4 - Cambridge Platonists versus Cambridge Calvinists:

Summary

This chapter provides important background for the 1651 correspondence between Anthony Tuckney and Benjamin Whichcote via an examination of a local Cambridge controversy sparked by the radical anti-Calvinist preacher John Goodwin, drawing especially on a little-known satirical account of Ralph Cudworth’s 1651 Commencement Disputation. When the disruptions of the civil war propelled the anti-Calvinists Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith and Worthington to new positions of authority in the university alongside their Calvinist teachers such as Anthony Tuckney, Thomas Hill and John Arrowsmith, a theological fault line emerged that split the university leadership down the middle. Primary sources around the Goodwin controversy at Cambridge indicate that Cudworth, Smith and Whichcote were widely known in the university community as close theological allies of Whichcote, who shared his anti-Calvinist convictions. These sources demonstrate that the Cambridge Platonists were part of a broader anti-Calvinist network at Cambridge, providing essential context for the distinctive Platonic anti-Calvinism which this book argues they developed in tandem.