Each of these books brings us closer to understanding the seventeenth-century English version of Reformed theology codified in the Westminster Confession (1647) and, on its more pastoral or open-ended side, known to its makers as the “practical divinity.” When the Westminster Assembly met in July 1643, it was expecting to revisit the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and ensure that, properly reworded, these would not support the theology associated with Launcelot Andrewes, William Laud, and Richard Montagu. In a petition to the Long Parliament, it also underscored the dangers of an emergent “Antinomianism.” This sense of alarm becomes Gamble's starting point. On the other hand, for Dixon, the starting point is the confusion in contemporary scholarship about the place of predestination in the practical divinity, a confusion apparent in misreadings of “Calvin's own delicate balance between human effort and the divine agency which made that effort effectual” (Practical Predestinarians, 271) or, as he remarks at another moment, in “lingering impression[]s . . . of Calvinism as a logical monolith” (Practical Predestinarians, 63).

From such beginnings flow two very different modes of describing theological practice in early modern England. Gamble limits herself to debate within the Westminster Assembly about the wording of Articles (or chapters) 11, on justification, 12, on adoption, and 13, on sanctification. Creeds and the boundary lines they attempt to impose are essentially irrelevant to Dixon, who ranges widely through English sermon literature before 1640—far more widely than is customary—in search of how the doctrine of predestination was represented in pastoral theology that its makers regarded as “practical.” His inquiry is driven by an intriguing question: How did clergy whose adherence to this doctrine may seem impeccable uphold the activist, often law-centered tenor of the practical divinity?

Antinomianism was on the minds of the dozens of ministers and laymen who, in July 1643, began to cleanse the Thirty-Nine Articles of Arminian-tilting interpretations. A year or two later, when the Assembly turned to fashioning a creed, it found itself wrestling with a version of the practical divinity fashioned by a handful of ministers who argued that the law-Gospel synthesis so central to English Calvinism undermined free grace by attaching it to “conditions” and substituting “duties” for the witness of the Spirit when it came to assurance of salvation. None of these ministers—the best known of them at the time was John Saltmarsh—referred to themselves as Antinomians, if only because their critics were conflating this term with “Libertine.” Gamble seems tone-deaf to this politics and says nothing about the pastoral issues that mattered so much to Saltmarsh. On the other hand, she describes in careful detail the debates in which the Assembly hammered out a consensus on matters that were not resolved in scripture—or were caught up in the ambiguities of the apostolic letters. One problem was how to represent the imputation of Christ's righteousness to sinners. Was it both “passive” and “active”? Another was to discern the place of faith in the order of salvation: as an “instrument” of justification (Confession 11.2) or placed after justification in order to avoid making it a condition of free grace? A third was what to do about repentance in response to the law, repentance being (as was said in the Confession 15.3) “of such necessity to all sinners, that none may expect pardon without it.” In the eyes of others in the 1640s, “the doctrine of repentance [was] . . . soule destroying,” which was the position taken by Saltmarsh and laywomen such as Sarah Wight, who had suffered that very experience until she was rescued by embracing the Christ, who offers unmediated grace (see David Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History [Princeton University Press, 2019], 278). For the Assembly, the easiest issue to resolve was the unity of the Old and New Testaments, which Saltmarsh and others severed in keeping with their goal of liberating free grace from the law.

Gamble's close reading of the Assembly records reveals a surprising amount of disagreement. Had she looked across the Atlantic at the “Antinomian controversy” in 1630s Massachusetts or included pre-1640 English figures such as John Preston in her inquiry, she would have encountered a similar questioning of conditions and any mode of assurance tied to the “practical syllogism.” Indeed, by the 1620s, a process of self-criticism was occurring among the Puritan wing of the state church, a process vividly apparent in New England. No creed could resolve such questions, as the tensions between Richard Baxter and John Owen (and others) after 1650 so forcefully reveal. In sum, Gamble's close reading of these chapters, although useful on its own terms, should be set within a larger context. A better guide to that context (alluded to, unkindly, in a footnote) is Theodore Dwight Bozeman's The Precisionist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) or perhaps to my discussion of Saltmarsh, Wright, and others in chapter 9 of The Puritans.

Leif Dixon divides his study of “practical predestination” into four parts: an opening argument that a “crisis of certainty” unfolded in the sixteenth century, a theological crisis that encompassed “pessimism” about the human condition and confusion about assurance of salvation. Hence the centrality of predestination. Among the benefits of this chapter is a riff on sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century estimates on the percentage of those who would be saved, which historians have sometimes cited without noting the rhetorical or biblical contexts.

What follows is a close reading of five pre-1640 English theologians: the much-studied William Perkins; a pairing of Richard Greenham and Richard Rogers, recognized in modern scholarship as fathers of the practical divinity; Thomas Wilson; and the conformist minister Robert Sanderson, who (as some interpreters have argued) did not actually endorse predestination. Each of these chapters repays a close reading, if only because Dixon is so attentive to these ministers’ understanding of the pastoral aspects of doctrine. To cite a single example, Perkins emerges from Dixon's analysis as someone engaged in “the project of describing divine power in a way which gave hope to human weakness, and direction to human choice” (Practical Predestinarians, 64). Then comes a brilliant chapter (based on a wide range of reading) detailing the ministers’ own awareness of contradictions and the like, followed by a chapter on how predestination was figured in funeral sermons.

In every respect, Dixon's is a remarkable book: beautifully written, imaginatively conceived (the chapter on funeral sermons is exceptional in this regard), and remarkably lucid in its understanding of the twists and turns of pastoral approaches to the doctrine of predestination. Moreover, it opens with an exemplary description of the historiographical situation in the aftermath of Patrick Collinson's scholarship, coupled with a cogent description of Dixon's confidence in sermons as a source. Without a creed hanging over his head, Dixon can acknowledge the shifts of thinking and uncertainties that occur in the writings of all five of his theologians and, in less detail, in those of many others. This is intelligent and innovative work of the highest caliber that will please every historian who wrestles with the Puritan (or Reformed) understanding of assurance of salvation. It will also please those who wrestle with the relationship between printed sermons and everyday Protestantism. As Dixon generously acknowledges, his is not a book based on actual lay responses, a task that animates Arnold Hunt's The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audience 1590–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and, in a different manner, Alec Ryrie's Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013). Nonetheless, Dixon's way of reading sermons is eye-opening and a model for others to employ in inquiries about lay people and their understanding or practice. I should add that Practical Predestinarians is also a healthy step around (or outside of) the “English Calvinism” paradigm that has attracted so much scrutiny in recent years.