itself. Gordis makes useful distinctions between Perkins’s emphasis on “the centrality of exegesis to sermon theory” and Bernard’s focus on
“the minister as interpreter and teacher.”38 Perkins’s relative emphasis on the relationship between scriptural exegesis and sermon composition (the interdependence of literal sense and plain style) suggests an explanation of why Puritan preaching manuals essentially seem to offer negative dictates (for example, not to go beyond the text, not to chase down fourfold exegesis, not to indulge in digressions of mere wit and foreign phraseology).39 Returning to Perkins’s handy list, we see that the first two directives (“To read the text” and “To give the sense and understanding of it”) are premised on the primacy of the literal sense of scripture and a faith that, as Bernard puts it, “No Scripture is in itselfe obscure, but that wee want eie-sight to behold what is therein conteined.”40 The practiced skill of the preacher, then, resides in the next two tasks of gathering doctrine (“out of the naturall sense”) and applying it to lived experience (“if he have the gift”). The series of negative dictates expressed as prescriptive formula imply something more akin to proscription.
From a theological perspective, the directives of plain-style explication accommodate the strenuous Protestant insistence on the five solas. A commitment to sola fide might be sought by the three closely related principles of solus christus, sola gratia, and soli deo gloria (only through Christ, by grace alone, and only for the glory of God, respectively), but sola scriptura suggests a potentially competing logic of salvation. As James Simpson has observed, sola fide and sola scriptura exist in Protestant thought in uneasy opposition.41 Which is it that will save you? Is it faith alone, a phenomenon that, after all, is an extratextual, likely passive, and possibly predetermined event? Or is your salvation textual, based on your reading of the Bible, with all the vagaries of its contingent wordiness? Conventional wisdom and scholarly tradition have long privileged a view of the Reformation in which the turn toward vernacular scripture and away from hierarchical church structures empowered Protestants in matters of salvation and selfhood. The need to distinguish a literal sense in the Bible highlights the concept of scripture as an accommodation for fallen human intellect. We need the scripture because we are fallen; yet, precisely because we are fallen, we need help in understanding scripture. The five solas, then, function as reminders of human debility even as they offer salvation from that fallen state. These premises of debility are at the core of the negative dictates of Puritan writing—the plain style, the literal sense, the formulaic aspects of sermon composition. One might reasonably expect these premises and dictates to restrain literary production—not only in terms of quantity of spoken, written, and printed texts but in terms of what efficacy is expected from those human words. This expectation is shattered by the excesses of Puritan literary output: the sermon continua on a single passage that lasts weeks, months, or even years; the potentially infinite branching capacity of Ramist logic structures; the physical heft of a printed sermon cycle; the obsessive quality of notetaking and self-writing.
The apparent preference for restraint in plain style might begin with the Puritan insistence upon the literal sense. Reiterating the Protestant rejection of the “4. senses of the scriptures, the literall, allegoricall, tropological, & anagogical”—a trend that begins at least with William Tyndale in the first half of the sixteenth century—William Perkins insists in his Arte of Prophecying: “There is one onelie sense, and the same is the literall.” Those senses that have come to be called “Anagoge and Tropologie are waies, whereby the sense may be applied.”42 Certainly, this is largely a matter of semantics; Perkins can retain the hermeneutic scope of the three traditional nonliteral senses if he just recasts them as “application.” Nevertheless, the implications of a single literal sense that unifies all moral, spiritual, and eschatological aspects in its historical truth have created profound repercussions from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers to present-day Fundamentalists, as Simpson has recently argued.43 Perkins tells us that the “principall interpreter of the Scripture is the holy Ghost,” essentially arguing for a self-explicating text. The problem is, of course, that those “dark places” in scripture44 are not merely spaces for deeper contemplation but also potential sites of confusion, doubt, controversy, intolerance, and violence. Sola scriptura, as Simpson points out, is surely as terrifying as it is comforting.
In his preface to the New Testament in English, William Tyndale urges the reader to partake but also points out that the vernacular Bible functions like a crucible. The elect are saved by reading, and the reprobates are damned by the same act.45 Thus conceived, the vernacular Bible was not a simple self-help book.
Many standard dictates associated with Reformation—sola fide, sola scrip-tura, and literal sense in particular—frustrate in part because they suggest a closed interpretive system. In her extensive treatment of Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History, Babette May Levy refers to “an occasional tendency” on the part of Puritan ministers to argue circularly—to maintain, for example, “that a just God by his very nature has certain attributes, and, having these attributes, is therefore a just God; or that man by his sinful nature fell from grace, and, having fallen, was therefore obviously sinful.” Despite the fact that the “modern non-believer in Puritanism” will find such reasoning unsatisfactory and unconvincing, Levy assures her reader that “individual points of doctrine and usually individual sermons remain lucid in the sense that there is rarely any doubt about what the minister thought and wished his reader to think.”46 Within the system is interpretive clarity and salvation; outside the system is ambiguity and damnation. In The Arte of Prophecying, William Perkins offers the reader both the substance and evidence of scripture’s gospel truth in a single proof:
| *The Maior, or Proposition.*The Minor, or Assumption.*The conclusion. | The Summe of the Scripture is conteined in such a syllogisme (or forme of reading, as this is which followeth.). *The true Messias shall be both God and man of the seede of David; he shall be borne of a Virgin; he shall bring the Gospell forth of his Fathers bosome; he shall satisfie the Law; he shall offer up himselfe a sacrifice for the sinnes of the faithfull; he shall conquer death by dying and rising againe; he shall ascend into heaven; and in his due time hee shall returne unto judgement. But * Iesus of Nazaret the Sonne of Mary is such a one; He * therefore is the true Messias.47 |
Within the proof by reason is proof by faith. Perkins concedes that although there exist “verie strong proofes, which show that the [scripture] is the word of God,” “there is onlie one, namely the inward testimony of the holy Ghost speaking in the Scripture, and not only telling a man within in [sic] his heart, but also effectually perswading him that these bookes of the Scripture are the word of God.”48 So while the proof of Jesus Christ as the true messiah can be demonstrated with formal logic, a previous acceptance of the conclusion and its terms is necessary to make the syllogism work. Then again, Perkins would never expect this or any intellectual syllogism to cause belief. The mistake is to suppose that the various examples of circular reasoning met with in Puritan texts are meant to be convincing on their own. It is the heart, not the intellect, that needs convincing.
To the extent that Puritanism is a closed system, its dictates short-circuit a clear theory or an explanation of language. In his study of the grammatical origins of Reformation theology, Brian Cummings points out that “the phrase ‘literal truth’ is at best a paradox, perhaps an oxymoron.”49 Etymologically, to say something is literal is to reference its manifestation in letters (or, synecdochally, language). To say, then, that truth does manifest itself in the contingencies of language flies in the face of theories from the Greeks to the early Christians and on down that make much of the difference between res (the thing itself ) and verba (words). Furthermore, one of the obstacles to understanding the effectual working of the sermon is the seeming paradox of its theory and practice: disproportionate human technology of branching explication and iterative dissemination
