Paul Bayns's pastoral teaching of predestination

Kranendonk, David Hugh (2021) Paul Bayns's pastoral teaching of predestination. Doctoral thesis.

[img]
Preview
Text
2021 Kranendonk, D.H..pdf - Accepted Version

Download (3MB) | Preview
Item Type: Thesis (Doctoral thesis)
Titel: Paul Bayns's pastoral teaching of predestination
Samenvatting (EN): This dissertation contributes to scholarship on the post-Reformation and especially puritan formulation and pastoral use of the doctrine of predestination. Examining the pastoral treatment of predestination in one theologian’s entire written corpus reduces the danger of culling quotations selectively and out of context, while providing conclusions concerning one theologian which clarify or correct current perceptions of the broader dynamics in early seventeenth-century puritanism. This study argues that Paul Baynes’s treatment of divine predestination evidences a pastoral approach which used orthodox scholastic precision to serve spiritual purposes so as to lead people neither to ignore nor to become obsessed with predestination, but glory in the triune God of sovereign grace. As the first monograph on this important theologian, this study explores Paul Baynes’s life within its academic, ecclesiastical, and theological context, to show he was deeply rooted in the puritan tradition of Reformed orthodoxy, committed to the very Church of England that silenced him as a preacher, and concerned to serve the spiritual welfare of those around him in whatever capacity he could. His practice is undergirded by his teaching concerning pastoral ministry as the exercise of those whom God calls and equips to bring especially the fundamental truths of his Word home to the hearts and lives of their flocks as God’s means to regenerate, feed, assure, and sanctify his people. This understanding of ministry sheds light on the amount, placement, and content of Baynes’s treatment of predestination. Baynes’s corpus is neither obsessed by nor afraid of predestination. He engages in precise theological discussion within the polemical genre, expounds predestination where the text speaks of it, and generally neither imports it where the text does not mention it nor expounds it within basic instructional guides. His pastoral desire to edify his hearers is also shown in the variety of uses he draws from the doctrine of predestination, thereby confirming that the infrequency of his treatments of predestination was not due to a fear of its pastoral consequences. His uses show that even a Cambridge theologian with strong supralapsarian convictions could use predestination primarily as a graciously motivating, comforting, and doxological doctrine.
Number of Pages: 492
Theologische Universiteit: Theologische Universiteit Apeldoorn
Trefwoorden (EN): Baynes, Paul, ca 1573-1617 ; Puritans, England ; 17th century ; Puritans Doctrines History
Date Deposited: 20 Apr 2021 13:11
Last Modified: 20 Apr 2021 13:52

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item