John Selden

The life of John Selden (1584–1654) was both contemplative and active. Seventeenth-century England’s most learned person, he continued in the Long Parliament of the 1640s his vigorous opposition, begun in the 1620s, to the abuses of power, whether by Charles I or, later, by the Presbyterian-controlled Westminster Assembly. His gift for finding analogies among different cultures—Greco-Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—helped to transform both the poetry and prose of the century’s greatest poet, John Milton. Regarding family law, the two might have influenced one another. Milton cites Selden, and Selden owned two of Milton’s treatises on divorce, published in 1645, both of them presumably acquired while he was writing Uxor Ebraica (1646). Selden accepted the non-biblically rabbinic, externally imposed, coercive Adamic/Noachide precepts as universal laws of perpetual obligation, rejecting his predecessor Hugo Grotius’ view of natural law as the innate result of right reason. He employed rhetorical strategies in De Jure Naturali et Gentium (“The Law of Nature and of Nations”) to prepare his readers for what might otherwise have shocked them: his belief in classic rabbinic law (halakha) as authoritative testimony. Although Selden was very active in the Long Parliament, his only surviving debates from that decade were as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The Assembly’s scribe left so many gaps that the transcript is sometimes indecipherable. This book fills in the gaps and makes the speeches coherent by finding their contexts in Selden’s printed works, both the scholarly, as in the massive De Synedriis, but also in the witty and informal Table Talk.

Conclusion

This draws conclusions based on John Selden’s acceptance of the Talmud as an authoritative source. His many references to Jewish ancestral custom and opinion reveal his understanding that ancient Talmudic traditions exist independent of the Bible, and of course these include the Adamic/Noachide laws. Despite its dubious historicity, Selden accepts the tradition of a seamless transmission of judicial authority in both sacred and civil issues from Moses to the time of the synedrion, which he regards as a model for Parliament. He regards the sages of the Talmud as legal scholars rather than as religious figures. In the fierce debates in the Westminster Assembly over Deuteronomy 17:8–10, the Presbyterians read the text literally, which gave priority in adjudication to the clergy, while Erastians like Selden followed the rabbinic interpretation, which favored those who were skilled in the law. The conclusion tries to explain why both Selden and Milton (at least in his divorce treatises and in the middle books of Paradise Lost) relied on simile and analogy rather than metaphor and typology. Milton would have found everything he needed to create the laws of paradise in Selden’s De Jure Naturali et Gentium, with its thousands of marginal references and its method of giving a fair hearing to all opinions.

Making Law and Recording It: Part I

This chapter analyzes Selden’s contribution to the struggle to define the reach of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the mid-1640s, as Presbyterians in the Westminster Assembly of Divines fought to have the power to exclude the “ignorant” and “scandalous” from communion. For Selden, the issue of excommunication turned—as it had in his handling of the topic of an ecclesiastical right to tithes—on the question of whether the clergy’s authority was God-given or man-made. The final section of the chapter suggests that Milton’s position on excommunication can only be indirectly inferred from his writings—in particular from his poem “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” which explicitly attacks the Assembly on plurality and the grouping of English churches in classes. Selden acknowledged that the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise might be construed as an “excommunication,” a cursing or anathemata. But Milton, who would become the great English poet of exile, failed to take the imaginative leap that would connect exile with excommunication.

Making Law and Recording It: Part II

John Selden’s historico-philological approach tends to prove that religious authority has its origins in civil institutions and their legal procedures, and to that extent his “literary” (philological) encounter with ancient texts helps determine the nature of law. Selden was an active member of the Long Parliament, chairing or serving on many committees, but there are very few transcripts of his speeches and none of his debates on the floor of the House of Commons. His only surviving debates from that decade took place in the Westminster Assembly of Divines, to which he was appointed by Parliament as a lay member. That makes them especially valuable. Even so, many of the transcripts are so lacunose that they are indecipherable as they appear in those volumes. This chapter is devoted to filling in the gaps and making the speeches coherent by finding their contexts in Selden’s scholarly works.

The Westminster Standards

The Westminster Standards were penned at the end of England’s second Reformation, and symbolized the high-water mark of Protestant scholasticism. The cluster of 1640s texts both codified prior developments in Reformed doctrine and standardized theological vocabulary, with the result that they have played an enduring role in the history of theology. This chapter addresses the unique contributions of the Larger and Shorter Catechisms and the flow and coherence of the Westminster Confession of Faith. Doctrinal topics, and the manner in which the Westminster assembly linked these loci, are discussed, and themes which find their place throughout the Standards are given particular emphasis. Since soteriological concerns dominate the Standards, they are given special attention in this précis. Select revisions of the Standards are also discussed.

Presbyterians in the English Revolution

This chapter is concerned with English Presbyterians and Presbyterianism during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. It traces the emergence of an English Presbyterian position from the Puritan and nonconformist networks of the 1630s to the opening of the Westminster Assembly in 1643. The Westminster Assembly and the influence of the Scottish Covenanters are explored in the emergence of the Assembly’s Presbyterian platform. The chapter looks at the ‘Erastian’ controversy with the Long Parliament over the power of parochial presbyteries to suspend and excommunicate the sinful and ignorant from the Lord’s Supper. The issue of toleration and the Presbyterians’ opposition to the Long Parliament granting a wide liberty of conscience is also discussed. The chapter concludes by looking at how English Presbyterians fared under the Cromwellian Protectorate and their journey towards Dissent in the early Restoration.