Salvation by Faith

Salvation by Faith
Author: Hyonam Kim
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2019-10-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3647564613

The doctrines of covenant, faith, and the order of salvation are crucial components of early modern Reformed soteriology. In seventeenth-century England, these three major doctrines of Reformed theology, which had been taken over undeveloped from the Reformers, took a mature shape, but aroused controversies among diverse Protestant groups. Modern historical scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy has produced little significant research that deals with these doctrines synthetically. This examination explores the broader role of faith in relation to these two significant doctrines for salvation in the early modern Reformed theology, with specific reference to the thought of Thomas Goodwin. To this end, Hyo-Nam Kim examines Goodwin's life to review his religious experience and to understand his socio-theological context. Goodwin's soteriology was sharpened by his battles on two fronts: The first is the threat of Arminian, Neonomian, and Socinian soteriologies that tended to place meritorious value on faith and on human acts. The second is the Antinomian errors that undervalued faith and human responsibility. Goodwin regarded faith as a key concept for his soteriology. Faith plays a central role in the covenant theology not only because a lack of faith was the immediate cause of breaking the covenant of works, but because saving faith was ordained in the covenant of redemption, and actually functions in the covenant of grace, as the instrument and a condition for the recovery of the relationship of mankind with God. Examination of Goodwin's ordo salutis provides specific insight into the place and function of faith in the covenant of grace since each element of an ordo salutis refers to the blessings prepared for the elect to be finally saved. Together with the role of faith in Goodwin's covenant theology, therefore, the reconstruction of Goodwin's ordo salutis and the close examination of the role of faith in each blessing confirm that although faith may be said to be both an instrument and a condition for salvation, faith is the perfect instrument both for making salvation totally God's gracious work, and for showing that the elect are not passive objects in the covenant.

Devil-Land

Devil-Land
Author: Clare Jackson
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 542
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0141984589

*WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2022* A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021, AS CHOSEN BY THE TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, TELEGRAPH AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A big historical advance. Ours, it turns out, is a very un-insular "Island Story". And its 17th-century chapter will never look quite the same again' John Adamson, Sunday Times A ground-breaking portrait of the most turbulent century in English history Among foreign observers, seventeenth-century England was known as 'Devil-Land': a diabolical country of fallen angels, torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. Clare Jackson's dazzling, original account of English history's most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis. As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering, foreign-leaning rule of Charles II and his brother, James II, before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army and a new order was imposed. Devil-Land reveals England as, in many ways, a 'failed state': endemically unstable and rocked by devastating events from the Gunpowder Plot to the Great Fire of London. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts - many penned by stupefied foreigners - to dramatize her great story. Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and concluding with a not-so 'Glorious Revolution' a hundred years later, Devil-Land is a spectacular reinterpretation of England's vexed and enthralling past.