Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine

doi: 10.1017/S00096407 1000 1885 Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine. By Peter J. Thuesen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv + 309 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Theology still matters in American religious history, and I cannot think of a book that makes that case more effectively than Peter Thuesen's subtle, learned account of predestination's fate (pun intended) in American history. Thuesen elucidates the significance of the question of predestination, which, as he notes, touches directly on the enduring question of what happens when we die. If there is a heaven, how does one get there? Normally, in Protestant theology, opinions on soteriology have polarized between free will and predestination, or the relative weight of human choice and God's sovereignty in sinners receiving grace and eternal bliss. But Thuesen, in his most original contribution, argues that the real debate in the broader Christian tradition (broader, that is, than just Protestantism) is between predestination and sacramentalism, or the contrast between the "utter transcendence" of God and the "efficacy of priestly sacrifice" in salvation (6-7). This debate carried out not just between Protestants and Catholics, but between Reformed Christians such as Jonathan Edwards and the congregants who booted him out of Northampton for restricting access to the Lord's Supper.

Thuesen opens with a very helpful, compact survey of predestinarian thought from Augustine to Arminius, and then sets the stage for the emergence of New England Puritanism by analyzing the theological controversies within English Protestantism as an outworking of the tension between...