Calvinism : a history by Hart D. G. (Darryl G.)

Author:Hart, D. G. (Darryl G.)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Calvinism -- History, RELIGION / Christianity / Calvinist, RELIGION / History, HISTORY / World
ISBN: 9780300148794
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

them, and had flashes of joy upon thoughts of the things of God. I was affected with good motions and affections of love to God and Christ, for their love revealed to man, and with grief for sin as displeasing them.'

But as a young man Goodwin experienced doubts and lustful temptations that he attributed to a rebellious heart. He finally experienced relief through conversion:

... this speaking of God to my soul, although it was but a gentle sound, yet it made a noise over my whole heart, and filled and possessed all the faculties of my whole soul. God took me aside, and as it were privately said unto me, Do you now turn to me, and I will pardon all your sins though ever so many, as I forgave and pardoned my servant Paul, and convert you unto me .. . 8

Aside from the popularity of journal-keeping, alertness to upswings and downturns in spiritual development became a characteristic mark of Puritan identity.

Even more indicative of the widespread appeal of practical divinity and its subjective earnestness was John Bunyan’s allegory Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). He too lacked a formal education and worked for much of his life in Bedfordshire as a tinker (pot repairer), with a brief stint in the Parliamentary Army during the English Civil War. After the war Bunyan married a woman (her name is unrecorded) with ties to Puritan circles, who had in her library Bayly’s Practice of Piety. Bunyan soon began to worship with a Nonconformist group of believers and underwent a conversion experience. He would eventually preach for this group, and by the time of the Restoration such activity had landed Bunyan in jail, where he was to conceive of the allegory that would make him famous. Like formal Puritan theology, Pilgrim’s Progress explored the order of salvation within the convert’s experience, from effectual calling to glorification. This meant that the pilgrim’s journey was hardly finished once he gained assurance of forgiveness; the pilgrimage had just begun, and it involved mortification (dying to sinful desires) and vivification (living for God). The account of the protagonist Christian’s ongoing struggle with sin and desire for holiness made Bunyan’s allegory appealing to readers well beyond Calvinistic circles; it would become a devotional staple among Arminians and Wesleyans. But for English Nonconformists it became an appealing guide to the nature of religious devotion outside the established church and on the margins of respectable society.

Puritan practical divinity spread immediately outside the British Isles to the Netherlands where English Protestants had, at least since the days of William Tyndale, ventured to escape religious policies in their native land. Aside from the theological affinity between the English and Dutch, William Perkins was an

important conduit of experimental Calvinism. Equally influential was Willem Teellinck (1579-1629), a Dutch pastor often credited with spearheading the Nadere Reformatie (Second Reformation) among the Reformed churches in the United Provinces. 9 In Teellnick’s case the transmission of practical divinity traveled less through English proponents in the Netherlands than through a Dutchman in England.

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