William Ames (1576-1633) was no stranger to controversy. A promising career as a college professor lay ahead of him but he was a card-carrying Puritan, who sought to purify the Church of England of its excesses. As a newly appointed professor at Cambridge University in England, William refused to wear clergy vestments (called a surplice) in the college chapel and preached a polemical sermon by calling students on the carpet for gambling during the twelve days of Christmas. This did not sit well with Dr. Cary, the college president, who already had little use for these reform-minded Puritans. He suspended William from his college duties and lobbied Church of England officials to bar him from further service. William fled to Holland and applied for a teaching position at Leiden University, but the long arm of the Church of England blocked his appointment there also. Finally, William caught on with an up-and-coming university at Franeker, a school in the Netherlands that ignored English authorities and appointed him professor of theology, where he flourished for a dozen years.
Theology is a heady word. While many are not sure what theology means, we assume it must be what people study in seminary. Theology is a compound word from the Greek that literally translates “study of God.” In William’s seminal textbook, The Marrow of Theology, which was read extensively in New World schools like Yale and Harvard, he defined theology as “living for God.” The goal in studying God is not acquiring theoretical knowledge about God, but, as Jesus prayed, “that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17.3). Living well for Puritans meant placing God’s will ahead of our will, even when it does not seem to serve our best interests. Nobody knew this better than William Ames, who paid a heavy price for his Puritan convictions. His prayer leads us to pray: