During the English Revolution, all groups participated in a remarkable explosion of theological creativity as the very notion of ‘orthodoxy’ was contested like never before. ‘Religious radicalism was not simply the journey of a few notorious sectarians; it was a national experience.’ Within this environment, the impulse for further reform increasingly turned against Reformed theology itself. High profile divines such as Davenant, Ussher and Preston had begun to modify Calvinism ‘as part of a general trend in early seventeenth-century England to reposition Reformed theology so that it could better resist the onslaught of an increasingly militant Arminianism’. However, during decades marked by puritan rule, divines who had followed the path of their Reformed tutors journeyed beyond hypothetical formulations. Some puritans, episco-palians and sectarians self-consciously crossed the Calvinist Rubicon and embraced Arminian formulations of predestination and grace. This pattern has been observed by charting the course of numerous individuals from diverse ecclesial styles who migrated from hypothetical to categorical universalism or from Amyraldianism to Arminianism. As Reformed divines counter-attacked, several publications referred to a doctrinal ‘civil war’ or quinquarticular controversy, demonstrating contemporary awareness that England was experi-encing a seismic theological contest. The 1650s proved to be a hinge decade when the softening of Calvinism became a more comprehensive and public embrace of Arminianism. Non-Calvinist doctrines of conditional election and resistible grace therefore gained the upper hand in a non-controversial way after the Restoration.

In addition to broader intellectual trends, Part One has highlighted the diverse styles of Arminian theologies that emerged during the 1650s. English anti-Cal¬vinism was never a monolithic or stable position but a variegated protest with some shared convictions regarding the conditional nature of predestination and the resistibility of grace. The persistent myth that English Arminianism can be reduced to a pre-war Laudian phenomenon has obscured the breadth of post-war English engagement with Arminianism. In fact, as Part One has demonstrated, more Arminian works were published by puritan and sectarian divines in the 1650s than by Laudians in the 1620s and 1630s. By considering expressions of anti-Calvinism across diverse styles, these chapters have therefore highlighted surprising theological proximity between those otherwise radically divided by political and ecclesial matters.