Puritanism - Religious Practice, Ecclesiology And Politics, Capitalism, Bibliography
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Puritanism is the set of religious beliefs and practices retroactively ascribed to Puritans by modern scholars. Since Puritan was originally a term of abuse toward people considered excessively, narrow-mindedly, or hypocritically religious, not an embraced identity, the definitions of both Puritan and Puritanism have been and remain inescapably vague. Roughly, we may take the term Puritans to refer to the fervently religious, "godly" fraction of the English nation who, dissatisfied with England's imperfectly Reformed status quo, between the 1560s and the 1640s pushed for a further reformation of England as a corporate whole toward more fully Reformed ecclesiastical practice and for the infusion of their own ardent religiosity in the faith, worship, and daily life of all Englishmen. Puritanism, therefore, encompasses Puritans' theology and practical divinity, the quite divergent religiopolitical goals of successive generations of Puritans, and, more loosely, the cultural, social, and economic habits scholars have since identified as corollaries of Puritan religiosity and belief.
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Puritanism began simply as a full-blooded articulation of Reformed theology, which strongly emphasized that the course of human events depended upon God's omnipotent providence and that the soul's salvation depended upon both human faith and God's absolute and predestining power to save and to damn. Certain aspects of this belief were characteristically but not exclusively Pur…
Puritanism became a political issue around 1570, as Elizabeth began to resist demands for further reformation of the English Church. Political Puritanism at first denoted the party counseling Elizabeth to change her mind and resume the transformation of England toward the practices of more fully Reformed polities, such as Geneva and Scotland. These Puritans' main desires were to eliminate E…
In retrospect scholars have associated Puritanism with almost every "modernizing" development in early modern European history. At the heart of this mountain of theorizing is the thesis propounded by Max Weber that Protestantism transmuted the idea of a religious calling into this-worldly achievement in the service of God, Reformed theology especially emphasized this transmutation, a…
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