The Diversity Of Views Of The Perpetual Virginity Of Mary In The Late Medieval And Reformation Eras (Part 3)

One of the issues that sometimes comes up in discussions of Mary's perpetual virginity is the necessity of accepting the doctrine. Is acceptance of it a requirement for salvation? If somebody believes in the perpetual virginity of Mary, to what degree does he think opponents of the doctrine have erred? As my last post mentioned, a person could be agnostic about whether Mary was a perpetual virgin. And people who support the doctrine or oppose it can do so to a wide variety of degrees. Issues like these often get overlooked or underestimated, not just when considering the timeframes I'm focused on in these posts, but also more broadly.

My Take on the Reformation in England: Owen, Packer, Hooker, Puritans, Anglicans, and Worship

Over on Facebook, in response to my recent blog article on John Owen, “Political Defeat was the Condition of Cultural Achievement”, an old [conservative Anglican] friend of mine commented:

the reformed Anglican judgment is that Puritanism (especially its more radical expression) constituted a perversion of the English Reformation, not its teleos. There were Calvinists among the supporters of High Church Anglicanism (e.g., Whitgift). They were the heirs of Cranmer et al., not the Puritans, whose radicalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

I responded:

I don’t know that “seeds of its own destruction” was an entirely fair characterization. I’ve been looking at this period a bit (the theological aspects which were called “Reformed Orthodoxy”). This period was characterized by “precise theological formulations”, among other things.

While it’s true that “Reformed Orthodoxy” seemingly came to an abrupt halt at one point, there were a lot of things that went into it: