Criticism, faith, and styles of common sense

Deep in the doldrums of graduate study, I read Perry Miller’s account of the theological controversies that plagued the early Massachusetts Bay colony. Two increasingly antagonistic tendencies of mine converged on this book: on the one hand, it was part of a desperate attempt to specialise as an Americanist after three years of intellectual vagrancy; on the other, I was pointed to Miller’s work in a collection of essays by David Bromwich, whose range and style as a critic I was (still am?) trying to imitate. First published in 1939, Miller’s account is, I imagine, seriously outdated to bona fide scholars in the field, but his parsings of the Arminian and Antinomian heretical outgrowths of Calvinist doctrine were instructive about the tension between visible works and imperceptible grace as grounds for divine election. At stake in these controversies were not only abiding metaphysical questions about squaring moral agency with predestination, outward behaviour with inward condition, but also political and sociological questions about the relation between experts and the laity, self and institution