The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

‘That God in his appointed time will bring forth the kingdom of the Lord Christ unto more glory and power than in former days, I presume you are persuaded. Whatever will be more, these six things are clearly promised:

1. Fulness of peace unto the gospel and the professors thereof, Isa. 11.6, 7, 54.13, 33.20, 2I Rev. 21.15.

2. Purity and beauty of ordinances and gospel worship, Rev. 11.2, 21.3. The tabernacle was wholly made by appointment, Mal. 3.3, 4; Zech. 14.16; Rev. 21.27; Zech. 14.20; Isa. 35.8.

3. Multitudes of converts, many persons, yea, nations, Isa. 60.7, 8, 66.8, 49.18—22; Rev. 7.9.

4. The full casting out and rejecting of all will-worship, and their attendant abominations, Rev. 11.2.

5. Professed subjection of the nations throughout the whole world unto the Lord Christ, Dan. 2.44, 7.26, 27; Isa. 60.6-9; — the kingdoms become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ (Rev. I I .I 5), amongst whom his appearance shall be so glorious, that David himself shall be said to reign.

6. A most glorious and dreadful breaking of all that rise in opposition unto him, Isa. 60. 12 — never such desolations, Rev. 16.17—19.’

JOHN OWEN ‘The Advantage of the Kingdom of Christ in the Shaking of the Kingdoms of the World’, A sermon to the Commons assembled in Parliament, 1651 (Works, vol 8, 334)

IN the turmoil of ideas which accompanied the Reformation of the sixteenth century it was inevitable that the question of unfulfilled prophecy should be reopened. The restoration of the Bible in pulpits and homes was in itself enough to make this certain. For long years the evangelical meaning of the Second Advent of Christ, and truths concerning the last things in general, had lain out of sight with the removal of the Scriptures from the common people. The future, both with respect to history and to eternity was a dark unknown. Purgatory cast its shadow upon life from the cradle to the grave. Anti-Christ remained unidentified, except in the convictions of some few Lollards or Waldensians. The Jews, despised and downtrodden, heard no word of hope from the professing Church, and the unevangelized world lying beyond the narrow borders of Christendom received no messengers of the gospel of peace.

None of these things could last once the Scriptures were uncovered. Prophecy was again examined and the onset of persecution caused believers to dwell all the more upon the prospects which that subject brought before them. Not without reason did John Knox describe the Christians of England, suffering in the reign of Mary Tudor, as those ‘that love the Coming of our Lord’. And yet it must at once be said that the Reformation period, save for restoring the certain hope of Christ’s Second Coming, did not establish for Protestantism a commonly accepted view of the unfulfilled prophecies which are to precede that coming. No unanimity was arrived at here as it was in many other areas of biblical truth. Luther, for example, regarded himself as living at the very close of history, with the Advent and Judgment immediately at hand. Others, on the outer fringe of orthodox Protestantism, ‘drew out of its grave’ (as a Puritan later complained against them) the belief common among some of the early Fathers, that Christ would appear and reign with his saints a thousand years in Jerusalem before the Judgment. From their emphasis on the word ‘thousand’ (Greek, chilias; Latin, mule), taken from Revelation, chapter 20, they were anciently called ‘chiliasts’ or ‘millenaries’. Calvin deemed this view ‘too puerile to need or to deserve refutation’. He has in turn been accused in more modern times of failing to animate his fellow-Christians by preaching and instruction to await patiently and in faith the establishment of the kingly rule that Jesus had promised in connexion with His Parousia’. This charge is true in so far as Calvin believed that Christ’s kingdom is already established, and, unlike Luther, he expected it to have a yet greater triumph in history prior to the consummation but it is false if it is understood to mean that Calvin did not proclaim the joyful expectation of Christ’s return. The latter he most certainly did, as one characteristic statement of the reformer’s is enough to show. Preaching in the great cathedral of St. Peter’s, Geneva, from the text, ‘The Lord grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord in that day’ (2 Tim. 1. 18), he dwells on the words ‘in that day’:

‘Let us learn to stretch out our hope, even to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . For if this hope do not reign in our hearts and sit as mistress there, we shall faint every minute of an hour. Will we therefore walk equally in God’s service? Before all things let us learn to fasten our eyes and stay them upon this last day, and upon this coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and know we that then there is a crown prepared for us, and let it not grieve us to be in great distress in the mean season, and to have many discommodities, to lead a painful and troublesome life, let us pass over all this, casting our eyes always upon this latter day, whereunto God calleth us, and indeed we see how Saint Paul speaks, In that day, saith he. No Christian man can read this text, but he must needs be touched to the quick. For we see that St. Paul was as it were ravished, when he spake of this coming of Jesus Christ and of the last resurrection. . . . Saint Paul, I say, spake not of these things coldly, nor according to man, but he was lifted up above all the world, that he might cry out, That day, That day!’

This central hope, then, the Reformers clearly asserted. It was in regard to other subjects bearing on unfulfilled prophecy that they left no united testimony. Several of these subjects received little attention from the first generation of Reformers and, with one exception, they were left for their successors to take up. The exception was the unanimous belief that the Papal system is both the ‘man of sin’ and the Babylonian whore of which Scripture forewarns (2 Thess. Rev. 19).” In the conviction of sixteenth-century Protestants Rome was the great Anti-Christ, and so firmly did this belief become established that it was not until the nineteenth century that it was seriously questioned by evangelicals.

One of the first developments in thought on prophecy came as further attention was given to the Scriptures bearing on the future of the Jews. Neither Luther nor Calvin saw a future general conversion of the Jews promised in Scripture; some of their contemporaries, however, notably Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr, who taught at Cambridge and Oxford respectively in the reign of Edward VI, did understand the Bible to teach a future calling of the Jews. In this view they were followed by Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva. As early as 1560 four years before Calvin’s death, the English and Scots refugee Protestant leaders who produced the Geneva Bible, express this belief in their marginal notes on Romans chapter 11, verses 15 and 26. On the latter verse they comment, ‘He sheweth that the time shall come that the whole. nation of the Jews, though not every one particularly, shall be joined to the church of Christ.’ .

The first volume in English to expound this conviction at some length was the translation of Peter Martyr’s Commentary upon Romans, published in London in 1568.The probability is strong that Martyr’s careful exposition of the eleventh chapter prepared the way for a general adoption amongst the English Puritans of a belief in the future conversion of the Jews. Closely linked as English Puritanism was to John Calvin it was the view contained in Martyr’s commentary which was received by the rising generation of students at Cambridge.

Among those students was Hugh Broughton (1549-1612) who had the distinction of being the first Englishman to propose going as a missionary to the Jews in the Near East, and also the first to propose the idea of translating the New Testament into Hebrew for the sake of the Jews. Broughton’s ardour for the conversion of the Jews found no sympathy, however, with the English bishops whom he had early offended by his Puritan leanings. Though given no preferment in the English Church he was so well known in the East on account of his learning that the Chief Rabbi of Constantinople wrote to him in 1599 and subsequently invited him to become a public teacher there! This early possibility of a mission to the Jews was thwarted by the Church authorities, but Broughton’s writings — of which the best known was probably his Commentary on Daniel, 1596 —stimulated further study of the whole question.

Broughton was too much an individualist ever to become a leader of the Puritan movement. Two years before he was ejected from his fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1579, William Perkins had entered the same college, a man whom we noted earlier as doing so much to influence the thinking of many who were to preach all over England. Perkins speaks plainly of a future conversion of the Jews: ‘The Lord saith, All the nations shall be blessed in Abraham: Hence I gather that the nation of the Jews shall be called, and converted to the participation of this blessing: when, and how, God knows: but that it shall be done before the end of the world we know.’ The same truth was opened by the succession of Puritan leaders at Cambridge who followed Perkins, including Richard Sibbes and Thomas Goodwin. In his famous book, The Bruised Reed, mentioned earlier in connection with Baxter’s conversion, Sibbes writes:

‘The Jews are not yet come in under Christ’s banner; but God, that hath persuaded Japhet to come into the tents of Shem, will persuade Shem to come into the tents of Japhet, Gen. 9.27. The “fulness of the Gentiles is not yet come in”, Rom. 11.25, but Christ, that hath the “utmost parts of the earth given him for his possession”, Psa. 2.8, will gather all the sheep his Father hath given him into one fold, that there may be one sheepfold and one shepherd, John 10. 16.

‘The faithful Jews rejoiced to think of the calling of the Gentiles; and why should not we joy to think of the calling of the Jews?’

This note of joy is significant. It had already been struck by Peter Martyr. If a widespread conversion of the Jews was yet to occur in the earth then the horizons of history were not, as Luther feared, wholly dark. Maintaining the truth that the great day for the Church would be the day of Christ’s appearing at the end of time, Sibbes nevertheless saw warrant for expecting what he calls ‘lesser days before that great day’. He continues:

‘As at the first coming of Christ, so at the overthrow of Anti-Christ, the conversion of the Jews, there will be much joy.... These days make way for that day. Whensoever prophecies shall end in performances, then shall be a day of joying and glorying in the God of our salvation for ever. And therefore in the Revelation where this Scripture is cited, Rev. 21.4, is meant the conversion of the Jews, and the glorious estate they shall enjoy before the end of the world. “We have waited for our God,” and now we enjoy him. Aye, but what saith the church there? “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.” There is yet another, “Come, Lord”, till we be in heaven.’

From the first quarter of the seventeenth century, belief in a future conversion of the Jews became commonplace among the English Puritans. In the late 1630’s, and in the national upheavals of the 1640’s — the period of the Civil Wars — the subject not infrequently was mentioned by Puritan leaders.

As a ground for hopefulness in regard to the prospects of Christ’s kingdom it was introduced in sermons before Parliament or on other public occasions by William Strong, William Bridge, George Gillespie and Robert Baillie, to name but a few. The fact that the two last-named were commissioners from the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at the Westminster Assembly, which was convened by the English Parliament in 1643, is indicative of the agreement on this point between English and Scottish divines. Some of the rich doctrinal formularies which that Assembly produced, bear the same witness. The Larger Catechism, after the question, ‘What do we pray for in the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer?’ (Thy Kingdom come), answers: ‘We pray that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, the fulness of the Gentiles brought in ... that Christ would rule in our hearts here, and hasten the time of his second coming.’ The Directory for the Public Worship of God (section on Public Prayer before Sermon) stipulates in similar language that prayer be made ‘for the conversion of the Jews’.

This same belief concerning the future of the Jews is to be found very widely in seventeenth-century Puritan literature. It appears in the works of such well-known Puritans as John Owen, Thomas Manton and John Flavel, though the indices of nineteenth-century reprints of their works do not always indicate this. It is also handled in a rich array of commentaries, both folios and quartos — David Dickson on the Psalms, George Hutcheson on the Minor Prophets, Jeremiah Burroughs on Hosea, William Greenhill on Ezekiel, Elnathan Parr on Romans and James Durham on Revelation: a list which could be greatly extended.

Occasionally the subject became the main theme of a volume. Perhaps the first in order among these was The Calling of the Jews, published in 1621 by William Gouge, the eminent Puritan minister of Blackfriars, London; the author was a barrister, Sir Henry Finch. A slender work, Some Discourses upon the Point of the Conversion of the Jews, by Moses Wall, appeared in 1650, and nineteen years later Increase Mather, the New England divine of Boston, issued his work, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation Explained and Applied. ‘That there shall be a general conversion of the Tribes of Israel is a truth which in some measure hath been known and believed in all ages of the Church of God, since the Apostles’ days….. Only in these late days, these things have obtained credit much more universally than heretofore.’ So Mather wrote in 1669.

By this latter date, however, divergencies of view had also become established within Puritan thought on prophecy, and to these we must now turn. They centre around those scriptural prophecies which appear to speak of a general conversion of the nations. The first expositors of a future conversion of Israel, Peter Martyr and William Perkins for instance, had placed that event very close to the end of time. Martyr interpreted the word ‘fulness’ in Paul’s statement, ‘blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in’ (Rom. 11.25) to mean that Christ’s kingdom among the Gentiles will have reached its fullest development, indeed its consummation, by the time that Israel is called. By the conversion of the Jews, he says, the churches will ‘be stirred and confirmed’, but the thought that thereafter many more Gentiles will be converted is not possible, Martyr argues, for ‘it is said, that the Jews shall then be saved and enter in, when the fulness of the Gentiles hath entered in. And if the calling of the Gentiles shall be complete, what other Gentiles shall there be remaining to be by the conversion of the Jews brought unto Christ?’

Thomas Brightman (1562—1607) seems to have been one of the first divines of the Puritan school to reject the argument that the Jews’ conversion must be placed at the very end of history. Brightman was a contemporary of Perkins at Cambridge and a fellow of Queens’ College before his appointment to the living of Hawnes, Bedfordshire, in 1592. With his Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, A Revelation of the Apocalypse (first published in Latin in the year of his death and later in English) he stands at the head of the long line of subsequent English commentators on that book. For Brightman the Revelation gives a chronological outline of church history: events up to the 14th chapter he considered were already fulfilled; the 15th commences to deal with things yet to come; while the 20th gives a summary in which ‘the whole history is repeated’. In the course of this exposition the Elizabethan Puritan gives considerable attention to the future prospects of the Jews: ‘I have set down these things with more store of words, because I would give our Divines an occasion of thinking more seriously of these things.’

Brightman’s work confirmed the view that the Jews would be called, but in addition it brought forward considerations concerning the time of their conversion which tended to show that the matter was not so conclusively settled as Martyr had considered. Though there would be a certain fulness of the Gentiles made up before the salvation of Israel, this does not necessitate the belief that no more Gentiles can be added; Paul himself Brightman argues, implies the contrary in verse 15 of Romans 11.15 The Jews’ calling, he believed, would be part of a new and brighter era of history, and not the end.

In the earliest and most popular Puritan exposition of Romans, the Plain Exposition of Elnathan Parr, published in 1620, it is interesting to note a development in the same direction. Parr was educated at Eton, graduated B.A. at Cambridge in 1597 and exercised a powerful ministry at Palgrave, Suffolk, dying about the year 1632. In handling chapter eleven he is in major agreement with Martyr and refers to his work. But over the prospects for the world at the time of Israel’s future calling he does not accept the Continental divine’s interpretation that the ‘fulness of the Gentiles’, preceding the Jews’ call, means that God’s saving work among the Gentiles will then be complete:

‘The casting off of the Jews, was our Calling; but the Calling of the Jews shall not be our casting off, but our greater enriching grace, and that two ways: First, in regard of the company of believers, when the thousands of Israel shall come in, which shall doubtless cause many Gentiles which now lie in ignorance, error and doubt, to receive the Gospel and join with them. The world shall then be a golden world, rich in golden men, saith Ambrose. Secondly, in respect of the graces, which shall then in more abundance be rained down upon the Church.” In 1627, seven years after Parr’s commentary appeared, further impetus was given to the expectation of world-wide blessing connected with the calling of the Jews, by the appearance of a Latin work by John Henry Alsted, The Beloved City. Alsted poses his main question in these words, ‘Whether there shall be any happiness of the Church here upon earth before the last day; and of what kind it shall be?’ From a consideration of some sixty-six places in the Scriptures he resolves this question in the affirmative and gives the following outline of the Church’s history during the course of the Christian era:

1.From Christ’s birth to the Council of Jerusalem, A.D. 50.

2.The second period is of the Church spread over the whole world and contains the calling and conversion of most nations.

3.From the beginning of the thousand years to the end thereof and it shall contain, as well as the martyrs that shall then rise, the nations not yet converted, and the Jews; and it shall be free from persecutions.

4.From the end of the thousand years to the last judgment. In which the estate of the Church shall be very miserable…..

It will be seen immediately that Alsted identifies the period of the Church’s highest development on earth, when the Jews will be called, with the millennium of Revelation 20. The most prevalent view hitherto was that the thousand years’ reign of Christ was his spiritual rule over the Church in this world —a symbolic picture of the whole period between Christ’s first and second advents. According to this traditional view, Christians of every generation share in Christ’s spiritual reign; they have ‘part in the first resurrection’ (Rev. 20.5), that is to say, they are people who have been quickened in regeneration. This spiritualization of the word ‘resurrection’ is not without support from other Scriptures. For instance, Christ, speaking of the present gospel era, says, ‘The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live’ (John 5.25).

This interpretation, popularized by Augustine, was now being challenged. In Alsted’s view the thousand years was literal not simply a symbolic figure — and the resurrection to mark its commencement was likewise to be literal. This new position on Revelation 20 soon gained influence in England, particularly through the writings of Joseph Mede (1586—1638), a learned Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Mede, like Alsted who influenced him, argued that the millennium is a future period of time, and he went further with the suggestion that it would be ushered in by a personal appearing of Christ —a ‘pre-millennial’ coming.’

Despite the general cautiousness of these two scholars, they both encouraged the practice of date-fixing and in the general excitement of the 1640’s — the Civil War period — the question whether Christ’s coming to establish a ‘millennial kingdom’ was near at hand was agitated by men of considerably less competence than Mede and Alsted. The end product was ‘the Fifth Monarchy’ party, so called because they believed that Christ’s monarchy, succeeding the four spoken of by Daniel, was shortly to be set up, with the Jews converted and the millennium brought in. Thomas Fuller, in his Worthies of England, published in 1662 when this party was thoroughly discredited, comments pithily: ‘I dare boldly say that the furious factors for the Fifth Monarchy hath driven that nail which Master Mede did first enter, farther than he ever intended it; and doing it with such violence that they split the truths round about it. Thus, when ignorance begins to build on that foundation which learning hath laid, no wonder if there be no uniformity in such a mongrel fabric.”

* * *

We have traced in these last few pages a sequence and development of ideas which may be enumerated as follows: (1) the Jews to be converted; (2) their calling to be associated with a further expansion of the Church and therefore not to be at the end; (3) a fuller development and future prosperity of the Church to be identified with the thousand years’ peace of Revelation 20 and (4) Christ himself to inaugurate this future reign and raise his saints.

It is important now to notice that these beliefs are not so necessarily related as to stand or fall together. The majority of Puritan divines believed that the scriptural evidence was broad enough to warrant an acceptance of points one and two above. Some considered that point three was correct, but that the ‘resurrection’ to usher in the millennium was not to be taken literally; it refers, they thought, to the spiritual resurrection of the Church’s influence in the world which will then be witnessed. This identification of the Church’s time of highest development with a spiritual millennium was to command very wide support in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Protestantism. Whether right or wrong, no major difference exists between those who accepted this refinement of point three and those who only went as far as point two. Sometimes those who accepted point three, in the sense just given, have been termed ‘millenaries’ or ‘chiliasts’, but Millenarianism proper is the view represented by point four and it is here that a radical difference is involved. According to this teaching the Church’s brightest era is to differ from the present not simply in terms of degree but in kind. That is to say, it will be more than a larger measure of the spiritual blessings already given to the church; by Christ’s personal appearing and the resurrection of saints an altogether new order of things is to be established. Christ will then reign in a manner not now seen or known. To this conclusion Mede’s teaching pointed and from it Puritanism, generally, diverged.

The reason for this divergence was the unwillingness of the majority to be committed to a prophetic scheme which virtually made Revelation 20, a notoriously difficult chapter; the axis of interpretation. Thus Elnathan Parr, while speaking of the future blessing promised in Romans 11 declines to employ Revelation 20 on account of its obscurity, though he notes that some have done so. Likewise John Owen with characteristic caution writes:

‘The coming of Christ to reign here on earth a thousand years is, if not a groundless opinion, yet so dubious and uncertain as not to be admitted a place in the analogy of faith to regulate our interpretation of Scripture in places that may fairly admit of another application.’

We must therefore note that it was not upon a Millenarian basis that the Puritan movement in general believed in the conversion of the Jews and a period of world-wide blessing. The belief was already common long before the challenge of Millenarianism became noticeable in the 1640’s, and, while the two sides held common ground in that both believed there are various passages in the Old and New Testaments warranting the expectation of future blessing for the world, men of the main Puritan school were quick to assert in answer to that challenge that those scriptures needed no pre-millennial interpretation of Revelation 20 to make their sense clear. Thus Robert Baillie answers a pre-millennial writer who had appealed to Romans 11.12 (where Paul writes of the Jews, ‘If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?) in this way:

‘There is nothing here for the point in hand: we grant willingly that the nation of the Jews shall be converted to the faith of Christ; and that the fulness of the Gentiles is to come in with them to the Christian Church; also that the quickening of that dead and rotten member, shall be a matter of exceeding joy to the whole Church. But that the converted Jews shall return to Canaan to build Jerusalem, that Christ shall come from heaven to reign among them for a thousand years, there is no such thing intimated in the Scriptures in hand.’

Thomas Hall in his pungent little book, A Confutation of the Millenarian Opinion, 1657, makes this same point in dealing with a certain Dr. Homes whose argument he summarizes and answers in the following terms:

‘Those things which are prophesied in the Word of God and are not yet come to pass, must be fulfilled, (very true.) But the great sensible and visible happiness of the Church on earth before the Ultimate Day of Judgement is prophesied in the Word of God, which is the Old and New Testament (very true,) ergo, it shall come to pass; who ever denied it? But what is this to the point in hand? Or what Logick is this? Because in the last dayes the Jews shall be called, and because the Glorious Spiritual Priviledges of the Church shall then be advanced, Ergo, Christ and the saints alone shall reign on earth a thousand years. This is the Drs Logick you see from first to last.’

We are now in a position to see how this somewhat prolonged discussion of Puritan thought on prophecy relates to the subject of revival. If the calling of the Jews and a wider conversion work in the world is to occur without such cataclysmic acts as personal descent of Christ and the resurrection of saints, by what means will these blessings be brought to pass? The answer of the main Puritan school became a most important part of the heritage which they left to posterity. It was that the kingdom of Christ would spread and triumph through the powerful operations of the Holy Spirit poured out upon the Church in revivals. Such periods would come at the command of Christ, for new Pentecosts would show him still to be ‘both Lord and Christ’. Their whole Calvinistic theology of the gospel, with its emphasis on the power given to Christ as Mediator for the sure ingathering of the vast number of his elect, and on the person of the Holy Spirit as the One by whom the dead are quickened, dovetails in here. They rejected altogether a naturalistic view of inevitable progress in history —so common in the nineteenth century — but asserted that the sovereign purpose of God in the gospel, as indicated by the promises of Scripture yet unfulfilled, points to the sure hope of great outpourings of the Spirit in the future. It was upon such central beliefs as these that the Puritans based their expectations. John Howe, for instance, exemplifies their common attitude when he dealt with unfulfilled prophecy in a series of fifteen sermons on Ezekiel 39.29: ‘Neither will I hide my face any more from them: for I have poured out my Spirit upon the house of Israel, saith the Lord God.’ The series was posthumously published under the title, The Prosperous State of the Christian Interest before the End of Time by a Plentiful Effusion of the Holy Spirit. As Howe’s emphasis on the work of the Spirit is so characteristic of Puritan thought I have included a lengthy extract from these sermons at the end of this book, though it may help the reader to appreciate what follows if it is read after this present chapter.

Throughout Puritan literature, embracing authors who followed ‘the independent way’ in church government and those who were of Presbyterian convictions, and as common in Scotland as in England, there is this emphasis upon the kingdom of Christ advancing through revivals. We shall later seek to show how the transmission of this belief to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became one of the most powerful influences in the spiritual history of Britain and America.

In conclusion, it may be helpful to attempt a summary of the different views on unfulfilled prophecy which were current among the main-line Puritans:

1. A small number continued the view current among the early Reformers that the Scriptures predict no future conversion of the Jews and that the idea of a ‘golden age’ in history is without biblical foundation. The most able spokesmen for this position were Alexander Petrie and Richard Baxter.

2. A larger number appear to have held the belief of Martyr and Perkins that the conversion of the Jews would be close to the end of the world. This was probably the dominant view at least until the 1640’s.

3. The attention drawn by such writers as Mede and Alsted to the millennium of Revelation 20, and to the Old Testament prophecies which appear to speak of a general conversion of the nations, led to a revived expectation of a pre-millerinial appearing of Christ, when Israel would be converted and Christ’s kingdom established in the earth for at least a thousand years before the day of judgment. Stated in its more moderate form this belief commanded the support of some of the Westminster divines (notably, William Twisse, Thomas Goodwin, William Bridge and Jeremiah Burroughs) ; in its wilder form it became identified with the Fifth Monarchy party. In all its forms, however, its influence seems to have been short-lived in the seventeenth century, and pre-millennial belief gained no general recognition in Protestantism until its revival two years later.

The fourth group, like the second, believed in a future conversion of Israel and opposed the idea of a millennium to be introduced by Christ’s appearing and a resurrection of saints. But, like the third group, they regarded Romans 11 and portions of Old Testament prophecy as indicating a period of widespread blessing both attending and following the calling of the Jews. The Confession of the Independents, The Savoy Declaration of 1658, summarizes this in its chapter ‘Of the Church’:

‘We expect that in the later days, Antichrist being destroyed, the Jews called, and the adversaries of the Kingdom of his dear Son broken, the Churches of Christ being inlarged, and edified through a free and plentiful communication of light and grace, shall enjoy in this world a more quiet, peaceable and glorious condition than they have enjoyed.’

This statement has been attributed to the millenarianism current among Independents in the late 1640’s, but it should be noted that the Savoy divines, among whom was John Owen, declined to identify this period of the Church’s highest development with the millennium. Moreover, this same belief was maintained by staunch Presbyterians as, for instance, Thomas Manton (author of the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ in the Westminster Confession), David Dickson and Samuel Rutherford. Before Rutherford met any of the English Independents he wrote from St. Andrews in 1640: ‘I shall be glad to be a witness, to behold the kingdoms of the world become Christ’s. I could stay out of heaven many years to see that victorious triumphing Lord act that prophesied part of his soul-conquering love, in taking into his kingdom the greater sister, that kirk of the Jews, who sometime courted our Well-beloved for her little sister (Cant. 8.8); to behold him set up as an ensign and banner of love, to the ends of the world.’ This was no millennialism as Rutherford was careful elsewhere to say, ‘I mean not any such visible reign of Christ on earth, as the Millenaries fancy.’

Forty years later this same belief was the common testimony of the Covenanting field-preachers who upheld the confession of the Church of Scotland in its purity during ‘the killing times’. Richard Cameron preached on July 18, 1680 just three days before his violent death on the moors at Ayrsmoss, from the text, ‘Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen: I will be exalted in the earth.’ (Psa. 46.10). To his hearers, gathered with him under the shadow of eternity, Cameron declared:

‘You that are in hazard for the truth, be not troubled: our Lord will be exalted among the heathen. But many will say, “We know He will be exalted at the last and great day when He shall have all the wicked on His left hand.” Yes but says He, “I will be exalted in the earth.” He has been exalted on the earth; but the most wonderfully exalting of His works we have not yet seen. The people of God have been right high already. Oh, but the Church of the Jews was sometimes very high, and sometimes the Christian Church! In the time of Constantine she was high. Yea, the Church of Scotland has been very high, “Fair as the moon, clear as the sun; and terrible as an army with banners.” The day has been when Zion was stately in Scotland. The terror of the Church of Scotland once took hold of all the kings and great men that passed by. Yea; the terror of it took hold on Popish princes; nay, on the Pope himself. But all this exalting that we have yet seen is nothing to what is to come. The Church was high, but it shall be yet much higher. “There is none like the God of Jeshurun.” The Church of Christ is to be so exalted that its members shall be made to ride upon the high places of the earth. Let us not be judged to be of the opinion of some men in England called the Fifth-Monarchy men, who say that, before the great day, Christ shall come in person from heaven with all the saints and martyrs and reign a thousand years on earth. But we are of the opinion that the Church shall yet be more high and glorious, as appears from the book of Revelation, and the Church shall have more power than ever she had before.’

The above four classifications cannot be taken as exact; they are an approximation. The Puritans, apart from the Fifth Monarchists — if they can be classed as Puritan at all — had no party divisions determined by prophetic beliefs. Yet the seventeenth century was the formative period of the differing schools of thought on prophecy which at a later date are more sharply identifiable. The fact that a present-day classification of evangelical prophetical belief would prove very similar seems to show that few new considerations have entered into the debate in the last three hundred years.

Having thus looked in general at Puritan thought on prophecy we shall now turn to a chapter of Scripture which lay at the heart of the matter.