Blackwell Reference Online

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John Rogers (1627–after 1664), Independent theologian, Fifth Monarchist agitator, legal theorist, and physician, has been the focus of increasing scholarly interest over the last two decades. His work has been considered by literary critics as much as by intellectual and religious historians, and its significance has most often been associated with the conversion narratives recorded in his most important text, Ohel or Bethshemesh (1653). Rogers was born in 1627 into a clerical family in Messing, Essex. His father, Nehemiah Rogers, was a conforming Calvinist, and possibly a friend of William Laud; he was appalled by his son's increasingly Puritan inclination, and perhaps also by the mental disturbance that appears to have accompanied it, and he expelled him from the household in 1642. Rogers faced a number of significant personal difficulties – including near-death by starvation – but graduated from King's College, Cambridge (1646), was ordained into the Presbyterian ministry (1647), and was called to a wealthy living in Purleigh, Essex (1648). Like many others in the period, nevertheless, he embraced Independent views of church government. Rogers hired a curate and moved to London, beginning a lectureship in St Thomas Apostle, where his preaching, often on ecclesiological and eschatological themes, gained him a reputation that warranted his being recruited, with five other divines, ... log in or subscribe to read full text