John Milton, the Westminster Assembly, and Gender, Marriage, and Divorce Theory
What is marriage for? How are husband and wife related to one another as a mirror of king and country? What constitutes a warranted divorce? This seminar presentation will outline the historical, theological, and political “intellectual biography” of, and contexts for, the language of the Westminster Confession of Faith on gender, marriage, and divorce (WCF 24). The Assembly's complicated relationship to the contemporary divorce polemicist, John Milton, is commonly overlooked in readings and uses of the Confession, though Milton dedicated the first of his divorce treatises to the Assembly. The textual center of this interplay is the anonymous "Answer" (pamphlet) to Milton, published within the context of the Assembly but not as an official Assembly document.
What is marriage for? How are husband and wife related to one another as a mirror of king and country? What constitutes a warranted divorce? This seminar presentation will outline the historical, theological, and political “intellectual biography” of, and contexts for, the language of the Westminster Confession of Faith on gender, marriage, and divorce (WCF 24). The Assembly's complicated relationship to the contemporary divorce polemicist, John Milton, is commonly overlooked in readings and uses of the Confession, though Milton dedicated the first of his divorce treatises to the Assembly. The textual center of this interplay is the anonymous "Answer" (pamphlet) to Milton, published within the context of the Assembly but not as an official Assembly document.
What is marriage for? How are husband and wife related to one another as a mirror of king and country? What constitutes a warranted divorce? This seminar presentation will outline the historical, theological, and political “intellectual biography” of, and contexts for, the language of the Westminster Confession of Faith on gender, marriage, and divorce (WCF 24). The Assembly's complicated relationship to the contemporary divorce polemicist, John Milton, is commonly overlooked in readings and uses of the Confession, though Milton dedicated the first of his divorce treatises to the Assembly. The textual center of this interplay is the anonymous "Answer" (pamphlet) to Milton, published within the context of the Assembly but not as an official Assembly document.