SCRIPTURE BINDS:

Even if magisterial Protestants opposed radicalism, didn't they still seed it by asserting freedom of conscience? That would be true if Protestants had in fact freed the conscience in the way critics assert. Freeing the conscience was not directed at presumed "irrational religious and social norms" (as Deneen put it). Nor did Protestant theology necessitate a successive wave of freedoms, as David Corey has asserted.

Luther refers to the conscience over five hundred times, identifying it as the "coram deo"--that which puts us before the face of God--to distinguish it from the ethical and political rules of society. Luther never frees the conscience; he prioritizes its binding. The conscience of man is bound by ethical and moral rules of society as well as the Word of God--particularly Old Testament Law. Human bindings are conditional; the conscience is unconditionally freed only by the Gospel. Luther did not empower the individual to free his own conscience any more than Thomas Aquinas did. Luther opposed anyone who presumed the conscience to be autonomous and it is impossible to find a magisterial reformer who did not bind the conscience to the authority of scripture and church leaders. Ordered liberty of the conscience is not anarchistic spiritual individualism.

What we now call "Church-State Relations" (an ongoing debate in Christendom) entered a new phase during the Reformation, but "freedom of conscience" had little or no effect on the freedom of an individual. In fact, because a believer's conscience is inwardly free (as Luther, Richard Hooker, and others argued) it is therefore untrammeled by outward impositions (e.g., conformity in vestments or liturgy) judged prudent by civil or ecclesiastical authorities for the unity of Church and Commonwealth. Nonconformists in England were counseled by continental reformers like Heinrich Bullinger to be prudent in their dissent. So-called "adiaphora" were not presumed to bind in the same way that the Word of God did, but they were imposed for the sake of unity and good order. John Locke's defense of imposition of adiaphora or "things indifferent" in his unpublished Two Tracts (1660-62) is an inconvenient truth for any Whig history of toleration from Luther to Locke to Madison, for example. [...]

Protestants not only opposed an autonomous conscience, they opposed leveling the social institutions essential for civil society. Activities of daily life, freed from their implicit inferiority to holy orders like monasticism, were elevated almost to the level of worship. Daily life was directed by one's vocations. Though Luther is most famously associated with the Protestant doctrine of vocation, its fullest presentation was in a remarkable work of 1626 by William Perkins, a Cambridge theologian of the Elizabethan settlement more popular at the time than Shakespeare or Richard Hooker. Perkins argued that every calling must be "fitted to the man, and every man be fitted to his calling." And though Perkins argued that God is the author of each man's separate calling through Creation and Providence, the application of that fact is neither individualistic nor egalitarian but instead deeply conservative. One learns one's desires and gifts within a community, particularly the communities of family, the Church, and one's neighbors. Our contribution to these communities invests our vocations with moral significance, not some modern individualistic and existential search for personal identity.  

Marriage was a particularly essential vocation for Protestants and became a cornerstone of civil society no longer demoted under the celibacy of holy orders. Protestants denied that marriage is a sacrament, but exalted its social status by making it a more universal and God-given school for sanctification. Spiritual and marital love became complementary, established by a covenantal association recognized not simply by the Church but also by families, the community, and the magistrate. Protestant consistories worked closely with magistrates to discourage infidelity, abuse, and fornication--often with mercy and wisdom.

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