America's Forgotten Colonial History by Dana Huntley

Author:Dana Huntley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493038480
Publisher: Lyons Press

In Virginia, on the other hand, the only church allowed in the fledgling colony was the established Church of England. Not only were other churches not permitted, but Sunday attendance at the parish Anglican Church was required by law. It wasn’t until 1702 that something other than the established English church was legal in the colony.

THOSE CRAZY PURITAN COMMONWEALTH YEARS

Through the years of the 1650s, the Commonwealth actually worked far better than popular history usually gives it credit for—particularly considering the significant reality that it had no historical precedence in Western civilization, or really any body of political philosophy on which to draw. This is still more than a generation before what we call “the Enlightenment” and the emergence of the political theory that would undergird the arguments in the colonies for independence and a whole new form of federal government. John Locke’s Two Treaties on Government and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1689 were seminal works that came too late to aid the guiding hands of the Commonwealth.

Enter the Westminster Confession

The hot-blooded convictions of the Puritan Parliament were hardly uniform. There were Presbyterians and Independents (Congregationalists), Baptists, and those still in the Church of England. What united them, however, was a conviction that the English church required systemic reform and doctrinal clarity.

Despite the divergence of doctrinal and ecclesiastical views that emerged during the English Reformation, the notion that all these different versions of Christian faith and the churches they inspired could exist side by side and in civil and Christian harmony really hadn’t been invented yet. Through the 1600s, it was largely just assumed that there was by natural and divine law an unbreakable connection between church and state, and that a state church was simply the order of things.

As relations between the King and Parliament had irrevocably broken down into war, in 1643 the House of Commons appointed an assembly of 151 theologians, academics, and clerics to tackle the problem and submit to Parliament a confession of faith and ecclesiastical practice that would accomplish just that. The commissioned assembly met 1,163 times over the next several years, in the crisis atmosphere of civil war, finally concluding in 1646. The Confession of Faith and Longer and Shorter Catechisms that they produced were each presented to and approved by Parliament in 1648. By the time the commission had completed its work, however, the House had fractured between Presbyterians and Independents and in practice the Westminster Confession of Faith ultimately never did become the defining doctrinal statement of the Church of England. Needless to say, the king and church episcopacy would have none of it.

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