02/20/2010

A Tale of Burning Books

In the midst of the Westminster Assembly minutes, you'll find that they discuss a book so heinous that it needed to be burned. So in July of 1645 they published an 8 page decree exposing the errors of the book and asking that it be burned.



In fact, it specifies that they'll burn a stack of them in Cheapside, a stack over in the Palace-Yard, a stack in St. Paul's churchyard, etc. just so everyone can be on notice about how bad the book is. The fact that the book is still extant proves that nothing makes someone want to keep a book like making it forbidden! You'd think that maybe the book would be some kind of antinomian tract or Arminian tract, or maybe even some nascent example of atheism or unitarianism. But in actuality, it was a book titled Comfort for Believers About Their Sinnes and Troubles that argued, essentially, that God works everything for good, even the sins of believers.



The book ran afoul of the assembly's sensibilities, however, because it teaches rather explicitly that God is the author of sin. It must be the case, the book argues, because otherwise the existence of sin would be outside of God's providential guidance of all things. In the assembly's critique, they note that this is just the very complaint that Roman Catholics were making against Reformed churches. This is probably why the book needed to be so publicly repudiated - it was playing into the hands of the critics of true Reformed doctrine which does not hold that God is the author of Sin. Like antinomians who were taking salvation by faith and deducing the non-necessity of good works, the author of Comfort for Believers was deducing divine authorship of sin from God's all-encompassing providential care. This tendency towards hypercalvinism would continue to be a thorn in the side of reformed religion in England in the years following the assembly. At its best, Calvinism grounds its precepts about God's sovereignty over all things in biblical teaching and not in rational deductions about causality. Consistency is nice in some areas of life, but with regard to divinity, wisdom combined with humility tells the pious person to accept A, accept B, and yet be very careful in deducing C.

You might think that Calvinists would treat hypercalvinists (or whatever we want to label those who see God as the author of sin) as cute, slightly over-zealous rascals, but in reality, they took it seriously enough to make a public show of distancing themselves from such nonsense.

(Postscript: Obviously, we hate to think of our theological forebears as book-burners, but this is not really unusual in the historical context. The Westminster Assembly never called for a person to burned, as far as I can tell, so we can be thankful of that.)