predestinarianism

The rise of "experimental predestinarianism"

With the rise of experimental predestinarianism, there was a concomitant call among some of the godly for gathered churches.

The synergistic controversy, breaking out about the same time, also sprang out of the ethical interest which had induced Melanchthon to enunciate the doctrine of free will in opposition to his previous predestinarianism.

Puritans who adopted Perkins' brand of experimental predestinarianism felt obliged, once they had undergone a religious process to attain knowledge of their election, to seek out like-minded individuals who had undergone similar religious experiences.

Although both the credal and experimental forms of predestinarianism may now appear harsh and inflexible creeds, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they accorded well with the political and social realities of life in England.

In 1970, R. T. Kendall labelled the form of religion practised by William Perkins and his followers as experimental predestinarianism, a position that Kendall contrasted with credal predestinarianism.

A dualism of spirit and matter, mind and body, was joined with a powerful determinism or predestinarianism: the Gnostics (or 'people in the know') are the elect, their souls fragments of the divine, needing liberation from matter and the power of the planets.

So far as we can learn, however, Eriugena was considered orthodox and a few years later was selected by Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, to defend the doctrine of liberty of will against the extreme predestinarianism of the monk Gottschalk (Gotteschalchus).

They have argued that Elizabeth's church contained a variety of acceptable doctrinal positions, that predestinarianism never managed to achieve the dominance accorded it by Tyacke, and that at no time during the sixty-five years between 1560 and 1625 was the idea that good works could be an aid to salvation anything other than a perfectly orthodox belief.

The orthodox clerics were distinguished from the Presbyterians and from those dubbed Puritans not by a differing theology of salvation, but rather by the fact that they did not share the intensified spirituality displayed by the latter two groups, a spirituality which Lake and R. T. Kendall have labelled 'experimental' predestinarianism.