This crisply written, closely printed volume is the first extended treatment of Goodwin since Thomas Jackson's Life (2nd ed.; London, 1872), and is Coffey's third book about people, ideas, politics, and religion in the English Revolution (see especially Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997].)
Goodwin (c. 1594–1665) was vicar at St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, in the city of London (1633–1645, 1649–1660), and led an independent gathered congregation concurrently there (from c. 1642). His parishioners and congregants were prominent in London radical politics and sectarian activity during the Civil Wars and after. Of independent mind and a natural polemicist, attuned to the potential of unlicensed printing, Goodwin produced a great stream of tracts, defending liberty of subjects against royalists, Independency against Presbyterians, instituted churches and trained clergy against sectaries, toleration against coerced uniformity, and trinitarianism against Socinians. In print, he vociferously supported the war against the Cavaliers, the Army revolt, the purge of Parliament, the execution of the king, and the Protectorate. He advocated liberty of conscience and independence of religion from the authority of magistrates, and he broke with Cromwell over the ecclesiastical Triers. He survived the Restoration, partly on his reputation as an Arminian and a troubler of Puritans. Presbyterians called him the “great Red Dragon of Coleman Street.”
Coffey offers an “intellectual biography” (6), set in the context of Goodwin's intellectual affiliations and political connections, his associates and antagonists, and his publishers and printers, and also of contemporary events. He draws extensively on recent scholarship on English Puritans and on the period of the Interregnum. Nine chapters treat Goodwin's education and early career, early tenure at Coleman Street, activity during the First Civil War, challenge to Presbyterians and support of the New Model Army, conversion to and defense of Arminianism, and continued polemic and waning influence after 1652. Coffey canvasses both sides of Goodwin's running and episodic controversies and campaigns as they appear in his manifold publications. There is a bibliography of primary and secondary sources for Goodwin, and a critical review of anonymous works attributed to him.
Coffey shows that, as a city preacher in a strategic parish, Goodwin was at the center of excitement and contention during the high period of the Puritan Revolution. As a radical of the religious middle—between Presbyterians and high Calvinist Independents on one hand, and Baptists and Antinomians on the other—he acquired an influential following but established no party, and he remained outside the centers of policy in Parliament and the Army command. In the 1640s, he became “the leading clerical voice of radical Puritanism in the City and the London press” (104). He saw Commonwealth and Protectorate as a “new era” of political stability and religious liberty, “in which the godly could” at length “complete the reformation” in England (233). Goodwin began his ministry as a “moderate Calvinist,” of John Davenant's sort, affirming universal atonement, limited election, and prevenient grace. He ended a proponent of universal redemption grounded in divine “philanthropy,” and of a Grotian view of the atonement. En route, he challenged Reformed Orthodox notions about imputation of Christ's righteousness to believers, and about the authority of the biblical literature. In theological argument, he appealed to a loosely “humanist” reading of the plain sense of biblical texts, to the early Church Fathers, and to the power of natural reason—all in service of advancing theological insight and against uncritical adherence to inherited authorities. His intellectual progress was informed by an admixture of classical erudition, Italian Protestant Humanists, and Dutch Arminians, and a touch of Bacon. In the 1650s he successfully “decouple[d] Arminianism from Laudianism, and show[ed] that [it] was … compatible with the hotter sort of Protestantism” (211), to the comfort of some Independents and of General Baptists.
Jackson, a Methodist, saw Goodwin as a harbinger of Wesley. Coffey recognizes Goodwin as a person of his own time, a complex embodiment of intellectual, religious, and political currents and tensions in a distinctive historical situation. He recognizes Goodwin's revolutionary ruthlessness, dogmatism, scholasticism, biblicism, and enthusiasm, and acknowledges that Goodwin, throughout his career, considered himself “a godly, learned Reformed theologian” (293). At the same time, in Goodwin's defense of liberty of conscience, appeal to sound reason, Arminian universalism, and invocation of divine benevolence, he nonetheless finds a harbinger of Locke. There are indeed continuities here, though Coffey sometimes seems to overstate Goodwin's adumbration of post-Lockean “rational religion.”
Goodwin produced four big theological works: on justification (Imputatio fidei, 1642), on the nature of the Bible (The Divine Authority of Scripture Asserted, 1647), on the scope of redemption (Redemption Redeemed, 1651), and a pastoral manual (A Door Opening into Christian Religion, 1662). These mix, variously, controversial and constructive theology, and ad hoc polemic. Coffey's treatment of them is instructive, though selective and abbreviated, and is sometimes obscured by uncertainty about technical theological categories. There is more in this material respecting the scope and context of Goodwin's theological thinking than appears here, though Coffey is correct about the shape and direction of Goodwin's thought.
This is a big, richly detailed book. It contains most of what is known about Goodwin, and much that can be surmised. It corrects the conventional, posthumous estimate of him (attributed to Edmund Calamy, Sr.) as an isolated polemicist and party-of-one. Goodwin in fact had connections, influence, and an audience; his tracts sold well. Directly and indirectly in the 1640s and early 1650s, he had a hand in the Parliamentary and Puritan “cause,” in the contentious interactions among the city, the Commons, the Westminster Assembly, the Army, and the Protector. As in his book on Rutherford, Coffey directs attention to intellectual (as well as religious and political) ferment in the revolutionary period; and, in the case of Goodwin, to pertinent continuities between mid-century Puritans and subsequent, post-Puritan, rationalism in English religion.
