John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

Thank goodness John Coffey is a superb writer and an authority on mid-seventeenth-century British history. Otherwise, this study of the English Puritan controversialist John Goodwin, which contains over 200,000 words of text exclusive of notes and end matter, would stretch a reader's patience to the breaking point. "Only by building up a richly layered set of contexts can we gain a rounded appreciation of our author," Coffey writes in his introduction, in the spirit of full disclosure. "Consequently, this is a densely peopled book, peppered with references to Goodwin's contemporaries, both famous and obscure. Although Goodwin will be our central focus, we will regularly fan out from him to explore the various networks of people whose lives and works intersected with his" (6).

Goodwin spent most of his professional career as vicar of the Puritan parish of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, London. He published virtually nothing until 1640, by which time he was in his mid-forties, but then authored approximately sixty works in the remaining twenty-five years of his life. In these publica-tions Goodwin often argued for political, ecclesiastical, and doctrinal positions that stood to the left of many members of the Puritan movement, especially Presbyterians. He was among the first Puritans to advocate armed rebellion against King Charles I, to justify Pride's Purge and the execution of the king, and to call for the establishment of a republican system of government in England. His antimonarchical views nearly cost him his life after the restoration of the House of Stuart in 1660. Moreover, Goodwin embraced Congregationalism (or Independency) in the 1640s, at a time when most Puritans were committed to Presbyterianism; and he endorsed religious toleration and Arminian theology, two positions that remained controversial among Puritans, even among Congregationalists, throughout the revolutionary 1640s and 1650s. Goodwin's massive Arminian manifesto Redemption Redeemed (London, 1651), for instance, received more published refutations in the early to mid-1650s than did Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, which appeared the same year.

These features in Goodwin's biography have endeared him to modern observers. Methodists, for example, have viewed Goodwin as a precursor to John Wesley because both men combined evangelicalism and Arminianism, and Whig historians and their twentieth-century successors have interpreted Goodwin (along with John Milton, Roger Williams, and several other Puritans) as heralding the eventual triumph of liberal democracy in England. Coffey, the author of a 1997 study of Goodwin's contemporary Samuel Rutherford, argues that Methodist and Whig historians have created the misleading impression that Goodwin was "a maverick loner born in the wrong century" rather than a man "immersed in the intellectual and religious culture" of mid-seventeenth-century England (296). In order to counteract these anachronistic interpretations, Coffey contextualizes Goodwin's support for republicanism, toleration, and Arminianism within the Renaissance humanist and the Reformed Protestant traditions, meticulously explaining how both Goodwin and his more mainstream Puritan antagonists (who included Thomas Edwards, William Prynne, and John Owen as well as Rutherford) could construe the humanist and Reformed traditions in disparate ways. Moreover, Coffey observes that in important respects Goodwin was a traditionalist and not a progressive. In the 1640s and 1650s, his "residual conservatism" led him to condemn Baptists, Quakers, Ranters, Seekers, Socinians, and other sectarian Puritans who in his estimation had broken with "centuries of Christian consensus" (252).

Thus the biographical portrait that emerges from this book is that Goodwin was a man of his times, not a man of the future. In Coffey's perceptive phrase, Goodwin "had no 'Enlightenment' to relate to" (296). Goodwin wanted to move more conservative Puritans in the direction of intellectual and institutional change, but to prevent more radical Puritans from drifting too far to the left. Because he had enemies on both flanks, most of his publications were polemical or apologetic...