Calvin, Witsius (1636–1708), and the English Antinomians

2011 ◽  
Vol 91 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 229-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert van den Brink
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Defensive Strategy ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Investigative Tool ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The Reformation

At the core of the Reformation lies the belief that good works are excluded from man’s justification before God. Roman Catholic adversaries feared the rise of immorality and thus accused the Reformed of antinomianism. In this paper the term “doctrinal antinomians” is used for those who deny any human activity within the order of salvation. Within the Reformed tradition we do indeed find examples of such antinomians. As might be expected, they were highly criticised from within their own Reformed camp. However, as part of their defensive strategy they appealed to Calvin as one of their champions. This paper first investigates the manner in which the antinomians referred to him, and then goes on to consider whether their appeal is justified. In order to evaluate to what extent antinomian aspects can be detected in Calvin’s theology, the analysis of the antinomian position by Herman Witsius, a seventeenth-century Dutch theologian, will be used as an investigative tool.

scholarly journals The Attempts to Establish A Balance of Power in Europe During the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (1648–1702)

1904 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 33-76
Author(s):  
M. G. Routh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The One

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 put an end to the war which had troubled Europe for thirty years, and which had its origin in the bitter religious hatred, intensified by political jealousy, of the partisans of the Reformation on the one hand, and of the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church on the other.

scholarly journals Ekumenisiteit as ’n Skrifgefundeerde raamwerk vir kerklike eenheid – ook op die gebied van sendingwerk

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. Smit
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of ◽  
Core Characteristics ◽  
The Church

Ecumenicism as a Scripturally-founded framework for ecclesiastical unity – also in missionary work In this article the foundations of a Scripturally-based ecumenicism utilised as a framework within which the dilemma of church division, also in missionary work, can be approached are investigated. The article identifies these foundations as the attributa ecclesiae (the core characteristics of the church), namely unity, catholicity, apostolicity and holiness. The conclusion arrived at is that the purpose of ecumenicism is the unity of the church, because of the catholicity of the church, based on the apostolicity of the church and aimed at the holiness of the church. Within this framework, missionary work should rather focus on cooperation than on emphasising ecclesiastical differences. The concluding issue concerns the boundaries of ecclesiastical cooperation, also in missionary work. Is it possible that different churches within the Reformed tradition can cooperate in missionary fields? Is it furthermore possible that the boundaries can be extended to encompass more than the approach of the Reformed tradition? In which way can churches from the Reformed tradition also cooperate with, for instance, churches from the Lutheran tradition, or with churches from the charismatic or even Roman Catholic traditions? The conclusions arrived at point to the notae ecclesiae (the core marks of the church) as the widest boundary for ecclesiastical cooperation. This approach accommodates the diversity of culture and ethos within the boundaries of the core marks of the church which determine what the church should be like in order to be church of the Lord. In the currently rising ecumenical phase of the history of Christianity the emphasis will increasingly fall on unifying rather than on dividing aspects of the church. The conclusion indicates that the unity of the church, also in missionary work, can only be attained and maintained within the framework of the core characteristics of the church (the attributa ecclesiae) – and that ecumenicism is no longer possible if a church is not recognisable as church of Christ and does not function within the core marks set for the church (the notae ecclesiae).

American Missionary Motivation Before the Revolution

1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Pierce Beaver
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Protestant Missions ◽  
The Revolution

Sources for discovery of the missionary motivation of the Indian evangelists and their supporters in seventeenth century New England are scanty. Nevertheless, the most compelling factors come clearly to view. The avowed missionary intent of colonization, as voiced in the Plymouth and Massachusetts Charters, was not one of these. The directors of the colonial companies might have had the notion of serving God and checking Roman Catholic political expansion through Protestant missions, but such an aim was of little force in the thinking of the colonist and his children. They were, indeed, creating a Christian commonwealth. They were completing the Reformation also in a place at the end of the earth. It had to be wrested from the heathen who possessed it. But this extension of Christendom was by the displacement of the heathen, not by their conversion.

Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts

2021 ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
George Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Colonial Government

This chapter sketches some of the webs of interrelated contexts that helped shape Edwards’s life and work. It surveys some of the background contexts growing out of the Reformation, Puritanism in England, and related political developments including the seventeenth-century political revolutions. Then it turns to the background of seventeenth-century Puritan New England including ecclesiastical and political developments that shaped the world Edwards was born into. Finally it looks at the major social, political, and ecclesiastical contexts shaping Edwards’s world during his years in eighteenth-century New England. That includes relations to Indians both in warfare and in missions, British wars with Roman Catholic powers, colonial politics and local colonial government, hierarchical social assumptions, slavery, church controversies, especially regarding the sacraments, and international and colonial pietism and awakenings.

Dürer’s Reformation

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-208
Author(s):  
David H. Price
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Core ◽  
Good Works ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Last Supper ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Right

This chapter offers an interpretation of Albrecht Dürer’s energetic promotion of the Reformation during the first decade of the movement. As evidenced from personal documents and artwork, his firm adherence to humanism shaped his perception and support of the Reformation. Unquestionably, Dürer advanced the ideals of biblical humanism as the foundation of the new movement in his portraits of Melanchthon, Erasmus, and biblical saints. He also captured the core principles of Luther’s Bible, including the status of good works in a theology of solafideism, in his innovative Last Supper (1523). His Four Holy Men (1526) is a powerful endorsement of Lutheran reform that reveals the political crises arising from Protestant activism. In this important work, Dürer acknowledges that the sudden diversity of Protestantism has fomented political chaos; nonetheless, he defends biblicism, specifically by portraying the preservation of biblicism (and a biblically based orthodoxy) as the right and responsibility of governmental authority.

Intra-Confessional Polemics in the Reformation

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 629-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Keen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Mutual Antagonism ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Religious Polemic

Although religious polemic is typically understood and studied as a phenomenon of mutual antagonism across the confessions—Protestant against Catholic and Catholic against Protestant—the growth of the early modern polemic traditions was the product of heated internal controversy. In a series of theses intended to point to rhetorical aspects of conflicts within the Lutheran and Catholic confessions, this paper brings forward features of polemical writings from the disputes between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists in the wake of the Augsburg Interim of 1548 and those between and among Jesuits and Jansenists in the seventeenth century. Early modern religious thought, I suggest, cannot be understood without attention to the fissures within the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions.

John Dury, Advocate of Christian Reunion

1932 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 222-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Batten
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Storm And Stress ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
Theological Differences ◽  
The Church

Richard Baxter correctly described the seventeenth century as a “contentious, dividing Age”. Divisive tendencies had been dominant in the preceding century. But the Protestant leaders in the Age of the Reformation had generally maintained that there was but one universal church. Their protests against Roman Catholic abuses and the consequent counter-charges of a revived Roman Catholicism produced the cleavage of Western Christendom and broke the formal unity of the church. Despite the inevitable differences of opinion which emerged amid the storm and stress of the time, the Protestant leaders often expressed their interest in the promotion of the visible unity of the church and they shared a common hope for the ultimate establishment of a new catholicity expressed in terms of universal free communion in place of the old Catholicism under the headship of the pope. But tendencies which the reformers failed to curb soon produced a succession of divisions. The separatists from Rome showed a marked inclination to form separate communions which, at first, followed territorial and national lines. Due to territorial, national, personal, political, and theological differences, the lines of demarcation between the groups into which Christendom was being divided gradually became defined with more pronounced clearness. In the latter part of the sixteenth century new lines of cleavage appeared. The development of rigid types of Protestant scholasticism intensified the strife over confessional differences and the Wars of Religion increased the hatreds of the age.

Hope-Filled Sanctification: A Reformed Appropriation of the Theological Virtue of Hope

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Mary L. VandenBerg
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Good Works ◽  
Theological Virtues ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Theological Virtue ◽  
As If

Abstract Roman Catholic scholar Josef Pieper has suggested that the Protestant teaching of salvation by grace alone promotes a type of false assurance that undermines the necessity of striving for Christlikeness in the lives of Christians. Protestants do sometimes sound as if justification and sanctification are identical therefore downplaying the importance of good works and the pilgrim character of the Christian life. Nonetheless, a proper understanding of the distinction between justification and sanctification maintains both the Reformation emphasis on grace and a robust place for human striving toward sanctification in cooperation with the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, the Thomist tradition’s understanding of the theological virtues, as interpreted by Pieper, has the potential to offer a category for understanding the striving of sanctification as the fitting action of one with the disposition of hope.

James I and the Huguenot Synod of Tonneins of 1614

1972 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Brown Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
James I ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Ecumenical Council ◽  
King James I ◽  
James I Of England

That King James I of England was ardently interested in religious ideas is well-known to students of the seventeenth century. Less well-known is the fact that he was specifically interested in the cause of religious reunion and played a leading part in a movement to find a way to reconcile the different national churches of his day and thus significantly to reduce international tensions. His plans did not exclude the possibility of a rapprochement between the Churches of the Reformation and Rome — even though James's own religious and political writings involved him in a series of bitter exchanges with leading Roman Catholic controversialists. From the beginning of his reign in England James had wanted to approach the problem of religious disunity through an international assembly of divines — or an ecumenical council, and he took care to make his intentions clear through diplomatic channels. During the years 1610–1614 he made use of the celebrated classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, then resident in England, in stimulating support for his ideas, especially in learned circles on the continent. Casaubon's death in England in the summer of 1614 deprived James of a zealous ally in the cause of Christian reunion, but it did not bring the campaign to which they had committed themselves to an end. By this time James was involved in the most ambitious reunion plan of his career, the result of his collaboration with Pierre Du Moulin, pastor of the Reformed Church in Paris and one of the leading theologians in France

Critics and Skeptics in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

1988 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Lambe
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

The literature on the history of biblical criticism is voluminous, but remarkably consistent in its postulation of the Reformation and the Enlightenment as the two mainsprings of modern biblical criticism. That this history is written almost exclusively by heirs of the liberal Protestant tradition ought to sound a warning bell, especially since the extremely rare dissenting accounts of biblical criticism come from the Roman Catholic camp.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document