Cambridge Companion to Puritanism

 

The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds. John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

For what it’s worth, a few thoughts:

Up until last week, if you had asked me what was the best place to approach the study of Puritanism from I would have had to scratch my head and think about it. There was no really obvious starting point to begin reading. It would depend on one’s special interests and the period under consideration. For those simply wishing to read Puritan practical divinity for personal edification I would still recommend J.I. Packer’s The Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (published as Among God’s Giants in the U.K.), but for anyone embarking on a serious study of Puritanism I would now confidently recommend The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism.

This collection comprises an introduction and twenty essays. The first section gives an account of English Puritanism by period; the second takes the reader further afield with descriptions of Puritanism in New England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, with a discussion of the interchange of ideas with continental Reformed Protestants; the third dissects a number of important themes such as ecclesiology and millenarianism. The fourth and final section considers the legacy of the phenomenon and its historiography. From these essays, their notes and suggested further reading, one begins to appreciate the vast expanse of the field of Puritan scholarship.

Highlights must include the chapter by Patrick Collinson. The godfather of modern puritan research sets up the discussion of English Puritanism which follows with an examination of ‘Antipuritanism’. This encapsulates Collinson’s nominalist reading of Puritanism and the dialectical relationship between the godly and the ungodly. Anthony Milton’s chapter, ‘Puritanism and the continental Reformed churches’, describes a complex and changing relationship ‘characterised as much by tension and ambiguity as by instinctive fraternalism’ (p. 109). This intertraffic with the continent, the Netherlands playing a particularly important role, was conducted on many levels, and this chapter is a warning against insularity in the study of Puritanism. Margo Todd’s solution to ‘The problem of Scotland’s Puritans’ is a real gem. By not overreaching and by sticking to the question of whether there were Puritans in Scotland, and to some extent that depends on how one defines the terms, she supplies one of the most enjoyable contributions. Alex Walsham’s analysis of ‘The godly and popular culture’ is judicious and in many ways develops the discussion begun earlier by Collinson.

The final two chapters alone are worth the price of the volume. John Coffey scrutinizes the treatment Puritanism has received at the hands of modernity theorists such as Weber, Tawney and Hill, as well as Whigs, sociologists, historians of science, and those seeking the origins of an American identity. He notes the flaws in much of this work and the obsession with Purtanism’s secular by-products rather than the living religious legacy it has left to evangelicalism today. Peter Lake, with characteristic humour, charts the historiography of Puritanism from Richard Bancroft down through Gardiner, Neale and Collinson, to the twists and turns of revisionist and post-revisionist schools. These surveys of the plethora of literature on Puritanism will provide a sound orientation for those setting out on their study of the subject.

There were only two chapters which disappointed. One in which the author seemed to be trying to be a little too clever, and another in which the occasional sentence was tortured to the extent that I could barely bring myself to watch. In addition, Ann Hughes, in her essay on ‘Puritanism and gender’, claims that Puritanism ‘inspired the prosecution of vulnerable and deluded women as witches’ (p. 295). This questionable assertion is not buttressed by so much as a footnote, and is left hanging there, unqualified and unsubstantiated. The editors’ use of the term ‘legalism’ (p.3) to describe Reformed teaching on the role of the law in the Christian life was also unfortunate.

Such minor gripes aside, this is a book well worth purchasing for reading and future reference. It will greatly assist the student of Puritanism and also the non-specialist who has to teach something about the subject. The editors are to be commended for bringing together such an illustrious team to provide an accessible introduction to Puritanism.

Cambridge Companion Countdown

(I have an affinity for alliteration, don’t I).

Amazon.co.uk claim they will have the Cambridge Companion to Puritanism in stock in 10 days time. This will be essential reading for all students of the period. I have pasted the contents list below. Juicy.

Introduction John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim

 Part I. English Puritanism

 1. Antipuritanism - Patrick Collinson

 2. The growth of English Puritanism - John Craig

 3. Early Stuart Puritanism – Tom Webster

 4. The Puritan revolution - John Morrill

 5. Later Stuart Puritanism - John Spurr

 Part II. Beyond England

 6. Puritanism and the Continental Reformed Churches – Anthony Milton

 7. The Puritan experiment in New England, 1630–1660 - Francis J. Bremer

 8. New England, 1660–1730 - David D. Hall

 9. Puritanism in Ireland and Wales – Crawford Gribben

 10. The problem of Scotland’s Puritans – Margo Todd

 Part III. Major Themes

 11. Practical divinity and spirituality – Charles Hambrick-Stowe

 12. Puritan polemical divinity and doctrinal controversy – Dewey D. Wallace, Jr.

 13. Puritans and the Church of England: historiography and ecclesiology – Paul C. H. Lim

 14. Radical Puritanism, c. 1558–1660 – David R. Como

 15. Puritan millenarianism in old and New England – Jeffrey K. Jue

 16. The Godly and popular culture – Alexandra Walsham

 17. Puritanism and gender – Ann Hughes

 18. Puritanism and literature N. H. Keeble

 Part IV. Puritanism and Posterity

 19. Puritan legacies - John Coffey

 20. The historiography of Puritanism - Peter Lake

‘English Hypothetical Universalism’

My review of Jonathan Moore’s ‘English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology‘ (Eerdmans, 2007) should appear very shortly in the Spring issue of The Seventeenth Century. I wrote this back in December and have purposefully avoided blogging my thoughts on the book up until now. The book was enthusiastically endorsed by Carl Trueman, Anthony Milton, Patrick Collinson, and others of similar stature which was why I felt some trepidation in criticising it in print. But you go with your gut, eh?

The book is, on several levels, excellent. It is a very helpful study of John Preston on the extent of the atonement and the universal offer of the gospel. There is some very useful material on Perkins. The discussion of the York House Conference is superb. And in some important respects it contributes to the historiographical discussion around the Calvin vs. the Calvinists debate. R. T. Kendall comes out very poorly.

The major flaw is in the imbalance with which Moore portrays English hyothetical universalism. He foregrounds the discontinuity with Perkins, that paragon of Elizathan Protestantism, to such an extent that any sense of continuity with other streams in the Christian tradition is eclipsed. From one who has clearly read Muller carefully, this lack of sensitivity to the continuity and discontinuity of theological trajectories is disappointing. Ussher becomes the grand-daddy of hypothetical universalism in Moore’s genealogy, something of a spontaneous mutation, desperately seeking a via media to take the heat out of the Remonstrant controversy on the eve of the Synod of Dort. Ussher clearly played an important role, but as a shaper of a tradition, rather than a pioneer. Richard Muller’s review, recently published, makes the same point – see below. 

I have spent a lot of time on this subject recently, looking at both Ussher’s interaction with patristic and medieval sources on the intent and extent of the atonement and his precursors in England. The evidence in  the manuscripts is clear that not only did Ussher stand in continuity with a pre-existing stream of thought within the Christian tradition (a point well argued by Muller), but that he did so self-conciously, and that he cannot be considered the pioneer in Protestant England. I hope to publish something on this soon and will be talking to journal editors in the near future.

In the meantime, enjoy Muller, read my review (out shortly), and do read Moore, because despite this serious flaw, it’s an important book.

Muller:

This volume offers a detailed and finely argued exposition of the view of redemption expressed by John Preston both in his various writings and in his testimony at the York Conference in 1626. Where Moore clearly advances the discussion of both the York Conference itself and of early seventeenth-century British theology is in his clear identification of Preston’s teaching, together with that of several major contemporaries (notably John Davenant and James Ussher), as a form of hypothetical universalism, namely, the doctrine that Christ so died for the sins of the human race that, if all would believe, all would be saved. What Moore nicely shows is that the Reformed side of the debate was somewhat variegated, including hypothetical universalists as well as those who denied universal redemption and that previous analyses of the theological debates in early seventeenth-century England too simplistically identified the parties in debate as either Arminian or Calvinist. In effect, Moore resuscitates an issue recognized in the seventeenth century by Davenant, Baxter, and others, and noted with reference to the Westminster Assembly by Alexander Mitchell that there was an indigenous hypothetical universalism in British Reformed theology. Moore’s study, however, for all its excellent work on Preston and the York Conference, embodies two significant problems concerning perspective on and context of the materials examined. First, there is an underlying systematizing thread in the argument of the book that leads to claims that do not ultimately bear scrutiny concerning the interconnection of specific doctrinal formulations. Particularly in his review of William Perkins’ doctrine, Moore contends that Perkins’ supralapsarian predestinarianism together with his federalism “drives” him toward the conclusion of particular redemption, namely that the all-sufficiency of Christ’s satisfaction yields no hypothetical offer of salvation to all people. However, particularism was hardly the exclusive characteristic of supralapsarian federalists. There is also a clearly particularist formulation concerning Christ’s satisfaction in the work of Perkins’ contemporary, Gulielmus Bucanus, who tended toward an infralapsarian doctrine of predestination and was no federalist. Similarly, a later Reformed orthodox thinker such as Turretin, a convinced infralapsarian and, although party to the two-covenant schema but not a federal theologian in the strict sense of the term, taught a clearly prticularistic doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction.

Moore also underestimates the presence of non-Amyraldian or non-speculative forms of hypothetical universalism in the Reformed tradition as a whole and thereby, in the opinion of this reviewer, misconstrues Preston’s position as a “softening” of Reformed theology rather than as a continuation of one trajectory of Reformed thought that had been present from the early sixteenth century onward. Clear statements of nonspeculative hypothetical universalism can be found (as Davenant recognized) in Heinrich Bullinger’s Decades and commentary on the Apocalypse, in Wolfgang Musculus’ Loci communes, in Ursinus’ catechetical lectures, and in Zanchi’s Tractatus de praedestinatione sanctorum, among other places. In addition, the Canons of Dort, in affirming the standard distinction of a sufficiency of Christ’s death for all and its efficiency for the elect, actually refrain from canonizing either the early form of hypothetical universalism or the assumption that Christ’s sufficiency serves only to leave the nonelect without excuse. Although Moore can cite statements from the York conference that Dort “either apertly or covertly denied the universality of man’s redemption” (156), it remains that various of the signatories of the Canons were hypothetical universalists- not only the English delegation (Carleton, Davenant, Ward, Goad, and Hall) but also the [sic] some of the delegates from Bremen and Nassau (Martinius, Crocius, and Alsted)- that Carleton and the other delegates continued to affirm the doctrinal points of Dort while distancing themselves from the church discipline of the Belgic Confession, and that in the course of seventeenth-century debate even the Amyraldians were able to argue that their teaching did not run contrary to the Canons. In other words, the nonspeculative, non-Amyraldian form of hypothetical universalism was new in neither the decades after Dort nor a “softening” of the tradition: The views of Davenant, Ussher, and Preston followed out a resident trajectory long recognized as orthodox among the Reformed.

Calvin Theological Journal, 43(1), 150. (HT: Calvin and Calvinism)

Zen Calvinism

I have no idea what it is either. I’ll be ordering Carl Trueman’s new book to find out. This new collection of essays apparently covers ‘Chick Lit, Adolf Eichman, the i-pod, Roger Beckwith, the Blues, Watership Down, American Idol, Nietzsche, zen-calvinism, Augustine and ferrets(!)’

Details here.

Book of the Year, 2007

Last post of the year before I head out to parteee!

‘Book of the Year’ for this blogger has to be Pierced for Our Transgressions. It is a timely defence of penal substitution and its elenctic method makes it very useful for reference as well as for reading through. The exegetical and systematic sections and well handled. The latter half of the book deals with a host of obejctions and will help the reader think these through. It is well organised and well written. Stott’s Cross of Christ might be more edifying on some levels but for those who want to get tooled up to deal with the most recent arguments against penal substitution, this has to be first choice.

The book arrived on the UK scene in the wake of Steve Chalke’s controversial remarks, and the debate continues to run. N.T. Wright has described PFOT as ‘deeply, profoundly, and disturbingly unbiblical’. Jeffery, Ovey and Sach reply here.

Buy the book. Cherish the doctrine.

Happy ‘08.

Ussher’s Body of Divinity

You can download ‘A Body of Divinity’ for free. This is a problematic text and cannot be regarded as Ussher’s Summa. In fact, Ussher at first disowned this volume, describing it as ‘a common place book’ of the opinions of others. He later came round to the idea of publication, accepting that some might find it useful. The material was drawn from Cartwright’s catechism and other sources and forms a remarkably coherent whole. It seems that Ussher used this material in catechizing and in this sense he can be said to have made it his own.  It is a great source for the opinions that were current in the early seventeenth century.

Alternatively, you can get hard copy from Solid Ground Christian Books. Their edition has a preface by Renaissance man Crawford Gribben, who is now in hiding in rural Ireland. I think the students at Manchester were beginning to frighten him. Check out their fan club page (or should that be ‘cult’) on Facebook.

Christianity’s Dangerous Idea

Hot off the press – a new book from Alister McGrath. Yes, another one. He has attempted a study of the Reformation and Protestantism up to the 21st century. The dangerous idea in question is that any man or woman should be able to read the Bible for themselves and come to their own conclusions. This is a racy and readable account of the seemingly uncontrollable forces unleashed at the Reformation which have led to the diversity of expressions of Protestant belief today. Heavily discounted at Amazon.co.uk.