Practical Predestinarians in England, c. 1590-1640

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 19; p. 126
• Main Author: Parry, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2015
• Subjects: Anxiety; Bibliographic literature; British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Christianity; English literature; Funerals; Sermons; United Kingdom > UK; Europe; England
• ISSN: 0954-0970

[...]Dixon focuses more on pastorally comforting responses to predestination, redressing a balance in the scholarly literature, while not wholly ignoring instances in which predestinarian belief caused distress. Dixon argues that the doctrine of predestination, though in some form 'as old as Christianity' (p. 20), acquired a particular prominence in the early modern period due to a pervasive cultural crisis of certainty, with plague, Protestantism and progress conspiring to question older verities and fragment communal patterns of life, leaving individuals feeling dislocated and not at home in the universe. Slightly out of chronological sequence, chapter 2 synthesises the prolific writings of William Perkins as an example of a comprehensive predestinarian system, helpfully stressing Perkins' equation of faith with true knowledge in contrast to fallible human means of knowledge. (Dixon here interacts with the work of W.B. Patterson, finding Perkins less comfortably conformist than does Patterson, although Dixon's book was completed before the publication of Patterson's important 2014 monograph on Perkins.) Chapter 3 draws out contrasts between two pioneers of 'puritan practical divinity' often lumped together: 'where Greenham encouraged believers to locate assurance within their own anxiety, Rogers believed that assurance was a gift of God which put fretful questioning firmly behind the saint' (p. 147).