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Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism - Historical Religious Studies for Scholars & Students | Perfect for Academic Research & American History Courses
$54.45
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Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism - Historical Religious Studies for Scholars & Students | Perfect for Academic Research & American History Courses
Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism - Historical Religious Studies for Scholars & Students | Perfect for Academic Research & American History Courses
Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism - Historical Religious Studies for Scholars & Students | Perfect for Academic Research & American History Courses
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Description
Reexamining religious culture in seventeenth-century New England, Janice Knight discovers a contest of rival factions within the Puritan orthodoxy. Arguing that two distinctive strains of Puritan piety emerged in England prior to the migration to America, Knight describes a split between rationalism and mysticism, between theologies based on God’s command and on God’s love. A strong countervoice, expressed by such American divines as John Cotton, John Davenport, and John Norton and the Englishmen Richard Sibbes and John Preston, articulated a theology rooted in Divine Benevolence rather than Almighty Power, substituting free testament for conditional covenant to describe God’s relationship to human beings.Knight argues that the terms and content of orthodoxy itself were hotly contested in New England and that the dominance of rationalist preachers like Thomas Hooker and Peter Bulkeley has been overestimated by scholars. Establishing the English origins of the differences, Knight rereads the controversies of New England’s first decades as proof of a continuing conflict between the two religious ideologies. The Antinomian Controversy provides the focus for a new understanding of the volatile processes whereby orthodoxies are produced and contested. This book gives voice to this alternative piety within what is usually read as the univocal orthodoxy of New England, and shows the political, social, and literary implications of those differences.
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5
Janice Knight's work is superb! She cuts against the grain in her historiography of the period (English/American Puritanism), and as such mostly receives dismissive responses by those who read her. It is ironic, I think, that her thesis is simply dismissed precisely at the point that she challenges the premises upon which those dismissing her work are located themselves. She, just to state it basically, argues that there were at least two orthodoxies in Puritan England (and then as carryover to America); she identifies those as *The Spiritual Brethren* (represented by Sibbes/Preston/Cotton et al), and *The Intellectual Fathers* (represented by Perkins/Ames/Hooker et al). The former, she argues, emphasized a God of winsome love and mercy, whereas the latter emphasized a God of brute sovereignty and law. She provides extensive proofs and engagement with her primary sources in order to make her argument; I think, again, that she is successful in challenging not only Perry Miller's thesis, but those who have simply carried on in the spirit of Miller's work. Read her book and see what you think. If you are already committed to Miller's thesis, and work from that in regard to the way you resource this period, allow her insights to potentially challenge you. All she is asking the reader to do is to recognize the complexity of this period, and to accept the idea that what we think of Federal theology, or what counts as Covenant theology may well have had a different hue to it in the past. Indeed, as Knight argues, The Intellectual Fathers' version has become the dominant narrative, but this is too simplistic, as she argues. I think if nothing else she problematizes things to the point that the reader cannot simply dismiss her work. Be challenged. Tolle lege!

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