S. Bryn Roberts, Puritanism and the pursuit of happiness: the ministry and theology of Ralph Venning c. 1621–1674

Abstract

Puritanism and pursuit of happiness: ministry and of Ralph Venning c. 1621-1674, by S. Bryn Roberts, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2015, 232 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781843839781Since its origination as a sixteenth-century term of abuse, label has been associated with a grim severity in doctrine and a corresponding joylessness in life. From Benjamin Jonson to H.L. Mencken, cultural commentators have repeatedly portrayed English puritans as fundamentally unhappy men and women whose obsession with predestination stifled all else, a characterization with which modern historians have often agreed. Yet it is precisely this deeply ingrained ... stereotype (1) which S. Bryn Roberts challenges in his book Puritanism and Pursuit of Happiness: The Ministry and Theology of Ralph Venning c. 1621-1674.Such a work is helpful, Roberts suggests, because no published study to date has explored importance of pursuit of happiness as a central element of puritan theology (5). In Roberts' judgment, this lacuna reflects a broader tendency within puritan scholarship to overemphasise predestination. Historians who have taken predestination as puritanism's defining motif paint a bleak picture of puritan experience and theology, one marked by anxiety and despair (3). By contrast, Roberts argues that [a]bove all, puritans were concerned not with predestination ... but with (80) and this godliness was, in turn, considered to constitute ultimate human happiness in this life and next (90). In this way Roberts challenges longstanding assumptions about puritans by portraying them as people entranced with an overarching vision of life as one grand pursuit of a deep happiness rooted in communion with God.As title of book suggests, Roberts joins this study of a major theme in puritan thought with study of an individual in whom it was exemplified - thelifeand of puritan minster Ralph Venning serving as a lens through which Roberts can examine relationship between happiness and English puritanism. And to this end, structure of book is straightforward. In first four chapters, Roberts traces Venning's life and ministerial career, while in last four, he analyses aspects of Venning's thought, all of which pertain to puritan pursuit of happiness.The four biographical chapters mark critical passages in Venning's career and highlight places in which he lived, studied, and ministered. In bringing to life Devon, Emmanuel College, and London during tumultuous seventeenth century, Roberts creatively employs a wide range of primary sources including diaries, tax assessments, wills, and parish records. Influenced by recent methodological work of Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad Gregory - who are in turn channelling Quentin Skinner - Roberts prizes such contextual reconstruction, at one point identifying the social context in which Venning ministered as the key factor in shaping emphases of his theology (54). …