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doi: 10.1017/S0009640709000250 English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology. By Jonathan D. Moore. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007. xx + 306 pp. $36.00 paper.
John Preston was a person of influence at the court of James I as a chaplain to Prince Charles and on those of Puritan sympathies as master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Many books during the past generation have broadly redrawn the picture of the ecclesiastical and theological life of late Elizabethan and early Stuart England, and yet, in spite of his importance, there has not been a narrowly focused monograph on the career, theology, and significance of John Preston in the light of that scholarship. Jonathan Moore has filled this gap in the four sections of this book, which take up Preston's life, theological heritage, theological reformulations, and the sources of those reformulations.
In the process Moore seeks to establish a number of points, beginning with the centrality of the high Calvinism of William Perkins in the late Elizabethan Church of England. Perkins's supralapsarian and atonement-limiting version of Reformed theology, which Moore dubs "strict Elizabethan particularism" (68), led Perkins to deny that the call of the gospel for sinners to believe implied that God desired to save the reprobate. Preston, often taken as a follower of Perkins, is shown by Moore to have developed a "low" infralapsarian Calvinism featuring a universal gospel call and promise grounded in an English version of hypothetical universalism that made possible a sincere offer of salvation to the reprobate. For...