Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

denominations was not their distinctiveness, but that nominal Christians were allowed to rule
in them. Nominal Christians do not „adhere to Jesus as the Lamb of God.‟ As soon as two
persons of different denominations come together in the Lamb „and have one heart, nothing
can keep them from being agreed.‟
In the 17 th and 18 th Centuries reason became elevated to an almost divine position among
many philosophers. This trend was seen in Protestantism, where logic was expected to rule
theology as it ruled Mathematics and Science. While there could be agreement that the
doctrine of the Trinity could not be explained mathematically (though failure to do so led to
the founding of a Unitarian movement under Theophilus Lindsey and Joseph Priestly), there
was no such agreement in other areas of theology, especially not in the case of the doctrine of
election. The hyper-Calvinists, like John Gill, pressed the logic of the sovereignty of God to a
supra-lapsarian 93 position and gave no room at all to human endeavour in one‟s justification
before God. The Arminians held that was reasonable to hold to free will and man‟s
cooperation with God in working out one‟s salvation.
By the 18 th Century, distinctive doctrines (especially those smacking of „enthusiasm‟) were
regarded with suspicion, and it might have been thought that the age was ripe for the
broadness of a Latitudinarian 94 church to give rise to some movement towards unity and
harmony. But hopes of visible unity came to nothing. Churchmen and Dissenters actually
talked about steps to unity. Rouse and Neill point out that two of the leading churchmen of
the Georgian church, Joseph Butler (1692-1752) and Thomas Secker (1693-1768) had both,
though Anglicans, received their theological education in Dissenting academies. Philip
Doddridge (1702-1751), a leader of the Independents, had imbibed much of the irenical
spirit of Richard Baxter and initiated discussions with Churchmen. Secker wrote to
Doddridge that there were many Churchmen, indeed, all the bishops, in his opinion, who
wanted union with Dissenters, yet he could add, „But still I see not the least prospect of it.‟
Isaac Watts (1647-1748), the pioneer hymn-writer, welcomed Presbyterian and Baptist
Dissenters to have communion in his Congregational (Independent) church.
On the Continent, in 1711, Dr Ernst Jablonski, a Moravian bishop, supported the plan of the
King of Prussia, Frederic I, to unite Lutherans and Reformed in his domains by introducing
bishops to the churches by means of the English episcopate. The deaths soon afterwards of
those involved, the King, John Sharpe, who was Archbishop of York, and Queen Anne,
resulted in the failure of the project.
William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury (1657-1737), fostered hopes of some sort of
union with the Anglican Church and even lived in Paris for a while as English chaplain. In
93 The sub-lapsarian maintains that God devised His scheme of redemption after the „lapse‟ or fall of
Adam, when He elected some to salvation and left others to run their course. The supra-lapsarian
maintains that all this was ordained by God from the foundation of the world, and that therefore the
eternal destiny of each person was settled before the „lapse‟ or fall of Adam.
94 Latitudinarian. Any of the 17 th Century Anglican clerics whose beliefs and practices were viewed
by conservatives as unorthodox or, at best, heterodox. After first being applied to the Cambridge
Platonists, the term was later used to categorize churchmen who depended upon reason rather than
argument from tradition to establish the moral certainty of Christian doctrines. Limiting that doctrine
to what had to be accepted, they allowed for latitude on other teachings. The Latitudinarians thus
became the precursors of the similar Broad Church movement in the 19 th Century Church of England.
Page 90