity which had been so central to the original Puritan dream.

Let me begin with the so-called Antinomian Controversy of the 1630s. This centers around an interesting woman named Anne Hutchinson. Born in 1591, Anne was the second of Bridget and Francis Marbury’s thirteen children. She grew up in Alford, Lancaster, a village in the North Midlands of England. Her father was an Anglican minister, a rather outspoken critic of all forms of established authority, including the church in which he served. He was an independent spirit, which was passed on to Anne as well. He frequently called his ministerial colleagues to account for what he felt was their lack of training and ability. Such activity outraged many in the church, and shortly before Anne’s birth, his superiors deprived him of all of his ministerial support.

At the age of twenty-one, in August 1612, Anne married William Hutchinson, the son of an Alford textile merchant. The young couple and their expanding family (eventually they had fifteen children—six boys and nine girls) began attending worship at St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, that is, the Boston in England, a city 20 miles south of Alford. What drew them to the church was the preaching of the Rev. John Cotton, who in 1612 had



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left his job as tutor in Emmanuel College Cambridge to become vicar of the Boston parish. His preaching was clearly Puritan in form and content, combining a sense of dissatisfaction over the insufficiently Reformed nature of England with an emphasis upon experiential faith, those two classic elements, as you’ll remember, of Puritan thought. Unlike many of his Puritan colleagues, however, Cotton tended to stress what he called “the covenant of grace” rather than the covenant of works. Sanctification, Cotton had come to believe, should not be seen as primarily evidence of God’s election to salvation. While God expects His children to live holy lives, a person’s upright moral conduct should not be taken as a guarantee of redemptive grace. Assurance of salvation, insofar as it can be achieved, must rely primarily upon the inward witness of the Holy Spirit, not the outward show of obedience in life.

Cotton’s Puritan leanings brought him increasingly into conflict with his Anglican superiors, so that by 1633, the tensions had increased to such a point that Cotton was forced to flee his parish and England itself to avoid imprisonment for nonconformity. He set sail for America at the age of forty-eight. He arrived in the Bay Colony a few months later and was welcomed warmly by the settlers and installed as pastor of the Boston Church.

Anne Hutchison for her part not only missed her pastor but felt a divine call to follow him to America, so she and her family set sail for Massachusetts in 1634. They established themselves quickly in the society and soon opened their home for men and women to come and Anne would explain to them the theology of the sermons that were being preached on Sundays. If you’ve read any Puritan sermons, you’ll see why this might have been a useful practice. But folk came to flood into her home because she was such an able and bright expositor of what was going on in Puritan theology. This was all right, though it did raise some questions among the Puritans because she was a woman, but it was when she started criticizing the pastors for their preaching and theology, which she felt was not sufficiently biblical, that they had to bring her to court, and she ultimately was brought to trial, an ecclesiastical trial, in which she was excommunicated from the church, and a civil trial in which she was banished from the colony. So in March 1638, she and her family were kicked out. They went down to Rhode Island, and we’ll pick that story up in just a bit. This was known by many of the Puritans, one put it, as the sewer of New England. It was the place where all of the renegade mavericks tended to end up. In fact, it’s the birthplace



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of American Baptist Church life, and we’ll come back to that story in just a bit.

Anne Hutchinson, then, shows in her experience in this Antinomian Controversy some of the early cracks in this uniformity, this vision, this commonly held practice of life in the Massachusetts’s Bay Colony, which was then to come into bolder relief in the 1650s with the coming of the Quakers. And I’ll talk about the Quakers in just a bit in this lecture as well. They were founded in England in the early 1650s but in the early years were very missionary-minded, and they began to spread the faith as vigorously and zealously as they could throughout the inhabited world. They showed up first in 1656 in Boston Harbor. There weren’t any laws against them. In fact, it was two Quaker housewives who were found aboard ship in Boston Bay. The authorities apparently had been warned of their arrival, for the women were arrested even before they had a chance to step down on the earth. They were taken to jail. They were stripped of their clothing in search for marks of witchcraft. The next day their books were publicly burned in the marketplace, and not long afterwards they were joined in prison by a group of eight or nine other missionaries, Quaker in nature, who were with them and had followed them to the bay. Eventually this whole group was put on ship and sent down to Barbados. You see, the basic way of handling dissent and maverick qualities within the society was to kick them out, as they had Anne Hutchinson and others.

They tried to kick out the Quakers, but they wouldn’t stay out, and they started coming back. And so they passed some laws against them; in October 1656, they passed a first set of laws which provided for flogging of those who persisted in this heresy, as they called it. And yet the Quakers came back. So they passed a second series of laws in 1657. Let me describe them for you. “It’s further ordered that if any Quaker or Quakers shall presume after they once suffered what the law requires to come into this jurisdiction, every such male Quaker shall for the first offense have one of his ears cut off and be kept at work in the house of correction until he be set away at his own charge. And for the second offense, he shall have his other ear cut off and kept in the house of correction as afore said. And every woman Quaker that had suffered the law here and shall presume to come under the jurisdiction shall be severely whipped and kept in the house of correction at work until she be set away at her own charge, and so for her coming again, she shall be alike used as afore said, and for every Quaker, he or she, that shall a third time herein offend, they



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shall have their tongues bored through with a hot iron and kept at the house of correction close to work until they be sent away at their own charge.” And people kept coming back, and they were folk who lost their ears, had their tongues bored through, were banished again and again, and they kept coming back.

So in 1658 they passed a third law. The law provided that anyone guilty of Quaker disorders would be banished from the territory upon pain of death and, in fact, if they did not leave, they would be put to death. Thereupon, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and Mary Dyre all came back, accompanied by friends who carried grave clothing, and indeed all three were put to death. It’s interesting to note for those of you who visit Massachusetts and are in Boston at the State House that if you look in the front yard of the State House on the one side you’ll find a statue of Mary Dyre. On the other side, you’ll see a statue of Anne Hutchinson. Two of the major figures that I’ve been describing.

You see in the Quaker concerns the perplexity and the difficulty of handling those who didn’t easily leave the colony when they were banished. We see this difficulty even more sharply focused at the witch trials of the 1690s. These have been often discussed and I think frequently misunderstood. I think they need to be understood within the context of the loss of the dream and the concern that the devil himself through witches was undermining the kind of thing that they were trying to do and that they felt God had called them to do here in the New World.

No one really knows how the witchcraft hysteria began, but we do know that it originated in the home of Rev. Samuel Parris, minister of the local church. In early 1692, several girls from the neighborhood began to spend their afternoons in the Parris kitchen with a slave named Tituba, and it was not long before this mysterious sorority of girls, aged between nine and twenty, became regular visitors to the parsonage. We can only speculate what was going on behind the kitchen door, but we do know that Tituba had been brought to Massachusetts from Barbados and enjoyed a reputation not only as a storyteller, but for her skills in the magical arts, as they were called.

Before the end of the winter, they two youngest girls in the group succumbed to the shrill pitch of their amusements and began to exhibit a most unusual malady. They would scream unaccountably, fall into grotesque convulsions, and sometimes scamper along on their hands and knees making noise like the barking of a dog. No



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sooner had word gone around of this extraordinary affliction than it began to spread like a contagious disease. The town physician was brought in, and he couldn’t find anything physically wrong, and he concluded that it was the devil come to Salem Village. The girls were bewitched. Therefore, a series of clergy were brought together to counsel on what they ought to do, and the result was that they started asking these girls who had bewitched them, and they put the finger on three—first, Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, and thereafter upon many others. So that in the end, there were some nineteen people who were executed. Seven more had been condemned. One was pressed to death—Giles Corey, a relative of mine as a matter of fact—under a pile of rocks for standing mute at his trial. Two more died in prison, bringing the total number of deaths to twenty-two. In all that time, not one suspect brought before the court had been acquitted.

One can understand the perplexity of how to deal with young girls who seem to be so deeply affected, and the descriptions of this are really very marked. One visiting pastor, Deodat Lawson, described it in this way: “I went to get Mr. Parris a visit. When I was there, his kinswoman, Abigail Williams, about 12 years of age, had a grievous fit. She was at first hurried with violence to and fro about the room, though Mrs. Ingersol endeavored to hold her, sometimes making as if she would fly, stretching up her arms as high as she could and crying ‘whish, whish, whish,’ several times. After that she ran to the fire and began to throw fire brands around the house and run against the back as if she would run up the chimney, and as they said, she had attempted to go into the fire in this way during other fits.” You can understand the concerns that would grow out of those kinds of events, and they felt sure that it was Satan himself operating through witches (and, of course, they believed profoundly in witches in these days) that was undermining the very dream which had been crumbling under the disintegrating uniformity with all of the new maverick dissenting elements in the society, but now seemed to be coming to a conclusion as the stage became darkened and as the problems seemed to persist.

The collapse of the dream, of this marvelous Puritan dream, is one of the kind of sad stories of early American religious life, and I want to pick that up again because it’s the backdrop, the great sweep of revival which we know of as the Great Awakening, and we’ll be talking more about that later. Let me turn our attention, however, to two more of the Puritan groups here in America. We’ve talked a bit about the Presbyterians. We’ve talked a great deal now in



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this lecture and in the last about the Puritan Congregationalists, but there are two very important additional Puritan groups here in America that we need to take some time to look at, namely, the Baptist church and the Quakers.

Historians generally concede that modern Baptist thought, the Baptist tradition, has some connections to continental Anabaptism and arose as a part of the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century. Primarily, however, historians agree that the Baptist church emerged out of the left wing of the Puritan movement in England during the seventeenth century. It took form around both Arminian emphases in what are called the General Baptists and more Calvinist emphases, which are known as the Particular Baptists. Some of both of these groups came to America eventually, as we’ll see.

There’s a lot of good resources for Baptist study. The classic text is Robert G. Torbet’s A History of the Baptists, third edition, Judson Press, 1975. You can also read about some of the great Baptist leaders in James E. Tull’s Shapers of Baptist Thought, Judson Press, 1972. He writes about John Smyth and Roger Williams and Isaac Backus and Alexander Campbell and Andrew Fuller and Walter Rauschenbusch, even Martin Luther King Jr.

Baptist growth then is rooted within English Puritanism. It’s one of the wings of Puritanism. The first English Baptist congregation was established in 1612 by Thomas Helwys, a country gentlemen lawyer. In 1606 Helwys went to Holland with John Smyth. They went as refugees. Smyth had become convinced that infant baptism was wrong; therefore, he baptized himself in 1610 and then rebaptized his congregation, most of whom had come from among Mennonite ranks. A part of Smyth’s followers led by Helwys returned to England and formed there the first Baptist congregation in 1612.

By 1644, the English Baptist movement had forty-seven congregations. These were known as the General or Arminian Baptists. The wave of the future among Baptists in England, however, were the Particular Baptists, Calvinists in orientation. They believed that Christ had died for the elect only, and in this tradition there arose in 1641 an independent congregation started by Henry Jacob in Southwark, London. Jacob was a Puritan pastor. By 1644 then there were forty-seven congregations of General Baptists and some seven congregations of Particular Baptists in England. They grew rapidly throughout the seventeenth century,



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especially during the Commonwealth period, that period from 1640 to 1660. After the Restoration in the early 1660s, however, their growth slowed. A number of acts of parliament hurt their growth—the acts of uniformity, corporation acts, conventicle acts, five mile act, test act, and so on all passed in 1661. Furthermore, there was great persecution of Baptists in England. John Bunyan is a good example of this, perhaps the most famous victim of Restoration repression. A man with no formal education, a mechanic, preacher, arrested as the charge read for “devilishly and perniciously abstaining from coming to the Anglican Church to hear divine service and for upholding several unlawful meetings to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of the kingdom.” He was thrown into jail for twelve years, during which time he wrote the great Pilgrim’s Progress, which many of you, I think, have read.

Here in America, the story of Baptist development is tied most closely to Roger Williams and to Rhode Island. Roger Williams himself had come to the Bay Colony in 1631. He was called to be the pastor of the Boston Church but refused on the ground that it had not formally separated itself from the Church of England and wouldn’t repent of any past connection. Remember, they were reformers of the church, they were non-separatists. Williams was an ardent separatist. He also made himself unpopular by objecting to the practice of having unregenerate people take oaths in God’s name and by denouncing the colony for expropriating lands rightfully belonging to the Indians. Those were difficult issues in those days, and Williams lined up clearly on the side of the rights of the Indian people or the Native Americans.

Consequently, he went to the separatist Plymouth Colony for two years. The general court of Massachusetts finally moved against him in 1635. When after returning as newly elected minister up in Salem, which was known for its separatist tendency, he threatened the order and uniformity of the colony by asking that the church separate from other churches in Massachusetts. Thus in October he was ordered to leave the colony, and to escape deportation to England, he fled in January of 1636 to Providence, Rhode Island (though it wasn’t known as Providence at that time). Late in 1638, Williams and twelve loving friends and neighbors, as they described themselves, joined together in a social compact whereby all promised to “submit themselves in active or passive obedience to all such orders or agreements that shall be made for the public good of the body in an orderly way by the major consent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together



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into a township, and such others as they shall admit into the same in civil things.” This was the founding of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1638. The name of the place, Providence, William later wrote, was given because he desired that it might be a shelter for persons distressed of conscience, and Rhode Island did become a great catch basin not only for the mavericks from Massachusetts Bay Colony but for a whole variety of different folk who wanted to practice their faith according to their conscience. Here are the rootages of religious freedom, or soul liberty as they called it.

Equal shares of land were allotted to newcomers with preference shown for religious refugees. Rhode Island is rightly remembered as a sanctuary of freedom. In the spring of 1638, another band of exiles had purchased with the help of Williams the island of Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay. This group was under the dominant influence of Anne Hutchinson. Nineteen people joined in the following agreement, and this was the foundation of Portsmouth in 1638: “We whose names are underwritten due here solemnly in the presence of Jehovah incorporate ourselves into a body politic, and as he shall help, will submit our persons, lives, and estates unto our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.” They laid out Portsmouth at the northern end of the island and chose [William] Coddington to be judge of the colony. Dr. John Clarke served as its physician and preacher. For a few months, affairs proceeded very smoothly there, but the peace ended with the coming of Samuel Gorton, an extreme individualist, far more so than Hutchinson, and he, who had worn out his welcome already in Boston and Plymouth, not only arrived there at Portsmouth but caused them enormous trouble and eventually ended up in Warwick, which he founded in 1642.

He had precipitated a revolt which put Coddington out of his judgeship and placed William Hutchinson in his place; thereby, almost forcing Coddington and his followers, John Clarke and some others, to withdraw to the south end of the island where on May 1, 1639, they established Newport. So you begin to see this growing collection of little villages in Rhode Island. In 1643, Williams became convinced that if his colony were to resist the encroachment of its enemies, it needed a stronger legal claim, so he went to England in 1644 to obtain it. And he obtained from parliament a document authorizing the Providence Plantations. This patent fully empowered the inhabitants “to govern and rule themselves and such others as shall hereafter inherit any part of that track of land by such a form of civil government as by voluntary consent of them all or the greatest part of them shall



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be found most serviceable in their estates and condition.”

An assembly composed of freemen from the towns, all of these villages that had grown up, met at Portsmouth in 1647 and laid out plans for a federal commonwealth. The preamble of their Instrument of Government declared that the form of government established in Providence Plantations shall be democratical, that is to say, a government held by the free and voluntary consent of all for the greater part of the free inhabitants. This was very different from what we find in Massachusetts Bay, what we find in Virginia and a number of the other colonies. Here we have, along with Pennsylvania and a few other places, a foundational point for the establishment of the kind of pluralistic or democratic [society]. . . . Williams follows with The Bloody Tenet Yet More Bloody. Others pick up the pen as well. John Clarke writes Ill News from New England, the story of how he and other Baptists had been tried, fined, whipped, and imprisoned in Massachusetts for expounding their views there. Williams himself served as president of the colony from 1654 to 1657.

The first Baptist church here in America was planted there in Providence. It was formed by Roger Williams and other refugees. In March 1639, Ezekiel Holloman, who had been a member of Williams’s church at Salem, baptized Williams, probably by immersion, who in turn baptized Holloman and ten others. Williams seems to have accepted this method because like many radical Puritans, he placed great emphasis on conversion and on the strong New Testament testimony concerning believer’s baptism. Whatever the source of his views, however, they weren’t long held. Richard Scott, who later became a Quaker, wrote to George Fox about Williams’s spiritual pilgrimage, “I walked with Williams in the Baptist way about three or four months, at which time he break from the society and declared at large the ground and reason for it; that their baptism could not be right because it was not administered by an apostle. After that he set upon a way of seeking with two or three of them that had dissented with him by way of preaching and praying, and there he continued a year or two until two of the three left him.”

Williams, in short, is a Baptist only for a matter of months, years at most, but probably months, but it was a very important period in which the first Baptist church in America was established, and he had a hand in it, though later he left that fellowship. Even later he left the ministry himself and denied the legitimacy of institutional churches altogether. He got to the point that he felt



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that only he and his wife were really truly biblical Christians, and then he wasn’t sure she was.

Furthermore, Williams came to believe that governments did not have any legitimate right to regulate the spiritual Israel or to restrict anyone’s freedom of conscience. Insisting that the old Israel was done and gone, Williams thereby made his most extreme departure from mainstream covenantal Puritanism, a marked difference from what we saw in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They saw themselves as the new Israel. Williams saw that the old Israel was done and gone and there could be no new Israel.

There was enormous growth here in America of the Baptist church, and in fact, by the nineteenth century, the Baptists and Methodists had run away with the field and became far and away the dominant religious bodies. The nineteenth century was the great century of Baptist growth, and today there are more than twenty-three million Baptists in 110 countries, eighteen and a half million in the United States in seven different denominational groupings. Over a million in Europe; half a million or more in Asia; half a million in the Soviet Union, and so on. The Baptist World Alliance started in 1905 and represents the largest group of Baptists throughout the world.

We’ll be returning in other forms to this Baptist development, but it’s important to note, I think, as a kind of recapitulation that among the great Puritan, part of that large Puritan movement, we have not only Presbyterians and Congregationalists, which are often placed there, but also Baptists who are a direct outgrowth of that movement, and the last group that I want to talk about as we conclude today, and that is the Quakers.

One historian has typified the Quakers in a somewhat flippant manner. Subtract from the Roman Catholic Church the papacy, the Mass, and five sacraments, and you have the Church of England. If the rule of presbyters is substituted for bishops and the liturgy is simplified, the Presbyterians emerge. Congregationalism comes by replacing the national church by autonomous congregations. By removing infant baptism and making membership conditional upon regenerate church membership, the Baptists are revealed. Take away all church sacraments, all liturgy, all church offices, and what is left? The Quakers. Well, one needs to say that with some degree of tongue in cheek, but it does indicate some of the dimensions not only of Puritan thought broadly, but of Quaker concerns. The Quakers represent a kind of logical extension of



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Puritan belief, just as the Anabaptist movement was a kind of logical extension of sixteenth-century Reformed thought.

George Fox is the major figure within the development of Quaker thought. He was its founder. He claimed that Quakerism was primitive Christianity revived. The Quakers are of the seed of Abraham, he felt, and of that seed all nations are to be blessed, and of the faith of Abraham and all Protestants, all Roman Catholics need to return to that kind of basic biblical Primitivism, and that’s what he’s trying to both model and encourage people to do.

The name “Quaker” came from the fact that their preachers called on their followers to tremble before the Lord, so a great many of the Quakers were seen to shake and quiver as they spoke. Quaker origins are in England; 1652 marks the origin of the Society of Friends, as it was called. This happened in Preston Patrick, Westmoreland, in north England, what is often called the Quaker Galilee. The group came from among the Seekers, those earnest searchers for religious truth who weren’t satisfied with existing ecclesiastical structures. They met regularly for prayer and Bible study, and it was really George Fox who brought this rather disparate group from seeker status to possessor status around this new religious movement.

Fox was a great orator. He roamed restlessly across the British Isles and elsewhere. The nobleman, William Penn, was perhaps his most notable convert from which comes the name Pennsylvania. Fox was born in a devout Puritan home. He went through a period of despair about his life and society, and then he found the key: “Religion is not a matter of creed or cultic practice,” he came to feel, “but of experience.” He had a series of mystical visions. Ultimately he taught a condemnation of church buildings as steeple houses, to interrupt church services with personal testimonies, to refuse what was called “hat honor” or this hierarchical structuring of those who were above one on the social ladder and those who are below. He stressed plain speech. He declared an all-out warfare on the ways of the world. His doctrines were basically Puritan, but with more stress upon the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

Between 1660 and 1690, Quakers became a rapidly growing movement with great missionary zeal. We’ve already seen that in the coming into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1650s, large numbers of Quakers which the Puritans there didn’t know what to do with. One Anglican put it this way: “The Quakers compass of sea and land to make proselytes. They send out yearly a parcel of



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vagabond fellows that ought to be taken up and put into Bedlam. Their preaching is of cursing and lies, poisoning the souls of the people with damnable errors and heresies, and not content with this in their own territories of Pennsylvania, they travel with mischief over all the other parts as far as they can go.”

The reaction against Quakers was strong. They were thought of as troublemakers, as non-ordained fanatics. Others risked tremendous personal persecution and sacrifice. A Quaker in England said, “I was moved to go for the Friends meeting and to the steeple house; that is, the Anglican Church. I went to them and began to speak, but they immediately fell upon me and the clerk hit me with his Bible as I was speaking and struck me with it so I gushed with blood, and I bled exceedingly in the steeple house. Then the people cried, ‘Let us have him out of the church.’ When they got me out, they beat me with books, fists, sticks, threw me down and over a hedge into a close, and there beat me and threw me over and over again. After a while, I got to the meeting again among Friends. I went forth with Friends into the yard and there I spake to the priest and the people. My spirit was revived again by the power of God, for my body was sore bruised, but by the power of God I was refreshed again. To Him be the glory.” Interesting comment.

Before toleration was finally declared in 1689, some fifteen thousand Quakers were jailed in England; 450 died, and 243 were sentenced to penal colonies. By the age of twenty-seven, Robert Barclay became one of the great early leaders of the Quaker faith, wrote his apology, and that apology is a classic defense in systematic treatment of Quaker belief. It’s well worth reading. Elton Trueblood also has a fascinating book about Robert Barclay if you’d like to read further.

After 1689, with the coming of toleration, the Quakers entered a period of quietism; no longer missionary in spirit or activists, they became quietists. They became more middle class. Their evangelistic zeal was dampened. They turned inward. They began to practice a kind of birthright membership, and there was enormous growth of famous and rightly famous Quaker humanitarianism. A good example of this is the fascinating figure John Woolman in America, one of the great anti-slavery voices, one of the most interesting people that you can read about. I would encourage you to read about him if you want a good example of the outworking of Quaker faith in practical living.


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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World membership is now somewhat in excess of 200,000; 123,000 of them are in North America; some 6,000 in Latin America; 24,000 in Europe; some 40,000 in Africa; nearly 2,000 in Asia.

How then can we summarize this Puritan movement that we’ve been exploring in this lecture and the last? I think we need to say, first of all, that it is a very broad movement, encompassing a whole variety of denominations. We’ve looked at four of those and there are others as well—Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, and now Quaker. They were tied together by a dissatisfaction with the church, that the Reformed church, the Anglican body in England had not been fully enough reformed, and they wanted to see it more purified against a biblical model.

They also were all tied together by a focus upon, a deep commitment to experiential faith, to new birth or conversion or however they talked about it, that faith had an experience focus, so that all Puritans of all stripes are tied together by these two great streams—dissatisfaction with the Anglican Church and a focus upon experiential faith. Within that, however, we have great variety, and some of that variety we’ve been able to see in the development of very different kinds of groups, all of them Puritan. All of them making contributions in different ways to Christianity today, and we’ll see them emerging and reemerging as we move into our later lectures.

Church History Since the Reformation CH507 …...invasions of the 1650s, and finally the witch...

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