Assurance of Faith. Calvin, English Puritanism, and the Dutch Second Reformation.

In Assurance of faith, Joel Beeke takes aim at the entire historiographic school that draws a contrast between John Calvin's teachings and later Calvinism. Beeke's book is intended in particular as a rebuttal of R. T. Kendall's 1979 work, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, for he is arguing, contrary to that author, that Calvinist theologians, from Beza in the sixteenth century to Comrie in the eighteenth, in England and also in the Netherlands, did not depart from or alter in any substantive way the doctrinal teachings of Calvin concerning faith and assurance of salvation. Calvin asserted the simultaneous truth of two seemingly contradictory facts: that saving faith inherently brings with it an assurance of salvation, and that such assurance can never be perfect in this life (suggesting that a person with 'assurance' might at times feel quite unsure of being among the elect). According to Beeke, subsequent Reformed theologians merely elaborated on this two-fold truth. By analysing their works, Beeke seeks to reveal the fundamental agreement of these theologians, and hence the integrity and consistency of the Calvinist theological tradition. Assurance of faith is thus a bold, insistent work. Not only does it repudiate an entrenched school of revisionist interpretation, it also eschews the more nuanced anti-revisionism of Richard A. Muller, who, like Beeke, asserts the substantive doctrinal continuity of Calvinism, but, unlike him, shows an appreciation of the deep changes in theological form and method over the early modern ...