Reformation and Religious Identity in Cambridge, 1590-1644 David HoyleBoydell & Brewer £55 (978-184383-325-3)Church Times Bookshop £49.50John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance man Carl R. Trueman Ashgate £16.99(978-0-7546-1470-8)Church Times Bookshop £15.30HISTORIANS of the 16th and 17th centuries never seem to run out of things to say about religion. Sometimes their offerings present new responses to old questions; at other times, the questions they pose are entirely new. David Hoyle’s study, Reformation and Religious Identity in Cambridge, 1590-1644, is a recent and important reconsideration of theological change in that most critical of early modern environments; while Carl Trueman’s John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man is a thorough enquiry into its subject’s theology, and an often polemical argument favouring its subject’s Reformed Catholicity over the short-sighted spirituality of contemporary Evangelicals. Both books are historical in nature; but both are also written with one eye on the contemporary church scene. The Revd David Hoyle is Canon Residentiary at Gloucester Cathedral, as well as the diocesan Director of Ministry. His book — based on his Cambridge Ph.D. thesis — is a narrative account of theological change in Cambridge colleges during the period in which the theology of the reformed English Church was subject to enormous pressures and variations. Hoyle’s narrative reconsiders the “rise of Arminianism” — the idea that the robust Calvinism of the first generation of English reformers was pushed to one side by the ambition and aggression of the followers of William Laud, who intended to displace any expression of Protestantism in favour of an early modern ecumenism that extended a significant olive branch to the Roman Church. By contrast, he argues that there was no significant consensus in the late-16th-century English Church, and that the “rise of Arminianism” took place in an environment in which there was already ample room for theological manoeuvre. Reformation and Religious Identity in Cambridge, 1590-1644 is a well written and extremely engaging study, whose neat turns of phrase enable the reader to move swiftly through some detailed sections of interpretation. John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance man, by Carl Trueman, a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in the United States, is much more detailed and less expansive in its scope. This book, a thorough study of the character of early modern Protestant theology, returns to its author’s earlier interest in John Owen. Despite his book’s title, Trueman’s interests are always wider than Owen, though Owen is a central figure in this analysis of the mid-17th-century dogmatic tradition, and, reading between the lines, contemporary theological reflection. As the subtitle suggests, True-man’s interests lie in demonstrating the extent to which Owen can be better understood as a receptor of the medieval Catholic tradition than as an iconoclastic Puritan — and there is no doubt that he succeeds in proving this claim. He advances his argument by focusing on Owen’s theology proper, his covenant theology and Christology, and, in the shortest chapter, his theology of justification. There is a great deal of merit in this discussion, though many readers will find the material demanding. This is not an introduction to Owen’s thinking; and Trueman, like his mentor, makes few concessions to those unfamiliar with the theological heritage he has inherited. Both authors, however, write with deep consciousness of their own ecclesiastical environment. Hoyle’s argument for the radically open consensus of the English Church contrasts sharply with Trueman’s detailed account of the rigours of theological exploration in the ensuing decades. It is a signal reminder, if one accepts Hoyle’s conclusions, that the most funda-mental assumptions of one genera-tion may be entirely overturned in the next. The juxtaposition of these titles lends credence to the hope that the largely undefined patterns of contemporary Anglican theology will yet be overturned by a renewed commitment to biblical authority in and beyond the Church. Dr Gribben is Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture, and Director of “Texts, Contexts, Cultures” at Trinity College, Dublin. |
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