Aers's book covers a large terrain in a short compass. Its fundamental argument is that Augustinian doctrines of predestination and grace are unlivable. Aers makes this argument first by examining the fourteenth-century prose poem Piers Plowman, a text on which he is a leading expert. He places this text in the context of the medieval theological schools, beginning with Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas and continuing in the fourteenth-century with Peter Auriol, Gregory of Rimini, Thomas Bradwardine, Robert Holcot, John Bromyard, and William of Ockham—alongside Julian of Norwich. He then examines the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Anglican Church, again with a focus on predestination and grace. As necessary background to the English Reformed theologians, he sketches the thought of John Calvin on these topics, and he also treats Calvin's doctrines of the Incarnation and of Christ's bearing of the Father's wrath against sin on the Cross. Aers shows the impact of Calvin's views upon Edmund Spenser's 1590 prose poem The Faerie Queene and then upon a wide variety of authors of varying levels of fame: Henry Greenwood, Richard Baxter, William Twisse, Lucy Hutchinson, Robert Bolton (author of a Calvinist devotional work about the death of Thomas Peacock), John Dod, John Bunyan, Jacob Kimendoncius, Samuel Hoard, William Perkins, Samuel Harsnett, and Arthur Dent. Lastly, he treats the sui generis perspective of John Milton.
For Lombard and the later Aquinas—indebted to the later Augustine—predestination is God's eternal plan to move some persons to salvation by graciously healing and elevating their free will so that they choose the good and persevere in this choice across the portal of death. In his simple eternity, the Creator God predestines some of his rational creatures to share everlastingly in his glorious life. This eternal plan of predestination cannot be frustrated; God brings about this plan in time by his grace. Those who resist grace and reject God unto damnation do so by their own free will. Yet, had God willed from eternity that they be among the elect, they would have freely (by grace) turned toward God and been saved. Ultimately, the reason why some are saved is because God causes them to freely act unto salvation; and the reason why some are damned is that they freely act against God's grace, and God permits them to do so rather than healing and elevating them to share in everlasting glory.
In this short review, I cannot do justice to the depth and nuance of Aers's portraits of the figures that he covers. He covers them accurately though without doubt also polemically. His heroes are those both before and after the Reformation who oppose the doctrines of predestination sketched above and who argue that, in some (non-Pelagian) way or another, the most fundamental difference between those who are saved and those who are damned is human free choice, either cooperating with God's general work of grace or resisting the work of grace.
In his discussion of Piers Plowman, Aers shows that Piers undergoes a crisis of faith when he is confronted with the Augustinian doctrine of predestination and its consequences. Piers is brought back to a strong faith when he is reminded of Christ's love and mercy for all humans and when he is instructed in the centrality of free choice. Aers shows that Piers would have been dismayed by Aquinas's teaching and even more dismayed by Gregory of Rimini's double-predestination teaching. By contrast, Piers would have valued the theological and pastoral perspectives of Auriol, Holcot, Bromyard, Ockham, and Julian.
Aers praises the pastorally minded interpretations of the central disputed biblical texts—such as Romans 9 and 1 Timothy 2:4—that are found in the work of pre-Reformation theologians such as Holcot and Bromyard. He then highlights the intensification of the issue of predestination in the post-Reformation period. He traces the spiritual consequences of desperately seeking assurance that one is among the elect, a quest that is already found in Spenser's work and that is fully on display in such authors as Bolton, Twisse, and Dent. This quest and the predestinarian theology behind it are vigorously opposed by theologians such as Hoard and Harsnett. Over the course of the seventeenth century, their anti-predestinarian position became increasingly powerful in the Anglican Church, but at the outset of the century it was very much a minority position.
Milton's idiosyncratic role in all of this is to argue that he alone has been enabled to read scripture accurately. According to Milton, scripture's perspicacious truth has been obscured since earliest times. He holds that its truth depends as much on “internal scripture” as it does upon the corrupted textual versions of “external scripture.” He insists not only upon the truth of Arianism but also upon the absolute falsity of double predestination, since God reprobates no one from eternity and elects everyone by grace, despite the fact that some resist. In colorful and forceful terms, Milton argues that the Augustinian and Calvinist paths produce a fundamentally wicked God who hates some of his own rational creatures.
Theologically, Aers concludes that the path of “general election,” sketched by Peter Aureol and developed especially by Holcot, Bromyard, Hoard, and Harnsnett, is the path along which theology should proceed. Whether this path in fact suffices to account for an eternal Creator God is somewhat doubtful to me; and there are biblical texts, especially in the Gospel of John, that Aers does not treat. But Aers makes clear enough—as the Catholic Church likewise made clear in its seventeenth-century condemnation of the Jansenists—that strictly Augustinian doctrines of predestination cannot suffice and, indeed, cause pastoral and theological crises.
