REFORMING THE REFORMATION OR PURITANISM IN REVOLUTION?

• Published in: The Historical journal Vol. 52; no. 4; pp. 1111 - 1120
• Main Author: HALCOMB, JOEL
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.12.2009
• Subjects: 17th century; Americas; Bunyan, John (1628-88); Civil war; English; History; Puritanism; Radical groups; Radicalism; Reformation; Religion; Religious orthodoxy; Religious practice; REVIEW ARTICLES; Terminology; Theology; United Kingdom; Word meaning; Writers
• ISSN: 0018-246X; 1469-5103
• DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X09990124

According to Hardman Moore's calculations, as many as one in four resolved that question with their feet - or, rather, their sea legs. [...]the 1650s were not simply a struggle between the Kirk and the invading English sectarians. Besides these external challenges, the Kirk also faced dissention from within that accelerated after Dunbar and Worcester. [...]his dispositional use of the terms 'radical' and 'conservative' probably serves his purpose of complicating our understandings of many Irish theologians of the 1650s, but labelling figures at times radical and at times conservative may be more misleading than helpful. [...]defining what polemicists mean by such fundamental terms as 'national church' and 'the gospel way' (such phrases appear to mean different things to different writers at different times in all three of these works) may be the next stage in more accurately positioning theological and ecclesiological debate and understanding writers' polemical intention.