The Experience and Meaning of God’s Caress

Abstract

A constant theme in the history of Christianity has been the struggle between those who rely on divine inspiration to define the faith and those who argue that truth should be established by the institutional church. The chapter of the broader story that this book explores features the tension that shaped the faith and practices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century puritanism between scripturally aware laymen and laywomen, who believed themselves to be inspired by the Spirit, and university-trained clergy. There was a long prelude to this story. In the earliest days of faith, groups such as the gnostics, who asserted the value of personal, intuitive means to discern truth, were gradually forced to the margins, and their writings excluded from the “canon” of acceptable beliefs.¹ By the start of the third century there was a mainstream Catholic church in the west that asserted itself as the single authority able to “choose sacred texts for canonical status or compare the local creeds in Churches for a uniform direction in teaching.”² The Nicene Creed was a major step in the process of defining orthodoxy, produced at the general council that the emperor Constantine called to meet in the city of Nicaea in 325, and modified at the First Council of Constantinople (381).