Doctor of Divinity

CHAPTER 6 Doctor of Divinity

In the spring of 1654, Wallis performed the exercises required for the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and it was awarded to him in that year’s Act. The questions posed and his answers were later published in his Opera (hereafter, “Quaestiones Theologicae”).1 On 24–26 May 1654, Wallis delivered a series of three lectures in Latin (according to statute), choosing Paul’s epistle to Titus for his text. On 8 July he argued two of three proposed questions on the Saturday Vespers which preceded the commencement of the annual Act.2 Joshua Hoyle, a former member of the Westminster Assembly was the Regius Professor of Divinity who administered the exam.3 The three questions posed for Wallis’s doctor of divinity exam represent a summary of some of the most important issues to English Protestants in the middle of the seventeenth-century, and will serve here as a rubric for discussing Wallis as a theologian. The first, “Does divine election depend on the previous free act of the creature?”, addresses predestination, or, more specifically, the ordo salutis, and debates over Calvinist and Arminian interpretations of human free will and God’s sovereignty. The second, “Does the power of the Gospel minister extend to the members of only one particular church?”, is aimed at identifying the disputant’s views of church government. These questions seem to have been derived quite naturally from the sermons Wallis had delivered over a month before the Act. At the end of May, when he preached on Titus, he spoke explicitly of election and the divine decrees as well as ordination to the ministry and the ministerial office.4 The third, “Are the children of believers to be baptized?”, is concerned with wor- ship, particularly the sacraments, and covenant theology in general. Due to the focus of Paul’s epistle Wallis said little then on the nature of Christian wor- ship, so it is possible that the third question was the contribution of the Regius professor. Having exhausted his time on the first two questions, no answer was provided for the third.

1 OM 3(Misc).239–249. 2 The statutes allowed the candidate to choose from a range of texts or subjects to exposit, as well as the questions, so long as they were posted beforehand. See G. R. M. Ward, trans., Oxford University Statutes. Vol. 1. Containing the Caroline Code, or Laudian Statutes, Promulgated A.D. 1636 (London: William Pickering, 1845), 62–69. The lectures and questions were later published in OM 3(Misc).225–249. 3 Ward, Oxford Statutes, 62. 4 OM 3(Misc).226–27, 230.

The answers which Wallis provided (and later published) are a fitting summary of Wallis’s career as a theologian. Here we clearly see that Wallis car- ried the theology of Emmanuel College and the Westminster Assembly into his professorship in Oxford. But he was no slave to tradition since, as we will see below, he was willing to oppose colleagues on theological points, as well as creatively adapt some of the most crucial doctrines of the Reformation.

1 Dogmatics and the Distinctions of Reason

1.1 The Decrees of God Among those Protestants who subscribed to the Predestinarianism expressed in the Canons of the Synod of Dordt (1619), or the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), there was still room for disagreement on finer points. In particular, all those who called themselves Calvinists could yet be divided into three categories with respect to the order of the divine decrees. These positions were known then as Infralapsarianism, Supralapsarianism, and Amyraldianism.5 These differing positions arose by variously ordering God’s decrees made in the process of his foreordination of human destinies. The point of contention between infralapsarians and supralapsarians was whether God executed his decree of election before or after his decree to permit the Fall. The difference was important because it determined how one responded to the anti-Calvinist rebuttals of Roman Catholics and Arminians. The distinction between Infralapsarianism and Supralapsarianism was not known to the sixteenth-century reformers (in those terms), so it is neither possible nor wise to attempt to determine their views on this question.6 But by the seventeenth-century, as a result of debates with those such as Arminius, these distinctions had been made. Among English divines, Infralapsarianism seems to have been the standard view. It seemed reasonable to most that God would certainly not elect souls for salvation out of a pure mass, but out of a fallen race, otherwise election would seem totally unwarranted. God’s decrees, if they are to be ordered, ought to follow a logical order: creation, Fall, election,

5 Amyraldianism, or “hypothetical universalism”, was something of a minority and is beyond the scope of the present discussion. For a dogmatic presentation, see B. B. Warfield, The Plan of Salvation (Avinger, Tex.: Simpson, 1989), Ch. 5. For an excellent historical account germane to Wallis’s environment see Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). 6 B. B. Warfield, “Predestination in the Reformed Confessions,” in Studies in Theology, vol. 9 of The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, 10 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 230.