The Marrow of Perry Miller

The marrow of puritan divinity, Perry Miller explains, is Federal or Covenant theology. Perry Miller is a skilled chronicler of intellectual history, and his style of writing makes one glad. I buy his books whether I’m interested in the subject or not because his telling is so good he makes everything he speaks about interesting. Here is his explanation of the marrow of puritan divinity.

He begins with Calvin and contrasts Covenant theology with Calvin’s Calvinism. Calvin emphasized the sovereignty of God, God’s incomprehensibility and the inscrutable nature of his decrees. Miller does not supply this, but I think the Reformers repudiated the analogia entis of the Medieval consensus. God was not another being on a continuum with the rest of his creatures; the Reformers stressed the distinction between the Creator and the creatures. Hence the stress on sovereignty.

From this distinction which stresses sovereignty arises the need for the covenants, and, indeed, you see discussions of the covenants in confessions stressing the distance between the Creator and the creatures. If God is sovereign and does as he wills, what can men hold him to or expect of him? How can men hope anything of a being who is so distinct and remote as to be incomprehensible?

Miller sees the rise of Covenant theology as another surfacing of the problem of reason and faith, and particularly the surfacing of such a problem in a day when reason was gaining ascendancy and man’s intellect was held in high esteem. The puritan’s solution to the problem was to explain that God condescended to make himself known, and to bind his behavior by means of covenants. The covenant maintains the transcendence of God while at the same time showing his condescension toward his creatures: man has privileges because God has bound himself to give them.

The focus attention then becomes this transaction, the Covenant. What is our part, what does it do for us, how does it work?

Covenant theology, by giving an explanation that preserved the idea of God’s sovereignty, also further dignified man. It provided a rationale for the application of election and gave to Reformed doctrine a more reasonable feel than (this is according to Miller’s perception, I’ve not read Calvin) the system of Calvin had. Calvin did not explain so much, man was little dignified in his system, the decrees of God were abstract and worked without respect to man at all. The mystery that Calvin left unexplained made his system more terrible. (It was a system, it seems to me, more suited to the medieval mind than to the emerging modern one. Miller’s point is that this concerned the Puritans: they wanted explanations to the questions and were willing to accept them being satisfied that the answers which fit with questions that arose from the spirit of the age.)

What Covenant theology also did was to bring a disposition that was more favorable toward human intellect, in keeping with the times. In fact, while it was not rationalistic, it brought not only greater inquiry and better study, it also brought the Trojan horse of vaunting ‘the powers of the human intellect.’ If I am not incorrect in my understanding of Perry Miller, and if he is right in his assessment, then what happened was that the power to explain, an explanation having been achieved, trumped the irreducible mystery that originally posed the problem.

I am not interested in disparaging Covenant theology, especially at a time when I’m becoming a Reformed Dispensationalist. (I have just read such a refined version of Covenant theology [written by Reformed Baptists in an attempt to revise the 2nd London Baptist Confession] that some [or many?] old Covenant theologians would not hesitate to call it a departure. It is excellent and I approve it for all that I would still not be able to survive what I fancy would go on in one of their ordination councils—with apologies to any who believe that in order to join a Baptist church one must be willing to face an ordination council at least in principle.) What I am interested in is how Perry Miller handles the ideas as ideas and notices their effects. Ideas do not remain static in human minds. Human minds take hold of them and work out their consequences. Miller notices the disposition the explanation provided by Covenant theology created and he will watch it shape the history of New England as rationalism does eventually find a home in the puritan’s old divinity schools.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has a different solution for the relationship that Covenant theology sought to explain. In Eastern theology the incomprehensible essence of God is incommunicable. They formulated a doctrine of the uncreated energies which flow out of the unknowable essence and penetrate all creation. The uncreated energies manifest God in creation and are inseparable from the essence without being the essence which is distinctly and wholly other. If Eastern theology errs at this point, it errs in maintaining the distance between the creator and the creature. If. The majesty and mystery of God dominates Eastern theology.

Think of it this way: those who emphasize sovereignty might be tempted to deny the means God uses to convert sinners. Those who emphasize the means might be tempted to deny the sovereignty of God and to dignify man’s powers. What Perry Miller observed is that the old Covenant theologians then urged men to make claims on God on the basis of the Covenant. The Covenant became a sort of bargaining point where man could catch God in his own concessions and gain something for himself. The casuistry Miller finds in some of the quotations he offers is obvious to him; it was not obvious to those men in their day.

Some might be tempted to say the problem is with systems and to a certain point I agree. We are trying to account for things are great and deep subjects and our finite minds are obviously going out of their league in these matters. And yet we are rational creatures, we need explanations, we have to understand. Systems are the way we do it. Systems are how we explore and understand ideas or relationships. In a way, it seems to me, a system is the working out of an explanation to make all its ramifications explicit. The system is implicit in the explanation and then time makes it explicit.

We have to evaluate and to judge these things, but our judgments and evaluations should not be quick and cheap. The solution is not to say: well, they were caught up in the spirit of the age so we’ll avoid it. And the problem was not an attempt to understand, but an attempt to understand wrongly or a wrong attempt to understand. Something went wrong, but finding it ought to be careful work. It should not be less careful work than Perry Miller, a drunkard, did. It should be more careful work. We ought to understand the dispositions explanations entail; we ought to understand the history of ideas (to have a better grasp on the spirit of the age which molds men’s minds); and probably several other things beside. And for these sorts of understanding, good historians like Perry Miller are invaluable.