The conceptual infrastructure of English separatism stood on the bedrock foundation of one adamant conviction: the Scriptures presented a single, timeless, changeless, perfect and binding pattern of church worship and governance. Henry Barrow, the noted Elizabethan English separatist, opened his Brief discoverie of the false Church (1590) with exactly this conviction. God had
committed these holy oracles to the careful custody of the Church, there to be inviolably preserved … purely taught, expounded & delivered, without corrupting, mixing, hiding, obscuring, perverting, wresting, there to be precisely observed with all reverence and feare, without any willing or knowen transgression, or swarving either to the right hand or to the left, of the whole Church or any member therof.Footnote 1
There was simply no room for deviation. The Bible supplied the ‘true patterne, form, mould for everie thing, everie part, everie member’.Footnote 2 Like the Old Testament tabernacle or temple that was an exact replica of the heavenly ideal, not even the smallest detail of the scriptural blueprint could be altered, not ‘anie pinne or hooke (even the least thing)’.Footnote 3 This regulative principle was not unique to separatists, of course. It formed part of the mental furniture of Reformed ecclesiology that shaped so much of England's religious life within a general worldview that still looked back to the distant past for what was best and most authoritative, which meant, above all, looking back to the Bible.Footnote 4 What made the separatists distinctive was the thoroughgoing conviction, the uncompromising precision and the sheer urgency with which they held to it.
The story of English separatism begins with separatist congregations that appeared in London from the late 1560s. The result of these short-lived experiments was variously imprisonment and exile. The 1580s saw another flurry of separatist activity and here some famous names come to the surface, not least that of Robert Browne.Footnote 5 Born around 1550 into a gentry family in Tolethorpe Hall, Rutland, he was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1572. The Cambridge connection is not unimportant. R. Tudor Jones compiled a solid list of separatist figures who were educated at Cambridge: Robert Harrison, Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, Francis Johnson and his brother George, John Smyth, John Robinson and William Brewster.Footnote 6 It would be a mistake, therefore, to dismiss these men as mere rustics or, to borrow a later phrase, ‘mechanick preachers’:Footnote 7 they embodied the learned godly ministry. Even so, once again the authorities responded severely. In 1583 two men who had circulated the books of Browne and Harrison were hanged. Ten years later Barrow, Greenwood and a Welshman, John Penry, were executed for sedition.Footnote 8 Barrow and Greenwood had taken up the mantle of leadership, forming a separatist congregation in London sometime during the mid-1580s though leading it usually from the confines of prison from 1587 until their execution.Footnote 9 Their writings convinced Francis Johnson to jump from Presbyterianism to separatism, the very same writings that he was supposed to have suppressed while pastor of the Merchant Adventurer Church in Middelburg in the early 1590s. Following their deaths he led their separatist congregation, the ‘Ancient Church’, first in London and then in Amsterdam.Footnote 10 A final figure, Henry Ainsworth, joined the Amsterdam congregation as its teacher (or pastor) in 1597.Footnote 11 None of these men was among the Marian exiles and, for reasons that will soon become obvious, none of them looked to Geneva or anywhere else for models of church government. For them, there was nowhere else to look but in Scripture.
Scholars have long recognised the disruptive force of the Bible in sixteenth-century Europe. G. R. Elton observes that ‘[i]f there is a single thread running through the whole story of the Reformation, it is the explosive and renovating and often disintegrating effect of the bible, put into the hands of the commonality and interpreted no longer [only] by the well-conditioned learned’.Footnote 12 During the sixteenth century the barriers of language and literacy rapidly dissolved and translations in the vernacular proliferated with the invention of moveable type and the production of Bibles in ever-increasing numbers, not least in England.Footnote 13 Far more than ever before, lay people came into direct contact with the content of the Scriptures that had, until then, largely been kept in the preserve of the Church and parcelled out only in carefully orchestrated and selected instalments.Footnote 14 Not only was Scripture a more readily available authority, it was the prime authority. Thus the great Protestant rallying cry of sola scriptura. But this apparently simple notion meant different things to different groups. What was the range of Scripture's authority? Did it pertain only to matters necessary to salvation or did it encompass secondary issues? Was it even appropriate to categorise some issues as secondary, indifferent or adiaphora? Or, when it came to the authority of Scripture, was everything primary? Was there a place for other potential sources of authority alongside that of Scripture, even if only in reinforcement of Scripture? In late sixteenth-century England only the separatists expanded the range of the authority of Scripture to the uttermost and denied any place for other potential authorities.
Peter Lake captures the awkwardness of their rigorous biblicism in the context of debate between the leading Elizabethan Presbyterian, Thomas Cartwright, and the separatists. He explains that for Cartwright to address the separatists at all was fraught with risk, which is why he chose to do so only in manuscript, never in print. The reason is simple enough: their ‘motives and principles were almost identical’ to his. Thus to defend his position against the separatists required him to concede that the corruptions of the Church of England were only of secondary importance, a concession he could hardly make when advocating a thoroughgoing reform of the Church of England. Such an admission ‘would have crippled the radical coherence of the Presbyterian platform’.Footnote 15 Stephen Brachlow's study, focusing in the main on the proto-Congregationalist Henry Jacob and the separatist John Robinson, also emphasises continuity and commonality between Puritan conformists and separatists. He explicitly departs from earlier historians who tended to demarcate the two in stark terms. Any dividing lines were ‘often entirely blurred’; in fact, the ‘ideological lines of continuity … remained remarkably visible and intact’. He even discerns ‘an often unrecognized ideological consensus’ between them on a number of related dimensions of doctrine, including ecclesiology, soteriology and eschatology. Any differences were mostly a matter of strategy and timing.Footnote 16 That was always the challenge of separatism. The similarities that they shared exposed Puritan conformists to the accusation that separatism was the inevitable consequence of those Presbyterian ‘motives and principles’ that they held in common.
So what did set them apart? A surprisingly clear dividing line distinguished separatists from Puritan conformists, one that scholars have not observed before: the separatists accepted only one ground of authority, that of Scripture; their opponents accepted other grounds of authority alongside (if subordinate to) Scripture. In this article I would like to map in some detail the contours of that demarcation. This will elucidate the difficulty that Cartwright and other moderate Puritans faced when they tried to refute the separatists without at the same time conceding vital ground to their opponents in the other direction: the bishops, prelates and defenders of the Church of England in its current form.
I do not intend to examine the separatists’ view of Scripture as a whole, but only the effects of this one, absolute conviction of the separatists on intra-Protestant published polemic over church government and worship.
Thomas Cartwright, the separatists and some basic outlines
For the English separatists, Scripture really was alone. All other potential sources of authority, all other modes of reasoning and argument came to nothing in the face of Scripture's relentless, implacable and sole authority. The range of that authority extended to the whole of the Christian's life, since, as Francis Johnson recognised (citing 2 Timothy iii.15–17), ‘the man of God can … by the Scriptures be made absolute and fully furnished to every good worke’.Footnote 17 But this article focuses mainly on ‘the ministery, worship, and government’ of the Church for which, Johnson argued, Christ established a law and a pattern just as rigorous and precise as that of Moses.Footnote 18 Churches were to follow that pattern exactly, replicating every element it contained and rejecting any element it did not. Thus the separatists rejected such features of English worship as clerical vestments, liturgical music and the varied church offices that went beyond what was explicitly sanctioned in Scripture, even if they were vouchsafed by the very best of human authorities. There was one authority in these matters, and only one: Scripture. ‘[T]he word of God alone is that which can and must end these and all controversies in religion … One sound proof out of the divine Scriptures … is of more force and wilbe more regarded, then all the multitude of such flourishes … out of any humane writings whatsoever.’Footnote 19
To begin with, this meant that university training was worthless. Barrow's short work on the subject, The pollution of universitie-learning, utterly condemned the false knowledge peddled in the universities, which offered the education of the monasteries, not that of the schools of the prophets that he read about in the Old Testament.Footnote 20 He had taken a BA at Cambridge in the late 1560s,Footnote 21 so his book demonstrated an intimate knowledge of university curricula and methods at the same time as it offered a biting denunciation that extended beyond the study of Divinity or the training of ministers. At one point Barrow responded to criticism that the separatists sought to throw out all learning and ‘bring in barbarisme’. No one, he replied, should ‘suppose that wee condemne any lawful Arts or necessary Sciences’. But those subjects should be taught ‘in all places where an established Church is’, which would keep all teachers ‘under the holy government’ of Christ.Footnote 22 Therefore, universities were not to be trusted.Footnote 23 They furnished AntiChrist with everything that he needed to bolster his authority by subjecting the Scriptures to outside, pagan influences, thus ‘perverting the text it selfe with their glosses, paraphrases, notes, figures &c, fighting with their Schoole-learning, vaine arts, philosophie, rhetoricke, and logicke against the truth and servants of God’.Footnote 24
So the separatist stance on Scripture necessarily entailed a rejection of ancient pagan authorities – Aristotle above all – who had shaped these weapons of logic and philosophy. But separatists went further in dismissing even the Church Fathers. As Irena Backus has shown, the Church Fathers emerged from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with a new centrality and authority, becoming part of the way in which all Catholic and Protestant groups fashioned their identity.Footnote 25 But not the separatists. Robert Browne would never use such terms as ‘essence’, ‘substance’ and ‘being’ if not forced to by his opponent, Thomas Cartwright.Footnote 26 Even that Trinitarian language – ancient, weighty and credible, deeply entrenched in centuries of theological reflection – was out of bounds. More recently, the great names of Reformed Orthodoxy were rendered null. Barrow was not alone among the separatists in rejecting John Calvin, the ‘frivolous Doctor’, and his ‘crooked disciples’.Footnote 27
It is not that such authorities were absent in the writings of the separatists, but when they made an appearance they had no authority in themselves. Henry Ainsworth and Francis Johnson included a list of great names from the past but ‘we build not upon them: neither would now have mentioned so many of them’ except that their opponents seemed to revere them.Footnote 28 When Johnson justified separation in A treatise of the ministery of the Church of England he regularly quoted an impressive range of figures and sources within Reformed orthodoxy but in doing so he was merely taking advantage of his knowledge as a former insider. He quoted these sources not because he considered them authorities but only to embarrass his opponents by showing to the world that their own heroes spoke against them or that those same opponents were now contradicting their earlier writings.Footnote 29 When he crafted a ‘table of some preincipall things’, effectively an index of ideas in his book, he relegated five clusters of testimonies to the end of the list and even then only to demonstrate how his opponents had already testified ‘against themselves’.Footnote 30 Unsurprisingly, his list began with the ‘principall thing’ that mattered most: ‘The written word of God onely is to be the rule of our life and religion.’
All of this made the separatists difficult for Puritan conformists to argue with, in two main ways. First, when conformists argued from the ground of any other sources of authority, modes of reasoning, or ways of knowing they were wasting their breath (or ink). To the separatists, these extra-biblical sources were only so much shifting sand, and they treated everything built on them with disdain and indifference. Johnson complained to Henry Jacob that ‘in steed of Gods word (which is very rare with you in all this dispute) you presse us with the authoritie of Man’.Footnote 31 Browne scorned Cartwright in colourful terms: ‘His proofes are like wynde blowen out of a bladder.’Footnote 32 Second, the conformists could not easily argue on the basis of Scripture alone because the separatists had the market cornered. If the conformists made Scripture alone their ground, it was not nearly alone enough for the separatists, the only ones for whom it really was, literally, alone. Therefore, the separatists’ deployment of sola scriptura would always trump any efforts of the conformists to do the same. Recall Johnson's delight at being able to exploit the other writings of his opponents: they had indeed contradicted themselves, because the arguments that they could freely employ against their Church of England opponents were rendered inoperative when they reversed direction to argue against the separatists. They could not credibly use sola scriptura-type arguments that the separatists were already using with pristine fidelity. Thus it is fascinating to observe the way in which the conformists did try to make their case, and unsurprising that their arguments had so little effect on the separatists.
We can see the dilemma in Cartwright's reply to Robert Harrison in 1584,Footnote 33 in which he made no effort to stand his argument on sola scriptura. Instead, he employed Calvin's two marks of a true Church: the preaching of the word and the administration of sacraments. But Calvin was no authority to the separatists, and even if he was, his model omitted a third mark: discipline. Cartwright's defence was to offer not Scripture but metaphor: a ‘plaine similitude from the body of man’. If a man were to have both his arms cut off and his eyes put out he would remain a true man while he still breathed: a maimed man is still a man. Similarly, if a man should have six fingers on one hand and three on the other, and if they should grow out of where his mouth should be, he would remain a true man: a deformed man is still a man. So too, as long as the head of a Church is Christ, no amputation or deformation would render that Church anything other than a true Church. Browne's comment in the margin made it perfectly clear what he thought of all this: ‘a foppery’.Footnote 34
Cartwright's letter to the separatist Anne Stubbe six years later demonstrated the same kind of constraints. He claimed ‘that we doe herein according to that we are perswaded out of the Word’ but he asserted no perfect heavenly pattern to which the earthly Church had to conform.Footnote 35 In this way, Cartwright gave ample room for deviation and imperfection, once more resorting to metaphor: a disobedient wife is still a wife; a magistrate with a rusty sword is still a magistrate; and, of course, a maimed man is still a man. So the Church of England, for all its faults, was still a true Church, just as God never dismissed the wayward Corinthian church as a false one, or the Church in the time of Jesus, or even the Jewish Church in Babylonian exile.Footnote 36 Scripture was still in play here, but he argued that variation was tolerable in the eyes of God.
That is not what he said to Archbishop John Whitgift:Footnote 37 ‘nothing is to be done in the church of God, but by hys commaundement and worde directing the same’.Footnote 38 This was especially true of church government, which ‘is by the word of God, and heavenly, and not left to the will of men to devise at their pleasure’.Footnote 39 Noah's Ark, the Tabernacle and the Temple all came with very precise instructions and proportions, and if that was true of what were mere earthly shadows how much more was it true of the heavenly reality?Footnote 40 Offices such as archbishop and archdeacon, therefore, were not in Scripture, were ‘of the earth’, and ‘so can do no good, but much harme in the church’.Footnote 41 As Brachlow noted, Puritan conformists would employ what he calls ‘an adiaphora defence’ against the separatists but when addressing the episcopate ‘they tended to appeal to Scripture as a book of immutable rules which contained a detailed and perspicacious polity for the church that had been established by Christ for all succeeding generations’.Footnote 42 So in this context Cartwright was doing only what the separatists would do in attempting to strip the hierarchy of the Church of England back to an appropriate scriptural minimum. The only difference is that for him the Church Fathers carried genuine weight. Their authority did not exceed that of the Bible (for one thing, they disagreed among themselves and could be used to prove almost any position) but, even so, Cartwright argued that there was nothing in Augustine, for example, to contradict his position. Indeed, ‘against you [he] maketh much & overturneth all your building in [your] boke’.Footnote 43 He criticised Whitgift for being too selective in his use of the Church Fathers, not for using them at all;Footnote 44 and he appealed to figures as far apart as Aristotle and Calvin to help make his case.Footnote 45
The separatists were distinctive, therefore, in their total reliance on Scripture alone to assert their position. They were also distinctive in the way they put Scripture to use, in two main ways. First, one can observe the concentration of proof texts positioned in the margins to buttress their own writing. This is nicely illustrated in Browne's Answere to Master Cartwright. A total of eighty-five pages in length, it contains 487 Bible references in the margins, an average of nearly six references per page. The coverage is balanced and impressively comprehensive: 229 references come from the Old Testament, 255 from the New Testament with 98 from the Gospels and 157 from Acts, the Epistles and Revelation. They range across the whole of the Canon: Barrow cited twenty-nine out of the thirty-nine Old Testament books and twenty-six out of twenty-seven New Testament books (his only omission was 3 John, which comprises a mere fourteen verses); there were no references to the Apocrypha. Thomas Cartwright also used proof-texts. Some pages in his reply to Whitgift matched Browne's average and, like him, Cartwright included no references to the Apocrypha. But over all 224 pages of the work his average was under two per page (in his reply to Harrison it was less than one per page) and he included in addition plenty of marginal references to the Church Fathers, something Browne never did. Of course, the abundance of proof texts settled nothing because Scripture could be read in multiple ways; each side disputed the appropriateness and relevance of the other's proof-texts.Footnote 46
Second, notwithstanding the blanket coverage of their marginal references, the separatists’ deployment of Scripture privileged the Bible's apocalyptic writings: Daniel, parts of Ezekiel and Revelation. Francis Johnson said that England's parishes were not like a maimed man at all but a swarm of locusts, ‘whose forme is like unto horses … with faces of men, heare of women, teeth of Lyons, habergions of yron, wings like charets, tayles of scorpions, with stings in them to hurt withall’.Footnote 47 This privileging of the apocalyptic encouraged a semiotic reading of Scripture. In discussing one verse, Johnson advised that the words ‘are not literallie to be taken, but sacramentallie, attributing that in phrase of speach to the signe, which indeed is peculiar to the thing signified. This maner of speaking is usuall throughout the Scripture, both towching the true and false worship of God’.Footnote 48 The effect of this apocalyptic and semiotic reading of Scripture was to render their world in stark tones of either black or white, and to cultivate a dualistic, high-stakes sense of present reality and looming judgement on their opponents.Footnote 49
This sense of present reality informed the separatists’ reading of Old Testament history. For example, in Numbers xvi Korah led a rebellion against the leadership of Moses and Aaron. God instructed Moses, Aaron and the Israelites to ‘separate your selves from among this Congregacion, that I may consume them at once’.Footnote 50 For the separatists, this demonstrated the weight of God's injunction to separate from impure worship and governance. First, ‘Moses commaunded the congregation (& the Lord so bade him) to depart from the tents of those wicked men’. Second, the ground opened up to consume them, and ‘was this not also a putting apart or a casting out?’ Centuries later, Browne heard the same command to separate from the tents of the wicked: ‘these judgements were both an ensampell and a figure of the spirituall judging at this day’.Footnote 51 But signs can be interpreted in different ways. As we shall see, their conformist opponents could easily cast the separatists in the form of Korah and his rebels, rebelliously removing themselves from God's established order of leadership.
In his Brief discoverie of the false Church Barrow worked with a different story, that of King Josiah, in whose day the Book of the Law was rediscovered.Footnote 52 ‘[W]hen he heard the booke of Gods law read, & compared the acts of his forefathers, and the present estate of his kingdome thereunto, [he] rent his clothes in horror of the wrathfull judgements of God, in that booke denounced.’ To Barrow, the application was obvious: England's worship had also degenerated from the model set forth in God's word. Yet the nation's prophets and watchmen did not sound the alarm; instead they merely ‘pretend a kind of reformation’ and do not bring the people back to the ‘true patterne’ of worship in the Scriptures.Footnote 53 Both of these stories, and others similarly used by the separatists, carried with them the sense of impending judgement. This raised the stakes and required a stark choice to separate.
It is impossible to know entirely where this mindset originated. Did this stark biblical vision inform their separatism, or did the demands of separatism necessitate that high-stakes biblicism, or did both develop in mutually-reinforcing ways? To form a separate congregation was illegal, only the tiniest minority of believers was convinced enough to do so, and those who did ran the very real risk of imprisonment or execution. Justifying such a stand required an all-or-nothing mentality. The Church of England could not be just partly bad, but all bad. So Johnson declared a moral equivalence between the Church of Rome and the Church of England: ‘they are not to be receyved or joyned unto in the one any more than in the other’. Any Church not founded on the pattern in the New Testament belonged to AntiChrist, even if the members of that Church ‘walk with some show of piety and religion’ and even if they profess ‘many notable truths and foundamentall articles of religion’. There were only ‘true churches’ and ‘false churches’ with nothing in between.Footnote 54 Entirely absent is the desire so prevalent in early modern discourse to find the middle way.Footnote 55 The separatists had no interest in that discourse, not least because it derived from Aristotle. Whatever else the Bible delivered, it was not a golden mean. Conceptually it presented to the separatists two stark choices with nothing in the middle, and for the Church it set forth one true pattern, and only one. As Barrow warned, ‘No middle course (as you affirme) may here be taken; we must either make the tree good or evill.’Footnote 56
George Gifford, the separatists and a particular case study
So far the discussion has oriented us in the distinctive ways in which the separatists read and deployed Scripture. We can now investigate these dynamics in a particular dispute between the Presbyterian George Gifford and the separatists Henry Barrow and John Greenwood. In 1584 Archbishop Whitgift had deprived Gifford of his curacy at All Saints-with-St Peter, Maldon, for refusing subscription. Gifford was restored by early 1589, going on to become a respected and prolific godly author.Footnote 57 In 1590 he published A short treatise against the Donatists of England, whome we call Brownists. In that work he addressed the separatists directly; in another work of the same year, A plaine declaration that our Brownists be full Donatists, he made his case to a more general audience. Barrow and Greenwood replied in the following year, publishing A plaine refutation of M. G. Giffardes reprochful booke. Gifford quickly responded in A short reply to the late printed books of Henry Barrow and John Greenwood. Throughout the course of the extended controversy each side used Scripture to make its arguments and yet, strikingly, each side accused the other of not bringing in Scripture to prove its case. Seeing things only in their own way, they were blind to the other.
Gifford regularly used Scripture to attack the separatists. The first page alone of the ‘Preface to the Reader’ of his first book contained three references to the book of Revelation.Footnote 58 One gets the impression that he was prepared to meet the separatists on their own ground. Throughout the text he sprinkled regular references to a range of biblical texts and stories, sometimes the same stories that the separatists had used, though in the rebellion of Korah it was the separatists who played the part of Korah – they were the ones inviting God's judgement on themselves for their perverse rebellion against God's rightly instituted authority; and the story of Josiah proved only that the magistrate did have a legitimate place in overseeing the nation's religion.Footnote 59 This demonstrates, of course, that the same Scriptures were open to rival and quite contrasting interpretations, and who was there to adjudicate?
Needless to say, when Barrow and Greenwood replied to Gifford they also used Scripture. The way they did so demonstrated the same all-or-nothing instinct shared by all separatists. There is an ‘exact & absolute patterne’ of church government and worship in Scripture.Footnote 60 ‘We seeke to establish and obey the ordinances & lawes of our Saviour Christ … without altering, changing, innovating, wresting, or leaving out anie of them that the Lord shall gyve us sight of.’Footnote 61 There was to be no compromise or deviation, no muddying of the waters, much less any sort of middle ground. A little bit of yeast soured the whole lump; even rank heretics believed part of the truth.Footnote 62 ‘No error or transgression can be joyned unto or built upon this foundation, no more then light & darkenes can be mingled. The least departure from Godes worde is an error; the least transgression of God's lawe is a sinne.’Footnote 63 So a Church is either true or false according to its entire conformity to the pattern laid down; it stands either under Christ or AntiChrist, with no mixing of the two. Barrow and Greenwood found in Scripture only five officers in the Church: pastors, teachers, elders, deacons and ‘relievers’.Footnote 64 But when they turned from there to the Church of England they saw the elaborate hierarchy of prelacy. Over the space of thirty pages they dismantled the various offices in the Church of England to demonstrate that there was nothing like them in all of Scripture.Footnote 65
So when they asked Gifford to justify his ‘church estate’ – that is, this extensive hierarchy – they wanted verses from Scripture to justify each office. Yet those verses never came. He could assemble as many Scriptures as he pleased but as long as he failed to provide precise scriptural warrant for every office in the Church of England they counted for nothing. Thus they dismissed the Church of England as a false Church. There was nothing good about it, nothing at all. It had ‘not one pinne, naile, or hooke according to the true patterne’.Footnote 66 Even the smallest addition of human novelty corrupted the whole, rendering the Church of England a false Church.
Barrow and Greenwood were correct: Gifford did not provide scriptural warrant for the many offices structuring the Church of England. Such verses would have been very hard to find but, more importantly, Gifford did not see the need to look for them because he was working not from an all-or-nothing mentality but a bare-minimum mentality. It was held in common with other conformist Puritans and was reflected in the simile so beloved by them all, that of the maimed man. To offer it again in Gifford's words, if a body is ‘whole and sound’ but is not breathing then the ‘soule and life [have] departed, he is no longer a man, to speake properly, but the dead carcasse of a man’. It was the inner breath of life, not the outer working of his limbs or external appearance, that made a man both alive and true, so that ‘if he be sicke and diseased, so that all partes are feeble, or if he be deformed with sores and maimes, wanting hand, foote, eye, nose, or such like, yet he is still a man, so long as the soule and life remaine in him’.Footnote 67 This metaphor set a remarkably low bar for the Church of England. As long as it still breathed it was a true Church, whatever deformities and diseases it might carry, whatever limbs or organs may have been lost. It is hardly likely he would have made a similar claim when he was arguing to reform such imperfections.
Gifford drew a further distinction between what was fundamental in Scripture and merely circumstantial, accidental and indifferent. At one point in his Short treatise he broached the separatist conviction that the magistrate can make no laws for the Church beyond those of the New Testament. To ‘simple men’ it seemed a sound proposition. ‘The deceypt lyeth hid in this: that men do not consider there be general lawes or rules given by Christ for matters of circumstance, that bee indifferent and variable in the particulars, and so to be altered and abolished, as the peace and edification of the Churche shall require.’Footnote 68 Those ‘matters of circumstance’ included every aspect of ‘externall government’ of the Church and its form of worship. Only doctrine was fundamental, and even then only some doctrines: ‘a Church may erre in sundrie points of Doctrine, and not be Antichristian’.Footnote 69 This hermeneutical principle sat rather well with Gifford's bare-minimum mentality because it gave large room for error. For all the many faults in the Church of England, they ‘be not fundamentall, nor destroy the substance’.Footnote 70 Gifford accused the separatists of bundling up certain faults in matters circumstantial and making them out to be ‘odious enormities’.Footnote 71
Such a distinction between fundamental and circumstantial made no sense within the separatists’ all-or-nothing mentality and they were never going to let the Church of England off the hook that easily. Barrow and Greenwood scathingly dismissed Gifford's ‘scholastical or (as he useth it) we might more rightlie saye, papistical distinctions of fundamental errors and transgressions’.Footnote 72 Sitting behind their critique was the separatists’ rejection of university learning. They found Gifford's specious use of a syllogism ‘so ful of legier du main [sleight of hand], that we had neede look narrowlie to his fingers, lest by his sophistries & diepe schole learning he beguile us, as the Serpent by his craftiness deceaved Evah’ (that is, Eve).Footnote 73 Instead, for them, every part of Scripture was equally true and equally applicable.Footnote 74 Otherwise, who was to say which parts of Scripture were fundamental and which were not? Surely Christ was of only one mind.Footnote 75
Gifford accused the separatists themselves of not obeying the very ordinances of Christ that they claimed to follow. He had in mind Matthew xviii.15–17, where Jesus lays down a process whereby sin in the Church is to be confronted. The separatists had not followed that process: they had not brought their accusation to the Church, they had simply left.Footnote 76 In reply, the separatists claimed that this process applied only in the context of a true Church, and the Church of England was not a true Church. Its processes for weighing disputes between believers were the product of canon law much more than Matthew xviii. And anyway, what was the point of ‘telling the church’ when all that Church did was ‘hate, persecute, imprison al that speake for’ Christ's true pattern of church government?Footnote 77 But their response would have been insufficient for Gifford: ‘let us see where that commaundement ye speake of is given unto private men’ to form their own congregation; this ‘ye do boldly and presumptuously affirme, and can shew no one place of Scripture for it’.Footnote 78 The central action of the separatists – that of separating – had no warrant in Scripture, at least in Gifford's eyes. It allowed him to claim that the separatists themselves could bring in no Scripture to support their stand.
Gifford had offered legitimate arguments from Scripture to make his case, but they were not legitimate in terms that Barrow and Greenwood could recognise and they simply did not hear him. Immersed as they were in the world of Revelation they dismissed his words as the ‘opprobrie, blasphemie, and rage which he breatheth forth out of the mouth of that Dragon’.Footnote 79 They decried Gifford's handling of the Bible: he ‘perverteth and wresteth the Scriptures from their holie sense according to his owne lust’. They cast him in the shape of the ‘other’: their readers should not marvel that God had given him up ‘into a reprobate sense, and suffer[ed] him to draw these heretical doctrines and damnable conclusions from the same, to the destruction of himself, and of as manie as receive his doctrines’.Footnote 80 This was some acknowledgment that Gifford was reading the Scriptures, but only in a reprobate sense, as God in his sovereign purpose hardened his heart and readied him for judgement. In their usual all-or-nothing manner they declared that they had won the argument.Footnote 81 For all of Gifford's efforts there could be no winning over the separatists against such concentrated imaginative power. ‘Our innocence shalbe our defence, and his refutation.’Footnote 82 In this sense the Bible was for the separatists a closed book.
Henry Jacob, the separatists and some further possibilities
We have been tracing a simple yet suggestive demarcation in the way in which sixteenth-century English separatists and Puritan conformists conducted their printed debates over church government and worship. The separatists were entirely free to argue on the basis of Scripture alone because for them it really was alone. The conformists were not so free. It was a great deal harder for them to argue on the basis of Scripture alone because it was not alone: they accepted other grounds of authority alongside (even if lesser than) Scripture. Thus it was hardly credible for the conformists to claim that they were the ones arguing from Scripture alone. They would lose that argument every time. Faced with this obstacle, they had to retreat to weaker and less comfortable ground exemplified in the metaphor of the maimed man, even though metaphor (or reason, or the Church Fathers, or any other source of authority) was never likely to satisfy a separatist.
But, as we saw in the case of Cartwright against Whitgift, if the conformists turned to argue in the opposite direction they could stand on firmer ground. Facing the bishops of the Church of England, they could make the case on the basis of Scripture alone because, of the two parties, they held to that conviction with the greater degree of purity. In this sense we can position the conformists between the bishops and the separatists: not as pristine as the separatists but more rigorous than the bishops when it came to sola scriptura and thus more free to argue on that basis. That is why the separatists could use the conformists’ own arguments against them. The conformists could offer only what Brachlow calls adiaphora lines of argument against the separatists but they could launch sola scriptura lines of argument against the bishops.Footnote 83 Facing those like the separatists who held to Scripture alone with adamant purity, sola scriptura arguments were neutralised and compromised, thus conformists had to resort to a bare-minimum mentality. But when conformists turned to look in the opposite direction they were much freer to adopt something closer to an all-or-nothing mentality, though never with the same conviction and credibility as the separatists. Sola scriptura arguments, therefore, worked in one direction but not the other.
All this can be illustrated by the progress of Henry Jacob as he moved towards a position that came to be known as Congregationalist. He ‘led the puritan campaign to influence the new King James in the direction of a fundamental reform of religion by such means as the famous millenary petition which he helped to draw up’.Footnote 84 This will take us just beyond the Elizabethan period by locating Jacob in the immediate aftermath of the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. His early ministerial career is uncertain, but from 1596 to 1599 he engaged in dispute with Francis Johnson, defending the validity of the Church of England against the separatists. By 1604 he had made the move from Puritan conformity to what Michael Winship calls ‘something new, an irenic congregationalist third way between the separatists and the Church of England’.Footnote 85 Jacob now lay between the Presbyterians and the separatists, but would he join with the separatists in according authority to Scripture alone or would he remain with the Presbyterians in allowing other grounds of authority?
When writing against Johnson in 1599 Jacob could not have demonstrated clearer conformity with the arguments of Cartwright and Gifford: ‘My expresse words, and our Churches meaning is, That any reasonable kinde of Church-governement, and rites, and orders, are arbitrary and changeable, no matters of faith, nor written in the Scriptures.’Footnote 86 He distinguished between what he termed written and unwritten. The first comprised everything ‘touching doctrine, that is, touching faith and the inward opinion onely’. The second comprised everything ‘touching outward orders in the Church, and all outward gouernement, and ceremonies’. The first were ‘necessarie’ but the second were ‘arbitrary’ and changeable.Footnote 87 As for the Church of England, he could not offer a better answer than ‘this similitude: This man hath a wooden legge, and eye of glasse, his nose deformed, adde if you will, both his armes not natural, but framed of him of wood or what you will: Ergo this is no true man. Yes Sir, for all this he is a true man’.Footnote 88 Thus the ever-reliable maimed man made his appearance, and all this is very familiar. Stephen Brachlow makes a shrewd point: ‘Jacob's adiaphora line of reasoning in 1599 … sounded very much like the Calvinist Whitgift against a radical Cartwright – or, for that matter, the moderate Cartwright against a fanatical Richard Harrison!’Footnote 89 Exactly. Arguments such as these worked only in one direction.
In 1604, however, Jacob asserted the opposite. He declared that ‘all Ecclesiasticall Rites, Actions, Ministeries, & Formes of Visible Churches’ were ordained by Scripture and that all human traditions or inventions were ‘directly contrarie to Gods woord’, which was ‘a most perfect and absolute demonstration of all things whatsoever being properlie and simplie Ecclesiasticall or religious’.Footnote 90 The form of church government was fundamental, not circumstantial; things indifferent and open to human ingenuity were only matters of ‘Places, Times, Persons, Things’, which included church buildings and furniture; whether to sit, kneel or lie prostrate to receive communion, and at what time of day; and even whether to baptise in rivers.Footnote 91 Furthermore, the only valid and scriptural form of a Church was a ‘Particular ordinary constant Congregation of Christians’ with power of government in itself.Footnote 92 The diocesan government of the Church of England was ‘cleane beside the Scripture’ and, for that reason, ‘simplie evill and unlawfull’.Footnote 93
In coming to that conclusion he sounded just like Johnson and any other separatist, but he stopped short of separatism in two ways, both of them indicated in the title of his book. First, it spoke of reforming ‘our Churches in England’. To dismiss the English Church wholesale as a false Church, as the separatists did, was to buy into the conceptual framework of their opponents by conceiving it as just one national Church. For Jacob, the Church in England comprised thousands of individual congregations in varying states of adequacy, some of which were fit to commune with. So he did not dismiss the English Church out of hand as a false Church. Second, and more important for the purposes of this article, Jacob's ‘Reasons’ were ‘Taken Out of Gods Word and the Best Humane Testimonies’. He sounded much like the separatists when he argued ‘that all Humane inventions, or Unwritten Traditions Ecclesiasticall are directly contrarie to Gods woord’ and when he asserted that custom ‘is no warrant nor ground for any thing in Religion. The word of God alone must suffice us herein’.Footnote 94 Yet when he offered his definition of a visible Church he said that ‘against this there is no text of Scripture in all the New Testament, nor anie force of reason appearing’.Footnote 95 Both Scripture and reason, it seems, were permissible grounds of argument. And when he defended the privileges of the pastor in his congregation (and only in his congregation, thus denying the authority of diocesan bishops) he justified his position by appealing to the writings of Cyprian, Jerome and Gregory of Nazianzus.Footnote 96 For Jacob, it was entirely consistent to argue that human innovations in church government and worship were ‘directly contrarie to Gods woord’ and also to accept a place for merely human authorities in sustaining that argument; for the separatists, this was not consistent. Thus the clear line of demarcation remained: Congregationalists recognised non-scriptural authorities; separatists did not. This clear, consistent division remained. It is one way of distinguishing a separatist from a Congregationalist.
Of all the Protestant groupings in late sixteenth-century England, only the separatists rejected all forms of authority but the Bible, and that remained true of the separatists well into the seventeenth century. In 1642 Barrow's Pollution of universitie-learning finally made its way out of manuscript into print. Clearly his arguments had lost none of their relevance and currency. Likewise, in 1644 the Presbyterian William Rathband published a manuscript that had been circulating since the later sixteenth century, written by a collection of unnamed authors to counter ‘the old errors and dotages of Barrow and Greenwood’.Footnote 97 It offers further evidence for the same Puritan-conformist bare-minimum mentality that we have already observed: a Church may still be a true Church even though it does not hold to every truth of Scripture or contains error; not every verse in Scripture is of fundamental importance.Footnote 98 Separatists, they complained, loaded the margins with biblical proof texts to overwhelm ‘simple, or credulous Readers’ and they acted ‘as if the Word of God had come out from them, or had come unto them onely’.Footnote 99 It is difficult to see how these arguments would have had any greater effect than they had earlier. The point was probably not to persuade the unpersuadable,Footnote 100 but to prevent further defections to the separatist cause, to retain those who could be persuaded. The fact that Rathband felt prompted to publish the unrevised manuscript suggests that all the same issues remained in the 1640s. And in his ‘Epistle to the reader’, Rathband himself offered one of the most telling observations: the separatists acted ‘as if there were no middle’.Footnote 101 How true that was. What separates the separatists, therefore, was not so much a particular ecclesiology but the singular place of the Bible: pristine, adamant, absolutist and all-or-nothing. Scripture stood alone, and so, on this point, did they.
