Theopedia

William Ames

“Divinity is the doctrine of living to God.”

William Ames, opening line of The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642)1

Overview

William Ames (1576-1633)2 was an English Puritan theologian, a pupil of William Perkins at Cambridge, who later taught theology at the University of Franeker in the Netherlands.3 He is remembered chiefly for the Medulla Theologiae (Latin, 1623; English The Marrow of Sacred Divinity/Marrow of Theology), a compact systematic theology built on his own definition of divinity as practical rather than merely speculative, and for Cases of Conscience, a manual of practical divinity applied to the believer’s own self-examination.14 He was among the Reformed theologians present at the Synod of Dort when it condemned Arminian theology in 1619.5

Life and Ministry

Ames studied under William Perkins at Cambridge, and followed his teacher in defining theology itself as a practical rather than a speculative discipline: “the doctrine of living for God, the pursuit of piety,” rooted not merely in the intellect but in the will.3 He crossed to the Netherlands amid the controversy between Reformed and Arminian theology then convulsing the Dutch Reformed churches, and went on to serve as professor of theology at the University of Franeker in Friesland, alongside his colleague Johannes Maccovius.3 At Franeker his teaching on the certainty of faith became the subject of a university disputation controversy; his defense of the position, De fidei divinae veritate, was subsequently appended to later editions of the Medulla.2 Ames was among the Reformed theologians present when the Synod of Dort’s canons against the Remonstrants were signed on April 23, 1619.5 He died in 1633.2

Theological Contribution

Ames opened the Marrow by defining divinity itself as inescapably practical: “Divinity is the doctrine of living to God,” a formula he grounded directly in Scripture (John 6:68, Acts 5:20, Rom. 6:11).1 That practical emphasis shaped the book’s structure throughout, including its treatment of the covenant of redemption, the eternal agreement between the Father and the Son over the salvation of the elect. Ames described that agreement in terms of its outworking in time: “This agreement between God and Christ was a kind of advance application of our redemption and deliverance of us to our surety and our surety to us. Upon that latter redemption, to be completed in us, it has the effect of a kind of an efficacious example; the former is a representation of the latter and the latter is brought into being by the former.”6

Ames’s practical divinity extended to casuistry, the application of theology to particular cases of conscience, worked out at length in his Cases of Conscience. Petrus van Mastricht later quoted Ames there on distinguishing genuine assurance from false presumption: “A lively and strong faith is easily manifest and known to them in whom it is present, because (1) they have the testimony of it in themselves (1 John 5:10), that is, the Spirit of God bearing witness with their spirit that they are children of God (Rom. 8:16).”4

Historical Significance

Petrus van Mastricht, who studied under a faculty colleague sympathetic to Ames’s theology, built his own definition of theology directly on Ames’s formula, expanding it in an explicitly Christ-centered direction: “Theologia est doctrina Deo vivendi per Christum” (“theology is the doctrine of living to God, through Christ”), a change Adriaan Neele describes as more than a mere addition, since it made Mastricht’s own account of theology Trinitarian and Christocentric where Ames’s had been more general.7 Ames’s Medulla also became a principal required theology textbook in New England’s colonial-era colleges.8

Jan van Vliet’s study of Reformed covenant theology groups Ames with the later Dutch theologian Johannes Cocceius as the two chief “federal architects” of the Reformed doctrine of the covenant, crediting Ames in particular with holding together the “vertical” movement of God’s eternal decree and the “horizontal” movement of covenant history: “predestination and covenant meet in unity.”9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity: Drawne out of the Holy Scriptures, and the Interpreters Thereof, and Brought into Method (London: Edward Griffin for Henry Overton, 1642), bk. 1, ch. 1, “Of the Definition, or Nature of Divinity,” 1: “Divinity is the doctrine of living to God.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, chap. 1, “Saving Faith,” n. 23, describing a Franeker University disputation controversy and William Ames (1576-1633), whose De fidei divinae veritate was appended to the London Cotes editions of the Medulla theologiae (1627, 1629, 1630) and the 1641 Amsterdam Jansson edition. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation”: Perkins’s “pupil Ames, later professor in Franeker alongside Maccovius, described theology as ‘the doctrine of living for God, the pursuit of piety,’ rooted in the will.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 1, “Saving Faith,” sec. XXXVI, quoting William Ames, Cases of Conscience (De Conscientia et Ejus Jure vel Casibus), bk. 2, ch. 6, sec. 16. ↩ ↩2

  5. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine,” 115-16, naming William Ames among the Reformed theologians who signed the Synod of Dort’s canons on April 23, 1619. ↩ ↩2

  6. Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 135-36, quoting William Ames on the covenant of redemption. ↩

  7. Adriaan C. Neele, “Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Life and Work,” in Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 45-46. ↩

  8. Neele, “Petrus van Mastricht: Life and Work,” 50, describing William Ames’s Medulla as the principal textbook required among New England’s colonial-era colleges of divinity. ↩

  9. Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants, n. 115, citing Jan van Vliet, “Decretal Theology and the Development of Covenant Thought: An Assessment of Cornelis Graafland’s Thesis with a Particular View to Federal Architects William Ames and Johannes Cocceius,” Westminster Theological Journal 63, no. 2 (2001): 416. ↩