Redemption in the Poetry of George Herbert

The doctrine of "justification by faith alone," according to which the believing Christian is saved not by any of his or her own acts but only through the redemptive act of Christ's sacrifice, is one of the central tenets whereby the Anglican Church aligns itself staunchly on the side of the Reformation. Set forth in 1571 as the eleventh of the Church's thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the doctrine as formulated informs the poems in George Herbert's 1633 collection, The Temple. This paper attempts to show ways in which the doctrine appears in certain poems, through implicit references to the Old Testament themes of contractual obligation, but more importantly in the moral and psychological tension created by the individual's powerlessness before the gratuitous remission of sins in the New Covenant. It is suggested that this deeply personal expression points to the appearance of a more modern subjectivity in Herbert's work.