Reformed (Calvinist) theology faltered in late seventeenth-century England and, by the middle of the eighteenth, the orthodoxy enshrined in the Westminster and Savoy confessions had been abandoned by ‘Moderates’ in Scotland, most English Presbyterians, and one wing of Congregationalists in New England, and tested by mid-century ‘awakenings’. The twelve essays brought together in this book, all of them written by ministers and academics who identify in some manner with a transatlantic Reformed tradition, explore situations of theological debate, revisit hyper-Calvinism and reflect on two early moments in American Presbyterian history. For most readers of this Journal, the endnotes may be the book's most interesting feature, for they convey something of the quantity and quality of present-day Evangelical scholarship; on the other hand, the restlessness with ‘Calvinism’ shared by most historians of the seventeenth century is remarked on mainly in passing. No grand conclusions emerge, except by way of validating (or invalidating) someone's credentials as Reformed. Hyum Kwan Kim analyses Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of ‘free will’, which Kim regards as ultimately ‘necessitarian’ in the vein of Thomas Hobbes. Ian Hugh Clary ponders the tensions between George Whitefield and the two Erskines, John and Ebenezer, who broke with their fellow Presbyterians in Scotland over the issues of patronage and revivalism; Whitefield never understood that, despite forming their own ‘Presbytery’, the Erskines endorsed the concept of an authoritative state Church and rejected his breezy ecumenism. William VanDoodewaard explores the so-called ‘Marrow Controversy’ (1718–26) occasioned by Edward Fisher's The marrow of divinity (1645; reprinted in 1717), an attack on ‘preparationism’ and the kindred argument that faith was a condition of justification, a critique shared by English ‘Antinomians’ of the 1640s and some Scottish ministers in the early years of the new century. Mark Jones and D. Patrick Ramsey circle around the ‘Neonomian controversy’ of the early 1690s prompted by another reprinted book, the sermons of Tobias Crisp (d. 1643), who had criticised the legalism of the practical divinity. Daniel Williams's assault on Crisp and his defenders anticipated the turn toward moralism that became more visible among his fellow Presbyterians a few decades later. Paul Helm revisits the ‘hyper-Calvinism’ of John Gill and the opposition to it of Andrew Fuller, a back-and-forth that involved, among other issues, the role of faith in the order of salvation and the scope of the divine decree. Here, as in most of the essays, brevity has made it necessary to curtail much by way of context.
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