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War and Peace in the Puritan Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Timothy George
Timothy George
Affiliation:
associate professor of church history and historical theology in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.
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Extract

Between 1640 and 1660 the English nation experienced a political, social, and religious upheaval which in retrospect can only be called a revolution. So profound was this crisis, epitomized by the public execution of a duly anointed king, that not even the restoration of the Stuart monarchy could reverse the long-term effects of those turbulent decades. Historians long have noted the religious purpose and zeal which moved so many of the king's subjects, egged on by their ministers, to resort to insurrection against their lawful sovereign. For example, Stephen Marshall, parliamentary preacher, spoke to the House of Commons in February 1642 on the impending civil war: “If this work be to avenge God's church against Babylon, he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against the stone.” In August of the same year William Carter told the Commons that God sometimes commanded brother to fight against brother: “God hath put into your hands, a work of his, the greatest that hath been on foot for God in these islands for many hundred years … God hath called you to the purging of the land of those locusts and caterpillers.” Two years later, the war against the king still unconcluded, Edmund Staunton declared: “There is a fire of civill war kindled in England, still burning in the bowels of it … but two bloods will quench it, the blood of Christ and that of his desperate enemies.” Such statements, while prompted by the revolutionary stirrings of the 1640s, must be set in the larger context of Puritan theories of war and peace. From the 1570s when Puritanism emerged as a distinct party of reform within the Church of England until 1641 when the Long Parliament convened, English Puritans developed a considerable body of literature dealing with the nature, purpose, and limits of warfare. The purpose of this article is to examine in this literature what might be called a Puritan theology, or perhaps better, spirituality of warfare in prerevolutionary England.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 1984 , pp. 492 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1984

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References

1. Marshall, Stephen, Meroz Cursed (London, 1642), p. 10.Google Scholar This sermon was based on Judges 5:23.

2. Carter, William, Israels Peace (London, 1642), pp. 23–25.Google Scholar

3. Staunton, Edmund, Phineas Zeal in Execution of Judgment, or, a Divine Remedy for Englands Misery (London, 1645)Google Scholar, sig. D4v. This sermon was preached originally to the House of the Lords, 30 October 1644.

4. This article first appeared in the Andover Newton Bulletin 35 (04, 1943): 1–20,Google Scholar and was reprinted in Studies on the Reformation (Boston, 1963), pp. 248–274.Google Scholar

5. Compare his Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200–1700 (Princeton, 1975), esp. pp. 81–146.Google Scholar Johnson treats holy war rationale as a variant of just war theory, not as a distinct category of its own. By pointing to the wide variety of holy war attitudes in seventeenth-century England, he does offer a helpful corrective to the less nuanced studies of Bainton, and Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar. However, he tends to undervalue the religious component in Puritan holy war thought. For example, he describes the difference between the “Politique” Francis Bacon's advocacy of religious war for reasons of state and Puritan William Gouge's espousal of holy war as “mainly one of tone” (p. 91). Compare the review of Johnson's book by Murray, J. J., Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 423 (1976): 164–165.Google Scholar

6. Russell, Frederick H., The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1975), p. 2.Google Scholar

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8. Thomas, Harding, ed. The Decades of Henry Bullinger (Cambridge, 1849), p. 377.Google Scholar

9. Ibid. Johnson records Bullinger's influence on English holy war thought, noting that by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury every minister with a university degree was required to possess a copy of the Decades. Johnson, , Ideology, p. 110.Google Scholar

10. Calvin, John, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, trans. Bingham, Charles W., 4. (Grand Rapids, 1950), 3:53.Google Scholar

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13. Leighton, Alexander, Speculum belli sacri; or the looking-glasse of the holy warre (n.p., 1624), p. 4.Google Scholar

14. From Article 37, Creeds of Christendom, ed. Philip Schaff, 3 vols. (New York, 1877), 3: 513.Google Scholar

15. Ames, , Conscience, p. 186.Google Scholar Similar arguments for just war are set forth in Everard, John, The Arriereban: A Sermon Preached to the Company of the Military Yard (London, 1618)Google Scholar.

16. Ames, , Conscience, p. 186.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 190.

18. Ibid., p. 191.

19. Ibid., p. 190. Compare, Leighton, Speculum, p. 40;Google Scholar Staunton, Phineas's Zeal, passim.

20. Adams, Thomas, The Souldier's Honour (London, 1617);Google ScholarSutton, Thomas, The Good Fight of Faith (London, 1624);Google Scholar Leighton, Speculum; Barnes, Thomas, Vox Belli; or, an alarm to warre (London, 1626);Google ScholarGouge, William, Gods Three Arrowes: Plague, Famine, Sword (London, 1631).Google Scholar

21. Adams, , Honour, p. 9.Google Scholar Compare Henry Ainsworth's paraphrase of Exodus 15:3: “This is my God and for his sake I will an habitation make;/God of my father is this-same, and I will highly-him-preferre./Iehovah is a man of warre: Iehovah, his renowned name.” Annotations upon Genesis (n.p., 1616), sig. L1v.

22. Leighton, , Speculum, p. 48.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 290 (my italics). Compare also p. 305: “It is a great advantage to know our enemies, but a greater encouragement to know that our enemies are God's enemies.”

24. Ibid., p. 110.

25. Ibid., p. 100.

26. Gouge, , Arrowes, p. 209.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., p. 210. The Puritan concern to find a New Testament basis for warfare is reflected in Article 23 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647): Christians “may lawfully, now under the New Testament wage war upon just and necessary occasion.” Schaff, , Creeds of Christendom, 3:652.Google Scholar

28. Whitley, W. T., ed. The Works of John Smyth, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1915), 2:748.Google Scholar For Smyth's development from Puritan to Separatist to Anabaptist see George, Timothy, “Between Pacifism and Coercion: The English Baptist Doctrine of Religious Toleration,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 58(1984): 30–49.Google Scholar

29. An Apologie of the Church of New England (1643), quoted in Wilson, John F., Pulpit in Parliament (Princeton, 1969), p. 143.Google Scholar The hermeneutical presuppositions of the Puritan appeal to the Old Testament are set forth by Paul, R. S., “Social Justice and the Puritan ‘Dual Ethic,’” in Intergerini Parietis Septum: Essays Presented to Markus Barth on his Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Hadidian, D. Y. (Pittsburg, 1981), pp. 251–284.Google Scholar

30. Leighton, , Speculum, p. 109.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., p. 120, 109.

32. Rich, Barnabe, A Path- Way to Military Practise (London, 1587)Google Scholar, sig. Elr.

33. Compare Firth, C. H., Cromwell's Army (London, 1961; original ed., 1902), p. 311.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., p. 313.

35. Ibid., p. 328.

36. Edwards, Thomas, Gangraena (London, 1644), pt. 3, p. 7.Google Scholar Quoted in Watts, Michael, The Dissenters (Oxford, 1978), p. 114.Google Scholar Richard Baxter, itinerant chaplain with the New Model Army, strongly disapproved of such excesses and blamed much of them on Cromwell who, he alleged, “by degrees had headed the greatest part of the Army with Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, or Separatists at best.” Matthew, Sylvester, ed. Reliquiae Baxterianae, (London, 1696), 1. 1. 57.Google Scholar

37. Leighton, , Speculum, p. 27.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., p. 10.

39. Barnes, , Vox Belli, p. 15.Google Scholar

40. Ibid.

41. Adams, Honour, Epistle Dedicatory.

42. Sutton, , Good Fight, p. 27.Google Scholar

43. Adams, Honour, Epistle Dedicatory.

44. Ibid.Compare, Leighton, Speculum, p. 210:Google Scholar “Men must not only pray, but they must also fight against evil; they must not only speak, but they must also strike: Strokes and words will doe well together.”

45. Quoted in Walzer, , Revolution, p. 270.Google Scholar Compare also Blake, E. O., “The Formation of the ’” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970):27–29.Google Scholar Thomas Aquinas held that members of religious orders could engage in sacred, purposeful violence on the authority of the prince or the church: “Religious aliquae instituuntur ad militandum, non quidem ut militent auctoritate propria, sed auctoritate principum vel Ecclesiae” (Some religious orders are established for the purpose of waging war, not indeed on their own authority, but on that of the prince or the church.) Summa Theologiae 2/2 q. 188, a.4 (Madrid, 1963), 3:1127.Google Scholar

46. Everard, John, The Arriereban (London, 1618), pp. 17–18,Google Scholar quoted in Walzer, , Revolution, p. 279.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., p. 101.

48. Ibid., p. 58.

49. Ibid.

50. Gouge, , Arrowes, p. 217.Google Scholar

51. Leighton, Speculum, B3v.

52. Compare Leighton's lament, ibid., p. 8: “Shall the Saints be slaine, and the soules under the altar cry still for revenge, and Christian Kings and Princes keepe their hands in their bosome?”

53. King Henry the Sixth, First Part, act 5, sc. 1. Quoted in Clark, George, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1958), p. 18.Google Scholar

54. Gouge, , Arrowes, p. 213.Google Scholar

55. Leighton, , Speculum, p. 40.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., p. 58. Compare the excellent study of Christianson, Paul, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto, 1978), esp. pp. 132–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar