Arminius and the Reformation

1961 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Bangs
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Familiar Word ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglican Theology

James Arminius (1560-1609) is not nearly as well-known as the various movements which bear his name. “Arminianism” is a familiar word in Protestant history and theology and a pervasive movement particularly in English-speaking Protestantism. The Arminian movements, however, because of their diversity do not point clearly to Arminius himself. The label of Arminianism has been applied to and often accepted by such diverse entities as the politics of William Laud, seventeenth century Anglican theology from high churchmanship to moderate Puritanism, the communal experiment at Little Gidding, the empiricism of John Locke, Latitudinarianism, the rational supernaturalism of Hugo Grotius and the early Remonstrants, early Unitarianism in England, Wales, and New England, the evangelicalism of the Wesleys, and the revivalism of the American frontier. In our time the term means for some the crowning of Reformation theology; for others it points merely to an anachronistic sub-species of fundamentalism; and for still others it means an easy-going American culture-Protestantism.

Socinianism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Church Authority ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
The Trinity

Socinianism was both the name for a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological movement which was a forerunner of modern unitarianism, and, much less precisely, a polemic term of abuse suggesting positions in common with that ‘heretical’ movement. Socinianism was explicitly undogmatic but centred on disbelief in the Trinity, original sin, the satisfaction, and the natural immortality of the soul. Some Socinians were materialists. Socinians focused on moralism and Christ’s prophetic role; the elevation of reason in interpreting Scripture against creeds, traditions and church authority; and support for religious toleration. The term was used polemically against many theorists, including Hugo Grotius, William Chillingworth, the Latitudinarians, and John Locke, who emphasized free will, moralism, the role and capacity of reason, and that Christianity included only a very few fundamental doctrines necessary for salvation.

Evidentiary Cosmopolitanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
John Locke ◽  
External World ◽  
Eyewitness Testimony ◽  
Legal Evidence ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Faith Based

The late seventeenth century, known for its contributions to the scientific method, also saw shifts in the understanding of legal evidence, the most prominent of which charted a course away from faith-based claims about knowledge to claims based on eyewitness testimony. Less well-known was a shift in legal evidence from the local to the global or from circumscribed to cosmopolitan witnessing. When John Locke argued that knowledge was the result of human interactions with the external world, the category of what counted as knowledge became geopolitically extensive, opening itself up to “facts,” as they were understood in local and global contexts. This expansion of the sphere for available facts led to a preference for truths grounded in the facts of a larger world—in evidentiary cosmopolitanism—which emerges in the writings of the late seventeenth-century New England Puritans as the centerpiece of their argument against royal oppression and the loss of their charter.

An Uncertain Destiny: Indian Captivities on the Upper Connecticut River

1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin G. Calloway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Physical Abuse ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Connecticut River ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Northern New England

The prospect of being taken captive by Indians was one of the greatest terrors for pioneers on the American frontier. From seventeenth-century Massachusetts to twentieth-century Hollywood, Indian captivity has been regarded as a fate worse than death, and western frontiersmen advocated saving the last bullet for oneself to prevent it. Whites inhabiting the trans-Mississippi west in the nineteenth century had in fact every reason to dread falling into Indian hands and a good idea of what was in store for them: among the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, male captives were tortured (before being put to death), female captives were invariably subjected to sexual and physical abuse and generally condemned to a life of drudgery, while captive children might be killed out of hand or taken into the tribe. In the northeastern woodlands, however, the fate in store for whites captured by Indians was by no means so certain. A study of the experiences and narratives of captives on the upper Connecticut River during the era of Indian raids from Canada suggests that to be captured by Indians in northern New England was a terrifying and traumatic experience, but was certainly no guarantee of death, torture, abuse, or even mistreatment.

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.

The Law of Nations and the Sources of the Cosmopolis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
International Law ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law ◽  
John Selden

The Puritans’ cosmopolitan thought in late seventeenth-century New England had its source in the cosmopolitanism of a law of nations that was as much about the world as a whole as it was about the nation-state it later came to epitomize. With the nation-state not yet a consolidated entity, the seventeenth-century law of nations was far more open-ended than the international law to which it gave rise more than a century later. In the absence of a fixed idea of sovereignty, the law of nations was able to articulate multiple historical possibilities for social, political, and legal communities, one of which—the cosmopolitan—is fundamental. The cosmopolis emerges as a central part of the intellectual project of the law of nations put forth by the Protestant thinkers Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, with the main features of the law recast as the building blocks of the cosmopolis.

scholarly journals David D. Hall. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 233 p. ISBN 978-0812241020. $49.95

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-58
Author(s):  
Wade Garrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collaborative Culture ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
English Speaking World

Expanded from a series of three lectures given in 2007, Hall describes the political, social, and cultural forces that influenced modes of authorship, publishing, and dissemination in 17th-century New England. Separate, but not wholly apart, Hall delineates how writing in New England developed along a different trajectory from the center of the English-speaking world in London. Hall begins by asserting that two keys to understanding New England’s text-making culture have been undervalued. The first is the essentially collaborative culture of how texts were written, spoken, shared, transcribed, annotated, and rewritten. The second is the fundamentally handwritten or scribal practices that . . .

‘A Generall Reformation of Common Learning’ and its Reception in the English-Speaking World, 1560–1642

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Hotson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Common Learning ◽  
English Speaking World

This chapter provides a synthesis of the ‘Reformation of Common Learning’, which progressively developed from Peter Ramus’s pedagogy in the mid-sixteenth century to the work of the Moravian Comenius in the mid-seventeenth. The essay stretches the traditional periodisation and disciplinary boundaries often applied to reformation studies. By implication, it calls into question the understanding of a seventeenth-century ‘post-reformation’ era, a point underscored by mid-seventeenth-century writers such as Milton who spoke of reform as a continuous process. The wider intellectual currents that were contemporaneous to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological developments become essential to understanding the reception of reformation.

Latitudinarianism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Moral Performance ◽  
Moral Certainty ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
The Trinity

The term ‘Latitudinarianism’ designated, initially abusively, the attitudes of a group of late seventeenth-century Anglican clergy who advocated ecclesiastical moderation, voiced broad if heavily qualified support for religious toleration, and emphasized an undogmatic probabilism, ‘moral certainty’, a reasoned faith and moral performance over against infallibility, dogma, ritual performance and ‘unreasoning’ faith. They attempted to construct a ‘reasonable’ faith, with some emphasizing belief in carefully evaluated miracles to attest to the central truths of Christianity. The Latitudinarians had considerable influence on the thought of John Locke, among others, although Locke’s anti-clericalism, tolerationism and reticence on the Trinity went beyond their positions. The most important of the Latitudinarians, listed from the most eirenic to the least, were Edward Fowler, Benjamin Whichcote, John Wilkins, John Tillotson, Gilbert Burnet, Joseph Glanvill and Edward Stillingfleet; they were particularly influenced by the thought of William Chillingworth, the Cambridge Platonists and Hugo Grotius.

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