Religious Currents and Cross-Currents: Essays on Early Modern Protestantism and the Protestant Enlightenment.

Bradley, James E.

By Johannes van den Berg. Edited by Jan de Bruijn, Pieter Holtrop, and Ernestine van der Wall. Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 95. Leiden: Brill, 1999. xiii + 284 pp. $102.00 cloth.

All sixteen essays in this useful collection have appeared previously in journals, edited volumes, and Festschriften, dating from 1973 to 1994, but two are here translated into English for the first time. The essays represent Johannes van den Berg's interest in early modern Protestantism and the Protestant Enlightenment, particularly in England and the Netherlands, and the volume concludes with a supplemental bibliography of his works dating from 1987-98. The book is designed by van den Berg's students and colleagues to honor him and his work, but it is unlike a traditional Festschrift in that a short, three-page introduction by van den Berg himself takes the place of a more traditional tribute. With few exceptions, the chapters appear as they were originally printed; in only several instances were the bibliographical references brought up to date. No brief review can hope to do justice to the depth of research or to the pure intellectual charm of these collected essays.

The research is rooted in the Netherlands, as the two essays on the Synod of Dort that open the book nicely illustrate, but the scope of treatment constantly ranges across Western Europe and most often across the English Channel. Religious experience, biblical interpretation, toleration, and Jewish-Christian relations are subthemes throughout, and the finely tuned theological sensibilities of the author are constantly brought to bear on the political and religious complexities of the period. Most of the essays characteristically combine short biographical studies with trenchant, comparative analyses of the person's thought. For example, the second essay on the Synod of Dort shows Sir Thomas Browne defending the doctrine of election on the strength of religious experience and at the same time supporting toleration. In the next essay, van den Berg studies the interplay between those interested in further church reform in the Netherlands and the writings of the English Puritans by means of the life and writings of the theologian, mystic, and predestinarian, Francis Rous. The writings of Rous, like those of Browne, were characterized by both antipathy for Arminianism and a kind of tolerant disposition, though the latter's works were used in the Netherlands by those who opposed toleration.

A chapter and short appendix survey the Karaites, a Jewish sect that originated in the eighth century and that possessed significance for Catholic and Protestant controversialists all over Europe in the seventeenth century. The Karaites rejected Rabbinic tradition, relied solely upon Scripture, and hence were useful to Protestants in their polemic against Catholic tradition. The sect held special interest to English Puritans and even to the Cambridge Platonists, and the Karaites eventually came to the attention of enlightened thinkers like the abbe Henri Gregoire, who saw in the group the forerunners of Jewish emancipation. The theme of Christian-Jewish relations and the exchange of ideas continues in a study of Manasseh Ben Israel (the Amsterdam rabbi), Henry More, and Johannes Hoornbeeck on the preexistence of the soul, a topic of more than passing interest to More and his Cambridge Platonist colleagues. Henry More's extensive writings on the millennium are the subject of yet another essay that compares his views to those of the more famous author on the Book of Revelation, Joseph Mede. A study of Hugo Grotius' apocalyptic thought shows a more irenic attitude toward the Papacy in the great Dutch jurist than was typical in England. Mystical and chiliast themes are compared in William Ames, the English Quaker, and Petrus Serrarius, a Dutch Collegiant. A fresh survey of the life of Simon Patrick, Latitudinarian Bishop of Ely, attempts to account for the reception of his publications in the Netherlands. Drue Cressener, vicar of Soham, who was under the influence of Patrick, combined apocalyptic expectations with anti-Catholic fervor, much like his mentor at Ely. Isaac Watts' understanding of the preexistence of Christ's human soul is linked with other essays through an appeal to Jewish tradition on the subject of preexistence and the themes of orthodoxy and irenicism. The philo-Semitic orientation of eighteenth-century Christians is further developed in an essay on Joseph Priestley, the millennium, and the Jews, with the emphasis falling on Priestley's unhappy exchange with David Levi. Three generations of the Schultens family, Orientalist scholars and teachers in Leiden, all moderate, irenic, and sufficiently orthodox, are compared with their scholarly counterparts in Britain.

Four of the essays are somewhat wider-ranging in scope. A lucid if conventional survey of the debate over predestination beginning with the Remonstrants and the Synod of Dort is traced through challenges in England and the Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians, and in Scotland and the Moderate Party. In France among Protestants, and in Switzerland, the teachings of Dort faired better, at least before the eighteenth century. A chapter on the relations between Dutch and Anglican churches at the time of the Glorious Revolution places the accent on the comprehension of Nonconformity and highlights the work of Fridericus Spanheim, Leiden professor of theology, who favored Calvinism and a limited toleration. "Orthodoxy, Rationalism and the World in the Netherlands of the Eighteenth Century" illumines schools of spirituality within the history of piety and displays a highly sensitive handling of the more traditional religious aspects of Rationalist thought. In the concluding essay, a comparative study of the theology faculties at Franeker and Leiden helpfully reveals connections between the doctrinal and confessional standards of the church and matters of political uniformity. As with all of his essays, van den Berg's interest is to penetrate into the tendencies of Enlightened thought within the context of social, cultural, and political developments, and in the concluding chapter in particular, he underscores the connections between enlightened breadth, essentially orthodox beliefs, and pietistic warmth.

James E. Bradley
Fuller Theological Seminary