Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T01:58:12.925Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Puritan polemical divinity and doctrinal controversy

from Part III: - Major Themes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

John Coffey
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
Paul C. H. Lim
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Get access

Summary

John Bunyan declared that 'it pleased me much to contend with great earnestness for the Word of faith', and he and other Puritans were not slack in doing so. The theological literature of the Protestant Reformation and its seventeenth-century aftermath (including that written by English and American Puritans) was shaped by controversy. Doctrinal differences from Roman Catholicism had to be defended, boundaries drawn among Protestant factions and Christian truth defended against gainsayers. Such theological polemic was not confined to treatises written in the heat of doctrinal debate but spilled over into catechetical, systematic, exegetical, homiletic and even devotional works. Of course theological controversy was not new in the seventeenth century: Pauline and other New Testament letters reflected early Christian controversy, the creedal formulations of ancient Christianity were moulded by theological conflict and in the later middle ages theological polemic flourished in the new universities abetted by Aristotelian logic and dialectical speculation, producing the precision of scholasticism. Later, the theology of Renaissance Christian humanists such as Erasmus was polemical in its critique of such scholasticism. The doctrinal positions taken up and defended by Puritans were for the most part not original to them, but were rather the stock in trade of what is imprecisely designated Calvinist or more properly Reformed theology.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×