|
|
|
Reviews of Books
New Light on Precisianist and Antinomian Puritanism
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lombard, Illinois
| The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638. By Theodore Dwight Bozeman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 368 pages. $49.95 (cloth).Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England. By David R. Como. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. 520 pages. $65.00 (cloth).
|
|
One remarkable providence of the year 2004 was the nearly simultaneous publication of two significant books on Puritanism in old and New England that explore overlapping themes in complementary ways. Theodore Dwight Bozeman builds on his definitive exposition of the movement's biblical restorationism, To Live Ancient Lives, with a magisterial study of how its precisianism—the drive for holy living and the godly reformation of church and society—awakened an antinomian reaction on both sides of the Atlantic.1 David R. Como, meanwhile, revised his Princeton University dissertation into an impressively wide-ranging and provocative book describing the first wave of antinomian religious radicalism in England in the decades before 1640. Though neither author had the benefit of the other's completed book, the two studies were written in dialogue with one another. Bozeman, for example, toned down his thesis that antinomianism was a substantially different religious form ("post- and contra-puritan" [210]) in response to Como's critique in a journal article. In his text and in lengthy footnotes, Como engages material from Bozeman's book as it was published earlier in journals. Taken together these two volumes offer the clearest picture to date of the ways saints in old and New England embraced Puritan divinity in its mainstream and more radical manifestations. |
1
|
|
These two books not only deepen scholars' knowledge of the multidimensional qualities of Puritanism but also contribute to the larger field of Atlantic studies in which developments in England and Europe and in the Americas are understood as unfolding within interrelated contexts. For example, though the intensity of New England's Antinomian Controversy has always been attributed in part to theological baggage from earlier episodes of radicalism in Reformation history, and Anne Hutchinson's Spirit-oriented religion has been linked with that of similar individuals and groups arising in the turbulent years of the English Civil War, both these studies demonstrate that she and her followers participated in an amorphous countermovement surging within or alongside Puritanism years before the Great Migration of the early 1630s and the Civil War of the 1640s. The hegemonic drive for moral and social reform that characterized mainstream Puritanism on both sides of the Atlantic—called disciplinary religion by Bozeman—inevitably sparked this antinomian backlash. The countermovement was epitomized by numerous charismatic figures, "none of whom," as Como states, "can plausibly be mistaken for pillars of social or ideological stability" (441). That these essentially religious movements arose within widely varying contexts across an ocean illustrates the broad power of theological ideas and of spiritual yearning alongside whatever other social and economic forces were at work. Bozeman and Como put human faces on the transatlantic exchange of ideas, often with intriguing freshness—as in Como's section on the friendship and correspondence of John Winthrop Jr. and English Puritan-cum-antinomian Edward Howes. |
. . . |
There are about 1913 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
