The Restoration Of The Jews Early Modern Hermeneutics Eschatology And National Identity In The Works Of Thomas Brightman

This book offers the first detailed examination of the life and works of biblical commentator Thomas Brightman (1562-1607), analysing his influential eschatological commentaries and their impact on both conservative and radical writers in early modern England. It examines in detail the hermeneutic strategies used by Brightman and argues that his method centred on the dual axes of a Jewish restoration to Palestine and the construction of a strong English national identity. This book suggests that Brightman’s use of conservative modes of “literal” exegesis led him to new interpretations which had a major impact on early modern English eschatology. A radically historicised mode of exegesis sought to provide interpretations of the Old Testament that would have made sense to their original readers, leading Brightman and those who followed him to argue for the physical restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. In doing so, the standard Reformed identification of Old Testament Israel with elect Christians was denied. This book traces the evolution of the controversial idea that Israel and the church both had separate unfulfilled scriptural promises in early modern England and shows how early modern exegetes sought to re-construct a distinctly English Christian identity through reading their nation into prophecy. In examining Brightman’s hermeneutic strategies and their influence, this book argues for important links between a “literal” hermeneutic, ideas of Jewish restoration and national identity construction in early modern England. Its central arguments will be of interest to all those researching the history of biblical interpretation, the role of religion in constructing national identity and the background to the later development of Christian Zionism. This important study provides a new examination of Thomas Brightman's hermeneutical method, particularly his ideas on the restoration of the Jews. The author's thorough analysis of Brightman's approach also has more general and wider implications for understanding the development of English apocalyptic interpretation into the later seventeenth-century.' - Dr Warren Johnston, Associate Professor of History, Algoma University. Andrew Crome's ground-breaking study of Thomas Brightman offers a new and sometimes surprising account of the development of millennial thinking in and beyond early modern England. This masterly account demonstrates the extent to which an emerging Zionism supported an emerging English nationalism, while outlining the historical roots of some of the most important of contemporary geopolitical themes." - Professor Crawford Gribben, Professor of Early Modern British History, Queen's University Belfast. This important study provides a new examination of Thomas Brightman's hermeneutical method, particularly his ideas on the restoration of the Jews. The author's thorough analysis of Brightman's approach also has more general and wider implications for understanding the development of English apocalyptic interpretation into the later seventeenth-century.' - Dr Warren Johnston, Associate Professor of History, Algoma University.

The first comprehensive account of Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the European Reformation ​In this rich, wide-ranging, and meticulously researched account, Kenneth Austin examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther’s writings are notorious, but Reformation attitudes were much more varied and nuanced than these might lead us to believe. This book has much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities—and has important implications for how we think about religious pluralism more broadly.

This book explores why English Christians, from the early modern period onwards, believed that their nation had a special mission to restore the Jews to Palestine. It examines English support for Jewish restoration from the Whitehall Conference in 1655 through to public debates on the Jerusalem Bishopric in 1841. Rather than claiming to replace Israel as God’s “elect nation”, England was “chosen” to have a special, but inferior, relationship with the Jews. Believing that God “blessed those who bless” the Jewish people, this national role allowed England to atone for ill-treatment of Jews, read the confusing pathways of providence, and guarantee the nation’s survival until Christ’s return. This book analyses this mode of national identity construction and its implications for understanding Christian views of Jews, the self, and “the other”. It offers a new understanding of national election, and of the relationship between apocalyptic prophecy and political action.

Prophecy and millennial speculation are often seen as having played a key role in early European engagements with the new world, from Columbus’s use of the predictions of Joachim of Fiore, to the puritan ‘Errand into the Wilderness’. Yet examinations of such ideas have sometimes presumed an overly simplistic application of these beliefs in the lives of those who held to them. This book explores the way in which prophecy and eschatological ideas influenced poets, politicians, theologians, and ordinary people in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Chapters cover topics ranging from messianic claimants to the Portuguese crown to popular prophetic almanacs in eighteenth-century New England; from eschatological ideas in the poetry of George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet, to the prophetic speculation surrounding the Evangelical revivals. It highlights the ways in which prophecy and eschatology played a key role in the early modern Atlantic world.

This compelling book explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege featured prominently in many early modern English sermons, ballads, plays, histories, and pamphlets, functioning as a touchstone for writers who sought to locate their own national drama of civil and religious tumult within a larger biblical and post-biblical context. Reformed England identified with besieged Jerusalem, establishing an equivalency between the Protestant church and the ancient Jewish nation but exposing fears that a displeased God could destroy his beloved nation. As print culture grew, secular interpretations of the siege ran alongside once-dominant providentialist narratives and spoke to the political anxieties in England as it was beginning to fashion a conception of itself as a nation. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600-1800 will offer a comprehensive and reliable introduction to Christian theological literature originating in Western Europe from, roughly, the end of the French Wars of Religion (1598) to the Congress of Vienna (1815). Using a variety of approaches, the contributors examine theology spanning from Bossuet to Jonathan Edwards. They review the major forms of early modern theology, such as Cartesian scholasticism, Enlightenment, and early Romanticism; sketch the teachings of major theological concepts, along with important historical developments; introduce the principal practitioners of each kind of theology and delineate their particular theological contributions and stresses; and depict the engagement by early modern theologians with other religions or churches, such Judaism, Islam, and the eastern Church. Combining contributions from top scholars in the field, this will be an invaluable resource for understanding a complex and varied body of research.

Darren M. Pollock examines the 1611 Romans hexapla commentary by the prolific Church of England preacher and controversialist Andrew Willet. While some have considered Willet's later biblical commentaries to have been a retreat from his earlier engagement in religious controversy, the author argues that his exegetical work maintained a significant element of anti-Catholic polemics, only expressed in a different genre. This polemical hermeneutic served as an organizing principle and as a means by which to clarify the presentation of traditional Reformed readings in relief against a body of Roman Catholic theology that Willet believed threatened the gospel of grace. Paulös letter provided ample opportunity for Willet to identify what is distinctive about Reformed theology – or rather, as Willet would have it, the particular ways in which »papist« dogma had diverged from the true line of Christian belief running from the Fathers through to the (truly »catholic«) Reformed church of the seventeenth century.Willet's exegesis highlights many of the polemical issues that had long been contended between Protestants and Catholics, including the authentic versions of the bible, Scripture's attributes, and principles of interpretation, as well as doctrines like justification, predestination, the assurance of salvation, and the place of good works. A close investigation into Willet's exegetical method also helps to see how an identifiable hermeneutical lens is consistent with a disciplined reading that is faithful to the text. His polemical focus does not corrupt his exegesis or force upon it meanings that are alien to the text itself; rather, his polemical hermeneutic serves to focus his attention and frame positive doctrinal statements against the sharp contrast of alternate readings.

Among the proliferation of Protestant sects across England in the seventeenth century, a remarkable number began adopting demonstratively Jewish ritual practices. From circumcision to Sabbath-keeping and dietary laws, their actions led these movements were labelled by their contemporaries as Judaizers, with various motives proposed. Were these Judaizing steps an excrescence of over-exuberant biblicism? Were they a by-product of Protestant apocalyptic tendencies? Were they a response to the changing status of Jews in Europe? In Jewish Christians in Puritan England, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce shows that it was instead another aspect of Puritanism that led to this behaviour: the need to be recognised as a 'singular', positively distinctive, Godly minority. This quest for demonstrable uniqueness as a form of assurance united the Judaizing groups with other Protestant movements, while the depiction of Judaism in Christian rhetoric at the time made them a peculiarly ideal model upon which to base the marks of their salvation.