During the English Revolution, all groups participated in a remarkable explosion of theological creativity as the very notion of ‘orthodoxy’ was contested like never before. ‘Religious radicalism was not simply the journey of a few notorious sectarians; it was a national experience.’ Within this environment, the impulse for further reform increasingly turned against Reformed theology itself. High profile divines such as Davenant, Ussher and Preston had begun to modify Calvinism ‘as part of a general trend in early seventeenth-century England to reposition Reformed theology so that it could better resist the onslaught of an increasingly militant Arminianism’. However, during decades marked by puritan rule, divines who had followed the path of their Reformed tutors journeyed beyond hypothetical formulations. Some puritans, episco-palians and sectarians self-consciously crossed the Calvinist Rubicon and embraced Arminian formulations of predestination and grace. This pattern has been observed by charting the course of numerous individuals from diverse ecclesial styles who migrated from hypothetical to categorical universalism or from Amyraldianism to Arminianism. As Reformed divines counter-attacked, several publications referred to a doctrinal ‘civil war’ or quinquarticular controversy, demonstrating contemporary awareness that England was experi-encing a seismic theological contest. The 1650s proved to be a hinge decade when the softening of Calvinism became a more comprehensive and public embrace of Arminianism. Non-Calvinist doctrines of conditional election and resistible grace therefore gained the upper hand in a non-controversial way after the Restoration.

In addition to broader intellectual trends, Part One has highlighted the diverse styles of Arminian theologies that emerged during the 1650s. English anti-Cal¬vinism was never a monolithic or stable position but a variegated protest with some shared convictions regarding the conditional nature of predestination and the resistibility of grace. The persistent myth that English Arminianism can be reduced to a pre-war Laudian phenomenon has obscured the breadth of post-war English engagement with Arminianism. In fact, as Part One has demonstrated, more Arminian works were published by puritan and sectarian divines in the 1650s than by Laudians in the 1620s and 1630s. By considering expressions of anti-Calvinism across diverse styles, these chapters have therefore highlighted surprising theological proximity between those otherwise radically divided by political and ecclesial matters.

The ‘Quinquarticular Controversie

Historians of religion have long been fascinated with the erosion of Calvinist orthodoxy. Over the course of the seventeenth century a major intellectual shift occurred within England, the ramifications of which continued into the eight¬eenth and nineteenth centuries. During the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Reformed doctrines of predestination and perseverance formed a ‘common and ameliorating bond’, despite episodes of protest. By the close of the seventeenth century, however, these Reformed doctrines were widely rejected by many, both Anglicans and dissenters. Instead, there arose a commitment to conditional election and resistible grace, commonly referred to as Arminianism. The crisis of Calvinism and rise of Arminianism in England have previously been associated either with Laudians during the early Stuart period or Latitudinarians and High Churchmen in the post-Restoration church. However, this book provides an alternative and surprising explanation. The hinge decades for the intellectual swing away from Reformed theology were those of the English Revolution (1642–60).

In particular, the 1650s witnessed a paradoxical phenomenon – the rise of Arminianism during a period characterized by puritan rule. Under the shelter of Cromwellian toleration, numerous publications from scholarly folios to popular pamphlets attacked the doctrinal commitments of Reformed Orthodoxy. Most alarming were those from within the puritan fold, as the likes of John Goodwin, John Horn and John Milton formulated anti-Calvinist soteriologies predicated upon conditional forms of predestination and perseverance. The old enemy also reared its head as a new breed of episcopal anti-Calvinists, including Henry Hammond, Thomas Pierce and Herbert Thorndike, attacked the decretal and solifidian emphases of Reformed theology. Familiar battle lines were further confused by an insurgence of sectaries who flourished under the relative amnesty of Cromwellian toleration. Socinians, Ranters, Quakers and General Baptists laid siege to the pillars of the religious establishment, including Calvinist doctrines. This cacophony of ‘mechanick’ preachers and plebeian pamphleteers represented a new style of anti-Calvinism, which also eroded the Reformed hegemony.

Consequently, by 1655, Obadiah Howe voiced a growing concern among Reformed divines that the famous continental Arminian controversy had now come to England: ‘It is wel known, that those flames that did utterly consume the peace of the Belgick Churches, have miserably of late broken out amongst us.’

The insurgence of radical ideas, sects and publications during the English Revolution brought a third ‘style’ of anti-Calvinism to the fore. In particular, a proliferation of fissiparous networks and more formalized movements flourished during the 1650s under the relative amnesty of Cromwellian toleration, including ‘Anabaptists’, ‘Levellers’, ‘Diggers’, ‘Ranters’, ‘Muggletonians’, ‘Quakers’ and ‘Fifth Monarchists’. Much to the disgust of ordained divines, even ‘soap boilers’ and women morphed into preachers who turned tubs upside down as makeshift pulpits and turned the world upside down in the process. Daniel Featley dubbed these uneducated lay preachers ‘Mechanick Enthusiasts’. In particular, those committed to an immanentist ‘spirit’ religion considered the strictures of Reformed Orthodoxy to be suffocating and lacking any direct means of revelation or assurance. As Paul Lim has demonstrated, however, Socinians committed to ‘rational’ religion also undermined the Reformed tradition from a quite different perspective. The Socinians grounded theological authority in human reason and therefore rejected the scholastic method as specu¬lative, preferring instead the Grotian combination of historical and philological hermeneutic with an emphasis on natural law. Equally, Socinians rejected the foundational assumptions of classical theism, especially any recourse to divine mystery or aseity. As a corollary, they rejected the notion of predesti¬nation rooted in speculative eternal decrees or divine foreknowledge of future contingents. As the English Socinian John Biddle insisted, ‘God knoweth not such actions, till they come to pass’. Consequently, Lim has argued that the rejection of Calvinist soteriology became a surprising point of convergence between ‘proponents of “radical religion”, and “rational religion” … Calvinism was, unequivocally, the bête noire of both these groups’. Those committed to a rationalist hermeneutic that removed mystery from religion and those committed to the unio mystico that ‘godded’ the believer, both chipped away at the Calvinist hegemony throughout the 1650s.

Environmental factors considered in Chapter One, including the removal of press licensing, the suspension of religious Articles and unprecedented levels of political toleration, all contributed to the growth of more extreme religious views. In particular, the new print culture enabled radicals to play ‘an outsized role in shaping the tone and tenor’ of religious debate after the opening of the Long Parliament.

During the seventeenth century the theological tide was turning in England. A cursory glance at some bestselling books illustrates the intellectual shift that occurred. In the Jacobean period, the puritan bishop of Bangor published a Reformed handbook to cultivate godly spirituality. Lewis Bayly's The Practice of Piety (c.1612) became a publishing sensation, reprinted over thirty times in England before the Restoration. The success of other publications, such as A Golden Chaine (1591) by William Perkins or the Marrow of Sacred Divinity (Medulla Theologiae, 1623) by William Ames, reflected a voracious English appetite for Reformed theology and piety. In response to claims by Thomas Pierce that the Church of England had never been Calvinist, Henry Hickman was therefore able to appeal to the evidence of book sales: ‘Why hath the Practice of Pietie … with divers others been so often printed?’

However, in the second half of the century, trends and titles began to change. In 1658 an anonymous publication surfaced, entitled The Whole Duty of Man. In a commendatory letter Henry Hammond offered up intercessions that ‘the benefit of this Work’ should fill the ‘Hearts of the whole Nation’. His prayers were answered as sales of Richard Allestree's devotional classic eclipsed Reformed rivals. Stripped of doctrinal discussions, The Whole Duty exemplified the moral style associated with episcopal Arminians. In the preface, Allestree urged souls ‘to behave themselves so in this world, that they may be happy for ever in the next’ and warned of eternal torment for those who do not ‘faithfully obey’ the terms of the new covenant. Allestree's moral handbook captured the English imagination and went through forty-five editions between 1660 and 1715. Taylor's Holy Living reached its fourteenth edition by the Glorious Revolution and Holy Dying was into its twenty-first edition by 1710.5 These bestsellers indicate revised sensibilities among the English population as interest in Reformed doctrines was replaced by an emphasis on lay piety and moral reformation. These publishing histories therefore bear witness to a wider migration away from Calvinism during the seventeenth century.

The Reformation and post-Reformation eras were marked by major episodes of theological controversy. Registering high on the Richter scale were debates regarding predestination and the doctrines of grace, which troubled every major Christian tradition. The Eastern Orthodox Church faced the apparent conversion of a former Patriarch of Constantinople to Calvinism as witnessed in The Confession of Cyril Lukaris (1631). The controversy culminated in the Synod of Jerusalem (1672), whose Confession of Dositheos condemned Calvinist doctrines as ‘abominable, impious, and blasphemous’. In 1581, debate flared within the Roman Catholic communion as a Dominican friar, Domingo Báñez, accused Jesuit priests of reducing grace to synergistic aid (auxilia) rather than efficacious infusion. The publication in 1588 of Concordia Liberi Arbitrii by the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina added fuel to the fire. By 1602 Pope Clement VIII presided over a series of formal conferences in a bid to resolve what became known as the controversy de Auxiliis. After eighty-five conferences, the verdict was inconclusive and a papal decree in 1607 permitted both Dominican and Jesuit doctrines of grace. A later decree in 1611 forbade further publications regarding efficacious grace in a bid to dampen the flames of controversy that still raged. However, the writings of Cornelius Jansen reignited the controversy in 1640 when his three-volume work was posthumously published, in which Jesuits were denounced as Pelagiani moderni. Finally, in 1653 Pope Innocent X condemned the five cardinal doctrines of Jansenism as heresy, though the dispute continued to simmer under the surface into the eighteenth century.

Within Lutheranism, a synergistic controversy also erupted and deepened divisions between the self-styled ‘Gnesio’ or ‘genuine’ Lutherans and the Philippists who followed Melancthon. Johann Pfeffinger and other Melancthonians contended for human cooperation in conversion, insisting that sufficient modus agendi (mode of action) was available to fallen humanity to respond to divine grace, contra Luther's De Servo Arbitrio.

This chapter considers the social and intellectual contexts in which English puritans like John Milton applied the principle of reformation to the tenets of Reformed theology. This was of course not a new trend. As has already been argued, the breadth and ambiguity of the English Articles and liturgy resulted in several episodes of contest and reform during the Elizabethan, Jacobean and early Stuart periods. However, certain environmental factors enabled a more widespread and radical contest to develop during the 1640s and ‘50s, which led to a ‘retreat from Calvinism’. Until recently, Whiggish historiography assumed this anti-Calvinism was part of an inevitable modernizing trajectory, a combination of ‘progressive’ Enlightenment rationalism and social egalitar¬ianism. However, this chapter will highlight political contingencies, alongside longer-term theological trends, during a uniquely disrupted period of English history. Throughout the 1640s and ‘50s, unprecedented religious freedoms combined with millenarian expectations to generate remarkable intellectual exploration and fecundity. For many puritans, the disruption was interpreted as a divine opportunity to purge a church ‘but halfly reformed’. As John Goodwin claimed, the sun had risen higher over the ‘commonwealth of Israel’. Consequently, ‘[many] shall discourse and beate out the secrets of GOD in the Scriptures with more libertie and freedome of judgement and understanding’.

John Milton captured the heady atmosphere as he envisaged manual workers and scholars, ‘sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas … fast reading, trying all things’. The rise of Arminian theol¬ogies was therefore part of a broader impulse for further reform. This chapter will consider social and political contingencies, which contributed to the crisis of Calvinism during a unique period of English history.

After the decade of Personal Rule, the 1640s witnessed dramatic reversals of power as Cavalier defeats ushered in puritan rule. The first ecclesiastical intervention by the Long Parliament annulled the Canons of 1640, including the notorious et cetera oath. In 1641, Laudian bishops were de facto stripped of their powers, having been accused by the Grand Remonstrance of being an unholy alliance of ‘Arminians and Libertines’ in fellowship with ‘Papists’.

In 1638, the Scottish Presbyterian Robert Baillie gave a speech at the General Assembly of the Kirk, warning against Laudians such as Richard Montagu and Francis White, spreading ‘Arminian Errour’. In 1652, following the publication of Redemption Redeemed, Baillie published an identical speech under the title A Scotch Antidote to English Arminianism. In the preface, Baillie warned that ‘long hot skirmishes’ in the 1640s regarding ‘Bishops’ and ‘ceremonies’ had allowed John Goodwin to ‘cast open at our backs the gates of our great Towers … to undermine the very foundation of our Church’. It was the ‘at our backs’ threat that was so disconcerting. John Goodwin therefore became known as ‘the Great spreader of Arminianism’ from within the puritan fold.

Ironically, Goodwin's Reformed education strengthened his critique of Calvinism. After seven years at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he completed his MA degree in 1619. Through rigorous training he had mastered Hebrew, Greek and Latin, attaining the humanist ideal of trium linguarum gnarus. He was tutored in scholastic methods and fully conversant with the logic of Aristotelian causality. Goodwin's publications included extended exegetical arguments, which displayed the more general Protestant trait of ‘a profound recourse to the biblical text in its original languages’. Equally, Goodwin applied syllogistic argumentation based on what he referred to as the ‘rules’ and ‘axiomes’ of the ‘schoolmen’. In short, Goodwin illustrated the reasonably happy marriage between humanist and scholastic methodologies among Reformed divines. Consequently, Goodwin's Arminianism was radical precisely because of its conservative appropriation of the methods and authorities familiar to Reformed Orthodoxy. In defending Redemption Redeemed, Goodwin insisted: ‘A consid-erable part of my works consist of Scripture stabiliments’ along with lengthy citations from ‘Calvin, Musculus, Melancthon, Bucer, Peter Martyr … besides what I alleadge from the ancient Fathers’. He therefore claimed ‘patronage and countenance’ from Reformed luminaries throughout his Arminian publications. Despite Thomas Edwards labelling him ‘hereticum ingenium’, Goodwin's Reformed style was unnervingly conventional.

Goodwin's theological publications reflected his context as a religious contro¬versialist and puritan pastor. Redemption Redeemed (1651), the most systematic of Goodwin's works, was intended as a two-part project.

In 1655, Obadiah Howe voiced a growing concern among Reformed divines that the continental Arminian controversy had now spread to England. As the conflict deepened, the puritan Arminian John Goodwin bemoaned those among the godly ‘who have appeared in arms against me in this Quinquarticular war’. Fellow puritans such as George Kendall and John Owen had published lengthy ripostes against the one they dubbed ‘the English Tilenus’. Daniel Tilenus was a French Protestant who became an Arminian sympathizer and open critic of the Synod of Dort. This accusation offended Goodwin and he complained against the underhand tactics being used in ‘Quinquarticular warfare’. This internecine conflict among the godly led Goodwin to pray that God would ‘speedily cause these civil wars, about matters of opinion, to cease to the end of the common¬wealth of Israel’. However, Goodwin was also concerned to downplay his apparent affinity with ‘Oxford Cavaliers’ such as Thomas Pierce. In defending the Calvinist credentials of the Church of England, Henry Hickman had named Goodwin and Pierce among ‘many’ who ‘lift up an English pen against the Orthodox, in this quinquarticular controversy’. By denouncing puritan and episcopal Arminians on the same page, Hickman demonstrated contemporary awareness of new battlelines. During the 1650s, a soteriological ‘civil war’ erupted in pulpits and in print, only this time some royalists and regicides, puritans and prelates, appeared to be fighting on the same side. Such was the nature of this ‘quinquarticular war’.

The emergence of Arminianism within the puritan fold has been described as ‘another of the great paradoxes of puritan history’. The polemical conjoining of ‘Puritan’ with ‘Calvinist’, and the counter-slur of ‘Arminianism’ against Laudians, made the whole notion of puritan Arminianism an oxymoron before the English Revolution. Indeed, pejorative associations proved to be so persistent that ‘we have been trained to think reflexively of puritans as Calvinists, and Calvinists as strict predestinarians’. However, more recent scholarship has begun to appreciate that the ‘puritan revolution’ led to a revolution within puritanism itself as some among the godly applied the Protestant topos of reformation to Calvinism.

Richard Baxter's juxtaposition of the ‘old common moderate sort’ with those he elsewhere dubbed ‘New Prelatical Divines’ inevitably relied on a certain amount of caricature. However, Baxter also highlighted an important trend during the Interregnum, which has been largely overlooked. Revisionist historiography has concentrated its efforts on demonstrating the subversive and radical nature of early Stuart Laudianism in the build up to the Civil War. As Anthony Milton argues, this has resulted in the largely untested assumption that once Archbishop Laud was executed and his bishops sequestered, a post-Laudian ‘Anglicanism’ arose with an innocent commitment to Prayer Book liturgy, the Thirty-Nine Articles and a moderate style that was ‘theologically prudent, socially defer-ential and liturgically restrained’. However, Baxter was alarmed by the rise of an even more vociferous episcopal-style anti-Calvinism, which insisted on jure divino ordination and instigated a wholesale attack on the Reformed heritage of the Church of England. In short, ‘These men in Doctrine were such as are called Arminians’. To date, the theological commitments of this new breed of episcopalians in the 1650s have received limited attention. As McElligott notes, ‘In the vast scholarly literature on the English Revolution, more has been written about the 1640s than about the 1650s, and more attention has been given to the Parliamentarians than to the Royalists’. In his recent work, Anthony Milton has provided a signif-icant corrective. This chapter builds on his work to highlight the important role Arminian theology played as anti-Calvinist episcopal divines battled to gain control of the Church of England during the 1650s. Highlighting this doctrinal contest will further underscore the problematic nature of ‘Anglicanism’ as a stable concept before the Restoration. Though Spurr may be right to conclude that the English church ‘emerged from the 1640s and 50s with a distinct doctrinal, ecclesiological and spiritual identity’, the more significant point would seem to be that this was not the ‘Restoration’ of a Laudian status quo.

The puritan John Goodwin and episcopalian Henry Hammond displayed remarkable fecundity and sophistication in their diverse formulations of Arminian soteriology. Considered as representatives of broader intellectual trends, these divines provide some important insights regarding the shape of English Arminianism during the 1650s.

Firstly, English Arminians utilized a wide range of intellectual sources and displayed surprising levels of catholicity. Both Goodwin and Hammond drew upon the early modern synthesis of patristic, medieval and Reformation sources, along with the methodologies of scholasticism and Renaissance humanism. Their works cited a wide range of intellectual sources, which as van Asselt notes, did not equate to being ‘eclectic’ but was an intentional display of catholicity and orthodoxy. Regarding post-Reformation sources, for tactical reasons Goodwin largely appealed to luminaries from the Reformed tradition, whereas Hammond sought the patronage of anti-Calvinist episcopalians. However, as a puritan, Goodwin also borrowed openly from Catholic sources, including Iberian neo-Scholastics. In Redemption Redeemed, Goodwin drew on the ‘acute’ insights of the Franciscan bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, Francisco D’Arriba, and liberally cited his Operis Conciliatorii, Gratiae et Liberi Arbitrii (1622). In Triumviri, Goodwin defended himself against the attacks of Henry Jeanes by citing several ‘Schoolmen and Papists’, including D’Arriba, Aquinas and the Jesuit Francisco Suarez. Ironically, Goodwin assumed Suarez to be a credible reference in his debate with a fellow puritan and concluded, ‘if Mr. Jeanes be of Suarez minde … he is of mine also’.

This open recourse to post-Reformation Catholic scholastics serves as a corrective to common assumptions that English puritans, unlike ‘Anglicans’, only appropriated Protestant sources. In fact, whilst Goodwin openly cited Suarez, it was Hammond who appeared to disguise him as John Overall. Consequently, ‘the dividing line is not to be drawn between Reformed or Protestant and Catholic, but between different positions, which can be found in both Protestant and Catholic theologians’. The sources and arguments deployed by Goodwin and Hammond spanned the length and breadth of the Western tradition as they consciously situated themselves with regard to Augustine and other shared reference points within medieval and early modern traditions.

This chapter provides the first in-depth analysis of the only major contribution to the quinquarticular war by Henry Hammond. Published just after his death, Pacifick Discourse (1660) included sustained discussions of the order of decrees and the mode of grace, resulting in the clearest summary of Hammond's mature Arminian theology. The publication was the culmination of an arduous process, spearheaded by Thomas Pierce, who persuaded Robert Sanderson to confess publicly to ‘quitting the sublapsarian way’. His initial statement was deemed inadequate, so under duress Sanderson sent further correspondence. Pacifick Discourse contained two letters of reply by Hammond, including carefully selected extracts from Sanderson's correspondence. It was registered for print on 9 May 1660, though the reference entitled it ‘The Last words of the pious, reverend and very learned Dr Hammond’. It was therefore published shortly after Hammond died and just before Charles II landed at Dover. Pacifick Discourse was therefore both a sophisticated theological treatise and a politically charged publication, carefully crafted and timed to consolidate an episcopal anti-Calvinist church settlement.

Throughout the 1650s, Hammond worked hard to leverage the reputational value of English episcopalians who could be construed as anti-Calvinists. Underpinning these efforts was a concern to avoid the appearance of isolation. In a letter to Sheldon, Hammond bemoaned John Owen's backhanded compliment, which ‘tells me that the whole weight of the Episcopal caus seems especially to be divolved upon me’. He therefore urged a show of support: ‘I should be glad Dr Sanderson, or you, or some others would confute [him], for the truth is my appearing thus alone will go for little’. Hammond's other letters contained numerous tactical instructions regarding the activities and publications of episcopal divines, including ‘Dr. Sanderson’ and ‘Dr. Jackson’ whose public personas were valuable assets requiring careful management. For example, a letter to Sheldon voiced concern that Sanderson was considering attending Presbyterian lectures in Grantham. Hammond cautioned, ‘Instead of serving Dr. Sanderson, they desire to serve themselves of him … To have him thought such as they’. Pacifick Discourse therefore attempted to seize upon the apparent coup of Sanderson's anti-Calvinist confession in order to demonstrate that, despite ‘light differences’, Sanderson and Hammond were on the same page.