Sir Henry Vane, theologian

About this book

This volume is an inquiry into the theological and political writings of the English statesmen Sir Henry Vane the younger (1613-62), and is the first comprehensive study to be published on Vane's writings. Well-known to students of history as a leading political figure during the English Civil War and beyond, Vane is presented in this book as a formidable and articulate thinker. Author David Parnham sees Vane as a fascinating occupant of the rich intellectual world of the mid-seventeenth century. He provides a thorough analysis of Vane's complex religious and political tracts, and obliges readers to reconsider the prevailing consensus that Vane was too elusive and incoherent a writer to be capable of fruitful scholarly treatment. A central commitment of this study is that a sensitive consideration of Vane's variegated modes of expression will show him to be a theorist and exegete of considerable historical interest. Among the topics discussed are biblical hermeneutics and strategies of theological discourse, the doctrine of the Trinity, the role of Christ and of the Spirit in salvation, grace and free will, federal theology, mysticism, and the vision of the millennium. Parnham contends that Vane is deserving of attention by modern scholars, and that such attention on Vane will have as one of its outcomes a new vantage point from which to view the life of the mind as it manifested itself in seventeenth-century England.