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.’