The New Testament scholar Merrill C. Tenney described the Gospel of John as a grand symphony. Paul Cefalu is a masterful conductor drawing out the Gospel's energies and complexities that are pulsing through the devotional poems of George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Donne, and Richard Crashaw; framing John Milton's pneumatology and the meditations of Thomas Traherne; and fueling the literature of dissent by John Everard, George Fox, and others. The Johannine themes—realized eschatology, abiding belief and the assurance of salvation, spiritual dualism, relexicalization and high Christology, the trope of the disciples’ misunderstanding and illumination—all converge in Cefalu's compelling study.

Tracing the influences of the Gospel of John on English devotional poetry is strangely neglected, Cefalu notes, even as “the Fourth Gospel offers the most poetic and dramatic depictions of Christ's ministry” (11). The “Bread of Life” pericope (John 6) is a case in point, as Cefalu examines how Thomas Cranmer's polemical conclusion that Christ is present “effectually rather than substantially” (54) marked the true beginning of the Johannine renaissance in England. In his Eucharistic poems, Herbert's speakers often reflect Cranmer's position while elevating the need for heavenly grace and love, via the nexus of the Spirit, which allow true communion to take place, since the speaker's body is mired in earthly sin. Vaughan, meanwhile, emphasizes the mystery of Christ glorified in heaven even as he focuses on the crucial role of the believer's preparation to receive that mystery in the Eucharist. For Vaughan, affirming the Johannine assurance of salvation, through the coming of the Spirit-Paraclete (John 14), is the “endpoint of the sacramental process” (82).

Cefalu insightfully interrogates how Johannine assurance potentially becomes a dangerous illusion for Donne and Milton. Donne's poems often display frustration over incomplete renewal in a poetics of backsliding where his embattled speaker is “less confirmed” that the “Spirit will confer on him the rarity of eternal life” (159). In other poems, however, the speaker's initial vexation at the asymmetry of returning God's love is overcome by realizing the Spirit's enabling power to love others and thus love God (John 13:34–35, 14:20), a theological motif Dr. Donne expounds upon in several sermons. Milton, however, remains skeptical. Here Cefalu adroitly tackles Milton's derogated view of the Spirit, where the capacity of the Spirit to speak truth and protect the faithful is often stymied by the corruption of the church and world. As Michael elaborates in his end-time exposition (Paradise Lost 12.508–47), Christ's return alone provides ultimate comfort and assurance—an elevation of the Son over the Spirit that Milton develops in his anti-Trinitarian theological treatise. While Cefalu minimizes Milton's perfectionist strain in his realized eschatology, the point is not lost: false spirits abound in the dark world, and the faithful are left to discern muddy differences (1 John 4).

The world's encroachment thus creates odd bedfellows across the spectrum—Puritans, moderate nonconformists, radicals, even disenfranchised Laudian Royalists—who endorse John's dualisms (e.g., John 3:16–21, 15:18–19). This penultimate chapter is a gem for those studying the literature of dissent during and after the Civil War, as Cefalu keenly delineates how John fundamentally “underwrites much of the antinomian disposition” (216). The writings of sectarians abound with Johannine images of incorporation (John 15) and the Gospel's rhetoric of the marginalized whom Jesus favors, both of which are appropriated by Niclaes's Family of Love, Winstanley's Diggers, and Fox's Quakers. Cefalu also exerts pressure on perfectionist radicals who endorse the mystical idea that “the oneness that Christ enjoys with the Father,” as in John 10, “can itself be duplicated in the oneness that the believer can achieve with Christ” (240). In a wide-ranging chapter that considers John's tension between futurist and realized eschatology among the radicals, Cefalu carefully maintains distinctions among a dizzying array of figures.

The Johannine Renaissance is fluent in the theological controversies and commentaries of the age, as well as the secondary critical debates in our own, and generously reveals inroads for further exploration. Cefalu's revisionist book challenges and complements the work of historians and literary critics touting the dominance of Pauline forensic theology in the early modern period.