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.