The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (review)

Seventeenth-century Puritans believed that the Christian life required "precise walking." Bozeman argues that this ascetic "precisianism" not only helped give the Puritan movement its identity but also stimulated an antinomian backlash that troubled the Church of England and disrupted the colony of Massachusetts Bay. He has written a lucid and learned book, grounded in archival sources and an impressive array of early modern imprints, and his interpretation of the "precisianist strain" will influence future discussions of Puritan reform.

He argues that the roots of this emphasis on discipline, duty, and rigorous self-examination extended back through the early English Reformation, the continental Reformed churches, and centuries of Catholic penitential thought and practice. Indeed, the Puritan reformers—arch-opponents of the "papist" Church—not only drew heavily on Catholic thought but also promoted disciplinary themes partly to counter Catholic charges that Protestants neglected ethics.

In Bozeman's analysis, English Presbyterians popularized precisianism, both in their demands for church discipline and in a covenant theology that accentuated law and duty alongside divine grace. Not until the late sixteenth century, however, did English Puritan "pietists," seeking a reformed church and an orderly society, thrust these themes into the forefront. (Bozeman argues that an English pietism antedated the continental versions.) He draws special attention to Richard Greenham, pastor at Dry Drayton from 1570 to 1590, who laid out a program of constant struggle against sin, scrupulous obedience to Christian rules, and a regimen of weekly practice that included pious reading, self-examination, fast days, strict Sabbath observance, and the cataloguing of sins in a penitential ritual that bore residues of the earlier Catholic practice of "complete confession." The aim was both ethical purity and the assurance of salvation. The doubtful could reassure themselves by trusting God's promise and by living a rigorously sanctified life.

The rigor generated backlash. The English "antinomians" of the 1620's reacted with a theology of free grace that dispensed with demands for signs of sanctification and reassured the doubtful that they could merely trust in a gracious God. The Bay Colony antinomians of the 1630's proclaimed a parallel message, which they absorbed largely from the Boston preacher John Cotton. Bozeman explores Cotton's thought in exquisite detail and discovers a transition from a pietist temper to a radical accent on the gifts of the Spirit. Cotton gradually downplayed the contractual themes in theology, minimized the evidentiary character of good works, and proclaimed that the Spirit brought immediate assurance. When Cotton's lay followers, especially Anne Hutchinson, proclaimed his message without his subtle qualifications, the Bay Colony hovered on the brink of civil war. At the heart of the antinomian controversy stood a desire for relief from the burdens and demands of disciplinary religion.

By accenting the rigor of Puritan piety, Bozeman inevitably minimizes its joyful dimensions. He recognizes the rewards and the upbeat moments in the lives of Puritans, but his emphasis falls on the heavy psychic costs. In some ways his book returns to an earlier depiction of Puritan reform as a dour and grim episode in Christian history. By highlighting the strictness, however, he displays a pattern that other accounts have sometimes obscured. His book challenges not only scholars who have doubts about a discrete Puritan movement but also intepreters who have underplayed Puritan severity. He has made an important argument, and it deserves close attention.