Abstract
William Chillingworth was "born in Oxford in 1602.
While he was a student at Trinity College he gained a
wide reputation as a disputant. While a fellow of
that college he was for a short time a convert to the
Roman Catholic Church. lie returned to the Church of
England and wrote his famous defence of the Protestant
principles, The Religion of Protestants, a Safe Way to
Salvation, which was published in 1637. In 1638 he
accepted preferment and became Chancellor of Salisbury Cathedral. Prom that time the course of his
activities was determined by the impending war.
Politically he was a staunch Royalist serving actively
in the King's armies. He was captured by the Parliamentary forces at Arundel and died in their hands, at
Chichester early in 1644
His theological system, as evidenced in his
controversial works, was based on the autonomy of the
rational man. The end of the rational quest upon which
man is engaged is eternal life. The rational man
enjoys complete freedom to pursue this end. God
has investigated this rational freedom in the person of
his Son, Jesus Christ. God's self-participation in
man's rational state enables man to enjoy the freedom
created by God. God's revelation of his nature and
man's freedom is transmitted to man in the Bible. Holy
Scripture is the record of God's timeless, eternal
truths to which man assents in mind and will when he
truly follows God.
Chillingworth, therefore, bases his defence of
Protestantism upon the fact that man is rational and
that he has this record of God's truth. Men are
directed, "by the Bible, only to God and not to any
other man for their salvation. The Church is the
society of men v/ho follow the truths of God. He concludes that the Church ought to "be organised around a
minimum credal statement, hut that it must emphasise
the personal moral life. All that is necessary for
the Church is that it should direct men to Heaven by
the shortest possible route.
Chillingworth's defence of the Protestant
principle was actually a defence of the Protestantism
of the private conscience. It was not, in any sense,
a systematic presentation of the radical nature of faith,
nor of the doctrine of justification by faith. Its
basis in the rational autonomy of man was a link; with the
Scholastics and Humanists of the Renaissance, and he bypassed the Reformation to a great extent. His adherence to the principle of the centrality of the Word of
God was modified by his view of the Bible as the revelation of timeless, eternal truths. He adopted, on
the whole, those principles that were to govern orthodox
Protestantism for more than two centuries.
