Le Miroir obscur du salut : perception et assurance de l’élection dans le puritanisme anglais

Abstract

The question of knowing whether one’s own or another person’s soteriological status (saved or damned) can be perceived, seen or felt, and whether such perceptions can be trusted sheds light on a number of major issues in puritan pietism and practical divinity of the type developed by puritan divines from the late 1580s onwards and particularly during the first half of the seventeenth century. Turning the salvation problem into an issue of perception was of course made possible by the predestination dogma inherited from the Reformation, which could promote in turn the search for reliable marks or signs of election, with paradoxically opposite consequences for some puritans, depending on whether the focus was on oneself or others. This paper explores this issue through the analysis of three influential works published by Arthur Dent, Joseph Bentham and Thomas Goodwin, and their answer to this deceptively simple question: can we truly perceive whether someone is saved or damned?

Keywords

• puritanism
• early modern England
• certainty
• soteriology
• sociability