Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution

The essay attempts to recover a language of liberty, a set of assumptions common participants in the mid-seventeenth-century discourse on religion and liberty. The current historiography of seventeenth-century liberty and contemporary consensus on the complementarity civil liberty and law are used as contexts. In the religious sense, liberty was commonly taken to imply submission to the will of a God of millennial purpose and providential power. In the struggle for appropriate submission to such divine authority issues of freedom arose in the Pauline paradoxes service as perfect freedom and in the process of liberation from inappropriate authorities. The polarization of liberty and authority in traditional accounts of the puritan revolution, the reduction of religious liberty to an element within a greater struggle over constitutional forms, and the identification of religious liberty with individual and corporate rights are called in question.