Dewey Wallace’s impressive study of Calvinism between the Restoration and the Hanoverian succession views the continuity of Calvinism in, and beyond, the Church of England through the lens of five key thinkers: Peter Sterry, Theophilus Gale, Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, and John Edwards. It is also the distillation of some fifty years of study of Puritan and Calvinist traditions that make Wallace a leading scholar in the field. What Wallace advances is the idea that, far from disappearing after 1660, English Calvinism was alive and well. It has simply been overlooked and ignored by historians who have read back into this period the decline that happened later on. Wallace presents a convincing case for this, one that has found recent support in such works as Stephen Hampton’s study of the “anti-Arminians.” Wallace’s particular contribution to the debate on the continuity of Calvinism is in tracing and atomizing its diversity and variety—so that in effect he demonstrates that there were a number of English Calvinisms. It would be impossible to argue that the five Calvinisms covered in this book were representative—indeed they were almost certainly not—but they were influential and enabled Calvinism to “punch above its weight” in this period. Wallace is alert to the need for Calvinism to negotiate the dense undergrowth of religious identities in this period: natural religion, deism, Socinianism, atheism, and the rest. He sees the five Calvinisms as very much a response to these emerging “early enlightenment” religious ideas. Peter Sterry is perhaps the most perplexing and least accessible; a Puritan Cromwellian preacher in the Commonwealth, he developed strong links with the Cambridge Platonists. But he also developed a mystical and allegorical form of Christianity that drew on bodily and sensual imagery and emphasized Christian unity and deep Trinitarianism. Sterry’s idiosyncrasy made others wary of him, but his eschatology was attractive to those who, like Benjamin Whichcote, saw connections between Neoplatonism and mysticism. Theophilus Gale was a much more “standard” Calvinist, whose ideas rested on the study of “ancient theology” and research into Jewish and early Christian hermeneutic literature. Much the most interesting of the five is Joseph Alleine, whose Alarm to Unconverted Sinners was astonishingly popular, being reprinted fourteen times in this period as well as in the nineteenth century. Alleine was a 1662 ejectee from the Church of England who remained a stubborn minister among his former congregation in Taunton until his death in 1668. He was exactly the sort of minister whom the Conventicle and Five Mile Acts were meant to root out, and his refusal to submit to the law led to his persecution and early death. Alleine’s Calvinism was expressed in his writings and in his work as a minister in which evangelical Calvinism was endorsed and elevated by his repeated imprisonment. Wallace analyzes Alleine’s work well, although it would have been useful for him to have considered in detail the complex relationships between Alleine and the “rational dissent” that grew from the same tap root of the ejection of 1662.

Wallace’s chapter on Baxter puts him together with William Bates and John Howe—all moderate Calvinist Presbyterians—who adopted a practical and restrained view of predestination that fed into both rational dissent and Latitudinarian Anglicanism. Wallace does not regard Baxter, Bates, and Howe as identical—in fact, he points out the contrasts between them—but he regards them as a major tributary to the Calvinist mainstream. The fifth Calvinist, John Edwards, was an Anglican who also occupied a middle position, in his case between Catholicism and Socinianism. He sustained a belief in, and commitment to, supernatural religion within the Church of England that did not die in 1714 but reemerged in the moderate Calvinism of George Whitefield, Augustus Toplady, and John Newton.

In rescuing and reevaluating Calvinism in this way, Wallace explores many of the contradictions and tensions between Calvinist theologians and the ways that each of the five forms “was engaged in finding a way through the thicket of early Enlightenment modernity” (245). It is an impressively scholarly work and one that will repay detailed examination. Two observations struck me. First, Wallace does not seem to consider whether these varieties of Calvinism might themselves have been a cause, as well as a consequence, of early enlightenment ideas. Not to do so seems to subtly endorse the view that Calvinism was a regressive theology that was out of place in the emerging modern world. Second, and remarkable given the cover image chosen for the book (the trial of Richard Baxter before Judge Jeffries by Edward Matthew Ward) and the overtly political dates of this study, Wallace does not really consider the ways in which the theology of the Calvinists in this period was shaped by, and responded to, political concerns. Undoubtedly Alleine, Baxter, and Edwards reacted to the political events of the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s, and Wallace’s opinions on this would have been especially valuable. Nevertheless, this is an extremely impressive work that will inform our understanding of post-Restoration theology for years to come.