Search Results

Examines Bunyan’s soteriology as propounded in his doctrinal writings, concentrating on works in which Bunyan’s position on justification, election, antinomianism, and the role of human will in salvation are central. Bunyan’s salvatory emphasis lies less on the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination and more on salvation by grace and justification by faith, according to the Reformed tenets of his covenant theology. Bunyan’s purpose is to comfort rather than condemn anyone terrorized by the ‘law’ (i.e. by any attempt to achieve salvation by works). Two of Bunyan’s texts (A Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation, and An Exposition on the Ten First Chapters of Genesis) are read ‘gracefully’: that is, with a revised understanding of Bunyan’s theology and as subversive of narrative expectations.

This chapter documents Irish Cromwellian debates about baptism. Those on the radical left of Puritanism, such as Quakers and Seekers, argued that baptism was redundant in the age of the Spirit. Baptists denied their claims and argued that immersion in water ought to follow conversion. Presbyterians and Independents disagreed, arguing instead that baptism should also be provided for the children of “visible saints” and, it was occasionally claimed, also for the children of those who were not “visible saints.” This chapter demonstrates that both Baptists and those who favored the baptism of children were debating the issue through the lens of covenant theology.

The theological frame of The Pilgrim’s Progress is one defined not by election and reprobation but by Bunyan’s covenant theology. Through characters such as Christian and Faithful, Despair and Ignorance, Bunyan’s soteriological concerns are centred in law, grace, and faith, rather than in predestination, as well as in the need for believers to understand and interpret the Word ‘gracefully’. Christian’s progress is a one of spiritual understanding, as well as of learning to avoid questions about one’s soterial status. This text also instructs the reader in interpretation. Bunyan’s choice of medium — allegorical dream vision — serves ideally to draw attention to interpretive practices and to privilege ontological over epistemological concerns. Bunyan’s use of marginal notes and of folk-tale motifs is discussed as limiting the reader’s imaginative indulgence in the allegory and its tendency towards ‘romance’.

This is the last of six chapters on the Old Testament and its authors, and its subject is the religion of Israel. The introduction to the chapter briefly reviews previous work on this subject. The sections of the rest of the chapter are devoted to the following topics; the pre‐monarchical period; Canaanite syncretism in the religion of Israel; divination and the cult of the dead; the Deuteronomic movement Josiah's reform and covenant theology; monotheism and the prohibition of images; cultic law; natural theology; universalism and exclusivism; and the apocalyptic movement.

This chapter outlines definitional issues concerning Ussher’s doctrine of the covenant of works, showing the convergence of various strands of doctrinal thinking into one complex doctrine. This chapter surveys the components of Ussher’s covenant of works and indicates why, as an integration of foundational doctrines, it could ground other doctrines. Ussher built his doctrine of the covenant of works on the foundational premises of the natural law, God’s initial eschatological purposes for creation, and the centrality of Adam’s representative role, and these premises show how deeply catholic his formulation of this doctrine was. The natural law formed the terms of the covenant of works, and if Adam had met them, he would have been rewarded with eternal life. This chapter shows how Ussher shaped his doctrinal formulation specifically to refute the claims of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.

During the 1780s and 1790s, Congregationalism predominated on the religious landscape of southern New England. Compared to other denominations, the Congregationalists enjoyed a tax‐supported religious establishment in Massachusetts and Connecticut, large numbers of churches and clergymen, influence with the political and social elite, and ministerial associations that enabled coordinated action. Given their prevailing public position, Congregational clergymen articulated a rich social ideology that centered on the role of divine Providence in communal affairs. The clergy's social discourse borrowed from both covenant theology and classical republicanism, but it constituted a distinct, providential synthesis. This providentialism enabled ministers to explain the successful outcome of the Revolutionary War and optimistically to project a millennial role for the new nation, although they could also use it to warn that sinfulness would invite God's wrath.

This chapter outlines the arguments of the book and sets them within the context of the expanding scholarly interest in both James Ussher and Reformed covenant theology. This chapter surveys the secondary literature on Ussher from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, then describes the major arguments about the history of covenant theology and situates Ussher in the context of the development and failure of the Reformation in Ireland by describing the historical circumstances and surveying the major literature about the Irish Reformation. The last major section addresses some of the complexities in authorship, dating, and origin for some of the primary sources from Ussher’s corpus.

This chapter presents an essay which explores notions of divine freedom found in the Hebrew Bible in the context of the covenant by following the thread of references sharing the Hebrew term ‘perhaps’. Covenant theology disposed of any belief that Israel's election was simply Israel's destiny in the sense that Yahweh automatically guaranteed Israel's existence. This is because the very nature of the making of the covenant carried with it the possibility that the relationship between Yahweh and Israel could be terminated. There is a pronounced element of conditionality at the root of the covenant notion.

Assesses Bunyan’s presentation of religious experience in his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and addresses psychological, medical, and psychoanalytic interpretations of the text. Grace Abounding demonstrates the terrorizing strictures of the law, as well as freedom from them through grace, and many episodes in the account, often read as evidence of Bunyan’s psychological breakdown, are understood here as instructing the reader in covenant theology. Grace Abounding is not a text exemplifying Calvinist anxiety over predestination, as this conversion account warns against such introspection.

This chapter ties together lingering threads of argument by showing how Ussher used the covenant of works to explain various aspects of salvation. He used this covenant as a premise for preaching, in that the law showed sinners their need for salvation before the gospel was presented. The covenant of works explains how Christ’s obedience needed to be and could be imputed to believers. This covenant also provided a framework to explain how the law relates to sanctification. These discussions are situated within the broader historical context of debates between puritans and Laudians and the English civil war.

This chapter surveys the relevant backgrounds to union with Christ in the New Testament, and particularly the developments that have taken place in each area in recent decades. The problems associated with older concepts of ‘corporate personality’ are recognized, but a proper understanding of covenant is found to provide a more appropriate category by which the identification of a people with a representative may be considered. The assumption that apocalyptic and Jewish mysticism are disinterested in, or even hostile towards, covenant is demonstrated to be simplistic. The chapter also examines the theme of glory in the Old Testament, as a necessary background to the glorification of believers in the New Testament, finding this to be a distinctively divine property that is shared with God’s people by means of his presence. Finally, the changing currents in scholarship on messianism are surveyed, with a related examination of the Isaianic Servant.

This chapter examines the treatment of union with Christ in the Reformed tradition, particularly Calvin (and the later Reformed Scholastics) and Barth, and also in the interpretation of Luther advocated by the Finnish School of Lutheranism. The mishandling of these traditions has led to them being represented inaccurately in much biblical scholarship and this has arguably affected the reading of the New Testament. While maintaining a qualitative distinction between Jesus and his people, Luther and Calvin develop accounts of justification that are premised upon the reality of Christ’s union with his people and the transmission of his properties to them by the Spirit. In Calvin’s case, this is developed using the concept of ‘covenant’ and this governs his account of adoption. Barth draws upon the concept as it is developed in the Reformed tradition, but is openly innovative in how he connects it to the doctrine of election.

This chapter introduces the topic of the history of the early modern Reformed doctrine of the covenant of works. It first defines the doctrine and then provides a state of the question through a survey of relevant secondary literature. After the state of the question, the chapter states the book’s main aim, which is to present an overview of the origins, development, and reception of the covenant of works. In contrast to critics of the doctrine, this book stands within another strand of historiography that sees the covenant of works as a legitimate development of ideas present in the early church, middle ages, and Reformation periods. The chapter then lays out the topics of each of following chapters: the Reformation, Robert Rollock, Jacob Arminius, James Ussher, John Cameron and Edward Leigh, The Westminster Standards, the Formula Consensus Helvetica, Thomas Boston, and the Twentieth Century.

When republican theology first came to dominate the American pulpit in the 1770s, it displaced covenant theology, the idea that societies form for the purpose of extending God’s redemptive kingdom on earth. The question of how to put the new covenant to work in the polis spawned the diverse experiments in Puritan governance to which the likes of Hobbes and Locke responded with their various social contracts. The eighteenth century witnessed theological clash and compromise between the imperatives of the Christian covenant and those of the social contract. Republican theology of the American founding represents a latter stage of this dialectic. At the midpoint stands the Scottish moral sense tradition, exemplified in this chapter by Francis Hutcheson, which infused Lockean politics with a robust Christian morality. Jonathan Edwards’ rebuttal of Scottish moral sense in the 1750s reveals an American evangelical tradition that, for a few more years at least, would retain the moral idealism of the new covenant.

This concluding chapter summarizes the arguments of the entire book and draws together the implications for understanding Ussher and his relationship to early modern theology more broadly. It highlights the difficulties in analyzing Reformed theology after the Restoration, but it demonstrates that prior to the Restoration Ussher was clearly a major figure in the theological development of the Irish and English churches. Ussher’s relationship to puritanism is examined in light of the investigative results detailed throughout the book, and new directions are suggested for future research in Ussher studies and in studies of puritanism and conformity generally.

The Book of Mormon can be situated within the context of a tradition of covenantal rhetoric. The book is introduced by its editor as assurance to an American remnant of Israel of “the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off.” The term covenant occurs almost 200 times in the text—but it undergoes particular permutations that endow the concept with new shades of meaning. First, against the book’s stark apocalypticism, the gold plates themselves embody the durability of covenant and secure a bridge from ancient to restoration forms of relation to the divine. Second, The Book of Mormon hints at a soteriological reconstruction of covenant that emerges in the context of Smith’s radical theism and his reconstitution of heaven into an anthropocentric rather than theocentric heaven. Covenant, in this light, becomes constitutive of, rather than preparatory for, the celestial society that itself comprises the Mormon heaven.

In 1981, Betsy Halpern–Amaru published a paper entitled “Land Theology in Josephus' Jewish Antiquities”, arguing that Josephus downplayed the nationalist dimensions of a covenant theology that focused on the land. This conclusion is supported by a thorough examination of various citations from Josephus, mainly his Antiquitates judaicae. This chapter reexamines the texts analyzed by Halpern–Amaru and contests her conclusions about Josephus' land theology.