William Ames
English Puritan theologian and professor at Franeker whose Medulla Theologiae (The Marrow of Sacred Divinity) defined theology as the doctrine of living to God and served as a standard textbook in Reformed schools and early New England colleges.
Biography
William Ames (1576 to 1633) was an English Puritan theologian who spent the second half of his life in the Netherlands, where he taught theology at the University of Franeker and wrote the two Latin works, the Medulla Theologiae and De Conscientia, that carried his name across Reformed Europe and into colonial New England.
He was born at Ipswich, Suffolk, in 1576 and educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, where his tutor was William Perkins. He was elected a fellow of the college. After Perkins's death in 1602 Ames's Puritan convictions brought him into conflict with the college authorities: he refused to wear the surplice in chapel, and in a sermon preached in the university church in 1609 he attacked card-playing as an offense against the Christian life. The vice-chancellor suspended him from his ecclesiastical functions and from his degrees, and he left Cambridge soon afterward. He tried to settle as a pastor at Colchester but was forbidden to preach by the Bishop of London, and around 1610 he crossed to the Netherlands.
In Holland Ames made his name as a controversialist against the Remonstrants, engaging the Arminian minister Grevinchovius at Rotterdam. He married the daughter of Dr. Burgess, chaplain to Sir Horace Vere, commander of the English forces, and succeeded to the chaplaincy when Burgess resigned, though pressure from England later cost him the post. During the Synod of Dort (1618 to 1619) he was retained by the Calvinist party to observe the proceedings and give advice, and his Coronis ad Collationem Hagiensem (1618) answered the Remonstrant arguments. Archbishop Abbot blocked his appointment to head an English theological college at Leiden, but in May 1622 he took up the chair of theology at Franeker in Friesland.
The Franeker years were his most productive. He served as rector of the university in 1626, drew students from the Netherlands and from as far as Hungary and Poland, and published the Medulla Theologiae (first edition 1623), the Bellarminus Enervatus against Cardinal Bellarmine, and De Conscientia, eius Iure et Casibus (1630), a treatment of conscience and cases of conscience. Suffering from asthma, he moved in 1633 to Rotterdam to serve the English church there and to help found an English college. Shortly after his arrival the city was flooded; escaping from his house by night he contracted an illness and died on November 14, 1633. His widow and children later sailed for New England, taking his library with them, and his English readers received the Marrow of Sacred Divinity and Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof in translation in the years that followed.
Life & Career
Why Ames Matters
Ames matters because he gave Puritan theology a system. William Perkins had taught a generation of Cambridge men that divinity was a practical science, but it was his pupil Ames who compressed that teaching into a single, orderly textbook. The Medulla Theologiae opens with a definition that governs everything after it: theology is the doctrine of living to God. That opening move, placing practice inside the definition of theology rather than after it, runs through the whole Puritan tradition, and Ames stated it plainly at the very start of his system.
The method of the Marrow is Ramist. Following Peter Ramus, Ames divides each subject into two parts, then divides each part again, so that the whole body of divinity unfolds as an outline a student could memorize. The first book treats faith (what is to be believed about God, his decrees, creation, providence, the fall, redemption, and the church); the second treats observance (what is to be done). Within this frame Ames set out the covenant of works and the covenant of grace in a form that later Reformed writers, including Johannes Cocceius and Herman Witsius, would develop into full covenant theology.
His second major work, De Conscientia (1630, in English as Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof, 1639), applied the same principles to particular cases. Protestant teachers had long had to borrow from Roman Catholic casuists to answer hard questions of conduct; Ames's treatise supplied that lack from within Reformed theology and made the name Amesius a standard authority in moral philosophy.
The Marrow was read across the Reformed universities of the Continent, and in New England, where Ames's library and family arrived after his death, it became the foundational theology text at Harvard and later at Yale. Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and the Mathers all worked within the frame Ames built. Anyone reading the New England divines, or the English Puritans of the Westminster generation, is reading writers who learned their definitions from him.
