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Transforming Theology in Seventeenth-Century England: Calvinist Hermeneutics, Enemy-Love, and the Disappearance of Jesus

By (author) David Aers

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Examines the far-reaching theological transformations that took place during the seventeenth century, considering how medieval Christian traditions both influenced and resurfaced in them. This book explores the wide-reaching, and critically unacknowledged, impacts of a cluster of revolutionary transformations in Christian theology and tradition that unfolded during the magisterial Reformation and the seventeenth-century civil wars in Britain. Despite its focus on the Reformation, such a study is necessarily diachronic: medieval texts are woven throughout the work as it demonstrates the ways in which medieval and earlier strands of Christian tradition reemerge, even in dramatically altered contexts. Beginning with a discussion of Calvin's profound transformation of doctrines of the Atonement and his scriptural interpretation of Christ's teachings on enemy-love, it shows how these theological and hermeneutic transformations were manifest in the grisly wielding of the carnal sword during the revolutionary period. It then moves through a rich analysis of the many and varied challenges that emerged to counter this Calvinist hegemony in the wake of the civil warsÂ - challenges which often took on surprising and recognizably medieval forms. A final chapter focuses on Milton's revolutionary writings in the period between 1649 and 1660, demonstrating how the unacknowledged contradictions and incoherencies in Milton's political and theological work are emblematic of what it is to live among the fragments of a Christian tradition that is not only in disarray, but that is not recognized as a tradition at all. Throughout, this book examines theology not in isolation but as it was bound up with ethics, politics, and the way people related to each other in putatively Christian communities. In lucidly bringing together this vast array of diverse texts and writers, it offers a striking account of the political and ethical consequences of the rise and eventual fracture of Calvinist forms of Christianity in England.