Hartford Puritanism is a compelling, deeply researched study of the theology and preaching of an often misunderstood significant figure in early New England history. Baird Tipson's analysis of the career of Thomas Hooker on both sides of the Atlantic will surely stand as the definitive work on the subject for years to come. His valuable discussion of Hooker's younger colleague at Hartford, Samuel Stone, is less thorough because of sparser materials, leaving the reader wanting to know more about their working relationship. Tipson, who published articles in such journals as Church History and Early American Literature in the mid-1970s, has worked steadily on the puritans and their place in the trajectory of Christian history though a long career in teaching and academic administration, including two college presidencies. This book is a major achievement of mature scholarship. The staggering depth of Tipson's multilingual documentation is matched by the grace and clarity of his writing.

Thomas Hooker should not be considered the liberal “Father of American Democracy” (a “brand” created in the nineteenth century based on his departure from the purportedly more repressive Massachusetts Bay and support of Connecticut's Fundamental Orders), but Tipson suggests that Hooker and Stone did point to the future as forbears of American evangelicalism. Not that they were in any way “modern,” as their theology, preaching, ecclesiology, and social vision were grounded in the Reformation of the sixteenth century and were part of the “Long Reformation” in the Church of England. They were certainly pre-modern in that, as products of Cambridge University, they were trained to think, speak, and write theologically first of all in Latin. Puritan theology grew from the soil of the classics and the early church in the context of the Protestant Reformation. The way Hooker imagined the biblical God was rooted in Christian history, in the perspective of Augustine of Hippo that he and other puritans shared with Martin Luther and John Calvin. Tipson throughout the book demonstrates the role of Cambridge theologian William Perkins in transmitting this tradition to Hooker and of John Rogers for modeling passionate preaching. Rather than a softened form of the tradition, Tipson discovers in Hooker an “extreme Augustinianism” that bowed fully to the absolute sovereignty of God. With regard to ecclesiology, Hooker had already developed the congregational polity instituted in Hartford before he crossed the Atlantic, in England and Holland. Historians who also find in the Puritan experience a positive spirituality of communion with the divine will wince at his subtitle, but Tipson establishes that a hardcore doctrine of original sin, existential fear of God's wrath and the prospect of hell, and the homiletic “use of terror” to bring to Christ those whom God had predestined for salvation were essential to Hartford Puritanism.

Tipson drives a final nail in the coffin of the scholarly notion, initiated long ago by Perry Miller, that the puritans modified their Calvinism by adopting the philosophical method of Peter Ramus, a morphology of conversion including preparatory stages with human participation through means of grace, and a covenant theology that implied voluntary assent. Tipson shows that Ramist binary methodology actually hardened, not softened, Hooker's theology of double predestination. Regarding preparation for salvation, other scholars have recognized that it is God who does the gracious work of framing or preparing the soul. Tipson emphasizes the role of the sermon as God's means of operation. “The preacher, as God's instrument, breaks down a hearer's resistance” leaving her “utterly dependent on something outside herself” (278). Tracing the shift from the medieval sense of covenant as pactum to covenant as foedus in the theology exemplified by Perkins, Tipson demonstrates that the Puritan covenant of grace “was perfectly consistent with the most extreme Augustinianism,” eliminating any chance to somehow merit God's favor (161–162). Hooker's preaching regularly reached a fever pitch of urgency to repent of sin and turn to Christ, but without the later evangelical insistence on “the hour I first believed.” Although “conversion was in some sense linear,” for Hooker “this progression was endlessly repeated” until consummated in heaven (333).

Tipson's sophisticated analysis of Hooker's conversion preaching upends the conventional understanding of his ministry as a psychologist of spiritual experience. Previous scholars have explained his ordo salutis as deriving from his observation of souls working through the stages from agonizing remorse to assurance of grace, especially his famous intervention with Joanna Drake as well as self-analysis. According to Tipson it worked the other way around. Hooker preached the “application of redemption” (his famous book title) to provide for those under his ministry a framework and a language to describe their experience. Presenting this “mosaic of overlapping states of heart and mind” methodically as a “conversion paradigm in sermon after sermon, it is little wonder that his most attentive hearers found their experience conforming to it” (337).

Hooker was the pastor, Samuel Stone the teacher in the Hartford church. While Hooker understandably is the focus of the book, one wishes for more of Stone in the mix. When a chapter section is finally devoted to Stone's understanding of conversion, the main thrust is his contrast with Hooker. “Terror and the prospect of divine wrath is almost completely missing” in Stone's Whole Body of Divinity. Despite his embrace of predestination, “Stone describes God as attractive, even affectionate” (339). Did Stone play the role of “good cop” to Hooker's “bad cop”? How did the two of them function as a team? After all, the procedure for becoming a church member at Hartford was surprisingly accessible, with no relation of personal experience like in the Bay Colony. This, finally, was the way to get past the terror, allowing “members to build assurance on their participation in the sacraments” (397). Tipson thoroughly comprehends the “law” side of Hooker's preaching, but there is not quite enough of the “gospel” side—the application of redemption.