laudable Practice

We first encountered the Dutch Remonstrant theologian Episcopius early in Nelson's Life of Dr. George Bull , with the young Bull subversively reading him while under the care of a Calvinistic tutor during the Interregnum. The Remonstrant thinker, said Nelson, "preserved [the young Bull] from the bad Principles of those Times, and directed his Understanding in distinguishing Truths of very great Importance".  Episcopius now reappears as Nelson explores Bull's  Defensio Fidei Nicaenae : the context, however, is much more critical of the great Remonstrant. Part of Bull's motivation in writing this work was, Nelson states, to challenge a tendency amongst Remonstrant writers, while rejecting Socinian error, to yet critique the Council of Nicaea: It is plain Episcopius was far from being a Socinian, as our Author truly observeth, having expresly written against, and solidly overthrown the fundamental Article of Socinianism; and endeavoured from the Testimony of Scriptu...

Having considered the account given by Nelson, in his 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull , of the controversy following the 1669 publication of Bull's Harmonia Apostolica , we now turn to one particular aspect of that controversy, the involvement of a leading Dissenting divine: Some time after this, Mr. Daniel Williams, now a Doctor in Divinity, and an eminent Preacher and Writer in this City, among the Presbyterians, made himself famous for managing the Controversy against the Anti-Antinomian Principles, when they were breaking in with great impetuosity among those of his Persuasion. Williams (b.1643, d.1716), who refused to conform in 1662, was described by Nelson as standing in the line of Baxter's thought - in his  Aphorisms of Justification (1655) - regarding the necessity of works for our salvation, as against those whom Bull critiqued as 'Antinomians':  Dr. Williams may be said to have succeeded Mr. Baxter, in the Management of these Disputes, as he also incurred ther...

Robert Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull  provides a good introduction to an oft misunderstood, if not overlooked, divine of the 18th century Church of England. Beginning with the Tractarians, Bull was portrayed as a proto-Anglo-catholic: a quite ridiculous view of a very obviously Protestant theologian. More recently, the retrieval of the Reformed tradition in the post-1662 Church of England tends to employ Bull as a foil for a vibrant Reformed orthodoxy. This is the role of Bull, for example, in Samuel Fornecker's excellent exploration of Arminian Conformity in the late 17th and early 18th century Church of England. Here Bull - who was regarded himself as a defender of Nicene faith - stands in a line of heterodox thought which resulted in Samuel Clarke's anti-Trinitarian theology.  Nelson's Life provides a necessary corrective to such views. Nelson was - until he conformed in 1710 - a Nonjuror. As such, he was a robust opponent of heterodoxy, most obviously seen...

From Bishop Bull's sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', an extract illustrating how Wisdom 3:1 was understood as summarising the Scriptural hope for the post-mortem state, over and against the teaching of purgatory: even in the Old Testament, we have a full testimony given to this truth, that the soul subsists after the death of the body, by Solomon, where, describing man's death and dissolution, he saith, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."  Whereas man consists of two parts, body and soul, the condition of these two, when a man dies, will be very different: for the body being at first taken out of the dust of the earth, and so of a corruptible constitution, shall go back into the earth again, and moulder into dust; but the soul, as it is of another and more excellent original, (as being at first inspired immediately by God Himself into the body,) shall not perish with the body,...

From Bishop Bull's sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', an extract rejecting both the doctrine of purgatory and speculative theories about the post-mortem state, resting instead in a conventionally Reformed understanding of "the plain doctrine of the Holy Scriptures", with no need to go beyond the "modesty of the apostolic Doctors". Bull here echoes how the Prayer Book Burial of Dead - a graveside prayer of which is quoted in this extract - rests in the promises of Scripture and eschews fanciful speculations: I have shewn you, that the Apostolic writers were wont to express the different place and state of good and bad men presently after death, by this and the like phrases, that they went to their "own proper, due," or "appointed places": that is, to places agreeable to their respective qualities, the good to a place of happiness, the wicked to a place and state of misery ... I have now said all that I can think necess...