Some historians of seventeenth-century British Protestantism are dismissive of attempts to distinguish between Puritans and Presbyterians. Part of the problem, of course, involves definitions and categories. When it comes to politics, differences between Presbyterians and Puritans do not become clear until the 1650s with the regime of Oliver Cromwell since Puritans in Parliament joined forces with Presbyterians to do battle with the Stuart monarchy partly on the basis of the Solemn League and Covenant. When it comes to religion, Puritans and Presbyterians shared an intense and introspective piety that again makes differentiating them seemingly pointless.
I was surprised to read, then, in his treatment of John Owen Carl Trueman’s distinction between Puritan and Reformed. On the one hand, he argues that Puritan, at least with reference to Owen, is an unhelpful category.
First, . . . there is little consensus on exactly what constitutes a Puritan, let alone the reification of that elusive essence in the phenomenon known as Puritanism. Second, whatever else Puritanism is, it is fairly minimalist in terms of theological content – if John Milton, the quasi-Arian counts as a Puritan, for example, we can scarcely include even that most basic of Christian distinctives, the doctrine of the Trinity, in our definition. Third, Puritanism has, on the whole, far too parochial a range to allow us to see the full context of Owen’s thinking. . . . Thus, the use of a category like “Puritanism,†which brings with it all manner of narrowly parochial connotations, really needs to be deployed very carefully and in very specific contexts if it is to be at all helpful in our understanding of [Owen’s] thought.
The category that Trueman prefers to apply to Owen is Reformed Orthodoxy since it “is at once both more easily defined and less limiting that the category of Puritanism.†By Reformed Orthodoxy Trueman means:
. . . the tradition of Protestant thought which found its creedal expression on the continent in such documents, as, among others, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, and in Britain in the Westminster Assembly’s Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Historically speaking, the immediate roots of this tradition are to be found in the work of Reformers such as Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer and, a generation later, such men as John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr and Pierre Viret. (Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, pp. 6-7)
This is helpful, but it does raise a couple questions. First, since the Parliament that called the Westminster Assembly was dominated by Puritans, is it so easy to distinguish the Puritanism of Parliament from the Reformed orthodoxy of the Westminster Assembly, especially since Puritans were not in short supply at the Assembly?
The other questions concerns the original oldlife effort to distinguish Presbyterianism from Puritanism. If Presbyterians adopted the Westminster Standards as their church’s confession, then that would appear, following Trueman, to make them not Puritan but part of Reformed Orthodoxy. In which case, if Puritanism lacks substantial theological content and is not synonymous with the work of the Westminster Assembly, is distinguishing Presbyterianism from Puritanism really so peculiar?
Old Life 