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  • Lived Theology in Early Modern Britain and New England
  • Mark Valeri (bio)
David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. v + 516pp. Notes and index. $35.00

The Puritans—English-speaking Calvinists who attempted to reform the Church of England and, having failed to do so, created Presbyterian and Independent (later Congregationalist) church orders in England, Scotland, and New England—were, as Max Weber famously explained at the turn of the twentieth century, remarkably active. They criticized the monarchy in London especially during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I; led the civil wars of the 1640s and early 1650s, which included the execution of Charles I; attempted to organize a new national religious establishment during the mid-1640s; led the settler colonization of New England; created a prosperous political and commercial order in Massachusetts and Connecticut; initiated evangelistic missions among Native Americans; and participated in the development of the localist political and social institutions that shaped public life in early New England. They have continued to be the subject of much historical interest— an interest that nowadays is turned toward social issues such as religion and the early stages of the transatlantic English empire, religion and the origins of a market economy, religion and settler colonialism, and religion and race in early America.

In his most recent book on the Puritans, and, by some account, the magnum opus of his distinguished scholarly career, David D. Hall reorients the whole perspective represented in the above paragraph. Rather than approach Puritanism merely as an antecedent to or accomplice of some social and political force—the “religion-and-something else” formulation—he plunges into a deep study of Puritanism as a religious movement, full stop, and only then about some of the civic dimensions of their godly devotion. He writes plenty about social life in the process but gives the leading role to religious thought and life. His Puritans accordingly do not fit our preconceptions. They cared for theology more than they did for politics, held proper worship above property rights to be the goal of human community, and were fixated on eternal salvation rather than on imperial expansion. [End Page 399]

Hall suggests that we have lost track of this version of Puritanism. It was not, he explains, that Puritans detached their piety from political and social issues. Hall devotes much of his narrative to political matters especially in England and Scotland. He previously has written about Puritanism and public life in New England, in A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (2011). He maintains in The Puritans, however, that we ought to understand their theology rightly before we begin to issue pronouncements on the political and social implications of their religion.

He elucidates their theological concerns in this large and often dense book: 356 pages of text and 136 pages of notes. The notes themselves offer a full bibliography of the immense literature on Puritanism and include trenchant observations and critique. The Puritans depends on a large literature on Reformed theology by scholars who, often writing from a confessional perspective, are well-versed in the history of the internal debates among early modern Calvinists. Specialists such as Richard Muller and Paul Lim, for example, correct common perceptions that there was a Calvinist consensus on predestination or that the doctrine was as important as many modern readers assume.

Hall’s genius is to place such technical debates in the background and focus on the theological ideas that shaped common life and social experience among the Puritans. He does so by drawing on late-sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century texts that conveyed theological convictions in non-technical fashion: sermons, diaries, polemical pamphlets, creeds, ecclesiastical manifestos, and governmental pronouncements. He concentrates his commentary on sermons and manuals for piety that formed what Hall calls (drawing from the Puritan lexicon) “practical divinity.” We might otherwise think of this genre as spiritual or devotional writing, but Hall’s terminology reinforces the importance of the “divinity” or theology to the experiential and practical dimension of doctrine.

Hall begins with a fresh survey of central themes in Reformed theology from the days of Calvin, and...

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