Controversy and the Covenants

Abstract

In 1650, the first book was burned in Boston. This was a theological tract written by Pynchon and published in London before it was imported to New England. The controversy this tract caused was thanks to its audacious ideas about the nature of man’s redemption, which denied major tenets of Reformed orthodoxy. Pynchon’s theological heterodoxy has received prior attention, but chapter 4 offers a new perspective by showing how his positions arose from the intellectual and social contexts of Broughtonism, even as Pynchon himself had long outgrown the movement. By examining the long-term development of Holyoke and Pynchon’s heretical ideas from their youth to their final publications in 1658 and 1662 respectively, this chapter disentangles the threads that made up their theologies and argues that, despite the seeming strangeness of their thinking, their ideas developed organically from their communal studies in Jacobean London and 1640s New England.