Eamon Duffy

English Hypothetical Universalism

Theology

“Historians of Stuart England have only recently come to grasp the centrality of the intricate controversies of Reformed theologians about sin and grace, divine sovereignty and human freedom, for the interaction of religion and society, and even for the alignments of local and national politics. Jonathan Moore's learned, subtle, and incisive exploration of the thought of one of the shapers of Protestant thought in the England of James VI and Charles I brings a new sophistication to the analysis of the place of theology in the intellectual history of early Stuart England. Fascinating in its own right as a study in the varieties of English Calvinism, his study is also an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the theological tensions that provide the context for the English Civil War.”

Reformation Pastors

History & Biography

“Richard Baxter was the most influential puritan in Stuart England, whose writings on the ordained ministry in the 1650s were to prove seminal for Protestant understanding and practice for centuries. Dr. Black's searching and scholarly analysis traces the pedigree of Baxter's understanding of the ordained ministry to the work of the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer. He provides an authoritative account of the theological context of Baxter's role in the formation of County Associations of ministers in the 1650s, designed to cope with the pastoral crisis precipitated by civil war and the collapse of the Elizabethan Settlement, and he offers the most thorough analysis to date of the pastoral presuppositions underlying Baxter's revolutionary rethinking of the role of preaching and catechesis in parochial ministry. This book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the development of Protestant pastoral practice in early modern England, and it throws new and unexpected light on the reformation inheritance of seventeenth century Puritanism.”