Paradise Lost-Christian Theology

For early modern Christian theologians, the nature of god was more or less a settled question. There were, it is true, disputes along the margins. The synod of dort, convened in 1618 and 1619 to resolve debates between Calvinists and the arminian remonstrants, crystallized ongoing skirmishes over the proper understanding of divine foreknowledge and will. decades later, arminianism was just one of John Milton’s unorthodoxies, and one of his less eccentric ones; more unusual was his rejection, in his mature theology, of the doctrine of the Trinity.1 still, even at his most heretical, Milton could agree with nearly all reformed thinkers when it came to god’s essential attributes—immensity, infinity, eternality, immutability, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness—and his departures from orthodoxy generally begin from this common ground.2 but if the question “What is god?” had a sufficient answer in theory, thinking about god in more practical terms (How does he do things?) proved less satisfying. Perhaps it still does. Take immutability: what can it mean in practice to be unchanging? How, to pursue just one potential problem, does an immutable being act? We may decide that acting entails process, and that process implies change, and if we do so the answer begins to seem elusive. one can make certain claims about god, but transforming those claims into plausible accounts of how it all actually works turns out to be more difficult. Problems like this one weigh heavily on the preface to Joseph Fletcher’s 1628 religious narrative the Historie of the Perfect-CursedBlessed Man, which unfolds as a theological treatise in miniature, mounted to explain and defend the poetry that will follow. its fourteen pages cover a number of topics, with special attention going to the Fall and redemption, but their point of departure is a discussion of the infinite, eternal god and his relationship to our finite, temporal world: i know and beleeve that all things whatsoever that