No abstract

Tobias Crisp presented a sophisticated, if highly tendentious, critique of the Puritan way to salvation. Having taken the view that the Puritan ordo salutis required of its practitioners a works-based devotion that sprang from a principal commitment to ‘law’ rather than ‘grace’, Crisp attacked both the theological and pastoral shortcomings of Puritanism. He then proceeded to develop a counter-theology of his own that promised a pastoral direction very different from that presided over by Puritan divines. This article addresses these dimensions of Crisp's discourse, and also assesses the self-defence mounted by Puritan respondents to Crisp.

No abstract

It was with a flourish of grace-borne optimism that Thomas Hooker opened his massive redaction of a career's worth of “preparationist” theology, the posthumously publishedApplication of Redemption. The sermons in which this two-volume work consists were published in London in 1656, under the editorial direction of the Independent divines Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, but had been preached in New England in the aftermath of the “free-grace controversy” of the mid-1630s and rewritten by Hooker in the 1640s in order to “refine and expand” his previous explications of soul work. Setting concerned sights upon old England's luxuriant antinomian problem, Goodwin and Nye turned to Hooker, late of Chelmsford and Connecticut, in hopes that a strong dose of spiritual discipline might restore moral order to a disordered land. The God of the preparationists, it has been remarked, contributed centrally to an “emerging culture of stamina and rigor”; by the 1650s, however, the God who made his orderly favors known “by a long procession of hints, of interpretable suggestions” had relinquished the reins of moral control. None was better qualified than Hooker to interrogate fault for the sake of the regaining of favor.

No abstract