"John Edwards of Cambridge (1637-1716) has typically been portrayed as a marginalized 'Calvinist' in an overwhelmingly 'Arminian' later Stuart Church of England. In Retaining the Old Episcopal Divinity, Jake Griesel challenges this depiction of Edwards and the theological climate of his contemporary Church. Griesel demonstrates that Edwards was recognized in his own day and the immediately following generations as one of the preeminent conforming divines of the period, who featured prominently in notable theological controversies concerning contemporaries such as John Locke, Gilbert Burnet, Daniel Whitby, William Whiston, and Samuel Clarke. Despite some Arminian opposition, Edwards' theological works are shown to have enjoyed a warm reception among sizable segments of the established Church's clergy, many of whom shared his Reformed convictions. Instead of a theological misfit, this study contends that the anti-Arminian Edwards was a decidedly mainstream churchman. Griesel's reassessment has ramifications far beyond the figure of Edwards, however, and ultimately serves as a prism through which to visualize with much greater clarity the broader theological landscape of the later Stuart Church of England, and particularly the place of Reformed orthodoxy within it. It substantially develops recent research on the persisting vitality of Reformed theology within the post-Restoration Church by demonstrating to an unprecedented extent the sheer strength and numbers of conforming Reformed divines between the Restoration and the evangelical revivals. Finally, Griesel problematizes the idea that the post-Restoration Church developed a fairly homogeneous 'Anglican' identity, and argues instead that the Church in this period was theologically and ecclesio-politically variegated"--

This study examines the ethical character of John Calvin and his Genevan colleagues' evangelizing of France. It reveals that Calvin's plans for proselytizing his homeland involved lying, deception, and obfuscation which were employed as a means of evading detection by the French authorities. Balserak considers important questions about the relationship between godliness and cunning, about Calvin's manufacturing of his image, and about the lengths to which he and his colleagues went to spread their gospel.

This book explores the origins and development of one of the most significant doctrines of Reformation theology. The innovative ways in which the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli and his successor Heinrich Bullinger thought about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments left an indelible mark on the Reformed tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Distinctively, Zwingli and Bullinger emphasized the continuity of both testaments and spoke of a single covenant between God and humanity. This would become one of the defining teachings of Reformed Christianity. This book follows the development of their "covenant theology" in the Reformation and argues for its adoption by John Calvin in Geneva and the German theologians of the post-Reformation era.

In John Locke's Theology: An Ecumenical, Irenic, and Controversial Project, Jonathan S. Marko offers the closest work available to a theological system derived from the writings of John Locke. Marko argues that Locke's intent for The Reasonableness of Christianity, his most noted theological work, was to describe and defend his version of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity and not his personal theological views. Locke, Marko says, intended the work to be an ecumenical and irenic project during a controversial time in philosophy and theology. Locke described what qualifies someone as a Christian in simple and irenic terms, and argued for the necessity of Scripture and the reasonableness of God's means of conveying his authoritative messages. The Reasonableness of Christianity could be construed as personal, but mainly in the sense that it puts the burden of understanding Scripture and arriving at theological convictions on the autonomous individual, rejecting the notion that one should base one's doctrinal opinions on so-called authorities. His work was inadvertently controversial partly because then, like today, readers typically failed to make a distinction between Locke's personal and programmatic positions. Marko also points to places in Locke's corpus where he avoids advocating for a particular sectarian position in his treatment of theological doctrines. What is more, it shows why attempting to categorize Locke--a philosopher, theologian, and political scientist all at once--according to traditional Christian paradigms is a dangerous misstep and a difficult scholarly feat.

The relationship between English conformity and the Arminian tradition has long defied neat explanation. In Bisschop's Bench, Samuel D. Fornecker charts the incompatible theological agendas into which post-Restoration Arminian conformity proliferated and challenges the thesis that a monolithic Arminianism marched steadily from the post-Restoration period into the early Hanoverian. Fornecker examines the theological life of the English Church by paying particular attention to the Arminian conformists who accentuated Reformed divinity in an unprecedented display of disambiguation from the Dutch Arminian tradition and those who exercised authority from the Bishops' bench. By demonstrating the scope of intra-Arminian divergence and the negatively defined consensus that united traditionalist clergy otherwise at odds over grace and predestination, Bisschop's Bench provides an illuminating perspective on the Arminian tradition in the political, confessional, and educative contexts of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.

Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck (1854--1921) found himself between two eras. The end of the "long nineteenth century" and the experience of World War I marked how much the world around him had changed. This book examines Bavinck's theological methodology with a particular focus on its influence by the German historicist movement. Author Cameron D. Clausing uses Bavinck's doctrine of the Trinity to test the argument that while not embracing all of the relativizing implications of the movement, the role of history as a force that both shapes the present and allows for development into the future has a demonstrable influence on Bavinck's theological methodology. To make this argument Clausing considers Bavinck's larger nineteenth-century context. He traces the development of both history and theology being understood as sciences in the university and how this required a reimagining of both disciplines. It could be said that theology was thoroughly historicized in the nineteenth century. The book considers the three principia of Bavinck's theological methodology: Revelation; Confession; and Christian Consciousness. When considering revelation, Clausing focuses on Bavinck's argument that revelation takes its shape from the Triune God. He demonstrates how Bavinck understood the incarnation and Pentecost to be the pinnacles of divine self-revelation. When looking at confession, the author argues that Bavinck retrieved theological insights from early modern Reformed orthodoxy, particularly in the way Bavinck engaged with the Synopsis Purioris Theologiae. Finally, the book examines how Bavinck did not think that a particular time in the past was a "golden age" of theology, but that theology had to continue to develop. Therefore, as Clausing investigates Bavinck's understanding of the Christian consciousness, he demonstrates how Bavinck saw the need for theology to continue to develop and change. He demonstrates this in all parts by an examination of Trinitarian theology showing that Bavinck engaged with and developed his Trinitarian theology in light of nineteenth-century philosophical categories, particularly the language of "absolute divine personality".