Search Results

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.

Charles Wesley was a complex man in terms of his denominational identity and this ambiguity is reflected in the Methodist movement that he helped to found. Some of the keys to understanding Charles Wesley and his relationship with Methodism, the wider Evangelical Revival, and the Church of England can be found in a childhood shaped by a difficult environment and parents whose own denominational identities were a rich mix of Puritan and High Church Anglican tempered by influences from other Christian traditions. These same ingredients proved to be of fundamental importance in the making of Methodism.

The traditional image of Charles Wesley is that of a loyal Anglican whose attachment to the parent Church of England led to his isolation within Methodism in his later years. There is a contradiction in this viewpoint as Charles Wesley, despite his protestations of Anglican loyalty, contributed a great deal to the establishment of an evangelical popular movement. The more that one examines the activities of Charles Wesley, the clearer it becomes that he was in fact a radical conservative, whose high Sacramental theology was combined with the promotion of new worship practices such as congregational hymn singing and the class meeting. This mix of different elements produced a Methodist movement that was a combination of High Church theology, strict discipline, and innovative forms of structure, devotion, and worship.

This chapter details the growth of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in Northern Ireland (and its international expansion) and its development of schools, missionary work, and theological training. It considers whether success and increasing public acceptance has moderated the Church's distinctive separatism and its puritanism, and concludes that growth has not resulted in much change yet.

This chapter examines moral sensitivity in American society. It argues that American public life is pervaded by a profusion of moral reference points and by a drive to justify attitudes and actions through recourse to moral criteria. It is this level of moral consciousness in political exchange and argumentation that distinguishes the United States from other western democracies and which gives the conduct of American politics its distinctive character. God as a ubiquitous reference point in American culture, religion and politics, religion and the moral foundations of democracy are discussed.

At the end of the first-ever National Council of Congregational Churches (1865), Congregationalists were reluctant to embrace either the figure of John Calvin or the words that descend from him (Calvinistic, Calvinism). Why? This question animates the chapter. The story starts with the Unitarian controversy of the 1820s and 1830s when newly self-identified "Unitarians" disputed the legitimacy of Calvinism with their orthodox opponents. Thereafter, the chapter turns to the debates at the National Council and, at the end of the century, a New England Congregationalist’s (Williston Walker) study of Calvin. It concludes with the problem of Calvin and Calvinism within American Puritan studies as refracted through the writings of the most significant American student of Puritanism, Perry Miller. The more that nineteenth-century liberal Protestants distanced themselves from the Reformation, the more they caricatured Calvin and Calvinism. Some of the ironies and contradictions of that process will be noted.

In June 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe, exhausted from a triumphant publicity tour in England for her antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, crossed the English Channel for a few weeks of leisure travel on the Continent. One of her first stops was Geneva, which afforded her the chance to reflect on Calvin and his legacy in Western culture. Gazing on the view of Mont Blanc from the city, she wrote: "Calvinism, in its essential features, will never cease from the earth, because the great fundamental facts of nature are Calvinistic, and men with strong minds and wills always discover it." It was a striking statement, given her otherwise tortured relationship to her New England Puritan heritage, but it signaled a theme she would later develop in her fiction in ways that anticipated the arguments of Max Weber a half century later in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This chapter will explore this incident and its ramifications.

In the first millennium of Western Christianity, in the wake of Augustine's conflict with Pelagius, predestination's tension with free will preoccupied the theologians. With the rise of medieval Eucharistic devotion, however, the sacraments gained theological prominence. Luther and Calvin's reassertion of Augustine's absolute predestinarianism in the sixteenth century was in large measure a reaction to the perceived abuses of the sacramental system. So began the age of confession writing, when the various Protestant factions crafted careful statements of their respective positions, laying the foundation for the elaborate predestinarianism of Protestant scholasticism. From this context emerged two lasting options—Calvinist and Arminian—that mirrored in certain respects earlier Catholic opinions. Chapter 1 surveys this historical background, concluding with the rise of the zealously Calvinist party in the Church of England, led by William Perkins and others, that would eventually bring strong predestinarianism to America in the form of Puritanism.

This chapter provides a historical context through which to examine the struggle for democracy in Muslim societies. It re‐examines the relationship between religion and political development through the long view of history. After reviewing the place of religion in liberal‐democratic and modernization theory, an alternative reading of on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is provided. Drawing on key developments in the early modern European history and the scholarship of Fernand Braudel and Michael Walzer, parallels are discovered between the emergence of radical religious protest movements in the 16th/17th century Europe and similar events in the late 20th/early 21st century in the Middle East. The emphasis is on a sociological interpretation of religious fundamentalism. It is argued that historical depth is required to understand the relationship between religion and political development and that some forms of radical religious protest movements have a proto‐modern character to them.

The authority of Scripture is fundamental to Calvin's theology. This chapter explores the tension between the pneumatic and the rational aspects of his doctrine, after comparing his view and that of Aquinas. There are two case studies of the way Calvin's doctrine was received. First, the chapter explores the tension in the views in the Tuckney—Whichcote correspondence, Tuckney favouring the classic Calvinist position, and Whichcote relegating Scripture to a lower level than ‘reason’. Then the views of Pierre Bayle on Scripture and the operation of divine grace are considered, in the context of his defence of toleration. For Bayle, in a tolerant state Calvinism and Roman Catholicism (say) are to have public parity, even though their adherents may claim theological knowledge on the basis of adherence to their respective doctrines.