This chapter concerns the place of predestination in Andrewes’ own style of divinity. On the one hand, because of the organising role of predestinarian error in Andrewes’ sense of puritanism and of the importance of puritanism as the defining other against which Andrewes constructed his own position, predestination was in some sense central to Andrewes’ thought. But on the other, since presumption was precisely what was wrong with the puritan attitude to predestination, a topic which the puritans thought they could subjugate to their own rationalist cross-questioning, this was an area in which Andrewes affected an extreme reticence. Nevertheless, what looks like an explicitly Arminian account of theology of grace can be teased out of his sermons and assigned a central role in his overall theology, which stressed the collaboration between the grace of God and human effort, the will of God and that of fallen humanity, enabled by Christ’s sacrifice and the ameliorating effects of sacramental grace to help people collaborate actively in their own salvation.

The Introduction is in three parts. The first introduces the object of study and the sources and methodology used to study it and puts the topic in its historiographical context. The second locates it in terms of the religio-political developments of the period between the 1590s and the 1620s. The third addresses the immediate political and polemical circumstances in which Laudianism rose to prominence and then power in the mid- to late 1620s, and then identifies the 1630 edition of Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons as the movement’s key foundational text or mission statement.

This chapter looks at fellow-travelling Calvinist conformists, that is to say persons who had always espoused a Calvinist or reformed view of predestination, who, on certain issues and in certain modes, could sound like any moderate puritan, but who, on the issue of conformity, took a firmly anti-puritan line, and consequently on certain other issues could sound just like card-carrying Laudians. It does so through the analysis and comparison of the careers of two such men, Robert Sanderson and Humphrey Sydenham, whose views on the theology of grace, conformity and puritanism, and indeed on some of the signature values of Laudianism, are analysed and compared.

This chapter sets up the problem of the relationship between Arminianism – defined as a set of propositions on the subject of predestination, at odds with Calvinist orthodoxy – and Laudianism as it has emerged in this book. Predestinarian error played a central role in the Laudian analysis of puritanism – it underlay a great deal of puritan presumption and hypocrisy, as well as their most divisive, indeed sectarian, impulses and behaviour. In addition, puritanism was the organising other of the Laudian project. All of which meant that predestination was a topic of great interest to the Laudians. But when it came to the positive case for Laudian reformation, to Laudianism as a style of piety and way of being Christian, the doctrine was far less central. Indeed, the topic tended to fall within the remit of those things best left unaddressed and certainly not subjected to the sort of assertion and counter-assertion that had recently threatened to plunge the Low Countries into chaos. However, the intensity of the Laudians’ repudiation of the puritans’ Calvinist predestinarianism more than implied the presence of a counter-orthodoxy and certainly called down accusations of Arminianism upon the Laudians’ heads.

Chapter 5 considers the theology and moral philosophy of the respected theologian and moral casuist, Robert Sanderson. The divine Sanderson despaired of the unfortunate consequences for practical morality of denying the responsibility and freedom of individuals. In its historical context his doubt amounted to finally rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Scholars consider Sanderson’s Several Cases of Conscience Discussed in Ten Lectures in the Divinity School at Oxford a main reference for Locke in the writing of the unpublished Two Tracts of Government and his foundational Essays on the Law of Nature. Sanderson’s work sets out a moral philosophy of free will reinforced by mechanical overtones of necessary causality in reasoning. The chapter briefly analyses this type of ‘mechanical conscience’ and shows how Sanderson was committed to a de facto theory of government.

In late medieval Europe, most people accepted the Catholic Church’s teachings, but a significant minority called for reforms. In the 1520s, reformers came to include Martin Luther, a professor of theology in Germany. Luther’s ideas turned into a movement, in part through the new technology of the printing press. He and other reformers worked with political authorities, and much of central Europe and Scandinavia broke with the Catholic Church and established independent Protestant Churches. In England, King Henry VIII’s desire for a male heir led him to establish a separate English Church. In the late 1530s, the Catholic Church began to respond more vigorously to Protestant challenges and began carrying out internal reforms, led by the papacy and new religious orders such as the Jesuits. At the same time, the ideas of John Calvin inspired a second wave of Protestant reform, in which order, piety, and discipline were viewed as marks of divine favor. Protestant and Catholic political authorities thought that their territories should have one official state Church, and sought to purge ideas, objects, and people considered religiously alien. The Reformation led to religious persecution, individual and group migration, and more than a century of religious war.

Grotius’ earlier theological controversies concerned the authority of secular rulers and the normative status of the undivided church, principles given fullest exposition in De Imperio Summarum Potestatum. Meletius reveals deeper disagreements with the prevailing Calvinism, insisting on the distinction of core doctrines from theological speculations. The atoning death of Christ, expounded in De Satisfactione Christi, was of central importance to him, and his apologetic interest flowered in De Veritate Christianae Religionis, an exercise in natural theology. The later writings centre on his Bible Commentary and his writings on Christian unity. They reveal some changes upon earlier views, but no accommodation to Catholic doctrinal norms. The polemics with Rivet sharpened his opposition to Calvinism as a dogmatic system with an inadequate conception of the Christian moral life. His status as a layman of no church establishment exposed him to appropriation in support of later agenda that were not his. But his influence was widespread in later Protestantism of many strands.

The first principles behind the developmental idea are linear time, interiority and staged structure. ‘Development’ is one particular historical way of conceptualizing the primary principle of change; in it, human time is an attempt at successful ‘recapitulation’ (a term that would reappear with modern developmental psychology’s founder, G. Stanley Hall) of Adam’s initial failure. In monotheism, time constructs interiority as permanence, ‘the mind’, in contrast with the temporary visitations of pagan or shamanic religion. Medieval psychology saw a proliferation of its ‘faculties’ (memory, imagination, judgement) and ‘operations’ (abstraction, attention, consciousness, logical reasoning, information-processing), which penetrated both the monastic and the humanist idea of the individual. Augustine’s ‘six ages’ of man gave the lifespan a fixed structure. Following the Reformation, change in the elect minority was seen either as instantaneous or as a stadial sequence: Jansenists and Calvinists on the one hand, Jesuits and Arminians on the other, disputed the function of human agency in relation to divine determinism.

When influential philosophers prior to the Enlightenment such as Leibniz and Malebranche speculate about the interior life of ‘Man’ they presuppose the elect, saved man. This continues to be the case with Pierre Nicole and Jacques-Joseph Duguet, whose writings coincide with Jansenism’s turn towards a movement of political opposition to absolutism that ended up in Jacobinism. The shadows cast by predestination can still be detected even in Locke and Montesquieu, regarded as the founding figures of the Enlightenment. The theory of election would retain a subliminal presence in the history of the human sciences of the eighteenth century. So too would their increasing preoccupation with causality in psychological and social identity; out of the causes for election and reprobation came the imputation of causes for developmental normality and abnormality (‘idiocy’, ‘imbecility’ etc.) in the history of medicine.

This contribution examines an important triangulation in the thought of Hugo Grotius, or Hugo de Groot (1583–1645): his biblically based effort to redefine private property; a Remonstrant (or Arminian) theological framework for his definition of the free-willing and rational individual who could choose good or evil, as well as punish evil in others; and his work for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which in many ways framed all that he wrote. Through these three items, Grotius developed an initial framework for international law, especially the ideology of “freedom of the seas,” or what is now called “freedom of navigation.” The question that arises through this analysis is whether the universal category of “freedom of the seas” as well as his idea of human nature are vitiated by the specific context in which they arose and the interests they served, or whether one can indeed develop universals, recognized by others, from specific contexts.

In this chapter, I endeavor to weave together a complex series of European legal developments connected with the emergence of intellectual property. I begin by tracing the emergence of intellectual property in France, focusing on the context for this development in the revolutionary processes through which a new French nation was formed, and on the ambivalent implications of national codification for intellectual property in France. I then go back to the Reformation, pointing out the significance of Calvinist and Lutheran legal dcotrines for jurisprudential traditions carrying new conceptions of sovereignty and natural rights. Shifting to the legacies of these traditions for legal and administrative theories that developed in German-speaking lands, we see early foundations for a new jurisprudential narrative that becomes vital to the substantive rationale of intellectual property in our own time: progressivism. The upshot of these complex developments is a paradoxical linkage between bureaucratic impersonalism in the formal application of legal doctrines and an idealizing personalism in the agentive capacities of individual human beings: the idolizing of "genius."

Puritan theology was distinctly literary. Defined in relation to the Bible and asserting a scriptural standard for faith and religious practice, it was firmly anchored in reading and interpretation. Conversely, puritan theology shaped puritan literature. Puritans considered the Bible as they read it and heard it taught, and they interpreted and wrote about their own experiences in light of the Bible and other textual models of religious experience. Puritan texts were shaped by theology, both because theories of reading and writing were central to puritan faith and because puritan faith was central to the lives and experiences of many puritan writers. Puritan writers – both ministers and laypeople – addressed the complexities of their beliefs and their religious experience in various genres, including theology manuals, sermons, spiritual autobiographies and conversion narratives, and poetry. Puritan writers also addressed theoretical questions about what kinds of textual expression were most appropriate and most spiritually efficacious for their communities. As ministers, political leaders, and laypeople wrestled with the challenges of their faith and its consequences for individuals and communities, they created a varied body of illuminating and moving texts that reveal the rich complexity of puritan belief and puritan literary practice.

This chapter argues that William Cowper aligned various faiths against atheism and the moral degeneration that, in his mind, atheism necessarily produced. Examining poems from all phases of Cowper’s career – including his 1782 moral satires, the Olney Hymns (1779), The Task (1785), and “The Castaway” (1799; 1803) – I elucidate his belief that, unlike insensible atheists, Christians should extend their sympathy to all parts of God’s creation: to the Indians oppressed by British colonialism, to the poor inhabitants of the British countryside, even to the hares Cowper kept as pets in Olney. The only figure unworthy of such sympathy in Cowper’s thinking was the atheist. Thus, for Cowper, non-Christians from abroad were excusable, and even respectable, as long as they believed in a deity and did their best with the portion of divine light they had been granted. Cowper rejected all faiths but evangelical Christianity as false, yet he aspired to a form of sociability that was available to all theists. Although there were clear limits to Cowper’s ecumenical impulses, they reveal the imaginative multifaith alliances eighteenth-century atheism was capable of engendering.

This chapter examines the reception of Augustine’s “Confessions” in the Enlightenment through three major lexicographical works: Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary; Chevalier de Jaucourt’s entry in the Encyclopédie, “Church Fathers”; and Voltaire’s Questions on the Encyclopedia. All of them deliberately misappropriate Augustine's account of his life as a sinner in order to undermine aspects of his theology, and, by extension, the theology of Jansenism in their own era.

Chapter 16 considers the development of the doctrine of justification in Lutheran and Reformed Orthodoxy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Justification was understood by both Protestant communities as an essentially forensic notion. However, there were important divergences between the two, particularly in relation to their understanding of the nature of predestination and the role of a covenant between God and humanity. The chapter analyses the convergences and divergences between Lutheran and Reformed Orthodoxy on the question of the objective grounds and subjective appropriation of justification, before exploring the much greater emphasis placed on the covenantal context of justification in several sections of Reformed theology. Finally, the chapter considers the degrees of continuity that can be identified between the original approaches to justification found in the writings of Luther and Calvin and those found in their Orthodox successors.

This chapter explores Holmes’s emerging theology. Holmes was deeply agnostic; he had a modern and scientific view about the limits of human understanding. At the same time, he was inspired by a spiritual conception of human life. In these views, he was influenced by the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Understanding Holmes’s views thus requires recognizing their connection to Eastern philosophy as well as their origins in New England Puritanism and the Unitarian movement.

Religion was a force throughout Twain’s lifetime, early on as the strict Calvinism inherited from his mother, and later as he rebelled against orthodoxy. His reading of Thomas Paine at an early age introduced him to religious skepticism, which challenged the beliefs he held as a child. Despite his skepticism, he was very close with a number of clergymen, most notably his family minister Joseph Twichell, who may be considered his closest adult friend. He vowed to reform and become a devout Christian in order to marry Olivia Langdon, but his “reform” ended after a year or so. In many of his works, he satirically exposes religious hypocrisy, and in his later unpublished writing, most notably Letters from the Earth (not published until 1962), he expresses doubt and scorn for conventional Christianity.