Some say it is nonsense to posit any difference between Puritans and Presbyterians. Others put it more delicately and argue for essential agreement among British Calvinists. The URC pastor, Mike Brown, has given some attention to this subject through the lens of Calvin and Owen on worship. He writes with some surprise that “the likes of Horton Davies and J. I. Packer . . . see a gap between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at least) on worship practices. The piece of evidence that stands out is that John Calvin used and advocated a liturgy. John Owen opposed liturgies. To bring the Presbyterians into the debate, John Knox developed a liturgy for the kirk that became part of the early Presbyterian experience.
But Brown is unconvinced. He sees essential agreement:
Where one witnesses obvious discontinuity between the Continental Reformer and the English Puritan is in the use of liturgies. For Calvin, the liturgies he put to use in Strasbourg and Geneva displayed his understanding of a worship service that was spiritual, simple and in complete accordance with what Scripture alone prescribed. On the other hand, Owen clearly reveled great disdain for liturgies. In his Discourse Concerning Liturgies, Owen made many statements that suggest he believed liturgies somehow quenched the Spirit and obscured the simplicity of worship. Understood in its context, however, Owen’s Discourse is a polemic primarily against the imposition of liturgies. While Calvin knew well the difficulties of having a Protestant state make certain impositions upon the order of worship (such as the Genevan city council denying him his request for weekly communion), he never faced the type of situation which Owen and his fellow Nonconformists faced in England during the 1660s. This must be taken into consideration when evaluating any discontinuities between Calvin and Owen and their theologies of worship. Both Calvin and Owen were men of their times. Yet, both of these towering figures in the Reformed tradition firmly and unwaveringly believed that worship must be biblical, spiritual, and simple.
One question that lurks behind assessments like this is whether Puritans like Owen opposed all liturgy all the time, or simply the liturgy coming down from on high in the Church of England. Sure, most state-imposed measures are unwelcome, but Owen seems to go beyond this when he argues that liturgies restrain the free operation of the spirit.
This leads to an additional question, which concerns the way that Puritanism and Presbyterianism played out in the United States. New England was more receptive to revivalism than were the most Scottish segments of the Presbyterian Church (the Old Side and the Old School). This raises the further question, again for some unthinkable, whether Puritanism encouraged enthusiasm and spontaneity in ways that Old World Presbyterians regarded as a threat to confessional subscription and church polity. After all, if you can accept the word of others for creed and church order, why not in the prayers and forms of worship. (And, by the way, the Westminster Standards reveal much more detail on the interiority of Christian devotion — i.e. the ordo salutis — that The Three Forms of Unity or the Scottish Confession of Faith.)
One way to illustrate that these intuitions as more realistic than hypothetical is to remember that Presbyterianism started out in Scotland with liturgies (from Knox) and that arguably the greatest Puritan theologian, John Owen, wrote an essay against liturgy.
It may not prove the point about differences between Puritanism and Presbyterianism. But the different ways that those traditions played out in the United States do make you wonder.
Old Life 