Synopses & Reviews
The polemical revisionary writings of 17th-century puritan pastor Anthony Wotton on topics such as Christ’s redemptive suffering and the imputation of justifying righteousness, God’s saving grace and the moral law, faith and works, and the gracious covenant and legal covenant—as well as the bitter doctrinal controversy that they stimulated—are examined in this scholarly study. The book traces the Wottonian complexion of the theology of John Goodwin, who became, over the course of a 30-year period, a prolific exponent of unorthodox notions, perhaps the most provocative of England’s learned “heretics” and “blasphemers” in the age of the Long Parliament and the Interregnum. In analyzing contemporary responses to Wotton and Goodwin, this consideration reveals how fixed the core positions of orthodoxy were at the time and how worrisome the challenges posed to them were. In reassessing and reimagining the use of certain theological language, Wotton and Goodwin exposed how unstable the communication of “truth” could be, and their impact on traditional Calvinist theology is appraised in this book.
Synopsis
When, early in the seventeenth century, the puritan pastor Anthony Wotton started to circulate manuscript statements of his theological revision, he was courting danger. Wotton was at once bold and subtle, a provocation to clerical brethren yet a skilled exponent of their technical disciplines. He addressed matters of fundamental importance: Christ's redemptive suffering and the imputation of justifying righteousness, God's saving grace and the moral law, faith and works, the gracious covenant and the legal covenant. Crucially important, for Wotton, was the interpretation of St. Paul's epistles in relation to the justification of sinners. This book examines Wotton's revisionary writings and the bitter doctrinal controversy that they stimulated, and traces the Wottonian complexion of the theology of John Goodwin, who became, over the course of a period of thirty years, a prolific exponent of unorthodox notions -- perhaps the most provocative of England's learned -heretics- and -blasphemers- in the age of the Long Parliament and the Interregnum. Contemporary responses to Wotton and Goodwin reveal how fixed were the core positions of orthodoxy and how worrisome were the challenges posed to them. Wotton and Goodwin trespassed -- often in the name of John Calvin -- upon some of the borderlands at which unusual uses of technical language became intolerable to the custodians of Calvinist truth. At these points, the contingency of theological language was uncomfortably exposed, and interlocutors discovered how rubbery were the signifiers of doctrine and how unstable the communication of -truth- could be.
About the Author
David Parnham is an independent scholar living in Australia. He is the author of Sir Henry Vane, Theologian.