| dc.description.abstract | This thesis analyses how and why the Westminster Assembly (1643-1653),
the Long Parliament’s advisory committee for religious matters, attempted to
suppress antinomianism, one of the fastest-growing radical religious movements of
the early seventeenth century. The Assembly addressed antinomianism in its dual
capacity as an arm of Parliament and, in its own self-understanding, as a body of
theologians tasked with religious reformation. In the eyes of the Assembly,
antinomianism presented a two-fold threat. Socially, antinomianism had the potential
to bring anarchy and disorder: the Assembly responded to this threat by examining
antinomian ministers, forming its own antinomian committee, and liaising with
Parliament to determine whether antinomians should be branded as heretics with
concomitant civil punishment. Theologically, for the Assembly, antinomianism
encompassed more than simply the belief that obligation to the Ten Commandments
had passed away; it contained a complex structure of soteriology that was
fundamentally at odds with the Reformed tradition.
Working in the overarching backdrop of the rise of English Arminianism, the
divines debated soteriological questions raised by antinomianism, issues at the heart
of the Reformation such as: the relationship between the Old and New Testaments,
the continued effectiveness of the moral law, the nature of Christ’s propitiatory work
of redemption, the role and timing of justifying faith, and the relationship between
sanctification and justification. The Assembly’s 1643 debates over antinomian
theology, conducted as it revised the Thirty-nine Articles, produced revised Articles,
which formed the foundation for the Assembly’s 1646 Confession of Faith. The
Assembly then used the Confession of Faith to present a concise but comprehensive
refutation of antinomian theology.
The study uncovers the significance of antinomianism for contextualising the
Assembly’s debates, and thus advances and nuances current perception of both the
Westminster Assembly and English antinomianism. Analysis of debates carried out
on the floor of the Assembly provoked by antinomian theology reveals that, while
the divines as a whole disagreed with antinomian tenets, they were far from united in
their understanding of basic soteriological definitions and were also divided over the
best way to thwart antinomianism. A detailed investigation of this state of affairs
enhances interpretation of the Assembly’s documents, such as the Confession of
Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms, which in and of themselves do not reveal
the theological uncertainties and tensions present in the Assembly. The study also
offers a new example of the Assembly functioning as a regulatory body.
This thesis draws on a substantial new pool of primary material: The Minutes
and Papers of the Westminster Assembly (edited by Chad van Dixhoorn, OUP 2012,
3200 pages), the first full critical edition of the Assembly’s debates; also, the first
volume of Assembly member John Lightfoot’s journal, recently transcribed, which
supplies the only record of crucial exchanges between the Assembly and antinomian
theologians. A major contribution of this thesis, working with these new resources, is
to demonstrate how the Assembly interacted far more with antinomianism than
previous scholars have thought. The thesis breaks new ground by using both
theological and historical methods to provide a fine-grained contextual account of
the Assembly’s debates and actions against antinomianism. | en |
