If I am reading the current situation correctly, we often seem to be living in the past, trying to recapture the halcyon days of Calvin’s Geneva, or the Puritans, or the continental Reformed scholastics, or the Dutch Second Reformation, or the southern Presbyterians, or the Afscheiding, or whatever.  Here the temptation to hagiography that avoids critical treatments or pesky discussions of historical development is great. 

Judging by the e-mails from on-line book floggers, a major publishing event of the season, at least for historically minded conservative Reformed types, is the new volume by Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones entitled Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (Reformation Heritage Books, 2012).   I look forward to reading it more fully and it looks to be a useful compendium of Puritan thought.

As it happens, a pdf of the chapter on union with Christ is posted on the Internet, and a few days ago I received an e-mail from a former student familiar with my work.  He called my attention to a reference to yours truly in the book, suggesting that it was off-target.  Sure enough, on p. 487 I found the following:

William B. Evans has recently argued that for the Puritans, communion with Christ “tended to displace ‘union with Christ.’ ” This charge is utterly unconvincing as the evidence above shows. Union with Christ is the basis for communion with Him and, like Calvin, the Puritans viewed union with Christ in His divine-human person as the necessary context in which, and the means by which, redemptive benefits were applied to the elect. Evans’s point assumes that the Puritans deviated from a Reformed christological focus, but clearly they understood how union and communion worked together.

Well, that does sound a bit dismissive, doesn’t it!  As my former student rightly pointed out, that’s not quite what I said, and the larger context of the quote suggests a somewhat different focus.  After noting the well-established Puritan appropriation of medieval Jesus piety, I wrote:

A result of this trend was that “communion with Christ” (a devotional matter) tended to displace “union with Christ” (a theological concept) for many of the later Puritans. Calvin had focused on union with Christ’s incarnate humanity as the means whereby redemption is applied to the Christian, but the later Puritans viewed the humanity of Christ more as an object of contemplation and devotion.  This move was in part the result of pastoral concerns, but the Puritan pastors were also orthodox divines and Reformed theological developments worked against Calvin’s formulations.  (William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation: Union with Christ in American Reformed Theology [Paternoster, 2008], p. 78). 

Note that the focus here is on “later Puritans” (thus the question of historical development is raised), and more specifically on different ways that the humanity of Christ functions as we move from Calvin to later Puritanism.  In fact, there is a good bit of secondary literature relevant to the topic, including an important dissertation by Jonathan Won (“Communion with Christ: An Exposition and Comparison of the Doctrine of Union and Communion with Christ in Calvin and the English Puritans,” Ph.D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 1989), where the issue is discussed in great detail.  One would think that Beeke and Jones would have engaged the relevant literature.  

If the chapter online is any indication, I expect that the book will be a celebration of the Puritans that is long on primary-source detail but a bit short on genuinely critical historical and contextual analysis.  That doesn’t mean that it is without value, but it does suggest that some potentially important questions will not be asked.

Now all this may sound like a scholarly tempest in a teapot, but it does raise some interesting questions about the state of the contemporary conservative Reformed world.  If I am reading the current situation correctly, we often seem to be living in the past, trying to recapture the halcyon days of Calvin’s Geneva, or the Puritans, or the continental Reformed scholastics, or the Dutch Second Reformation, or the southern Presbyterians, or the Afscheiding, or whatever.  Here the temptation to hagiography that avoids critical treatments or pesky discussions of historical development is great.  After all, the particular group that is the object of our loyalty must have had a keen grasp of the truth in its fullness.  Right? 

William B. ‘Bill’ Evans is the Younts Professor of Bible and Religion and Department Chair at Erskine College.  He holds degrees from Taylor University (BA) Westminster Seminary (MAR, ThM), and Vanderbilt (PhD). 

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