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When, early in the seventeenth century, the puritan pastor Anthony Wotton started to circulate manuscript statements of his theological revision, he was courting danger. Wotton was at once bold and subtle, a provocation to clerical brethren yet a skilled exponent of their technical disciplines. He addressed matters of fundamental importance: Christ's redemptive suffering and the imputation of justifying righteousness, God's saving grace and the moral law, faith and works, the gracious covenant and the legal covenant. Crucially important, for Wotton, was the interpretation of St. Paul's epistles in relation to the justification of sinners. This book examines Wotton's revisionary writings and the bitter doctrinal controversy that they stimulated, and traces the Wottonian complexion of the theology of John Goodwin, who became, over the course of a period of thirty years, 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. Contemporary responses to Wotton and Goodwin reveal how fixed were the core positions of orthodoxy and how worrisome were the challenges posed to them. Wotton and Goodwin trespassed -- often in the name of John Calvin -- upon some of the borderlands at which unusual uses of technical language became intolerable to the custodians of Calvinist truth. At these points, the contingency of theological language was uncomfortably exposed, and interlocutors discovered how rubbery were the signifiers of doctrine and how unstable the communication of "truth" could be.
Explorations of the English Baptist reception of the Evangelical Revival often--and rightfully--focus on the work of the Spirit, prayer, Bible study, preaching, and mission, while other key means are often overlooked. Useful Learning examines the period from c. 1689 to c. 1825, and combines history in the form of the stories of Baptist pastors, their churches, and various societies, and theology as found in sermons, pamphlets, personal confessions of faith, constitutions, covenants, and theological treatises. In the process, it identifies four equally important means of grace. The first was the theological renewal that saw moderate Calvinism answer "The Modern Question," develop into evangelical Calvinism, and revive the denomination. Second were close groups of ministers whose friendship, mutual support, and close theological collaboration culminated in the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society, and local itinerant mission work across much of Britain. Third was their commitment to reviving stagnating Associations, or founding new ones, convinced of the vital importance of the corporate Christian life and witness for the support and strengthening of the local churches, and furthering the spread of the gospel to all people. Finally was the conviction of the churches and their pastors that those with gifts for preaching and ministry should be theologically educated. At first local ministers taught students in their homes, and then at the Bristol Academy. In the early nineteenth century, a further three Baptist academies were founded at Horton, Abergavenny, and Stepney, and these were soon followed by colleges in America, India, and Jamaica.