| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael P. Winship. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 322. $29.95.

In the forty years since the "antinomian controversy" in early Massachusetts last received a book-length treatment, historians have interpreted the event as a turning point in the development of modern economic values, gender roles, and forms of spiritual and literary expression. Michael P. Winship's new book challenges these interpretations of the controversy and even offers a new name for it. Winship argues that the conflict had little to do with antinomian beliefs that God's elect were freed from God's moral law. Rather, the two sides battled in the late 1630s over "how best to magnify the free grace of God," which all agreed was the only path to salvation, and Winship therefore suggests we call it the "free grace controversy" (p. 1). According to his lucid summation of the doctrinal issues, "the core energizing question of the controversy was whether or not you had to know that God loved you before you could trust the signs that you loved him" (p. 228). For the dominant party, one's growing ability to obey God's law was a trustworthy sign that God had offered the gift of grace, whether or not one had directly felt that grace. For the party that most historians have called antinomians, trust in such signs was unwise and insufficient. The direct personal experience of God's free grace was for them preeminent, and reliance on signs such as obedience and good works encouraged a dangerous form of hypocrisy. . . .

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