Introduction by Kirk R. MacGregor - James Clarke and Co Ltd

Introduction
tion of the elect, without controlling with certainty the necessary means
on which the outcome depends. The systematic nature and logical consistency
of Calvin’s model rendered it a quite attractive export to Reformed
communities in the Netherlands, France, and Scotland. Moreover, in
England the traditional quasi-Catholic exterior of the church received
new life from the Calvinist doctrinal stream. This stream’s perception of
biblical fidelity led opponents of the Anglican Church who migrated to
the New World, notably the Puritans and Particular Baptists, to place perseverance
of the saints at the center of their theology.
Perseverance of the saints emerged to a position of prominence across
the American religious landscape as a result of the First (c. 1730–1760)
and Second (c. 1800–1830) Great Awakenings, nineteenth-century evangelical
revivalism characterized by Charles G. Finney (1792–1875) and
Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899), and the Princeton school of Calvinist orthodoxy
(c. 1810–1920). Starting among the Calvinistic Dutch Reformed
and Presbyterians of the middle colonies, the First Great Awakening
spread to Congregationalist New England through the efforts of Jonathan
Edwards (1703–1758), arguably the foremost American theologian. In
his sermons and treatises, Edwards emphasized the sovereignty and the
love of God, maintaining that all who have embraced Christ are continually
and infallibly drawn by God’s love to himself and to his service over
the course of life. 1 Although unabashedly Reformed in his conviction
that those who embrace Christ were first predestined to do so, Edwards’
message, echoed as it was by Particular (or Regular) Baptist preachers,
gradually became attached in the popular mindset to the notion of conversion:
once individuals passed out of “nominal Christianity” through
born-again experiences where they, by repentance and faith, became new
creatures in Christ, they were forever sealed by the Holy Spirit for the
day of salvation. By the time of the Second Great Awakening, pastors
and theologians without Reformed persuasions proclaimed a new variant
on eternal security representing a theological halfway house between
synergism and monergism, where those who freely chose to respond to
God’s prevenient grace are then supernaturally preserved in faith until
beatitude. This variant arose as a regular ingredient in the frontier preaching
of camp meetings and tent revivals, alongside the Reformed model of
perseverance which received fresh propagation at the hands of Princeton
SAMPLE
1. Cairns, Christianity, 367.
xviii
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