Heretics Within

Anthony Wotton, John Goodwin, and the Orthodox Divines

The polemical revisionary writings of 17th-century puritan pastor Anthony Wotton on topics such as Christ’s redemptive suffering and the imputation of justifying righteousness, God’s saving grace and the moral law, faith and works, and the gracious covenant and legal covenant—as well as the bitter doctrinal controversy that they stimulated—are examined in this scholarly study. The book also traces the Wottonian complexion of the theology of John Goodwin, who became, over the course of a 30-year period, a prolific exponent of unorthodox notions—perhaps the most provocative of England’s learned “heretics” and “blasphemers” in the age of the Long Parliament and the Interregnum. In analyzing contemporary responses to Wotton and Goodwin, this consideration reveals how fixed the core positions of orthodoxy were at the time, and how worrisome the challenges posed to them were. In reassessing and reimagining the use of certain theological language, Wotton and Goodwin exposed how unstable the communication of “truth” could be, and their impact on traditional Calvinist theology is appraised in this book.