PREFACE
This book is a first attempt to fill a long-standing gap – not, unhappily, the only one – in the story of English “Calvinism”. Partly, no doubt, because few in recent years have thought of the Reformed faith as more than an outmoded oddity, the study of its history from the first Elizabeth to the second has been neglected. Hence the most vehement adherents of “the Reformed position” today are often unaware of the different sorts of “Reformed position” that this country has seen. This is not, of course, to deny the basic continuity of the English Reformed tradition, any more than it is to endorse all the attempts to detect differences that individual scholars have made. But it is to point out that those who profess the Reformed faith should know that at certain points their profession may mean more than one thing.
With its stress on the rationality of God and man, and therefore of revelation and of true Christian life and worship, Calvinism has great intellectual strength – a strength that easily becomes weakness, when dry intellectualism and rationalism take over. By the end of the seventeenth century, the crippling touch of rationalism was apparent within the Puritan tradition: a delusive reliance on natural theology, the taproot of Latitudinarianism and Deism among Anglicans, was starting to produce Unitarianism among Dissenters, as it had already produced the neo-legalism of Baxter (not to mention the Carolines, and the Arminians in Holland), to whom the Gospel was a new law. All these tendencies struck, in one way or another, at the free sovereignty of God, which to Calvinists is of the essence of His glory. Not surprisingly, therefore, the eighteenth century saw a reaction against such trends, a reaction which saw itself as a rediscovery of the true line of Reformed development. But, in an increasingly rationalistic age, the reaction itself was as rationalistic, within the Reformed supernaturalistic frame, as the movements away from that frame had been. In its teaching about man, sin and grace (always the staple themes of Reformed interest), this reaction fairly ran the thought of God’s free sovereignty to death. It earned itself the name, “Hyper-Calvinism”. This is the development whose rise and fall Mr. Toon traces in the following pages. The story is a cautionary tale with timely lessons for those who seek a revival of Reformed Christianity today.
J. I. PACKER.
Latimer House, Oxford
