The books under review concern themselves with two of the leading lights of the hotter Protestant community – both authors use the word ‘Puritan’ with considered hesitation – of seventeenth-century England. Jonathan Moore and Carl Trueman approach their subjects wholly via the avenues of doctrine and doctrinal controversy. Neither author concerns himself in any significant way with matters outside his designated areas of theological focus: predestination, the extent of the atonement and the Gospel call, in Moore's case, and a relatively capacious set of ‘western Christian’ and ‘Reformed’ doctrinal offerings, in Trueman's. We learn that the ‘Reformed consensus’ was a self-modifying phenomenon, intensely protective of itself and yet prepared, up to a point – and in the context of profound indebtedness to its profuse array of sources – to rethink its doctrinal bases.

Moore's study of John Preston is important and path-breaking, its thesis argued robustly and, at times, abrasively. The book gets down to business with a review of its subject's Elizabethan ‘heritage’, upon the verities of which Preston unleashed the powers of a talented, if derivative, revisionist intellect. Dominating the construction of Elizabethan context is the soteriology of William Perkins – unconditionally and doubly predestinarian, unequivocally particularistic on the redemption and disinclined to allow the reprobate a stake in the evangelical promises. Perkins and his high Calvinist brethren cut sharp lines; of no attraction to these arch dichotomists were ‘appeasing grey areas’ and ‘paradoxical mysteries’ (p. 68). It is Moore's singular contribution to reveal Preston's unPerkinsian predilection for the grey and the paradoxical. Preston stood ‘in a most rigorous tradition of predestinarian theology’ (pp. 72, 92), though he subjected the rigour to ‘softening’ qualifications, ‘lowering’ the discourse of the decrees from the Calvinist height to which it had been transported at the hands of his Elizabethan forebears. Preston's ‘soft’ preaching of eternal reprobation and its forbearing temporal process betokened an inclination to ‘maximise human responsibility’ (p. 92), an objective given additional theological grounding by the preacher's hypothetically universalist construal of the atonement. Preston might speak the language of particular redemption, but not in Perkinsian full throat; and universalist ambiguity tends to smother particularist orthodoxy. Preston retreats from the idiom of Christ's death on behalf of ‘the elect’, preferring more pastorally approachable designations; stretching the scope of Christ's blood, he shifts ‘efficacy’ away from the redemption and lodges it instead in the ‘limited and discriminating intercession’ (p. 102). The infinite plenitude of the atonement, moreover, accommodates a dimension of conditionality that settles the preacher's interest on the ‘individual's response’ to the universal offer of Christ's righteousness. The call to receive Christ renders every congregant responsible, despite God's intending Christ ‘onely to the Elect’ (pp. 110, 113). Preston serves his turns by duplicating the covenant of grace, allowing it to be conditional and universal as well as absolute and particular. Honouring the need to portray a God whose intentions cannot be frustrated and whose decrees must prevail, Preston paradoxically attests the sincerity of the conversionary call to the reprobate, undertaken via the conditional covenant, while maintaining fidelity to the efficacy of the absolute and the particular – which entails the reprobates' condemnation rather than their conversion. The Gospel call expresses a desire to save even as it lays a path to damnation. The taste for ‘paradox’ and the inclination to ‘soften’ the hard edges of Calvinism were learned impulses, products of the teaching of James Ussher and John Davenant. Moore addresses these mentors in chapter vii, having, in chapter vi, offered a compelling reading of their pupil's exquisite discomfort in the cut and thrust of the York House Conference. Preston may have softened some hard Calvinist dichotomies, but it bears recalling, lest Moore's subtitle convey a false impression, that Preston was not soft on the disciplines of discipleship. He once said of sin that ‘thou never makest peace with it, thou hast perpetuall warre with it, as there was with the Amalekites’ (Saints qualification [1634], 397). He likened sorrow to a constantly running ‘spring’; sin elicited ‘an assiduous and daily repentance’ (Golden scepter [1638], 41, 86; New covenant [1629], 248). Moore's interest in the softening ways of Preston's mind effaces the hard strivings of the Prestonian heart.

Trueman's Owen, unlike Moore's Preston, is unyieldingly orthodox by Reformed lights, a fortress of theological rectitude in a world threatened by heresy. But the solid dogmatician was no dry rationalist: Trueman sees the need to specify and illustrate Owen's ‘eclectic’ and ‘traditionary’ credentials in the wake of a heritage of misguided scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy, and in so doing builds on his own earlier fine work on the richness and subtlety of Owen's theology. Owen appears here as a scholar of prodigious learning and of broad interests: a ‘Renaissance man’ who applied his knowledge and talents to the service of embattled Reformed truth, itself an amalgam of biblical, patristic, medieval and contemporary Roman Catholic sources, in addition to those emanating from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century centres of Protestantism. In his commitment to the traditional, Owen was unremarkable and unoriginal, but in the depth and scope of his literary pursuits he stood out as one of the early modern masters of theological formulation and confessional apologetic. Trueman depicts a man in ready possession of ancient wisdom and a man, too, who kept abreast of the theological pace-setters, keen-sighted enough, for example, to recruit the covenant of redemption when in its incipience. This book – which might usefully be read in conjunction with Kelly Kapic's more ‘practical’ and ‘experiential’ Communion with God – covers Owen on God and Trinity, on federal theology and Christology, and on the doctrines of justification, faith and works. For each doctrinal area Trueman sets Owen in a set of wide-ranging theological, exegetical and controversial contexts, showing the intellectual measure of the man (with skilful economy, given the task at hand) in a way that is rarely attempted in studies of early modern English theologians. The proof-reading appears to have been hasty, for some typographical errors present occasional blemishes; but this is a book which, though possibly overdoing the quarrel with older scholarship, will profit enthusiastic undergraduates and advanced scholars alike.