Meet the Puritans

T hese days no one asks a question like this. It seems too arrogant, too outdated, grossly missing the mark of a honest religious conversation. Moreover, any reference to the Anti-Christ seems to be further marred by the fancy treatments that it has received in popular pseudo-apocalyptic novels,...

T he Papacy has always had its critics throughout the centuries. It is fair to say, however, that it was the XVI century Protestant Reformation that developed the most comprehensive and massive argument against the Papacy pulling together biblical, doctrinal, historical, moral, and institutional...

L uther and the Pope have long been perceived as representing the two enemies within Western Christianity. Their persons embodied the religious conflict that took place in the XVI century giving rise to the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Before Luther rejected the Pope, the...

I n the last article , I looked at John Davenant’s discussion on the formal cause of our justification. Now I will turn to his discussion of the role of good works in light of our justification in Christ. Davenant is at pains to refute the common Romanist accusation that Protestants deny the...

O ne of the key theological battles between the Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church was over the doctrine of justification. This important battle continued on into the seventeenth century and indeed it continues unabated today. John Davenant, the Bishop of Salisbury and a British...

W e need to make a distinction between the various forms of debate that historians classify as "polemical theology." Anti-Catholic preaching at St. Paul's Cross was something different because it addressed a lay audience untrained in the theological details of the question at issue. The strategy...

It is no exaggeration to say that one sermon dominated anti-Catholic preaching in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, and that was the Bishop of Salisbury John Jewel’s Challenge sermon, first delivered on November 26, 1559, and again on 31 March 1560. But before we examine the sermon, we need to...

I n my previous post , we considered the response of William Tyndale to the excesses of medieval Roman Catholic exegesis, specifically the fourfold method. In line with his claim for the “single, full, and natural sense” of Scripture passages, William Perkins (1558-1602), a pioneer in the rise of...

W illiam Tyndale (c.1494–1536), the English Reformer and proto-Puritan, clearly showed a burden for providing the Scriptures in the common language of the people. Likewise, regarding biblical exegesis, he imparted correctives for the abuses of medieval interpretation. We must appreciate the...

As the previous two posts demonstrated ( #1 , #2 ), Amandus Polanus envisioned Christians interpreting the Scriptures with the help of the church. In colloquial terms, this means that no Christian can read their Bibles well by themselves on a private island with no external aids or input. Yet it...