Hidden in Plain Sight: John Cotton's Middle Way and the Making of the Cambridge Platform of Church Discipline
The 1648 Cambridge Platform, Congregationalists’ first, guided New England Congregationalist church practice well into the next century. Yet the synodical deliberations that shaped the platform remain largely a closed book. Were the contents of all three preparatory platform drafts known, a baseline...
| Published in: | Church history |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2022
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| In: |
Church history
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| Further subjects: | B
John Cotton
B Savoy Assembly B Cambridge Platform B Westminster Assembly B Congregationalism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | The 1648 Cambridge Platform, Congregationalists’ first, guided New England Congregationalist church practice well into the next century. Yet the synodical deliberations that shaped the platform remain largely a closed book. Were the contents of all three preparatory platform drafts known, a baseline could be established for inferring those deliberations. But it has long been taken as a given that John Cotton's draft is missing. The now-recovered draft was, among other things, Cotton's vehicle for working reforms restraining Congregationalism's democratic and fissiparous tendencies into the Cambridge Platform. He had first laid out those reforms in Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), a book that attracted widespread attention, including at the English Westminster and Savoy Assemblies. Yet the slender amount of scholarship on the Cambridge Platform has offered, at most, generalized acknowledgment, if any, of Cotton's considerable and complicated impact on it. That neglect leaves a large gap in our understanding of the platform, the synod, and Cotton himself, as well as of the unstable dynamics of clerical authority in an awkwardly peripheral emergent puritan church movement that emphasized lay empowerment. |
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| ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0009640722002785 |