Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates Within Seventeenth-century British Puritanism 9783525569450, 9783647569451, 3525569459

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© 2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525569450 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647569451

Reformed Historical Theology Edited by Herman J. Selderhuis in co-operation with Emidio Campi, Irene Dingel, Wim Janse, Elsie McKee, Richard Muller

Volume 17

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

© 2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525569450 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647569451

Drawn into Controversie Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates Within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism

Edited by Michael A.G. Haykin and Mark Jones

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

© 2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525569450 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647569451

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-525-56945-0 ISBN 978-3-647-56945-1 (E-Book) © 2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Oakville, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. – Printed in Germany. Druck und Bindung: Ñ Hubert & Co, Göttingen Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier.

© 2011, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525569450 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647569451

Contents

Preface..........................................................................................................10 RICHARD A. MULLER 1. Diversity in the Reformed Tradition: A Historiographical Introduction...........................................................11 1.1 Introduction: Tradition, Diversity, and the Interpretation of Reformed Thought..................................................................11 1.2 Debate Within the Reformed Tradition ...........................................17 1.3 Debates Concerning Confessional Boundaries – Crossing Over or Pressing the Boundary....................................18 1.4 Debates Over Philosophical Issues ..................................................22 1.5 Debates Concerning Issues of Significant Import that Threatened to Rise to a Confessional Level ........................23 1.6 Debates over Theological Topics that did not Press on Confessional Boundaries........................................................25 1.7 Concluding Comment ......................................................................29 ALAN D. STRANGE 2. The Imputation of the Active Obedience of Christ at the Westminster Assembly.................................................................31 2.1 Introduction......................................................................................31 2.2 Historiography .................................................................................32 2.3 Recent Evidence...............................................................................35 2.4 Article 11 of the Thirty-Nine Articles .............................................36 2.5 The Problem of Antinomianism.......................................................38 2.6 Vines, Gataker, and Twisse .............................................................39 2.7 The Wider Context of the Westminster Assembly ..........................46 2.8 Conclusion .......................................................................................50

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Contents

HUNTER POWELL 3. October 1643: The Dissenting Brethren and the Proton Dektikon ....................................................................... 52
Hunter Powell ....................................................................................... 52
3.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 52
3.2 “The builders must have a platform” .............................................. 56
3.3 “We are now on the foundation of all” ........................................... 60
3.4 πετρος τη πετρα, The Grand Charter of the Church ....................... 64
3.5 The Apologists’ Proton Dektikon ................................................... 67
3.6 Ecclesiae Primae and Ecclesiae Ortae: “an untrodden path”......... 71
3.7 A break from “the fathers & the schoolmen” ................................. 79
3.8 Conclusion ...................................................................................... 82
CRAWFORD GRIBBEN 4. Millennialism .......................................................................................... 83
4.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 83
4.2 The Tradition Established ............................................................... 85
4.3 The Tradition Challenged ............................................................... 92
4.4 Conclusion ...................................................................................... 97
J.V. FESKO 5. Lapsarian Diversity at the Synod of Dort ............................................... 99
5.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 99
5.2 The Debate over Infra- and Supralapsarianism............................. 102
5.3 The Supralapsarian Position.......................................................... 107
5.4 The Infralapsarian Position ........................................................... 111
5.5 The Lapsarian Outcome of the Canons......................................... 114
5.6 Analysis of the Outcome............................................................... 117
5.7 The Maccovius Case ..................................................................... 119
5.8 Was Supralapsarianism Rejected? ................................................ 120
5.9 Why no Rejection of Supralapsarianism? ..................................... 121
5.10 Summary ..................................................................................... 122
5.11 Conclusion .................................................................................. 123


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Contents

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JONATHAN D. MOORE 6. The Extent of the Atonement: English Hypothetical Universalism versus Particular Redemption ....................................... 124
6.1 Introduction ................................................................................... 124
6.2 John Owen & Particular Redemption ........................................... 125
6.2.1 Trinitarian Concerns........................................................ 128
6.2.2 Covenantal Concerns ...................................................... 129
6.2.3 Exegetical Concerns........................................................ 131
6.2.4 The Nature of the Atonement.......................................... 132
6.2.5 The Force of Logic.......................................................... 135
6.3 John Davenant & English Hypothetical Universalism ................. 136
6.3.1 Dualism ........................................................................... 137
6.3.2 Potential Redemption ...................................................... 138
6.3.3 Voluntarism..................................................................... 140
6.3.4 Conditionalism & the Evangelical Covenant.................. 141
6.4 English Hypothetical Universalism & Reformed Confessions..... 143
6.4.1 The Canons of Dordt....................................................... 144
6.4.2 The Westminster Confession .......................................... 148
6.5 The Case of Richard Baxter .......................................................... 152
6.6 A Softening of Reformed Theology?............................................ 156
MARK A. HERZER 7.
Adam’s Reward: Heaven or Earth? .................................................... 162
7.1 Introduction ................................................................................... 162
7.2 Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) .................................................... 165
7.3 Francis Turretin (1623–1687) ....................................................... 169
7.4 Examining Their Positions............................................................ 171
7.5 Seventeenth-Century Divines and Adam’s Reward...................... 175
7.6 Conclusion .................................................................................... 181
MARK JONES 8. The “Old” Covenant.............................................................................. 183
8.1 Introduction ................................................................................... 183
8.2 Taxonomies................................................................................... 187
8.3 The Majority Position: “Dichotomist” .......................................... 189
8.4 Foedus Subserviens: “Trichotomist” ............................................ 194
8.5 John Owen: Dichotomist or Trichotomist? ................................... 199


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Contents

8.6 Conclusion .................................................................................... 202
CARL R. TRUEMAN 9. The Necessity of the Atonement ........................................................... 204
9.1 Introduction ................................................................................... 204
9.2 Owen’s Early Position .................................................................. 206
9.3 The Argument of the Dissertation................................................. 209
9.4 The Evidence for Essential Vindicatory Justice ........................... 213
9.5 Revelation and the Doctrine of God ............................................. 217
9.6 Conclusion .................................................................................... 221
ROBERT J. MCKELVEY 10. “That Error and Pillar of Antinomianism”: Eternal Justification............................................................................. 223
10.1 Introduction ................................................................................. 223
10.2 The Antinomian Endorsement .................................................... 226
10.3 The Westminster Resistance ....................................................... 237
10.4 The Anti-Arminian Foundations ................................................. 246
10.5 The Anti-Antinomian Connections ............................................. 255
10.6 Conclusion .................................................................................. 259
JOEL R. BEEKE 11. The Assurance Debate: Six Key Questions ........................................ 263
11.1 Introduction ................................................................................. 263
11.2 Is the Seed of Assurance Embedded in Faith? ............................ 265
11.3 Is Faith a Condition of the Covenant? ........................................ 267
11.4 Is Assurance Primarily Grounded in God’s Promises?............... 270
11.5 How Important is Syllogistic Reasoning for Validating Inward Evidences of Grace? .................................................... 273
11.6 Does the Inward Witness of the Holy Spirit Coincide with the Inward Evidences of Grace? ...................................... 276
11.7 Is Assurance Normative? ............................................................ 281
11.8 Conclusion .................................................................................. 283


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MICHAEL A.G. HAYKIN & C. JEFFREY ROBINSON 12. Particular Baptist Debates about Communion and Hymn-Singing ......................................................... 284
12.1 Introduction ................................................................................. 284
12.2 The Communion Controversy of the 1670s and 1680s............... 285
12.3 The Hymn-Singing Controversy of the 1690s ............................ 296
12.4 Isaac Marlow and His Opposition to Hymn-Singing.................. 300
12.5 Benjamin Keach and an Old Ordinance Reclaimed.................... 304
12.6 The Outcome............................................................................... 307
Bibliography.............................................................................................. 309
About the Authors ..................................................................................... 333
Index.......................................................................................................... 334


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Preface

This project began as an idea a few years ago when I (Mark Jones) sat down with my then Ph.D supervisor, Michael Haykin, and discussed with him the idea of a book that looks at the various theological debates that took place between Reformed theologians in the context of British Puritanism. Since that time we sought to find authors with expertise in Puritan theology that would be able to write on the debates covered in this book. We are grateful for their co-operation in making this project a reality.1 We are also grateful to the staff, especially Jörg Persch and Christoph Spill, at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht for their help in bringing this book to the press. We are also very thankful to Herman Selderhuis and the RHT series editors for accepting this book into this fine series. This book does not look at every debate that took place among Puritan theologians, but it does give a fairly comprehensive overview of some of the most significant debates that took place in Britain during the seventeenth century among Reformed theologians who agreed on more points of theology than they disagreed. Richard Muller’s chapter shows that this type of project provides a helpful companion to the literature in recent years that has questioned the old historiography put forth in terms of “Calvin against the Calvinists”. While it is customary to offer thanks to those who have helped make a book a reality, I (Michael Haykin) would also like to stress that in doing so, I am not doing this in any sort of perfunctory manner. I am deeply thankful for the help afforded me by my assistant at the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Revd. Steve Weaver. Finally, I would like to thank my dear wife Alison for her patience and ongoing support in all of my academic pursuits, and especially in the editing of this book. I (Mark Jones) want to thank the members at Faith Vancouver Presbyterian Church for encouraging (enduring?) me in my academic pursuits as their minister. It is also an honor to have edited this book with Michael Haykin, a person and scholar from whom I have learned much. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife Barbara for her continued support in all areas of my life. —————

1 The title for this book, “Drawn into Controversie” comes from John Crandon’s Epistle dedicatory to Mr. Baxter’s Aphorisms Exorized and Anthorized (London, 1654).

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1. Diversity in the Reformed Tradition: A Historiographical Introduction

Richard A. Muller 1.1 Introduction: Tradition, Diversity, and the Interpretation of Reformed Thought Traditions are, by their very nature, diverse. Nor do theological traditions provide an exception to this rule, even when, as in the cases of Augustinianism, Thomism, Lutheranism, or Calvinism they have been named for a single individual. The case of Augustinianism is particularly instructive. That there is an Augustinian tradition, few would deny. What “Augustinian” precisely means is, however, subject to considerable variety, if not disagreement. In a general sense, the theology of Western Christendom is Augustinian. If one traces out the medieval theology of grace, Thomas Aquinas stands as an Augustinian. If one examines the issue of philosophical models, Franciscans like Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus are clearly Augustinian. If one examines the emphatically Augustinian theology and spirituality of the Augustinian order, one nonetheless finds both via antiqua and via moderna Augustinians.2 A similar point can be made concerning Thomism, which experienced several branches in the later middle ages, a significant shift from an emphasis on the Sentence commentary to the Summa in the early sixteenth-century, and significant development in the debates over Molinism in the seventeenth century. Likewise the Lutheran tradition which, although it does tend to identify Luther as its foundational thinker, early on incorporated Melanchthonian elements, and experienced considerable differences over such issues as the understanding of Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper, the relationship of faith and works, and the nature of original sin – as evidenced in the debates leading to the Formula of Concord (1580). Equally so, the Reformed tradition, which did not begin with the generation of thinkers like Calvin, Musculus, and Vermigli, but with an earlier —————

2 See David C. Steinmetz, “Luther and the Late Medieval Augustinians: Another Look,” Concordia Theological Monthly, 44 (1973), 245–260.

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generation of Reformers of rather varied training and background – notably Bucer, Zwingli, Capito, and Oecolampadius – is a highly diverse tradition and, in addition, was rather diverse in its origins. Nonetheless, the diversity of the older Reformed tradition was not a prominent subject of discussion in the older literature on “Calvinism.” The appearance of diversity in the Reformed tradition as the subject of the present volume identifies a significant line of argument in the on-going work of examining and reassessing the development of seventeenth-century Protestant thought. Accordingly, readers will find little of the older “Calvin against the Calvinists” model in the following chapters. The theological positions of seventeenth-century authors are no longer evaluated in terms of their resemblance (or lack of resemblance) to Calvin’s thought, but as exponents of a diverse and variegated tradition – indeed, a tradition that diversified increasingly in proportion to the increasing number of teachers, preachers, and theologians who came to be numbered in its ranks. The old claim that Calvin was the founder and norm of the Reformed tradition and that something disastrous happened to the Reformed tradition shortly after his death, yielding a predestinarian, scholastic, speculative, metaphysical monolith that could be set over against Calvin’s humanistic Christocentrism, has given way to the portrait of a highly complex tradition in process of development. “Calvin against the Calvinists” has not, in other words, been replaced by an equally monotonous refrain of “Calvin for the Calvinists.” Calvin’s theology is referenced, not as a norm to be invoked for the examination of the later Reformed tradition, but as part of an antecedent complex of earlier Reformed formulations lying in the background of many aspects of the later Reformed positions. Beyond this, later developments in this diverse tradition are allowed to speak for themselves, out of their own historical contexts. From the perspective of one who has participated in over three decades of the examination and reassessment of the older Reformed theology, the importance of this shift in method and approach ought not to be underestimated – nor, indeed, should the confusion concerning both the nature of the Reformed tradition and the significance of Calvin’s theology generated by the “Calvin against the Calvinists” approach. Noting some of the inherent problems in this approach in order, if only to highlight the historiographical advance represented in the essays found here. At its core, the “Calvin against the Calvinists” historiography was a highly theologized product of the era of neo-orthodoxy. It not only identified Calvin, often specifically the 1559 edition of Calvin’s Institutes, as providing the sole theological index for the assessment of later Reformed thought, but it identified Calvin as a thoroughly Christocentric thinker whose theology focused on Christology and which for purely dogmatic

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concerns placed the doctrine of predestination in an a posteriori position.2 With these dogmatic shibboleths in hand, it rather easily labeled theologies that placed the doctrine of predestination toward the beginning of the system, often following the doctrine of God, as drastic departures from Calvin’s christocentrically “balanced” theology. Theodore Beza was identified as the culprit, and his little Tabula praedestinationis, labeled as the source of the predestinarian system – even thought it was written a decade before Calvin’s death, in consultation with Calvin, and is neither a theological system nor a prospectus for a theological system.3 According to the “Calvin against the Calvinists” model, where Calvin was Christocentric, a posteriori, inductive, and humanistic, later Calvinists focused on predestination, and argued scholastically in an a priori, deductive manner. The understanding of scholasticism on the part of this scholarship was, among other things, unique to the “Calvin against the Calvinists” model and quite out of touch with the main lines of scholarship concerning the nature of scholasticism. Specifically, scholasticism was defined as a highly deterministic form of predestinarianism, immersed in Aristotle, and devoted to a logic of deducing entire theological systems from the divine decree rather than, as the large body of extant scholarship on scholasticism had long indicated, primarily an academic method that was suited to multiple disciplines and that did not determine such results as predestinarian systems.4 In what was, arguably, a more dogmatically deductive argument than any launched by a seventeenth-century Calvinist, this older line of scholarship held that a Christocentric Calvin must have held to a notion of universal atonement while the later Calvinist predestinarians must have deduced a doctrine of limited atonement from their view of the divine decrees. Stray seventeenth-century proponents of universal atonement, like John Cameron and Moises Amyraut, could be identified rather uncritically as the true Calvinians, opposed by the predestinarian Calvinists.5 Advocacy of a scho————— 2

In the following paragraphs, I cite only a few salient examples of each claim concerning “Calvin against the Calvinists.” For a lengthier bibliography and critique of these lines of argument, see Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63–102. 3 Cf. Basil Hall, “Calvin Against the Calvinists,” in John Calvin: A Collection of Distinguished Essays, ed. Gervase Duffield (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), 19–37; Brian G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 32, 40–42, 136–137; and Peter Toon, The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism in English Nonconformity, 1689–1765 (London: The Olive Tree, 1967), 13; with the analysis of the Tabula in Richard A. Muller, “The Use and Abuse of a Document: Beza’s Tabula praedestinationis, the Bolsec Controversy, and the Origins of Reformed Orthodoxy,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, ed. Carl Trueman and Scott Clark (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), 33–61. 4 Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 32, 131–139. 5 Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 54–55, 161–167, 172–172, 186–191; Alan Clifford, Calvinus: Authentic Calvinism, a Clarification (Norwich: Charenton Reformed Publish-

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lastic method in academies and universities was argued to be the cause of declension from the more flexible and purportedly inclusive theology of the Reformers into a rigid, unyielding orthodoxy.6 In its fully developed form, the “Calvin against the Calvinists” approach linked humanism, some form of fideism, and Christocentrism in Calvin and in a few later true Calvinians, and in the case of Armstrong’s and Moltmann’s theories, connected these characteristics with Ramism, a posteriori argumentation, and covenant theology.7 It then opposed this artificially constructed pastiche of balanced, purportedly true, Calvinian theology to the purportedly unbalanced, Aristotelian, scholastic, predestinarian, metaphysical, a prioristic, and rationalistic theology of later Calvinism. Not only did the approach view the thought-world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of neat dogmatic packages, but the packaging typically reflected twentieth-century dogmatic interests and not the patterns of formulation found among early modern Reformed theologians. Several variant lines of argument, related to this basic “Calvin against the Calvinists” approach, took up the issue of covenant theology. Each of these approaches the rise of covenant theology and argue, on the basis of Calvin’s minimal contribution to the development of a doctrine of covenant, that later federalism was a departure from Calvin. According to one pattern of argument, inasmuch as Calvin had identified the covenant of grace as unifying the two testaments and had offered no discussion of a pre-lapsarian covenant, the problematic innovation separating Calvin from later Calvinists was the covenant of works. In this view the Christocentric grace theology of Calvin stood opposed to the legalisms of later Calvinism.8 According to another pattern of argument, Calvin’s own doctrine of predestination prevented him from understanding the covenant of grace as bilateral and therefore marked out a fundamental difference between the Calvinian side ————— ing, 1996). It must, incidentally be questioned as to whether such terms as “limited” and “universal atonement” can ever do justice to an early modern discussion and debate that did not use this language but instead had recourse to questions of the sufficiency and efficiency of Christ’s satisfaction. 6 Thus, Brian G. Armstrong, “Semper Reformanda: The Case of the French Reformed Church, 1559–1620,” in Later Calvinism: International Perspectives, ed. W. Fred Graham (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994), 119–140. 7 Note, in particular, Jürgen Moltmann, “Zur Bedeutung des Petrus Ramus für Philosophie und Theologie im Calvinismus,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 68 (1957), 295–318. 8 James B. Torrance, “Calvin and Puritanism in England and Scotland – Some Basic Concepts in the Development of ‘Federal Theology,’” in Calvinus Reformator (Potchefstroom: Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 1982), 264–277; idem, “The Concept of Federal Theology – Was Calvin a Federal Theologian?” in Calvinus Sacrae Scripturae Professor, edited by Wilhelm H. Neuser (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 15–40; and Holmes Rolston III, John Calvin versus the Westminster Confession (Richmond: John Knox, 1972). On the other side of the argument, see Peter Alan Lillback, The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2001).

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of the Reformed tradition and “the other Reformed tradition” grounded in the work of Bullinger, specifically in his bilateral understanding of covenant and, indeed, in what amounted to his virtually Arminian doctrine of predestination.9 A third pattern of argument, already noted as found in the work of Moltmann and Armstrong, enlisted Ramism on the side of antiAristotelian humanism and posed Aristotelian, scholastic, a prioristic, deductivistic Bezan predestinarians against anti-Aristotelian, humanistic, Ramistic covenantal thinkers invested in salvation-historical a posteriorism.10 What united all of these approaches was a highly dogmatic reading of Calvin’s theology in relation to a largely uninvestigated but nonetheless dogmatically-characterized and presumedly monolithic or monochromatic later “Calvinist” or Reformed tradition. Calvin was Christocentric – later Calvinists were predestinarian; or, in a recent equally problematic variant, Calvin was a theologian of union with Christ – later Calvinists failed to focus on union with Christ.11 Calvin was a theologian of grace – later Calvinists were immersed in legalism.12 Calvin, for all his purported Christocentrism, was still a predestinarian and therefore opposed to bilateral covenant theology – later Calvinism evidenced a deep-seated tension between predestinarianism and covenantalism, with the federal theology of Cocceius reasserting the anti-predestinarian bilateral covenantalism of Bullinger.13 Calvin was a humanistic, anti-Aristotelian and, despite his predestinarianism, graciously covenantal – later Calvinism, with the exception of the Ramist covenantal thinkers, was scholastic, non-humanistic, rationalistic, and Aristotelian.14 Calvin taught unlimited atonement – later predestinarian Calvinism taught limited atonement, to the bitter exclusion of proponents of —————

9 J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (Athens, Ohio, 1980); and idem, “Heinrich Bullinger, the Covenant, and the Reformed Tradition in Retrospect,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 29, no.2 (1998), 359–376; note the contrary argument in Lyle D. Bierma, “Federal Theology in the Sixteenth Century: Two Traditions?” Westminster Theological Journal, 45 (1983), 304–321. 10 As has been admirably shown, this third pattern of argument has little or no basis in early modern documents: see Lyle D. Bierma, German Calvinism in the Confessional Age: The Covenant Theology of Caspar Olevian (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996), 24–25, 162–168; idem, “The Role of Covenant Theology in Early Reformed Orthodoxy,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 21, no.3 (1990), 457–459; cf. Willem J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), trans. Raymond A. Blacketer (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), 75. 11 So Hall, “Calvin against the Calvinists,” 24–28; and Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 36-42; and recently, with reference to union with Christ, Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008), 3, 4, 25, 27. 12 E.g., Torrance, “The Concept of Federal Theology,” 15–40. 13 Thus, Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant, 199–215. 14 Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, “Prädestination und Heilsgeschichte bei Moyse Amyraut,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 65 (1953/54), 281; with Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 32–33, 37–42, 55–56.

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unlimited atonement as advocates of a “heresy”.15 Calvin’s theology was wonderfully “balanced” – later Calvinists destroyed the balance.16 All of these claims represent modern macro-dogmatic explanations that fail to engage the content, context, and intentionality of the early modern sources. There are, also, a series of contradictions among these approaches: simply put, the older approaches, loosely identified under the rubric “Calvin against the Calvinists” did not agree with one another – and their disagreements fell, typically, along dogmatic rather than historical lines of argument. One, found in the work of J. Wayne Baker, for all its kinship to the argumentation of Hall and Armstrong,17 probably ought to be separated out as “Calvin and the Calvinists against the Bullingerians.” What they all have in common, however, is the a-historical assumption that Calvin was the founder and dogmatic arbiter of the later Reformed tradition and that the tradition was a fairly monolithic departure from its Calvinian norm, the exceptions appearing either as pure Calvinians when the body of Calvinists had departed from Calvin or as Bullingerians (or something else) when the body of Calvinists was presumed to stand lock-step in accord with Calvin. The various “Calvin against the Calvinists” approaches also all have in common a highly dogmatic, value-laden vocabulary: thus, christocentrism is good, legalism bad; humanism presumably flexible and therefore good, scholasticism and Aristotelianism purportedly rigid and rationalistic and therefore bad. Diversity in the tradition, whether doctrinal or methodological, was consistently assessed as problematic insofar as it represented something other than the declared norm, whether that norm was pure Calvinian grace theology cum christocentrism, Bullingerian anti-predestinarian bilateral covenantalism, Calvino-Amyraldian-humanistic universal atonement, Ramistic covenantal a posteriorism, or some other mythological construct, depending on the particular line of argument. Those scholars involved in setting aside the Calvin against the Calvinists model and reassessing the post-Reformation development of Reformed orthodoxy have typically avoided dogmatically-loaded usages, recognized that historical method does not decide on matters of theological rectitude, and acknowledged the variegated nature of intellectual traditions. The last point, acknowledgment of the variegated nature of the Reformed tradition, goes to the heart of the present volume, which focuses on the test case of —————

15 Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 41–42, 137; cf. R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 13–18, 31–32, 57–58; summarized in idem, “The Puritan Modification of Calvin’s Theology” in John Calvin: His Influence in the Western World, ed. W. Stanford Reid (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 197–214. 16 Thus, Hall, “Calvin against the Calvinists,” 25, 28; Toon, Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism, 11–13. 17 See Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant, 214.

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English puritan debates, but it could be easily extended to other theological cultures.

1.2 Debate Within the Reformed Tradition The eras of the Reformation and of Reformed orthodoxy were times of intense polemic and debate, initially over issues of reform and, as the Reformation progressed and the church divided, over issues of confessional identity and confessional boundaries. There were also a large number of debates, varying in intensity, which took place over theological and philosophical issues not immediately related to confessional definition. A tentative distinction of these different types of debate – recognizing that the categories are not rigidly defined and include some overlapping aspects – can serve both to clarify the nature of Reformed orthodoxy and to characterize the direction of investigation undertaken by the present volume. The main point of the categories is to highlight not only the diversity of Reformed theology in the era of orthodoxy but also the diversity of the debates as they played out across a spectrum from major encounters requiring confessional statement and, indeed, condemnation or disapproval, to often bitter arguments of considerably lesser weight that addressed issues of preference in theological formulation without directly broaching questions of confessionality or leading to new confessional formulae. Three kinds of kinds of debate have been most frequently referenced in the older scholarship – namely 1) the polemical debates with other confessionalities, whether Lutheran, Roman, Socinian, or Anabaptist; 2) debates concerning particular lines of doctrinal argument that transgressed acknowledged confessional boundaries – notably the controversies over Samuel Huber’s universalism and Jacob Arminius’ views on grace and predestination; and 3) debates internal to the Reformed confessional tradition that, in one way or another, pressed questions of the precise meaning of the confessional documents, such as the debates over eschatology or over various elements of Salmurian theology as proposed by Moises Amyraut, Paul Testard, Josue La Place, Samuel Morus, but that did not result in synodical decisions of heresy – although sometimes yielding, as in the case of the Articles of Morus and the Formula Consensus Helvetica, confessional documents of a more limited scope. There are also several other types of debate characteristic of the era, debates that took place far more frequently, but that have generally been given less attention. Thus there were 4) debates over philosophical issues, often concerned with the impact of the new rationalisms on fundamental understandings in logic, physics, and metaphysics and, by extension, on theological formulation. There were also, 5) debates concerning non- or sub-

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confessional issues that were nevertheless of a fairly significant theological weight that threatened to rise to the confessional level. Here we count the supralapsarian-infralapsarian debates, debates over what for lack of a better term can be called non-Amyraldian hypothetical universalism, over the imputation mediate or immediate of Adam’s sin to his posterity, over the imputation of Christ’s active obedience to believers, and the debates related to elements of Cocceian theology. Finally, 6) there were a large number of theological topics subject to rather different formulations on the part of the Reformed orthodox that sometimes issued in fairly heated interchanges among theologians but that, arguably, did not rise to the level of the debates just noted in the fifth category. By way of example, there were differences in understanding of divine simplicity in relation to the predication of divine attributes and the problem of divine knowledge of future propositions.

1.3 Debates Concerning Confessional Boundaries – Crossing Over or Pressing the Boundary Leaving aside the first category, the debates with other confessionalities, as not belonging to the scope of the present study and concentrating specifically on debates within the Reformed tradition, some comment is necessary concerning the difference between the second and third kinds of debate – namely those identifying transgressions of confessional boundaries and those remaining withing the confessional limits – given the way in which such differences were typically glossed over in the older scholarship, particularly when the debates were analyzed in terms of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” paradigm. The late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century debates over universalistic and synergistic soteriologies, notably those over Huber’s and Arminius’ understandings of grace and predestination arose over the thought of theologians who were Reformed in terms of their ecclesial or confessional location but whose thought contradicted basic statements of the Reformed confessions, rendering these debates rather different from the debates over Amyraut’s theology, given that not only was Amyraut Reformed in ecclesial and confessional location but his theology also arguably fell within the boundaries established by the Gallican Confession and the Canons of Dort. Huber’s and Arminius’ theologies did not fall within the boundaries established by such confessional documents as the Second Helvetic Confession, the Belgic Confession, and the Heidelberg Catechism.18 ————— 18

Note the rather tendentious efforts to identify Arminius’ theology as Reformed prior to the definitions of Dort in G.J. Hoenderdaal, “De Kekordelijke Kant van de Dordtse Synode,” Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift, 25, no.5 (1969), 349–363; and Carl Bangs, “Arminius as a Re-

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The historiographical issue is virtually the opposite in the case of Amyraut. The rather unnuanced association of Amyraut’s hypothetical universalism with Calvin’s theology and with a trajectory of French humanism, taken together with identification of Amyraut’s views as “heresy” in the eyes of scholastic Calvinists, abetted the false picture of the nature of Reformed orthodoxy as a predestinarian, scholastic departure from Calvin’s more or less humanistic theology, indeed, as a monolithic theology capable of being contrasted quite negatively with the Reformation-era foundations of the Reformed tradition. The French Synods, while objecting to some of the formulations of Amyraut and Testard, refrained from condemning their views and it was left to the Formula Consensus Helvetica, a document of limited geographical reach and short-lived use, to disapprove the doctrine – yet without identifying it as a heresy.19 Once the nature of the controversy as a debate internal to the confessions has been duly recognized, as well as the genuine differences between Amyraut’s formulations and Calvin’s thought and the rather scholastic patterns of distinction and argument assumed by Amyraut are noted,20 Amyraldian hypothetical universalism can be recognized as belonging to the internal diversity of the Reformed tradition itself – and a very different picture of orthodoxy emerges. Alan Strange’s analysis of the debate over of Christ’s active obedience highlights the continued intensity of reaction to the heritage of Piscator among the English Reformed. The essay examines some of the backgrounds to the Westminster debates in the French synodical decisions of Privas and Tonneins against Piscator and in James I’s letter to the French Synods requesting moderation of the issue. Earlier, the Synods of Gap (1603) and La Rochelle (1607) censured Piscator’s views, specifically indicating the imputation of Christ’s active obedience.21 In 1612 at Privas, the Synod required clergy to sign a confessional clarification to the effect that “toute l’Obeissance” of Christ was imputed in justification, specifically that justification is not merely a matter of forgiveness but also consists in the impu————— formed Theologian,” in The Heritage of John Calvin, edited by John H. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), 209–222; see Richard A. Muller, “Arminius and the Reformed Tradition,” Westminster Theological Journal, 70 (2008), 19–48. 19 Formula Consensus Helvetica, praefatio and canon xvi, in H. A. Niemeyer, Collectio confessionium in ecclesiis reformatis publicatarum (Leipzig: Julius Kinkhardt, 1840), 729–730, 735; and see the similar approach to Amyraut’s doctrine in Francis Turretin, Institutio theologiae elencticae, in qua status controversiae perspicue exponitur, praecipua orthodoxorum argumenta proponuntur, & vindicantur, & fontes solutionum aperiuntur, 3 vol. (Geneva: Samuel de Tournes, 1679–1685), IV.xvii.4; and XIV.xiv.6. 20 See Richard A. Muller, “A Tale of Two Wills? Calvin and Amyraut on Ezekiel 18:23,” Calvin Theological Journal, 44, no.2 (2009), 211–225. 21 Jean Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux des églises de France, 2 vol. (Den Haag, 1710), I, 257–258, 301–302; also see Heber Carlos de Campos, “Johannes Piscator (1546–1625) and the Consequent Development of the Doctrine of the Imputation of Christ’s Active Obedience” (Ph. D. dissertation: Calvin Theological Seminary, 2009), 10–18, 216–239.

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tation of Christ’s “active righteousness” (Justice Active) – without, however, any reference at this point to Piscator.22 In the appended documents, however, there is a substantial, unsigned, refutation of Piscator’s doctrine.23 Two years later, however, at Tonneins, the more explicit language of Privas concerning Christ’s active obedience was replaced by the phrases “Obedience parfaite” and “toute cette Obedience.”24 These synodical censures and confessional elaborations are as close as the Reformed ever came to a full confessional declaration specifically against Piscator. As Strange also makes clear, while noting the rather pointed worry on the part of several delegates that the doctrine could strengthen the antinomian cause, a significant majority of divines at Westminster assumed the imputation of Christ’s active as well as passive obedience to believers in and for their justification. Still, the Westminster Assembly did not follow the route adumbrated in the initial debates over revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles: the phrase “whole obedience” was not used and the language adopted in WCF 8.5, “perfect obedience and sacrifice” WCF 11.1, “imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ”, could be subscribed by all, including those who did not accept the imputation of Christ’s active obedience to believers. Whereas all of the motivations and considerations behind the final language of the Confession refuse modern reconstruction, the intention of the language is clear – the debate over the imputation of Christ’s active obedience for the justification of believers was not raised to confessional status by the Westminster Assembly. That development was left to two later confessions of limited provenance, namely the Savoy Declaration (1658) of the Congregationalists, written by Owen and Goodwin, and the Helvetic Consensus Formula (1675).25 In the Helvetic Consensus Formula, Piscator’s doctrine hangs in the background of the Salmurian issues addressed. The Westminster Assembly’s early debate (1643) over ecclesiology – specifically over the problem of church government and the power of the keys analyzed by Hunter Powell, when examined from the perspective of its immediate result, namely the formulae contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith, fits into the category of debates of significant theological weight that threatened to rise to the confessional level. In the longer view however, given the eventual severance between Presbyterians and Congregationalists or Independents, followed by the editing of confessional formu————— 22

Jean Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux des églises de France, 2 vol. (Den Haag, 1710), I,

400.

23 Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux, I, 457–461. N.B. the document is not given in Quick’s Synodicon. 24 Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux, II, 13. 25 A Declaration of the Faith and Order owned and practised in the Congregational Churches in England […] meeting at the Savoy, October 12. 1658 (London: John Field, 1659), xi.1 (p. 20); Formula Consensus Helverica, xv, in Niemeyer, Collectio, 734–735.

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lae to account for the differences in church polity, it bore the seeds of a deeper concern that would press the limits of the confessional formulae and result in confessional variants and schism. Powell surveys the minutes of the Westminster Assembly and collateral documents in detail, demonstrating that the debates over the nature and extent of the power of the keys and over the interpretation of Matthew 16:19 – viz., whether it was a generalized power of the universal church, a power reserved to the Apostles, a power given to all believers, or a power delegated or communicated by believers to the pastors of the church – stood in significant relation to immediate questions of church polity that plagued the English church throughout the seventeenth century. We can note, here, among other points of difference and debate, the rise of separatist groups in the early seventeenth century, the problems that the English delegation to Dort had with the polity of the Dutch Reformed church, the trans-Atlantic debate between Thomas Hooker and Samuel Rutherford over the nature of a church covenant, and the efforts of a writer like John Owen after the Restoration to refute the charge that Independents were schismatic.26 By ending the debate with the briefest of formulae and not deciding on the broader implications of the power of the keys to the nature and forms of church government, the Assembly achieved a certain level of unity, leaving the issue unsettled and a source of later conflict. That picture is further nuanced by Crawford Gribben’s essay. The issue of millennial debate among the Reformed is both highly complicated and rather uniquely related to the confessional issue. The new eschatologies of a future millennium ran counter to the eschatologies of the sixteenth-century Reformed which, from Bullinger’s commentary on the Apocalypse to Franciscus Junius’ annotations, as ensconced in the margins of later editions the Geneva Bible, understood the millennium as past. Although, moreover, the major Reformed confessions had tended to tread lightly concerning the last things, two of them, the Forty-two Articles of Edward VI and the Second Helvetic Confession, had strongly argued against “the fable of the millennium” and notions of a “golden age” on earth prior to the final judgment.27 What is rather remarkable, then, is the vast revision of Reformed eschatology that took place in the seventeenth century both in England and on the continent without yielding a major confessional confrontation – in fact, both witnessing an increased diversity in the tradition, a significant break with the views of the Reformers on the part of many orthodox Reformed writers ————— 26 Note Sung Ho Lee, “All Subjects of the Kingdom of Christ: John Owens’ conceptions of Christian Unity and Schism” (Ph.D. dissertation: Calvin Theological Seminary, 2007); and Sang Hyuk Ahn, “Covenant and Conflict: the Controversy over the Church Covenant between Samuel Rutherford and Thomas Hooker’ (Ph.D. dissertation: Calvin Theological Seminary 2011). 27 Articuli XLII. Eduardi VI, art. 40, in Niemeyer, Collectio, 600; Second Helvetic Confession 11.14; cf. the Augsburg Confession, art. 17.

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evidenced by their acceptance of a doctrine of a future millennium. The spectrum of opinion among the continental Reformed, similar to what Gribben has identified among the English, is evidenced by the millennialism of Wilhelmus à Brakel on the one hand and the anti-millennial views of Francis Turretin on the other.28 Turretin, significantly, distinguished between the “crass” chiliasm of various heretics and the highly objectionable but not heretical “subtle” chiliasm of Piscator, Alsted, Mede, and Launaeus – an approach parallel to his objection to Amyraldianism.29

1.4 Debates Over Philosophical Issues This category of debate does not appear as a separate topic in the present volume, but it nonetheless deserves some notice given both the caricatures of Reformed scholasticism and its philosophical backgrounds found in the older scholarship and the rather diverse and variegated picture of Reformed approaches to philosophy that emerges when the documents are actually studied. Often dismissed as holding rigidly to a moribund and discredited Aristotelianism, the Reformed orthodox thinkers of the seventeenth century expressed a series of significant concerns over impact of the new rationalisms on fundamental understandings in logic, physics, and metaphysics and, by extension, on theological formulation, while at the same time developing and modifying their own approaches to the formulation and use of philosophy. The Reformed encountered, debated, and adapted various of the patterns of metaphysical and physical argumentation that arose in the broader debates of the early modern era. Thus, for example, toward the beginning of the seventeenth century, perhaps generated by Suarez’ influential work on metaphysics, with its stress on the univocity of being, Reformed theologians and philosophers debated the question of whether or not God could be discussed in metaphysics – with some arguing that God, considered as infinite being, could be a subject of metaphysics and others restricting the topics of metaphysics to being in general, excluding God from discussion.30 As the seventeenth century progressed, various Reformed writers combated —————

28 Cf. Wilhelmus à Brakel, LOGIKH LATREIA, dat is Redelijke Godsdienst in welken de goddelijke Waarheden van het Genade-Verbond worden verklaard [...] alsmede de Bedeeling des Verbonds in het O. en N.T. en de Ontmoeting der Kerk in het N. T. vertoond in eene Verklaring van de Openbaringen aan Johannes, 3 parts (Den Haag: Cornelis van Duyck, 1701), III.xx.1–27; with Turretin, Institutio theologiae elencticae, XX.iii.1–22. 29 Turretin, Institutio theologicae elencticae, XX.iii1–4. 30 See the discussion in Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 4 vol. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), III, 167–170.

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the problem of Pyrrhonic skepticism in their Roman Catholic opponents and at least one major Reformed thinker, Pierre Bayle (otherwise largely Cartesian), himself adopted a form of skepticism, the implications of which continue to be debated in the scholarly literature.31 There have been several studies of the debates that took place in the Netherlands over the reception of Cartesian thought among the Reformed,32 studies of some of aspects of more traditional metaphysics among the Reformed,33 and there is a highly significant recent study of the relationship of Reformed orthodoxy and philosophy from the early seventeenth through the middle of the eighteenth century, noting the shifting patterns of the more traditional, modified Aristotelianism of the era and the gradual appropriation of Cartesian arguments on the part of other Reformed thinkers.34 In yet another example of philosophical debate, Reformed concerns over the doctrine of providence and divine foreknowledge of future contingents associated with the rejection of Molinism, brought Reformed orthodox writers into dialogue with Dominican opponents of Molinism and led to the adoption or adaptation on the part of many of the Reformed of the concept of divine concurrence understood as “physical premotion” (praemotio physica). William Twisse advocated the concept, Francis Turretin adapted it selectively, and Richard Baxter polemicized against it as a form of determinism.

1.5 Debates Concerning Issues of Significant Import that Threatened to Rise to a Confessional Level These are debates that fall within the bounds of the major Reformed confessions and that, in some cases were debated in the process of framing confessions – notably the lapsarian and hypothetical universalist questions at Dort and the hypothetical universalist issue at the Westminster Assembly – ————— 31

See the essays in Paul Dibon, ed., Pierre Bayle, le philosophe de Rotterdam (Amsterdam: Elsevir, 1959); and Wiep van Bunge and Hans Bot, ed., Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), le philosophe de Rotterdam; philosophy, religion, and reception (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008). 32 E.g., Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesianism (1637– 1650) (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992); idem, “Descartes and the Problem of Atheism: the Utrecht Crisis,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, 71, no.2 (1991), 211– 223; J.A. (Han) van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature, and Change (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995). 33 J. A. (Han) van Ruler, “Franco Petri Burgersdijk and the Case of Calvinism Within the Neo-Scholastic Tradition,” in Egbert P. Bos and H. A. Krop, ed., Franco Burgersdijk (1590– 1635): Neo-Aristotelianism in Leiden (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 37–55; idem, “Burgersdijk and Heereboord on the Question of Divine Concurrence,” in ibid., 56–65. 34 Aza Goudriaan, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625–1750: Gisbertus Voetius, Petrus van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006).

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but which did not rise to the level of causing further confessional formulation. Typically, these debates reflect issues in seventeenth-century Reformed thought that were not debated or defined by the Reformers. They also manifest a kind of diversity and variety of formulation not suitably acknowledged in the older scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy. Included here is one debate (concerning Adam’s reward) that did result in the disapprobation of the Formula Consensus Helvetica, but that was not confessionally defined or delimited in England, where the Formula had no authority. John Fesko’s analysis of lapsarian debates at the Synod of Dort works through the arguments of Franciscus Gomarus on the supralapsarian side with the various definitions and supportive arguments presented by infralapsarians at the Synod, including the British delegation and, in so doing, underlines the theme of the volume, namely the diversity of the Reformed tradition. With the infralapsarians in a clear majority, the Synod not surprisingly formulated its final set of canons to include an infralapsarian definition. Fesko turns to the question of the character of the orthodoxy framed by the synod: does the infralapsarian formula render a supralapsarian definition heterodox? Significantly, this was not the conclusion drawn by the Synod. In the case of charges brought to the Synod against the supralapsarian views of Johannes Maccovius, the synodical verdict indicated the orthodoxy of his views, albeit accompanied by admonitions against excessive speculation. In Fesko’s view, the underlying issue was the problem of divine authorship of sin – denied alike by infra- and supralapsarian – and the interest of the Synod in arriving at a formula that would make clear the Reformed position. The Canons of Dort, therefore, reflect both an attempt to arrive at a majority formulation and a willingness to allow for breadth and diversity of theological opinion among the Reformed. Jonathan Moore’s essay carries forward the issue of hypothetical universalism, firmly establishing by way of an examination primarily of John Owen’s and John Davenant’s thought that there was a significant development of non-Amyraldian hypothetical universalism in English Reformed orthodoxy that continued through the era of the Westminster Confession. There is, moreover, good reason to place this branch of the debate over hypothetical universalism in this rather than in our third category, given that it did not rise to the confessional level of the Amyraldian debates – receiving neither synodical reprimand nor explicit confessional disapproval. Moore’s careful examination of the text of the Westminster Confession confirms his analysis over against those who would either read the confession as containing an unequivocal exclusion of hypothetical universalism or who would attempt to view all hypothetical universalists as Amyraldian, including those present at Westminster.

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A question can be raised here concerning Moore’s description of the non-Amyraldian trajectory of hypothetical universalism as a “softening” of a Reformed tradition that was “on the whole” particularistic and resistant to such softening. Given that there was a significant hypothetical universalist trajectory in the Reformed tradition from its beginnings, it is arguably less than useful to describe its continuance as a softening of the tradition. More importantly, the presence of various forms of hypothetical universalism as well as various approaches to a more particularistic definition renders it rather problematic to describe the tradition as “on the whole” particularistic and thereby to identify hypothetical universalism as a dissident, subordinate stream of the tradition, rather than as one significant stream (or, perhaps two!) among others, having equal claim to confessional orthodoxy. Mark Herzer’s study of “Adam’s Reward: Heaven or Earth?” also takes up an issue related to covenant theology, specifically to the problem of the promises given under the covenant of works and the meaning of the “life” promised to Adam in return for obedience – perpetual, yes, but would it be heavenly or earthly? The fairly radical disagreement on the issue between such eminent thinkers as Thomas Goodwin, John Cameron, Moise Amyraut, John Ball, and Johannes Marckius on the side of an earthly reward, and Francis Turretin, J.H. Heidegger, the Formula Consensus Helvetica, Thomas Boston and Thomas Ridgley on the side of a heavenly reward. Against the kind of arguments presented by Holmes Rolston and Donald Bruggink, Herzer shows that this aspect of a Reformed debate and formulation of issues concerning the covenant of works did not lead to “legalism” as had been alleged – both on the ground that the Reformed assumed grace in Eden and on the ground that the doctrine did not offer works as salvific in any way after the fall. What is significant here is, as Herzer concludes, that the debate occurred within the Reformed understanding of the covenant of works and did not yield intense polemics in Britain. It did, however, in the view of continental disputants in the Amyraldian controversy, press on the confessional boundaries, as made clear in the Formula Consensus Helvetica – without, given the limited acceptance of the Formula, succeeding in ruling out either the doctrine of an earthly reward for Adam or the trichotomous federal definitions with which it was associated.

1.6 Debates over Theological Topics that did not Press on Confessional Boundaries This category of debate is of particular importance to the understanding of the character of Reformed orthodoxy and, even more than the previous category, was either ignored or misunderstood by the “Calvin against the

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Calvinists” approach to the materials. These debates are particularly illustrative of the diversity of orthodoxy. There were a considerable number of variations of covenantal language, illustrated here by Mark Jones’ essay, whether over the nomenclature itself or over the number and interrelationship of the covenants, which typically did not generate heated debate.35 Jones notes the variety of Reformed positions on the number of covenants, most notably the distinction between the so-called dichotomist or majority position that argued two basic covenants, a prelapsarian covenant of works and a postlapsarian covenant of grace and the trichotomist view, often associated with the thought of John Cameron, that argued a covenant of works, a Mosaic covenant or dispensation of covenant “subservient” to the gospel, and the covenant of grace. Despite the differences among these positions, the Reformed were in agreement that, however related the law might be to the original covenant of works, the Mosaic covenant neither set aside the promise of salvation by grace given after the fall nor offered an alternative salvation by works. As Jones points out, the variations in formulation represent different ways of handling this assumption while at the same time arguing the distinctiveness of the Mosaic covenant. In the case of John Owen, there are arguably trichotomist accents in a basically dichotomist covenant structure. One of the several advances offered by this approach to the very diverse Reformed language of covenant is the setting aside of Armstrong’s all-too-neat bifurcation of covenant language into the trichotomous views of the Salmurians (Cameron and Amyraut) and the dichotomous approach of “orthodoxy”: the diversity, as Jones shows, including the formulations of Cameron and Amyraut, lay within orthodoxy, once again evidencing the diversity of Reformed orthodox theology and continuing the direction of the recent reassessments of seventeenth-century orthodoxy. Carl Trueman’s study of the thought of John Owen both analyzes Owen’s own change of position and sets Owen’s doctrinal argumentation into the context of a centuries-long doctrinal conversation and debate over the necessity of the atonement, noting the position of Aquinas, the shift in argumentation brought about by Scotus’ voluntarism, and the apparent reflection of the Scotist view in Calvin’s own thought. Owen’s earlier approach followed out this more or less Scotistic approach and found confirming echoes in the thought of William Twisse and Samuel Rutherford. In his later approach, Owen saw the primary threat to orthodoxy as arising not from the Arminians but from the Socinians and, accordingly refocused his argument from a more intellectualist perspective and rooted the necessity of —————

35 Also see the earlier studies by Rehnmann, “Is the Narrative of Redemption History Trichotomous or Dichotomous,” 296–308; and Richard A. Muller, “Divine Covenants, Absolute and Conditional: John Cameron and the Early Orthodox Development of Reformed Covenant Theology,” Mid-America Journal of Theology, 17 (2006), 11–56.

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the atonement in God’s vindicatory justice. This shift in Owen’s formulation and the fact that it involved significant debate with and departure from the views of such significant Reformed thinkers as Calvin, Musculus, Twisse, and Rutherford and actually, as Trueman notes, put Owen into the company of Pareus, Piscator, Lubbertus, Cameron, and Maccovius, very clearly illustrates the diversity of the Reformed tradition, the presence of significant debates within the confessional tradition, and also the need to reassess the rather rigid bifurcation of the Reformed tradition made by members of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” school of thought, like Armstrong and Clifford. Owen’s mature views placed him, on this particular issue, consciously in the camp of Piscator, Cameron, and Amyraut. The debate over justification from eternity, analyzed in Robert McKelvey’s study, also belongs to the category of heated but lesser, subconfessional debate, connected with the lengthy controversy over antinomianism. The arguments against a doctrine of justification from eternity, particularly in the form that placed justification prior to faith, echoed many of the claims made against the Reformed doctrines of predestination and justification through faith alone – namely that it opened the door to licentiousness. As McKelvey points out, the terms used in debate serve as an index to the level of polemic reached in the controversy: “antinomianism” itself represents an exaggeration and distortion of the message of its purported proponents and, likewise, the term “eternal justification” was used without nuance to describe a series of positions, few if any of which would have asserted that the eternally justified could freely commit gross sins and never repent. Although it did not end the antinomian debates, the Westminster Confession offered a resolution of the problem, not by pointedly condemning various understandings of eternal justification, but by stating a distinction between eternal decree of God to justify the elect, the temporal work of Christ for the sake of justification, and actual justification in the Spirit’s application of Christ to believers (WCF 9.4). The distinction reflects the standard Reformed language of the eternal decree and its execution in time and perhaps intentionally echoes the standard distinction between eternal and actual providence. Joel Beeke’s study also chronicles a series of distinction, differences, and points of debate among Puritans on the relation of faith and assurance that were theologically and pastorally significant but that fell well within the confessional boundaries. The importance of the issue to Puritan writers as well as the diversity of expression is easily seen in Beeke’s enumeration of members of the Westminster assembly who wrote on the subject. Noting that there was “no significant debate” on assurance in the Westminster Assembly, Beeke goes on to note a series of differences, some substantial other less so, among the Puritans – notably whether assurance belongs properly to faith or is a fruit of faith; whether faith is a condition of the

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covenant of grace or something promised by it (coupled with the issue of whether the covenant is unconditional or conditional – or, in some sense, both); whether assurance is primarily grounded on God’s promises or primarily gained from introspection and evidences of grace in the life of a believer; whether syllogistic argumentation (practical or mystical) should be a basis for assurance or a “reflex” act having Christ as its foundation; whether the inward witness of the Spirit coincides with inward evidences of grace. The significance of this wide variety of expression is that it fell entirely within confessional boundaries. Beeke’s essay is also helpful in manifesting the nuances of the various positions on faith and assurance – nuances ignored or misunderstood in the highly flawed but still often cited work of R. T. Kendall.36 The essay by Michael Haykin and C. Jeffrey Robinson on the debates over hymnody manifests the diversity of the Reformed tradition in several ways, not the least of which is the relationship of the Particular Baptists to the broader Reformed confessional community. Continuity between Baptist theologians and the Reformed confessional tradition is clear in the use of the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration of the Congregationalists as the basis for large portions of their Second London Confession of 1677 and 1688. The point can also easily be illustrated from the thought of major English Particular Baptist theologians, whose thought apart from the question of baptism, remained in continuity with Reformed orthodoxy.37 The internal Baptist debates over open or closed communion and over the singing of hymns in worship also had clear parallels among the Reformed. Focusing first on the issue of open communion and open membership, Haykin and Robinson focus on the debates between John Bunyan and several fellow Baptists – Thomas Paul, Henry Danvers, and William Kiffin. Whereas Bunyan clearly viewed the baptism of adult believers on profession of faith as the proper form of baptism and was, certainly, himself baptized as an adult, he nonetheless did not view baptism as a necessary “initiating and entering ordinance,” resisted the use of believer’s baptism as a basis for division among Christians, and accordingly argued the case for open communion. His opponents argued the opposite, holding that baptism was universally held to be the initiatory ordinance by Baptists and nonBaptists alike, with Kiffin adding an appeal to Scripture as regulative principle and, interestingly, citing Bunyan’s Congregationalist friend, John Owen, against Bunyan’s arguments. Debate was fairly pointed, but resolution was reached under the terms of the Second London Confession, which —————

36 I.e., Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649; and idem, “The Puritan Modification of Calvin’s Theology.” 37 Cf. Richard A. Muller, “John Gill and the Reformed Tradition: A Study in the Reception of Protestant Orthodoxy in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Life and Thought of John Gill (1697– 1771): A Tercentennial Appreciation, ed. Michael A.G. Haykin (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), 51–68.

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did not broach the issue of closed communion. The other debate analyzed by Haykin and Robinson, over the question of congregational singing of “uninspired” hymns in addition to psalms, reflects a general concern among the Reformed from the beginnings of the Reformation. The argument, pressed by Isaac Marlow, opposing the singing of any previously composed psalms or hymns, adds a different dimension to the Baptist debates of the late seventeenth century. The authors conclude that the victory of Benjamin Keach’s view – that both psalms and newly written hymns could be sung – marked a significant juncture in Baptist worship. We add, that it marked the juncture without occasioning a confessional statement.

1.7 Concluding Comment The Puritan or English Reformed tradition, as surveyed in the present volume, evidences a rather diverse and variegated development, characterized not only by debates with other confessionalities or over theological developments deemed heretical and subsequently condemned by synodical decrees, but also by major and minor debates among the Reformed orthodox themselves. Most of the debates analyzed here have been passed over in the older scholarship in its quest to find these few true Calvinians to oppose to the socalled Calvinists. By contrast, none of the studies included in the present volume brands one side of a seventeenth-century debate as un-Calvinian or identifies an alteration of doctrinal perspective as a declension from Reformation-era purity. Calvin no longer appears as a norm, although he does appear, with other Reformers, as an antecedent of certain lines of argument. What ought to be most evident is that research into the diversity of the later Reformed tradition not only undermines the older claim that the dawn of an era of orthodoxy and scholasticism produced a rigid, nearly monolithic Calvinism or a nearly universally-held model according to which all aspects of theology were deduced from a divine decree, but also documents both an ongoing concern to further the Reformation in and through clarification of its doctrines and a fairly clear sense on the part of Reformed theologians and pastors of the nature of confessions and confessional boundaries. Specifically they understood the confessions as specifically worded to exclude certain positions (like various synergistic soteriologies, including Arminianism), but also very carefully worded either to discourage certain positions without overtly condemning them or to allow a significant breadth of theological expression within and under the confessional formulae. Specific issue can be taken, therefore, with Armstrong’s rather anachronistic use of the phrase semper reformanda as a characterization of the process of confessional recitation, revision, and re-subscription found in the earlier French synods and to his argument that the earlier synods aimed at a

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form of theological inclusiveness, while the later synods, beset with debates over Piscator, Amyraut, and Testard and guided toward rigid formulation by scholastic methodology, rejected “continuing reformation”.38 The language of ecclesia Reformata, semper reformanda comes from later seventeenth-century developments in the Dutch Nadere Reformatie, which was profoundly connected with the scholastic orthodoxy of Dutch university theology, most notably that of Utrecht. More importantly, however, the process of confessional revision that took place in the French synods of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, like the process of revision of the Belgic Confession in the Dutch synods of the era documents the attempt of synods, particularly when faced with cases of variant theological formulation, to clarify the nature of the Reformed faith, to include what was viewed as acceptable, to exclude what was not, on a case by case basis. What is more, the history of the French Synods in the seventeenth century hardly evidences either an early inclusiveness or increasing rigidity. The revisions stand not as attempts to broaden the Reformed faith but as clarifications of positions. Nor does later synodical behavior indicate a reversal: in the cases of Amyraut and Testard, the synodical decisions tended away from the production of new and more explicit confessional statements toward admonitions and demands that controversy cease and that controversial works not be published. The essays in the present volume document rather convincingly the diversity of the tradition and the large number of debates that took place within the tradition without yielding increasingly detailed confessional statements. The importance of this diversity to the understanding, indeed, the reassessment of Reformed orthodoxy rests on several issues: first, the presence of such a variety of debates within the tradition sets aside the rather standard claims of the older scholarship concerning “rigid orthodoxy”. Second, it offers evidence of a tradition that was both varied in its sources and backgrounds and actively involved in formulating theology in new and varied contexts. Third, it offers an approach to analyzing the Reformed thought of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries categorically different from the rather barren dogmatic game of one-for-one comparisons between a thinker from the era of orthodoxy and John Calvin. Instead of the one-for-one comparison it offers a more historically-grounded examination of Reformed orthodoxy that looks to context and situation of an individual thinker’s contribution to a debate for explanation rather than to a generalized “ism” like “Christocentrism” or “scholasticism or “Aristotelianism.” The emphasis of the present volume on concerted examination of the diversity of the tradition, therefore, also marks out a salutary path to future research in the field. ————— 38

Armstrong, “Semper Reformanda,” 119, 136–138.

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2. The Imputation of the Active Obedience of Christ at the Westminster Assembly

Alan D. Strange 2.1 Introduction Those who affirm the imputation of the active obedience of Christ (hereafter, IAOC) in the doctrine of justification by faith, and those who deny it, have in recent years vigorously debated the issue. No small part of the debate has been about the role of the Westminster Assembly of Divines and the documents produced by that body. Several sources have historically averred that the Assembly did not affirm the IAOC, and more recent sources have repeated that assertion. Others, however, have argued that, while the Divines in what they finally adopted, may never have explicitly affirmed the IAOC, nonetheless, the Westminster documents, taken as a whole, tend to affirm the IAOC.1 It may be thought that little remains to add to this discussion. It is my contention, however, that a few lacunae remain that, when examined, will fill in the picture and permit us to see more clearly that the Westminster Assembly, when it specifically addressed the issue of the IAOC, affirmed it, and though the final language may not have reflected it as do some other formulations (such as the Savoy Declaration of 1658), the documents of the Assembly do reflect a two-covenant structure that affirms (indeed, arguably, that entails and requires) the IAOC. Moreover that the Assembly was not a ruling body of the church but was rather constituted to give advice to the Parliament materially affected how it did its work, consideration of which is relevant in a variety of controversies, including the question of whether or not the Assembly affirmed the IAOC.2 —————

1 Jeffrey Jue argues this position well in “The Active Obedience of Christ and the Theology of the Westminster Standards: A Historical Investigation,” in Justified in Christ: God’s Plan for Us in Justification, K. Scott Oliphint, ed. (Great Britain: Mentor, 2007), 99–130. The assertion that the Westminster Standards tend to affirm the IAOC is also made in Justification: Report of the Committee [of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church] to Study the Doctrine of Justification (Willow Grove, PA: The Committee on Christian Education of the OPC, 2007), 144–45. 2 Two works are particularly helpful in understanding the nature of the Westminster Assembly as a body erected to give doctrinal and ecclesiastical advice to the British Parliament: Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand

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2.2 Historiography The allegation that the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), more specifically, or the Westminster Standards (including the Larger and Shorter Catechisms) more broadly, do not teach the IAOC, or that it at least accommodated those who objected to it, is of some ancient lineage. Mitchell and Struthers treat it in their edition of the Assembly’s Minutes. They speculate that the alleged omission of explicit language affirming the IAOC in WCF 11 was probably to appease Thomas Gataker and others who objected to it. Mitchell and Struthers acknowledge that though most of the divines at the Assembly “favoured the views of Ussher and Featley,” theologians distinctly and vigorously supportive of the IAOC (and expressive of such originally), those same divines were later willing to forego a clear affirmation of IAOC and thus to “abstain from further controversy about the matter.”3 The clear implication is that the divines were unwilling to make the IAOC a confessional matter and that, in the end, they accommodated those who did not affirm the IAOC.4 In his history of the Westminster Assembly, Mitchell argues along similar lines, but more fully.5 Relying chiefly on Daniel Featley’s speeches in favor of affirming the IAOC, Mitchell correctly notes that on the vote taken ————— Debate’ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), esp. Part I, and S.W. Carruthers, The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly, J. Ligon Duncan, III, ed. (rpt. Greenville, SC: Reformed Academic Press, 1994), esp. chaps. 1–4. See also, for the figures of the WA, William Barker, Puritan Profiles: 54 Puritan Personalities drawn together by the Westminster Assembly (Great Britain: Mentor, 1996). And, finally, a recent work that sheds much light on the ecclesiastical circumstances and theological positions of the divines is Robert A. Letham’s Westminster Assembly: Reading its Theology in Historical Context (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 2009); with respect to the justification controversy, and the affirmation of the IAOC, see pp. 250–264. Letham tends to see the debate over the IAOC at the Westminster Assembly as inconclusive, retaining an ambiguity inasmuch as the Assembly refrained from positively affirming the IAOC. 3 Alex. F. Mitchell and John Struthers, Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1874), lxv–lxvii. The reference to avoidance of further controversy occurs because Mitchell and Struthers recognize that though early in the Westminster Assembly (Sept. 1643), there was controversy over the IAOC, there latter appeared to be, at the time of the adoption of WCF 11 (in 1645/6), no further significant debate over the IAOC, considerations of which are developed below. 4 James Ussher did not argue for the affirmation of the IAOC in the debates at Westminster because, as a devoted Episcopalian, he opposed the meeting of the Assembly (Barker, 44–47) and Daniel Featley, though a good source for the 1643 debate on IAOC, and a staunch defender of it, was also an Episcopalian, who was arrested just after the justification debates and died in 1645, before the adoption of the Westminster Confession of Faith (Barker, 47–50). It is remarkable given the strong animus against Episcopalians how much doctrinal influence Ussher and Featley had. This shows that the Divines could strongly disagree on matters ecclesiastical (as with the Erastians and Independents) but be doctrinally united and give a strong affirmation of the IAOC in the whole of the Standards even after the death of IAOC champion Featley. 5 Alex. F Mitchell, The Westminster Assembly: Its History and Standards (London, 1883; rpt. Edmonton: Still Water Revival Books, 1992), 149–56.

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on the question of whether Christ’s “whole” obedience was imputed to the believer – as a part of the debate on Article 11 of the divines’ revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1643 – “far the major part” of the Assembly voted in favor of affirming the IAOC. Why, then, in 1645/6, when debating and adopting WCF 11, did the divines not adopt explicitly adopt the language of whole obedience?6 Mitchell speculates as follows: “Probably it was on this account that when the Assembly came to treat of the subject of Justification in their Confession of Faith they left out the word whole to which Gataker and his friends had most persistently objected, so that the clause, which in their revised version of Article XI [of the Thirty-Nine Articles] had stood in the form ‘his whole obedience and satisfaction being by God imputed to us’ was in the confession changed into ‘imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ,’ which though it hardly seem to us to include, still less to favour their view, they were content to accept as less rigid than the other.” Mitchell concludes that this was a concession on the part of the Assembly that led to “Gataker and his friends” agreeing to “drop further controversy on the question.”7 Not only have earlier historians of and commentators on the work of the Assembly argued for some sort of allowance by the Assembly for a denial of IAOC, but more recent historians have also argued for such. William Barker, in his helpful work on the lives of the Westminster Divines, has denominated the debate over the IAOC at the Assembly as one of the areas in which the Assembly differed among itself and permitted the difference to remain and not be resolved in favor of a single position. It is Barker’s view, specifically, that the Assembly, as with other questions (like the millennial question and that of the order of the decrees), did not prescribe the IAOC and proscribe every other view. Barker argued that, over against Featley (who championed the IAOC), William Twisse, Thomas Gataker, and Richard Vines (all of whom Barker contends opposed the IAOC) “succeeded in getting the term ‘whole obedience’ removed from the phrase ‘imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them’ in Chapter XI of the Westminster Confession.” Barker concluded that Westminster, when it came to the IAOC, as in some other controversies, “sought to be clear and faithful to Scriptural language, yet to allow for shades of difference within a generic Calvinism.”8 There is no evidence, however, as we shall see below, that there was any debate whatsoever about having the phrase “whole” added in —————

6 The reason that the date of the debate/adoption of Chapter 11 of the WCF will be consistently given throughout this essay as 1645/6 is that, though debate on this chapter took place in 1645, it was not until July 1646 that this chapter was adopted. 7 Mitchell, 155–56. 8 Barker, 176. Even in acknowledging that the Divines sought to accommodate those who scrupled at the IAOC by allowing the omission of “whole” as a modifier of obedience, Barker notes that the language of the Confession was nonetheless such that the “imputation of Christ’s active obedience was thus included,” being made explicit in the Savoy Declaration.

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1645/6 when the Assembly debated Chapter 11 of the WCF. That debate was entirely restricted to the debate held in September 1643 when the Divines were debating revising Article 11 of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Further note should be made here that some British churchmen had earlier tended to shy away from making the IAOC a confessional requirement; or, at least James I (1603–1625) had done so in 1612. James wrote to the Synod of the French Protestant Church meeting in Privas in that year, urging that assembly to let the question of the IAOC (and some other related ones) “be altogether buried and left in the grave with the napkin and linen clothes wherein the body of Christ was wrapped […] lest peradventure by too much wrangling they seem to cut in two the living child which the tender-hearted mother would not endure, or divide the seamless coat of Christ which the cruel soldier would not suffer.”9 James argued as he did, alleging that the “question was altogether new, and not necessary to be determined, unheard of in former ages, not decided by any council, nor handled in the fathers, nor disputed by the schoolmen.”10 A union of all Protestants, and possibly even reunion of Protestants with Rome, was a great interest of James I and no doubt a part of the reason that he wanted to minimize differences among the Reformed and make the Reformed tent as large as possible.11 Though James I did not want to make the IAOC a test of orthodoxy, the French Protestants showed no such reluctance, ignoring James’s counsel. When Johannes Piscator (1546–1625) taught that the active obedience of Christ was that which Jesus owed to God and was not something imputed to the believer in justification, such a view was declared deficient by the French reformed synods of Privas (1612) and Tonneins (1614).12 The Synod of Privas affirmed the IAOC in these words: “Our Lord Jesus Christ was obedient to the Moral and Ceremonial Law, not only for our good, but also in our stead, and his whole Obedience yielded by him thereunto is imputed to us, and our Justification consists not only in the forgiveness of sins, but also in the Imputation of his Active Righteousness.”13 It appears that, since ————— 9

Quoted in Mitchell, Westminster Assembly: Its History and Standards, 155 Ibid. Mitchell argues here and on p. 156 that “Probably it was on this account that when the Assembly came to treat of the subject of Justification in their Confession of Faith they left out the word whole to which Gataker and his friends had most persistently objected.” Mitchell also notes, interestingly, that the great IAOC advocate Featley had himself cited this letter of King James (155), indicating to this writer that Featley did not find James’s reasoning compelling. 11 Significant work has been done on the ecumenism of James I by W. Brown Patterson, beginning with his important article, “James I and the Huguenot Synod of Tonneins of 1614,” Harvard Theological Review 65 (1972), 241–270. 12 J. Wesley White, “The Denial of the Imputation of the Active Obedience of Christ: Piscator on Justification,” The Confessional Presbyterian, 3 (2007), 147. 13 John Quick, ed., Synodicon in Gallia Reformata: Or the Acts […] of Those Famous National Councils of the Reformed Churches in France, v.1 (London: T. Parkhurst and J. Robinson, 1692), 348. 10

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the Synod of Dort (1618–19) did not directly address the issue of the IAOC, the Westminster Assembly was the next time the subject was taken up by an ecclesiastical assembly following the aforementioned French synods, and, like those bodies, the Westminster Assembly did not refuse to address the question of the IAOC.

2.3 Recent Evidence The affirmation of the IAOC at the Assembly in 1643 has only recently come to fuller light in the work of Chad Van Dixhoorn. While Mitchell and others knew of this debate, we did not have all the minutes (or Lightfoot’s Journal) from that debate and do now, thanks to the seminal work done by Dr. Van Dixhoorn as part of his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University.14 It is this work to which historians now must look for the fuller picture of the great justification debate that took place at the Assembly in 1643. What we see in these materials, to which even a contemporary historian like Barker did not have access, is that when the Westminster Assembly fully debated the matter of the IAOC, it did so in a way that clearly affirmed the IAOC. Jeffrey Jue has recently done a good job recounting this history, based on the more recent work of Van Dixhoorn, and has concluded that, on the whole, the Assembly affirmed the IAOC.15 Jue’s work should be consulted, along with Van Dixhoorn’s, for the fuller argument of this. A few points, however, that fill in, and complement, the work of Jue and Van Dixhoorn may helpfully be made here. When the Westminster Assembly came into session on 1 July 1643, it did not begin drafting a confession of faith (or a form or government or directory for worship, for that matter). Rather, in its initial attempts to reform the English Church further (the Scottish would come later), the Parliament tasked the Assembly with revising the already existing articles of faith that the English Church had employed since the time of their drafting in the reign of Edward VI (1547–1553) and their restoration in Elizabeth’s ————— 14

Chad Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Cambridge, 2004. This is a seven volume work, with the first volume containing Van Dixhoorn’s thesis proper, and volumes 2–7 consisting of appendices containing, inter alia, Lightfoot’s Journal and the Minutes of the Westminster Assembly from 4 September 1643 to 25 March 1652. This is now the most complete printed representation of these records that we have and have been extensively consulted in the preparation of this essay by this writer. 15 Jue, 121–128, see esp. 126 where Jue addresses the fact that the word “whole” does not appear as a modifier to “obedience” in the final version of what the WA adopted: Jue concludes, as does this essay, that though the historical record throws no clear light on the precise reason for “whole” not being finally employed to modify obedience, the overall “two-Adam Christology” of the Westminster Standards clearly militates against the denial of the IAOC.

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reign (1558–1603): the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church. The Divines began working methodically through the Thirty-Nine Articles shortly after coming into session in July 1643 and reached the article on justification, Article 11, in September 1643.16

2.4 Article 11 of the Thirty-Nine Articles In the Thirty-Nine Articles only Article 11 treats justification. This is significant because there are so many aspects that the Reformation addressed with regards to the doctrine of justification: the nature and necessity of justification (both of the godly and the ungodly), the grounds of justification, the nature of justifying faith, double (and triple) imputation, etc. Article 11, as the only place addressing justification in the Thirty-Nine Articles, had to bear the entire weight of all the major aspects of the doctrine of justification. It was thus in the interest of the Assembly, insofar as its original task doctrinally was restricted to revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles, to be as precise (and concise) as possible in the revision of Article 11 so as to give maximal Reformed expression to the doctrine of justification in the comparatively minimal space of one article. The WCF, on the other hand, enjoyed considerably greater space to develop the doctrine of justification, able to have a whole chapter (with five subsections) devoted to it as well as in other WCF chapters and spread over a number of Shorter and Larger Catechism questions.17 This original restriction of having to express everything about justification in Article 11 meant that the Assembly was pressed to attempt to say all that it wanted to about justification in a relatively brief space and that every word must tell and precision was at a premium. The original Article 11, as earlier adopted by the Anglican Church and before any amendment by the Assembly in 1643, was as follows: “We are ————— 16

In addition to the background materials on the 1643 revisions to the Thirty-Nine Articles furnished by Mitchell and Struthers in their edition of The Minutes of the Westminster Assembly, (see lxv ff. for Article 11 on justification), see R. M. Norris, “The Thirty-Nine Articles at the Westminster Assembly,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of St. Andrews, 1977, lv–lviii. Van Dixhoorn gives extensive treatment to this in his dissertation, v. 1, 270 ff. 17 Jue points out, pp. 126–28, that an affirmation of IAOC is integral to other places in the Westminster Standards, like WCF 7 (on covenant) and 8 (on Christ the mediator), as well as LC 70, 92–93, in addition to WCF 11, which is directly on justification. WCF 8:5 speaks of the “perfect obedience and sacrifice of himself,” and LC 70 affirms the “perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ.” The conjunction “and” in both cases suggests that this “perfect obedience” is in addition to the “sacrifice” and “full satisfaction” of Christ and that both are, as LC 70 affirms, “by God imputed to them.” This is an affirmation that not only the death of Christ (the sacrifice that fully satisfies Adam’s and the elect’s violations of the law) is substitutionary, but also that the life of Christ is substitutionary (pro nobis), because both the perfect obedience and the full satisfaction of Christ are imputed to us for our justification. If this is not an affirmation of the IAOC, the import of the words is obscure to this writer.

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accompted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wherefore that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort; as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.” After other amendments had been made to this article, the proposed revision that occasioned all the debate about the addition of the word “whole” to modify obedience was as follows: “We are justified, that is, we are accounted righteous before God, and have remission of sins, not for nor by our own works or deservings, but freely by his grace, only for our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s sake, his whole obedience and satisfaction being by God imputed unto us, and Christ with his righteousness, being apprehended and rested on by faith only, is an wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort: notwithstanding God doth not forgive them that are impenitent, and go on still in their trespasses.”18 As noted, there were other revisions made to Article 11 than the addition of the word “whole” as a modifier to obedience. However, it is agreed by all students of this debate that nothing occasioned greater debate than this modification; all also agree that the addition of the word “whole” was a short-handed way of affirming the IAOC.19 There may have been, arguably, better ways of affirming the IAOC than this particular wording. “Some divines, even some advocates of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ, felt the language of whole obedience was itself ambiguous.” IAOC champion Daniel “Featley initially urged that the Assembly use the language of the imputation of the ‘perfect satisfaction and righteousnesse of Christ.’”20 It is perhaps worth noting at this point, particularly in support of Jue’s contentions, that language outside of the specific chapter on justification that would later be adopted at the Assembly (WCF 11), the wording of WCF 8:5 and 11:1–3, for instance, is in these very terms, 11:3 speaking even more fully about a “proper, real, and full satisfaction to his Father’s justice in their behalf” and distinguishing between Christ’s “obedience and satisfaction,” with the word “both” signifying that such obedience and satisfaction are “accepted in their stead,” (implying that Christ is our substitute in death and life so that both the active and passive obedience is imputed to us). It is hard to see how this is any less than Featley, as one of the —————

18 Both the original and revised texts are given in van Dixhoorn’s “Reforming the Reformation,” v. 1, 270 and 320, respectively. 19 Van Dixhoorn, v. 1, 271, Lightfoot regarded this 1643 justification debate as “our great question,” engendering a “hot debate.” See Lightfoot, MS Journal, fos. 32 v. 30v, 35r, 35v, 26r. Richard Baxter, now widely regarded as a neonomian, was quite interested in the Assembly’s debate and had correspondence with several members about his own doctrine of justification which, like this debate, came to be seen as a “hot peppercorn,” for a discussion of which see the fine study by H. Boersma, A Hot Pepper Corn: Richard Baxter’s Doctrine of Justification […] (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1993). 20 Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” v. 1, 328.

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stalwart defenders of active obedience, would have wanted.21 This observation supports the contention that even the WCF in its final form, both in Chapter 11 and elsewhere, affirmed the IAOC, regardless of whether the word “whole” modified the word obedience at any place in the Westminster Standards.

2.5 The Problem of Antinomianism In considering the debate over the word “whole” at the Assembly and the affirmation of the IAOC, it is important to note that the main theological error among Protestants, at least as far as the Assembly was concerned, and which it determined to oppose, was antinomianism.22 To be sure, Romanism concerned the divines, especially in regards to the doctrine of justification, and the Assembly sought carefully to refute Rome’s errors, particularly in this regard, at every point. The same is true of Arminianism, although there is some dispute as to whether the Assembly took a clear position on Amyraldianism.23 A number of factors point to the chief doctrinal concern being antinomianism, perhaps because it was an error closer to the Assembly’s view that salvation was entirely by grace and grace alone. In view of earlier confessions having condemned Roman and Arminian error, the Westminster Assembly wanted to make it clear that the gracious character of the salvation that it confessed was in no way at odds with the requirement that Christians pursue holiness and live a godly life. Thus the Westminster Assembly condemned the foundational antinomian error of eternal justification, out of which various antinomians of the time developed doctrines teaching not only that Christians are not bound by the third use of the law but also ideas such as that God sees no sin in his children and that Christians need not pray “forgive us our sins.”24 The an————— 21

Much of this paragraph derives from fn. 289 of the OPC Justification Report, 144, to which this writer was a primary contributor. 22 Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” v. 1, 276 ff. A number of more recent works have highlighted the “threat” of antinomianism in Britain at the time of the WA. See, e.g., David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in pre-Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 64 ff, and recent articles by David Parnham in Church History (75:3; September 2006), “The Covenantal Quietism of Tobias Crisp,” 511–543, and in The Westminster Theological Journal (70; 2008), 73–104: “Motions of Law and Grace: The Puritan in the Antinomian.” 23 Mitchell and Struthers, Minutes, 152 would indicate that the divine Edmund Calamy was an Amyraldian. Warfield and others would also note Richard Vines, Lazarus Seaman, and Stephen Marshall among that number, although Warfield argued that the expressions made in WCF 3:6, 8:5; and 8:8 would militate against any hypothetical universalist position, see Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and its Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), 56. 24 Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 307: “Francis Taylor openly sided […] with Gataker, Vines, and Woodcock […] by raising the antinomian issue. As Taylor saw it, if ‘Christ

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tinomians of this period tended to collapse everything either into the eternal decrees or the work of Christ (we could say pactum salutis and historia salutis), giving short shrift to the necessity for the Christian to walk in and strive for holiness (tending to see the Christian as passive in all the parts of the ordo salutis). The Assembly was deeply troubled by this corruption of the gospel and, in fact, at the time of the great debate on justification (Fall 1643), also had a committee of some of its members consulting with parliament as to how certain antinomian publications should be handled and antinomianism suppressed.25 Given, then, that antinomianism posed the kind of threat that it did, at least as far as many of the Westminster Divines perceived it, it is little wonder that the Assembly took great care to give that error no quarter. In fact, the determination to yield no ground to the antinomian or to do nothing to give aid and comfort to antinomianism played no little part in the debate over the affirmation of the IAOC. In the course of the 1643 debate, it became plain that, among the few divines who opposed the affirmation of the IAOC, all of them opposed antinomianism and many of them took the position that they did in opposition to the IAOC because of their opposition to antinomianism. The divines were quite aware that certain antinomians were only too glad to hear and would likely misconstrue any affirmation of the IAOC. This makes all the more noteworthy, then, the Assembly’s affirmation of the IAOC: though the Assembly knew that antinomians might misuse the affirmation of the IAOC, because the Assembly believed such to be at the heart of the gospel, they affirmed it anyway as a testimony to the free gospel of Christ.26

2.6 Vines, Gataker, and Twisse The debate on Article 11 (on justification) involved not only the debate over the addition of the word “whole” as a modifier of obedience but also a number of amendments before and after the debate on “whole,” including ————— hath performed the law for me, then it will follow I am not bound to keepe this lawe myself.’” Then, van Dixhoorn makes a most telling observation: “Fear of catering to antinomianism was far more real to most divines than the likelihood that they would stumble into one of the heretical pitfalls” associated with antinomianism. Even in view of such, that the divines gave as vigorous an affirmation of the free grace of God manifested in justification is significant. 25 Carruthers, 125 ff.; Paul, 176–182. See the Humble Petition of the Assembly to Parliament concerning antinomianism, Van Dixhoorn, v. 2, Lightfoot’s Journal, 26–28. 26 Lightfoot had great disdain for the antinomians and made it clear (Van Dixhoorn, v.2., Journal, 31, passim) that the Assembly’s contempt for such played no little role in the debate, even prompting a few to oppose the IAOC on the grounds that such opposition would militate against antinomianism. Lightfoot, though a strong opponent of antinomianism, was a strong proponent of the affirmation of the IAOC.

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debate over what to title the article.27 All observers agree, however, that the real debate was over the addition of “whole,” and thus over the question of the IAOC. Richard Vines, opponent of the affirmation of the IAOC, spoke first in the debate and argued that since justification means “the remission of sins,” he assigns such strictly “to the passive obedience of Christ.” He argued that the passive sufferings of Christ are the proper matter imputed.28 Typically throughout this debate, the few opponents of IAOC would argue along these lines, observing also that Christ’s active obedience was that which he was due to yield as a part of his humanity in the Incarnation and that such was necessary to fit Him to be our sin-bearer in the passive obedience of His death on the cross. Thus begins the debate, with rejoinders to Vines coming from Hoyle and Walker, who raise issues about whether Christ as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity was bound to keep the law for Himself (as opposed to keeping it for us), claiming also that references to Christ’s obedience are synecdochal and that one cannot separate Christ’s active and passive obedience.29 Not only does Vines respond, but Thomas Gataker as well. Gataker becomes the chief opponent of the affirmation of the IAOC in the debate at the Westminster Assembly. He argues somewhat differently from Vines, however, contending that justification itself is merely legal and does not have in view the remission of sins. Since Gataker tends to separate the remission of sins from the legal declaration and see justification as applying only to the latter, he would also tend to refer the grounds of justification to the work of Christ, separating that from the definition of justification, narrowly construed.30 William Twisse, the prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, who is often said to have opposed the affirmation of the IAOC31 (though there is ————— 27

Van Dixhoorn, v. 3, Minutes, 12. Van Dixhoorn, v. 3, Minutes, 25. 29 Ibid. 30 Van Dixhoorn, v. 2, Lightfoot’s Journal, 48ff. for the shape of the great justification debate. 31 Barker, 176, claims that Twisse joined Gataker and Vines in opposing the IAOC. This contention is not substantiated, however. Twisse, as a supralapsarian, was particularly concerned with any teaching that savored of synergism (Roman Catholicsm, Arminianism, etc. see Barker, 29). A number of Twisse’s writings bear out his supralapsarian convictions, particularly his work on John Cotton’s Treatise Concerning Predestination (London: J. D. for Andrew Crook, 1646) and The Riches of Gods Love unto the Vessells of Mercy, Consistent with His Absolute Hatred or Reprobation of the Vessells of Wrath […] (post., Oxford: Printers to the University, 1653), this last work containing a particularly vigorous defense of the supralapsarian order in the decrees. If Twisse for some reason did oppose the IAOC in justification, it was not because he believed salvation to be anything than utterly monergistic. If Twisse was extreme in any direction, he was a hyperCalvininst, not a neo-nomian like Richard Baxter (Barker, 288–94) and so Twisse’s alleged opposition to IAOC would not threaten the utter graciousness of justification as would the opposition of neo-nomians to IAOC. For more on Twisse, see also Benjamin Brooks, The Lives of the Puritans, v. 3 (1813; rpt. Pittsburgh: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1994), 12–17. 28

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never any clear opposition expressed in the minutes) came at the question of justification from yet another perspective. Twisse believed in eternal justification, as did the antinomians, though there is no evidence that he shared in the errors that the antinomians drew from their affirmation of eternal justification. Twisse, in fact, warned the Assembly about too strenuously opposing the antinomians.32 One thing is clear: if Twisse opposed the IAOC, which remains unclear and contested, he did not do so on the grounds that it would lend aid and comfort to the antinomians, given that he himself was concerned about Assembly over-reaction to antinomianism. It may be that he referred the doctrine of the IAOC to sanctification and not justification. At any rate, Twisse would be no friend of anyone wanting to introduce any element of human merit or works (as a part of our faithfulness) into the equation of our justification. It ought to be remembered that a good deal of debate does not necessarily mean that there is a good deal of disagreement among the debaters. Heated debate, as was the 1643 debate over the addition of the word “whole,” often indicates that there are some parties participating in the debate who feel very strongly about the issue at hand, not that the body debating is highly divided.33 In the great justification debate of 1643, Gataker spoke twenty-five times and Vines twenty-three times: these two were among the top four speakers in the debate.34 Those who opposed the affirmation of the IAOC spoke a lot during the debate, in other words, yet when it came to the vote, of about fifty men voting, only three or four voted against affirming the IAOC.35 This means that the vote in favor of affirming the IAOC was in excess of ninety percent, even if there were four voting against it. Only those inexperienced in church deliberative bodies would wonder how such a vigorous debate might yield such a lopsided vote. Those more familiar with the ways of such bodies know that such is not uncommon. Novitiates may express surprise that vigorous debates can lead to one-sided conclusions, not realizing that most people do not speak in a debate and that the most fervent speeches are often given by a small minority strongly opposed to the motion under consideration and committed to the employ————— 32

Van Dixhoorn, v. 3, Minutes, 19. See Van Dixhoon, v. 3, Minutes, 32 in which something of the debate psychology of the Westminster Assembly can be gathered from the remarks of an IAOC defender (Walker) who makes the point to those vigorously debating against the IAOC: [We, advocates of the IAOC] desire [that] they [opponents of the IAOC] would not think we yield the cause because [we do] not answer things answered before.” In other words, because the few opponents of IAOC were vigorously combating it and making many speeches against it does not mean that the “silent majority” did not remain strongly supportive of IAOC, nor does it mean that the speeches against IAOC were ultimately persuasive, evidenced by the final vote. 34 Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 332. 35 Van Dixhoorn, v. 3, WA Minutes, 77 33

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ment of every reasonable debate tactic to secure its defeat. Gataker, Vines, and a few others ultimately exhausted their say and were unconvincing to their fellows. When the vote came in Session 52 at the close of the Tuesday morning session on 12 September 1643, only three or four are said to have dissented and even at that none had their negative votes recorded save Gataker, initially at least, and he for some reason thereafter apparently changed his mind and asked that his negative vote be stricken.36 This 1643 debate over the addition of the word “whole” to modify obedience is the only record that we have of such a debate over the IAOC.37 The other citations in the Assembly Minutes, which includes every reference at the Westminster Assembly to the doctrine of justification, read as follows: “2 Dec. 1645; 23 July 1646; and 4 Feb. 1647 (Minutes 3:113r, 281v or 166v, 303v or 195v). For the debates on the text of the chapters, see 3, 8-11, 16 Dec 1645; for the scriptures see, 10, 11 Feb. 1647 (Minutes 3:113r–115r, 123v–124r).”38 There is no record for any of these dates, when checked in the Minutes concerning the Confession of Faith and catechisms, of any debate on justification, not to mention active obedience, comparable to that held in September 1643 when the Assembly voted to affirm active obedience by retaining the language of “whole obedience.” Insofar as it is alleged that the dissent of certain figures in this debate points to a lack of agreement on the IAOC, it is the case that no one in this debate availed himself of the mechanism of dissent available to all members of the Westminster Assembly. The Parliament had established a protocol for the Assembly whereby members might express dissent.39 Lest it be thought that such a mechanism was never employed, in the same general timeframe as the 1643 justification debate, Cornelius Burgess objected to a particular action of the Divines and invoked the established avenues of dissent.40 Gataker did nothing of the sort when it came to the vote of the ————— 36

Ibid. It is noted in Van Dixhoorn’s note 7 here (on 77), “‘dissenting. Mr. Gataker,’ ‘Mr. Gataker’ erased.” 37 What follows in this paragraph comes from footnote 287 of the OPC Justification Report, 143. 38 Van Dixhoorn’s “Reforming the Reformation,” 324, notes 234–235. 39 Van Dixhoorn, v. 2, Lightfoot’s Journal , 3–4: On 6 July 1643, both houses of Parliament sent to the Assembly a set of eight “general rules” of procedure, the 7th and 8th being particularly relevant for our purposes. Rule 7 sets forth that “no man [is] to be denied to enter his dissent from the Assembly, and his reasons for it at any point,” and if subsequent debate in the Assembly does not yield satisfaction, the dissenting party may have it sent to Parliament not as the concern of a particular man but as a point not capable of clear resolution by the Westminster Assembly. Rule 8 makes further provisions for dissent. The important point to be made here is that recourse to such rules was never taken by Gataker or others who may have opposed the Westminster Assembly’s affirmation of the IAOC in 1643. 40 Van Dixhoorn, v. 2, Lightfoot’s Journal, 40 ff. Here Lightfoot begins to report on what he regards as great contentiousness on the part of Burgess in opposing certain features of the Solemn

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overwhelming majority affirming the IAOC. While, as noted above, Gataker seems to have originally asked to have his dissenting vote recorded, he had his name as a dissenter stricken from the record. Even this mildest of dissents, recording one’s negative vote, was abandoned by Gataker and none of the stronger forms of dissent available were ever engaged. That Gataker did nothing further indicates that, at the point in which it was clear that the IAOC had been affirmed, even the most vigorous dissenters, and Gataker was undoubtedly that, seemed willing to live with it. It is regularly asserted that the Westminster Standards involve compromise, making it possible for all parties to live comfortably with the finished product.41 On certain issues, such compromise is clear, particularly in cases in which the Assembly chose to prescribe less than what a majority of its members might otherwise affirm on an issue.42 On the issue of justification, however, when the Westminster Assembly debated the question of the IAOC, it clearly affirmed it, even in the face of strong, albeit few, dissenters. Though the Assembly afterwards did not choose this precise language, it is not to be assumed that it changed its mind on the issue or that it sought to provide a berth wide enough to make all its members comfortable, both the many who did affirm the IAOC and the few who did not. In regards to the contention that the Westminster Assembly, though clearly affirming the IAOC in 1643, backed off from it in 1645/6 as a necessary compromise to accommodate Gataker and others, it should be noted that the nature of the Assembly, as a consultative body, never required such compromise since all its members were never asked to subscribe all the revisions to the ThirtyNine Articles, or, later, all the chapters of the WCF, as if the Assembly was a church court with power to compel compliance, and failing such, to excommunicate. No vote taken at the Assembly on any particular issue, meant that all were in agreement with what had been adopted as if they were all subscribing it. Here’s the point: the IAOC was affirmed in the revision of Article 11 in 1643 and there is no reason to suppose that it was not also affirmed in WCF 11 and in the other relevant chapters of the WCF, even ————— League and Covenant concluded with the Scots. Burgess invoked the rules of dissent set forth in the immediately preceding footnote. 41 Sinclair B. Ferguson, “Westminster Assembly,” in The Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993), 863–64: “In some matters, we find indications that the Divines were concerned to express a generic Reformed theology in such a way that a certain latitude of interpretation would be possible.” 42 J.V. Fesko, The Westminster Confession and Lapsarianism: Calvin and the Divines,” in The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, v. 2 (Scotland: Mentor, 2004), 477–525. Fesko treats here an area about which the divines exercised genuine theological latitude: the Assembly dealt with the lapsarian question so as to affirm infralapsarianism without decidedly ruling out supralapsarianism. Warfield puts it a bit differently: “the Supralapsarians […] and the Infralapsarians […] set down in the Confession only what was a common ground to both, leaving the whole region which was in dispute between them entirely untouched,” in The Westminster Assembly and its Work, 56.

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though the specific wording of revised Article 11 never again appears. It is my contention that it did not need to appear in that form because the wording of WCF 11.3 and 8.5, especially, did everything that the revision of article 11 by the addition of the word “whole” was intended to do, and, arguably, more. It seems assumed that something like theological exhaustion set in between the first debate on justification (1643) and the treatment given justification in the WCF (1645/6). This supposed exhaustion meant that when it came time to adopt the confessional statement about justification in 1645/6, the Divines had little heart further to engage in the kind of intense theological debate that they had in 1643. Perhaps, it seems to be supposed, to avoid the kind of intense fight that the Westminster Assembly underwent in 1643, and particularly to accommodate opponents to the IAOC, like Gataker and Vines, the Assembly decided to forego the issue and not make an issue of “whole obedience.” Two considerations, however, need to be taken into account before entertaining this apparently appealing notion of theological exhaustion. First of all, as noted above, in 1643 the entire freight of the argument for the IAOC rested on the one word “whole.” But in 1645/6, as also noted, the Westminster Assembly no longer had simply one article with which to work in terms of justification and the IAOC, but rather a whole chapter and more. Second, the role of those who objected to the IAOC in 1643, though never rising to the level of formal dissent in the immediate aftermath of the affirmation of the IAOC, is somewhat unclear in the years that followed. Scholars seem to assume, in other words, that Gataker, Vines, Twisse, and perhaps others must have agitated for the removal of the word “whole”— i.e., for the effective repeal of the 1643 affirmation of the IAOC—and must, in some measure, have been successful since the IAOC is not clearly delineated in the subsequent Confession or Catechisms. What role did Gataker, Vines and Twisse, play after the 1643 debate? The record simply does not say but there are some clues that Twisse and Gataker, specifically, may have played a very small role. As noted above, whatever Twisse’s role was in the justification debate, Twisse, having been ill and missed many sessions, died between Session 676 (July 17, 1646) and 677 (July 22, 1646). It was in Session 678, on July 23, 1646, that “report was made by Mr. Arrowsmith ‘of Justification and Adoption.’ The Report was debated, and upon debate agreed to; and it is as followeth [in our current WCF, Chapters 11–12].”43 Thus Twisse was not present at the adoption of WCF 11. Furthermore, it is unclear what role Gataker played, if any, in the 1645/6 de-

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Mitchell and Struthers, Minutes, 258–59.

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bate: his health “after the first two years of the Assembly […] forced him to curtail his activities.”44 Speculation abounds as to why the Divines affirmed the IAOC in 1643 but left it ambiguous in 1645/6. It is Mitchell’s opinion that, though “far the major part [of the Westminster Assembly] voted for the affirmative, that Christ’s whole obedience was imputed to the believer,” Daniel Featley, a major advocate for affirming the whole obedience, yielded to the dissenters because the question of active obedience was new and not disputed in previous centuries; “probably,” Mitchell continues, “it was on this account [of several factors, including the newer nature of the question] that when the Assembly came to the treat of the subject of Justification in their Confession of Faith [in Chapter 11] they left out the word whole to which Gataker and his friends had most persistently objected […]” so that the dissenters were content to accept Chapter 11 as less rigid than the earlier revised Article 11. Mitchell cites Simon Ashe’s funeral sermon for Gataker as maintaining that “Gataker and his friends agreed to drop further controversy, the matter having been conceded.”45 Van Dixhoorn tends also to read all the evidence, on balance, as indicating that the Assembly ultimately adopted a consensual position (that would accommodate those scrupling at affirming the IAOC),46 though he cites possibly counter-indicatory evidence as well, such as how Ashe’s funeral sermon for Gataker is to be interpreted: “Other comment on the conclusion of the debate is provided by Simeon Ashe, where he cites Ga————— 44

Barker, Puritan Profiles, 159. Mitchell, Westminster Assembly: Its History and Standards, 155–56. 46 “Reforming the Reformation,” 324–330. See especially 326: Van Dixhoorn does note that the Assembly, in drafting its 1646 catechism that was eventually abandoned in favor of the larger and shorter catechisms, may have considered adding there something explicit about the IAOC. Because the Westminster Assembly did not then or thereafter in either the WCF or the catechisms explicitly affirm the IAOC (as Savoy clearly did in 1658), Van Dixhoorn concludes that the Assembly’s decision “not to use the language of the active obedience of Christ” was “deliberate,” and thus it “appears that the Assembly chose not to make its statement as clear as possible.” He further says, on 328, that it is possible in the two to three years between the two main debates over justification, “a critical number of divines may have changed their minds over the necessity of the doctrine in a national confession.” Two observations: there was no real debate to speak of in 1645/6 in re: the IAOC, and there is counter-evidence that in other places and in other words the divines manifested that they still affirmed the IAOC. This writer thinks it more likely that, to make for as much peace as possible (and adopting a wise debate strategy), the divines chose not to reintroduce the word “whole” as it was not needed, being rendered unnecessary by other words that did the same, if not a better, job and enjoying more space to express affirmation of the IAOC. This writer appreciates Van Dixhoorn’s pacific approach here, but points out that Van Dixhoorn himself admits that there is no clear evidence that the divines changed their minds over the necessity of the doctrine in a national confession. The only supposed evidence is that “whole” no longer modifies “obedience” at any point. This essay attempts to provide an answer for such an “omission,” noting that the greater space given to issues relating to the IAOC in the Confession and catechisms more than makes up for any alleged lack because of the absence of the word “whole.” 45

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taker’s silence at the end of the debate as an example of his peace-loving spirit. Ashe also brings up Gataker’s “resolutions” not to publish his discourses on Romans 3:28, “that he might not publikely discover his dissent from the Votes of that Reverend Assembly.”47 The clear implication is that the Assembly codified a doctrine of justification with which Gataker could not agree. Unfortunately Ashe and Gataker do not say if he is referring to Gataker’s silent opposition to votes on the eleventh article (which would tell us nothing new) or votes on the eleventh chapter of the Confession, which would suggest that Gataker understood the Assembly’s final text, even with its increased ambiguity, to be teaching a view opposite to his own. Gataker’s own comment on the matter is also ambiguous: he states that Twisse and “one of the Independent partie” agreed with his views, but the majority of the Assembly did not. The debate in which the IAOC was hotly disputed occurred in September 1643, before the English Parliament had concluded the Solemn League and Covenant (SLC) with its northern neighbors, the Scots. The SLC, which changed the entire character of the Westminster Assembly and the documents that it would produce, was not ratified by both houses of the English Parliament until October 1643.48 But the Westminster Assembly had earlier been established by an act of the English Parliament, absent any agreement with the Scots, and had begun meeting on 1 July 1643. Thus the Assembly, as it was originally constituted and purposed, was not for the Reforming of the church in the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, as it became after the adoption of the SLC, but was for the reform of the English Church. It was while the Westminster Assembly was still working strictly for the reform of the English Church, then, that this great battle over the IAOC in justification occurred, not as a part of ratifying the Westminster Standards, but as a part of that original task of the Assembly, revising the Thirty-Nine Articles.

2.7 The Wider Context of the Westminster Assembly Given that the original task of the Westminster Assembly was not to propose a new confession of faith but to revise the already existing articles of religion (the 39 Articles), along with suggesting revisions for the government, discipline, and worship of the church, it might prove helpful to reflect

————— 47

Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 329. See, for much of this history, W.D.J. McKay, “Scotland and the Westminster Assembly,” in The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, v. 1 (Scotland: Mentor, 2003), 213–45. 48

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on the circumstances surrounding Parliament’s calling of the Assembly.49 The majority in Parliament, the House of Commons more specifically, after the calling of the Long Parliament of 1640, was clearly Puritan in its sympathies. As such the Commons tended to oppose both the high-church innovations referred to as Laudianism, more particularly, and episcopacy, more broadly, many in the Commons preferring some form of established Presbyterianism or congregationalism. The Assembly was largely of this mind as well. Where the Assembly diverged from Parliament, however, was on the question of the relationship between the church and the state. While there were a few Erastians in the Assembly, who tended to view the church as under the state and its creature, the Assembly generally, certainly urged on by the Scots after they came, opposed Erastianism.50 While many in the Assembly would be quick to counsel, and eloquent in doing so, that the church should be able to maintain a province distinct from, and in no way inferior to, that of the state, few in the Commons would agree, as they wanted to retain Erastian control over the church. Thus while Laudianism tended to be opposed by all in Parliament and in the Westminster Assembly, the same could not be said for Erastianism, with some few in the Assembly supporting it while many in Parliament did. While all students of this history know that the Parliament called the Westminster Assembly into session, the implications of Parliamentary Erastianism, particularly its effect on the relative power that the Assembly thus enjoyed, or failed to enjoy, as a result of a dominating Parliament, seems often overlooked. Too little is made, when it comes to questions of what the Westminster Assembly intended doctrinally to proscribe and to prescribe, of the reality that the Assembly was called to meet by the state and was not a court of the church (it was not a synod; it had none of the powers of a General Assembly). Provoked by certain Laudian and divine right Episcopal claims, the Parliament, in reaction against that, and in response to the “Root and Branch Petition” in late 1640, moved to abolish the episcopacy and to call into session an assembly of divines that could serve to advise Parliament as to the further reform of the church. Accordingly, Parliament established and named an Assembly that was its, “and no other[’s],”creature.51 This assembly was not a convocation, as ordinarily conceived, “or in any sense ‘a court of the church.’”52 In terms of the perennial question of church over state (as —————

49 As noted above, Carruthers and Paul are helpful for this as is Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 12–54, on the “calling and constitution of the Westminster Assembly,” all of which were consulted especially for the following paragraphs. 50 Hugh M. Cartwright, “Westminster and Establishment: A Scottish Perspective,” in The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, v. 2 (Scotland: Mentor, 2004), 181–221. 51 Carruthers, 21. 52 Ibid.

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Rome taught) or state over church (as Caesoropapism had it in the Middle Ages and Erastianism in the Reformation), England, since the time of the Reformation under Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547), had largely, at least in the monarchy and her governing bodies, embraced the state over church model. And it was this Erastian model that prevailed even at the time of the Westminster Assembly and that rendered that body purely advisory to the Parliament, impacting something of the way that it did its work and of how we should view the products of that Assembly. Perhaps a bit of historical perspective would be helpful in comparing the Westminster Assembly to other bodies that addressed matters of Christian doctrine.53 It is the case that after the conversion of Constantine (312), civil authorities fairly commonly convened ecclesiastical assemblies. But the nature of such convocations was usually for the purpose of addressing particular errors and/or condemning certain heresies, unlike Westminster which was called to address the further reformation of the church in England broadly. Constantine himself, for instance, called the Council of Nicea (325) to secure the purity, peace, and unity of the church with regards to the Arian controversy. That council ended with all those present, but two, signing off on the condemnation of Arianism (with the two dissenters also being condemned). Councils in the ancient and medieval church, whether called by civil rulers or not, typically on their own authority, together with papal approval as that became an issue, condemned various views and defined the faith in authoritative ways. The Westminster Assembly, however, was not a body that had the authority of itself to condemn views and then compel those who held such condemned views either to recant or to suffer excommunication. The Westminster Assembly, in other words, did not have the power that General Assemblies, or even lower judicatories of the church, have. As far as Reformed synods were concerned, following the ecumenical councils of the earlier church, Dort (1618-1619) was the Reformed body back to which the Westminster Assembly looked in the execution of its work. Dort was an assembly called by the state to deal with the crisis in the Reformed churches precipitated by the Remonstrants, followers of Arminius, who challenged Reformed orthodoxy at that point. Dort condemned Arminianism, dismissing the Remonstrants from its meetings and giving the state warrant to deal with the Arminians as those whom the church acting in solemn synodical council had determined to censure. Westminster had no such power of church censure, much less to order the state to treat those whose teachings it might have proscribed in a certain way. —————

53 Helpful here, broadly, and from which some of this generally derives, is the article by this writer, “Church and State in Historical Perspective,” in Ordained Servant 16 (2007), 93–100.

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At Westminster, no one was on trial nor could that body, acting solely on its own authority, enact church discipline. While the civil magistrate in Scotland did promulgate the various documents produced by the Westminster Assembly, such never happened in England, due especially to the triumph of Oliver Cromwell, including the execution of Charles I, which led to the defeat of all those who opposed Cromwell and the regicide (most of the Presbyterians in England and Scotland, with many Presbyterian parliamentarians removed by Pride’s Purge). All the advice given by the Westminster Assembly to the Parliament, in other words, was never officially taken (though it was so received among the Scots). To assume that if the Westminster Assembly decided something in a certain way this must have meant that it was a compromise position in the case in which it is known that the Divines held different positions on the given issue is not necessarily the case. The Assembly might choose to affirm less than what a majority of its members believed in order to accommodate a minority; on the other hand, the mere presence of a minority position at the Assembly does not mean that whatever was finally adopted was a clear accommodation to that minority. A minority of brethren favored independency but this does not mean that the Westminster Assembly accommodated that position. Because the Assembly chose not to prescribe certain positions does not mean that it chose to prescribe no positions. The fact is that we know that the Assembly, when it had before it a distinct vote on the question of the IAOC (in 1643), clearly affirmed it. There is no evidence of any kind whatsoever that anything that the Westminster Assembly did amounted to a repeal of that affirmation. And the absence of another debate about justification in 1645/6 does not count as evidence in favor of the Assembly backing off on the affirmation of the IAOC. In regard to the contention that WCF reflects an accommodation to those who denied the IAOC, or what is often referred to as a consensual expression in WCF 11 (comprising both the supporters and the deniers of the IAOC), Van Dixhoorn has noted that “perhaps the strongest evidence of favour of reading the Assembly’s Confession in a consensual fashion, is the fact that when the Independents revised and then reissued the Assembly’s Confession of faith in 1658, they inserted the language of the ‘active and passive obedience’ of Christ into their version of the Confession.”54 The addition made to the Savoy Declaration in its chapter 11 is arguably stronger than what was adopted by the Westminster Assembly. That this addition represents a significant one to Westminster must not be simply assumed but needs to be demonstrated from primary sources. It is noteworthy that Philip Schaff did not regard Savoy’s addition to WCF 11 as one ————— 54

“Reforming the Reformation,” 330. For the full text of the 1658 Savoy Declaration, see Jaroslav Pelikan, ed. Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, vol. 3. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), 104–135.

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worth mentioning in the changes that Savoy made to the WCF.55 One might argue, then, that what Savoy did to modify chapter 11 in its revision of the WCF was not regarded as something clearly different from Westminster but served only to clarify the WCF on the specific point of the IAOC, making explicit what was implicit in it. Two things, in summary, seemed to be missed by those who contend that since the Westminster Assembly did not in 1645/6 affirm the IAOC the way that it did in 1643 that the Assembly intended ambiguity on the question. First, as we have sought to show above, simply because the specific language used early in the Assembly to affirm the IAOC does not appear later in the Assembly (in the final form of what we now call the Westminster Standards) does not mean that one should infer that the Assembly did not affirm (in a host of ways) the IAOC. Second, Westminster was not a court of the church and did not have the power to exclude any of her members who differed from her as do church courts (witness the debate about church government which did not lead to the exclusion of the independents). This is how a Gataker could have his position ruled out but still continue in the Assembly, which was not a body that could act on its own authority but was consultative with Parliament.

2.8 Conclusion The burden of this essay has been to argue that when the Westminster Assembly of Divines directly addressed the question of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ with respect to the doctrine of justification, the Assembly, on balance, affirmed such a doctrine. Nothing that was done subsequently in the Westminster Confession of Faith or Catechisms undermined that commitment, though such affirmation as those documents contained was implicit rather than explicit. That outside the Westminster Assembly the doctrine remained disputed is evident from several considerations. For example, Westminster divine Anthony Burgess wrote, “Among the Protestants there are some eminent and Learned men, who have also been for the Negative, viz. the Non-Imputation of Christ’s Active Obedience, as the matter of our Justification; though the number for the Negative, is nothing equal to the number for the Affirmative.”56 So before and after the Westminster Assembly, the doctrine of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ remained in dispute. The Independents who modified the Westminster Standards at Savoy in 1658 to suit their ————— 55 Philip Schaff, ed. The Creeds of Christendom, v. 3 (rpt. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 718. This paragraph derives from the OPC Justification Report, fn. 290, p. 144. 56 The True Doctrine of Justification Asserted & Vindicated […], (London, 1654), To the Reader, [p. 3].

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purposes deemed it appropriate to make explicit what this writer has affirmed was implicit in the Westminster Confession. Westminster Confession 11.1 affirmed that believers enjoy the forgiveness of sins and the declaration of being righteous “by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ to them.” The Savoy puts it, more fully, this way: “by imputing Christ’s active obedience to the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness.”57 In the English context, then, we have gone from James I urging the English delegates to Dordt not to make the affirmation of the IAOC a requirement, to the implicit acknowledgment of it at Westminster, and the explicit teaching of it in the Savoy Declaration, with Burgess acknowledging that it remains disputed (though more affirm than deny the imputation of the active obedience of Christ). What has happened to the doctrine beyond the seventeenth century is beyond the scope of this essay, though the first footnote of this essay gives some indication of the abiding legacy of debate with respect to this issue. The article from which this essay derives also seeks to address this issue with respect to its context in the modern church.58

—————

57 Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, ed., Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, v. 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 115. 58 Alan D. Strange, “The Affirmation of the Imputation of the Active Obedience of Christ at the Westminster Assembly of Divines,” The Confessional Presbyterian, 4 (2008), 194–209, 311.

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3. October 1643: The Dissenting Brethren and the Proton Dektikon1

Hunter Powell 3.1 Introduction The “Dissenting Brethren” – Thomas Goodwin, Jeremiah Burroughs, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson and William Bridge – were a small group of congregational ministers who went into exile in Holland together in the late 1630s, published a famous tract during the Westminster Assembly entitled the Apologeticall Narration, and subsequently led Oliver Cromwell’s state church in the 1650s. No group in the history of the Puritan Revolution had a more disproportionate impact on the course of events than this vocal minority. As a group they have fascinated historians for years. Yet the very fact that they crossed so many paths, and partook in so many pivotal events during the Puritan Revolution, has meant that our understanding of them has been largely tangential to, and derivative of, other story lines. Historians of the Westminster Assembly, largely guided by the belief that “presbyterianism” was England’s only hope for religious stability, have dismissed their involvement as an unwanted nuisance. As one historian believed, their behaviour in the Assembly showed an “intractableness and rigid adherence to formal principle with iron resolve and utter carelessness for the consequences marked”.2 Uncritically accepted as the leaders of “independency” in the 1640s, their polity was regarded as the logical fulfil—————

1 This is chapter is from my thesis, “The Dissenting Brethren and the Power of the Keys 164044”, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. Much of this current chapter is further explained and amplified by the rest other chapters in the thesis. I am grateful to Crawford Gribben, Joel Halcomb, Mark Jones, John Morrill, Chad Van Dixhoorn, and Elliot Vernon for reading drafts of this chapter and providing invaluable insights. προτον δεκτικόν means “first designated” taken from William Carter’s speech on 30 October 1643, “The subject of the keyes is in that place & it will hardly be proved that what is said to Peter is to be aplyed as a beleiver or rather as an apostell, pastor & beleiver; what is given to Peter as the proton decticon must comprehend all these”. C. Van Dixhoorn, 'Reforming the reformation: Theological debate in the Westminster Assembly: Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. 1643 to 17 Nov. 1643', University of Cambridge, Ph.D. thesis (2004a), 214. 2 J. R. De Witt, Jus divinum: The Westminster Assembly and the divine right of church government (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1969), 106.

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ment Jacobean separatist and semi-separatist polities. Their importance in the Revolution is seen in their ability to stop a rigid presbyterian settlement and to give hope to radically new notions of the separation of church and state that carried with it the birth of religious toleration.3 Conversely, when they rise to power under Oliver Cromwell, they are then regarded as the opportunistic architects of religious intolerance who systematically tightened the Calvinistic screws on the “extremists” they used to support. In terms of the broader storylines in the Puritan revolution, the Apologists are the tail that seems to always wag the dog.4 The axiomatic binary conflict model of “presbyterian versus independent” is a dominant leitmotif that has dictated the terms of ecclesiastical historiography in the early 1640s.5 Presbyterianism and independency has been portrayed as essentially monolithic and static categories into which historians must plug their thesis. Connectedly, the Westminster Assembly —————

3 William Haller stated, “In speaking, however moderately, against too rigid an application of presbyterian principles, [the Apologists] spoke for all who desired a certain latitude in the church, and they gave the signal for many to speak with less moderation for a wider freedom than they themselves conceived.” W. Haller, Liberty and reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 119. W. K. Jordan stated, “This modest vindication of Independency was shortly to be expanded, into a demand for religious liberty on the grounds of both religious right and of political necessity. In this great movement, whose velocity carried its clerical leaders far from their original moorings, even the framers of the Apologeticall Narration were profoundly to broaden the scope and content of their thought.” W. K. Jordan, The development of religious toleration in England; attainment of the theory and accommodations in thought and institutions (1640-1660) (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1938), 371. D. Cressy, England on edge: crisis and revolution, 1640-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 4 For their views on toleration see H. Powell, “The Last Confession: A Background Study of the Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order”, University of Cambridge, M.Phil thesis, deposited in Seeley Library (2008). For more on toleration as it relates to the Apologists and the wider revolutionary period see, J. Coffey, “The toleration controversy during the English Revolution”, in C. Durston & J. D. Maltby (eds.) Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006b), 42–68; B. Worden, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate”, in W. J. Sheils (ed.) Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History (Padstow: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 199–234. For summary of those who thought they were intolerant see, C. Polizzotto, “The campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1987), 569–81; Hetherington claimed they wanted toleration but when they had power they were “as intolerant as any of their opponents.” W. M. Hetherington, History of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (Edinburgh: J. Johnstone, 1843), 137–138. For their calculated obstinacy and dogged desire to stop the Assembly from any presbyterian platform as early as 1643 see, De Witt, Jus divinum, 91. For the argument, largely based on a reading of Thomas Edwards, that the Apologists were reviled for fleeing England, see T. Webster, Godly clergy in early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan movement c.1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chapter 14. Burroughs, however, claimed that no one suffered as he did under Bishop Wren. Burroughs, Vindication, 21. Forthcoming work by John Adamson will show that Wren’s persecution of the Godly in East Anglia was even more severe than we have come to believe. I am grateful to Dr. Adamson for discussing Wren’s behavior in East Anglia during the 1630s. 5 For a discussion on the “warfare” motif at the Westminster Assembly, see H. Powell, “The Dissenting Brethren and the Power of the Keys, 1640–1644” chapter 3. Robert S. Paul influential work on the Assembly has unhelpfully promulgated this warfare metaphor. R. S. Paul, Assembly of the Lord (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1985).

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has been seen as an ecclesiastical war between these two groups. But scholastic debate was a fundamental part of the way these divines thought and argued, and this reality has been oddly overlooked in studies of the Westminster Assembly debates over church government. Therefore historians have seen intense debate as conflict, rather than as the application of requisite methodological rules for discussion.6 Being sensitive or gentle to one’s opponent was utterly foreign to those trained in scholastic disputation. “He was rather a proselytizer for his own opinions, eager to divide truth from error, to best his adversary here and now, to secure acceptance of his ideas by his disciples and contemporaries.”7 The enshrined methodology of scholastic disputation, utilizing Aristotelian syllogisms as a preferred rhetorical tool, heightens the complexity of studying the Westminster minutes. “The rhetorical ‘trick’ […] of a syllogism is that one constructs a line of reasoning on the basis of premises one supposes to be accepted by the opposition. One then can draw a conclusion from the premises in favour of one’s own position.”8 Using this method, “an attempt is made to corner the opponent, since if the syllogism is constructed properly he must accept the conclusion or else deny the premises.”9 The disputation was highly stylized, rigorously adhered to and success was fought for.10 Thus, what may seem like ecclesiastical warfare in the Westminster Assembly to the modern reader was exactly what these divines were trained to do. The last three days of October 1643 give us the most accurate depiction of the uniquely English controversies of the Westminster Assembly. We witness the Assembly’s brief foray into the “substratum”, as Thomas Goodwin called it, of all ecclesiological discourse. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the “Grand Debate” was over before it began. At the end of October, the Scottish commissioners had not yet taken their seats in the Assembly and therefore a third party was not present to convolute the discussion. The Assembly first addressed the topic, “the power of the keyes.” The verse at the heart of the debate was Matthew 16:19, where Christ tells Peter, “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” W. M. Hetherington, J. R. De Witt and Robert S. Paul pass this month over as —————

6 Robert S. Paul is more interested in the conclusions of each debate, instead carefully analyzing the theological content of those debates. Although, as a source for sheer information concerning the Westminster Assembly, Paul remains the best available source. 7 W. T. Costello, The scholastic curriculum at early seventeenth-century Cambridge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 8–9. 8 T. T. J. Pleizer & M. Wisse, “‘As the Philosopher Says: Aristotle’”, in W. J. van Asselt (ed.) Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism vol. 26–44 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), 36. 9 Ibid., 36. 10 Costello, The scholastic curriculum, 20–21.

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virtually irrelevant. Yet it was arguably one of the most important ecclesiological debates the Assembly would ever have. Few divines doubted that this verse got to the very heart of what a church was, and virtually all interpreters agreed that Jesus was founding his church through Peter. From there exegesis diverged greatly. As Thomas Gataker noted early in the debates, “[as to] what the keyes are. This is a metaphorical word & debate amongst the learned what they are. A point of much use for the stating many controveryes.”11 Although we will primarily tease out the Apologists’ position in these crucial discussions, we should also note that the minutes convey a great deal of confusion, and indeed, uncertainty in how to address Matthew 16:19. Ideally the scholastic method necessitated a great deal of preparation to understand the opponent’s position, but this particular debate is complicated by the fact that although there was an agenda (namely a proposition and a proof), the divines kept veering off topic and into the more controversial subject of the keys. Since the divines were trained to ferret out inconsistencies as well as to promote their own positions, gathering a linear narrative out of any Westminster debate is difficult: a difficulty compounded by the fact that the style of disputation is already foreign to the modern observer.12 We will therefore draw heavily on Thomas Goodwin’s Government of the Churches of Christ, for it is evident that he was organizing and citing his own personal Assembly notes when writing it, something that has gone unnoticed in the scholarship of the Assembly.13 Furthermore, we now have the use of two previously unknown manuscripts of church government by Philip Nye at our disposal.14 Two things were necessary for understanding what Matthew wrote: what the keys were and in what regard Peter received those keys. This chapter is concerned primarily with the latter point: what (or who) was the primum subjectum (first subject) of church power, and second, a demonstra————— 11

Ibid. 210–211. This is the biggest problem with R.S. Paul’s overview of the Assembly. By attempting an overview, he misses extremely important details that – at times – would completely change his conclusions. 13 We will see this throughout this thesis. See also, T. Goodwin, The Consitution right, order, and government of the churches of Christ (London, 1696), 176. See also below, 220ff. 14 Nye, A discourse in which the practiced now asserted was opposed. (New College Library: Comm 1); Nye, Mr Phillip Nyes upon Dr Owens seting downe with his Church att Wallinford house. (New College Library: Comm 1). I came across both manuscripts in New College, Edinburgh. The first manuscript tracks very closely with a Westminster Assembly debate during July 1644, over whether churches may take communion “in waves”. This may have been a document intended for the Assembly, but never submitted. The manuscript gives a very robust description of Nye’s understanding of the universal church and how it relates to the particular church. The second manuscript is particularly important to late Interregnum historians, for it tells us that Nye was affiliated with John Owen’s Wallingford house church. The content of this sermon is devoted to role of elders in the church. 12

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tion that the position of the Apologists was distinctly different than that of most “independents”. These were not new concepts the Apologists were introducing to the Assembly. Indeed, over a year before Goodwin stood before Parliament and preached an uncontroversial sermon in which his view of Matthew 16:19 and his understanding of national church reform along congregational lines were fully present.15 The October 1643 debate materialized out of a seemingly innocuous proposition by Lazarus Seaman, namely that the apostles had the power of the keys and also exercised those powers. Because Seaman attempted to use Matthew 16:19 as his proof-text, he exposed decades of ecclesiological positioning against opposing spectres of prelatic tyranny and separatist anarchy. For the Apologists Matthew 16:19 represented the ‘substratum” of all church power, and therefore could not so easily be passed over without putting one of their bedrock theological tenets at risk.

3.2 “The builders must have a platform”16 On 12 October 1643 Parliament sent an order “enjoining [the Assembly of Divines’] speedy taking in hand the discipline and liturgy of the Church.”17 The House of Lords ordered that the divines “treat and confer among themselves” to find the “discipline and government, as most agreeable to God’s holy word” that is nearer in “agreement with the church of Scotland and other reformed churches abroad, to be settled in this church instead and in place of the present [prelatic] church-government” which the Parliament “has resolved to be taken away.”18 A debate on Church government, and more specifically a church government to replace the Prelatic Church of England had been forced upon the Assembly. —————

15 A significant story overlooked in the historiography is that Zerubbabels encouragement was preached as an Old Testament recapitulation of Goodwin’s commentary on Revelation 11, which, as Michael Lawrence has shown, was the exegetical basis for Goodwin’s migration toward congregationalism. T. Goodwin, Zerubbabels encouragement to finish the temple. A sermon preached before the honourable House of Commons, at their late solemne fast, Apr. 27. 1642 (London, 1642); Chapter 3. 16 Paraphrased from Simpson, Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 180. 17 J. Lightfoot, The journal of the proceedings of the Assembly of Divines, from January 1, 1643, to December 31, 1644: and letters to and from Dr. Lightfoot, The whole works of the Rev. John Lightfoot, D.D v. 13 (London, 1824), 17; Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 172. 18 “House of Lords Journal Volume 6: 12 October 1643”, Journal of the House of Lords: volume 6: 1643 (1767–1830), 254–255. Online version. Date accessed: 01 September 2010; Lightfoot, Journal, 17.

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On 17 October an agitation arose amongst the divines over how to proceed upon the topic of church government. 19 The primary concern for the Assembly was whether or not to establish a general rule and model for church government in Scripture and then proceed to specifics, or to proceed to specifics (i.e. church officers) and build a model derivatively from each specific as it arose. Charles Herle aptly summarized the mood of those who wished to go straight to the discussions of officers, “The question is not whether Christ hath instituted a government, but whether constituted such a government as that officers & exercises of them be set downe in the word. It is not to spend time about the subject of the church”.20 Therefore the Assembly should first find out what offices, and how many of those offices are set down in the Scripture, and subsequently explore their powers and how that power is exercised.21 Dr Thomas Temple agreed with Herle, stating that the general rule of church government can only be found by examining the particulars of the church first.22 Seaman claimed that to proceed with officers first was in keeping with the model of all other churches. Those opposed to this methodology were the Erastians and the congregational divines. That the Erastians, fearful of jure divino presbyterianism, wanted to discover first whether there was a clear rule government in the Scriptures is not surprising.23 However, at first glance we are more surprised to see the congregational divines also asking to begin with an exploration of the general rule for church government. It was certainly not for the same reason as the Erastians. Goodwin, Bridge, and Simpson believed there was a rule in Scripture, and asked that the Assembly examine and find the rule of church government first.24 The congregationalist divines considered it fruitless to debate “perticulars” without having ascertained the broader parameters and boundaries of church government. As Goodwin stated, “We must first agree on the rule and how this rule binds.”25 Or, to use Simpson’s construction metaphor, “the builders must have a platforme that is first drawn before the materials are prepared.”26 ————— 19

Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 174. Ibid., 176. 21 Ibid., 176. 22 Ibid., 176. 23 Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 137. 24 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 177, 178 25 Ibid. 177; Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 137. 26 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 180. When the Assembly wrote about these debates, two years later and in an very different polemical climate, the validated affirmed that the Apologists had been denied the chance to begin with the a platform. They also stated that the Scots, when they arrived, had wanted to start with their platform and the Assembly rejected their request as well. The Answer of the Assembly of Divines [...] unto the Reasons given in to this Assembly by the Dissenting Brethern [T. Goodwin and six others, 22 Oct. 1645] of their not bringing in a model of their way; and since published [...] under the title of A Copy of a Remonstrance, etc (London, 1645), 10. 20

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One of the accusations levied against the Apologists by the antiindependent pamphleteers was that they refused to bring forward any platform of church government between 1640 and 1644. Scholars, such as Tolmie, Paul, and Bradley, who have promulgated this position, have missed the fact that it was the presbyterian majority, fearing a breakdown of the tenuous alliance between various presbyterian positions, had initially denied the Apologists’ request to offer a platform of church government.27 However, the evidence indicates that during this period the Apologists tried to develop a platform in the context of the Assembly debates, as an effort to protect the godly alliance. This happened twice, first in late October and again four months later in February 1644. It may seem foolhardy that the congregational divines wished to dive headlong into the debate on church government in general, particularly when there was bound to be agreement in matters of church officers. From the perspective of Edmund Calamy, this was precisely the point. “All assert their government & discipline to be jure divino,” and therefore to go to this “greatest thing” would only, as the majority said against John Lighfoot – who also requested that the rule be explored first – expose the Assembly “to [a] sudden of trial of the differences of opinion that are likely to arise be—————

27 The belief that the Apologists promised a platform prior to 1644 has been largely derived from William Rathband. Rathband was not an Assembly member when he made the claim. Nor was Rathband a member of the Assembly when the Apologists request to start with a platform was denied. In the Assembly Rathband came quite close to the Apologists in his own polity. Furthermore, Rathband is particularly engaging New England divines. Thomas Welde, the New England divine who responded to Rathband, “profess[ed] solemnly” that he had “not so much of heard of any promise” to deliver a platform of church government “why then doth [Rathband] lay it upon the Independent brethren without exception”. And indeed, Rathband does not tell us who promised a platform of church government. Although he claims that an organization of John Robinsons” polity would be the best approximation of the platform that had been denied to him. It was clear in the Assembly that the Apologists were not defending Robinson’s ecclesiology. W. Rathband, A briefe narration of some church courses held in opinion and practise in the churches lately erected in New England. Collected out of sundry of their own printed papers and manuscripts with other good intelligences. Together with some short hints (given by the way) of their correspondence with the like tenents and practises of the separatists churches. And some short animadversions upon some principall passages for the benefit of the vulgar reader. Presented to publike view for the good of the Church of God by W.R. (London, 1644), 1–2; T. Welde, An ansvver to W.R. his narration of the opinions and practises of the churches lately erected in Nevv-England. Vindicating those Godly and orthodoxall churches, from more then an hundred imputations fathered on them and their church way, by the said W.R. in his booke. Wherein is plainely proved, 1. That the grounds of his narration are sandie and insufficient. 2. That the maner of his handling it, unloving and irregular. 3. That the matter of it, ful of grosse mistakes & divers contradictions. 4. That the quotations extremely wrested, and out of measure abused. 5. That his marginall notes impertinent and injurious. By Thomas Welde, pastour of the church of Roxborough in NevvEngland. This is licensed and entered according to order. (London, 1644), 1–2. For an example of Rathband’s similarity to the Apologists in the Assembly, see Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 12 April 1644 to 15 Nov. 1644”, 55.

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tween us.”28 Seaman summarized the majority’s response to the Erastians and congregational divines when he stated, “I take it for granted […] and do not dispute […] that there is a sufficiency in Scripture concerning church government and this is in great measure agreed upon,” however, “we shall not fall onto this question in the generall [but] in the particulars.”29 The problems with this decision were again encountered the following month. In debating whether the Church of England was a true church – which the Apologists believed – the Assembly struggled to understand in what sense it was a true church. Simpson chided the Assembly for adding to this confusion by having failed to establish a platform first. “When we are inquiring about a particular rule in the Word of God, that was waved by many in the Assembly” and now we are left trying to decide what ministers may have living in the church of England “for that which we have not [yet] declared to be jure divino […]”30 Ironically, by focusing on officers the presbyterians actually prejudiced the debate over Matthew 16:19 the following week; it limited the discussion to whether Matthew 16:19 was a proof text for the Apostles receiving the keys immediately from Christ, rather as to whether Matthew 16:19 had anything at all to do with the church. The congregational divines, anticipating this, were quick to request that while they conceded the methodology proposed on 17 October, they nonetheless asserted their right to, as Nye said, “if there be a necessary to return to the rule, let it not be a grievance to the Assembly”.31 The more portentous – albeit completely ignored – comment came from the French minister Samuel De la Place. He considered this tack taken by the English presbyterians to be a “blemish on Christ” and requested that the Assembly instead “begin to examine the power of the keyes”.32 Delaplace gave voice to the latent concerns undoubtedly permeating the Assembly members. They were diving headlong into debates that would, on the surface, draw out the similarities on particulars such as church officers, but at the expense of sorting out the most complex and contentious issues of the previous twenty years, namely the power of the keys.

—————

28 Lightfoot, Journal, 20; Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 177. 29 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 177. 30 Ibid., 290. This was a fascinating debate, particularly as we see the Assembly giving leeway to some separatists who wanted to work within the national church. Calamy stated, that the main goal of question was “to keepe out totall separatists from sequestered livings.” By “totall separatists” Calamy meant those who left the church and subsequently denied the church they left to be a true church. Ibid., 290. 31 Ibid., 178. 32 Ibid., 176.

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3.3 “We are now on the foundation of all”33 On 27 October, Seaman brought this proposition to the Assembly: “That the apostells did immediately receive the keyes from the hand of Jesus Christ and did use and exercise them in all churches of the world on all occasions”.34 Strictly speaking, was the power of the keys (i.e., all ecclesiastical power) given to all the apostles? The proposition itself was not particularly contentious. As Burroughs would say: “This proposition may be granted by all without any further debating.”35 The question, of course, was how this verse related to the church, for all knew that the power of the keys was a power of church government. Was this an extraordinary power, limited to the Apostles, or did it include the ordinary ecclesiastical power subsequently conveyed to elders? Did this power include the congregation? The central, unavoidable question was whether or not, as Seaman asserted, Matthew 16:19 could be used as a proof-text. For clarification, we should note that the Assembly was only meant to debate the validity of Seaman’s proposition, and whether or not Matthew 16:19 could be used as the proof text. This is far from what actually happened. Bridge stated what was obvious to any divines who had lived in England for the previous twenty years, that “there is a great dispute concerning the keys”.36 To which Dr Joshua Hoyle echoed Delaplace’s request from ten days before, “If [the keys] must [be] determined, why not now?” Thomas Case broadened the question to consider both “what the keyes were” and whether “the apostles used them qua apostles”.37 Seaman knew exactly where this would lead and quickly tried to stop any further debate. Referring to Burroughs’s comment, Seaman stated, “[He] moves that we take the propounded for granted. Let it so be resolved.” Gataker similarly tried to shoehorn the proposition through, stating, “I conceive we need not inquire any further.”38 Given the protocol set forth by the Assembly the previous week, a general discussion about Matthew 16:19 was bound to be tense. They were meant to debate officers and therefore, Seaman attempted to prove the apostles did indeed receive the power of the keys from Christ, without any reference to the church. Interestingly, it was some of the presbyterians who struggled with the proposition whereas the Apologists were fine with it, provided Matthew 16:19 was not attached to the proposition. But by citing Matthew 16:19, Seaman was removing the very verse that was widely considered to be the foundation of all church government. As Nye ————— 33

Ibid., 222 (Sir Arthur Haselrig, 30 October 1643). Ibid., 209. 35 Ibid., 210. 36 Ibid., 210. 37 Ibid., 210. 38 Ibid., 211. 34

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stated, “the proposition is granted, [w]hether the scripture prove it is doubted.”39 In John’s Gospel, Christ did indeed give the Apostles the power to bind and loose, and this meant the Apostles had an extraordinary power that did not accrue to ordinary elders.40 Everyone in the Assembly knew they were dealing with a fundamental, and highly problematic, ecclesiological text, but they were less clear on where the debates would lead. Of course, the more clerically-minded English presbyterians were not as alarmed by the prospect of using Matthew 16:19 as a proof-text, for whenever the Assembly did revisit the general issue of church government it would have been established that Peter as Apostle received the power of the keys apart from the church. The proof for the propositions was not nearly as innocuous as Seaman and Gataker intimated. No one doubted the Apostles had an extraordinary power of the keys: they had a special commission from Christ to spread the gospel, and they had this as universal commission not rooted to a particular church or location. These extraordinary powers died with the Apostles and therefore were not conveyed to the elders or the church. But to limit Matthew 16:19 to the extraordinary powers of the keys effectively removed the question of the ordinary power of the keys and the ordinary subject (viz. the church). Limiting the exegesis in this way was a first step in fending off separatism, for by protecting the unique power of the apostles, it was only a small exegetical step to protect the unique power of the elders, quite apart from reference to the whole particular church. For the Apologists the problem was not claiming Matthew 16:19 proved Seaman’s proposition, but the risk that the verse would be limited to Seaman’s proposition. The Apologists, along with Gataker and Seaman, were content to pass the proposition and move on to debate the proof-text. But Charles Herle intervened: “I think that to know what those keyes are not here pertinent, or seasonable”, but he nevertheless went on to enumerate the various prevalent opinions as to who received the keys. Herle’s speech ultimately forced Seaman to concede that a discussion of Matthew 16:19 prior to the passing of the proposition was inevitable, stating, “now we are hard put seeing our Brethren have brought it in.”41 This made the resultant debates disorganized and chaotic. The Assembly swerved back and forth between discussions about the recipient of the keys and the definition of the keys. The former slowed the passing of the proposition, and the latter kept bringing the debate over the proof-text back into the proposition before the proposition had even passed! Bridge, helpfully, organized the chaos into three distinct cate————— 39

Ibid., 210. John 20:22–23, “And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” 41 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 215. 40

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gories. “One: whether the words of the proposition be true. [2]. Whether that place 16 Math. prove it. [3]. What is the primum subjectum?”42 The Assembly found it nearly impossible to isolate one of those three points from the other two. We will briefly look at the salient points made about point one, before taking a closer look at the Apologists’ understanding of the last two. Lightfoot recorded that Herle, “thought it very questionable whether the keys were given to the apostles or the church.” Herle cited the Catholic Sorbonnists of Paris “who thinke that the keyes ware not immediately given to the apostles, but to the church, as they quote most of the fathers, &c.”43 They stated that “in the natural body all faculties are not given to the several instruments, The subject by which (subjectum quo) is the eye, but the subject which (subjectum quod) is the whole man.”44 Herle was essentially saying what many presbyterians had long believed, the keys were given “to the church formally and subjectively, and not only finally for the benefit of it.”45 By saying this, Herle was not so subtly introducing the great English divine Robert Parker into the debates. Parker had noted, “so that primarily all is in the church, secondarily in her rectors for her sake, as the end which is before the meanes intention, and as the whole which is before the part,” and therefore “God and nature intend the whole first and more immediately then any part how noble soever, say the Paris divines illustrating it by the eye induced with sight for the whole, etc.”46 Parker was himself indebted to the Sorbonnists. It is a fascinating moment, given, as we noted in chapter one, that Robert Parker had been effectively labelled an “independent” by Rutherford. Rutherford also rejected the interpretation of the Sorbonnists for the same reason. But, of course, Rutherford was not yet there to object. Parker followed the Sorbonnists in acknowledging that the keys, as Herle also noted, “were not Immediately given to the apost[les], but to the church, as they quote from many of the fathers”.47 The Sorbonnists, represented in the writings of Jacques Almain, John Major, and Jean Gerson, believed that Christ had given the power of the keys immediately to all the believers, and through them to the pastors.48 Almain stated that the power promised to Peter in both Matthew 16:19 and Matthew 18:18, “are to be understood as referring to the faithful” and that “Christ conferred […] power immediately on the Church, understanding the ————— 42

Ibid., 221. Ibid., 211. 44 Ibid., 211–212; Lightfoot, Journal, 31. 45 Lightfoot, Journal, 31. 46 Parker, De Politeia Ecclesiastica [trans.], 96r. 47 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 211. 48 Rutherford, Peaceable plea, 3. 43

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Church as being a gathering of all the faithful.”49 Bridge claimed the keys could “[e]ither [be] given to [Peter] as representing the church or else in commodum ecclesiae, ad ecclesiam or pro ecclesia”. That is, “for the benefit of the church, towards the church or on behalf of the church.” He cited Almain’s use of Augustine to prove his point: “Alman proving that cannot be the sence of Austin that the keyes ware given to the church finaliter.50 Almain’s writing indicates the same objection, I prove that Augustine did not say that the keys were given to the church in that sense, because, on that basis, [to say that] the keys were given to the church would mean that they were given for the eventual benefit of the Church, not that they were given to the Church as such—which is manifestly contrary to what Augustine says.51

Although Parker believed that all believers gathered into a particular fellowship were the proper first-subject of the keys, the guides are not excluded because the believers can give power to certain guides (i.e. elders). This was a relatively standard “independent” argument, and one not held by the Apologists. But Herle was nonetheless opening the door to the Apologists’ position, for he conceded the strength of Parisian argument, namely that the “the whole church” seemed to be the formal subject of the keys. His concern was that when Jesus states, upon Peter’s confession, that “the gates of hell not prevail against” the church, he cannot simply mean the officers. For it was a matter of fact that officers, as men, certainly fell into sin and would fall into sin. This was not the case for the universal church, which by definition, could not be defeated by Satan. This only confused the debate further and brought a variety of presbyterian opinions out of the woodwork. The only clear fact was that Matthew16:19 was about to be used to defend a proposition that made no reference to the church. Gataker attempted to steer the Assembly back to Seaman’s proposition “that is before us.”52 And Jeremiah Whitaker, in response to the “gates of hell” stated that therefore it must only be the Apostles as containing “extraordinary power”, rather than the officers.53 The Apostles had an extraordinary gifting from Christ, and this could be proved by Matthew 16:19. Extraordinary apostles, who had the power the church, would indeed withstand the “gates of hell”, because their great commission from Christ would be invariably fulfilled. However, William Gouge saw the —————

49 J. Almain, “A book concerning the authority of the church”, in J. H. Burns & T. M. Izbicki (eds.) Conciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 134–200, 144, 153. 50 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 215. 51 Almain, “A book concerning the authority of the church”, in 158–159; Willet also understood Augustine to mean the keys were given to the “whole church”, although Willet came to a different ecclesiological conclusion. Willet, Synopsis papismi, 86, 88, 107. 52 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 212. 53 Ibid., 212.

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strength of Herle’s statement and sought to defer the entire question regarding the “universal militant church”, which “will come better to be discussed at another time.”54 Gouge concluded, “Although it be granted that the church had the power [of the keys], yet if the apostles had them Immediately from Christ, is the question at hand.”55 The Assembly went ahead and voted in approval of the proposition. But it was not the end of the debate. The proposition needed a proof-text and the Apologists were on the verge of losing the basis for their whole ecclesiological position. They needed to convince the Assembly that the proposition could stand, but that Matthew 16:19 could not stand with it.

3.4 πετρος τη πετρα, The Grand Charter of the Church Thomas Goodwin aptly summarized the relatively uncontroversial exegetical starting point for Matthew 16:19, “The first charter granted by the Founder, and the pattern of those Masters Builders the Apostles”. Therefore the true import of the verse was vital to any further establishing of church government. When Peter had made his confession he effectively inaugurated the Church of the New Testament. As the builder of the church, Christ says two things to Peter, “I will build my church” and “I will give Keys.” The church was moulded anew by the Son. “By the keys he means, the keys of the kingdom of heaven (as the State of the Church under the Gospel is called) which, to shew he is the Son, and hath all power committed to him, he professeth to dispose anew, (as the Keys themselves were new)”.56 In doing so, Christ was doing away with the Old Testament church, as it were, under the Mosaic Law and building a new church. “For Christ the Son, being come, shews his Prerogative by declaring the Old to be done away, saying I will build, I will give the keys, &c whilst he speaks of a New, the Old is done away” and further “the Persons to whom, and the Extant and Limits of the power are to be set out by him”.57 In doing so, Christ singles Peter out “electively, [and] argues his special designation of the Subject or persons (whoever they may be) to whome he will bequeath them.” That “Peter here in this promise of the keyes for the future to be given, should stand in a Representative respect and not merely personal”, Goodwin continued, “Writers in all Ages, and all sides, although in Peter’s name, laying several claims unto those keys, do universally acknowledge and observe.”58 Charles Herle conceded this topic would “afford a great deal of debate.” He ————— 54

Ibid., 212. Ibid., 212. 56 Goodwin, Government, 45. 57 Ibid., 45. 58 Ibid., 45. 55

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noted that there were four “4 wayes” to interpret Peter in Matthew 16:19, Bridge and Thomas Goodwin claimed there were five. The minutes are incomplete in Herle’s speech, but we can fill them in using Goodwin’s description of the variant interpretations. Through understanding these interpretations, we can begin to understand the schools of thought that were emerging in the Assembly debates. The first three positions were immediately dismissed. First, there were those who argued that Peter stood as Peter only.59 This position, proffered only by Lightfoot, argued Peter was merely being commissioned to take the Gospel to the gentiles. Herle dismissed this position outright, although Bridge acknowledged it was a position held by Cameron.60 The second interpretation of the keys was held by “the papists” who assert that Peter was the prince of apostles, thus vindicating the power of the bishop of Rome.61 This “Romish” position would imply the keys were given to Peter for the church, but “they do not make the church the first subject to which the keys were given.”62 The third option marked an important point for this chapter and how the Apologists distinguished themselves from the “independents”. In this category the keys were given to Peter “considered as a believer, having made his confession of faith, that Christ was the Son of God and therefore representing the Church of Believers, as unto whom all Church power should be first be given.”63 This was the standard position held by most “independents”, such as Jacob, Ainsworth, Robinson, Canne, Henry Burton and New England divines like John Davenport, and Thomas Hooker. For example John Canne stated, “Jesus Christ, Lord & King of his Church, hath given said [church] power of his to all his saints, and placed it in the body of each particular congregation”.64 Thomas Hooker argued, “The power of the Keyes take it in the compleat nature thereof, it is in the Church of believers, as in the first subject”.65 This was also Robert Parker’s belief and that of ————— 59

Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 210; Goodwin, Government, 45. 60 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 210. 61 Ibid., 210. 62 Goodwin, Government, 66. 63 Ibid., 45. 64 J. Canne, Syons prerogatyve royal. Or a treatise tending to prove that every particular congregation hath from Christ absolute & entyre power, to exercise in & of her selfe every ordinance of God. And is an independant body, not standing under any other ecclesiasticall authoritie ou of it selfe. By a well-wisher to the truth. (Amsterdam, 1641), 4. 65 T. Hooker, A survey of the summe of church-discipline. Wherein, the vvay of the churches of New-England is warranted out of the vvord, and all exceptions of weight, which are made against it, answered: whereby also it will appear to the judicious reader, that something more must be said, then yet hath been, before their principles can be shaken, or they should be unsetled in their practice. By Tho. Hooker, late pastor of the church at Hartford upon Connecticott in N.E (London, 1648), 195. What unites these following examples is that the power of excommunication

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many English presbyterians that followed him, although they drew different practical conclusions. None of these three options were seriously debated on the floor. And although the Apologists were intent on distancing themselves from this third option, there were nonetheless some Assembly presbyterians who were reluctant to totally dismiss it.

————— – the highest act of church power – was given to the church of believers as the first subject. This “binding and loosing” typically cited from Matthew 18:17–19, was exegetically tied to Matthew 16:19. While some of these divines would delineate distinct functions of elders and the people (particularly Davenport and Hooker) in the process of excommunication, yet they either implicitly or explicitly embraced the exegesis that Peter represented the believers and therefore believers were the first subjects of all church power. The connection between Matthew 16:19 and Matthew 18:19 will be explored in chapters 5 and 6. For examples, see H. Ainsworth, An animadversion to Mr Richard Clyftons advertisement Who under pretense of answering Chr. Lawnes book, hath published an other mans private letter, with Mr Francis Iohnsons answer therto. Which letter is here justified; the answer therto refuted: and the true causes of the lamentable breach that hath lately fallen out in the English exiled Church at Amsterdam, manifested, by Henry Ainsworth (Amsterdam, 1610), 10; H. Ainsworth, An apologie or defence of such true Christians as are commonly (but vniustly) called Brovvnists: against such imputations as are layd vpon them by the heads and doctors of the Vniversity of Oxford, in their Ansvver to the humble petition of the ministers of the Church of England, desiring reformation of certayne ceremonies and abuses of the Church. (1604), 43; H. Ainsworth, A True Confession of the Faith, and humble Acknowledgment of the Alegeance, which wee hir Maiesties Subjects, falsely called Brownists, doo hould towards God, and yeild to hir Majestie and all other that are ouer vs in Lord. Set down in articles or positions, etc. [By Henry Ainsworth.] ([Amsterdam?], 1596), 22–24; W. Best, The churches plea for her right. Or A reply to an answer, made of Mr. Iohn Paget, against William Best and others (Amsterdam, 1635), 72; H. Burton, A vindication of churches commonly called Independent, or, A briefe ansvver to two books the one intituled, Twelve considerable serious questions touching church-government, the other, Independency examined, unmasked, refuted &c. (London, 1644), 26; Canne, Syons prerogatyve royal, 4; K. Chidley, The Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ. Being an answer to Mr. Edwards his booke, which hee hath written against the government of Christs Church, and toleration of Christs publicke worship; briefly declaring that the congregations of the Saints ought not to have dependance in government upon any other, etc. (London, 1641), 10–11; J. Davenport, The Power of Congregational Churches asserted and vindicated, in answer to a treatise of Mr. J. Paget, intituled The Defence of Church-Government exercised in Classes and Synods (London, 1672), 90–106; H. Jacob, A confession and protestation of the faith of certaine Christians, etc. (1616), Articles 3, 4, and 10; The Presbyteriall government examined, vvherein the weaknesse of their grounds are unfolded: also their pretended proofes disproved; and the liberty of the people in chusing of their owne officers: proved out of the word of God. Whereunto is annexed certaine arguments an reasons, proving the foresayd Presbyteriall government to be contrary to the patterne that our Lord Jesus Christ hath left us in the New Testament. All which we humbly present to the Kings most Excellent Majesty: the right Honourable Lords, and the Honourable House of Commons, now assembled in Parliament., (1641), 12; J. Smyth, Paralleles, censures, observations. Aperteyning: to three several writinges, 1. A lettre written to Mr. Ric. Bernard, by Iohn Smyth. 2. A book intituled, the Seperatists schisme published by Mr. Bernard. 3. An answer made to that book called the Se Schisme by Mr. H. Ainsworth. Whereunto also are adioyned. 1. The said lettre written to Mr. Ric. Bernard divided into 19. sections. 2. Another lettre written to Mr. A.S. 3. A third letter written to certayne bretheren of the seperation (Middleberg, 1609), 36.

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The fourth position was that “[this] grant was made to Peter as an Apostle, and so Representing the Apostles and ministers only.”66 It was a central tenet of some English presbyterians that “the proper subject wherein Christ hath seated and intrusted all Church-power, and the exercise thereof, in only his own Church-officers.”67 This position was latent within Seaman’s proposition and was, at least in part, held by all English presbyterians. Of course, Seaman’s proposition made no mention of elders or church power. On the surface of it, his proposition meant to address the uncontroversial question of the extraordinary power vested in the apostles. There was little doubt in the Assembly, however, as to what lay behind the proposition. Cornelius Burgess, ignoring the obvious desire to keep unity, cut to the chase and claimed, “Peter, as is generally held, represents all pastors.”68 Dr. Temple echoed the sentiment of many English presbyterians when he stated, “They who ware called immediately & had commission immediately from & by Christ without mention of the church”.69 The design behind Seaman’s proposition was made manifest: if the verse meant apostles without the church, then it would subsequently mean elders, without the church.

3.5 The Apologists’ Proton Dektikon Thomas Goodwin opened the door to the Apologists’ central tenet, which was the fifth option for Matthew 16:19. Goodwin stated, “If the question be whether the apostle be subjectum totale or the church be subjectum totale” this is “a distinction I do not soe well understand. They received apostells and the church had his power afterwards.”70 From Goodwin’s perspective, there were three questions: “Whether Peter represented the Apostles and ministers only; or whether he represented the Church also, or whether Peter here is personally taken, as the sole and single subject of a personal privilege.”71 And the solution to this debate takes us to the heart of the Apologists’ understanding of the keys: “We say all these here are intended, in this [Christ’s] first promise uttering it himself in this indefinite way, which was afterwards to be more distinctively divided.”72 For the Apologists this promise made to Peter was done in an indistinct, general, and comprehensive way. As William Carter stated, “it will hardly be proved that what is said to Peter is to be aplyed as a believer or rather as ————— 66

Goodwin, Government, 45. Jus divinum regiminis ecclesiastici, 68; See also 36, 55. 68 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 213. 69 Ibid., 216. 70 Ibid., 214. 71 Goodwin, Government, 47. 72 Ibid., 47. 67

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an apostell, pastor, & believer. What was given to Peter as the proton decticon must comprehend all of these.”73 Nye would repeat this very comment on the floor a few months later.74 For the congregationalists the word “Church” in Matthew 16:19 was taken indefinitely “and for the Church Universal; but not as an Institution Political, and therefore [Jesus] does not say he will give the keys to [the church political] but to Peter” and Peter is taken, as we have seen, “as representing both Saints and Minister, to be divided into several bodies, as afterwards Christ should appoint.”75 This was, as Goodwin told the Assembly, “the first promise Christ ever uttered, that he would build the church; & the first expression that he would give the power of keyes out of himself & because Peter made the first confession.” Peter therefore, “represented all power whatsoever. The first grand charter of the gospel which is afterwards to be branched out as Christ placed it.”76 This branching out and delimitating of church power would occur in Matthew 18. For Goodwin, when Christ gives Simon Bar-Jonas his new name, Peter, it was not so much a “personal, as a Mystical consideration”.77 It was a grand charter, taken federally and yet indefinitely, for all the aspects of the church that was to be built. And the strength of this argument came from redemptive history, where God had singled out one Man “in whose name this Grand charter should emmeninately run”. The two examples singled out by Goodwin were Adam and Abraham. “Adam was fixed upon, when God, in his name gave the Earth unto the rest of the Sons of men; So Abraham was singled out to represent […] the Jews who were his children” and who would inherit the land of Canaan.78 In this way Peter bore the “persons of all sorts, that were to have any portion of power, whether of his Apostles, Extraordinary officers; or ordinary officers, as also of the Church of Believers, and even to all to whom ever any portion of the keyes was for the future to be given.”79 Goodwin followed Paul Baynes in stating that Peter was a typical representation of the church and its officers who would receive power afterward.80 The Greek for “give” was in the future tense, and therefore when Christ said, “I will give”, it meant that there was to be a further clarifying and constituting of a specific church. This indefinite promise ————— 73

Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 214. C. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the reformation: Theological debate in the Westminster Assembly: Westminster Assembly Minutes, 17 Nov. 1643 to 11 April 1644”, University of Cambridge, Ph.D. thesis (2004d), 665. 75 Goodwin, Government, 44. 76 Ibid, Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 221. 77 Goodwin, Government, 45. 78 Ibid., 45. 79 Ibid., 46. 80 Ibid., 46; Baynes, The diocesans tryall : Wherein all the sinnews of D. Downams defence are brought unto three heads, and orderly dissolved (Amsterdam, 1621), 84–85. 74

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included the “mystical church”, for Christ tells Peter that the gates of hell would not stand against her, which by definition means the mystical church. But the promise must also include particular churches, for, as Goodwin noted “the mystical general church” hath not the power of the exercise of the keys; but only as divided into particular Churches”.81 The more clerically minded English presbyterians, consumed with the fears of separatism, tried to assert that the decision over Matthew 16:19 was black and white. Either Peter as an Apostle stood in for all elders, or because Peter was a believer the power of the keys was given to believers. No one disagreed with the former position, but there was great confusion as to whether it included the latter position. There was, however, a great deal of concern that including believers in the keys would ultimately lead to a position of “anabaptism or libertinism”.82 Edmund Calamy, in citing his concerns over denying Matthew 16:19 as a proof text for Seaman’s proposition, demonstrated an acute awareness of the complexity of the positions of the Apologists, and the potential dangers inherent in it. If believers were included as recipients, it would seem they must also have the power to exercise the keys. Calamy stated, “ther is a promise of the use of the keyes, not only the power; if the power, then exercise, & then all that professe the faith of Christ” would be able to exercise that power.83 The same argument John Ball had used against Gillespie. This would lead to a position of Brownism where the pastor had no unique authority over the church. Goodwin countered “we doe believe every officer hath power immediately from Christ, but not church power […] Officers doe not exercise the power of the Church, but the power of Christ.”84 This was clearly a distinct position from the “independents”, who argued that Peter received all the powers of the keys standing in the place of believers, and therefore any elders who were put in place over the church only had the power the church of believers was willing to give to them. The mistake the presbyterians were postulating was that “because all believers have not all church power, therefore they have none.”85 Goodwin would go on to explain the numerous types of power to prove his point. There is a power in the people, but it is not the same power that is in the elders, and further that power in the elders is alone given to them directly by Christ, not derivatively through – or from – a gathered church.86 And in the same language the Apologists would use in the Apologeticall Narration two months later, Goodwin affirmed that this was a “middle ————— 81

Goodwin, Government, 46. Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 218. 83 Ibid., 220. 84 Ibid., 220. 85 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 225. 86 Ibid., 225. 82

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way” between purely clerical rule and the anarchy of Brownism.87 These are the types of distinctions that would draw the Scottish presbyterians closer to the Apologists. They respected the distinction between the elders and the people, but they attempted to prevent the people from ruling over their leaders, while nonetheless protecting the prerogatives of the people. Indeed, the evidence suggests that one reason the Apologists were included in the Assembly was that they did not believe the faithful in a church were the first subjects of all church power.88 Whereas some of the English presbyterians were horrified by any power belonging to the people, the Apologists found sympathizers in men like Charles Herle who warned the Assembly against the danger of pushing the denial of Peter’s representing the faithful too far. Herle said, “Many of the fathers and schoolmen have understood [Peter as representing the faithful] & and yet are far from anarchy.”89 He noted that the “consent of the people in election of officers is absolutely necessary”. And if this was true, Herle conceded, there must be some sort of power in the church, although not necessarily an exercise of power.”90 This debate shows that their fears of anarchy, coupled with the clerical impulses, caused many among the English presbyterians to feel caught between two extremes. On the one hand, it was clear that many “fathers and scoolemen” believed that Peter represented the faithful. For Herle, if the “power” was not first in the people, “then officers cannot represent the church”.91 On the other hand, Herle could not accept a government by the people beyond their right to elect church officers, for ‘such a popular way [would be] anabaptisme”.92 The only way for Herle to cut this Gordian knot was to embrace the position where “power” was in the church as the “primum susceptivum not of that exercise but of that power.”93 Therefore, the only way to salvage Matthew 16:19 in favour of the presbyterian position, without sacrificing Parker-type representation, was to join it to John 20:23, where Jesus gives the extraordinary power to bind and loose specifically to the Apostles. That way Matthew 16:19 could be further restricted to the Apostles, without having to address the power of the church at all. So, Herle concluded, either “Wave [Math. 16:19] or joyn it with Joh[n].”94 ————— 87 88

107.

Ibid., 231. Compare Herle’s comment on “anabaptism” below, and his comments about the Narration,

89

Ibid., 229. Ibid., 229. 91 Ibid., 229. 92 Ibid., 229. 93 Ibid., 229. 94 Ibid., 229; John 20:23, “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” 90

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The Assembly was clearly burdened with trying to make sense of various questions regarding power. Time and again they had to ask each other for clarification. And indeed, because Seaman’s proposition seemed so simple in its request, many divines simply ignored the request to clarify – for as we have noted, clarification only opened pre-existing debates. Even toward the end of the discussions, divines would exasperatedly come back to the same questions. John Ley stated “It was well moved before to find out what is the keys which will prevent a deal of this debate” and later that day Lightfoot claimed “We cannot extricate ourselves unlesse we unlocke this text & inquire 1. What meant by the kingdome of heaven”.95

3.6 Ecclesiae Primae and Ecclesiae Ortae: “an untrodden path” This issue of the visible universal church is an important concept for us to address. It has been usual to make it a distinguishing mark between congregational and presbyterian polity.96 What we learn in the 1640s, however, is that the notion of a universal church also served to fundamentally highlight the differences within various presbyterian positions, distinctions that have been missed in the historiography of the presbyterian polity. The presbyterians believed the general universal church, in some regard, to be a political body (although pragmatically delimited in national or provincial churches). Seaman’s proposition effectively left the door open for the presbyterian assertion that Matthew 16:19 also meant the keys to a visible universal church. The Apologists wanted to keep the universality of the keys without the institutional church. This may seem tangential to the discussion of the keys, but it actually accentuates how the nature or power within the church was a uniquely English source of division. If the English divines could prove that there was a “one general visible church”, then necessarily, the “keys of jurisdiction” would be “given unto the whole Universal Church”.97 The Apologists were adamant that they believed in a visible catholic church. We can also now see Nye’s understanding of the visible “Catholick” church. When Nye wrote his manuscript on church government, possibly in the summer of 1644, he claimed specifically that the congregations are members of the Catholick visible church, through “preaching, praying, and Breaking of bread”.98 But for the “orderly & more edifying administration, wee ought also to be members of some particular church”.99 Indeed, ————— 95

Ibid., 225, 229. Ha, English Presbyterianism, 66–67. 97 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 152. 98 Nye, A discourse, 184. 99 Ibid., 185. 96

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talking of the ordinances of the church, he adds “wee [do so] within the compass of the whole Catholick. So much and so neare is our affinitie with a member of the membership of the Catholick church in such a performance.”100 This communion however, does not extend to matters of jurisdiction, including “elections, censures, &c […] which are properly kept to that one Individual church whereof wee are members of.”101 Citing the Scottish presbyterian David Calderwood, Goodwin even went as far as to say that communion with the universal church was through membership in a particular church.102 They flatly denied, however, that the “keys of jurisdiction” could be committed to the universal church.103 Some English presbyterians began to fear that Seaman’s proposition would mean the particular church’s power was derivative of the power given to the visible universal church as the primum subjectum. And this fear was fully realized only five months later when Seaman pressed the Assembly to agree that the “keys” were given to the universal visible church. Bridge pointed Seaman back to these October debates and retorted, “You have voted the power of the keyes to the apostells Immediately, & how can it be now to the church visible”?104 This is why Goodwin prioritized his rejoinder to presbyterian views of the universal church before his discussion on the keys in his Government of the Churches of Christ.105 For the congregationalists the church universal was not instituted as a political body, and therefore the particular church did not derive its power from it. According to Goodwin, “those who assert the General Church to be a Political Body, seem to be divided into two sorts of ways to explain it.”106 There were those who made the particular church to be the ecclesia primae and they believed that synods, classes, and national assemblies are “but Ecclesiae ortae, removes from, and representations of those that are Ecclesia Primae, the first Churches which are Congrega————— 100

Ibid., 185. Ibid., 185. 102 Goodwin, Government, 152, 227. 103 Ibid., 152. Goodwin would use this argument preaching in London in 1641 to point out that the Donatist error was to deny the universal church, while the Brownist error is to deny “true churches”, whether in presbyterian or Episcopal parishes to be true churches. Francis Cheynell was evidently in attendance at these sermons and cited this section positively. T. Goodwin, The Works of Thomas Goodwin, D.D. Sometime President of Magdalen Colledg in Oxford. The First volume. Containing an Exposition on the First, and part of the Second Chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians. And sermons preached on several occasions, 3 parts [with separate t. pt. I: An Exposition on the First, and part of the Second Chapter, of the Epistle to the Ephesians, pt. II: An Exposition on the First Eleven Verses of the Second Chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, pt III: Thirteen Sermons Preached on Diverse Texts of Scripture upon Several Occasions] (1681), vol. 1, 476; Cheynell, The rise, growth, and danger of Socinianisme, 66. 104 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 662 105 Goodwin, Government, 42. 106 Ibid., 42. 101

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tions”.107 Therefore church power, as Goodwin says, is “ascendendo”. Conversely, there were also presbyterians who believed church government “to be descendendo, as asserting the first principle Charter, to be given to the Church Universal, so as that by institution first a Church, and particular congregations have it by derived right, as lesser leases have theirs out of a greater charter.”108 Gataker, for example, rejected the ascending position, denying that the shepherd “received his power from the sheepe”.109 Seaman similarly denied the Apostles could “represent” the church because that would mean “the keyes belong to every particular individual Christian.”110 Gataker and Seaman, rather, believed a descending position. William Gouge similarly stated, “the promise [of the keys] is made to the universal militant church.”111 Rutherford also saw these distinctions when he observed English presbyterianism in late 1643: ‘some derive all church-power from a single congregation to the presbyteries and classes, ascendendo, by ascending, others derive it from presbyteries to a Congregation descendendo,” and some believe power begins in “the Catholicke visible Church to national assemblies, and from national assemblies to provinciall synods, and from Synods to presbyteries, and from Presbyteries to Congregations”.112 For those who hold this latter position, according to Goodwin, the church was at one point able to meet “by vertue of being the Church Universal; but afterwards was multiplied to so many, as they must meet in several places, which is the occasion of forming particular churches” yet this separation was “accidental and occasional, and so they are to be regarded as one Church still, and so that first fundamental Institution still goes on.”113 To Goodwin’s mind, it seemed a contradiction for those who held the Universal church to be a political church with jurisdiction, also to believe that synods acted their particular churches’ power by representation.114 This was probably more indicative of the fact the topic itself was a relatively new one, rather than any sort of contradiction. The latter position however is more difficult to pin down. It seems to be the position held by those clerical presbyterian ministers, and Seaman, Gataker and Burgess, whose positions, distinct ————— 107

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42. 109 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 217. 110 Ibid., 216. 111 Ibid., 212. 112 S. Rutherford, The Due right of Presbyteries, or a peaceable plea for the government of the Church of Scotland, wherein is examined 1. The way of the Church of Christ in New England, etc. 2. Their apology for the said government, etc. 3. A treatise for a Church Covenant is discussed. 4. The arguments of Mr. Robinson in his justification of separation are discovered. 4. His treatise, called, The people’s Plea for the full exercise of prophecy is tryed, etc (London, 1644), 383. 113 Goodwin, Government, 42. 114 Ibid., 155. 108

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though they were, may have reflected residual traces of their Episcopalian tradition. Nevertheless, the particular English presbyterian position on the church universal was unique in the Reformed orthodox tradition. The London ministers’ Jus Divinum Ministerii Ecclesiastici is largely representative of at least one major strand of English presbyterianism.115 However, in their views of the universal visible church they refer the reader to Samuel Hudson whom they cite as their authority on the matter.116 Hudson’s book represents a complex, logical pamphlet debate that deserves more attention than this chapter has space to address.117 Yet it does expose us to a uniquely English debate that does not seem to be a source of tension prior to 1643. According to Thomason, Hudson’s The Essence and Unitie of the Church Catholike Visible, and the Prioritie thereof in regard of Particular Churches Discussed was brought to publication in March 1645. However, in the preface Hudson himself states, “This Thesis was compiled about a year agoe, for the accommodation of private friends.”118 In other words, this document that defined the English presbyterian position was written around the same time that the Assembly was debating the Universal church. More interestingly, given the Assembly’s effort to conform to the best Reformed —————

115 I am grateful to Elliot Vernon for his discussing the importance – and limitations – of Jus Divinum as an English presbyterian document. 116 Jus Divinum Ministerii Evangelici, or the divine right of the Gospel-Ministry. Divided into two parts [...] Together with an appendix [...] about the whole matter of episcopacy, etc. Published by the Provincial Assembly of London, (London, 1654), 143. 117 An interesting component of this debate is the fact that Samuel Hudson finds more sympathy with the writings of Cotton, the Apologists, and John Norton, than he does with Thomas Hooker. See, J. Ellis, Vindiciæ catholicæ, or the rights of particular churches rescued: and asserted against that meer (but dangerous) notion of one catholick, visible, governing church: the foundation of the (now endeavoured) Presbyterie. Wherein by Scripture, reason, antiquity, and later writers first, the novelty, peril, scandal, and untruth of this tenet, are cleerly demonstrated. Secondly, all the arguments for it, produced by the Rev. Apollonius, M. Hudson, M. Noyes, the London ministers, and others: are examined and dissolved. To the Parliament of England, and Assembly of Divines (London, 1647); Hooker, A survey of the summe of church-discipline, for example, 287; S. Hudson, The Essence and Unitie of the Church Catholike Visible, And the prioritie thereof in regard particular churches discussed (London, 1644); S. Hudson, A vindication of The essence and unity of the Church Catholike visible. And the priority thereof in regard of particular churches. In answer to the objections made against it, both by Mr. John Ellis, junior, and by that reverend and worthy divine Mr. Hooker, in his Surve of church discipline. By Samuel Hudson minister of the Gospel at Capell in Suff. (London, 1650); S. Stone, A congregational church is a catholike visible church. Or An examination of M. Hudson his vindication concerning the integrality of the catholike visible church. Wherein also satisfaction is given to what M. Cawdrey writes touching that subject, in his review of M. Hooker’s Survey of church discipline. By Samuel Stone, Teacher to the Church of Christ at Hartford in New-England (London, 1652). For examples of Hudson’s views of Cotton, the Apologists, and Norton, see, Hudson, A vindication of The essence and unity of the Church Catholike visible, preface, 20, 162, 177, 198. 118 Hudson, Essence and unitie, preface, not paginated.

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churches, Hudson also declared “I finde it a subject flatly denied by many Divines of great worth both England, French and Germane, who affirme there is no Church Catholike visible, but that Church Catholike is invisible church only.”119 In other words, there was not a debate about the creedal belief in catholicity of the invisible church, but only in catholicity of a visible church with the power of jurisdiction. In regards to Matthew 16:19, Hudson is unequivocal, the keys were given to the “Church Catholick”, not to any “particular church.”120 Hudson’s main goal was to refute those who believed “particular churches to be prime churches”.121 He claimed the distinctions between ecclesia primae and ecclesiae ortae were not ancient conceptions, but first deduced by Robert Parker. The question, similarly posited by Goodwin on the Assembly floor, was “whether in our apprehension of Churches we are to begin at the Church Catholike and descend to particular churches, or begin at particular Churches, and ascend to Church Catholike.”122 Hudson readily recognized that there were those such as Zanchius, Gerhard, Chamier, Whitaker, and Ames who, against the “Pontificans” denied a Church Catholique to be visible.123 In Hudson’s opinion, they rightly denied the visible Catholic Church as “conspicuous, and glorious and manifest, specious and flourishing.”124 In denying the Church Catholic, these divines denied it belongs to one church, viz. the Church of Rome, “comprimizing the universality of the Church in itself, all that will be members of the “Church Catholike” must submit to them, and be members of that Church” and that that one church must be “under one visible head” (viz. the Pope).125 Nonetheless, the English presbyterians did assert that there was a Universal visible church, made up “of all the believers throughout the whole world”.126 So as he began to distinguish between “ecclesiae primae” and “ortae”, Hudson offered the caveat that he did not see distinctions between Church visible and invisible, but he saw differences “between Churches of the same kinde, viz., The Catholick visible, and the particular visible churches”. Therefore Hudson concluded, “I conceive the Church Catholick is Prima and the particular churches are Orta.”127 Hudson offered his position cautiously; knowing the “ascendendo” position was also tenable. This reticence to disavow the opposing position was most likely due to the influence of ————— 119

Ibid., preface, not paginated. Ibid., preface, not paginated. 121 Ibid., preface, not paginated. 122 Ibid., 10. 123 Hudson, A vindication of The essence and unity of the Church Catholike visible, 26. 124 Hudson, Essence and unitie, 11. 125 Ibid., 12. 126 Ibid., 4. 127 Ibid., 25. 120

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Robert Parker within the English presbyterian community. Parker had believed in synods of elders gathered from several churches, but only insofar as the particular church of believers – the ecclesiae primae, and the first subject of church power for Parker – was willing to give over its own power to synods. For Parker, the universal church was unable to exercise the power of the keys, and therefore cannot be the first subject of the keys.128 Hudson, conversely, believed that all promises, including the keys, were given to the Catholic Visible Church as the first subject. As Hudson stated, “that promise that the gates of hell shall never prevail against the Church is primarily given to the Church-Catholike visible here on earth”.129 All particular churches derive their power and rights from that Catholic Church.130 Edmund Calamy described Hudson’s argument in logical terms: “if there be a Church-Catholike visible, and this Church be not onely a ChurchEntitive but a Church-Organical, and a Totum Integrale, having all Churchpower habitually seated in the Officers of it.” These officers are part of particular congregations, and these “congregations are integral parts and members of the Church-Catholike, as the Jewish Synagogues were of the Jewish Church. And if the Ministry, Ordinances, and censures were given by Christ to the Church-general-visible,” then Calamy concluded, “the particular church is not the first receptacle of church power”.131 In this regard, Hudson could see common ground with John Norton, who in his response to Apollonius published by the Apologists and Cotton, argued that the “Church Catholik is an integral […] and that the particular churches are similar parts of that integral.” Indeed, Norton conceded “Political visibility is an adjunct in respect of the Church Catholick.”132 This may indicate another difference within congregational groups. Samuel Stone, for example, argued that the “catholike” church was not integral and was actually a species of the particular church, and the particular church was the genus.133 What is important to emphasize on this point, is that while Calamy agreed that the particular church was not entirely independent in terms of church government, he refused to say whether he believed, like Hudson, the par————— 128

Ibid., 25. Hudson, A vindication of The essence and unity of the Church Catholike visible, 220. 130 For all of Hudson’s arguments in favor of this position see, 25ff. 131 Hudson, A vindication of The essence and unity of the Church Catholike visible, to the reader. 132 Ibid., preface, not paginated. Cotton had a similar view that Hudson cited. Ibid., 51–52; J. Cotton, A brief exposition of the whole book of Canticles, or Song of Solomon; lively describing the estate of the church in all the ages thereof, both Jewish and Christian, to this day: and modestly pointing at the gloriousnesse of the restored estate of the church of the Iewes and the happy accesse of the gentiles, in the approaching daies of reformation, when the wall of partition shall bee taken away. A work very usefull and seasonable to every Christian; but especially such as endeavour and thirst after the setling of church and state, according to the rule and pattern of the Word of God (London, 1642), 191. 133 Stone, A congregational church is a catholike visible church, cha 5, reason 6. 129

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ticular church was ecclesiae ortae, or like Parker it was ecclesiae primae. Calamy readily acknowledged this topic was “an untrodden path” and full of “difficulty and intricacy”.134 Indeed, for Hudson, Matthew 16:19 speaks of the universal church, but not indistinctly, as the Apologists would have it. Because, as Hudson asserted, the gates of hell would not prevail against the church established in Matthew 16:19, it not only means the invisible church, but the “to-be” established “Church Catholik” which comprised visible members of the invisible church.135 The Apologists also saw Matthew 16:19 as related to the “mystical” church, but it was nonetheless indefinite and not the establishment of an “institutional political” church.136 For the Apologists Matthew 16:19 imports various types of keys (knowledge, faith, jurisdiction, power), and there is indeed a key of faith that is given to the church universal. But the key of jurisdiction was limited to the particular church, as constituted with elders and believers into one body. Goodwin specifically raised the question of the universal visible church in March 1644 when the Assembly debated the proposition that “There is one general visible church held forth in the New Testament”.137 According to Lightfoot, “Mr. Goodwin suspected there might be some snare in this proposition.” Goodwin pointed out that some “rise to church-government, ‘ascendendo’, from particular congregations to the church universal, some ‘et contra descendendo’; ergo, there may be some scruple or entanglement” in the debate over this proposition.138 Interestingly, it was Rutherford who responded to Goodwin with two views of the church universal. Whereas the English presbyterians debated amongst themselves as to the first subject of all church power, the universal or the particular church, Rutherford offered a third option. The “ecclesia presbyterialis” (meaning the elders in a particular church) is “ecclesia prima” and “the church catholic is “totem integrale,” and what power is given to it was neither “ascendendo,” nor “descendendo”, but immediately from Christ on every part.”139 As early as 1642, Rutherford was already arguing against this descendendo position, “The mistake hath beene, that some Doctors believe that the power of the keyes […] must have some common substance, viz. the universall Church, in which it must for orders ————— 134

Hudson, A vindication of The essence and unity of the Church Catholike visible, To the

reader.

135

Hudson, Essence and unitie, 18. Ibid., 19. 137 Lightfoot, Journal, 215. 138 Ibid., 215. This once again indicates Goodwin was using his personal Assembly notes when writing his Government of the Churches of Christ. 139 Ibid., 216; Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 313; For more on Rutherford’s view of the Universal church, 289ff. 136

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cause first, before it be given to certaine guides”.140 Rutherford believed the particular church was the “ecclesia primae”, something we will discuss more at length in the following chapters. But, unlike many of his English counterparts, he believed that a power could reside in a synod over multiple congregations, and the power in that Assembly was directly given to it by Christ. Goodwin similarly argued that Christ had specifically ordered that a particular gathered church was given a specific charter from Christ. This charter was the complete seat of church government; it was not derived from the church universal, nor was a power that could be passed onto greater assemblies. Rutherford argued that each level of church government, from the particular church, to the national Assembly also had their specific charters from Christ. The Apologists also believed power was not shared; a power was given to believers and a power was given to elders, each directly from Christ. The differences were clear, but the similarities should be noted. Both Rutherford and the Apologists believed that the particular gathered church, along with elders, had a specific charter from Christ. The elders had their charter, the church members had their charter, and neither were derivative from the other. Both of these beliefs, however, were different than the majority of English presbyterians. A strain of English presbyterianism was emerging that saw all power as derivative from the Universal visible church, and therefore whether power trickled down to the particular congregation was not vital, in their mind, to a functioning presbyterian government. The Assembly effectively left these fundamental questions about Matthew 16:19 unanswered. They eventually voted that the verse was indeed a proof text for Seaman’s position. The power of the keys was given to the Apostles, but they had failed to address the question that actually dominated the debate: how any of this related to the church. After only a few days of debate, on 1 November, the whole issue was shuffled to the side, never to be revisited again as a topic unto itself. For if the way power was allocated to the particular church was left unresolved, it was nearly hopeless to find a resolution to the kind of power allocated to synods of elders gathered from various congregations. They did not deny it was related to the church. Despite and perhaps because of the intense debate, they just ignored the question altogether. As it stood, the Assembly was perilously close to claiming that Matthew 16:19 simply meant that “the apostles were the extraordinary first subject of the power of the keys”.141

————— 140 141

Rutherford, Peaceable plea, 3. Norton, Answer, 79

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3.7 A break from “the fathers & the schoolmen” On 1 November, Bridge, who had been sick the day before, requested that “church” be added to the proposition voted in the day before, thereby adjusting the proposition to mean the keys were “given to Peter & apostles with the church.”142 Stephen Marshal retorted, rather naively given what had just transpired over the preceding three days, “Whether the church did receive it is yet a question undebated.”143 Charles Herle had echoed this concern when he warned the Assembly against over application of the terms Brownism and separatists, simply because Peter received the keys on behalf of believers. Herle had noted that “many of the fathers & schoolmen have understood it thus & yet are far from anarchy.”144 Bridge desisted from pushing a debate. Therefore, what these keys were, what their functions were, and in what sense the Apostles received them, and how they concerned the church, were questions left entirely unanswered. In the Apologist’s mind, and indeed to many in the Assembly, discussing Matthew 16:19 without any reference to the church, seemed extraordinary in the history of exegesis. Time and again in the debates, although the proposition dealt only with the Apostles, the members kept bringing up the church. Many in the Assembly failed to see any precedent for limiting Mathew 16:19 to Seaman’s proposition. Simpson tried to warn the Assembly that it would be outside the reformed tradition to use Matthew 16:19 to prove Peter as an apostle excluding the church. He cited Gerhard, who said “from the time of Christ that 16 Math [was] understood as concerning the church in all ages.”145 Gerhard himself had argued “that unto the Church [Christ] hath given the keys the kingdom of heaven.”146 Cornelius Burgess, knowing Gerhard’s wide influence regarding the power of the local church, quickly dismissed this statement with, “We are not to look at what Gerrard hath affirmed but never proved”.147 We have already noted that Fulke interpreted Matthew 16:19 to mean that the Christ gave the keys to Peter, and after him both to the Apostles and to the church. Whitaker, summarized Augustine, “that in Peter [the church] did receive [the keyes] properly, truely, and more principally than Peter himself.”148 We have already noted ————— 142

Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 233. Ibid., 233. 144 Ibid., 233. 145 Ibid., 218. Probably, J. Gerhard, Confessionis Catholicae, 4 vols. (1634), vol.1, 326–329; bk 2, art. 3, ch. 9 in vol. 2, 922–3. I am grateful to Dr. Chad van Dixhoorn for allowing me to use this citation. 146 Gerhard, The Summe of Christian doctrine, 255. 147 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 218. 148 Cited in J. Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared: In two Treatises. In the former, from the historical aspersions of Mr. Robert Baylie, in his book, called A Disswasive from the Errors of the Time. In the latter, from some contradictions of Vindicæ [sic] Clavium [by 143

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the Sorbonnists of Paris who believed that the church, upon Peter’s confession was the first subject of all church power, as did the German catholic John Wild (Ferus).149 If we look at the Dutch annotations on the whole Bible, written as a result of the Synod of Dort, we see that “upon Peter’s confession […] power is given also given to the Church […] and to all the Apostles.”150 Theodore Beza’s annotations stated that Peter’s confession “is the churches as well as his” and the keyes were given to “ministers of the word”, but there is no mention of the Apostles.151 What was clear was that the congregationalists had lost a debate that centred on the most fundamental tenet of their polity. The Apologists’ fears were not unfounded. Within two years the London presbyterians were claiming that the “keyes” only belonged to elders, and thus “the Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, with all their Acts, were immediately committed to Church-guides, viz. to the Apostles and to their successors to the end of the world; Math. 16.19 and 18.18.”152 The problem was never whether the elders received authorial power of the keys, but it was how that power was connected to, and in the context of, the particular church. Hence the ability to argue for congregational power on the basis of Matthew 18:18 was severely curtailed due to the constraints placed on Matthew 16:19. It was not that the Apologists disagreed with ministers receiving unique ministerial keys, it was the fact that the proposition and proof text might result in neutering power in the church. This account also indicates how important careful ecclesiological distinctions are when engaging these debates. Both Robert S. Paul and J. R. De Witt claimed that Seaman accused the “independents” of being “Brownists”.153 Yet Seaman clearly stated that “here hath been none of the opinions [of] the Brownists.”154 Paul and De Witt have collapsed Seaman’s following comment, that “not one argument used ————— Daniel Cawdrey]: And from, some mis-constructions of learned Mr Rutherford in his book intituled The Due Right of Presbyteries (London, 1648), vol. 2, 31. 149 Cotton cites Ferus’ commentary on Matthew 16. Likely from J. Wild, In sacrosanctum Iesu Christi domini nostri Euangelium secundum Matthæum, piæ ac eruditæ iuxta catholicam & ecclesiasticam doctrinam enarrationes / Per fratrem Ioannem Ferum, summæ Moguntiæ ædis concionatorem. Cum indice locupletissimo, recèns adiecto (1577), 48–56. Cited in Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared, 31. 150 Haak, The Dutch Annotations, Matt 16:18–19. 151 The New Testament of our Lord Iesus Christ, translated out of Greeke by Theod. Beza, whereunto are adioyned briefe summaries of doctrine vpon the Euangelistes and Actes of the Apostles, together with the methode of the Epistles of the Apostles, by the said Theod. Beza : and also short expositions on the phrazes and hard places, taken out of the large annotations of the foresaid authour, and Ioach. Camerarius, by Loseler. Villerius / Englished by L. Tomson, whereunto is adioyned a concordance or table made after the order of the alphabet, conteining the principall both wordes and matters, which are comprehended in the Newe Testament, (1582), 25. 152 Jus divinum regiminis ecclesiastici, 181. 153 De Witt, Jus divinum, 70; Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 152. 154 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 230.

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about this text but used by Robinson”, into their own belief that “independency” and Brownism are essentially the same.155 Seaman was not calling the Apologists “independents” or Brownists. It was a rhetorical trick to show that those, including Charles Herle, who read Matthew 16:19 as referring to the church of believers, and those who followed Robert Parker, were exegeting the verse in the same way as the “independent” John Robinson. After that, “The Grand Debate” to come was effectively moot. Nye and Goodwin in their Preface to Cotton’s Keyes of the Kingdom asserted, “many of our friends, and some that are of a differing opinion, [have] known our private judgments long, as likewise our owne Notes and transcripts written long agoe, can testifie; besides many public professions”; but that did not stop them from fearing the implications of believers having any share of the keys.156 In the middle of their debates on church government in March 1644, William Price said what was undoubtedly the position of many in the Assembly “That which hinders us in this debate is the want of accurate distinction betwixt authority & jurisdiction.” Charles Herle lamented, “[we lost] much time by mistaking one another”.157 As it stood, the keys would only reappear as it related to various aspects of church government, but never again as a topic unto itself. The variety of interpretations espoused on the floor of the Assembly cut across the ecclesiastical spectrum. The divines had different opinions; they all knew they had different opinions; and they were all evidently squeamish about debating the keys in the first place, and at times, equivocated in order to placate. What is most striking is that none of these discussions was new; each divine was keenly aware there was a variety of opinions being postulated, and they all to varying degrees tried to steer the discussion back from the brink of discord. It was the English presbyterians who triumphed, not because the congregational divines deftly hid their polity, but because the presbyterian majority knew that any further specificity in the proposition or the proof text would have forced many presbyterians to take sides against each other. The Apologists’ positions were fully developed, whereas the presbyterian majority was by no means united. Where the first subject of the keys was placed did not dictate whether or not one was a Presbyterian; it did dictate, however, what type of presbyterian one was. For example, the debates highlighted how unique some of the more clerical presbyterians’ position was in the Reformed tradition. On the other hand, there were those presbyterians who believed the particular church received the keys, but that the elders acted as their representatives. These positions understood church ————— 155

De Witt, Jus divinum, 70; Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 152. J. Cotton, T. Goodwin & Nye, The keyes of the kingdom of heaven, and power thereof, according to the Word of God (London, 1644), preface, not paginated; Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 4 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1643”, 230. 157 Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 17 Nov. 1643 to 11 April 1644”, 609. 156

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power as being generated from two opposing theological starting points that would have practical implications for how the national church would be designed. Even here, the congregationalists were the middle-way men.

3.8 Conclusion This was a pyrrhic victory for the various English presbyterian polities who were coalescing to form a majority for practical purposes. Indeed, reading the debates over excommunication almost exactly a year later, in October 1644 when a presbyterian settlement was a foregone conclusion, we can see how this unresolved issue continued to complicate debates about power in the particular church. Edmund Calamy wrote: “The 16 Math. gives the power of the keyes to the apostles; true is it alone?”158 In that debate, Calamy had become concerned that the Assembly had given power to the Apostles at the expense of the church. Citing the case of discipline by the church of Corinth, Calamy stated, “in this text [excommunication] was an act of the Church of Corinth. If Jesus Christ did give the power to the church, I see not by what authority they could doe it alone; any one apostle is not a church”.159 Thus, the month of October 1643 enables us to see the uniquely English complexities of ecclesiological debates. The English presbyterians, if anything, demonstrate ambivalence in the Apologists positions on the keys. For the congregational divines the debate represented one of the two most consequential debates in the Assembly. Not having sorted out what the keys were and who could use them, along with initially avoiding the question of a platform of church government, the congregationalists were outmanoeuvred. The presbyterians knew that codifying a platform of church government would have only crystallized their own differences. Thus the typical pamphlet critique outside the Assembly, that the Apologists feared that a platform would divide the independents in England, was actually true of the presbyterians in the Assembly.

————— 158 159

Van Dixhoorn, “Westminster Assembly Minutes, 12 April 1644 to 15 Nov. 1644”, 428. Ibid., 426.

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4. Millennialism

Crawford Gribben 4.1 Introduction In 1691, Richard Baxter reflected upon a century of eschatological study among British Reformed orthodox theologians. It had been an eventful series of decades, encompassing civil war, regicide and restoration, and popular interests in eschatology had both influenced and been influenced by these events. Baxter, like many others, was concerned by the fact that in these decades the eschatological consensus of the reformation confessions of faith had been overturned. And, throughout the British kingdoms, despite the publication of a series of new confessions of faith, no new eschatological agreement had emerged. Baxter’s concerns were particularly focused on the controversial rise of millennial belief, and his conclusions were entirely dismissive of its exponents.1 “It is a marvel,” he noted, “that the great disagreement of the Millenaries among themselves […] hindereth not their seeming Concord, while they can but cry up the Thousand years Reign, though most of them know not what the words mean.” He noted disagreements about the location of the proposed millennium (“some of them say, The Thousand years are on Earth; and some say, They are only of the Souls of the Martyrs and Confessors in Heaven: Some say, They are both in Heaven, or in the Air, and on Earth at once”); its extent (“some say, That they shall be a Jewish Monarchy at Jerusalem, and some, That it shall be of the godly all over the World”); the possibility of the physical presence of Jesus Christ on earth during the millennium (“some say, Christ will reign there visibly in his Humane Nature; Others, that he will only sometime —————

1 For Baxter’s eschatological position, see William Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1979), passim. Conventionally, scholars working in millennial studies have followed Ernest L. Tuveson in distinguishing “millennialim” (postmillennial, optimistic and gradualist theologies) from “millenarianism” (premillennial, pessimistic and radical theologies). Ernest R. Sandeen has noted, however, that the terms are interchangeable in much of the literature and a strict distinction should probably not therefore be imposed; Ernest L. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 33–34; Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 5 n. 3.

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appear, as he did after his Resurrection: And some, That he will Rule there only by Reforming Christian Princes”); the number of millennia to be expected (“some hold but one Thousand years, and some two”); and the relation of the millennium to the last judgement (“some say, That the Day of Judgement is the Thousand years […] and some, that it is only the Beginning and the End of the Thousand years, that the Judgement will take up, and the rest will be in other Government”).2 After a century of discussion, one recent commentator has noted, “no consensus had […] been achieved concerning whether the golden age would be literal or spiritual, in heaven or on earth, or, indeed, about whether the millennium was to occur in the past, present, or future.”3 But, Baxter complained, this did not put an end to the doctrine of the millennium: “Other differences seem almost reconciled to some, by the bare name of a Thousand years Reign.”4 Baxter’s concerns highlighted one of the most significant novelties of the theological cultures of seventeenth-century Britain. It was in eschatology that early modern British Reformed orthodox theologians displayed their greatest exegetical and applicatory variety. It was in their maintaining of millennial theories that they displayed greatest difference from the sixteenth-century confessions they had inherited and from their European contemporaries. It was in their constructions of millennial theories that authors from within the Reformed orthodox tradition drew on their widest range of source materials, including materials that ranged far beyond the boundaries of the biblical canon. And it was in their expression of millennial theories that these authors engaged most robustly, and sometimes most violently, with the world in which they lived.5 Eschatology, in general, and millennialism, in particular, must therefore be central to any discussion of the “diversity of tradition” among seventeenth-century British Reformed orthodox authors; and yet a study of the millennial theories produced by these authors will make problematic the notion of the “orthodoxy” and the singular “tradition” they might be believed to share. Seventeenth-century British Reformed orthodox writers found in their discussions of millennial theories a liberty of conviction and expression that challenges easy assumptions of their unity and their Biblical or confessional limitations. But these theories demonstrated that these ————— 2

Richard Baxter, The Glorious Kingdom of Christ, Described and Clearly Vindicated (1691),

9–10.

3 Reiner Smolinksi, “Caveat Emptor: Pre- and postmillennialism in the late reformation period,” in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (eds), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture: The Millenarian Turn (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 145–69, 147. 4 Baxter, The Glorious Kingdom of Christ, 9–10. 5 See Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), passim.

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authors, despite deep differences, shared a robust commitment to the study of biblical prophecy and its relevance to the times in which they lived.

4.2 The Tradition Established By the end of the sixteenth century, the European Reformed churches were united in their rejection of an earthly millennial hope.6 But their consensus was rapidly overturned. The rise of a millennial tradition among the Reformed churches began its consolidation in a series of texts so advanced in their revisionary instincts that they were not published in England until several decades after their author’s death. Apocalypsis apocalypseos (Frankfurt, 1609), translated as A revelation of the Apocalyps (Amsterdam, 1611), was prepared by Thomas Brightman (1562–1607), a former fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge with a penchant for Presbyterian polemic.7 Brightman’s writing reacted to the “hoch pot luckwarmnesse” of the English church, governed, as he complained, by bishops who “love riches and honor so dearely, that they content themselvs with the losse of a full Reformation.”8 His exegesis of Revelation 20:1–10 decisively broke with the Augustinian and reformation confessional traditions, and took the radical step of arguing that the passage referred to two periods of one thousand years each, only one of which had been completely fulfilled in the past. The first of these periods (Rev 20:1–3) had begun in or around 304 and ended in 1300, after which the release of Satan had been made evident by the Islamic invasions of Europe. The second period of one thousand years (Rev 20:4– 10) had begun with the revival of true theology at the reformation – a revival Brightman identified as the “first resurrection.” This beginning of the saints’ rule with Christ would, he believed, result in a “global Presbyterian utopia.”9 But Brightman also expected the fulfillment of eschatological events in the near future. In 1650, he predicted, the power of the Turkish empire and the Roman Catholic Church would fragment and the national conversion of the Jews would begin. By the end of the century, European protestants would enjoy “a most happy tranquility [...] the joy will be so much that it will be strange and unexpected: for in place of former troubles, there will be perpetual peace, & then Kings and Queens will be nursing —————

6 For an account of the origins and development of evangelical millennial belief, see Crawford Gribben, Evangelical Millennialism in the trans-Atlantic world, 1500–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 7 On Brightman, see Andrew Crome, “The Jews and the literal sense: Hermeneutical approaches in the apocalyptic commentaries of Thomas Brightman (1562–1607)” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2009). 8 [Anon.], Reverend Mr. Brightmans judgement (1642), sig. A2v–A3r. 9 Oxford DNB, s.v.

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fathers, and nursing mothers unto the Christian Churches.”10 And by 2300, he concluded, the church’s enemies would be finally destroyed and the eternal age would commence. In Brightman’s own day, these events appeared to be far in the future. His work fell victim to censorship laws while European protestants found themselves engaged in a bloody struggle for survival. Nevertheless, his writing was influential long before its first English publication in 1641.11 For many of his readers, Brightman would become the “English Prophet,” the “famous prophet of these times,” whose books made sense of the future.12 The broad outline of Brightman’s exegesis of Revelation 20:1–10 was confirmed historically by the Irish scholar and churchman James Ussher (1581–1656). Ussher, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin who was later to become archbishop of Armagh, was one of the towering intellectual figures of his day, whose “fascination with history, chronology and the ages of Satan, the Beast […] was an effort to justify the reformation movement on a historical-theological basis.”13 He was extremely widely read, and an avid book collector, and drove initiatives to enlarge the college library, in which Brightman’s works were early represented.14 In 1613, the same year in which Brightman’s Apocalypsis apocalypseos appeared, Ussher published his own first book, Gravissimae quaestionis de Christianarum ecclesiarum successione et statu, a long and ultimately incomplete account of the history of the true church.15 Gravissimae quaestionis expounded Revelation 20:1–10 to outline the course of church history and the descent of the faith that would eventually be identified with that of the reformation. Ussher’s historical enquiry was rooted in his exegesis of the thousand-year binding of Satan, which, following Brightman, he referred to two distinct periods of one thousand years each. He defined the first of these millennia as that in which Satan was “restrained [from] procuring the

————— 10

[Anon.], Reverend Mr. Brightmans judgement, sig. A4r. Crawford Gribben, “The Church of Scotland and the English apocalyptic imagination, 1630–1650,” Scottish Historical Review 88:1 (2009), 34–56. 12 Thomas Brightman, A most comfortable exposition of [...] Daniel, 895; The art of selfdeniall: or, A Christian’s first lesson: By that famous Prophett of these times: Tho: Brightman (1646). 13 Phil Kilroy, “Sermon and pamphlet literature in the Irish Reformed Church, 1613–34,” Archivium Hibernicum 33 (1975), 117. 14 Elizabethanne Boran, “The libraries of Luke Challoner and James Ussher, 1595–1608,” in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European universities in the age of reformation and counterreformation (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998), 98–102. 15 The text was translated into English by Ambrose Ussher, James’ brother, and English quotations will be taken from this unpaginated translation, Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 2940. 11

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universal seduction.”16 Despite the persecution of Huns, Goths, Alans, Vandals, and Persians, the true faith had been preserved, until, “after Constantine ye great and before Mahomet ye lawgiver, Sathan was indeed so much loose, not only to vex ye churches and christian people, but also to take away and waste their provinces and kingdoms: as may be seen in ye persecutions.”17 It was these persecutions that identified the first millennial age, Ussher contended, for “where the state of that thousand where Sathan was bound is described, there is mention made of those who were smitten for the testimony of Jesus, and for ye word of God.”18 The first millennium was a period of suffering, Ussher argued, following Calvin, and therefore not a period of heavenly bliss or earthly power, as John Foxe had suggested in his Acts and Monuments (1563); and, as a consequence, the end of the first millennium should be marked by the church’s appropriation of the authority of the state. Satan’s being “newly loosed” was evidenced in the long investiture controversy, the struggles for power of the Holy Roman Emperors Henry III (1046–56) and Henry IV (1084–1105) against popes Gregory VII (1073–85) and Paschal II (1099–1118).19 These conflicts drove the faithful remnant underground, when with “darkness prevailing, they […] dare not preach publickly.”20 Ussher’s rewriting of Revelation 20:1–10 therefore reversed the celebration of the church’s accession to temporal power in the earlier reformation tradition. Confronted with the unpromising nature of the historical record, Ussher was compelled to look elsewhere for the golden age he expected he would find. And so, following Brightman, he proposed a second millennium, a “new binding of Satan, by the restoring of the gospel,” which had begun with the recovery of evangelical truth at the reformation, but which had not been consummated.21 Ussher’s argument, therefore, was that protestant believers, in the midst of a general European ————— 16

James Ussher, The whole works of James Ussher, ed. C.R. Erlington and J.R. Todd, 17 vol. (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1847–64), 2:ix: “ligatum dici Satanum, quando ab universali seductione procuranda est cohibitus.” 17 Ussher, Works, 2:6: “Satanum ligatum asserit, ne persecutionibus amplius noceret Ecclesiæ: a Constantini videlicet Imperatoris temporibus, a quo sublatæ persecutiones, usque ad annum Domini 1300. quo Turcicum imperium in Ottomanno coepit.” 18 Ussher, Works, 2:6: “ubi status Millenarii illius, in quo vinctus erat Satanas, describitur, expressa mentio fit eorum qui securi percussi sunt propter testimonium Jesu, et propter sermonem Dei.” 19 Ussher, Works, 11:417. 20 Ussher, Works, 2:163–4: “Universa sanctorum abscondetur Ecclesia. Ha enim electi Dei sapient sibi ipsis id, quod sapient; ut tamen prædicare publice (prævalentibus tenebris) non præsumant. Non quod animare fideles et secretius exhortari desistant, sed quod prædicare publice non audebunt.” 21 Ussher, Works, 2:xi: “Pars tertia, deo volente, subsequeter: in qua agendum de statu rerum ab initio pontificatus Gregorii XI. usque ad initium pontificatus Leonis X. id est [...] De nova ligatione Satanæ per Evangelii restaurationem sub medium secundi millenari exiguo tempore fieri coepta.”

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crisis, were already experiencing the conditions of the millennium, and their martyrdoms were the proof of his claim. Ussher was never able fully to outline this radical re-thinking of evangelical eschatological expectations, for the third part of his book, addressing the period after 1370, was never published. It was not that he lost interest in the subject, for his doctoral oration, also delivered in 1613, addressed the “reign of the saints” in Revelation 20:4. Ussher resumed his research for the third part of Gravissimae quaestionis but felt increasingly constrained by the changing theological environment of the English court. As late as 1625, his book agent, Thomas James, reported that he was continuing to search for “helps necessary for the forwarding so great work,” but he found that his efforts were being stymied by those who should have been his allies.22 This new atmosphere had been evidenced in the publication of Richard Montagu’s A gagg for the new gospel? No: a new gagg for an old goose (1624), the first printed English denial of the reformation axiom that the Antichrist could be identified in the papacy.23 Those holding to traditional evangelical convictions found themselves increasingly sidelined within the English church, eclipsed by representatives of the newly fashionable party of sacramental revisionists associated with William Laud, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Ussher opted for strategic silence, and sought to consolidate his eschatological interests by attempting to recruit one of Europe’s leading millennial theorists as provost of Trinity College. But others refused to be silent. The re-reading of Revelation 20:1–10 to which both Ussher and Brightman had contributed was confirmed in a series of significant European publications, some of which moved beyond their conclusions to push the church’s golden age entirely into the future. Johannes Piscator (1546–1625), a professor at Herborn, one of the most important centres of European Reformed theology, had defended the notion of an entirely future millennium in a brief note in his German Bible translation (1604), but outlined his convictions in greater detail with the publication of In Apocalypsin commentarius (Herborn, 1613), a text reprinted in his Commentarii in omnes libros Novi Testamenti (Herborn, 1621).24 The commentary staggered many of its early readers and provoked outrage across the Lutheran and German Reformed world. In response, David Pareus (1548–1622), a professor at Heidelberg and Piscator’s only rival as the most important of the German Reformed theologians, published his own ————— 22

Ussher, Works, 15:264. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and protestant churches in English protestant thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112. 24 Das ander Thäil Des Newen Testaments I Darinnen [...] Die Episteln [...] und die Offenbarung S. Johannis, trans. and annotated by Johannes Piscator (Herborn, 1604), 451; Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 208. 23

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commentary on Revelation, In divinam Apocalypsin commentaries (Heidelberg, 1618), the longest to date in the European Reformed tradition. Its defense of the Augustinian tradition explicitly repudiated Piscator’s arguments and provoked an equally robust reply.25 Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) was one of many students who found themselves caught between their mentors’ competing millennial positions. Alsted was a student of Pareus who nevertheless drove forward Piscator’s expectation of a future golden age for the church.26 His Diatribe de mille annis apocalyptics (1627, second edition 1630) was a massive explication of Revelation 20:1–10 that was translated into German in 1630 and into English in 1643. The Diatribe indicated the extent to which these texts were taking their place in panEuropean culture of evangelical print, for the commentary directly engaged with that of Brightman, who served as a foil to many of the most advanced of Alsted’s claims. By the later 1620s, in other words, the millennial debate had begun to stretch across confessional divisions and across Europe, and, as a consequence, had begun to subvert the older denominational distinctions. And its influence was to be significant. Throughout the Thirty Years War (1618–48), a number of Lutheran theologians refused to be bound by their creedal commitments, began to consider the polemical and pastoral possibilities offered by the new millennial ideas, and adopted a robustly chiliastic faith.27 Further east, Hungarian Calvinists continued to investigate the possibilities of millennial theology, especially in the 1650s, after sightings of new comets.28 Across the continent, evangelicals were being driven to consider millennial ideas, and these ideas were being increasingly provided by English publications. But these English publications also reflected wider European influences – and not all of them protestant. Not all of his readers would have known it, but Brightman’s work had clearly depended on conclusions already advanced by one of the most eminent defenders of Catholic reformation, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine.29 European debates made a significant impact upon the English millennial tradition. And so, in the same year in which Alsted’s Diatribe was published, there also appeared Clavis Apocalyptica (1627), the most important publication by the Cambridge philologist and biblical scholar, Joseph Mede (1586–1638). Mede’s theological and ecclesiastical interests contrasted sharply with those of his partners in the millen————— 25

Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 212–14. Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 130–131. 27 R. B. Barnes, Prophecy and gnosis: Apocalypticism in the wake of the Lutheran reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 28 Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the frontier, 1600–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 268–70. 29 Crome, “The Jews and the literal sense: Hermeneutical approaches in the apocalyptic commentaries of Thomas Brightman (1562–1607),” passim. 26

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nial revolution.30 He was certainly not a puritan. He and Brightman had taught in the same university, but they had quite different attitudes towards the hierarchical system of the Church of England. Brightman, an emerging Presbyterian, had been dismissive of the bishops’ rule, but Mede found the pattern of their Episcopal government described in Revelation itself.31 Yet his work was more radical than his ecclesiological preferences might suggest. The first edition of the Clavis was followed by a second, enlarged, edition in 1632, and an English translation, prepared by Richard More, entitled The key of the Revelation (1643). The book made evident Mede’s debt to the mathematical revolution. Focusing on the symbolic numbers in the biblical apocalyptic literature, he argued that “every interpretation” should be “tryed as it were by a square and plumb-rule” by “the characters of Synchronismes.”32 His commentary found a focus in apocalyptic pessimism. He admitted that “our Brightman” had considered that references in Revelation to “warre and slaughter” had already been fulfilled. But, he argued, the “expectation of a future calamity conduceth more to piety, then an over-credulous security thereof, as if it were already past.”33 And, in any case, the future promised as much blessing as woe. Mede followed Piscator in launching the millennium, “the most abstruse of all the propheticall Scripture,” solidly into the future.34 He denied the claims of Ussher and Brightman that the reign of the saints was one-third complete. Like Alsted, Mede argued that the text of Revelation 20:1–10 described only one period of one thousand years, and that this millennium could only be expected in the future. It was a master-stroke that made possible the radical eschatological reflections of later English evangelicals. Mede’s Clavis advanced a violent assault on the Augustinian and reformation tradition while modifying the conclusions of its earliest revisers. His most important book certainly had its admirers, especially among the puritans whose ranks its author never joined. In the year of its publication, Ussher invited Mede to take up the position of provost of Trinity College Dublin. Mede refused, but the men continued to correspond, regularly on eschatological issues. In 1628, Mede sent Ussher a number of copies of his new book. His covering letter clarified both his dismissal and his appropriation of medieval chronological concerns: “I had no intent or thought, nor yet have, to avow that old conceit of the Chiliasts, That the world should as ————— 30 See Jeff K. Jue, Heaven upon earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006); Sarah Hutton, “The appropriation of Joseph Mede: Millenarianism in the 1640s,” in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (eds), Millenarianism and messianism in early modern European culture: The millenarian turn (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 1–13. 31 Joseph Mede, The key of the Revelation (1643), 1:35. 32 Hill, Antichrist in seventeenth-century England, 27; Mede, The key of the Revelation, 1:27. 33 Mede, The key of the Revelation, 2:13. 34 Mede, The key of the Revelation, 2:121.

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it were labour 6000. years, and in the seventh thousand should be that glorious sabbath of the reign of Christ.” Instead, he noted, he was “inclined to think it much nearer.” Mede therefore argued in his letter that the end of the present age should be expected in 1736, “the very year when the 1260 years of the beast’s reign will expire.”35 Ussher, in reply, expressed his appreciation for his colleague’s conclusions. Ussher described the Clavis Apocalyptica as a “most accurate explication,” which he “cannot sufficiently commend,” and two years later, in 1630, he again offered Mede the role of college provost.36 Other puritans continued to admire his scholarly contribution. Over one decade later, William Twisse, first prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly (1643–49), the most important English ecclesiastical gathering of the seventeenth century, noted in his preface to the English translation of the Clavis (1643) that Mede had “exceeded in merit all others that went before him in this argument” for the millennial reign of Christ.37 Yet the Clavis was a model of brevity. Twisse noted Mede’s plans for a “Larger Commentarie, which I am perswaded he hath written,” but, like’s Ussher’s third volume of his history, it was never published. Even in the early 1640s, Twisse admitted, when Mede’s doctrine of the millennium was “delivered with that moderation and subjection to the censure of the Church, that it can displease no man,” it was “not received by many as Orthodox.”38 Nevertheless, by the 1640s the basic parameters of the emerging millennial tradition had been established. Evangelicals had entered the seventeenth century with an eschatological orientation that was apocalyptic without yet being millennial. In the early decades of the new century, evangelical writers across Europe pushed the millennium from the past to the present, explaining the text with reference to the martyrdoms of medieval “heretics” or the revival of true religion at the reformation. But, by the 1630s, Reformed theologians in England, Ireland and the German states had begun to argue that the golden age described in Revelation 20:1–10 could only be located in the future. Their arguments would be confirmed by a number of American writers in the 1640s, including John Cotton, who argued that the millennium could be expected in 1655, Roger Williams, the defender of “soul liberty,” Edward Johnson, the historian, Michael Wigglesworth, the poet, Samuel Sewall, the commentator, as well as Increase

————— 35

Ussher, Works, 15:407. Ussher, Works, 15: 561; R. G. Clouse, “The rebirth of millenarianism,” in Peter Toon (ed.), Puritans, the millennium and the future of Israel: Puritan eschatology, 1600 to 1660 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1970), 60. 37 Mede, The key of the Revelation, sig. av. 38 Mede, The key of the Revelation, sig. a4v. 36

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and Cotton Mather.39 By then, as it would become clear, the foundational expectation of the evangelical millennial tradition had firmly taken root.

4.3 The Tradition Challenged Once established, this tradition mutated with remarkable speed, in both popular and scholarly publications and across the trans-Atlantic world. This trend was particularly evident among English, Scottish and American puritans, who shared a common eschatological vocabulary, but debated its proper sources and conclusions. Scottish writers were noticeably reluctant to move from assumptions of an unspecified “latter-day glory” to embrace the full-fledged millennialism of their English and New English counterparts.40 But, in the latter territories, these debates developed such momentum that scholars have struggled to come to terms with their breadth and significance. Much of this confusion stems from the fact that these “hotter sort of protestants” did not confine themselves to “the Bible only” in their search for knowledge of the future. Throughout this period, English publications demonstrated the enduring popularity of texts which advertised themselves as being the work of Merlin or Nostradamus. One recent commentator on this phenomenon has noted that the apocalyptic thought of early modernity combined Christian Cabala, Hermeticism, and angelology, as well as alchemy, astrology, and historical and textual criticism.41 These were demanding intellectual traditions, abstruse and arcane, but they successfully entered the popular imagination and successive puritan expositors felt the need to warn their readers of the dangers inherent in dependence on these extra-Biblical sources. Thus readers of Thomas Hayne’s Christs kingdom on Earth (1645) were advised of the “senseless” teaching of “Rabbi Elias,” the third-century Hebrew midrash projecting six thousand years of human history which had found some powerful advocates within a small coterie of the more radical millennial theorists, while others, like Thomas Hall in A confutation of the millenarian opinion (1657), exposed the excessive credulity of some towards the competing eschatological positions of “Jewish Targums and Talmuds, Sibylline Oracles, the Koran, and astron—————

39 Stephen J. Stein, “Editor’s introduction,” in Jonathan Edwards, Apocalyptic writings, ed. Stephen J. Stein, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 5, 8; John Stuart Erwin, “Like a thief in the night: Cotton Mather’s millennialism” (unpublished PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1987). 40 Gribben, “The Church of Scotland and the English apocalyptic imagination, 1630–1650,” 34–56. 41 Katherine Firth, The apocalyptic tradition in reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 5.

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omy.”42 These writers sought to remove the influence of pagan apocalyptic and replace it with data more firmly derived from Scripture. Writers in Scotland and New England were much less likely to appeal to extracanonical texts. This insistence on “the Bible only” could not silence the eschatological debate. Discussion collected around a number of key terms. Perhaps the greatest range of reference was ascribed to the term “Antichrist.” Almost every sixteenth-century commentator who had published their conclusions on the identity of the Antichrist had pointed to the wickedness of the papacy.43 This claim was finally granted creedal status in the Irish Articles (1615), a revision and expansion of the Thirty-nine Articles (1563) which was prepared under Ussher’s guidance and adopted by the convocation of the Church of Ireland.44 The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) similarly concluded that the Pope “is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God.”45 But this common identification presented evangelical exegetes with a genuine methodological difficulty. Early modern evangelicals knew that Jesus Christ “shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” (2 Thess 2:3–4). If the Antichrist were to reveal himself in the visible church – which this passage’s reference to the “temple of God” was widely believed to signify – then the Roman Catholic Church had to be recognized as being an authentic Christian denomination.46 George Gillespie, a Scottish commissioner at the Westminster Assembly, consequently argued the case: “If there was not a true church when Popery and Antichristianism had most universally spread itself, why is it said that Antichrist sitteth in the temple of God?”47 But this reconsideration of the status of the Roman Catholic Church did not necessarily demand any concessions to its claims. Apocalyptic rhetoric was driving the evangelical recognition of the churchly status of the Roman com————— 42

A. R. Dallison, “Contemporary criticism of millenarianism,” in Peter Toon (ed.), Puritans, the millennium and the future of Israel: Puritan eschatology, 1600 to 1660 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1970), 111; John Bunyan, Works, ed. George Offor (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1860), ii. 424; Saul Leeman, “Was Bishop Ussher’s chronology influenced by a midrash?” Semeia 8 (1977), 127; Ussher, Works, vii. 45. 43 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 93–127. 44 For Ussher’s influence on the Irish Articles, see Amanda L. Capern, “The Caroline Church: James Ussher and the Irish Dimension,” Historical Journal 39 (1996), 57–85. 45 Westminster Confession of Faith 25:6. 46 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 128–72. 47 George Gillespie, A treatise of miscellany questions (1649); rpt. in The Presbyterian’s armoury, ed. W.M. Hetherington (Edinburgh: Robert Ogle, and Oliver & Boyd, 1846), 27.

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munion, even as it identified the head of that communion as the eschatological enemy of true believers. But this discourse also insisted on the ongoing danger of the Roman communion: “Rome is not to cease from being Babylon,” Ussher explained, “till her last destruction shall come upon her; and that unto her last gasp she is to continue in her spiritual fornications, alluring all nations unto her superstition and idolatry.”48 Not every one of Ussher’s peers could appreciate the nuance that underlay this argument. In the first half of the early seventeenth century, the eschatological role of the Roman Catholic Church was both being denied and expanded. It was being denied by many of the sacramental party within the Church of England, those followers of William Laud who attempted to answer questions of the historical validity of the Reformed faith by tracing an ecclesial succession through western catholicism – and, in so doing, qualified the assumption that evangelicals would always want to reject the legitimacy of the papal office.49 But this definition was also being expanded, not least by an increasing number of puritans, who identified the extension of the influence of the Antichrist from the Vatican through the Church of England and into the sectarian movements of the mid-century crisis. Anglicans bore the brunt of verbal assault in this intra-puritan conflict, as radicals complained that their liturgy and theology continued to owe too much to the medieval church. James Ussher, as archbishop of Armagh, had good cause to complain that nothing was “so familiar now a days, as to father upon Antichrist, whatsoever in church matters we do not find to suite with our own humours.”50 While the debate about the identification of the Antichrist tended to distinguish puritans from “cooler” evangelicals, the debate about the proper interpretation of Revelation 20:1–10 tended to divide puritans from each other. The violence of these arguments about the millennium is a key to understanding the importance of the issues at stake: for many puritans, eschatology was an applied rather than an abstract subject, a cultural as well as a political conflict in which one was automatically involved. The tradition developed through a tangled web of publications engaged in a dynamic and impassioned debate, quoting and refuting one another with inter-textual abandon. The subtitle of Thomas Hayne’s Christs kingdom on Earth (1645), for example, promised an examination of What Mr. Th. Brightman, Dr. J. Alsted, Mr. J. Mede, Mr. H. Archer, The Glimpse of Sions Glory, and such as concurre in opinion with them, hold concerning the thousand years of the Saints Reign with Christ, And of Satans binding. Similarly, Thomas Goodwin’s An exposition of the book of Revelation (posthumously published, but based on sermons preached in 1639) referred to Theodore Beza, ————— 48

Ussher, Works, 12:542–3. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, passim. 50 Ussher, Works, 7:45. 49

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Thomas Brightman, Joseph Mede and John Foxe, Patrick Forbes, James Ussher, Matthew Parker, Franciscus Junius, David Pareus, William Ames, and John Napier.51 Similarly, John Cotton, in The churches resurrection (1642), advanced a postmillennial apologetic that argued for an allegorical reading of the first resurrection (Revelation 20:4), which was the “rising of men from spirituall death to spirituall life” and the revival of Independent church government, and on that basis positioned his colleagues in the Church of England with the horrors of Antichrist, arguing that “you will finde little difference betweene Episcopacy and Popery, for they are governed by Popish Canons.”52 Puritans were adopting competing positions, and advertising their exegetical differences. On both sides of the Atlantic, therefore, a number of demarcated millennial positions emerged from this debate. Even in mid-century, the Augustinian tradition continued to find a few defenders. Like Calvin, these writers rejected any hope of a future “conversion of the Jews” and consequently faced no difficulty in wondering where to place this great evangelistic advance within their eschatological scheme. Chiliasto-mastix (Rotterdam, 1644), an anti-millennial apologetic authored by the minister of a Scots congregation in the Low Countries, Alexander Petrie (c. 1594–1662), was one of a tiny number of works published to reassert Augustinian orthodoxy, in this case in a response to Israel’s redemption (1642) by Robert Maton. But Petrie’s book was itself refuted in – and, at least in length, entirely overwhelmed by – Maton’s replies in Israel’s redemption redeemed (1646) and A treatise of the Fifth Monarchy (1655). This exchange was emblematic of the larger trend. Like Maton, most puritan writers seem to have adopted a millennial theory of one kind or another, and, like Maton’s texts, these defenses of millennial theory dominated in the literary marketplace. Believing that this period of one thousand years had some relationship to the church in a more glorious future state, their notion of the “blessed hope” increasingly combined evangelistic, ecclesiastical, missiological and political aspirations. There were, of course, hugely significant disagreements among these millennial believers. Modern distinctions between pre- and postmillennialism find their roots in this period, as theologians sought to isolate and arrange the various elements of prophetic discourse. Some exegetes advanced their view of radical disjunction between this age and the next. They argued that Christ would return before the millennium, and often (though not always) added that he would remain in person with his church during that —————

51 Thomas Goodwin, Works, 12 vol. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1861–66), 3: 4, 3, 36, 88, 61, 87–8, 103–4, 178, 180, 181, 194; Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 209. 52 John Cotton, The Churches Resurrection (1642), 9, 19.

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period. Some of these premillennialists were not slow to realize that their position actually demanded two future comings of Christ. For some, no doubt, this proved embarrassing, but others were keen to capitalize on the novelty. John Archer, in 1643, made the point with some force: “Christ hath three comings,” he declared; “the first was when he came to take our nature, and make satisfaction for sin. The second is, when hee comes to receive his Kingdome; [...] A third is, that when hee comes to judge all, and end the world: the latter commings are two distinct commings.”53 Not many of his premillennial brethren were as emphatic. Other postmillennial theologians postulated a more gradual movement into the new age, as increasingly reformed societies paved the way for Christ’s return after the millennium. Some of these theorists called for radical intervention in the political status quo – the Fifth Monarchists engaged in a series of violent attempts to destabilize successive governments through the 1650s and early 1660s, for example – but others assumed a much more obviously divine movement in the conditions of the new age.54 The existence of this debate as to the relationship between the second coming and the millennium should not be understood as indicating that these competing millennial traditions had become clearly distinguished. The discussion has become particularly pointed as scholars have sought to define the eschatological teaching of the most important seventeenth-century creedal statement in the trans-Atlantic world, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). Modern scholars have struggled to reach consensus on the significance of its teaching. R. G. Clouse argued that the Confession is “clearly” amillennial;55 LeRoy Froom viewed the Confession as “the strongest premillennialist symbol of Protestantism”;56 and James de Jong argued that its statements “must be seen as a deliberate choice of mild, unsystemized, postmillennial expectations.”57 But, recognizing the fluidity and occasional obscurity of early modern evangelical discourses, we should not impose a-, pre- or postmillennial paradigms without proper qualification. There was significant latitude both between and within these competing positions as they continued to be defined throughout this period. ————— 53

John Archer, The personall reigne of Christ upon Earth (1643), 15. B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-century Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), passim . 55 Clouse, “The rebirth of millenarianism,” 60. 56 L. E. Froom, The prophetic faith of our fathers: The historical development of Prophetic Interpretation (Washington: Review and Herald, 1948), ii. 553. 57 James de Jong, As the waters cover the sea: Millennial expectations in the rise of AngloAmerican Missions, 1640–1810 (Kampen: Kok, 1970), 38 n. 11. Along with the above texts, important studies of puritan eschatology include William Lamont, Godly rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (London: Macmillan, 1969); idem, Richard Baxter and the millennium; Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men; Christianson, Reformers and Babylon; Firth, The apocalyptic tradition in reformation Britain; John Coffey, Politics, religion and the British revolutions: The mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 54

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Of course, with so much polemical advantage at stake, millennial ideologies could not remain static. Apocalyptic imagery and themes were too potent to remain safely within the control of careful exegetes. The tradition continued to mutate, develop, and divest itself of external controls, spiralling into confusion, chaos, and, eventually, outright opposition to the conservative political parameters upon which it had been established, culminating in the dramatic execution of Charles I in January 1649. But the seeds of this revolution were sown in the slow and cautious formation of evangelical millennial belief.

4.4 Conclusion British Reformed theologians in the seventeenth century revolutionised existing patterns of millennial belief. Three discernable paradigms emerged from their mid-century debate. Those theories that did not conform to these three paradigms were increasingly regarded as eccentric – even the double millennium motif, advanced exegetically by Brightman, defended on an historical basis by Ussher, and later adopted by Dutch Reformed theologians, including Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669).58 In the later 1620s, Joseph Mede had proposed a scholarship characterised by pious modesty, reminding his readers that “we shall […] enquire in vaine of those things which God would have kept secret and to be reserved for their owne times.”59 But in succeeding decades, as English and American puritans advanced upon his conclusions, and began to take the most significant roles in the advance of evangelical millennialism, the Augustinian tradition continued to be challenged, and the staple elements of the older ideology broke down completely in the free market of ideas created by the collapse of censorship in the 1640s and in the theological turbulence of the British and Irish civil wars. Publications by Brightman, Mede and Cotton drove the three kingdoms and their North American colonies into the vortex of revolution and swept away their latent Augustinianism.60 Later seventeenthcentury theologians constructed enduring paradigms of evangelical millennial belief. Those millennial positions that did not conform to these three paradigms were increasingly regarded as eccentric. By the end of the 1650s, —————

58 W. J. Van Asselt, “Chiliasm and Reformed eschatology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centirues,” in A. van Egmond and D. van Keulen (ed.), Christian hope in context, Studies in Reformed Theology 4 (Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2001), 24. Cocceius would also argue for seven dispensations in redemptive history; W. J. Van Asselt, “Structural elements in the eschatology of Johannes Cocceius,” Calvin Theological Journal 34 (1999), 76–104. 59 Mede, The key of the Revelation, 1:121. 60 For a discussion of the eschatological conflicts of the Westminster Assembly divines, see Gribben, The puritan millennium, 105–19.

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theologians on both sides of the Atlantic and within and beyond the British Reformed orthodox movement had abandoned the apocalyptic but not yet millennial eschatological schemes proposed by the first generation of evangelical scholars, and were developing theories that addressed with the utmost seriousness the possibility of an earthly millennial hope.

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5. Lapsarian Diversity at the Synod of Dort

J. V. Fesko 5.1 Introduction At first glance some might wonder why attention would be given to the Synod of Dort, a somewhat continental affair, in a book largely devoted to British Reformed theology.1 To borrow a turn of phrase from Tertullian, What has Dort to do with Westminster? True, the Synod of Dort was largely a continental event, but it had an international character. There was an official delegation from the Church of England that participated in the debate and work of writing and composing the Canons. Hence it should be no surprise that the English delegation entered the fray of the debate over supra- and infralapsarianism. So, in a word, the debates over lapsarianism are part and parcel of the history of British Reformed theology in the seventeenth century. The English delegation to Dort was appointed by King James VI (1566– 1625) to represent England and the Anglican Church. Among those appointed to represent England were Dr. George Carleton (1559–1628), bishop of Llandaff, Dr. Joseph Hall (1574–1656), who was Dean of Worcester, Dr. John Davenant (1572–1641), Master of Queens College in Cambridge as well as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, and later would become Bishop of Salisbury in 1621, Dr. Samuel Ward (1572–1643), a Master of Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge as well as Archdeacon of Taunton, Walter Balcanqual (1586–1645) of Scotland, and Thomas Goad (1576–1638), the chaplain to Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot (1562–1633). Goad was not one of the originally selected theologians but replaced Joseph Hall once the Synod was underway.2 —————

1 This essay is based upon material originally presented in J. V. Fesko, “Diversity Within the Reformed Tradition: Infra– and Supralsarianism in Calvin, Dort, and Westminster” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Aberdeen, 1999). It has been updated and modified. 2 M. W. Dewar, “The British Delegation at the Synod of Dort—1618–19,” EQ 46/2 (1974): 105; Mark Shand, “The English Delegation to the Synod of Dordt,” British Reformed Journal 28 (1999): 37–39; Keith L. Sprunger, Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), 355. For background information on John Davenant see Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pederson, Meet the Puritans: With A Guide to Modern Reprints (Grand Rapids: Reformation

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In addition to the presence of the English delegation well-known theologian William Ames (1576–1633) was also present but as the advisor to the moderator of the Synod, Johannes Bogerman (1576–1637).3 The presence of English theologians such as Carleton, Davenant, Ward, and Ames, shows that a number of key Puritan theologians participated in the doctrinal discussions and debates at Dort. The English delegation was one of the more significant foreign influences at the Synod, and as the exposition that follows below will indicate, they shaped the lapsarian direction and outcome of the Canons.4 Ames, while not a member of the Synod, had a role in matters that took place behind the scenes, and though no record appears indicating his role in the debates, one has to wonder as to the degree that he influenced the discussion of these issues.5 For example, Ames was involved, as we will see below, in the defense of the supralapsarian, Johannes Maccovius (1588–1644), who was accused of making God the author of sin.6 Therefore because of the presence of the English delegation at Dort, as well as the work of Ames, Keith Sprunger rightly characterizes the Synod of Dort as a “prime event of seventeenth-century British-Dutch church history,” and therefore a subject worthy of consideration in a book that treats theological diversity in British seventeenth-century Reformed theology.7 However, before the study proceeds, it is important to give some basic definitions, which are best shaped by the following question: Does God take into account man’s sin in the divine decree of election? In other words, did God decree the predestination of man supra lapsum (above the fall) or infra lapsum (below the fall). There are two basic considerations regarding lapsarianism: (1) the ordo decretorum (order of the decrees) and (2) the object of predestination. Depending on a theologian’s position, his understanding of the order of the decrees can determine what he believes regarding the lapsarian question. On the other hand, the number and order of the decrees can vary from theologian to theologian; therefore the question ultimately hinges upon how a theologian understands the object of predestination. According to a basic supralapsarian position man is predestined creabilis et labilis (creatable and fallible). In other words, man ————— Heritage Books, 2006), 169–72. For a biography of Joseph Hall see G. Lewis, A Life of Joseph Hall, D. D. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1886). For a biography of John Davenant, see Morris Joseph Fuller, The Life, Letters and Writings of John Davenant D. D. (London: Methuen & Co., 1897). For coverage of the delegation’s actions and role throughout the Synod see Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–19). Church of England Record Society (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2005), esp. xxi–xxii n. 16. 3 For Ames’ role at the Synod see Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 52–70. 4 Sprunger, Doctor William Ames, 58. 5 See, e.g., Sprunger, Doctor William Ames, 56–57. 6 Sprunger, Doctor William Ames, 60–62. 7 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 355.

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is a creatable possibility and is capable of falling into sin. According to a basic infralapsarian position man is predestined creatus et lapsus (created and fallen).8 In the former, God does not take into account man’s fall into sin in the decree of election; in the latter, the fall is factored into the eternal decree of election. One should note, though, that these definitions are basic, in that there are a number of variations on these two major positions. Nevertheless, employing these basic definitions, particularly regarding the object of predestination, will prove helpful in surveying the debates over lapsarianism at the Synod of Dort.9 What this study will show is that despite disagreement over these matters, sometimes intensely debated, the Synod was content to allow a diversity of opinion on the the debate under consideration. From 13 November 1618 until 29 May 1619, eighty-six delegates from various Reformed churches across Europe met to respond to the Arminian Remonstrance. There were twenty-six Reformed theologians from eight different foreign countries and territories, including England, Scotland, the Palatinate, Hesse, Switzerland, Nassau-Wetteravia, Geneva, Bremen, and Emden. There were also ten Dutch delegations representing various provinces. Each delegation was normally comprised of four pastors and two elders. In addition to the provincial delegations, there were five professors from various Dutch universities, including Franciscus Gomarus (1563– 1641) of Groningen, Sibrandus Lubbertus (1555–1625) of Franeker, Antonius Thysius (1565–1640) of Harderwyk, Johannes Polyander (1568–1646) of Leiden, and Antonius Walaeus (1573–1639) of Middelberg. There were also eighteen civil delegates at the Synod, but they did not participate in the theological debates at Dort.10 The members of the Synod decided that the best way to render judgment upon the Remonstrance was to have each of the delegations submit a verdict on each of the five separate articles. Hence each of the nineteen delegations submitted a theological examination of the Remonstrant articles, and from these various verdicts the Canons were written.11 It is during the delivery of the various verdicts upon the first Remonstrant article (on predestination) that the debate over infra- and supralapsarianism arose.

—————

8 Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Greek and Latin Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986), 292. 9 For a survey of the various positions see the helpful series of lectures delivered by Richard A. Muller, “Revising the Predestination Paradigm: An Alternative to Supralapsarianism, Infralapsarianism, and Hypothetical Universalism,” Mid-America Fall Lecture Series, Fall 2008, Dyer, Indiana. 10 Donald W. Sinnema, “The Issue of Reprobation at the Synod of Dort (1618–19) in Light of the History of this Doctrine,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of St. Michael’s College, 1985), 214. 11 Sinnema, “Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 338.

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5.2 The Debate over Infra- and Supralapsarianism Beginning on 6 March 1619 (session 103) the foreign delegations began to read their verdicts over the first article on predestination. The English, Palatinate, Hessian, Swiss, and Nassauvian delegations delivered their verdicts without incident or disagreement.12 In fact, Walter Balcanqual, a Scottish theologian and member of the English delegation who was tracking the progress of the proceedings of the Synod for the English ambassador in Holland, notes: “So now the judgments of all the Exteris Theologi concerning the first article were read, among whom there was nothing to be seen but full and orthodox content, for which the president told us God was to be praised, and he prayed God that harmony might be found among the provincials.”13 When the Dutch delegations began to read their verdicts, specifically the Dutch professors, the debate over infra- and supralapsarianism surfaced. When the Dutch professors began to discuss their verdicts with the rest of the Synod, Franciscus Gomarus, a supralapsarian, objected to how the three Dutch professors, Polyander, Thysius, and Walaeus, who submitted a joint statement, defined the object of predestination in their verdict.14 The three Dutch professors submitted the following definition: Predestination to salvation is the eternal, most free, and immutable decree of God, through the free exercise of his good pleasing will he elected certain men to salvation in Christ out of the whole of mankind which had fallen into sin and perdition, and he decided to effectually call those chosen according to his election through the word and his spirit, to justify them through faith in Christ, sanctify them, preserve them in faith and holiness, and lastly to glorify them, in order to show the wealth of his grace and mercy.15

————— 12

Geeraert Brandt, The History of the Reformation and Other Ecclesiastical Transactions in and about the Low-Countries, from the Beginning of the Eighth Century, Down to the famous Synod of Dort, 4 vol. (1720–23; London: AMS Press, 1979), 3.252; also Sinnema, “Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 289. 13 John Hales, The Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable Mr. John Hales of Eton College and Dr. Balcanquals Letters from the Synod of Dort to the R. Honourable Sir D. Carlton L. Embassador (London: Printed for Tim Garthwait, 1659), 20. Note, all archaic spelling through the essay has been updated. John Hales, and later Walter Balcanqual were given the task of making reports to the English ambassador in Holland during the Synod of Dort. John Hales reported on the proceedings of Dort until 2 February 1619 when Balcanqual assumed the reporting duties; Balcanqual’s letters begin a new series of pagination, though his work comes after Hales. 14 Hales, Golden Remains, 20. 15 Acta Synodi Nationalis, In nomine Domini nostri Iesu Christi, Autoritate Illustr. et Praepotentum DD. Ordinum Generalium Foederati Belgii Provinciarum, Dordrechti, Habitae Anno MDCXVIII et MDCXIX. Accedunt Plenisima, de Quinque Articulis, Theologorum Judicia (Dordrechti: Typis Isaaci Elzeviri, Academiae Typographi, Societatis Dordrechtanae Sumptibus, 1620): “Praedestinatio ad salutem est aeternum, liberrimum et immutabile Dei decretum, quo pro gratuito voluntatis suae beneplacito quosdam homines ex universo genere humano in peccatum

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What is immediately noticeable is that this definition is markedly infralapsarian because they assert that predestination is “out of the whole of mankind which had fallen into sin and perdition.”16 This means that the three Dutch professors believed the object of predestination was homo creatus et lapsus. The professors maintained the same distinction in their definition of reprobation when they said that reprobation is the most free and most just decree of God by which he decided not to elect in Christ certain men from the human race fallen into sin, and not to call them by the same efficacious spirit as he called the elect from the state of their perdition so that he might justify and glorify them, but he determines to let them walk in their own ways justly hardened in their sins, and to condemn at last to well-earned destruction those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness or reject in various ways and degrees the Gospel preached to them.17

Again, they note that the object of reprobation, or non-election, is “men from the human race fallen into sin.” Gomarus testified that he agreed with his colleagues in their definitions of election and reprobation with one exception. He did not agree with their conclusion that the object of predestination was homo creatus et lapsus. Balcanqual notes that Gomarus appealed to the confessions of several churches in support of his argument by noting that none of them “did determine hominem lapsum to be the object of predestination, which he said had not as yet been determined in the Belgic churches, in the French nor English churches, and many others.”18 After this objection the verdict of another Dutch professor, Sibrandus Lubbertus, who signed his name in affirmation of the verdict of the other three Dutch professors, read his verdict upon the first article. Lubbertus defines election and reprobation in the following manner: ————— prolapso ac perdito ad salutem in Christo elegit, eosdemque secundum suam electionem per verbum ac spiritum suum efficaciter vocare, per fidem in Christum justificare, sanctificare, in fide ac sanctitate conservare, et tandem glorificare constituit, ad divitis suaegratiaeac misericordiae demonstrationem. Atque hoc est, de certis quibusdam hominibus in Christo et per Christum salvandis, verum, unicum et totum Electionis decretum” (III.3). They cite the following Scripture: Matt 25.34; John 10.29; 17.11; Rom 8.29–30; 9.11, 15, 18, 22–24; 11.5, 28–29; Eph 1.5, 11; 2 Thess 2.13; 1 Pet 1.2. 16 Acta Synodi, III.3: “ex universo genere humano in peccatum prolapso ac perdito.” 17 Acta Synodi, III.8–9: “Reprobatio est liberrimum ac iustissimum Dei decretum, quo statuit quosdam homines ex genere humano in peccatum prolapso, non eligere in Christo, nec eadem Spiritus sui efficacia, qua electos, ex statu suaeperditionis vocare, ut eos justificet et glorificet, sed eos in suis ipsorum vijs finit incedere, ac veritatem ipsius in injustitia detinentes, vel Evangelium ipsis praedicatum diversiis modis ac gradibus reijcientes, atque in suis peccatis iuste induratos, post multam suam tolerantiam merito tandem exitio adjudicare.” They cite the following Scripture references: Psa 147.19; Matt 13.9; 11.25, 27; John 6.43; Acts 14.16; 16.6–7; 17.30; 28.24–25; Rom 1.24, 28; 9.6, 18, 21; 11.7–8; Eph 2.1–3, 12; 4.17–18; 1 Cor 1.8; Heb 6.5–6; 10.26; 2 Thess 1.8; 2.11–12; 1 Pet 2.8. 18 Hales, Golden Remains, 21–22.

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Predestination is the eternal, most free and just counsel, or purpose, by which God from eternity for himself elected in Christ out of pure grace and mercy certain people out of the corrupt human race and predestined them to eternal life so that he might effectually call them in time into the communion of his Son, endow them with the true knowledge of Jesus Christ, faith and repentance, justify them, and lastly glorify them to the praise of his glorious grace; some he has not elected in Jesus Christ, nor has he predestined them to eternal life, but by his just judgment he has passed them by in his eternal election, and has left them as vessels of wrath in sin and misery, and on account of their own sin he will at last justly condemn them, so that he may declare his mercy in the elect and his justice in the non-elect.19

Again, Lubbertus defines the object of election and reprobation as homo creatus et lapsus when he notes that people are predestined “out of the corrupt human race.” Gomarus stood up again and agreed with his colleague, but he made the same exception as before: he disagreed over the object of predestination. With his objection noted, Gomarus proceeded to give his own verdict upon the first article. Gomarus delivered his verdict which included the following definition on predestination: “The predestination of man to salvation is the decree of God, concerning his glory and grace which suffice for salvation, and effectually accomplish it, to be bestowed upon certain men out of the whole human race in accordance with his most free, pure, and unmerited good pleasure.”20 On reprobation Gomarus argues: “Final reprobation is the decree of God, by which, according to his most free will and for the declaration of his vindicating justice, he has determined not to give grace or glory to certain men out of the whole human race, but permit them to fall freely into sin and leave them in their sin, and at last justly condemn them on account of their sin.”21 At first glance it does not appear that Gomarus’ definitions greatly differ from those of his colleagues. In general, it is true —————

19 Acta Synodi, III.11: “Praedestinatio est aeternum, liberrimum, et iustum consilium sive propositum, quo Deus sibi ab aeterno ex corrupto humano genere aliquos ex mera gratia et misericordia in Christo Iesu elegit, et ad vitam aeternam praedestinavit, ut eos in tempore efficaciter vocaret ad communionem Filii sui, vera cognitione Iesu Christi, fide et resipiscentia donaret, justificaret, ac tandem glorificaret ad laudem gloriosaesuaegratiae; aliquos non elegit in Iesu Christo, neque ad vitam aeternam praedestinavit, sed justo suo judicio in aeterna electione praeteriit, et tanquam vasa iraein peccatis et miseria reliquit, eosque tandem propter peccata ipsorum iuste condemnabit, ut in illis suam misericordiam, in his suam justitiam declaret.” 20 Acta Synodi, III.21: “Praedestinatio hominis ad salutem est decretum Dei, de gloria et gratia ad salutem sufficiente, et efficaciter perficiente, certis, ex universo genere humano, hominibus, pro liberrimo ac mere gratuito beneplacito, conferenda.” Gomarus offers the following in support of his definition: 2 Thess 2.13; Rom 8.28–30; Phil 2.13; and Eph 1.6. 21 Acta Synodi, III.24: “Reprobatio peremptoria est decretum Dei, quo, pro voluntate sua liberrima, ad declarationem iustitiaesuaevindicantis, certos ex humano universo genere homines, nec gratia nec gloria donare, sed in peccatum libere prolabi permittere et in peccatis relinquere, iusteque tandem propter peccata condemnare constituit.” He offered the following references in support of his definition: Matt 11.26; 7.23; John 6.44–65; 10.26; Rom 11.7–8; Rev 20.13; 9.18, 20–22.

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that there is not a great difference between the definitions; there is, however, a minute difference in the phrase that indicates the object of predestination. While the other Dutch professors defined the object of predestination as homo creatus et lapsus, Gomarus does not specify that man has indeed fallen; Gomarus simply uses the phrase, “men out of the whole human race” in both definitions. He does not specify that mankind has fallen or has committed any sin. This reflects Gomarus’ opinion that the object of predestination is homo creabilis et labilis. Beyond this minute distinction, Balcanqual notes that Gomarus “said nothing of that question of the object of predestination whether it was homo lapsus or not, which silence in that point being excepted, his judgment in all points agreed with the former judgments of his Colleagues.” He goes on to note that Gomarus’ verdict, however, was not accepted without objection. Polyander stood up and testified on behalf of himself and his colleagues, Thysius, Walaeus, and presumably Lubbertus, that they all agreed with the verdict of Gomarus with the exception of the object of predestination. They believed the object of predestination was homo creatus et lapsus.22 Hence, despite Gomarus’ subtlety, his omission of whether or not mankind had fallen, whether unintentional or deliberate, did not go unnoticed by his colleagues. Balcanqual notes about the disagreement that there was “little hope of agreement among them,” because for several hours the Dutch professors “did only dispute by many arguments against Gomarus.”23 This, however, was not the only moment during the Synod when a disagreement over the object of predestination arose. During the initial debate between Gomarus and the other Dutch professors, Gomarus made an appeal to the confessions of the Belgic, English, and French churches. He argued that the object of predestination had not been determined by the churches of those nations.24 The English delegation challenged this assertion. The English delegation first inquired as to whether Gomarus had indeed intended to say that the English churches had not determined the object of predestination; to this inquiry Gomarus responded affirmatively, but he also noted that he had no evil intentions in his declaration. Gomarus said that “the words of the confession [the ThirtyNine Articles] determined no farther of the subject, than (quosdam ex humano genere),” or “certain ones out of the human race.”25 The members of the English delegation objected to this statement for two reasons: (1) because in their verdict they decided for homo creatus et lapsus; and (2) the Thirty-Nine Articles did indeed specify the object of predestination. ————— 22

Hales, Golden Remains, 21–22; Brandt, History of the Reformation, 3.252. Hales, Golden Remains, 20. 24 Hales, Golden Remains, 21–22. 25 Hales, Golden Remains, 24–25; Brandt, History of the Reformation, 3.254–55. 23

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When the English delegation delivered their verdict upon the first article, they defined predestination and reprobation in the following manner: “The decree of election, or predestination to salvation, is the efficacious will of God, by which according to his good pleasure, for the purpose of demonstrating his mercy, he planned the salvation of fallen man, and prepared such means, by which he willed to bring the elect effectually and infallibly to that end.”26 On the subject of reprobation, they determined: “Reprobation properly called, or non-election, is the eternal decree of God, by which he determined by his most free will not to have mercy upon certain persons fallen in Adam.”27 The English delegation in both definitions specified that both those subject to election and reprobation were people already fallen into sin. The reason the English delegation was very specific on this point was due to the instructions they received when they were sent to participate in the Synod. They were instructed not to commit the Church of England to any new doctrinal positions and to remain firmly within the confines of the Thirty-Nine Articles. The members of the English delegation, therefore, cited not only their delivered verdict upon the first article, but they also brought out the Thirty-Nine Articles and read from the seventeenth article. Balcanqual writes: “So D. Goad read publicly the 17 article of the confession where the words are quosdam ex humano genere, in exitio et maledicto, which last words Gomarus had left out.”28 Gomarus explained that he had misunderstood the confession and would willingly submit himself to the judgment of the Synod for his error. Gomarus, however, went on to explain that the reason he mistakenly thought that the Church of England had not decided on the object of predestination was because he thought that William Perkins (1558–1602) and William Whitaker (1548–95), two fellow supralapsarians, would not be in conflict with the confession of the church. Additionally, he continued to argue that the University of Leiden, for example, had never decided that the object of predestination was homo creatus et lapsus. For these reasons, he thought it —————

26 Acta Synodi, II. 3: “Decretum Electionis, seu Praedestinationis ad salutem, est efficax voluntas Dei, qua pro suo beneplacito, ad demonstrationem suaemisericordiae, salutem hominis lapsi intendit, eique media talia praeparavit, quibus electos ad istum finem, efficaciter et infallibiliter perducere voluit.” They cite the following: Ps 113; Isa 47.14; Matt 13.11; John 6.39, 37; Rom 8.30; 9.18, 23; Eph 1.4, 11; 1 Tim 1.15; 2 Tim 1.9; 2 Thess 2.13. 27 Acta Synodi, II.11: “Reprobatio proprie dicta, seu non-electio, est aeternum Dei decretum, quo statuit, proliberrima sua voluntate, quarundam personarum in Adamo lapsarum, non […] misereri.” They cite the following: John 10.26; Rom 6.21; 9.11, 15ff, 21. 28 Hales, Golden Remains, 24–25; edited spelling. The seventeenth article reads: “Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind [eos quos in Christo elegit ex hominum genere, a maledicto et exitio liberare], and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour” (Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 3 vol. [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1877], 3.497).

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prudent that the Synod should not make a decision regarding the object of predestination but instead leave it an open issue. Nevertheless, Gomarus was rebuked by the Synod and instructed that the members were within their rights to hold various opinions, but that he should not meddle in the decisions of other churches. After this exchange of words between Gomarus and the English delegation, the president of the Synod determined that after all of the verdicts were read on all the Remonstrant articles, a decision would be rendered on the object of predestination.29 After this pronouncement, the debates over infra- and supralapsarianism ended and the Synod continued with the reading of the rest of the verdicts on the other Remonstrant articles. One of the main questions behind the debate over infra- and supralapsarianism is, Why were there disagreements over the object of predestination? Another related question is, Was this merely a disagreement about the ordo decretorum, or were there any scriptural grounds for their debates? The answer to both of these questions lies in the Reformed interpretation of the locus classicus on predestination: Romans 9. In Romans the general conclusions of the infra- and supralapsarians are harmonious on the major points concerning predestination. This general agreement on the nature of predestination is reflected in the similarity between the verdicts of Gomarus and the other Dutch professors as previously noted. The difference, however, between the infra and supralapsarians lies in how they interpret Romans 9.21: “Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use, and another for common use?” The main question is whether the lump (fura¿matoß or massa) refers to an uncorrupted mass (as asserted by supralapsarians) or a corrupted mass (as affirmed by infralapsarians).30

5.3 The Supralapsarian Position From a supralapsarian perspective, Gomarus argues in his Analysis and Explanation of the Epistle to the Romans that it is necessary to define properly what is understood by the words lump and clay in Romans 9.21.31 He notes that “some say the terms refer to pots of the earthly potter; others offer a better explanation that they are the material of the heavenly potter.”32 ————— 29

Hales, Golden Remains, 24–25. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vol., ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001–08), 2.383–84. 31 Franciscus Gomarus, Opera Theologica Omnia (Amsterdam: Johannis Janssonii, 1664), 428b. 32 Gomarus, Opera, 428a: “Quidam de testacea figuli terreni materia; alii de materia figuli cœlestis melius exponunt.” Karl Barth has an excellent exposition of both positions; see Church 30

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He determined through careful analysis that the terms do not refer to earthen vessels but instead is an allegory for the human race as it is prepared for election and reprobation. Gomarus argues: “Others, therefore, more precisely argue that the terms do not refer to clay pots and a lump; but they conclude mankind is the subject of discussion: and the question is twofold, depending on whether the reference is to the creation of mankind or to mankind already created and fallen.”33 Gomarus continues to explain that there are distinguished theologians on both sides of the debate, but that the preferred position is the supralapsarian interpretation because it agrees with the common principles of reason and the wisdom of God.34 First, Gomarus notes that “when the purpose is the reason for the existence of an object, it exists firstly in intention and lastly in execution.” He further elaborates: In the mind of every wise craftsman, what is first in intention precedes the actual inception of the works themselves: as is unanimously agreed without any exception, by the consensus of the Philosophers. Therefore, God, the most wise architect of mankind, even though he has decreed everything simultaneously, yet, proposed as first in order of importance the purpose of homo creabilis before he ordained the creation: otherwise contrary to the order of wisdom and the nature of purpose, he would have decreed the means to the destined end, before the end itself.35

In other words, Gomarus believed God intended to glorify himself by the demonstration of his mercy in the election of some and the reprobation of others; this auto-doxological manifestation of mercy and justice is the ultimate goal. Therefore, according to the stated principle it is necessary to postulate two groups of people, the elect and the reprobate, prior to anything else, including the creation. Another point that must be observed is Gomarus’ recognition that he is not spelling out a specific chronological order of the decrees; he admits that God “has decreed everything simultaneously.” He instead assigns the logical priority of the decree of election and reprobation over that of creation, the fall, and salvation. The second reason that Gomarus gives for the superiority of the supralapsarian interpretation is that the “potter, who would first decide on the creation of vessels, ————— Dogmatics, vol. 2, The Doctrine of God, pt. 2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley, et al. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1957), 127–45. 33 Gomarus, Opera, 428a: “Alii igitur accuratius, non de luto et massa testacea; sed de humana disputari statuunt: idque bifarium, ut ad genus humanum, aut condendum, aut conditum et lapsum referatur.” 34 Gomarus, Opera, 428a. 35 Gomarus, Opera, 428b: “Cùm enim finis sit causa, cujus gratiâ res est: primus est in intentione et postremus in executione: ac propterea in omnis artificis sapientis mente, praecedit operis ipsius aggressionem: ut citra ullam exceptionem, unanimi Philosophorum consensu approbatur. Quocirca Deus sapientissimus generis humani architectus, etsi simul omnia decrevit, ordine tamen primum proposuit finem hominis creabilis, antequam decreverit creationem: alioqui contra sapientiaeordinem et finis naturam, decrevisset primò media ad finem destinata, quàm ipsum finem.”

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and then think about their purpose, would deservedly be considered foolish.” He believes that this is an “absurd idea, just as it does not apply to the wise potter, so it applies all the less to God himself, who is the only source of sure wisdom and order.”36 At this point, there are those who may accuse Gomarus of subjecting Scripture to the rigors of logic without properly exegeting the disputed verse. Gomarus, however, did not restrict his comments to the principles of logic and reason alone. Gomarus examined the various verses that are related to Romans 9.21 and specifically focuses in on verse seventeen of the same chapter: “Scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.’” Gomarus returned to the source of the quote in Exodus 9.17 and notes: The word of Moses, Kytdmoh properly means, ‘I have caused you to stand or I have determined.’ For that reason Paul has excellently translated I have raised: just as he does in Acts 13.23, where he says using a simple term, ‘from this man’s seed (namely David’s) according to the promise h¡geire he has raised up, he has raised up for Israel the savior Jesus,’ that is, he has brought him forth, or formed him, from the seed of David: and Matthew 3.9: ‘God can raise up,’ that is, create, or form, ‘sons of Abraham from these stones.’37

Gomarus goes on to argue grammatically that the Hebrew language supports his interpretation of the passage in question: And there is no reason why objection should be raised that in Greek it can have this meaning: but not in the Hebrew word dmo: for this word does not mean to exist, or to become, nor in the hiphil conjugation dymoh does it mean to cause to exist, or to create; which Hebrew word Moses uses. For, on the contrary, as one must observe, dmo is understood in Psalm 33.9 in that sense, not for to stand; but metaphorically, for to arise and to exist: ‘he commanded and it came into existence,’ the Hebrew is dmoyw and likewise the interpreters of the Septuagint translated kai« e˙kti÷sqhsan as, ‘they were created.’ As R. D. Kimchi also asserts in his Hebrew commentary this can be accepted concerning the creation whether of the world or that which followed. And so for the hiphil conjugation of dymoh, the best interpretation is to cause to stand, instead of to cause to exist or to create, for just as things which perish are said metaphorically

—————

36 Gomarus, Opera, 428b: “Figulis ille stultus merito censeretur, qui decerneret vasis effectionem primum, deinde de fine cogitaret. Quod absurdum, ut in figulum sapientem non cadit: ita multo minus in Deum ipsum, sapientiaeet ordinis certi fontem unicum.” Cf. Brandt, History of the Reformation, 3.254. 37 Gomarus, Opera, 426b: “Deinde quia magis congruit cum verbo Mosis Kytdmoh quod propriè significat, stare te feci, seu constitui. Idcircò optimè vertit Paulus excitavi: quemamodum idem Actor. 13.23. eadem simplici voce usus, dicit, hujus (Davidis scil.) è semine, secundum promissionem h¡geire suscitavit, excitavit Israëli servatorem Jesum, hoc est, è semine Davidis produxit, formavit: et Matt 3. v.9. Deus potest ex lapidibus hisce suscitare, id est, creare, formare, filios Abrahae.”

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to fall: so, things which are said, to rise up; and it is objected that this exposition does not agree with the words of Moses, verse 15, but it most certainly agrees. God gives in verse 16 this reason why he did not destroy Pharaoh himself, and the people, namely because he created him, not expressly to destroy him: but, so that through his hardness of heart, he might reveal the glory of his power.38

In other words, based upon a dissection of various linguistic and grammatical points of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and with the help of Hebrew commentaries, Gomarus argued that God creates the reprobate, Pharaoh in this case, for the express purpose of demonstrating His glory through their hardness of heart. This is why he believed the object of predestination is homo creabilis et labilis. Gomarus did not end his analysis of the chapter at this point; he goes on to explain the significance of Romans 9.21. Gomarus comments on Romans 9.21 that he did not believe the verse supported the infralapsarian position of homo creatus et lapsus because it did not specifically mention this in the text. Gomarus notes: “Next, if by the term lump, corrupt mankind is to be understood, God the potter would not be said to make vessels, some for glory and others for shame, but from vessels full of shame, or liable to sin and malediction, to renew certain ones to glory, and to leave others in their own disgrace.”39 In other words, Gomarus contends that if the infralapsarian case for homo creatus et lapsus was correct, Romans 9.21 might read “Or does not the potter have a right over the [corrupted] clay, to make from the same [corrupted] lump one vessel for honorable use, and [leave the other in corruption] for common use.” On the contrary, Gomarus did not view the text according to the infralapsarians’ claim. He also argued that when the infralapsarians tried to support their claim with verses such as Jeremiah 18.6, this did not refer to predestination but instead to God’s providence over man and nations: “But it is objected that the same sentiment which is found in Jeremiah 18.6 and following, should be found in the same context in Paul. Nevertheless, Jeremiah does ————— 38

Gomarus, Opera, 427a: “Neque est cur objicatur, in Graeca voce, hoc locum habere posse: sed non in Hebraea dmo: hanc enim vocem non significare existere, seu fieri, nec in conjugatione hiphil dymoh existere facere, seu creare; qua voce Hebraeâ Moses utitur: nam contra, quod observandum est, dmo accipitur Psal. 33.v.9. eo sensu, non pro stare; sed metaphoricè, pro oriri atque existere: praecepit et extitit, Hebraicè est dmoyw et sic LXX. interpretes rectè verterunt, kai« e˙kti÷sqhsan et creata sunt. Sicut etiam de creatione vel mundi, vel rerum sequentium, accipi posse R. D. Kimchi asserit in Hebraicis suis comment. Ideoque optimè in conjugatione hiphil dymoh stare facere, pro existere facere seu creare accipitur: ut enim quaepereunt, cadere dicuntur metaphoricè: sic quaeoriuntur, exurgere; atque haec expositio Mosis verbis v.15 non repugnat, ut objectatur, sed optimè convenit. Causam enim reddit Deus vers. 16 cur ipsum Pharaonem, et populum non perdiderit, nimirum quod crearit ipsum, non ut ea ratione perderet: sed, ut in illo, indurato, suae potentiae gloriam patefaceret.” 39 Gomarus, Opera, 428b: “Deinde si massae nomine, genus humanum corruptum intelligeretur, non diceretur Deus figulus vasa facere, alia ad decus, alia ad dedecus: sed ex vasis dedecore plenis, seu peccato et maledictioni obnoxiis, quaedam ad decus renovare, quaedam in suo dedecore relinquere.”

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not speak about the creation of man, but only about the governance of man once created, whose state God changes in accordance with his own power and just will and the ways of men.”40 Hence Gomarus not only supported his position logically, but he also supported it with a careful examination of the key passages, verses, and languages, to support his conclusions; in other words, Gomarus did not form his opinion based upon the speculation of metaphysics. The infralapsarians, however, also examined various passages of Scripture but came to different conclusions.

5.4 The Infralapsarian Position Over and against Gomarus’ supralapsarianism, the three Dutch professors, Polyander, Thysius, and Walaeus, define predestination in the theological text they co-authored, the Leiden Synopsis, as God’s eternal and immutable decree, by which from the entire human race that had fallen by its own fault from primaeval integrity into sin and destruction He elected a fixed multitude of individual men, neither better nor worthier than the rest, of His sole good pleasure, to salvation in Christ Jesus, and resolved to give them to His Son to redeem, and by a peculiar and effectual mode of operating to bring them to living faith in Himself and to a sure perseverance in the same living faith, and that for a proof of His gracious mercy and for the praise of His glorious grace.41

One can immediately see that this definition is similar to the verdict they delivered at Dort during the discussions on the first remonstrant article. What this definition does, however, is give more information as to why the Dutch professors thought homo creatus et lapsus was the object of predestination. One of the primary presuppositions to this definition is the idea that those who are predestined to salvation are predestined to salvation “in Christ Jesus.” The Dutch professors believed that homo creabilis et labilis was not in need of salvation because he had not yet sinned. The only reason a person would need a mediator was if he had sinned. What they believed the supralapsarians did is separate predestination from the means by which it was executed, namely salvation in Christ. The Dutch professors comment that they “willingly concede that election to salvation and the means of —————

40 Jer 18.6: “‘Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does?’ declares the LORD.’ Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel;” Gomarus, Opera, 428b: “Sed objicitur, quaemens est in propheta Jeremia cap. 18.v.6 et coeteris, eadem esse debet hoc in loco Pauli. Atqui Jeremias loquitur non de creatione hominis, sed tantùm de gubernatione creati, cujus statum Deus, pro sua potestate et justa voluntate et hominum moribus, commutat.” 41 The Leiden Synopsis, XXIV.24, in Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics: Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1950), 163.

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salvation may be considered separately,” but they “deny that on that account these acts in God’s decree are truly different.”42 They believe that predestination may not be severed from the means of execution and therefore write: When it is objected to us that ordination of means is superfluous, when the elect have already been absolutely ordained to salvation by some antecedent act, this arises from sheer ignorance of the orthodox view, because God never elected anyone absolutely to salvation, if ‘absolutely’ excludes the means which God has ordained for securing salvation. That ordination to salvation involved in God’s purpose the consideration of the means necessary to salvation, always involved them from eternity in that very same act.43

Hence, unlike the supralapsarians who considered the initial election and reprobation of people apart from any consideration of means, the infralapsarian Dutch professors considered predestination and salvation in Christ as a unit. Again, only homo creatus et lapsus is in need of a mediator. In contradistinction to the supralapsarianism of Gomarus, the Dutch professors have a christological focus. In Gomarus’ supralapsarianism, predestination is an expression of God’s sovereignty, whereas in the Dutch professor’s infralapsarianism predestination is an expression of God’s saving mercy in Christ. For this reason the professors write: “In this decree of election we assign first place to Christ as the head and redeemer of the Church.”44 A second reason they argue for homo creatus et lapsus is due to various passages of Scripture. The Dutch professors argue that virtually every passage of Scripture that deals with predestination speaks of homo creatus et lapsus. For example, they write: For we are elect in Christ, so that we might be holy, Eph 1.4 and predestined to be adopted as sons, v. 5. Therefore we were outside of Christ previously, unrighteous, and unsuitable of the adoption of sons. We are elected unto salvation through the sanctification of the Spirit and through faith in the truth, 2 Thess 2.12, therefore we were previously destitute of the sanctification of the Spirit and faith in the truth. Those whom he foreknew, he predestined to be conformed in the image of Christ, that image of God therefore, was not in them, Rom 8.30. The elect are vessels of mercy, just as the reprobate are vessels of wrath, Rom 9. God also exclusively pities the wretched, just as he only demonstrates his wrath towards sinners, Rom 1.18.45

————— 42

Leiden Synopsis, XXIV.18, in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 171. Leiden Synopsis, XXIV.19, in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 171–72. 44 Leiden Synopsis, XXIV.24, in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 168. 45 Johannes Polyander, et al., Synopsis Purioris Theologiae, ed. Herman Bavinck (Lugduni Batavorum: Didericum Donner, 1881), XXIV, 22, (p. 226): “Electi enim sumus in Christo, ut essemus sancti, Eph 1.4 et praedestinati in adoptionem filiorum, vers 5. ergo antea eramus extra Christum, injusti, et ab adoptione filiorum alieni. Electi sumus ad salutem in sanctificatione 43

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In other words, these passages of Scripture always speak of predestined man in need of salvation. Moreover, they argue that for God to demonstrate mercy one must be in a miserable state; likewise, for God to demonstrate wrath one must be deserving of wrath. This, however, is not the only Scriptural data they bring forth. They conclude based upon two other passages of Scripture that homo creatus et lapsus is the object of predestination. The professors argue that the matter from which God graciously elects, is the human race fallen from its primeval integrity into sin through its own fault, and therefore liable to condemnation by him. For God did not plan to make this choice from any other human race, than from that which was to be continued by procreation. Now Scripture in fact testifies that the whole world has fallen into sin, 1 John 5.19, likewise Jews and Greeks are all under sin, there are none that are righteous, not even one. Rom 3.9 and 19. Every mouth is silenced and the whole world is uJpo/dikoß twˆ◊ qewˆ◊ˆ, liable to divine condemnation; whence it evidently follows, that from the same human race God has decided to elect from eternity those who are his.46

Hence, while the supralapsarian Gomarus argues that Romans 9.21 speaks of a massa pura, the Dutch professors would argue that based upon the analogia fidei the object of predestination is homo creatus et lapsus. The infralapsarian position as argued by the three professors, therefore focuses around two major points: (1) the idea that it is contrary to reason to assign man a mediator if he is not in need of salvation; and (2) that Scripture speaks of predestined man as having fallen into sin. The supralapsarians thought, however, that this construction had God creating the human race without an end goal in mind. This is why they gave election and reprobation the intended divine auto-doxological telos, primary logical priority. In contradistinction to the supralapsarians, the Dutch professors believed that God willed first to show what liberum arbitrium amounted to in man, and then what the benefit of His own grace. So with the infinite light of His own knowledge foreseeing that it would turn out, that man created in His image would with his entire poster-

————— Spiritus et fide veritatis, 2 Thess 2.12. ergo sanctificatione Spiritus et fide veritatis destituti. Quos praecognovit, eos imagini Christi conformandos praedestinavit, imago ergo Dei in iis no erat. Rom 8.30. electi sunt vasa misericordiae, quemadmodum reprobi vasa irae, Rom 9. Deus autem proprie miseretur miserorum, quemadmodum non nisi in peccatores iram aut odium demonstrat, Rom 1.18.” 46 Synopsis Purioris Theologiae, XXIV, 21, (p. 226): “Materia ex qua Deus quosdam gratiose elegit, est genus humanum e primaeva integritate in peccatum sua culpa prolapsum, ac proinde et coram eo condemnationis reum. Nam Deus non instituit hanc electionem ex alio hominum genere, quam quale erat propagandum. Jam vero Scriptura testatur totum mundum jacere in malo, 1 Joh. 5.19, item Judaeos et Graecos omnes esse sub peccato, ac non esse justum ne unum quidem. Rom 3.9 et 19. omne os esse obturatum et totum mundum esse uJpo/dikoß twˆ◊ qewˆ◊, divinae condemnationi obnoxium; unde evidentur consequitur, ex eodem hominum genere Deum suos ab aeterno eligere statuisse.”

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ity abuse his liberum arbitrium[.] God, in order that the more manifest way of an admirable righteousness and mercy might be opened up, considered it more in accord with His most almighty goodness to make well of ill, than not to let evil live, as Augustine reminds us.47

That is to say, the infralapsarians wanted to emphasize the same glory of God in predestination as the supralapsarians, but they did so in a different manner. The supralapsarians believed that God’s glory is manifested in the demonstration of mercy and justice and therefore creatures are created towards those ends. The infralapsarians, on the other hand, believed that God’s glory is manifested when man misuses his liberum arbitrium and then God demonstrates his glorious mercy to some and leaves the others in their own self-induced condition to demonstrate his justice. The question, however, remains, What position did the Synod of Dort determine more appropriate?

5.5 The Lapsarian Outcome of the Canons Prior to the composition of the Canons, all of the individual verdicts from each of the delegations were read before the Synod. The foreign delegations presented first, followed by the Dutch professors, and they were followed by the various provincial Dutch delegations. Out of all of the verdicts delivered upon the first article concerning predestination, all but two decided for homo lapsus as the object of election and reprobation. The two exceptions were Gomarus, who, as previously noted, argued that man was predestined from “the whole human race;” the second exception was the delegation from South Holland who decided that it was not necessary to define whether or not mankind was homo creatus et lapsus or homo creabilis et labilis.48 What is also noteworthy is that all of the delegations, save the two noted exceptions, spoke of reprobation in Augustinian terms of preterition, or non-election. For example, the English delegation writes: “This nonelection, or preterition, does not presuppose some quality or other condition in the rejected man than what is found in the elect and what is common to the whole mass.” In fact, the English delegation delivered the only verdict that was annotated with multiple references to the works of Augustine in addition to multiple Scripture references.49 In other words, the Synod over————— 47

Leiden Synopsis, XXIV.23, as cited in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 158. See Acta Synodi, II.1–III.89, for the various verdicts upon the first article on election and reprobation. Also cf. Sinnema, “The Issue of Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 338–90, for a thorough exposition and analysis of each individual verdict on the issue of reprobation as it relates to the object of predestination. 49 Acta Synodi, II.11: “Haec non-electio, sive praeteritio, non praesupponit in homine praeterito aliquam qualitatem, vel conditionem aliam, quam quaein electo reperta est, et quaetoti 48

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whelmingly decided for homo creatus et lapsus as the object of predestination. Were these verdicts, however, reflected in the Canons themselves? After the individual delegations read their verdicts upon all five of the Remonstrant articles, the Synod moved to have the Canons composed. The Synod decided the best method for composing the canons was to select a committee to draft a provisional document that could later be voted on by the members of the Synod for approval. One of the members of the English delegation suggested the Canons should not include matters of debate such as the ordo decretorum, that they should be written in a popular rather than academic style, and that they should follow an analytical approach to the question of predestination by starting with the creation of man in God’s image, then the fall, and then on to predestination. This suggestion was taken under advisement and a committee was selected, which was composed of three foreign and three Dutch theologians: Bishop George Carlton of England, Abraham Scultetus (1566–1625) of Heidelberg, Jean Diodati (1576–1649) of Geneva, Polyander, Walaeus, and Jacobus Trigland (1583– 1654), a Dutch minister.50 The committee completed their draft and the following was approved by the Synod: “As all men have sinned in Adam, lie under the curse, and are obnoxious to eternal death, God would have done no injustice by leaving them all to perish, and delivering them over to condemnation on account of sin, according to the words of the Apostle (Rom 3.19).”51 The very first article contains the suggestion of the English delegation: it begins with homo creatus et lapsus; there is no mention of homo creabilis et labilis. The more specific definition of election under article seven of the first head of doctrine elaborates how predestination relates to man: Election is the unchangeable purpose of God, whereby, before the foundation of the worlds he hath, out of mere grace, according to the sovereign good pleasure of his own will, chosen, from the whole human race, which had fallen through their own fault, from their primitive state of rectitude, into sin and destruction, a certain number of persons to redemption in Christ, whom he from eternity appointed the Mediator and head of the elect, and the foundation of salvation.52

Once more, in this definition of election, the Canons specify that homo creatus et lapsus is the object of predestination; this reflects an infralapsarian position. This same emphasis also continues in the Canons’ definition of reprobation. The Canons note: ————— massaecorruptaesit communis.” The English delegation cited the following works of Augustine: On the Predestination of the Saints, Rebuke and Grace, On the Gift of Perseverance, and Against Julian. 50 Sinnema, “Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 391–92. 51 Articles of the Synod of Dort, I.1, in Schaff, Creeds, 3.581. 52 Articles of Dort, I.7; in Schaff, Creeds, 3.582; emphasis.

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What peculiarly tends to illustrate and recommend to us the eternal and unmerited grace of election is the express testimony of sacred Scripture, that not all, but some only, are elected, while others are passed by in the eternal decree; whom God, out of his sovereign, most just, irreprehensible and unchangeable good pleasure, hath decreed to leave in the common misery into which they have willfully plunged themselves, and not to bestow upon them saving faith and the grace of conversion; but permitting them in his just judgment to follow their own way; at last, for the declaration of his justice, to condemn and punish them forever, not only on account of their unbelief, but also for all their sins. And this is the decree of reprobation which by no means makes God the author of sin (the very thought of which is blasphemy), but declares him to be an awful, irreprehensible, and righteous judge and avenger.53

The Canons, once again, maintain that homo creatus et lapsus is the object of reprobation and that man is not reprobated by a specific separate decree. Instead, man is “passed by in the eternal decree;” the Canons define reprobation in Augustinian terms of preterition. A second important point to notice is that the Canons specifically deny that their definition makes God the author of sin. They were very careful to place the blame for the fall and corrupt condition of man upon man himself: “[…] into which they have willfully plunged themselves.” Hence the Synod decided to specify in the Canons that the object of predestination was the infralapsarian homo creatus et lapsus despite the reluctance of the South-Holland delegation to define the object of predestination and Gomarus’ objections and attempts either to have the object of predestination as homo creabilis et labilis or at least leave the issue unspecified.54 There are several readily identifiable reasons for this infralapsarian outcome. First, the majority of the Dutch professors and ministerial delegates were infralapsarians. Hence, on the first article concerning predestination, the infralapsarians simply possessed more influence by virtue of superior numbers.55 Additionally, members of the committee that drafted the Canons, Walaeus, Polyander, and Carlton, were noted infralapsarians. A second reason lies in the fact that the Synod’s other supralapsarians, Gisbert Voetius (1588–1676), Johannes Bogerman and Johannes Maccovius, did not come to the aid of their fellow colleague during the debates over infra————— 53

Articles of Dort, I.15; in Schaff, Creeds, 3.584; emphasis. G. C. Berkouwer, Divine Election, Studies in Dogmatics, trans. Hugo Bekker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), 264; Barth, Dogmatics, 127; J. A. Dorner, The History of Protestant Theology Particularly in Germany, 2 vol., trans. George Robson and Sohia Taylor (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1871), 1.415, 426; Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vol. (1880; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 2.317; Èmile G. Léonard, A History of Protestantism, vol. 2, The Establishment, trans. R. M. Bethell (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1967), 253; Sinnema, “Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 411, 431–32. 55 W. Robert Godfrey, “Tensions Within International Calvinism: The Debate on the Atonement at the Synod of Dort, 1618–1619,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1974), 268; Schaff, Creeds, 1.513; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2.317. 54

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and supralapsarianism; Gomarus virtually stood alone in his affirmation of homo creabilis et labilis against the Dutch professors and the English delegation.56 The third, and final, reason that the infralapsarians wielded greater influence was most likely due to Gomarus’ failed attempt to appeal to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Not only was his attempt incorrect, but he received words of admonition from the Synod about “meddling in the affairs of other churches.” Additionally, whether his appeal to the Thirty-Nine Articles was a subtle attempt at selectively quoting the document or a genuine mistake, it no doubt left serious questions in the minds of the rest of the delegates regarding Gomarus’ opinion that the churches of other countries had left the issue of the object of predestination unspecified. Does this mean, then, that because the Canons decided for homo creatus et lapsus that it considered supralapsarianism heterodox?

5.6 Analysis of the Outcome Because the Canons of Dort decided for an infralapsarian homo creatus et lapsus rather than a supralapsarian homo creabilis et labilis, some may assume that this represented a rejection of supralapsarianism. This, however, is a superficial judgment once all of the facts are taken into consideration. The main focus of the debate between infra- and supralapsarianism was not primarily over the ordo decretorum as it is commonly caricatured. For example, Brian Armstrong, notes: “Nevertheless, they would then proceed to discuss theology by taking as their starting point the decrees of God, indeed in terms of a specific order in these decrees, giving the impression that there was nothing incomprehensible about them. The famous infralapsarian-supralapsarian debate, of course, offers an excellent example of this.”57 Armstrong leaves the impression that the debate over infra- and supralapsarianism was over the specific ordo decretorum. Quite the contrary, the ordo decretorum did not surface as a point of contention between the two parties. Rather, the main focus of the debate was God’s relation to the fall of man and predestination, or homo creatus et lapsus versus homo —————

56 Simon Kistemaker, “Leading Figures at the Synod of Dort,” in Crisis in the Reformed Churches: Essays in Commemoration of the Great Synod of Dort, 1618–1619, ed. Peter Y. DeJong (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 44; Schaff, Creeds, 1.513. Brandt notes about the debate with the infralapsarians that “Gomarus and his followers said […].” yet there is no mention of any other supralapsarians who might have assisted Gomarus by Balcanqual or Hales in their records of the proceedings. Moreover, Brandt fails to list any other supralapsarians who might have sided with Gomarus. Brandt, History of the Reformation, 3.254. 57 Brian G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 136.

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creabilis et labilis.58 The main issue of debate from the expressed infralapsarian position was, How does God remain righteous in his dealings with man if he predestines him to an end before he is considered guilty of sin?59 This question was not new to the proceedings at the Synod of Dort. The same issue arose during the predestinarian controversy between John Calvin (1509–64) and Jerome Bolsec (d. ca. 1584). Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75) asked the same question of Calvin. Bullinger was afraid that Calvin inevitably made God the author of sin.60 This is why Bullinger only spoke of God’s praescientia of the fall to avoid the implication that God might be made the author of sin. This same issue also resurfaced in the debate between Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) and Francis Junius (1545–1602): “But according to the opinion of Calvin and Beza God is made to be necessarily the author of sin […] they say, that ‘God ordained that man should fall and become sinful, in order that He might in this manner open the way for His eternal counsels.’ For he who ordains that man shall fall and sin, he is the author of sin.” Arminius, however, also noted that he did not believe Calvin and Theodore Beza (1519–1605) intentionally made God the author of sin, but he thought it was the legitimate and logical conclusion of their position.61 This historic criticism, whether right or wrong, was likely in the back of the minds of the delegates at the Synod of Dort; it was an issue raised not only by Arminius but also by the Remonstrants in the first of their five articles.62 Additionally, there was a case of heresy brought before the Synod: Johannes Maccovius, one of the professors from the University of Franeker and a delegate, was under charges of heresy for using phrases

————— 58

Berkouwer, Divine Election, 257; Barth, Dogmatics, 127. Brandt, History of the Reformation, 3.254. 60 See Cornelis P. Venema, “Heinrich Bullinger’s Correspondence on Calvin’s Doctrine of Predestination, 1551–53,” SCJ 4 (1986): 435–50; idem, Heinrich Bullinger and the Doctrine of Predestination: Author of ‘the Other Reformed Tradition’? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), 57–62. 61 Jacob Arminius, Conference with Junius, in The Works of James Arminius, 3 vol., trans. James Nichols and William Nichols (London: Longman, Hurst, et al., 1825–75), Prop. 6, 3.74–75; idem, Amica Cum D. Francisco Iunio De Praedestinatione Collatio (Leiden: Apud Godefridum Basson, 1629), 498: “At ex sententia Calvini et Bezae Deus necessario autor peccati statuitur […] dicunt, Deum ordinasse ut homo laberetur et vitiosus fieret, quo hac ratione viam suis aeternis consiliis patefaceret. Nam qui ordinat ut homo labatur et peccet, ille peccati auctor est.” It should be noted that Gomarus, though a staunch supralapsarian, speaks of the fall in terms of divine permission; he notes that God “permit them [man] to fall freely into sin and leave them in their sin” (Acta Synodi, III.24). Bavinck makes an astute observation on this point: “Accordingly—and fortunately!—supralapsarianism is consistently inconsistent. It starts out with a bold leap forward but soon afterward it shrinks back and relapses into the infralapsarianism it has previously abandoned. Among the proponents of supralapsarianism this phenomenon is very clear. Almost all of them were reluctant to place the decree of reprobation (in its entirety and without any restriction) before the decree to permit sin” (Dogmatics, 2.388). Cf. Barth, Dogmatics, 28. 62 Sinnema, “Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 168–69. 59

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duriores and attributing the authorship of sin to God.63 The Synod was thus faced with the challenge of answering the critics of the Reformed doctrine of predestination on the topic of whether Reformed theologians made God the author of sin.

5.7 The Maccovius Case Johannes Maccovius, born in Poland as Jan Makowsky, was a professor at the University of Franeker with Sibrandus Lubbertus and was one of the delegates to the Synod of Dort. There were reasons why heresy charges were brought against Maccovius at the Synod. First, Maccovius presided over a public disputation involving several students where one of the students presented thirteen theses that were strongly supralapsarian in nature. Lubbertus, a staunch infralapsarian, heard about this occurrence and was concerned enough to complain to university officials.64 Second, Maccovius’ own theological views were strongly supralapsarian in nature. Maccovius emphasized the divine decrees so much that he placed them above the Trinity in his discussion about the essence and attributes of God.65 Moreover, in his lectures and writings he made a great use of scholastic and Aristotelian concepts. For example, Maccovius explained that predestination needs a Mover, which is God; a motion, which is election; an object, which is man; and the result of the movement, which is salvation itself.66 Lastly, Maccovius and his colleague, Lubbertus, had a clash of personalities. Maccovius was a young professor and Lubbertus was an older gentleman. Maccovius reportedly would carouse with his students and spend the evenings in pubs. Additionally, Maccovius decided to schedule his lectures at the same time that Lubbertus was holding his own lectures; this took students from Lubbertus. Moreover, he also told Lubbertus he was a heretic for holding to the infralapsarian position. For all these reasons, both theological and personal, Maccovius was brought up on fifty charges of heresy before the Synod of Dort.67 The Synod convened on the Maccovius case on 25 April 1619 because he petitioned the Synod in objection to charges of heresy. The opinions of ————— 63 This might explain why Maccovius did not come to the aid of Gomarus in his debate with the infralapsarians; he already had troubles of his own to contend with. 64 Michael Daniel Bell, “Propter Potestatem, Scientiam, ac Beneplacitum Dei: The Doctrine of the Object of Predestination in the Theology of Johannes Maccovius” (Th.D. Dissertation, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1986), 15; Sinnema, “Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 177–79. 65 Martin I. Klauber, “The Use of Philosophy in the Theology of Johannes Maccovius (1578– 1644),” CTJ 30 (1995): 380. 66 Klauber, “Johannes Maccovius,” 382; also Sinnema, 292–95, 303–04 nn. 97–100. 67 Bell, “Theology of Johannes Maccovius,” 15–18; Klauber, “Johannes Maccovius,” 382.

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Maccovius were brought before the Synod for examination to see whether he was guilty of heresy. The charge that he believed that God was the author of sin was brought to his attention, but Maccovius showed from his writings that he wrote nothing unlike other Reformed theologians of the past.68 A small committee was appointed to investigate the charges, and they determined that Maccovius’ views on predestination and sin were within the confines of orthodox Reformed theology. On the charges related to the abuse of the scholastic method, several of the delegates, including several of the more moderate infralapsarian English delegates, argued in support of Maccovius’ scholastic methodology in his teaching and writing.69 William Ames, for example, worked vigorously behind the scenes to see Maccovius exhonerated; he even offered to present a defense of Maccovius before the Synod.70 The Synod later concluded that Maccovius’ views were not heterodox, and they acquitted him of any charges of heresy. Maccovius, however, was admonished on several points by the Synod. The Synod warned Maccovius that he should not heavily rely upon scholastic language in his teaching; instead, he should speak in the language of Scripture rather than that of Roman Catholic theologians Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) or Francisco Suarez (1548–1617). Additionally, he was warned that he should not condemn the teachings of infralapsarianism.71 Hence the Synod determined that one of its own members was not guilty of making God the author of sin. Nevertheless, there was still the charge brought by the Arminians against various theologians within the Reformed camp. Did the Synod scapegoat some of the esteemed members of its community and ostracize them as heretics with the Canons of Dort?

5.8 Was Supralapsarianism Rejected? Several features about the Canons of Dort dismiss the conclusion that the Canons reject supralapsarianism. First, the delegates, among whom some were supralapsarians, were well aware that there were several Reformed theologians of great prestige who held to the supralapsarian position: Beza, Perkins, and Whitaker, to name a few. Second, while the infralapsarian —————

68 Brandt, History of the Reformation, 3.283, 285. Cf. Bell, “Theology of Johannes Maccovius,” 93–168, for a complete examination of Maccovius’ doctrine of predestination. Bell concludes that Maccovius’ views on predestination are within the confines of Reformed Orthodoxy. 69 Bell, “Theology of Johannes Maccovius,” 20. 70 Sprunger, Learned Doctor Ames, 60–61. 71 Brandt, History of the Reformation, 3.289; Bell, “Theology of Johannes Maccovius,” 20. Cf. Berkouwer, Divine Election, 17–21. It should be noted that Johannes Bogerman, the president of the Synod, worked behind the scenes with Maccovius and Lubbertus to bring a resolution to their personal differences (Kistemaker, “Leading Figures at the Synod of Dort,” 40–41).

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delegates knew that one of the criticisms of the supralapsarian position was that it appeared to make God the author of sin, they, like Arminius, knew that its proponents vehemently denied this conclusion.72 There were some, however, such as the English delegates, who desired to have several phrases duriores condemned, like those of Maccovius, but the Synod refused this request. The Synod responded that Scripture uses strong expressions at times but that upon examination, in the proper context, the expressions are understood not to be harsh. They believed this was the case with several theologians whose writings were being quoted out of context.73 For these reasons, though the Canons decided for homo lapsus, there is no mention, either positive or negative, of the supralapsarian position. The Synod wished to leave supralapsarianism as a “private opinion” and left the Canons silent on the issue.74

5.9 Why no Rejection of Supralapsarianism? Ultimately, the Canons neither condemn nor address supralapsarianism because the delegates wanted to present a unified front against the Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, Lutherans, and Arminians.75 They did not want to show that there were any disagreements among themselves and that they were, supra- and infralapsarian alike, united in their opposition to anyone who would attempt to assign man too great a role in salvation. For this reason, when the Synod discussed the various verdicts upon the different heads of doctrine, they met in closed session so that if there was dissension or debate it would not be viewed by the public. John Hales (1584–1656) notes: “Our Synod goes on like a watch, the main wheels upon which the whole business turns are least in sight. For all things of moment are acted in private sessions, what is done in public is only for show and entertainment.”76 Moreover, both parties, while they disagreed on the object of predestination, were complimentary of one another and more concerned with stopping the tides of Pelagian and semi-Pelagian doctrine. For example, ————— 72

Bavinck notes on this point: “For though one may assume that there is a ‘predestination to death,’ no Reformed theologian has ventured to speak of a ‘predestination to sin.’ Every one of them (Zingli, Calvin, Beza, Zanchius, Gomarus, Comrie, et. Al) has maintained that God is not the author of sin, that humans were not created for perdition, that in reprobation also the severity of God’s justice is manifested, that reprobation is the ‘primary cause’ but only the ‘accidental cause’ of sin, that sin is not the ‘efficient’ but the ‘sufficient’ cause of reprobation, and so forth” (Dogmatics, 2.388). 73 Bavinck, Dogmatics, 2.367; Godfrey, “Tensions Within International Calvinism,” 161–162. 74 Barth, Dogmatics, 129; Bavinck, Dogmatics, 2.384. 75 Sinnema, “Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 160; Godfrey, “Tensions Within International Calvinism,” 40, 218, 252. 76 Hales, Golden Remains, 78.

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Voetius, a supralapsarian, strongly recommended the works of infra- and supralapsarians alike. Voetius, commenting about the works of Jerome Zanchi (1516–1590), Amandus Polanus (1561–1610), Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), Junius, Gomarus, Maccovius, and Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563), writes: “So as far as I know, no one, or at least no one who makes fair and reasonable judgment in such matters, has disapproved of their labors.”77 Although he is a Reformed theologian of the High Orthodox period (1630/40–1700), Francis Turretin (1623–1687) best summed up why the two parties did not condemn each other’s teaching as heterodox. Turretin notes that between the two groups they both agreed upon: (1) the universal corruption and sinfulness of mankind; (2) the election of certain people out of the wretched state of sin; (3) effectual grace that works through the gift of faith given by God alone; (4) and the primacy of the Gospel and the Scriptures as the only means of salvation and God’s revelation to mankind. Turretin writes: “These are the capital doctrines of faith which we all constantly defend against the Pelagians and semi-Pelagians.”78

5.10 Summary The Synod did not reject supralapsarianism likely due to the prominence and prestige of the theologians who held the position, the knowledge that the supralapsarians denied that God was the author of sin, and a great desire to present a unified front against all other critics of the Reformed churches. The Synod, however, did warn one of its members, Johannes Maccovius, to use more scriptural language in his teaching and writing to avoid any future confusion; it also issued denials that God was the author of sin in its definition of reprobation and in the final statements of the Canons. The Canons state that the Reformed church staunchly denies “that it makes God the author of sin, unjust, tyrannical, hypocritical; that it is nothing more than an interpolated Stoicism, Manicheism, Libertinism.”79 In the concluding remarks, the Canons also vaguely allude to the issues regarding the debates over infra- and supralapsarianism: Finally, this Synod exhorts all their brethren in the gospel of Christ to conduct themselves piously and religiously in handling this doctrine, both in the universities and churches; to direct it, as well in discourse as in writing, to the glory of the Divine name, to holiness of life, and to the consolation of afflicted souls; to regulate, by the Scripture, according to the analogy of faith, not only their sentiments, but also their

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77 Gisbert Voetius, Concerning Practical Theology, in Reformed Dogmatics, A Library of Protestant Thought, ed. and trans. John W. Beardslee (New York: OUP, 1965), 266. 78 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg: P & R, 1992–97), 4.17.12; cf. Barth, Dogmatics, 133. 79 Articles of Dort, Conclusion, in Schaff, Creeds, 3.596.

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language, and to abstain from all those phrases which exceed the limits necessary to be observed in ascertaining the genuine sense of the Holy Scriptures, and may furnish insolent sophists with a just pretext for violently assailing, or even vilifying, the doctrine of the Reformed Churches.80

Hence there was no rejection of supralapsarianism. There was a firm denial by the Synod that Reformed theologians made God the author of sin, and in its closing remarks a brotherly admonition, perhaps aimed at those like Maccovius, to handle the doctrine of predestination with care. The Synod was able to affirm an infralapsarian position of homo creatus et lapsus and at the same was silent concerning supralapsarianism; they left it to the realm of private opinion.81

5.11 Conclusion The Synod of Dort for some represents all that is backwards and inflexible in Reformed Orthodoxy. True, the Synod did close the door on an Arminian understanding of redemption. However if careful attention is given to the various opinions of the delegations, both local and international, one will easily see that there was a great degree of flexibility exhibited at the Synod, even over matters that were sometimes strongly disputed. Within the boundaries of confessional orthodoxy, Dort allowed for a degree of individuality and a carefully crafted level of cooperation.82 This spirit of flexible orthodoxy allowed supra- and infralapsarians to coexist at Dort and codified a spirit of diversity that one can find in subsequent Reformed confessions.

————— 80

Articles of Dort, in Schaff, Creeds, 3.597; emphasis. B. B. Warfield, “Predestination in the Reformed Confessions,” in Studies in Theology, ed. Ethelbert D. Warfield, et al. (New York: OUP, 1932), 229; Bavinck, Dogmatics, 2.384. 82 Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy, International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol. 8 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1965), 87; cf. Godfrey, “Tensions Within International Calvinism,” 264, 269. 81

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6. The Extent of the Atonement: English Hypothetical Universalism versus Particular Redemption

Jonathan D. Moore 6.1 Introduction Of all the intramural debates amongst seventeenth-century British Reformed Orthodox divines, the one to persist in the popular consciousness today as being among the most contentious, notorious, and even repugnant tenets of ‘Calvinism’ is the doctrine of so-called ‘limited atonement’.1 The Protestant Reformation’s recovery of the free and sovereign, unmerited and unconditional grace of God in the gospel, led many Reformed theologians to develop the doctrine of unconditional, particular grace (as opposed to conditional, universal grace) to the point where it became unacceptable to say that Christ had died on the cross for every single person, head for head, rather than specifically for those predestined to salvation. For if Christ had died for every single person, then Christ’s atonement, while not being limited in extent, must of necessity be limited in value and rendered ineffectual unless the sinner himself fulfilled some prior condition, a condition which, if not all were to be finally saved, could not have been secured directly by the atonement itself. This would therefore appear to introduce a contingency that threatened the doctrine of sovereign and unmerited grace, and that resulted in an intolerable synergism in the work of salvation with resonances of the Pelagianism of old. Furthermore, if Christ had actually died for every single person, then this introduced questions concerning the divine intentionality in Christ’s sufferings that tended to undercut the Reformed doctrine of absolute predestination. For after all, how could the Son of God die to save those whom God had already predestined to destruction, or at least, had altogether —————

1 We put these terms in inverted commas because, despite their validity and continuing popularity both in modern historiography and popular discussion, they are generally unhelpful terms – Reformed Orthodoxy was no more tied to Calvin’s thought than to that of any other leading Reformed theologian, and even Arminianism has to ‘limit’ Christ’s atoning work in terms of its nature in order to avoid full-blown eschatological universalism.

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passed by in the matter of salvation? The very integrity and unity of the Triune God in his works ad intra et ad extra were at stake. Hitherto tried and trusted Medieval formulations such as the sufficiency-efficiency distinction of Peter Lombard,2 that had been used by the early Protestant Reformers with varying degrees of enthusiasm, began to display cracks, and, as the pressure from anti-Reformed protagonists increased, the tendency of Reformed Orthodoxy was, by and large, to secure the integrity and unity of God’s works ad intra et ad extra via the doctrine of ‘particular redemption’ in which the scope of the Father’s election and the Son’s redemption were made more explicitly co-extensive. We must say ‘by and large’, however, because the Reformed Orthodox failed to secure unanimous agreement on this matter, and therefore the formulations that were finally agreed at synodical level were of necessity capable of a range of interpretations. The purpose of this essay is briefly to outline the main features of a classic defense of the developed doctrine of particular redemption as found in the writings of John Owen, and to compare these with one of the most robust defenses of an alternative, more moderate, position within Reformed Orthodoxy, namely, John Davenant’s exposition of English Hypothetical Universalism. We will then briefly consider how this debate within British Reformed Orthodoxy influenced some of the major Reformed Orthodox confessional statements on the work of Christ, before turning, even more briefly, to consider whether English Hypothetical Universalism can in any sense be said to be a ‘softening’ of Reformed theology.

6.2 John Owen & Particular Redemption Sometime vice-chancellor of Oxford University and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, John Owen (1616–1683) was, in the words of Carl Trueman, “without doubt not only the greatest theologian of the English Puritan movement but also one of the greatest European Reformed theologians of his day, and quite possibly possessed the finest theological mind that Eng-

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2 This historically important formula reads, “pro omnibus quantum ad pretii sufficientiam, sed pro electis tantum quantum ad efficaciam” (Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV Libris Distinctae, 3rd edn, 2 vol., Spicilegiurn Bonaventurianum (Grottaferrata: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae Ad Claras Aquas, 1971–1981), 2:128 [3.20.5.1]); “for all with regard to the sufficiency of the price, but only for the elect with regard to its efficacy” (Peter Lombard, The Sentences, edited by Joseph Goering and Giulio Silano, trans. Giulio Silano, 1st English edn, 4 vol., Mediaeval Sources in Translation [St Michael’s College Medieval Translations], vol. 42–45 [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2007–2010], 3:86).

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land ever produced.”3 From the outset of his publishing career, Owen was concerned to defend the particularity and irresistibility of divine grace over against the Arminian claim that God’s grace was universal and resistible. In 1643 Owen published his first book, “A Display of Arminianism”, and, dedicating it to the committee for religion in the House of Lords, set out the basic outline of what was to be for the rest of his life his convinced position on particular redemption.4 Provoked by continued agitations for universal grace, Owen then published in 1648 “Salus Electorum, Sanguis Jesu; or the Death of Death in the Death of Christ,” a thorough, 300-page treatise devoted specifically to refuting ‘universal redemption’ and establishing theologically and exegetically that Christ died for the elect only.5 Owen spent over seven years seriously investigating this issue, and could write, in a follow-up defense of this book against Richard Baxter, “There hath (sic) not been many things in my whole enquiry after the Mind of God in his Word, which have more exercised my thoughts, then (sic) the right ordering, and distinct disposal of those whereof we treat [in this controversy over the death of Christ].”6 Although Owen by 1653 was to change his position ————— 3

Carl R. Trueman, “John Owen,” in Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, edited by Timothy Larsen, David W. Bebbington, and Mark A. Noll (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003), 494–497, 494. 4 John Owen, Theomachia autexousiastike: Or, A Display of Arminianisme. Being a Discovery of the old Pelagian idol Free-Will, with the new Goddesse Contingency, advancing themselves, into the Throne of the God of Heaven to the Prejudice of his Grace, Providence, and supreme Dominion over the Children of Men. Wherein the maine Errors of the Arminians are laid open, by which they are fallen off from the received Doctrine of all the Reformed Churches, with their Opposition in divers Particulars to the Doctrine established in the Church of England. Discovered out of their owne Writings and Confessions, and confuted by the Word of God, 1st edn (London: By I. L. for Phil. Stephens, 1643). See also John Owen, The Works of John Owen, D.D., edited by William H. Goold, 24 vol., Standard Library of British Divines (Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–1855), 10:1–137, especially 87–100. 5 John Owen, Salus Electorum, Sanguis Jesu; or the Death of Death in the Death of Christ: A Treatise of the Redemption and Reconciliation that is in the Blood of Christ with the Merit thereof, and the Satisfaction wrought thereby. Wherin the proper End of the Death of Christ is asserted: the immediate Effects and Fruits thereof assigned, with their Extent in Respect of it’s [sic] Object; and the whole Controversie about Universall Redemption fully discussed. In foure Parts, whereof the 1. Declareth the eternall Counsell, and distinct actuall Concurrence of Father, Sonne, and Holy Spirit unto the Worke of Redemption in the Blood of Christ; with the covenanted Intendment, and accomplished End of God therein. 2. Removeth false and supposed Ends of the Death of Christ; with the Distinctions invented to salve the manifold Contradictions of the pretended Universall Atonement; rightly stating the Controversie. 3. Containeth Arguments against Universall Redemption from the Word; with an Affection of the Satisfaction and Merit of Christ. 4. Answereth all considerable Objections as yet brought to light either by Arminians, or others, (their late Followers as to this Point) in the behalfe of Universall Redemption; with a large Unfolding of all the Texts of Scripture by any produced and wrested to that Purpose, 1st edn (London: W. W. for Philemon Stephens, 1648). See also Owen, Works, 10:139–428. 6 John Owen, Of the Death of Christ, the Price he paid, and the Purchase he made. Or, the Satisfaction, and Merit of the Death of Christ cleered (sic), the Universality of Redemption thereby oppugned: and the Doctrine concerning these Things formerly delivered in a Treatise against

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expressed in Death of Death on the necessity of the atonement,7 and although a key part of his argument derives from viewing Christ’s priestly work in light of a pretemporal intra-Trinitarian covenant of redemption or pactum salutis – a theme which Owen develops considerably more at length in his commentary on the Hebrews along with a more elaborate use of Old Testament typology concerning Christ’s priestly work of atonement8 – Death of Death can still be seen as Owen’s classic defense of a developed Reformed particularism in the face of an increasingly bold universal redemptionism. By 1648 John Owen was utterly convinced of particular redemption. “To me nothing is more certain than that to whom Christ is in any sense a Saviour in the work of redemption, he saves them to the uttermost from all their sins of infidelity and disobedience, with the saving of grace here and glory hereafter.”9 But what made Owen so confident in denying “that Christ died for any but those who shall certainly be brought unto him by the ministration of the gospel”?10 Some have answered this question in terms of Owen’s captivity to an Aristotelian “one-end teleology” and a scholastic logic chopping that forced Scripture into this preconceived philosophical system.11 However, such recourse to Aristotelianism as an explanatory key is highly problematical, not least because a modified Aristotelianism was a standard methodology self-consciously, self-critically and selectively employed by those on all sides of this debate – even Arminians – and cannot therefore have been of any decisive influence.12 Rather, a more contextually ————— Universal Redemption vindicated from the Exceptions, and Objections of Mr Baxter, 1st edn (London: Peter Cole, 1650), 5. See also Owen, Works, 10:429–479, 436. The result of this sustained attention to this subject is the fact that nearly two whole volumes of Owen’s 24–volume corpus are taken up with the theme of Christ’s atoning work (vol. 10 and 12). 7 Owen later conceded that the atonement was absolutely necessary if God was to forgive sin, and rejected his earlier voluntarist position which he now came to view as leading to Socinianism. For an excellent discussion of this development in Owen’s thought, see Carl R. Trueman, “John Owen’s Dissertation on Divine Justice: An Exercise in Christocentric Scholasticism,” Calvin Theological Journal 33, no. 1 (1998): 87–103. 8 See especially Owen, Works, 19:77–97. 9 Ibid., 10:192. 10 Ibid., 10:219. 11 E.g. Alan C. Clifford, Atonement and Justification: English Evangelical Theology, 1640– 1790: An Evaluation, 1st edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 95–110; Hans Boersma, A hot Pepper Corn: Richard Baxter’s Doctrine of Justification in its Seventeenth-Century Context of Controversy, 1st edn (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 1993), 211–212. 12 For specific refutations of this Aristotelian “one-end teleology” charge against Death of Death, see Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology, 1st edn (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 1998), 203–205, 233–240; Carl R. Trueman, “Puritan Theology as historical Event: A linguistic Approach to the ecumenical Context,” in Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise, edited by Willem J. van Asselt and Eef Dekker, Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 253–275, 261–273; and Edwin E. M. Tay, “The Priesthood of Christ in the Atonement

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sensitive reading of Death of Death reveals that Owen’s fundamental influences were Trinitarian, covenantal and exegetical concerns, even though he was happy to present aspects of his case in terms of common Aristotelian categories that he shared with his opponents. 6.2.1 Trinitarian Concerns Carl Trueman has ably demonstrated that Owen’s theology was deeply Trinitarian, and, as such, was the theology of a Reformed Catholic developing and applying Trinitarian orthodoxy to the needs and concerns of his own day.13 Owen’s Death of Death bears out this claim and in fact it is significant that Owen begins his treatise by setting out the role of each member of the Trinity in accomplishing redemption. The Father sends his Son into the world, appointing and equipping him for his work as Saviour and Mediator, and lays the punishment for sin upon him. The Son humbles himself, takes upon himself a human nature, offers himself up to the Father as an oblation and makes intercession to the Father on the basis of that oblation. The Holy Spirit overshadows the Virgin Mary to bring about the incarnation, fills and empowers the Son for his earthly ministry and suffering, and then quickens the Son from the dead.14 In keeping with the ancient maxim opera Trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, Owen asserts that, “The agent in, and chief author of, this great work of our redemption is the whole blessed Trinity; for all the works which outwardly are of the Deity are undivided and belong equally to each person, their distinct manner of subsistence and order being observed.”15 For Owen, a consideration of this unity of the Trinity in the work of redemption is enough on its own to secure the doctrine of particular redemption, because the work of the Son is the means by which the Father saves his elect, predestined people, and the Son and the Spirit fully concur in the Father’s distinguishing mercy, and act in perfect harmony with the divine eternal purpose of redeeming and glorifying these foreknown, elect individuals. This is particularly clear for Owen in the matter of the unity of the Son’s priestly work. For Owen, oblation and intercession are indissolubly conjoined, and so the scope of both actions must be identical.16 Christ’s intercession is “an authoritative presenting himself before the throne of his Fa————— Theology of John Owen (1616–1683)” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Edinburgh University, 2009), 218– 259. 13 Trueman, The Claims of Truth. See also Carl R. Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, 1st edn (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007). 14 Owen, Works, 10:163–179. 15 Ibid., 10:163. 16 Ibid., 10:418.

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ther, sprinkled with his own blood, for the making out to his people all spiritual things that are procured by his oblation.”17 As an ‘authoritative’ intercession it is also effectual – an intercession to the Father that secures its intent, because no intercession from the Son clashes with the will of the Father. It should not surprise us therefore that, given Christ does not pray for the world (John 17:9), neither does he pay for the world.18 So intimately connected in Owen’s mind is this limited intercession with Christ’s oblation, that he can call Christ’s intercession “his oblation continued.”19 6.2.2 Covenantal Concerns As well as a Trinitarian theologian, Owen was a covenant theologian. In more traditional Reformed terms this took the form of a presentation of Christ as the federal head and public representative of a new humanity, namely, God’s elect. Christ acting as the public representative of a new humanity led Owen to particular redemptionism, for after all, “The seed of the woman was not to be a public person in the place, stead, and room of the seed of the serpent. [...] Christ was not, in his oblation and suffering, when he brake the head of the father of the seed, a public person in their room.”20 Owen also argues from John 17:19 in context (“for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified”) that Christ only sanctified himself or set himself apart to act as a public representative for those whom the Father had given him out of the world. Furthermore, Christ as a public person is a surety (Heb 7:22), and “None can perish for whom Christ is a surety, unless he be not able to pay the debt.” But of course, Christ can pay the debt and “therefore, he was not a public person in the room of all” since some finally perish.21 It is quite clear from these considerations alone that Owen was driven by his federal theology to conclude that Christ’s redemptive work was strictly particular and not capable of being extended in any meaningful way to the reprobate.22 ————— 17

Ibid., 10:177. Owen frequently cites John 17:9 as part of his argument (ibid., 10:171, 177, 190, 191, 197, 210, 244, 245, 355, 393). 19 Ibid., 10:184. For a comprehensive study of how Christ’s united acts of oblation and intercession lie at the heart of Owen’s atonement theology, see Tay, “Priesthood of Christ.” 20 Owen, Works, 10:358 (italics original). Cf. Gen 3:15. 21 Ibid. 22 For the avoidance of doubt, when I say ‘driven’ I do not mean that any or all of these considerations would so drive everyone. Richard Muller is of the view that in my book I imply that supralapsarian predestinarianism and federalism lead inescapably to particularism (Calvin Theological Journal 43, no. 1 (2008): 149–150; Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology, 1st edn [Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007], 41 – the only place where I speak of Perkins being driven). However, all I argued is that supralapsarian predestinarianism and federalism drove William 18

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In terms of a more recently emerging Reformed covenant theology, Owen’s covenant theology took the form of viewing redemption from the perspective of the pactum salutis. Roughly around the time that Owen began his career as a polemical theologian, developments were being made by Cocceius and others that Owen was happy to make use of and develop in his own work.23 These developments involved a more detailed systematisation of those passages in Scripture24 that appeared to reveal a dialogue between the Father (LORD) and the Son (Messiah) in the counsels of eternity, which formed the mutual agreement on the basis of which Christ obediently came into the world as the servant of Jehovah to save sinners.25 The pactum salutis features prominently in Death of Death and in Owen’s subsequent defense of his treatise against the sustained attacks of Richard Baxter. In fact, despite the relatively recent arrival of a fully developed pactum salutis in Reformed theologising, Owen soon came to believe that the death of Christ must not be considered apart from the pactum salutis, as that would be to consider it out of its true context.26 For example, without the pactum salutis Christ’s death cannot even be seen as a payment for anyone, never mind for the elect alone, because “That any thing should have any such reference unto God as a payment or satisfaction, whether refusable or otherwise, is not from itself and its own nature, but from the constitution of God alone.”27 It is the pactum salutis which describes that constitution, and ————— Perkins to particularism. They did not so drive William Twisse, for example, but that is not the point. Sometimes theologians come to the same conclusions for different reasons. Here in this case, it happens to be an infralapsarian predestinarianism and federalism that drove Owen to the same conclusions as Perkins, along with a heavy emphasis on Trinitarian considerations and the pactum salutis – the latter not being significantly present in Perkins’ thought or context. 23 Willem J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), trans. Raymond A. Blacketer, 1st edn, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, vol. 100 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 227–247, and especially 227–228. 24 For example, Ps 2:7–9; 16:2–3, 10–11; 40:6–8; Isa 49:6–12; Zech 6:13. 25 The covenant of redemption was officially a covenant or “compact” between all three persons of the Godhead, but some Reformed theologians, Owen not excluded, struggled, at least initially, to articulate a compelling role for the Holy Spirit in this Trinitarian counsel, that is, when they remembered to involve him at all (e.g. Owen, Works, 10:178–179; 12:496–508, 605, 606, 615; 19:58, 67, 77–97; cf. The Savoy Declaration of Faith 8.1 (The Savoy Conference, A Declaration of the Faith and Order owned and practised in the Congregational Churches in England; agreed upon and consented unto by their Elders and Messengers in their Meeting at the Savoy, October 12, 1658, 1st edn [London: John Field for John Allen, 1658], 15). However, Edwin Tay has recently defended the mature Owen from any resulting charge of a binitarian formulation, by highlighting the Spirit’s instrumental, if not pactional, role in Owen’s understanding of this doctrine (Tay, “Priesthood of Christ”, 63–67). Cf. Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, 86–87. For a similar defense of Cocceius from the same charge, see van Asselt, Federal Theology, 233– 234. 26 Owen, Works, 10:441; cf. 10:464; 12:614–615. 27 Ibid., 10:458.

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which provided Owen with the framework for understanding Christ’s priestly work.28 6.2.3 Exegetical Concerns Inaccurate but convenient caricatures notwithstanding, Owen was supremely a biblical theologian, deeply engaged with the biblical data and willing to change or develop his position as exegetical considerations were brought to bear. Writing a seven-volume, two-million-word commentary on the epistle to the Hebrews should alone suffice to establish the importance Owen put upon careful scriptural exegesis,29 but also in his early publications this meticulous attention to the text of Scripture is evident. In Death of Death, abundant places in Scripture are not only cited by Owen, but carefully exegeted, with special attention given to linguistic, textual and contextual considerations in order to establish his case positively. Negatively, every conceivable ‘problem text’ raised by his opponents is also carefully considered, and, in several instances, Owen does not stop until he has convinced himself that these texts, far from being problems for his position, actually positively establish it. One exegetical example must suffice for our purposes here. 1 John 2:2 is often cited by universal redemptionists as it reads “he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” But, says Owen, given that John was an apostle to the Jews and is writing to them and not to the Gentiles; that the gospel is to the Jew first and only secondly to the Gentiles; that John’s historical context is Jewish prejudice against Gentile inclusion; that the context of the passage is about assuredly comforting believers through an advocate; and that hilasmos (Gk.) comes from kapporeth (Heb.) which means ‘to cover’ or ‘expiate’, Owen concludes that beyond a shadow of a doubt John uses the word ‘world’ to refer to believers throughout the whole Gentile world, thereby expanding messianic comforts beyond the Jewish people to whom he is writing. Indeed, John could only communicate the comfort intended by these words if by them he was referring to a particular, effectual redemption. A non-effectual, general propitiation also made for those now in hell could offer no comfort to those currently feeling the guilt of their sins. John’s use of ‘world’ in this way is consistent with usage elsewhere in the New Testament concerning not only the word ‘world’ but also the words ‘all’ and ‘every’ in connection —————

28 None of this, of course, is to say that the Reformed Orthodox theologians who declined to present the eternal counsel of the Triune God as a ‘covenant’ could therefore never be as committed to particular redemptionism as Owen. This is quite clearly not the case. 29 Owen, Works, vol. 18–24. For the word count, I am relying on Lee Gatiss who is engaged in doctoral studies on this commentary.

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with Christ’s saving work, and Owen has already painstakingly established and schematised how in Scripture the word ‘world’ can have over a dozen different meanings.30 This is a typical example of how Owen sought to establish his doctrine of particular redemption by means of lengthy and careful exegesis of all relevant passages, be they at first sight friendly or threatening to his case.31 6.2.4 The Nature of the Atonement So far we have outlined how Owen’s particular redemptionism was part and parcel of his espousal of an exegetically grounded Trinitarian covenant theology. But to get to the heart of Owen’s understanding of Christ’s atoning work, we must understand that crucial to Owen’s position is the nature of that atonement. Too often Reformed historiography has obsessed at a superficial level about whether or not a particular theologian did or did not state that Christ did or did not ‘die for all’ or ‘for the world’ or some such other ambiguous statement, without actually examining their respective positions on the nature of the atonement itself. But John Owen could immediately see that the Arminian attack on Reformed theology threatened the received understanding of the nature of Christ’s work as an accomplished penal substitution and actual reconciliation, and posited an atonement that merely opened the way for God to offer a potential reconciliation conditioned on the human response. Owen could also see English Hypothetical Universalists moving in this same direction with their espousal of “a twofold reconciliation and redemption,” thereby conceding that it is possible to have a satisfaction for sins that does not satisfy and a reconciliation that does not in fact reconcile.32 Yet, according to Owen, the Scriptures know nothing of “being freed so far or so far by redemption, and not wholly, fully, or completely.”33 Consequently Owen goes to considerable length in Death of Death and elsewhere to defining the precise nature of Christ’s satisfaction and reconciliation over against Grotian and Socinian teachings as well as those of hypothetical universalism.34 The death of Christ, while having a govern—————

30 Ibid., 10:330–338; 303–307. This is followed by an examination of the various meanings that ‘all’ can have in various Hebrew and Greek passages (ibid., 10:307–309). 31 For more on Owen’s exegetical methodology see Henry M. Knapp, “Understanding the Mind of God: John Owen and seventeenth-century exegetical Methodology” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Calvin Theological Seminary, 2002) and Barry H. Howson, “The Puritan Hermeneutics of John Owen: A Recommendation,” Westminster Theological Journal 63, no. 2 (2001): 351–376. 32 Owen, Works, 10:222–223. 33 Ibid., 10:473. 34 Owen lays the groundwork here for his major refutation of Socinian formulations on Christ’s death which was to appear seven years later as Vindiciae Evangelicae, or the Mystery of

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mental aspect, could not be reduced to a governmental role alone. On exegetical grounds Owen believed that when the Scriptures say ‘Christ died for’, the word huper (Gk.), as made clear by 1 Corinthians 1:13, “doth argue a commutation of change, and not only designs the good of them for whom he died,”35 still less a simple upholding of the moral law for the general good of the created order. Christ therefore died in the place of particular individuals and not just in an unspecific sense in order to bring about general effects. Owen also argued, along with “far the greatest number of protestant divines,”36 that Christ’s satisfaction is the same thing (solutio ejusdem) as sinners deserve, and not simply a divinely determined equivalent (solutio tantundem) as Grotius argued.37 By solutio ejusdem Owen meant “essentially the same in weight and pressure, though not in all accidents of duration and the like.”38 “It was no less than the weight of the wrath of God and the whole punishment due to sin that he wrestled under.”39 This, for Owen, constitutes the perfection of Christ’s sacrifice. Admittedly, there was a relaxation of the law in so far as God accepts a substitution,40 but as concerning the satisfaction made by the substitute, there was no relaxation whatsoever. Christ suffered the very same punishment that was due to his people, and this is what constitutes the power of Christ’s satisfaction to free God’s elect from condemnation – not their own faith or response to Christ’s ————— the Gospell vindicated, and Socinianisme examined, in the Consideration, and Confutation of a Catechisme, called A Scripture Catechisme, written by J. Biddle M.A. And the Catechisme of Valentinus Smalcius, commonly called the Racovian Catechisme. With the Vindication of the Testimonies of Scripture, concerning the Deity and Satisfaction of Jesus Christ, from the Perverse Expositions, and Interpretations of them, by Hugo Grotius in his Annotations on the Bible, 1st edn (Oxford: Leon. Lichfield for Thomas Robinson, 1655). See Owen, Works, 12:1–590, and especially 411–551. 35 Ibid., 10:288–290. 36 Ibid., 10:438; cf. 10:441. 37 Ibid., 10:265–270. This position is cryptically ascribed to Grotius in ibid., 10:268, 271, 272; cf. 10:437. Richard Baxter relentlessly opposed Owen on this whole point and also claimed that Owen had misunderstood Grotius (ibid., 10:438, 447). For more of Owen on this key part of his argument see also ibid., 10:436, 437; 12:613–615 where Owen revisits these arguments against Baxter’s defense of the solutio tantundem position, so essential to his own system of universal redemptionism. 38 Ibid., 10:269–270. “There is a sameness in Christ’s sufferings with that in the obligation in respect of essence, and equivalency in respect of attendancies.” For example, Christ suffered “eternal death” in potentia (ibid., 10:448). Owen’s repeated use of the Aristotelian distinction at this point between essence and accidents is noteworthy. As Edwin Tay has argued, this clears Owen from Clifford’s reductionist charge that Owen’s defense of solutio ejusdem betrays a crass commercialism in his understanding of the atonement. Owen was not in fact thinking of sin in quantitative terms (Tay, “Priesthood of Christ”, 212–215, 266–267; Clifford, Atonement and Justification, 9–10, 112, 128–129). 39 Owen, Works, 10:449. 40 Ibid., 10:270, 440–443, 447, 454.

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death, but Christ’s very death itself.41 Although there is a logical distinction and temporal separation between the impetration and application of redemption, the impetration contains within itself its eventual application in the lives of every single person for whom Christ died.42 Because the exact punishment for the sins of the elect has been visited upon Christ, their sins are actually remitted on the cross and the final salvation of the elect is certain. Those in the Reformed churches such as Richard Baxter who argued against this “actual remission” for sin, were left with only “potential remission, not once mentioned in the book of God.”43 A ‘hypothetical’ or conditional satisfaction for all without exception is a logical impossibility. Concerning those who suffer eternally in hell, Owen asks “how can the justice of God require satisfaction of them for their sins, if it were before satisfied for them in Christ? To be satisfied, and to require satisfaction that it may be satisfied, are contradictory, and cannot be affirmed of the same in respect of the same.”44 This is why Owen saw hypothetical universalism as containing much “venom” as it makes salvation “only a possibility” and of necessity evacuates the atonement of its intrinsic meaning and power.45 Owen follows the same line of thought concerning Christ’s atonement considered in the original sense of that word: an at-one-ment, or reconciliation. For Owen, reconciliatio is by definition mutual. “If one be well pleased with the other, and that other continue akatallaktos, unappeased and implacable, there is no reconciliation.”46 A ‘potential’ reconciliation is as meaningless as it is impossible to achieve. Reconciliation is “the immediate effect and product of the death of Christ” and cannot therefore be universal.47 Rather, God “is atoned, appeased, actually reconciled, at peace, with those for whom Christ died; and in due time, for his sake, will bestow upon them all the fruits and issues of love and renewed friendship.”48 In Owen, ————— 41

Owen rejected as groundless the counter-claim that such a perfect satisfaction undermined the freeness of forgiveness (ibid., 10:446). 42 This is especially the case as Owen demands that the death of Christ never be considered outside of the only context that gives it meaning, namely, the pactum salutis and eternal election. 43 Owen, Works, 10:477. 44 Ibid., 10:247. 45 Ibid., 10:226. 46 Ibid., 10:262. 47 Ibid., 10:264. Owen means logically immediate and elsewhere emphatically and repeatedly rejects both “justification before believing” (i.e. from the time of Christ’s cross work onwards) and “justification from eternity,” although Baxter was determined that some mud should stick (ibid., 10:449, 478, 274–279, 425–428, 454, 456–457, 465, 470, 472; 12:592, 593, 596, 601–607, 615). Owen did come closer to teaching justification before faith than many Reformed Orthodox, and was also of the opinion that some Reformed theologians who saw “justification by faith to be but the sense of it in our consciences” (i.e. in foro conscientiae as opposed to in foro Dei) were “better, wiser, and more learned” than he (ibid., 10:470; 12:593, 596). I am grateful to Richard Snoddy for helpful clarification on the general issue of justification before faith. 48 Ibid., 10:459.

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therefore, the very nature of the atonement demands that all for whom it is made are actually and finally saved. Given that the reprobate are finally lost, Christ’s atonement cannot have been made for them in any way whatsoever. 6.2.5 The Force of Logic Having therefore established the nature of Christ’s atonement and positioned it within the framework of a Trinitarian redemption and a pactum salutis, Owen is able to harness all the powers of human logic to press upon his opponents the absurdity of rejecting Reformed particularism. In what has to be a locus classicus in the particular redemptionist literature, Owen argues as follows: God imposed his wrath due unto, and Christ underwent the pains of hell for, either all the sins of all men, or all the sins of some men, or some sins of all men. If the last, some sins of all men, then have all men some sins to answer for, and so shall no man be saved [...] If the second, that is it which we affirm, that Christ in their stead and room suffered for all the sins of all the elect in the world. If the first, why, then, are not all freed from the punishment of all their sins? You will say, “Because of their unbelief; they will not believe.” But this unbelief, is it a sin or not? If not, why should they be punished for it? If it be, then Christ underwent the punishment due to it, or not. If so, then why must that hinder them more than their other sins for which he died from partaking of the fruit of his death? If he did not, then did he not die for all their sins.49

This is how Owen could conclude “that to affirm Christ to die for all men is the readiest way to prove that he died for no man, in the sense Christians have hitherto believed, and to hurry poor souls into the bottom of Socinian blasphemies.”50

—————

49 Ibid., 10:173. Owen evidently took delight in presenting this “dilemma” for “our Universalists” and reused it later on in Death of Death: “If Christ died in the stead of all men, and made satisfaction for their sins, then he did it for all their sins, or only for some of their sins. If for some only, who then can be saved? If for all, why then are all not saved? They say it is because of their unbelief; they will not believe, and therefore are not saved. That unbelief, is it a sin, or is it not? If it be not, how can it be a cause of damnation? If it be, Christ died for it, or he did not. If he did not, then he died not for all the sins of all men. If he did, why is this an obstacle to their salvation?” (ibid., 10:249). 50 Ibid., 10:290.

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6.3 John Davenant & English Hypothetical Universalism Despite the rigor and vigor of Owen’s defense of particular redemption, this was by no means the only option for the Reformed Orthodox in seventeenth-century Britain, and many reputable Reformed Orthodox theologians remained unconvinced by the arguments for particular redemption. One such theologian was John Davenant (1572–1641), Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, who although he did not live to see the publication of Owen’s Death of Death, did deliver a series of lectures against particular redemptionism some time before being consecrated Bishop of Salisbury in November 1621.51 These Latin lectures, comprising over one hundred tightly argued folio pages, were not published until 1650,52 but are to English Hypothetical Universalism what Owen’s Death of Death is to particular redemptionism – a classic, thorough statement of the position that arguably was not bettered by a British divine in the Reformed Orthodox period. Although for the purposes of this essay it would have been convenient if Owen and Davenant had clashed swords directly,53 it is still possible, due to the explanatory care of both theologians, and making use of Davenant’s other material on this debate produced in connection with the Synod of Dordt, to compare the core tenets of their respective positions, and, without anachronism, contrast their different approaches to articulating what Christ accomplished on the cross.

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For the issue of dating these lectures see Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 187. John Davenant, Dissertationes duae: Prima de Morte Christi, quatenus ad omnes extendatur, quatenus ad solos Electos restringatur. Altera de Praedestinatione & Reprobatione. [...] Quibus subnectitur ejusdem D. Davenantii Sententia de Gallicana Controversia: sc. de Gratiosa & Salutari Dei erga Homines Peccatores Voluntate, edited by Thomas Bedford, 1st edn (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1650). For the purposes of this essay, English quotations will be taken from Josiah Allport’s adequate nineteenth-century translation (John Davenant, “A Dissertation on the Death of Christ, as to its Extent and special Benefits: containing a short History of Pelagianism, and shewing the Agreement of the Doctrines of the Church of England on general Redemption, Election, and Predestination, with the Primitive Fathers of the Christian Church, and above all, with the Holy Scriptures,” in An Exposition of the Epistle of St Paul to the Colossians [London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1832], 2:309–569). 53 Davenant’s 1650 dissertation did not appear until after Owen’s follow-up treatise to the Death of Death, against Richard Baxter, was already at the printer’s. But there was time enough for Owen to give a brief assessment in the preface to the reader. He viewed Davenant’s position as “repugnant unto truth” and not “founded on the word.” He deemed that the “several parts thereof are mutually conflicting and destructive of each other, to the great prejudice of the truth therein contained.” He was convinced that Davenant was engaged in a futile attempt to make the gospel more palatable to “carnal affections” and “the fleshly-minded,” for why else would he have concocted such an elaborate system of “unscriptural distinctions” and “inextricable entanglements” (Owen, Works, 10:432–433)? Davenant did not live long enough to return such compliments on Owen’s treatise, dying seven years before its publication. 52

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6.3.1 Dualism Perhaps the most striking contrast in the approaches of Davenant and Owen is that right from the outset Owen addresses Christ’s work in terms of the “end” (telos) that the Father had in mind and that Christ effectually accomplished,54 whereas for Davenant, everywhere he turns he sees the work of Christ in dualistic or bifocal terms and as admitting of a legitimate reference at once to both the elect and non-elect. For example, Christ came to save the elect, but he also came to save all without exception in another sense, since his work always has a dual aspect to it. The salvation of the elect is not the “only or sole end” of Christ’s death, and Christ “merited, and offered his merits, in a different way for different persons.”55 Thus, Christ had different things in mind for different people when he was dying on the cross: “there was in Christ himself a will according to which he willed that his death should regard all men individually; and there was also a will according to which he willed that it should pertain to the elect alone.” Both this special reference and universal reference of Christ’s death are “conformed to the ordination of the Father.”56 Although Davenant subordinates Christ to the Father’s decree of election, Christ himself, while suffering on the cross, affirms the decree of election and to that extent participates in his own death’s special application. Trinitarian unity is thereby maintained even while Christ dies for those whom the Father has not elected.57 Davenant’s sensitivity to the charge, much used by Owen, that hypothetical universalism threatens the unity of the Trinity, is also seen when he refuses to make the more traditional hypothetical universalist concession that Christ’s priestly intercession is limited to the elect. Instead Davenant universalises the whole of Christ’s priestly work on one level, in order to correspond with the Father’s equivalent dual purpose. Thus, “not only […] the death, but the resurrection and intercession of Christ regards [the nonelect], as to the possibility of their enjoying these benefits, the condition of faith being pre-supposed.”58 Similarly, the work of the Holy Spirit in redemption also has a dual aspect in so far as “sundry initial preparations tending to Conversion, merited by Christ” are “wrought by the Holy Ghost in the hearts of many” non————— 54

Ibid., 10:157–163. Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:396, 557. 56 Ibid., 2:398. 57 It is this teaching that Christ died in a special way for the elect that distinguishes all forms of Hypothetical Universalism from the Remonstrant or Arminian doctrine of the atonement which teaches that Christ died for everyone equally and for no one in a special way. 58 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:373. 55

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elect.59 In this, Davenant was asserting what the British Delegation to Dordt as a whole had officially confessed. These men spoke of “some fruits of Christ’s death, not comprised in the Decree of Election, but afforded more generally.” By this they meant “true and spiritual Graces accompanying the Gospel, and conferred upon some non-electi.”60 Granted that “Christ does not confer anything upon men which he hath not first merited for them by his obedience,” it follows for Davenant that, “[w]hatever supernatural grace is given through Christ to any man, is given from the merit of Christ.”61 The Son and the Spirit therefore both operate with a dual reference to the elect and reprobate in their respective opera ad extra, and, in so doing, fully concur with the will of the Father. Against Owen’s claims to the contrary, therefore, the Trinitarian nature of redemption is upheld within this hypothetical universalist, dualist system. 6.3.2 Potential Redemption One of Davenant’s main criticisms of particular redemptionism was that it did not do justice to the received Lombardian sufficiency-efficiency distinction concerning Christ’s atonement.62 Although the particularists conceded its sufficiency in one sense due to the divine nature of the sin bearer,63 Davenant was adamant that the sufficiency of the atonement was not a bare or “mere sufficiency” (nuda sufficientia) but rather an “ordained sufficiency” (sufficientia ordinata).64 This is because the Scriptures “speak of the death of Christ so as to refer its universal efficacy not to the mere dig—————

59 John Hales, Golden Remains of the ever memorable Mr. John Hales of Eton Colledge &c. With Additions from the Authours own Copy, viz. Sermons and Miscellanies. Also Letters and Expresses concerning the Synod of Dort (not before Printed) from an authentic Hand, [1659] 2nd edn (London: Thomas Newcomb for Robert Pawlet, 1673), 2:187. Davenant’s appeal here is to Hebrews 6. The position paper from which this quotation is taken is entitled “Doctour Davenant touching the Second Article, discussed at the Conference at the Haghe, of the Extent of Redemption.” It is not entirely clear that Davenant is its sole author, but for the evidence in favour of Davenant’s authorship see Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), 1st edn, The Church of England Record Society, vol. 13 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 218. 60 Hales, Golden Remains, 2:185. The position paper from which this quotation is taken is entitled “The British Divines at Dort, March 11. 1618. To the Arch-Bishop of Canterbury. Reasons of enlarging Grace beyond Election.” 61 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:353. 62 See above, footnote 2. 63 There was basic agreement amongst the Reformed Orthodox that Christ’s atonement was intrinsically or hypothetically sufficient to save all without exception. Owen himself taught that it “was in itself of infinite value and sufficiency to have been made a price to have bought and purchased all and every man in the world” (Owen, Works, 10:296 [italics original to 1648 edition]. Cf. ibid., 10:231, 295–298, 397). 64 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:378, 401–403, 409, 412; Davenant, Dissertationes duae, 37, 38.

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nity of the sacrifice offered, but to the act and intention of the offering.”65 For Davenant, therefore, as for all hypothetical universalists, the sufficiency of the atonement involves the will of God and not just christological considerations. More specifically it involves the will of God that Christ’s sufficient death should set the foundation for a two-staged reconciliation and should render all men salvable – in other words, the formal establishment of a potential redemption for all without exception. Whereas for Owen reconciliation is always a guaranteed accomplishment or no reconciliation at all, for Davenant reconciliatio has two steps with the second step not always occurring. Firstly, because Christ has died sufficiently for all, God is now rendered “placable and reconcilable” (placabilis & reconciliabilis) to every member of the human race, which means he is made willing to be reconciled upon “the performance of some certain condition.” The second step is when a sinner is actually reconciled to God by meeting that condition of faith.66 Thus, no one has “an hereditary right to eternal life” or is actually reconciled “by the work of Christ alone.” Rather, “it is necessary, before he obtains this actual reconciliation, to add the act or work of the man himself believing in Christ the Redeemer, and applying the merit of his death to himself individually by faith.”67 Davenant could not understand why particular redemptionists were “superciliously” rejecting the term “placability” or “reconcilability,” since “God would not be actually pacified and reconciled to any man, as soon as he should believe [...] unless he were placable and reconcilable to any man before he should believe.”68 ————— 65

Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:410–411. Ibid., 2:443, 441; cf. 2:440, 566, 427. This view of reconciliation is not exclusive to Hypothetical Universalists. It is presented here simply because it is a key part of Davenant’s overall system. 67 Ibid., 2:441–442. Davenant therefore had to teach a different mode of salvation for infants and those who lack the intellectual faculties necessary for adult faith (ibid., 2:440–441, 446–447). For more on the implications of Davenant’s position for infant salvation and how he tried to reconcile it with his doctrine of baptismal regeneration see Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 194–195. 68 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:443. Davenant acknowledged here that only “some persons” actually used this term, and most likely he was referring primarily to Samuel Ward, Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. According to fellow British delegate George Carleton, Bishop of Llandaff, Ward made up the term reconciliabilitas at the Synod of Dordt, specifically to buttress his and Davenant’s position on hypothetical universalism. Davenant may also have had Carleton in mind here as a particularist who “superciliously” scrupled the term. While the Synod was debating the extent of the atonement, Carleton wrote to his cousin Sir Dudley Carleton on 8 February, 1619, of his having privately opposed Davenant and Ward over their hypothetical universalism. He confessed to Sir Dudley that this “devising of Words makes me more to suspect the Doctrine [of universal redemption]; for I think a devised School term should not determine a Truth in Divinity.” According to Carleton, Ward was also forced at Dordt to coin the terms redimibilitas and impetrabilitas for the same purpose of avoiding full-blown universalism (Hales, Golden Remains, 2:179–182). The popular notion that particular redemptionists were ‘scholastic’ 66

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The second aspect of Davenant’s potential redemption based on the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice is the rendering of all without exception salvibile. Firstly, because the atonement “is as far applicable as it is announceable” (for if it were not applicable, it would not be announceable), Christ’s death can be seen as “a medicine” or “universal remedy” ready to be administered or applied to any member of the human family.69 It “is applicable to all from the Divine loving-kindness to man,” even to the non-elect who are still in this world.70 Secondly, the corresponding salvability of man (as opposed to angels and demons) means that as a result of Christ’s universal atonement all men without exception have “a common right” to salvation.71 Thus salvation “neither is, nor ought to be conceived by us to be altogether impossible to any person living.”72 Rather “salvation is procurable” for all without exception, and “his sins are expiable.”73 Indeed, because of Christ’s universal satisfaction, there is “an universal capacity of salvation in all persons living in this world.”74 In concrete terms this means that the death of Christ “was capable of application to Judas, if Judas had repented and believed in Christ,” and was genuinely applicable to non-elect Cain before Christ died in history.75 Cain and Judas were therefore potentially or hypothetically, but not actually, redeemed by Christ. 6.3.3 Voluntarism Another key to understanding the school of English Hypothetical Universalism that Davenant represents is an appreciation of the importance of voluntarism in this system. Speaking with a Scotist accent of acceptatio, Davenant stresses that what the satisfaction of Christ achieves depends utterly on “the ordination and acceptation of God,” and is not determined by anything arising from the intrinsic nature of justice or satisfactio.76 Daven————— whereas universal redemptionists just took Scripture words at face value does not reflect the nature of these seventeenth-century debates. 69 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:380, 460, 513, 381, 386, 513, 522. Owen rejected this patristic medicine metaphor (Owen, Works, 10:150, 232–233, 239). 70 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:358. 71 Ibid., 2:411. 72 Ibid., 2:429. 73 Ibid., 2:372. 74 Ibid., 2:566. 75 Ibid., 2:342, 368. Note how Davenant makes the application of the atonement contingent on faith, whereas in Death of Death Owen always sees faith itself as arising out of an unconditional application of the atonement. 76 Davenant claimed that “the merit of Christ is a benefit to us only as far as it was accepted by God, as Scotus hath taught” (ibid., 2:455). Davenant was of the view that Scotus “has many things which greatly conduce to the illustration of our opinion” (ibid., 2:543–544).

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ant even argues that it is only “on account of the want of its ordination and acceptation as to angels” that it does not save any angels. It is only due to the acceptatio divina, and not, for example, because Christ did not take upon himself the nature of angels, that Christ cannot “be said to have died for [angels] in any way.”77 Similarly, it is only this divine acceptation that makes the death of Christ pertain to the elect “in some special way.”78 It is not the effect of propitiation itself that brings about faith in the elect, as in Owen, but a separate decree of predestinating grace.79 It is the most free will of God that takes a general atonement and applies it how he wills and to whom he wills. It just so happens that God used “his own most free power”80 to apply it not to angels or the reprobate, but to the elect alone. In that sense, Davenant’s voluntarism stands over against Owen’s pactum salutis. It is also this voluntarist approach to the satisfactio Christi that enables Davenant to evade, partially at least, the dilemma that Owen sets for hypothetical universalists concerning their apparent presentation of God exacting a ‘double payment’ from the reprobate in hell. Davenant saw no injustice in damning those for whom Christ died. He argued that no injustice is done to those persons who are punished by God after the ransom was accepted for the sins of the human race, because they offered nothing to God as a satisfaction for their sins, nor performed that condition, without the performance of which God willed not that this satisfactory price should benefit any individual.81

However, many Reformed divines would have questioned whether Davenant in this way evades the other aspect of Owen’s dilemma concerning the fact that this failure to believe merely constitutes the sin of unbelief, a sin for which perfect satisfaction has in theory already been made. Thus, they would argue, if Owen was emptying the sufficientia of Christ’s sacrifice of any real meaning, Davenant was emptying Christ’s satisfactio of any real meaning. 6.3.4 Conditionalism & the Evangelical Covenant Finally, having emphasized how important covenant theology was in Owen’s form of particular redemptionism, it would be misleading to leave the impression that Davenant himself did not heavily use covenant theology in the defense and development of his position. In fact, rather than using ————— 77

Ibid., 2:386; cf. 2:413; Heb 2:16. Ibid., 2:547. 79 Ibid., 2:398. 80 Ibid., 2:371. 81 Ibid., 2:376; cf. 2:461. 78

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covenant theology, like Owen, to emphasise a unilateral dispensation of sovereign grace to the elect, Davenant used the covenant motif to emphasise the conditionality of salvation to all in the divine economy, developing a highly elaborate bilateral scheme concerning what he called the ‘Evangelical covenant’ or pactum Evangelicum.82 The first stage of Davenant’s two-staged reconciliation, outlined above, was to furnish a new covenantal relationship between God and “the whole human race”83 in the form of an “Evangelical covenant”84 founded upon Christ’s oblation. This covenant has two main characteristics: its unrestricted universality and its conditionality. Faith is annexed to this covenant as a “condition of works.”85 Thus, by virtue of the Evangelical covenant, “a right accrued to all men individually, on condition of faith, of claiming for themselves remission of sins.” Consequently, “through the death of Christ having been accepted by God as a ransom, now it is lawful for any man indiscriminately to ascend into heaven by believing.”86 The foedus Evangelicum is to be contrasted with God’s foedus arcanum or “secret covenant which comprehends some certain individual persons known only to God” and is “subordinate” to the Evangelical covenant.87 —————

82 It would be anachronistic to expect Davenant in the 1620s to be interacting with the notion of a pactum salutis. However, all the evidence suggests that had Davenant been challenged to articulate what form a pactum salutis might have taken, he would probably have said something along the lines that the Father covenanted with the Son that he should die for all a death which would be applicable to all upon condition of faith – a faith that the Father promised he would give to the elect. It is inconceivable that Davenant would have conceded a pactum salutis without such a dual reference. 83 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:368. 84 References to this ‘Evangelical covenant’ are legion: ibid., 2:357, 375, 381, 396, 398, 399, 401, 404–405, 417–429, 439, 440, 442, 449, 473, 478, 511–512, 525, 554–555, 556, 557; Hales, Golden Remains, 2:187; John Davenant, A Treatise on Justification, or the Disputatio de Justitia habituali at actuali [...] translated from the original Latin, together with Translations of the Determinationes, trans. Josiah Allport, [1631, (1634) 1639] 1st English edn, 2 vol. (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1844–1846), 1:289; 2:144. 85 Davenant, Justification, 1:289. By this term, Davenant does not mean to imply some form of neonomianism: “In fine, the law rests the value and form of its covenant upon the condition of works, but the Gospel places the value and form of its covenant in the blood of the Mediator, apprehended by faith; but annexes the condition of works, as subserving this Evangelical covenant, not as comprising or constituting the covenant itself” (ibid.). In other words, faith is still not to be seen as meritorious (ibid., 2:144; cf. 2:46). 86 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:473, 404. Davenant’s Evangelical covenant also provides the conceptual environment for his formulations on the free offer of the gospel. However, the nature of the gospel call for both particular redemptionists and hypothetical universalists is beyond the scope of this essay. But for an examination of Davenant’s teaching that God loves and desires to save the reprobate in a gracious gospel call that announces that Christ has died for every hearer, see Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 198–208. For Owen’s denial of the same in Death of Death see Owen, Works, 10:227–230, 240, 294, 298, 300, 311–316, 328, 384, 393, 395, 396, 404–412. 87 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:525, 555. Davenant cites Jeremiah 31:33. Davenant usually employs his own term of pactum Evangelicum in his defense of hypothetical universalism, but

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Whereas Owen puts conceptual priority on the eternal counsel, the pactum salutis and the eternal covenant of grace, Davenant puts conceptual priority on this universal conditional covenant, and not on any absolute covenant: “Lest, therefore, this universal compact should not bring the effect of salvation to any one, God, by a special and secret intention, hath taken care that the merit of the death of Christ should be applied to some for the infallible obtaining of faith and eternal life.”88 Although eternal, this absolute new covenant comes after the conditional Evangelical covenant, with the purpose of ensuring that salvation becomes a reality.89 In Davenant and English Hypothetical Universalism, therefore, we have within the ranks of the Reformed Orthodox a competing system in which sovereign, particular grace operates within a conditional, covenantal framework, such that none are antecedently excluded on the basis of eternal reprobation, but all have equal access, at least in theory, to the finished, universal work of Christ as set forth in the gospel.

6.4 English Hypothetical Universalism & Reformed Confessions We have so far seen something of the considerable differences that lay between the representative positions of Owen and Davenant on the extent of the atonement, and the differing extents to which their predestinarian systems were allowed to control their presentation of the work of Christ. But could such radically different approaches both be accepted as ‘orthodox’ by the seventeenth-century British Reformed churches? It is fair to say that ————— here, in contrasting it with God’s absolute covenant, he adopts the standard Reformed Orthodox term of foedus Evangelicum (Davenant, Dissertationes duae, 92). This is lost in Allport’s rendering of it as ‘covenant’ in all cases. 88 Davenant, “Dissertation”, 2:555–556. The difference here with Owen is not that Owen denies faith is a condition, but that he teaches that this condition, though still a sine qua non, is purchased for, and applied to, the elect absolutely and unconditionally (Owen, Works, 10:203, 224, 225, 235, 241, 450, 465; 12:608). For Owen, faith is a necessary “fruit and effect of the death of Christ” for all those for whom he died, and he vehemently repudiated the conditionalism of hypothetical universalism: “their conditional satisfaction, or their suspending the fruits of the death of Christ upon conditions, as though the Lord should give him to die for us upon condition of such and such things, is a vain figment, contrary to the Scriptures, inconsistent in itself, and destructive of the true value and virtue of the death of Christ” (ibid., 10:254, 450). 89 In this, Davenant anticipates the Cameronian or Amyraldian placement of the decree of election as logically following the decree to give Christ for the salvation of the whole world, in order to pre-empt the otherwise foreseeable outcome of no one believing the gospel. But there appears to be no evidence that, before Davenant’s lectures were “ready for ye presse” in 1628 (Bodleian Tanner MS. 72 f.298v), Davenant had been consciously following John Cameron in this regard. In 1630 in a letter to Samuel Ward, Davenant explicitly rejected the notion that election was on the basis of “ye Forseen Merits of Christ” (Bodleian Tanner MS. 71, f.37r; Morris Fuller, The Life, Letters and Writings of John Davenant, D.D. 1572–1641 Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 1st edn [London: Methuen, 1897], 325).

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Owen’s basic position was generally perceived to be the more orthodox of the two amongst the seventeenth-century British Reformed Orthodox, if only because it was manifestly further away from Arminianism than hypothetical universalism could ever be. But that is not the same as saying English Hypothetical Universalists were therefore officially regarded as heterodox, or that they could not themselves offer a robust defense of their own orthodox credentials. It goes without saying that particular redemptionism was not excluded by the final pronouncements of the two greatest synods in the seventeenthcentury for the codification of Reformed Orthodoxy at which British divines were present, namely the Synod of Dordt (1618–1619) and the Westminster Assembly (1643–1653).90 But was English Hypothetical Universalism excluded? The popular perception, both at the time and subsequently, that both the Canons of Dordt and the Westminster Confession of Faith excluded hypothetical universalism was never universally shared and has always been challenged right from the genesis of these documents.91 A majority influence at a Synod is not the same as an exclusive influence, and a minority influence or influences could potentially still have resulted in modified or necessarily more ambiguous joint codifications. 6.4.1 The Canons of Dordt In the case of the Canons of Dordt, modifications deriving from a substantial minority influence are exactly what we find.92 It might at first be thought out of place in an essay on diversity in the British Reformed tradition to trespass into a consideration of the position on this controversy taken by the Synod of Dordt. That would doubtless have been the case had it not been for the fact that a highly significant part of this minority influence at the Synod came from the British Delegation, and the most influential among its five delegates was none other than John Davenant.93 Like the —————

90 Chad Van Dixhoorn and the Westminster Assembly Project (westminsterassembly.org) have recently redated the end of the Westminster Assembly to 1653 based on local newspaper evidence (unpublished communication). 91 In the case of Dordt, Daniel Tilenus’ gross caricature of the Canons did much to promote this popular perception (Daniel Tilenus, Canones Synodi Dordracenae. Cum Notis et Animadversionibus D. Tileni. Adjecta sunt ad calcem Paralipomena ad Amicam Collationem quam cum D. Tileno ante Biennium Institutam nuper publicavit lo. Camero, 1st edn [Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1622]). 92 W. Robert Godfrey, “Tensions within International Calvinism: The Debate on the Atonement at the Synod of Dort, 1618–1619” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1974), 263–264. 93 For a detailed examination of the options on offer at the Synod of Dordt, including an examination of the views of the continental hypothetical universalist delegates, see G. Michael Thomas, The Extent of the Atonement: A Dilemma for Reformed Theology from Calvin to the

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Synod itself, the British Delegation was by no means unanimous on the extent of the atonement, and the influence of particular redemptionist impulses was felt, initially at least, from three delegates within the British ranks.94 Tales of the ‘conversion’ of British delegates from particularism to hypothetical universalism under the influence of Davenant and the other convinced hypothetical universalist delegate Samuel Ward (1572–1643) are not implausible, but hard to verify. But certainly ground was conceded to Davenant and Ward either reluctantly and for tactical reasons, or otherwise.95 Due to the towering influence of Davenant and his close friend Ward, it was the position of English Hypothetical Universalism that was brought to bear powerfully upon the deliberations and final formulations of the Synod to the extent that the British Delegation were able to subscribe to the resulting Canons shortly before returning to England.96 In subscribing to the Canons, the British Delegation affirmed the following in Article 2.8: “voluit Deus, ut Christus per sanguinem crucis (quo novum foedus confirmavit) ex omni populo, tribu, gente, et lingua, eos omnes et solos, qui ab aeterno ad salutem electi, et a Patre ipsi dati sunt, efficaciter redimeret.”97 But how exactly could a theologian such as John ————— Consensus, 1st edn, Paternoster biblical & theological Monographs (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 1997), 128–159. 94 Hales, Golden Remains, 2:101, 179–186. 95 Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 213; W. Brown Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom, 1st edn, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 272–274; Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War, 1st edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 187–192. 96 The Canons themselves conclude with the claim that they were unanimi omnium et singulorum totius Synodi membrorum consensu firmata (“confirmed by the unanimous consent of all and each of the members of the whole Synod”) (Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes, edited by David S. Schaff, [1931] 6th Revised reprint edn, 3 vol. [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993], 3:577, 596). For further documentation on the British Delegation subscribing to the Canons, see Hales, Golden Remains, 2:152–156; Gerard Brandt, The History of the Reformation and other Ecclesiastical Transactions in and about the Low-Countries, from the Beginning of the Eighth Century, down to the famous Synod of Dort, inclusive. In which all the Revolutions that happen’d in Church and State on Account of the Divisions between the Protestants and Papists, the Arminians and Calvinists, are fairly and fully represented, [1677– 1704] 1st English edn, 4 vol. (London: T. Wood for Timothy Childe, John Childe & John Nicks, 1720–1723), 3:282; James Ussher, The whole Works of the most Rev. James Ussher, D.D., Lord Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of all Ireland. With the life of the Author, and an Account of his Writings, edited by Charles R. Elrington, 17 vol. (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1847–1864), 15:144–145. For more detail and key source documents on the theology and influence of the British Delegation, see Milton, ed., British Delegation. 97 Schaff, ed., Creeds, 3:562. This forms just part of Article 2.8. The English translation of this portion published in 1619 reads, “God willed, that Christ by the blood of his crosse (whereby hee was to establish a new covenant) should effectually redeeme out of every people, tribe, nation, and language, all them, and them onely, who from eternity were elected unto salvation, and given to him of the Father” (The Synod of Dordt, The Judgement of the Synode holden at Dort, concerning the Five Articles: As also their Sentence touching Conradus Vorstius, [1619] Another edn

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Davenant subscribe to this? At first glance the terms efficaciter (‘effectually’ or ‘efficaciously’) and eos solos (‘those only’) appear to shut up the would-be subscriber to a particularist understanding of the death of Christ, as if Christ died to save “only” the elect. This explains why in the twentieth century this second Article of the Canons was to form the ‘L’ for ‘Limited Atonement’ in the popular ‘T.U.L.I.P.’ acronym for the so-called ‘Five Points of Calvinism’.98 But ironically it is the inclusion of the word efficaciter that gives the hypothetical universalist room for his position. Had this word been omitted, the Canons would be teaching that Christ’s redemptive work in all respects was “only” for the elect. But as it stands, what the Canons teach here is that Christ’s effectual redemptive work was “only” for the elect. This leaves a door open – even if it is only a back door – for any subscriber to hold privately to an ineffectual redemptive work for the nonelect, or, to put it differently, Christ dying for the non-elect sufficiently but not efficiently – precisely what a hypothetical universalist usage of the Lombardian formula entailed. In other words, this section subtly allowed the likes of Davenant to subscribe to the Canons, and, in terms of vindicating the rejection of Remonstrant errors (the official purpose of the Synod), it was still fit for purpose.99 ————— [London: John Bill, 1619], 20. This translation is, as Milton notes, not the most accurate but the most contemporary [Milton, ed., British Delegation, 297]). It is with these words that the Synod explains its immediately preceding statement that God’s intention (intentio) was that the saving efficacy (salvifica efficacia) of Christ’s death should exert itself (sese exereret) in all the elect, in order to give them alone (eos solos) justifying faith, and lead them infallibly (infallibiliter) to salvation (Schaff, ed., Creeds, 3:562). 98 The ‘T.U.L.I.P.’ acronym appears to have originated no earlier than a 1905 lecture in New Jersey by Dr. Cleland Boyd McAfee (1866–1944), a leading Presbyterian minister in Brooklyn, New York (William H. Vail, “The Five Points of Calvinism historically considered,” The Outlook 104, May–August [1913]: 394). For the first influential popularisation of this acronym, still in print to this day, see Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1932), 59–60, 150–161. 99 It is important to take into account at this point that the Synod’s intention was never to produce a positive confessional standard, and that requiring the delegates or others to subscribe to the final document was not initially envisaged. The Synod’s original intention was simply to produce a negative document that judged and definitively rejected Remonstrant theology. Therefore the ‘Rejection of Errors’ sections of the final document are actually primary, despite the fact that they eventually took second place and are even sometimes omitted in modern editions of the Canons. Indeed, the original drafting committee used the term ‘Canons’ to refer only to the Rejectio Errorum in distinction from the positive articles. The positive articles were eventually folded into the final document in order to vindicate the rejections and demonstrate how an orthodox biblical alternative was available. Although the Rejectio Errorum gradually faded from view once the final synodical judgment began to function increasingly as a confessional standard, it follows that the positive articles can still only be responsibly interpreted with the ‘Rejection of Errors’ as an interpretive backdrop (Donald W. Sinnema, “The Canons of Dordt: From Judgment on Arminianism to Confessional Standard,” in Revisiting the Synod of Dordt (1618–1619), ed. Aza Goudriaan and Fred A. van Lieburg [Leiden: Brill, 2011], 313–333). I am very grateful to Professor Sinnema

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According to the Synod, the Remonstrants maintained that Christ died in the same manner for all without exception, that is to say, that “God the Father ordained his Sonne unto the death of the crosse without any certaine & determinate counsell of saving any particular man expressely” (sine certo ac definito consilio quemquam nominatem salvandi).100 Against this claim, both particular redemptionists and hypothetical universalists were united in maintaining that Christ died efficaciter for the elect. That Christ died efficaciously for the elect and “those only” (and therefore not efficaciously for all equally) was enough to put the Remonstrants well outside the bounds of Reformed Orthodoxy, while still allowing anti-Remonstrant hypothetical universalists to remain within the Reformed Orthodox fold. With regard to Article 2.3, all the Dordt delegates needed to do was to demonstrate that their rejection of the Remonstrant formulation of a universal atonement in no way reduced their own ability to uphold the infinite sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. Accordingly, though internally divided on this issue, they forged a carefully crafted statement, binding any subscriber neither to the view that it was only an intrinsic sufficiency (derived from the hypostatic union), nor to the view that it was an ordained sufficiency (with a divine intention to benefit more than the elect in at least one respect). Article 2.3 simply reads “Haec mors Filii Dei est unica et perfectissima pro peccatis victima et satisfactio, infiniti valoris et pretii, abunde sufficiens ad totius mundi peccata expianda.”101 Thus it was that particular redemptionist Edward Reynolds could argue from the floor of the Westminster Assembly that the Synod of Dordt “intended noe more than” an intrinsic sufficiency, whereas, in the same debate, English Hypothetical Universalist Edmund Calamy could argue for an ordained sufficiency by announcing that he held to universal redemption “in the sence of our devines in the sinod of Dort; that Christ did pay a price for all.”102 Reynolds was conveniently closing down an interpretative option, just as Calamy was conven————— for sharing and clarifying with me the above findings from his extensive research into the drafting of the Canons of Dordt. 100 Synod of Dordt, Judgement, 21; Schaff, ed., Creeds, 3:563. 101 Schaff, ed., Creeds, 3:561. “The death of the sonne of God is the onely, and most perfit sacrifice, and satisfaction for sinnes, of infinite price, and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sinnes of the whole world” (Synod of Dordt, Judgement, 18–19). 102 Session 522, 22 October, 1645. “Minutes of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, from 4th September, 1643 to 25th March, 1652 in three Volumes,” Dr Williams Library, London, MS. 35.1–3, 3.104r, 104v. Cf. Alexander F. Mitchell and John Struthers, ed., Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines while engaged in preparing their Directory for Church Government, Confession of Faith, and Catechisms (November 1644 to March 1649) from Transcripts of the Originals produced by a Committee of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1st edn (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1874), 152, 153. The Westminster Assembly Minutes are fully reproduced in Chad B. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2004), 7 vol, and are shortly to be published by Oxford University Press.

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iently stating more than was explicitly required by Article 2.3. But reading a divine intentionality into this section is not itself proscribed by the Synod’s meticulously crafted wording, and Calamy’s was a fair summary of the British Delegation’s reading of the Canons, even as Reynolds’ position was also fully accommodated in Article 2.3. 6.4.2 The Westminster Confession Finding modified or intentionally ambiguous codification in the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) is altogether more difficult, but, just as a significant body of hypothetical universalists successfully influenced the final wording at Dordt, so too at the Westminster Assembly do we meet with a vocal minority who were able to restrain the final codification sufficiently for there to be some significant ambiguity at crucial places. This may come as a surprise to many, because it is quite clear that the Westminster Standards not only do not teach English Hypothetical Universalism or allow it to be deduced or expounded by logical deduction from various propositional statements made, but the whole exegetical approach and systematic structures of the finally codified Westminster theology are inimical to it.103 But that should not take away from the fact that the Westminster Assembly was far from unanimous on the issue of the extent of the atonement, and the vocal and influential English Hypothetical Universalist minority pushed hard so as not to be needlessly excluded from orthodoxy at any crucial point. And neither was the Assembly unwilling to comply. There is no evidence to suggest that the Assembly excluded views unnecessarily just because it could. Indeed, to have done so would have been strategically disastrous for this parliamentary committee, as well as against the stated will of some of its leading divines. For example, on the Fast Day of 8 October, 1645, days before the extent of the atonement was debated at the Westminster Assembly, Edward Reynolds preached a sermon to the Assembly in which he exhorted the divines to self-denial in relation to the Assembly, including in the matter of expressing their “judgments and opinions” when these threatened “to hinder the peace of the church.” Reynolds feared that a “devided ministry” would only serve as “an advantage for the common enemy.”104 By ‘common enemy’ Reynolds would have included Papists, —————

103 For example, WCF 29.2 speaks of “the alone propitiation for all the sins of his elect.” This does not necessarily exclude English Hypothetical Universalism as its advocates would argue that in one sense this is still true, i.e. the elect have no other source of propitiation for their sins other than in Christ’s one sacrifice (which, for the elect, is effectual). But this is language more characteristic of the particularist, and anticipates Owen’s reading of 1 John 2:2 in his Death of Death. 104 Session 514, 8 October, 1645. “Minutes,” 3.98r–98v; cf. Mitchell, Minutes, 142.

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Anabaptists, Arminians and the like, but not – despite his own particular redemptionist convictions – English Hypothetical Universalists. The printed edition of this sermon “Published by Authority” indicates that what Reynolds had in mind by judgments and opinions that needed to be suppressed for the sake of unity were those that were “not in themselves matters of faith and morall duty” but rather “matters meerly problematicall, and of private perswasion, wherein godly men may be differently minded, without breach of love, or hazard of salvation.”105 Reynolds’ spirit here is not out of keeping with the fact that although the Westminster Confession goes way beyond Dordt’s calculated ambiguity in the direction of a much more defensive particularism, it too also falls short of explicitly proscribing English Hypothetical Universalism where, in theory, it could have done so. An exhaustive investigation of this complicated matter is beyond the scope of this essay, but one example of this falling short would arguably be Chapter 3 of the Confession concerning “Gods eternall Decree”. This chapter was debated at length during the Assembly in the autumn of 1645, following the report of the first Committee concerning predestination on Friday, 17 October. It is significant, given his irenicism above, that Reynolds himself was in charge of this committee.106 A surviving comment from Scots Commissioner George Gillespie on the opening session of the debate on the following Monday also gives an indication of the spirit in which its predestinarian statements were drawn up. Gillespie advocated studied ambiguity in the confession at this point “soe every one may injoy his owne sence.”107 Two days later, as the debate continued, the boundaries of Gillespie’s commitment to studied ambiguity were to be put to the test as the debate moved towards the relationship between the decree of election and the redemption of Christ. Gillespie, along with Samuel Rutherford, John Lightfoot, Thomas Goodwin, Anthony Burgess and various other particular redemptionists, locked horns with the English Hypothetical Universalists Edmund Calamy, Lazarus Seaman, Stephen Marshall and Richard Vines for extensive debates on whether “Christ did intend to Redeeme the elect only.”108 The extent of the atonement was debated at length for the rest of the week and rolled on into a second week of debates, with the “debate about Redemption” still appearing in the Minutes as late as 31 October. By this stage some level of agreement appears to have been reached, for dis—————

105 Edward Reynolds, Self-Deniall: Opened and applied in a Sermon before the Reverend Assembly of Divines on a Day of their private Humiliation, 1st edn (London: Robert Bostock, 1645), 42–43. 106 For the meticulous care and prolonged revision process that the Assembly employed in the production of Chapter 3, see Benjamin B. Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and its Work, 1st edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), 73–151. 107 Session 520, 20 October, 1645. “Minutes,” 3.103r; cf. Mitchell, Minutes, 151. 108 Session 522, 22 October, 1645. “Minutes,” 3.105r; cf. Mitchell, Minutes, 154.

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cussion then proceeded to the doctrine of reprobation. But just what was this agreement, and to what extent could ‘every one enjoy their own sense’? WCF 3.6 reads: Wherefore they who are elected, being fallen in Adam, are redeemed by Christ, are effectually called unto faith in Christ, by his Spirit working in due season, are justified, adopted, sanctified, and kept by his power through faith unto salvation. Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified and saved, but the Elect only.”109

As if echoing the phrase “those only” of the Canons of Dordt, the Confession here speaks of “the elect only” in connection with Christ’s redemption, and, once again, at first glance it would appear that the particularists won the day. We have seen how the English Hypothetical Universalist, faced with Canons Article 2.8, could argue that this limitation to the elect concerned only the ‘effectual’ aspect of redemption. But this is not as easy to do in WCF 3.6 because the word ‘redemption’ is not proactively qualified in this way. However, the first sentence above can still be taken to be referring only to effectual redemption, and the second sentence similarly fails to close down the English Hypothetical Universalist position.110 Had the Confession said “Neither are any other redeemed by Christ but the elect only” full stop, or “Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified or saved, but the Elect only,” even the most scholastically agile English Hypothetical Universalist would have been in difficulty, though not, perhaps, insuperably so. But because it says “and saved” the English Hypothetical Universalist could much more easily argue that the limitation to the elect here only applies concerning the full set, and not individually to each component part, i.e. only the elect have the redemption of Christ fully applied to them, but it just so happens that the non-elect are also redeemed in another sense. But even with the second sentence as it finally stood, an English Hypothetical Universalist might still ‘enjoy his own sense’ by simply confining its scope to the effectual redemption of the elect, while reserving the right to hold privately to another, ineffectual redemption. Structurally speaking this would be a contorted reading of the Confession, because WCF 3.7 immediately contrasts God’s decree concerning the reprobate with that concerning the elect in 3.6, and thereby implies that the categories of 3.6 do not apply to the non-elect (who are dealt with in 3.7). These categories are therefore presented only as the ‘appointed —————

109 The Westminster Assembly of Divines, The humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, now by Authority of Parliament sitting at Westminster, concerning a Confession of Faith: With the Quotations and Texts of Scripture annexed. Presented by them lately to both Houses of Parliament, 1st edn (London/Edinburgh: Evan Tyler, 1647), 7–8. 110 This second sentence remains exactly as proposed by the Committee, despite it being much debated on the floor of the Assembly (Warfield, Westminster Assembly, 149, 151).

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means’ for the salvation of the elect. But it still remains a fact that this Chapter does not exclude English Hypothetical Universalism in a way that it could have done. For example, on the floor of the Assembly Gillespie rightly identified the concept of a “conditionall Redemption” as key to a hypothetical universalist system,111 but the Confession nowhere explicitly denies the possibility of a conditional redemption as having also been procured by Christ.112 It nowhere answers the question debated on the Assembly floor explicitly with a simple statement such as ‘Christ intended to redeeme the elect only.’ It certainly falls far short of the crystal clear particularism of a Scottish Presbyterian synod a century later which declared, with breathtaking confidence and a surgical precision that would have attracted the admiration of John Owen, that Christ “died in one and the same respect, for all those for whom he in any respect died.”113 Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that some members of the Westminster Assembly did detect a hypothetical universalist loophole remaining in WCF 3.6. Five of the six members of the main committee at the Savoy Conference of 1658 had been active members of the Westminster Assembly: Thomas Goodwin (who had also argued for particular redemption from the floor of the Assembly), Philip Nye, William Bridge, William Greenhill and Joseph Caryl.114 The sixth member was none other than John Owen, who led the committee along with Thomas Goodwin. It was probably through Owen’s influence, therefore, and certainly with his approval, that the Committee inserted the crucial word ‘or’, as suggested above, into 3.6 of the Savoy Declaration of Faith – a strategically conservative revision of the WCF – thereby explicitly denying that Christ redeemed the reprobate in another sense.115 Similarly, in WCF 8.5 and 8.8, although these sections reflect particularistic categories and concerns, they do not do so to the unambiguous exclusion of an English Hypothetical Universalist reading, as strained as it might come across to the modern reader. For example, 8.8 could have been made ‘bullet proof’ had it read “To all those for whom Christ hath purchased redemption in any sense” instead of just “purchased redemption.” As it stands, an English Hypothetical Universalist could, in the absence of any ————— 111

Session 522, 22 October, 1645. “Minutes,” 3.104v; cf. Mitchell, Minutes, 153. Another chance to do so was also missed in the Larger Catechism (Qs 57 and 59), where a hypothetical universalist gloss concerning “special” or “effectual” redemption is also still possible, though structurally contorted. 113 Article 3 of the Act of the Associate Synod at Edinburgh, 18 April, 1754 (quoted in Ian Hamilton, The Erosion of Calvinist Orthodoxy: Drifting from the Truth in Confessional Scottish Churches, [1990] Revised edn [Fearn, UK: Mentor, 2010], 74). 114 Arnold G. Matthews, ed., The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order, 1658 (London: Independent Press, 1959), 34. 115 “Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, or effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the Elect onely” (Savoy Conference, Declaration, 8–9). 112

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explicitly prohibitive qualifier, simply take this to be referring once again only to that effectual redemption that God intended for the elect alone.116 As it happened, the Reformed Orthodox had to wait until 1675 before a Reformed Confession unequivocally and without any possible means of escape explicitly condemned and excluded Hypothetical Universalism in all its forms. Yet this Formula Consensus Helvetica, specifically aimed at Amyraldianism rather than decretally orthodox forms of hypothetical universalism such as the English variety, never attained widespread and sustained usage.117

6.5 The Case of Richard Baxter If Davenant produced the most rigorous, scholarly defense of English Hypothetical Universalism in seventeenth-century England, it was Richard Baxter (1615–1691) who made the most noise and spilled the most ink about it. Baxter’s literary output was about double that of Owen’s 24 volumes, but the casual reader cannot help but think that few books by Baxter were ever entirely free of something said in defense of universal redemption. Baxter’s most extensive defense of universal redemption was not —————

116 The extent to which Hypothetical Universalism is excluded by the Westminster Standards point has been long debated, but the confidence of those who argue that it is completely excluded has often proceeded from a failure to distinguish adequately between Amyraldianism (which alters the ordo decretorum) and English Hypothetical Universalism (which does not). Establishing that the former is excluded does not automatically mean that the latter also is. See Schaff, ed., Creeds, 1:770–773; Mitchell, Minutes, lv–lxi; Warfield, Westminster Assembly, 138–144; William Cunningham, Historical Theology: A Review of the principal doctrinal Discussions in the Christian Church since the Apostolic Age, edited by James Buchanan and James Bannerman, 1st edn, 2 vol. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1863) 2:326–331; A. Craig Troxel, “Amyraut ‘at’ the Assembly: The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Extent of the Atonement,” Presbyterion 22, no. 1 (1996): 43–55. For a more recent study, this time more helpfully grounded on making a clear distinction between English Hypothetical Universalism and Amyraldianism, see Lee Gatiss, “‘Shades of Opinion within a generic Calvinism’: The Particular Redemption Debate at the Westminster Assembly,” Reformed Theological Review 69, no. 2 (2010): 101–118, and Lee Gatiss, “A Deceptive Clarity? Particular Redemption in the Westminster Standards,” Reformed Theological Review (forthcoming). It is also noteworthy that Robert Letham, who also acknowledges this distinction between English Hypothetical Universalism and Amyraldianism in his recent examination of this debate at the Assembly, and who notes that “roughly one-third of the recorded speeches” favoured English Hypothetical Universalism, still comes down on the side of Warfield, denying that there is technically any room for hypothetical universalism in the Confession (Robert W. A. Letham, The Westminster Assembly: Reading its Theology in historical Context, 1st edn, The Westminster Assembly and the Reformed Faith [Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Company, 2009], 176–182; especially, 181–182; Warfield, Westminster Assembly, 142–144). This debate looks set to continue, but its very existence is enough to establish my main point here. 117 For more on the Formula Consensus Helvetica, see Martin I. Klauber, “The Helvetic Formula Consensus (1675): An Introduction and Translation,” Trinity Journal 11, no. 1 (1990): 103– 123.

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published until three years after his death,118 but throughout his publishing career he was in the habit of merging Amyraldianism and English Hypothetical Universalism together in his mind in order to present a united front of notable authorities who rejected particular redemption. But even Richard Baxter claimed that he could subscribe to the Canons of Dordt and the Westminster Confession of Faith, provided he could ‘enjoy his own sense.’ From his first book onwards Baxter’s orthodox credentials were being questioned. In 1655, in an attempt to counter these charges, Baxter set out to establish that he could subscribe to the Canons of Dordt and the Westminster Standards. Concerning the Canons he wrote: I have perused over all the Articles or Decrees of the Synod of Dort, and unfeignedly honour them, as containing sound and moderate Doctrine, and heartily lament that some late Divines have to the great detriment of the Church and Truth, forsaken the moderate way of that Synod, and laid the weight of the Anti-Arminian Cause, so much upon higher points not owned by them. And there is nothing that I have observed in it all, that my Judgement doth contradict, if I be allowed these few Expositions following.119

The exceptions that follow reveal that it was phraseology around the doctrines of assurance and the perseverance of the saints that were the problem areas for Baxter and not the way it handled the matter of the extent of the atonement. Concerning this latter topic in the Canons, Baxter claimed that “in the Article of the extent of Redemption, wherein I am most suspected and accused [...] I do subscribe to the Synod of Dort, without any exception, limitation, or exposition of any word as doubtful and obscure.”120 He continued, “A man that holds to the moderation of the Synod of Dort, need not say that Christ did not dye or satisfie for all men.”121 Three years later, Baxter was more explicit on exactly how he could subscribe to Article 2.8 of the Canons. As we have already suggested is possible above, he took “those ————— 118 Richard Baxter, Universal Redemption of Mankind, by the Lord Jesus Christ: Stated and cleared by the late learned Mr Richard Baxter. Whereunto is added a short Account of special Redemption, by the same Author, 1st edn (London: For John Salusbury, 1694). 119 Richard Baxter, Rich: Baxter’s Confession of his Faith, especially concerning the Interest of Repentance and sincere Obedience to Christ, in our Justification & Salvation. Written for the Satisfaction of the Misinformed, the Conviction of Calumniators, and the Explication and Vindication of some weighty Truths (London: R. W. for Tho. Underhil and Fra. Tyton, 1655), 23. 120 Ibid., 25. 121 Ibid., 26. Baxter later went even further, claiming that the Synod of Dort disowned “the Doctrine of Christs dying only for the Elect” (Richard Baxter, The Grotian Religion discovered, at the Invitation of Mr Thomas Pierce in his Vindication. With a Preface, vindicating the Synod of Dort from the Calumnies of the new Tilenus; and David, Peter, &c. And the Puritanes, and Sequestrations, &c. from the Censures of Mr Pierce, 1st edn [London: R. W. for Nevill Simmons and by Thomas Brewster and by John Starkey, 1658], *3v). For more on Baxter’s assessment of the “Healing Principles” and moderation of the Synod of Dordt, see Richard Baxter, Richard Baxter’s Catholick Theologie: Plain, pure, peaceable: For Pacification of the dogmatical WordWarriours, 1st edn (London: Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1675), 1:124–126.

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only” to be speaking only of an effectual redemption and not of another more general, ineffectual redemption.122 When it came to the Westminster Confession, in keeping with its increased rigor, Baxter was forced to make “a limiting Exposition” and “Explications” before he could claim meaningfully to subscribe to them. However, he could still write of WCF 3.6 and 8.8 that, although these sections “speak against Universal Redemption,” they do not speak “of all Redemption, and particularly not of the meer bearing the punishment of mans sins, and satisfying Gods Justice.” Rather, they only speak “of that special Redemption proper to the Elect, which was accompanied with an intention of actual application of the saving benefits in time.”123 Thus, because Baxter held to a twofold redemption, like Davenant and all English Hypothetical Universalists, when the creeds of Reformed Orthodoxy spoke of an effectual, limited redemption but did not go out of their way to explicitly deny any other kind of redemption, he could still subscribe to these formulations, while holding to an ineffectual, general redemption that just happened not to be mentioned in the confessional statement. This, of course, required the convenient ignoring of any implicit, structural exclusions of a universal atonement, but Baxter justified this approach by saying, “I have spoken with an eminent Divine, yet living, that was of the Assembly, who assured me that they purposely avoided determining that Controversie, and some of them protest themselves for the middle way of Universal Redemption.”124 If we take the Westminster Confession as the high watermark of British Reformed Orthodoxy, we can now see how English Hypothetical Universalism never came to be regarded as a heresy in British seventeenth-century Reformed thought. Although language could be very heated at times, and this controversy was deemed by many to be of the utmost importance, polemic fell short of using such emotive language, provided that a common abhorrence of, and separation from, Arminianism could still be established.125 Indeed, those sometimes charged with being hard, harsh and ob————— 122

Baxter, Grotian Religion, A3r. Baxter, Confession, 21. 124 Richard Baxter, Certain Disputations of Right to Sacraments and the true Nature of Visible Christianity: Defending them against several Sorts of Opponents, especially against the second Assault of that pious, reverend and dear Brother Mr Thomas Blake (London: R. White for Nevil Simmons and Nathaniel Ekins, 1658), B4v. 125 Davenant’s opposition to Arminian/Remonstrant theology was strenuous and extensive. Accordingly, Owen never attributed heresy to Davenant, but, on the contrary, spoke reverently of him, and especially appreciated Davenant’s treatise on justification, employing it in the 1670s in his own writings on justification and perseverance (Owen, Works, 3:218–219; 5:208, 368; 11:497). On the other hand, Owen’s chief opponent in Death of Death was an altogether different case. Unlike Davenant, Thomas Moore was unlearned and unqualified, and went far closer to Arminianism and even Pelagianism in his bold efforts to defend his system of universal redemption. This provoked sustained and open contempt from Owen and repeated charges of “abominable” or “gross error” as well as “heresies” (ibid., 10:189, 356–358, 379, 381–382, 398–399, 403, 415). Cf. 123

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stinate on this point could sometimes prove to be most charitable in the larger context of the Puritan brotherhood. For example, it was John Owen himself who wrote a recommendatory preface in 1674 to Westminster Divine Henry Scudder’s The Christians daily Walk, in which a recommendatory preface by Baxter also appeared. In this book Scudder spends a section of five pages defending a hypothetical universalist position, and in his recommendation Owen covers himself accordingly by distancing himself from some unspecified expressions in the book.126 But his willingness to commend it warmly on the basis of the plain and practical godliness it promotes is indicative of the relative importance given to this in-house Reformed debate, at least in Post-Restoration England, even by one of the staunchest defenders of particularism. Indeed there is even evidence that might lead one to doubt whether the later Owen would have ever republished his Death of Death without revising it in terms of its severe tone and language concerning hypothetical universalism.127 In his recommendatory preface to English Hypothetical Universalist Edward Polhill’s book on the divine decrees, of which 65 pages are taken up with a robust refutation of particular redemptionism and defense of English Hypothetical Universalism,128 Owen ventures

————— the sentiments expressed in Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 1st edn, 4 vol. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 1:76–77, 80 and Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, 29–31. 126 Henry Scudder, The Christians daily Walk, in holy Security and Peace. Being an Answer to these Questions: 1. How a Man may do each present Days work with Christian Chearfullness?, 2. How to bear each Present Days Cross with Christian Patience? Containing familiar Directions, shewing 1. How to walk with God in the whole Course of a Mans Life. 2. How to be upright in the said Walking. 3. How to live without taking Care or Thought in any thing. 4. How to get and keep true Peace with God, wherein are manifold Helps to prevent and remove damnable Presumption; also to quiet and ease distressed Consciences [...] commended to the Practice of all Professors, by Dr Owen and Mr Baxter, [1627] 11th edn (London: For Lodowick Lloyd, 1674), 331–336, A1v. Scudder’s defense of hypothetical universalism also appeared in the edition that had most likely enthused Owen as a young man (Henry Scudder, The Christians daily Walke, in holy Securitie and Peace. Being an Answer to these Questions: 1. How a Man may doe each present Daies Worke with Christian Chearfullnesse?, 2. How to bear each Present Daies Crosse with Christian Patience? Containing familiar Directions, shewing 1. How to walk with God in the whole Course of a Mans Life. 2. How to be upright in the said Walking. 3. How to live without taking Care or Thought in any thing. 4. How to get and keepe true Peace with God, wherein are manifold Helpes to prevent and remove damnable Presumption; also to quiet and ease distressed Conscences. First intended for private Use; now (through Importunity) published for the common Good, [1627] 8th Corrected and enlarged edn [London: I. L. for Henry Overton, 1642], 350–357; Scudder, Christians daily Walk, 1674, A1r). 127 We have already noted above that Owen would have revised it in terms of his change of mind on the necessity of the atonement. 128 Edward Polhill, The Divine Will considered in its eternal Decrees and holy Execution of them, 1st edn (London: For Henry Eversden, 1673), 281–346.

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to express my own dissent from some of his apprehensions, especially about the Object and Extent of Redemption. Had I seen this discourse before it was wholly Printed, I should have communicated my thoughts unto him upon that Subject, and some few passages in it: but where there is an agreement in the substance and design of any Doctrine, as there is between my judgment and what is here solidly declared, it is our duty to bear with each other in things circumstantial, or different explanations of the same Truth, when there is no incursion made upon the Principles we own.129

So by the 1670s, it was not hypothetical universalists but “Papists, Socinians, Arminians, [and] Quakers”130 that Owen wanted to see attacked, and that from the apparently much safer vantage point of a Reformed Orthodox fortress free from the embarrassing cracks of vituperous intraReformed debates, and lined with a good insulating layer of warm fellowship for the godly.131

6.6 A Softening of Reformed Theology? Finally, it may be asked whether it is ever correct to see English Hypothetical Universalism as a ‘softening’ of Reformed theology, a concept that may be taken to give priority to an earlier ‘harder’ form. Professor Richard Muller has expressed dissent from such a notion in a review of my book, preferring to see the existence of a perennial ‘soft’ trajectory in the Reformed tradition such that Reformed theology as a whole could not be ‘softened’ on the question of the extent of the atonement, but individual Reformed theologians could always simply choose from a range of parallel trajectories.132 Presenting a monolithic consensus in the history of Reformed theology against which any newly discovered variant can be pronounced a ‘departure’ is, of course, a serious mistake, and, in this particular case, the existence of a ‘softer’ trajectory in the sixteenth century is not denied, and was even acknowledged in my book.133 But it has to be said that a title should not interpret a book, but a book the title, and any talk of ‘the softening of Reformed theology’ has to be understood within the context in which it was spoken. The context of my book on English Hypothetical Universalism and its main focus was the experience of leading English theologians in the first —————

129 Polhill, Divine Will, A6r–A6v. The other recommendatory preface to this volume was written by English Hypothetical Universalist and Westminster Divine Lazarus Seaman. 130 Ibid., A7r. 131 Soon after the Restoration, a disillusioned Owen had given up hope for a Christian unity based on confessional uniformity (Owen, Works, 14:314–315). 132 Calvin Theological Journal 43, no. 1 (2008): 149–150; Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism. 133 Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 39, 95, 157, 163, 220 and especially 228.

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quarter of the seventeenth century, in the light of their Elizabethan heritage, and in the run-up to the English Civil Wars. In such a context I still have to maintain that English Hypothetical Universalism can indeed be helpfully seen as a ‘softening’ of Reformed theology as it was then commonly understood in England. An exciting interplay of various ‘trajectories’ was not how the Reformed tradition was viewed in Jacobean England, and such a construction could not explain the evident hush, embarrassment and suppression of views that existed concerning the extent of the atonement amongst the English Reformed Orthodox until the outbreak of the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the ensuing eruption of doctrinal chaos. It is significant that James Ussher’s (1581–1656) and Davenant’s expositions of hypothetical universalism were not first published until posthumously in the 1650s, and England as a whole saw no significant public or published debates on the extent of the atonement until the 1640s. This was not because there was a monolithic consensus in favour of particular redemption – I clearly documented how this was not the case – but was rather a tacit acknowledgement that if the more dominant ‘harder’ theology was ‘softened’ too quickly and too publicly, this might threaten the stability of the whole fortress of Reformed Orthodoxy in the face of a growing anti-Reformed siege.134 Instead a gradual and covert ‘softening’ process can be traced in early Stuart England, as the Reformed Orthodox slowly came to terms with a new polemical context significantly different from that of their sixteenth-century forbears. During the heady days of Elizabethan supralapsarianism the strictest forms of particularism were seen as not only fashionable but also loyal to the governing authorities and conducive to the public peace. But gradually as the Jacobean reign continued, the perceived threat of Arminianism grew and the need for a Pan-Protestant political unity became more acute. The strict particularist formulations that had come to dominate English Reformed Orthodoxy came increasingly to be seen as a liability, if not the very cause of the problem, in that they were arguably what had provoked the ‘anti-Calvinist’ backlash in the first place. Infralapsarianism and a more moderate approach in presenting Reformed teaching on divine grace and the work of Christ came to be seen as the better part of wisdom, until eventually even preaching on predestination itself was banned in 1626. But from as early as the 1610s, from King James downwards, leaders in church and state were self-consciously eager to ‘soften’ Reformed theology in order to accommodate an increasing unrest with the legacy of Elizabethan particularism, and by so doing to secure a more durable unity, not only at home but —————

134 Cf. David R. Como, “Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in early seventeenth-century England,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English church, c1560–1660, edited by Peter G. Lake and Michael C. Questier, Studies in Modern British Religious History (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2000), 64–87.

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abroad.135 This localised softening process appeared to many at the time to be so significant in its influence and so sophisticated in its increasingly refined and elaborate formulations, that by 1648 John Owen saw rhetorical value in distinguishing theologically between “our new Universalists” and “our old Arminians.”136 Furthermore, there is also another way in which we may rightly speak of a significant ‘softening’ of Reformed theology, and that is on the level of changes that occurred in the theology of individual Reformed Orthodox theologians. For example, John Davenant was not simply born in ‘another parallel trajectory’ but rather modified, or ‘softened’ the theological position that he initially embraced. I have already documented how Davenant, along with another key Jacobean leader, John Preston (1587–1628), was taught the tenets of hypothetical universalism by James Ussher and how both Davenant and Preston consequently softened their earlier particularist positions.137 But in addition, even Ussher himself had undergone a similar ‘softening’ process, quietly moving away from a traditional particular redemptionist stance in the 1590s and early 1600s to embrace a ‘softer’ hypothetical universalist position as his understanding matured.138 In a catechism that Ussher wrote as a young minister around the age of 22 or 23 he stated that Christ offered to the Father “a perfect sacrifice for all the sinnes of Gods children.”139 This catechism remained in manuscript form for the next forty years, but when it was suddenly published in 1644 with this phrase included, but without Ussher’s permission and “contrary to [his] mind,” and when it was repeatedly reprinted,140 Ussher was decidedly annoyed at the “very faulty manner” in which this had been done, and decided to do his ————— 135

For secondary source material supporting these claims, see Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 225–226. 136 Owen, Works, 10:367. 137 Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 139–140, 173–175, 208–213. 138 Cf. Baxter’s report that he heard Ussher “rejoycing that hee [i.e. Ussher] sooner owned” “Universal Redemption” than Davenant did (Baxter, Certain Disputations, C2v). This testimony is quoted at greater length in Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 174. 139 Trinity College Dublin, MS. 291 f.16v. 140 James Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion: With a briefe Method, of the Body of Christian Religion, shewing the Connexion, and Coherence of the chiefe Points thereof. With a more particular Declaration of some principall Heads of Doctrine, which for more Plainnes Sake, were but shortly touched in the former Summe, 1st Unauthorised edn (London: By T. B. for George Badger, 1644); James Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion: Summarily sett downe according to the Word of God: Together with a briefe Epittomie of the Bodie of Divinitie, 2nd Unauthorised edn (London: By R. B. for George Badger, 1645); James Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion: Summarily sett downe according to the Word of God: Together with a breife Epitomie of the Bodie of Divinitie, 3rd Unauthorised edn (London: By F. B. for George Badger, 1647); James Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion, summarily set downe according to the Word of God: Together with a briefe Epitomie of the Body of Divinity, 4th Unauthorised edn (London: For George Badger, 1650). See page 20 of all these editions for the clause in question.

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best to remedy the situation by publishing his own revised, authorized edition.141 One of these revisions to his earlier work involved Ussher changing this phrase to read “a perfect sacrifice for the sinnes of the world.”142 Ussher was hereby quietly distancing himself from his earlier particularist position as if he were simply correcting a pirated edition. But the surviving manuscript at Trinity College Dublin makes it clear that whatever the faults of these unauthorised editions, they were at least at this point being faithful to Ussher’s original manuscript – and his earlier position.143 Although it is true to say that Ussher had come to tap into and develop another pre-existing trajectory in the Reformed tradition, and that this mighty patristic scholar did not see himself as inventing a system of hypothetical universalism out of thin air, the real problem for Ussher in terms of this unauthorized catechism was that Ussher had indeed ‘softened’ his own Reformed theology. It is also significant for an historically sensitive reading of English Hypothetical Universalism that Ussher was extremely reluctant to go public on his newly embraced ‘trajectory’ and lamented that the manuscript he had quietly shared with enquiring friends had “without [his] privity” been copied and “scattered abroad,” falling into the hands of people who saw in it confirmation that Ussher favoured “Arminianism”.144 As it happened, despite a prolific publishing career, Ussher’s ‘softer’ position on “the true Intent and Extent of Christ’s Death” was not actually published until immediately after his death.145 Examples of such ‘softening’ of Reformed theology in early Stuart England could be multiplied,146 but let us return once again to Richard Baxter —————

141 James Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion: With a briefe Method of the Doctrine thereof. Now fully corrected, and much enlarged by the Author [...] with his Preface thereunto, 1st Authorised edn (London: For George Badger, 1653), A2v. 142 Ussher, Principles of Christian Religion, 1653, 21. 143 I am most grateful to Richard Snoddy for kindly sharing with me the above findings of his research on Ussher’s catechisms. For further evidence of Ussher’s doctrinal shift and for an illuminating treatment of Ussher’s whole doctrine of Christ’s atonement in relation to faith and assurance, see Richard Snoddy, “‘Quicunque Vult’: The Act and Object of Saving Faith in the Thought of James Ussher” (Ph.D. Dissertation, London School of Theology/Middlesex University) (forthcoming). 144 Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 175; Ussher, Works, 12:563; 16:356. 145 James Ussher, The Judgement of the late Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, 1. Of the Extent of Christs Death, and Satisfaction, &c. 2. Of the Sabbath, and Observation of the Lords Day. 3. Of the Ordination in other Reformed Churches. With a Vindication of him from a pretended Change of Opinion in the First; some Advertisements upon the Latter; and, in Prevention of further Injuries, a Declaration of his Judgement in several other Subjects, edited by Nicholas Bernard, 1st edn (London: For John Crook, 1657). 146 I have also documented the similar transition of Ezekiel Culverwell (c1554–1631) in Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 175–176, 184, and Jonathan D. Moore, “James Ussher’s Influence on the Synod of Dordt,” in Revisiting the Synod of Dordt (1618–1619), ed. Aza Goudriaan and Fred A. van Lieburg (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 163–179, 166–170. Another example would be John Goodwin (c.1594–1665), the protégé of Preston and Davenant, who not only

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who played such an active role in the seventeenth-century British debates on the extent of the atonement. In Baxter, yet again, we find a leading promoter of hypothetical universalism who, this time by his own open admission, had softened his position from a previously held form of particular redemptionism. Baxter tells us that he was initially “a Disputer against Universal Redemption” but was then shaken in his views through contact with the Arminian, Tristram Diamond, and also Samuel Cradock. As a result, Baxter put away “prejudice” and, while still denouncing Arminianism proper, came at length to concede that “Christ so far dyed for all, as to purchase them Justification and Salvation conditionally to be given them, if they believe.”147 So in terms of outstanding advocates of universal redemptionism in seventeenth-century British Reformed theology, whether it is Davenant, Ussher, Preston or Baxter, all these men self-consciously ‘softened’ their earlier Reformed theology as part of a general trend in early seventeenthcentury England to reposition Reformed theology so that it could better resist the onslaught of an increasingly militant Arminianism. This trend of self-consciously and warily ‘softening’ earlier received forms of English Reformed theology can in fact be traced in leading theologians right through the seventeenth-century. It should be remembered, therefore, that historical theology is as much, if not more, about understanding and describing the theology and perceptions of individuals in their local historical contexts, as it is about placing these individuals into ahistorical and aspatial theological categories. The perception of someone like Thomas Good as he surveyed the English theological landscape of the 1620s is therefore noteworthy. Writing to Richard Baxter on 23 March 1625, Good confessed to his own oscillations for “many years” between Arminianism and Calvinism. He wistfully noted that after all was said and done, English Hypothetical Universalism – or what he and Baxter called “the middle way” – despite its strenuous rejection of ————— softened his particularism into English Hypothetical Universalism under their influence, but eventually ended up a notorious Arminian (John R. D. Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and intellectual Change in seventeenth-century England, 1st edn [Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006], passim, but especially 26, 27, 29, 199, 202, 224). 147 Baxter, Catholick Theologie, 1:a2r–a2v; N.H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ed., Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 1st edn, 2 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1:43. See also Richard Baxter, Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession and his necessary Vindication in Answer to a Book called, The second Part of the Mischiefs of Separation, written by an unnamed Author. With a Preface to Mr Cantianus D Minimis, in Answer to his Letter which exhorted this Publication, 1st edn (London: For Tho. Parkhurst, 1691), 24. Baxter says he was also helped in this transition by the hypothetical universalist writings of Westminster Assembly Prolocuter William Twisse (Baxter, Catholick Theologie, 1:a2v; Baxter, Certain Disputations, B3r). It is also to be noted that it was not the writings of John Cameron or Moïse Amyraut that at first influenced Baxter.

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particular redemptionism and appeal to other trajectories within Reformed Orthodoxy, was still “in effect Rigide Calvinisme in a softer Dresse.”148

————— 148

Keeble and Nuttall, ed., Calendar, 1:168.

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7. Adam’s Reward: Heaven or Earth?

Mark A. Herzer 7.1 Introduction What did God promise Adam? The Westminster Confession of Faith declares that “life was promised to Adam” (7.2) and the Shorter and Larger Catechisms indicate that God entered into a “covenant of life with him” (LC, #20; SC, #12). What is not explicitly stated is the kind of life promised to Adam. No divine would have disagreed with those statements because they were not controversial. But what kind of life would Adam have received had he perfectly obeyed? Not surprisingly, a diversity of answers surrounded this question. Rowland Ward believes no consensus existed regarding the nature of life promised to Adam at the time of the Westminster Assembly (1647).1 This may explain why the WCF itself is so indecisive on this. The Socinians were the main targets of those who held to the alleged unorthodox position on Adam’s reward and this may have been the main reason for the consensus that supposedly emerged at the end of the seventeenth century. Francis Turretin (1623–1687) claimed that his was “the received opinion among the orthodox.” He says “that the promise given to Adam was not only of a happy life to be continued in paradise, but of a heavenly and eternal life […].”2 He and others advanced this position at the height of protestant orthodoxy. Early in the eighteenth century, men such as Thomas Boston (1676– 1732), Thomas Ridgley (1667–1734), and John Brown (1722–1787) embraced a position similar to that of Turretin.3 However, there were important —————

1 Rowland S. Ward, God and Adam: Reformed Theology and the Creation Covenant (Wantirna, Australia: New Melbourne Press, 2003), 108. 2 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, translated by G. M. Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: R&R Publishing, 1992–1997), VIII.vi.3; cf. VIII.iii.15. 3 Thomas Boston, The Complete Works of the Late Rev. Thomas Boston (London: William Tegg & Co., 1853), 8:17; Thomas Ridgley, A Body of Divinity: Wherein the Doctrines of the Christian Religion are Explained and Defended, Being the Substance of Several Lectures on the Assembly's Larger Catechism, 4 vol. (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1814–15), 2:85ff.; John Brown, A Compendious View of Natural and Revealed Religion (London: J. & C. Muirhead, 1817), 200ff.

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Reformed divines like John Gill (1697–1771) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) who emphatically disagreed.4 On the one hand, standard orthodox reformed theologians in the nineteenth century, such as Charles Hodge (1797–1878), were not as explicit as Turretin, though Hodge was often heavily dependent on Turretin.5 But Heinrich Heppe (1820–1879) characterized the Reformed position as being well nigh a consensus on this question.6 Every Reformed divine believed in everlasting life or perpetual life upon condition of perfect obedience.7 What was not clear is the place and nature of that life. It is not always clear if eternal life concerned life in heaven or perpetual life on earth. For example, Amandus Polanus (1561– 1610) taught that the eternal covenant promised men “eternal life” (sempiternam vitam) and the covenant of works (foedus operum) was a pactum Dei with man concerning “eternal life” (aeterna vita).8 Because he speaks of “eternal death” (i.e. eternal spiritual death) and also the republication of the covenant of works in the Mosaic covenant, it may imply that this promise of eternal life is a heavenly one. But his position is not unambiguous.9 Turretin’s question therefore was: “Whether Adam had the promise of eternal and heavenly life so that (his course of obedience being finished) he would have been carried to heaven” (Institutes, VIII.vi.1). This question accurately framed the debate.

—————

4 John Gill, A Complete Body of Practical and Doctrinal Divinity (Philadelphia: B. Graves, 1810), 222; Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18, The ‘Miscellanies’ (Entry Nos. 501–832), ed. Ava Chamberlain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 512–516. 5 Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 2:119. Since it is beyond the purview of this paper, we will not interact with nineteenth-century theologians except to say that Robert L. Dabney and James H. Thornwell merely talked about “life” without any reference to issue we are pursuing. See Robert L. Dabney, Systematic Theology (1871; repr., Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1985), 302; James Henley Thornwell, The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1986), 1:270. This suggests that the “received opinion” was not as universally received or acknowledged (not with the same kind of specificity). 6 Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, translated by G. T. Thomson (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1950), 294–5. He cites the Formula Consensus Helvetica to support his position (as well as Heidegger). 7 Pelagius thought that Adam would naturally die (see Bucanus, Body of Divinity [London, 1659], 127) as did the Socinians (see Turretin, Institutes, VIII.vi.1) Turretin cites Socinus, Praelectionis theologicae 1; and Volkelius, De vera Religione 3.11. See also Valentin Smalcius and Faustus Socinus, The Racovian catechisme (Amsterdam, 1652), 10–11. 8 Amandus Polanus, The Substance of Christian Religion, 2nd ed., translated by Elijah Wilcocks (London, 1597), 96; Partitiones Theologicae, 2nd ed. (London, 1591), 53. 9 For example, Samuel Petto says that Adam was to “seek eternal life in the way of his own obedience […].” He is not explicit but, like Polanus, implies eternal life in heaven. See Samuel Petto, The difference between the old and new covenant stated and explained with an exposition of the covenant of grace in the principal concernments of it (London, 1674), 2, 8.

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Not surprisingly, the Formula Consensus Helvetica (1675) was emphatic on this point.10 It states the following in Canon VIII: “Moreover that promise connected to the Covenant of Works was not a continuation only of earthly life and happiness, but the possession especially of eternal and celestial life [vitae aeternae et coelestis], a life, namely, of both body and soul in heaven [in coelo], if indeed man ran the course of perfect obedience, with unspeakable joy in communion with God.”11 Without vitae coelestis, the vitae aeternae could be interpreted to mean perpetual life here on earth. These explicit uses of eternal and heavenly were not accidental. There could be no misunderstanding on this. Therefore, J. H. Heidegger, who did much to advance the reception of the Formula Consensus Helvetica, wrote emphatically that the promise of the covenant of works was eternal and heavenly life some twenty years after the Helvetic Consensus.12 Others were not so certain about this conclusion. John Ball, Peter Bulkeley and Anthony Burgess were agnostic about the matter and were convinced that it was going too far to decide this issue.13 Some were inclined towards Turretin’s position but only tentatively.14 Was this doctrine a critical one? That is, did this doctrine affect other teachings? Why was there diversity on this matter among the orthodox divines? Did those reluctant to espouse “the received opinion among the orthodox” have other doctrinal concerns? We will study the positions of two orthodox theologians who held opposing positions, Thomas Goodwin and Francis Turretin. They both gave hearty defenses of their respective positions on this topic and their arguments will help us to understand some of their concerns on this theological issue. Although we will also interact with their contemporaries who have written on this, we will nonetheless focus mainly on Goodwin and Turretin. Though they developed different theological structures to this question, it becomes clear that they both worked with the concept of the covenant of ————— 10

Heidegger and Turretin were the principal authors of the Formula. See Martin Klauber’s introduction (cited below) to the translation of the Helvetic Formula Consensus. He presents a helpful background for this document. 11 The text is taken from Martin Klauber, “The Helvetic Formula Consensus (1675): An Introduction And Translation,” Trinity Journal 11:1 (Spring 1990): 117. Another translation can be found in A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (1860; reprinted, Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1983), 656–63. The Latin text is available in H. A. Niemeyer, Collectio Confessionum in Ecclesiis Reformatis Publicatarum (Lipsiae: Sumptibus Iulii Klinkhardti, 1840), 729–39; Canon VIII is on pp. 732–733. 12 “Promissio Foederis Operum fuit vitae aeternae & Coelestis” (Medulla medullae theologiae christianae [Zurich, 1697], IX:10). 13 John Ball, A treatise of the covenant of grace (London, 1645), 10; Peter Bulkeley, The gospel-covenant […] (London, 1674), 55; Anthony Burgess, Vindiciae, 136. All of these are cited by Roland Ward. 14 For example, Ezekiel Hopkins, “The Doctrine of the Two Covenants,” in The Works of Ezekiel Hopkins (Philadelphia, 1874), 2:158.

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works, or more precisely, foedus naturae. Both carefully highlighted the graciousness of both this estate and Adam’s reward. Goodwin emphasized the distinction between nature and grace in his position while Turretin did not go so far. They preserved the gracious character of the covenant of works while utilizing typical scholastic distinctions. Though some of the language (especially in Goodwin) came from some of the Medieval distinctions, they nonetheless utilized them to advance Reformed orthodoxy. Of the two, Goodwin is the more interesting on account of his careful emphasis on Adam in the foedus naturae.

7.2 Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) This Westminster divine vigorously defended his understanding of what Adam would have procured had he perfectly obeyed. Goodwin clearly sets forth his position as follows: “the reward, the promised life and happiness that he should have had for doing and obeying, was but the continuance of the same happy life which he enjoyed in paradise, together with God’s favour towards him.” Furthermore, he emphatically denies that Adam would have been translated into heaven: “not the translating him, in the end, unto that spiritual life in heaven, which the angels have, and which the saints shall have.”15 He offers five reasons for his position. Before exploring those reasons, we must examine some of the theological assumptions in his understanding of the covenant. These assumptions governed his understanding of Adam’s reward. Though he deals with the covenant of works in chapter six, chapter five establishes the parameters for his view and sets forth his understanding of “Adam’s theologia naturalis.”16 He further unpacks the implications of Adam’s natural theology in the longer seventh chapter where he again insists that heaven could not have been offered to Adam on account of his noetic and natural constitution.17 Basically, Goodwin’s prelapsarian anthropology served as the foundation for his understanding of Adam’s reward. In chapter five, Goodwin compares Adam’s knowledge of God to the redeemed saints’ knowledge. Adam enjoyed God “in a way natural to man” while redeemed believers know God “in a way supernatural or above nature.”18 Adam’s knowledge of God was completely natural. Even the “knowledge of this covenant, and of the promise and threatening annexed to ————— 15

Works, 7:49. Chapter five is covered in pp. 44–48 while chapter six covers pp. 48–53. 17 Works, 7:57. The seventh chapter is covered on pp. 54–69. We will come back to this chap16

ter.

18

Works, 7:44.

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it, was natural.”19 This knowledge came to him by creation while the knowledge of God for the redeemed comes to us by faith: “And thus, to love God above all, to believe on him, &c., was to Adam but the dictate of pure nature.” Even the use and observance of the Sabbath was “natural” to Adam “by the light of common infused principles, and by observation of God’s works to be improved.” On the one hand, Goodwin concludes that Adam in his best condition “is called animal and natural” (citing 1 Cor 15:45, 46). Redeemed believers, on the other hand, are called “spiritual or supernatural.”20 Goodwin developed this line of theological reasoning to prepare the reader for his argument on the foedus naturae. In chapter six, Goodwin develops the manner in which the prelapsarian Adam relates to the covenant. Since Adam was no higher than “the sphere of nature”, the covenant in which he stood “under was but foedus naturae.”21 Though the phrase foedus naturae was often used interchangeably with such phrases as foedus operum and foedus creationis among Reformed theologians, yet Goodwin has deliberately focused on a more narrow reading of the term.22 Since everything Adam did in his integrity was natural, his righteousness and his justification were natural. Justification “was a natural due to the creature” for obeying. God’s approbation of his goodness was therefore “natural.” If Adam’s obedience naturally necessitated a reward, then was God indebted to him? It was by “way of natural justice” between “a just creator and an holy creature.” This debitum naturale is a “debt of nature, and not a debt of retribution in a mercenary way.”23 Since Adam’s knowledge, obedience, state of integrity, etc., were all natural, the reward must be of the same kind: “Answerably, the reward, the promised life and happiness that he should have had for doing and obeying, was but the continuance of the same happy life which he enjoyed in para————— 19

Works, 7:47. Works, 7:48. 21 Works, 7:48–9. Goodwin’s use of this term is not unique to himself. It existed in men like Ursinus and others. See Lyle D. Bierma, “Law and Grace in Ursinus’ Doctrine of the Natural Covenant: A Reappraisal,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, ed. Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark (Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1999), 96–110. 22 Goodwin later on narrows the definition of the covenant of works: “Seeing all other things belonging to him were natural, his covenant, the covenant of works, was but foedus naturae, founded upon the title of what, as a reasonable creature, was due to his nature […]” (Works, 7:56). For a good overview of the way the phrase “covenant of works” was used in conjunction with covenant of nature, covenant of creation, etc. see Willem J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), translated by Raymond A. Blacketer, Studies in the History of Christian Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), 254–257; Richard Muller, “The Covenant of Works and the Stability of Divine Law in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Orthodoxy,” in After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 181–183. 23 Works, 7:49. 20

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dise, together with God’s favour towards him.”24 This answer conforms well with Goodwin’s understanding of Adam’s natural state of innocence. Goodwin makes a sharp distinction between nature and grace to develop his defense of Adam’s reward. This enables him to draw a sharp contrast between Adam and Christ since his major concern seems to be Christological.25 His five arguments assume Adam’s natural creaturely estate. First, the reason Adam would have been rewarded an earthly paradise is because Adam was an earthly man while Christ was the heavenly man (using 1 Cor 15:47, 48). Goodwin suggests that Paul’s argument of Christ procuring heaven for believers is based not “upon the merit of Christ’s death” but upon the fact that the Lord is from heaven “because heaven is his natural due.” Adam could never procure heaven because it was not his natural due. Second, from a typological standpoint, Adam’s paradise was a type of “paradise above” whereas Christ’s paradise is the true paradise. Only Christ procured the true heavenly paradise and without Him, the heavenly paradise was beyond Adam.26 Goodwin’s third reasoning is the most compelling. The moral law in “which was the law of nature,” he says, “makes mention of no such promise as of going to heaven.” The promise of life can only be the life on earth as Adam already enjoyed. The Old Testament is quite sparing when it talks of heaven, he argues. Only Christ offers heaven.27 The fourth support for his earthly paradise is similar to the third, the “law of nature towards all the creatures.” The moral law for Adam in nature could only attain to the glory of that nature. Man could not be awarded the condition of the angels (since man’s nature differed from the angels’).28 Once again, what Goodwin developed in the previous chapter about Adam’s natural condition is strictly followed in dealing with Adam in covenantal terms. The final argument is more of a summary of his others. He says, “I think that Adam’s covenant, and the obedience unto it, was not able to do so much as confirm him, and secure him in that condition he was created in, so far was it from being able to have transplanted him into heaven.”29 Adam’s created natural state relegates him to an earthly paradise. Since the reward is according to what is due, “the obedience of the creature, could never have ————— 24

Works, 7:49. See Mark Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth: The Christology of the Puritan Reformed Orthodox theologian, Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 77–80. 26 Works, 7:50. 27 Works, 7:50–51. His reasoning assumes a literal use and non-use of the words heaven, eternal life, etc. If those words are absent, then heaven or eternal life could not be the object of promise. This literalistic hermeneutic borders on sounding like twentieth-century dispensationalists. On Goodwin’s literalistic hermeneutic, see Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth, 90–92. 28 Works, 7:51. 29 Works, 7:51. 25

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procured indefectibility, for that must be of grace.”30 Heaven, for Goodwin, required supernatural faith and it was a gift through Jesus Christ. Such was not offered to Adam in his natural creaturely state; it was not “suitable […] unto […] his nature.”31 If God offered heaven to Adam, then supernatural faith would have been required.32 He believed that believers excel the created state of Adam and that the present believer’s light is supernatural and more glorious than Adam’s. Adam’s light was modo humano but our light is “the light of the Spirit that is in Christ.”33 In chapter seven, he not only argues that Adam’s faith was entirely natural but also shows how our knowledge is better than Adam’s.34 Adam’s natural light does not compare with our “light of faith and revelation from God.”35 Our knowledge is superior because it is supernatural. The things that we know are “utterly above the due and right of pure nature in Adam.”36 If there is an underlying burden in Goodwin’s argument, it is his emphasis on grace over nature. He does not deprecate nature but instead elevates grace. Christ’s work secured a better reward for us than Adam’s. Our light is better than Adam’s and everything we have is of faith and heavenly while Adam’s is natural and earthly. This does not mean that Goodwin viewed the foedus naturae as being static. Rather, Goodwin’s limited or clearly demarcated understanding of foedus naturae enabled him to show in sharp contrast how the second Adam was much better than the first. Nature dominated the first Adam; grace dominates the second Adam. He wanted to set up this contrast for the sake of clarifying and elevating Christ as the Second Adam and the superior benefits we derive from Him. This he clearly sets forth in chapter eight.37

————— 30

Works, 7:52. Works, 7:54. God’s revelation in the garden suggests the existence of supernatural revelation. This knowledge therefore is above nature (and would also require supernatural faith). Goodwin answers that in chapter seven and argues at length that Adam’s faith was natural and all that he had was “still but within the compass of nature” (54). 32 “And I confess, if the promise given him had been that of heaven, and the vision of God, as there, then it had been necessary for him to have such a supernatural faith as we” (Works, 7:57). 33 Works, 7:61–62. 34 Works, 7:67ff. 35 Works, 7:69. 36 Works, 7:59; cf. 2:342. 37 See especially pp. 73–74 where he says, “I proceed to show how Adam and his whole story was intended by God as a more imperfect type going before, to signify and set forth Christ […] and that not simply upon the fall, but before in his first creation and estate of innocency.” 31

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7.3 Francis Turretin (1623–1687) Francis Turretin regarded his argument on Adam’s reward to be “the received opinion among the orthodox.” Because of the nature and method of his theological work, he takes issue with the Socinians and Moïse Amyraut. Amyraut’s basic position is the same as Goodwin’s, namely, that Adam was promised perpetual earthly paradise.38 The first argument he advances remains the most important one. The “law of works” (Lex operum), he insists, had the promise of vitae coelestis & aeternae. The general substance of the law is eternal life (he cites various verses) — “therefore also the law prescribed to Adam” (VIII.vi.4). Whereas Goodwin argued that the law did not explicitly promise eternal heavenly life and that it really could not because of Adam’s nature, Turretin argues inductively. Since all the other examples promised eternal life and that is the nature of the “law of works”, it must follow that the law to Adam offered the same. This line of reasoning is advanced in Adam’s comparison to Christ. Christ acquired “eternal and celestial life” and since He came to recover what Adam lost, it therefore implies that Adam was promised eternal life (VIII.vi.5). While Goodwin highlighted the difference between Adam’s and Christ’s reward, Turretin displayed their similarity and symmetry. Turretin advances another argument by appealing to God’s threat of death in the covenant. That threat was an eternal one. God would not have delighted in aggravating punishments and lessening rewards, Turretin reasons. Would God threaten spiritual and eternal punishment and bestow only earthly promises (VIII.vi.6)?39 The reward therefore had to be heavenly. Turretin also argues on the basis of God’s nature (VIII.vi.7). God wants to fully communicate himself and for his creatures to fully enjoy him can only mean eternal and heavenly communion with God since this is the “state of the highest good of God.” J. Mark Beach maintains, “The portrait here depicts God’s goodness as bursting forth to enter into fellowship with his rational creatures and image-bearers.”40 From God’s desire to communicate himself, Turretin next turns to the “dignity of man” (VIII.vi.8). Man’s noblest part is his spirit “touched with a vehement desire of heavenly goods” and this could only be satisfied in heaven in communion with God. —————

38 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, translated by G. M. Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: R&R Publishing, 1992–1997), 1:583 (VIII.vi.1–2); Francisco Turrettino, Institutio theologiae elencticae (Geneva, 1688–90), 1:642. 39 Goodwin says that eternal life was a gift while eternal death was rightly due; the first came by grace and the latter came about from works. See Works, 7:52. 40 J. Mark Beach, Christ and the Covenant: Francis Turretin’s Federal Theology as a Defense of the Doctrine of Grace (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 134.

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Furthermore, the “absolute fruition of God is not to be sought apart from the beatific vision which can be looked for only in heaven” (VIII.vi.8). Finally, he incorporates a teleological or eschatological aspect of Adam. Adam was in the “state of the way” (status viae). It was not to be permanent; the state of trial had to give way to reward, to “the state of native country” (status patriae).41 Earth was the status viae and a different place must be the status patriae. “Otherwise,” Turretin reasons, “it would follow that no good was promised to him” because it would have been the same paradise he enjoyed before.42 That is, the reward would have only been what was before and nothing more. But since Adam was in the status viae, God must have promised something beyond his current state. Some of these arguments advanced by Turretin have been addressed by Goodwin (though it is not clear if Goodwin had Turretin in mind).43 Turretin does entertain some of the problems associated with this topic. In his section entitled Fontes Solutionum, the question of how one interprets the “natural covenant” (foedus naturale) is thoroughly addressed. He tackles the key issue advanced by men such as Goodwin (VII.vi.10).44 He says that the term is not so called “because it conferred nothing above nature and condition (which man had from creation).” That is, the term does not mean that Adam could only receive what was equal to his nature and condition. In utilizing the same language of “natural covenant,” the two drew different conclusions. Goodwin literalizes the covenant of nature and adheres to its strict literal meaning while Turretin has a broader appreciation of the term. He says that the promises of God are not “regulated according to the proportion of the merit. On the contrary, they depend upon God’s will and goodness (a voluntate & bonitate Dei).” Goodwin argued that the moral law and its rewards worked together with Adam’s natural state because Adam’s obedience could only “secure him in that condition he was created in.”45 Turretin takes up other arguments advanced by the proponents of perpetual earthly life. The question of 1 Corinthians 15:45, 46 is answered in VIII.vi.16, while section 17 explains how flesh and blood can inherit ————— 41

He develops this same argument later on in VIII.vi.15. Turretin also notes that had man remained perpetually on earth after the test, the population of the earth would have increased beyond earth’s capacity (VIII.vi.9). This was considered by Ezekiel Hopkins (1634–1690) to be the greatest problem associated with the view that taught that Adam was promised perpetual life on earth, see “The Doctrine of the Two Covenants,” in The Works of Ezekiel Hopkins (Philadelphia, 1874), 2:157. The problem is also noted by Blake, Vindicae Foederis, 101. 43 For example, Goodwin takes on the argument that man’s highest good would be fellowship with God in heaven. He says it would have been “an unlawful and an inordinate desire in him” because he desired more than what God promised (Works, 7:52–53). 44 Neither Goodwin nor Turretin refers to each other. They simply interact with the arguments generally advanced by the opposing side on this theological question. 45 Works, 7:51. 42

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heaven. Goodwin bases much of his argument on 1 Corinthians 15.46 For Goodwin, 1 Corinthians 15 emphatically supports his position. Turretin shows clear awareness of those arguments and offers a different viable interpretation of the text. How the two interpret the passage is not of great concern. As for flesh and blood not being able to inherit the kingdom of God, Turretin (and all others who hold to the heavenly eternal life position) assumes that there would be some change before being translated into heaven.47

7.4 Examining Their Positions Comparing the two divines reveals that both of them utilized scholastic distinctions in this debate. They made use of observations found in Medieval theology while advancing reformed orthodoxy. Though Thomas Goodwin’s Reformed Orthodoxy remains unquestionable,48 his idea of natural justice and man in pure nature had a long history in Medieval theology. Aquinas used 1 Corinthians 15:45 to argue that Adam was not created in grace. Furthermore, he uses 1 Corinthians 15:46 to speak of Adam’s “natural life” and his inability to see God’s essence.49 Calvin also spoke of original justice and “natural law” as did the Medieval theologians.50 Clearly, Goodwin used categories reminiscent of both the Reformers as well as the Medieval divines. This continuity with the scholastic tradition, though expected, had some differences as well. Goodwin seems to have gone further than most Reformed divines in depicting Adam almost as pure nature.51 ————— 46

See pp. 48, 49, 62, 73, 76–91 (ch. 9). Much hinges on his exegesis of this passage. For example, Guillaume Bucanus argued that if Adam had not sinned he would have been removed into heaven “indeed without death (which is the dissolution of the soule from the body) but yet not without some change […].” (Body of Divinity, translated by Robert Hill [London, 1659], 127); William Bates, A sermon preached upon the much lamented death of our late gracious sovereign, Queen Mary (London, 1695), 11: “If he had persevered in his Obedience, after a short Immortality on Earth, he had ascended to Heaven alive in his intire Person, but he must have been changed in his Ascension, for Flesh and Blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.” 48 See Mark Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth, passim. 49 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, P(1)–Q(95)–A(1)–O(1–2); Q(95)–A(1). 50 Calvin, Interim Adultero-Germanum: cui adiecta est vera Christianae pacificationis, et ecclesiae reformandae ratio, in the section “De Conditione Hominis Lapsum”; Henry Beveridge, ed., The Interim, or Declaration of Religion of His Imperial Majesty Charles V, Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1849; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983), 193–194. For references to the natural law in Calvin, see Peter A. Lillback, The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2001), 279–80. 51 Not in puris naturalibus in the Roman Catholic sense; Adam was endowed with righteousness and created in the image of God. Goodwin could affirm Turrretin’s discussion of this matter (V.x.1–11) and develops the same idea, although he does not use the exact same language. Remember, Goodwin does speak of the “pure nature in Adam” (Works, 7:59). Goodwin’s vigorous 47

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As noted above, the motivation was to set up a stark contrast with the second Adam, Christ. He goes to great length to deny anything supernatural in Adam. Whereas Medieval theologians argued for a donum superadditum to elevate man, Goodwin simply relegated Adam to the whole realm of nature by utilizing foedus naturae (common to most seventeenth-century reformed orthodox divines).52 That is, what the Papists added as extra grace to Adam, Goodwin subsumed under pure nature. Mark Karlberg demonstrates that the use of this scholastic distinction between nature and grace in Adam among Protestant orthodox divines was their attempt “to preserve the graciousness of the first covenant with Adam.” He is convinced that this was a “speculative and dualistic distinction” and “as a result, the covenant order was set over against the natural order of creation.” He sees this as a “revision to an older view” and finds it in men such as Francis Junius, Johannes Cloppenburg, and David Dickson. He insists that this is a “significant revision of Calvinistic doctrine regarding creation and God’s covenant with Adam.”53 Furthermore, he rightly finds this expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith (7.1) and the Shorter Catechism (the covenant being a “special act of providence”). The most interesting observation he makes is that this distinction enabled the divines to draw the following conclusion: “natural life was contingent upon good works (merit); eternal life was nonmeritorious.”54 This observation seemingly rings true in some measure, especially in Goodwin. But under closer scrutiny, even Goodwin would not have accepted the “merit” versus “nonmeritorious” dichotomy. In fact, he carefully avoided that schema. It was not a “revision to an older view” but instead a true maturing development or improvement of Reformed orthodoxy. Most of the seventeenth————— argument for the natural state of Adam apparently was a hotly contested issue. John Ball says, “Whether this was naturall or supernaturall unto the first man, is a question needlesse to be disputed in this place, and peradventure if the termes be rightly understood, will be no great controversie” (A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace, 11). Anthony Burgess insists that some things were supernatural in Adam, Vindiciae legis (London, 1647), 133. 52 The language is explicitly found earlier in Ursinus and Olevianus. See Bierma, “Law and Grace in Ursinus’ Doctrine of the Natural Covenant: A Reappraisal,” 96–110; Peter Lillback, “Ursinus’ Development of the Covenant of Creation: A Debt to Melanchthon or Calvin?,” Westminster Theological Journal 43 (1981): 247–88. Cf. Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenantal Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 36–39. 53 Mark W. Karlberg, “The Original State of Adam: Tensions Within Reformed Theology,” Evangelical Quarterly 59:4 (1987): 295–300. This essay was republished with some spelling corrections in his Covenant Theology in Reformed Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2000), 95–106. In the republished version he has “revision to an older view” while the journal article had “revision to an order view.” I take it that the republished version is the more accurate one. 54 Karlberg, “The Original State of Adam,” 300.

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century divines did not use the word “merit” when it came to Adam’s reward (which for Goodwin was not heaven). In a very significant passage, Goodwin carefully utilized debitum naturale in Adam’s covenantal estate. This debt of nature, as we have already quoted, was “not a debt of retribution in a mercenary way.”55 Though Goodwin does heighten the contrast between nature and grace, the natural and the supernatural, yet Adam in his natural condition was not placed in a strict legalistic context of merit (as Karlberg implies). The language of debt suggests a strict contractual legalistic structure, but Goodwin carefully answers what kind of “debt” he has in mind. God owes nothing, he says, and he is not “obliged unto his creature for anything received from” the covenant of works. Whatever debitum naturale might mean, it is not strict merit in a “mercenary way.”56 Furthermore, Goodwin explains that Adam’s holiness was from God “as well as ours under the new covenant is.” Karlberg’s general criticism, if it fits anywhere, should have found a target in Goodwin’s theological formulation of Adam in his natural state. Whether Goodwin’s formulation escapes the charge of legalism or not may be a different question, but he certainly sought to excise the strict mercenary understanding in the foedus naturae. At least, he attempted to soften it.57 Turretin’s argument for the eternal heavenly life in Adam’s “state of nature” (in statu naturae) was “according to God’s pact” (ex pacto Dei). Furthermore, the foedus naturae could not “promise and confer upon Adam (persevering) heavenly life” (VIII.vi.12, 14). The reward viewed as merit “must not be understood properly and rigorously […] but from the pact and the liberal promise of God (ex pacto, & liberali Dei promissione)” (VIII.iii.17). In these statements, the idea of strict merit simply does not apply. So, Karlberg’s thesis of merit in natural life and nonmerit for the supernatural life cannot be sustained.58 This will also help us to address the ————— 55

Works, 7:49. We read something similar in Anthony Burgess when he says that God entered into a covenant with him. “But in God it is not, because he doth not hereby become obliged to us, to his own self: so that we have not a right of justice to the thing, because God hath promised it to us; but only God cannot deny himself nor his word, and therefore we are confident” (Vindiciae legis, 126–27). 57 In another context, Goodwin states that God was not a debtor to Adam in the strictest sense. But there was a certain “dueness and a meetness” between the Creator and the creature. He avoids merit language and will go so far as to speak of some sort of “justice” in the covenant of works but not in the sense that the Creator is obliged, see Works, 2:223 (I am indebted to Mark Jones for referring me to this passage). 58 Cf. J. Ball, A treatise of the covenant of grace, 10: “In this state and condition Adams obedience should have been rewarded in justice, but he could not have merited that reward […] for it is impossible the creature should merit of the Creator […]” Also, David Clarkson, A discourse of the saving grace of God (London, 1688), 122: “Eternal Life had not been due to Adam, if he had performed perfect Obedience; it was only the Promise intitled him to it.” Idem, The Practical Works (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864–65), I, 20: “Perfect obedience performed by Adam in the state of innocency had not been meritorious, could not deserve eternal life, suae naturae, in its 56

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older interpretation of legalism in federal theology, which we will consider later. We can make another observation by analyzing Goodwin and Turretin’s premises. They both worked with assumption that eternal life was more than Adam could deserve. Goodwin believed that Adam’s obedience could only confirm him in the state in which he existed.59 To receive heaven upon condition of perfect obedience would require supernatural grace – more than what his nature could muster. Turretin and those who believed in Adam’s heavenly reward all argued that heaven was indeed beyond what Adam properly was due — it was “upon a pact or gratuitous promise” (ex pacto seu promissione gratuita)” (VIII.iii.16). Their premise was the same. Yet, they drew different conclusions. Goodwin argued that since heaven was beyond Adam’s nature, it was not (could not be?) promised. Turretin believed that God’s promises were always disproportionate to our labors and therefore He could (and did) promise heaven to Adam. He seems to have in mind the argument of those who limit the reward to Adam’s nature and to his natural due: “It is gratuitously and falsely supposed that the promises of God are regulated according to the proportion of our merit.” Adam’s heaven depends “upon God’s will and goodness (a voluntate & bonitate Dei)” (VIII.vi.10), says Turretin. Goodwin remained convinced that Adam’s earthly reward was a “debt of nature” (debitum naturale).60 Though they both agreed that heaven was beyond Adam’s nature, yet they applied two different principles to argue for their respective positions. Interestingly, they also used the principle of “Do this, and thou shalt live” (cf. Lev 18:5) to draw very opposite conclusions.61 Surprisingly, Turretin’s position was not limited to the Reformed school of thought. Though the foedus naturae served as the context for this question among all Reformed orthodox divines, some Arminians still managed to come to the same conclusion as Turretin without embracing his covenantal structure. Philip Limborch believed that God would have translated Adam into a “heavenly life” (coelestem vitam). This was not promised to him in the foedus naturae but God would have conferred this benefit out of ————— own nature, for it was but his duty; nor was eternal happiness due to it in justice, as the nature of merit requires, but only by virtue of the promise, vi pacti […]” A. Burgess, Vindiciae legis, 119: “If God required obedience of Adam to keep the law, and happinesse thereupon, it was due not by way of merit, but condcency to Gods goodnesse, to furnish him with abilities to performe it […]” “[…] though it were a Covenant of works, it cannot be said to be of merit. Adam though in innocency, could not merit that happinesse which God would bestow upon him […]” (125). Patrick Gillespie said, “For there was no merit in Adams obedience […] or in ours” (The Ark of the Testament Opened, 221). 59 Works, 7:51. 60 Works, 7:49. 61 Turretin, VIII.vi.4; Goodwin, Works, 7:50–51.

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pure grace (ex mera gratia).62 Limborch, who did not accept a covenant concept in Adam’s prelapsarian state, drew the same conclusion as Turretin’s on the question of Adam’s reward. In the end, Goodwin did not believe that God promised heaven to Adam while Turretin did. For that reason, they drew different conclusions on this question while utilizing their understanding of God and man’s nature. Though the polemical element is present in Turretin’s work on account of the nature of his work (contra Socinians and Amyraldians), we find in the end that these orthodox divines were very close to each other on this question. This was truly an intramural debate and one that did not involve serious theological issues. They both believed eternal life was promised and that death was the consequence of sin. They differed as to the destiny of that reward, here on earth in paradise or translated into the paradise in heaven. Peter Bulkeley says the Adam’s reward was whether “life here on earth […] or whether a heavenly life and glory […] as some other think […].” On this matter, he will not determine whether it is in heaven or earth because it was not “material” or all that important. “It’s enough to know that life and blessedness was and is promised in both [Covenant of Works and Covenant of Grace].”63 Perhaps he is correct.

7.5 Seventeenth-Century Divines and Adam’s Reward Having looked at two representatives on this question, we now look at several other writers who have written on this and will also interact with Holmes Rolston’s theory.64 Though his thesis has been thoroughly corrected recently (if not refuted), it is still necessary to consider it in the light of our theological question since it involves the heart of the foedus operum. Seventeenth-century federal theology as found in the use of foedus naturae or foedus operum is thoroughly (though not exclusively) gracious. That is, as these Reformed orthodox divines spoke on the matter of “Adam’s reward,” they did so in the context of a covenant of works. Though few developed the doctrine as thoroughly as Goodwin and Turretin, they nonetheless spoke on the issue. Most of them simply set forth their —————

62 Philip Limborch, Theologia christiana (Amsterdam, 1715), III.ii.5. Cf. John Mark Hicks, “The Theology of Grace in the Thought of Jacobus Arminius and Philip van Limborch: A Study in the Development of Seventeenth Century Dutch Arminianism,” (Ph. D. Dissertation, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1985), 113ff. Also see Richard A. Muller, “The Federal Motif in Seventeenth Century Arminian Theology,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 62 (1982): 115– 121. Muller gives a full account of Limborch’s “covenant-motif.” 63 Peter Bulkeley, The Gospel Covenant, 55. 64 Holmes Rolston, III, John Calvin versus the Westminster Confession (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1972).

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position with little exposition. For example, Edward Leigh believed there was “the promise of eternal life” and argues that Adam’s immortality was contingent.65 But he does not explicitly argue the nature of that eternal life. Polemical issues are raised concerning other things but not on this. Most did believe that Adam’s reward was ultimately heaven.66 Richard Baxter originally asserted that Adam would have continued in paradise had he obeyed (in his Aphorismes), but 26 years later, his position changed and he ended up believing that “man should have been translated to Heaven.”67 The popular Thomas Brooks asserted, “Had Adam never sinned, Adam had never died; had Adam stood fast in innocency, he should have been translated to glory without dissolution.”68 Thomas Watson clearly and succinctly states, “In case Man had stood, it is probable he had not died, but had been translated to a better Paradise.”69 William Whately believed that Adam had “the hope and assurance of Eternall life upon condition of their obedience, of which Paradise it selfe and the tree of life were signes unto them. For if wee should live the life of glory by obeying the Law, so should they have done seeing they also were under the same Covenant of workes that we be under.”70 Similarly, John Maynard said that Adam was “living the life of nature […] and a supernatural life too […] and, had he continued in that estate, he should have conveyed the same life, both natural and supernatural to his posterity […]”71 George Lawson was much more explicit: “The thing promised was Life, and the same not onely bodily and spiritual, but eternall: Yet this life was not a new being, but the happinesse of the former Being. And this happinesse was not merely a continuance of that present estate, he enjoyed in Paradise but a farr higher condition which might reach Heaven, and come neere the blisse of Angels […].”72 Junius’ asserted that God had promised Adam and Eve “supernatural life” (vitam supernaturalem) and

————— 65

Edward Leigh, A systeme or body of divinity consisting of ten books, wherein the fundamentals and main grounds of religion are opened [...] (London, 1662), 363–64. 66 Mark Beach and Rowland Ward have given a list of various seventeenth-century writers who have written on this topic; see Beach, Christ and the Covenant, 130 n.157 and Ward, God and Adam, 108–111. I have for the most part added new names to the list. 67 Richard Baxter, Catholic theologie (London, 1675), 2nd Part, 6. For his earlier view, see Aphorismes of Justification (London, 1649), 14–15. 68 Thomas Brooks, Paradice opened […] (London: Printed for Dorman Newman, 1675), 13. 69 Thomas Watson, A body of practical divinity […] (London: Printed for Thomas Parkurst, 1692), 74. 70 William Whately, Prototypes […] (London: Printed by G. M., 1640), 7. 71 John Maynard, The beauty and order of the creation […] (London: Printed by T. M., 1668), 188. 72 George Lawson, A body of divinity […] (London: Printed by J. Streater, for Francis Tyton, 1659), 57. Thomas Blake says that the life promised “was not barely a propagation of his being.” See The covenant sealed (London: Printed for Abel Roper, 1655), 11.

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Rijssen believed that Adam would have received eternal life in heaven.73 Lastly, William Lyford (1598–1653) clearly argued that it is eternal life and ultimately “for ever in heaven.”74 As we can see, a great many of these British and continental divines believed as Turretin did. But on the other hand, very significant divines held to the position as espoused by Goodwin. Highly recognized theologians such as Moïse Amyraut (1596–1664), John Cameron (1579/80–1625), John Ball (1585–1640), Johannes Marckius (1656–1713), James Ussher (1581– 1656), John Downame (d. 1652), and possibly Patrick Gillespie (1617–75) all believed that Adam would have perpetually remained in earth’s paradise.75 A fellow Westminster divine Jeremiah Burroughs (1599–1646) also needs to be added to the list along with the famous Baptist, John Bunyan.76 This is quite a list of influential writers in the seventeenth century and Turretin’s position was by no means a consensus. ————— 73

Francis Junius, Theses theologicae in Opuscula Theologica Selecta, ed. Kuyper (Amsterdam, 1882), 184. Admittedly, he represents the end of sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. For Leonard Rijssen, see Summa theologiae elencticae (Bern, 1676), IX.10 (p. 92). 74 William Lyford, The plain mans senses exercised (London, 1655), 223. It appears Thomas Blake (1597?–1657) could be on the list as well. See Thomas Blake, Vindiciae foederis; or, A treatise of the covenant of God entered with man-kinde (London, 1658), 88 and 100–1 (the latter pages seem to contradict the former). Also, Burgess, Vindiciae legis, 123. 75 Here I am depending on Mark Beach’s extensive list as cited before, see Christ and the Covenant, 130 n.157. It is evident that John Ball was reticent about deciding this. In addition, Blake also cites John Cameron’s De Triplici Foedere (Thes. 9), see Blake’s Vindiciae Foederis, 88, 100. Beach places Gillespie as being uncommitted but Gillespie says God promised “a declaration concerning his continuance in the possession of his Paradise-state, so long as he continued in his obedience” (The ark of the testament opened, or, The secret of the Lords covenant unsealed, in a treatise of the covenant of grace (London, 1661), 185; cf. 178, 235. Yet, on p. 250, he states that he would not determine if it is eternal life eventually in heaven. Cameron’s view can be found in Praelectionum in selectiora quaedam Novi Testamenti loca, Salmurii habitarum (Salmur, 1628– 1632), III, 611–612 (he says that the Covenant of Nature promised eternal and blessed life but “an animal [life] in Paradise”). My other reservation on this list is J. Marckius. The reference he cites seems to state otherwise and the following also makes clear that he is in Turretin’s camp, Christianae theologiae medulla didactico-elenctica (Philadelphia: J. Anderson, 1824), XIV:19 – “Promisit vero Deus vitam aeternam et coelestem […].” Beach also places F. Burman in both groups when in fact, he, along with Marckius, should have been placed within the Turretin’s perspective. With so many names on his list, it would be understandable if the names were mislabeled. 76 Burroughs, Gospel-conversation (London, 1653), 43–46. John Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94), 2:162: “The first hath promised nothing but an early paradise, Do this, and thou shalt live. Namely, here in an earthly paradise. But the other doth bring the promise of a heavenly paradise” (cf. 12:124– 125). Thomas Manton seems to be of this position as well. He said that believers have a better portion than Adam, “Adam had paradise, we have heaven” (The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, D. D. [London: James Nisbet, 1870–1875], 10:171; cf. 2:191, 391; 12:429). He is clearer when he says that Christ will restore what Adam lost (image of God, the favour of God, etc.) and “bestow upon us a blessedness which possibly we should not have had if Adam had stood – eternal life and rest in heaven, grace to bear our expenses in heaven, and glory at the end of the way […] (18:271).

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One would expect a legalistic tendency on this question since these men wrote on what kind of “reward” Adam received. Is not arguing about rewards a deviation from the high emphasis on grace that John Calvin taught? As is well known, Rolston argues that the Westminster Confession is a return to the legalism from which the great magisterial Reformers liberated us. The development of the “covenant of works” which was completely absent in Calvin emerged to deaden grace. “That it is by a name a covenant of works has a very deadening effect on anything said about grace. The overall emphasis was that God did not come to primal man in a relationship of grace, for man did not yet need that grace, but stood by his works.”77 Much more has been written to counter Rolston but we will use “Adam’s Reward” to give his thesis another test. Did these seventeenth-century divines fall into legalism on account of their use of the covenant of works? We have seen how careful Goodwin was in describing the terms of Adam’s existence in the foedus naturae. It was never in a “mercenary way.” Other writers, like William Lyford goes a step further and says that this of the Covenant of Life: “[…] in this Covenant there was some kind of grace, because God might have required Obedience at his Creatures hands, without any such promise […].”78 Furthermore, the reward was “above the merit of Adam’s obedience.”79 Then he says, “Thirdly, especially considering that Adams ability to perform that condition of Life, was of Gods own donation; and this is almost as much Grace some men allow in the new Covenant.”80 Here, this covenant of works was considered one of grace. Many divines saw the offer of life to be greater than Adam’s obedience and viewed it with awe and wonder: “What a God must he be, who will come downe and put himself in a lovely and gaining capacitie to be a Covenanting debtour to our feeble obedience, whereas he ow[e]s nothing, and to make heaven and glory so sure to us, that the heavens should sooner break and melt, like snow ————— 77

John Calvin versus the Westminster Confession, 17. Donald Bruggink argues similarly in “Calvin and Federal Theology,” The Reformed Review 13 (1959–60): 15–22. He even suggests that Richard Baxter’s neonomianism was “facilitated by the triple covenant scheme” (19). Bruggink further argues that the introduction of foedus operum “set the mood for putting works between man and God” (20). Federalism also led to the weakening of the doctrine of the church (20– 21). One is at a loss as to how to respond to these kinds of fallacious arguments. 78 Cf. Thomas Boston said, “[…] there was grace and free favour in the first covenant […].” (Complete Works, 8:18). 79 Cf. John Ball, A treatise of the covenant of grace, 9: “This Covenant God made in Justice; yet so as it was of Grace likewise to make such a free promise, and to bestow so great things upon man for his obedience.” Thomas Boston taught similarly: “There was no proportion between the work and the promised reward” (Complete Works, 8:18) as did Burgess, Vindiciae legis, 129. Gillespie said, “[…] nor did his work bear proportion to the eternal reward promised for it” (The ark of the testament opened, 221). 80 William Lyford, The plain mans senses exercised , 223. The good Adam would receive “did farre exceed the power and ability of man” (Burgess, Vindiciae legis, 129).

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before the Sun, then his promise can fail.”81 Patrick Gillespie (1617–1675) says the same, “That by this Law that was written in the heart of Adam, he had not only the exact knowledge of the Soveraigne will of God concerning his duty, but also of the gracious will of God and his goodness concerning the reward of his obediency […].”82 In the full bloom of federal theology in the seventeenth century, the divines saw and argued forcefully that the covenant of works itself and the required obedience in Adam were gracious acts on God’s part. It is actually difficult to find examples where this point is not at one place or another noted when they develop the doctrine of the foedus operum. This gracious element existed in an earlier generation in men like Ursinus. Bierma notes that in Ursinus’s writings, the language of grace is not absent when speaking about Adam’s originalis iustitia. He proves that Ursinus did not shift from grace to law in his writings.83 Leonard Rijssen (1636–1700) believed Adam’s reward came not from the dignity of the work but from the God’s generous promises.84 Federal theologians were careful to highlight some sort of grace even in the covenant of works. This Westminster divine Samuel Rutherfurd states the point emphatically: “God then never loved to make any Covenant, yea even that of Works, without some acts and out goings of grace.”85 Lyford’s phrase “some kind of grace” is helpful. The divines recognized that Adam did not receive redemptive grace before the Fall. They seem to struggle with the precise meaning of this “grace” in the covenant of works. The Westminster Confession speaks of the “voluntary condescension on God’s part” by means of covenant because Adam as a creature “could never have any fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward” (VII, 1). Though the term “grace” is not used, yet what emerges is how the Confession downplays a mercenary merit system.86 For that reason, it was not uncommon for the divines to speak of this covenant as a Pactum Amicitia “because before the fall, there was nothing at variance or enmity betwixt God —————

81 S. Rutherfurd, The covenant of life opened: or, A treatise of the covenant of grace (Edinburgh, 1654), 15–16; also, W. Bates, The Whole Works of the Rev. W. Bates, 4 Vol. (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Pub., 1990), 2:8. 82 P. Gillespie, The ark of the testament opened (London, 1661), 183. 83 Lyle D. Bierma, “Law and Grace in Ursinus’ Doctrine of the Natural Covenant: A Reappraisal,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, ed. Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark (Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1999), 108–109. 84 Summa theologiae elencticae, IX.10: “Merces, non ex dignitate operis, sed ex liberalitate promissa, fuit vita aeterna, in coelis beata, Gal. 3. v. 12.” 85 Rutherford, The Covenant of Life Opened, 22. Thomas Manton says, “The first covenant, it was grace for God to make it. It was the grace of God to accept of man’s perfect obedience […] Grace engaged the reward, there was no more merit in Adam’s obedience than in ours […]” (The Complete Works, 8:376). 86 Patrick Gillespie states that the two Covenants agree in that “both God sheweth wonderful condescensions” (The ark of the testament opened, 225).

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and man; that estate was an estate of love and kindnesse, and friendship; God was Adams friend, and Adam was a friend to God; they agreed together, and conversed as loving friends.”87 The covenant of works was painted as a covenant of friendship to call attention to its goodness and graciousness. Though it was not grace in the same sense as post-lapsarian grace, it was “some kind of grace.” Gillespie spent considerable amount of time showing how the Covenant of Works agreed with the Covenant of Grace. In the fourteen ways in which they agree, one of the ways was that they were both of grace: “They agree in this, that there was very much of Grace Favour in both: the moving cause in both was meer Grace, […] yet even the Covenant of Works […] even that Covenant was thus far a Covenant of Grace.”88 These are simply stunning statements. Grace is noted in Eden in the writings of both Calvin and the federal theologians of the seventeenth century. Both Calvin and the federal theologians emphasized the obedience required of Adam, a point often overlooked.89 There is continuity between the two; the language has been refined but that was to be expected. Rolston and others believe this perverts Calvin’s view of grace while Karlberg believes it was a “temporary setback.” Rolston argued that federalism taught a merit system so rejected it. Karlberg believed that federalism should have accented strict merit in the covenant of works and is dissatisfied with what he perceived to be “tensions” in covenant theology. Rolston misreads the evidence and argues that federalism got it wrong while Karlberg reads it correctly and believes the Puritans confused the issue. Both have an idea of what federalism was supposed to look like. Of the covenant of works, one says too much merit and the other, not enough. Federal theology simply does not fit into their pre-determined definitions. At times, these seventeenth-century divines highlighted the “works” of the covenant. Though they avoided strict merit language, they did at times accentuate Adam’s required obedience, its legal element. But they did it to emphasize the sheer graciousness and superiority of the Covenant of Grace. They never underscored the works element for its own sake as if it were the terms of salvation. Bruggink says, “[…] the federal structure played a culpable part in this theological ascendancy of works.”90 This is a complete —————

87 Obadiah Sedgwick, The bowels of tender mercy sealed in the everlasting covenant (London, 1661), 9. Friendship with God in the foedus operum was used by Cocceius and William Ames, see Willem J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), 256–57. Also interesting is van Asselt’s “Amicitia Dei as Ultimate Reality: An Outline of the Covenant Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669),” Ultimate Reality and Meaning. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Philosophy of Understanding 21/1 (1998): 35–47. 88 The ark of the testament opened, 221. 89 This is perceptively noted by Muller in “The Covenant of Works and the Stability of Divine Law,” 184. 90 “Calvin and Federal Theology,” 20.

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misunderstanding of what the seventeenth-century theologians taught. Burroughs emphasized the obedience required in Adam to spotlight the superiority and stability of the Covenant of Grace in Christ.91 Even Patrick Gillespie, who highlighted the agreement between the two covenants, noted the differences as well. In these examples, like Burroughs, Gillespie does it to display the glories of the Covenant of Grace.92 The development of the foedus operum served as a perfect backdrop for the blessings of the Covenant of Grace. The orthodox divines never confused this.

7.6 Conclusion Perhaps it is an understatement to say that this “debate” was not a major one among the orthodox divines. Diversity of opinions existed for sure but it was not one that was hotly debated. However, against the Socinians and at times Amyraldians, the issue became more focused and polemical. Goodwin and Turretin differed on this question of Adam’s reward and the matter probably will not be settled in the theological world. The question we were not able to pursue is one of eschatology. Their eschatological outlook no doubt played a significant role on this issue. When it comes to eschatology, modern Reformed theologians often argue for a “heaven on earth” — a renewed creation is the believer’s heaven.93 If that is the biblical position, then the seventeenth-century debate over this question would be moot for contemporary theologians. Yet a few things should be noted from this study. One is that Goodwin and Turretin both labored within the confines of foedus naturae but arrived at different answers to the “Adam’s reward” question. Interestingly, the question of Adam’s reward cannot be settled on the basis of the covenant of works (e.g., P. Limborch). Goodwin argues for what is naturally due but shies away from arguing for some sort of strict merit. At that point, it all depended on God’s promise and not the debitum naturale. On the other hand, Turretin argued that the blessing of the heavenly reward was ultimately based upon God’s will and goodness and not in proportion to merit. If that is the case, then once again, it falls on God’s promise. Neither one of them could argue it had to be their respective positions because it ultimately depended on what God had promised. The implied promise was life and the nature of that life was never explicitly specified. Peter Bulkeley said that ————— 91

Gospel-conversation, 42ff. The ark of the testament opened, 232ff. 93 For example, see Anthony Hoekema, The Bible and the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979) and Cornelis P. Venema, The Promise of the Future (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2000). 92

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the final answer to the question did not materially affect much – it is sufficient that God promised a blessed life. The covenant of works, we have tried to show, was not “legalistic” as some of the writers have tried to argue. We have seen that a great many of the divines argued for the presence of God’s grace in the covenant of nature. The exact meaning of what kind of “grace” they have in mind is not always apparent. Condescending grace may be what they believed existed in the original covenant; it definitely was not salvific grace. One thing becomes apparent though, the idea of “strict merit” or “strict justice” is assiduously avoided. Lastly, perhaps the Westminster divines struck the perfect balance on this question. They stated that life was promised to Adam. With this, all Reformed orthodox divines would have agreed. It appears that the Formula Consensus Helvetica’s statement on Adam’s reward effectively answers the Salmurian view of the three covenants. Adam’s natural covenant differed from the legal and evangelical covenants.94 Though there is no evidence that the three covenant view leads to Adam’s earthly reward, Turretin sought to demolish the De tribus foederibus divinis view along with their view of Adam’s reward.95 What did The Formula Consensus Helvetica gain from Canon VIII (its affirmations regarding Adam’s heavenly reward)? Nothing seems to have been at stake. The one thing that appears problematic is the way Amyraut used Adam’s reward as part of the progressive redemptive historical revelation of God’s plan (blessed life in Eden, in Canaan, and then in heaven).96 Perhaps Turretin wanted to destroy Salmurian theology, root and branch? But in so doing, he and Heidegger effectively cut off good British men such as Goodwin and Burroughs in Canon VIII. If Canon VIII is the received opinion among the orthodox, then why did so many orthodox divines teach differently? Fortunately, the Formula Consensus Helvetica did not achieve wide acceptance.97

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94 Klauber, “The Helvetic Formula Consensus,” 108; Beach, Christ and the Covenant, 301ff.; Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), 1:489; Brian Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 143ff. Canon XXV: “We disapprove therefore of the doctrine of those who fabricate for us three Covenants, the Natural, the Legal, and the Gospel, different in their entire nature and essence; and in explaining these and assigning their differences, so intricately entangle themselves that they greatly obscure and even impair the nucleus of solid truth and piety. Nor do they hesitate at all, with regard to the necessity, under the OT dispensation, of knowledge of Christ and faith in him and his satisfaction and in the whole sacred Trinity, to speculate much too loosely and dangerously.” 95 Institutes, XIII.xii.1ff. 96 Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 146. 97 Klauber, “The Helvetic Formula Consensus,” 114–15.

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8. The “Old” Covenant

Mark Jones 8.1 Introduction By the seventeenth century, the concept of the covenant of grace (foedus gratiae) had become a theological commonplace in Reformed orthodoxy. Beginning with the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15, the history of redemption from Genesis to Revelation was understood covenantally. The terminology of the covenant of grace was used to express the idea that in both the Old and New Testaments God provided salvation for his people apart from any human initiative in and through the person and work of the Mediator, Jesus Christ. For this reason, the covenant of grace was in the first place one-sided (foedus monopleuron); humanity’s fallen condition meant that they could receive the benefits of the covenant only by God’s grace. That did not, however, rule out conditions for God’s people. As John Owen (1616–1683) would argue: “if by conditions we intend the duties of obedience which God requireth of us in and by virtue of that covenant; but this I say, the principal promises thereof are not in the first place remunerative of our obedience in the covenant, but efficaciously assumptive of us in the covenant, and establishing or confirming the covenant.”1 Thus the covenant of grace may be understood as both monopleuric (foedus monoplueron) and dipleuric (foedus dipleuron). John Calvin (1509– 1564) captures this idea well by noting that God requires “uprightness and sanctity of life” from those in the covenant; “nonetheless the covenant is at the outset drawn up as a free agreement, and perpetually remains such.”2 Leonard Trinterud’s contention that a tension existed between the covenant theology of the Rhineland theologians (e.g., Heinrich Bullinger) and the covenant theology of Calvin, the latter emphasizing the monopleuric (i.e., unilateral) nature of the covenant and the former emphasizing the dipleuric (i.e., bilateral) nature of the covenant, with the Puritans opposing Calvin, —————

1 John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews in TheWorks of John Owen, D.D. 24 vol. (Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–55), 23:68–69. 2 Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.17.5 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008).

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cannot be sustained.3 As Richard Muller has argued, “the language of monopleuron and dipleuron describes the same covenant from different points of view.”4 By the seventeenth century the covenant of grace provided a tool for understanding not only what God had done for his people, but also what God required of his people who were in covenant with him. Hence, treatises on the covenant of grace were essentially bodies of divinity.5 Besides the covenant of grace, by the seventeenth century Reformed orthodox theologians also developed the concept of the covenant of works (foedus operum), which was the first covenant God made with Adam in the Garden of Eden. The basic question of when precisely the concept originated has perplexed scholars.6 Tracing the origin of the covenant of works proves particularly hard given that Reformed theologians each had their own preferences for describing the nature of the Creator-creature relationship in the garden.7 Moreover, the theology behind the covenant of works may be found in John Calvin, even though he does not use the exact lan—————

3 For example, Trinterud argues the following: “For Calvin, and so in the Geneva Bible, the covenant of God is God’s promise to man, which obligates God to fulfill. Moreover, in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ God did actually fulfill that promise to which his covenant bound him. Therefore, the sacraments are witnesses, attestations, or seals to the effect that God has long since fulfilled his covenant, his promise. Therefore, covenant and testament are identical. In the covenant theory of the Rhineland and of the English reformers the covenant is a conditional promise on God’s part, which has the effect of drawing out of man a responding promise of obedience, thus creating a mutual pact or treaty. The burden of fulfillment rests upon man, for he must first obey in order to bring God’s reciprocal obligation into force. Theologically, of course, the difference between these two views is of the greatest moment.” (“The Origins of Puritanism,” Church History 20 [1951]: 45). Two responses to Trinterud are particularly noteworthy. See J. Mark Beach, Christ and the Covenant: Francis Turretin’s Federal Theology As a Defense of the Doctrine of Grace (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 22–64; John Von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), 17–33. Von Rohr’s statement on page 33 sums up the issue with regard to Puritan covenant theology rather well: “For the mainstream of Puritanism, therefore, it would appear that basically the bilateral and the unilateral were conjoined, human responsibility and divine sovereignty were unitedly maintained, and the covenant of grace was seen as both conditional and absolute.” 4 Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 120. 5 See John Ball, A treatise of the covenant of grace wherein the graduall breakings out of Gospel grace from Adam to Christ are clearly discovered, the differences betwixt the Old and New Testament are laid open, divers errours of Arminians and others are confuted, the nature of uprightnesse, and the way of Christ in bringing the soul into communion with himself [...] (London, 1645). 6 See, for example, Robert Letham, “The Foedus Operum: Some Factors Accounting for Its Development,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983), 457–68; David A. Weir, The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 7 See Willem J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (Leiden: E.J. Brill), 254–57. He lists the following terms: foedus naturae (covenant of nature); foedus naturale (natural covenant); foedus creationis (covenant of creation); foedus legale (covenant of law); amicitia cum Deo (friendship with God); foedus operum (covenant of works).

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guage of his successors.8 The English Puritan theologian Dudley Fenner (1558–1587) may have been the first to use the exact phrase foedus operum. He likely picked up the substance of the doctrine from his teacher Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603), who in turn may have learned it during his twenty years of exile on the Continent.9 Whatever the case, the term “covenant of works” was firmly entrenched in the writings of most Reformed theologians during the seventeenth century, and thus found its way into the Westminster Confession of Faith: “The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience” (7.2).10 Adam’s obedience, however, was neither perfect nor perpetual. Therefore, the Westminster Confession contrasts the covenant of works with the covenant of grace: “Man by his fall having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace: wherein he freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto life, his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe” (7.3). The Westminster Confession of Faith upholds what might be termed a dichotomous understanding of redemptive history by contrasting the covenant of works with the covenant of grace. Moreover, notwithstanding the distinction between the time of the law (i.e., the Old Testament) and the time of the gospel (i.e., the New Testament), the Westminster divines made clear that “there are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations” (7.6). The dichotomist understanding of redemptive history appears neat so far. However, the words in the Westminster Confession, “this covenant was differently administered in the time of the law,” provide a gateway into a debate among Reformed theologians that caused Anthony Burgess (d. 1664) to remark that on the relation between Sinai and the covenant of grace he did “not finde in any point of Divinity, learned men so confused and perplexed […]

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8 See Peter Lillback’s argument in The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 276–304. 9 For Fenner’s explicit use of foedus operam, see Sacra theologia, sive, Veritas quae est secundum pietatem (1585), 88. Michael McGiffert recognizes Fenner’s importance in the development of this doctrine. See “From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 19, No. 2 (Summer 1988), 131–155. 10 The doctrine of the covenant of works has received criticism from a number of well-known theologians. In response to these criticisms, see Cornelis P. Venema, “Recent Criticisms of the Covenant of Works in the Westminster Confession of Faith,” Mid-America Journal of Theology 9 (Fall 1993), 165–198.

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as here.”11 Burgess was not alone in his assessment of how complex this point of theology was among the Reformed orthodox. The highly regarded covenant theologian, John Ball (1585–1640), noted that most divines understood the old and new covenants (Heb 8; 2 Cor 3) to be “one in substance and kind, to differ only in degrees: but in setting down the differences they speake so obscurely, that it is hard to find how they consent with themselves.”12 John Owen agrees with Ball that most Reformed divines have understood the differences between the old and new covenants to be different administrations of the one covenant of grace. And he contrasts this “Reformed” position with the “Lutheran” view that argues “not a twofold administration of the same covenant, but that two covenants substantially distinct” are intended by Paul when he refers to the old and new covenants in Hebrews 8:6.13 Though insisting on the unity of the covenant of grace, Owen joins the Lutherans by insisting that the old and new covenants are two distinct covenants, “rather than a twofold administration of the same covenant.”14 In other words, the old covenant was “not a mere administration of the covenant of grace.”15 The complexity of the debate is exacerbated by the fact that Owen’s position seems to be one of many among the British Reformed orthodox during the seventeenth century. These positions will be discussed below, but there is no question that while there is basic agreement among Reformed theologians on the unity of the covenant of grace, and the distinction between the covenants of works and grace, they certainly did not agree on the function of the old covenant in the history of redemption.

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11 Vindiciae legis: or, A vindication of the morall law and the covenants, from the errours of papists, Arminians, Socinians, and more especially, Antinomians (London, 1646), 219. 12 A treatise of the covenant of grace wherein the graduall breakings out of Gospel grace from Adam to Christ are clearly discovered, the differences betwixt the Old and New Testament are laid open (London, 1645), 95. 13 Exposition of Hebrews 23:73. Anthony Burgess makes the same point: “It is true, the Lutheran Divines, they do expresly oppose the Calvinists herein, maintaining the Covenant given by Moses, to be a Covenant of works, and so directly contrary to the Covenant of grace. Indeed, they acknowledge that the Fathers were justified by Christ, and had the same way of salvation with us; only they make that Covenant of Moses to be a superadded thing to the Promise, holding forth a condition of perfect righteousness unto the Jews, that they might be convinced of their own folly in their self-righteousness. But, I think, it is already cleared, that Moses his Covenant, was a Covenant of grace.” Vindiciae legis, 251. 14 Exposition of Hebrews 23:76. 15 Exposition of Hebrews 23:77.

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8.2 Taxonomies Edmund Calamy (1600–1666) provides a brief, if somewhat unreliable, taxonomy of the views among the Westminster divines on the number of covenants made between God and man. He speaks of “severall opinions”: Some hold that there be foure Covenants, two of Works, and two of Grace; the two first, one with Adam before the fall, and the other with Israel at their returne out of Egypt, and the Covenants of Grace the first to Abraham, and the other at the Incarnation of Jesus Christ; this M. Sympson affirmed before a Committee of the Assembly of Divines in my hearing. 2. Others hold that there is but three Covenants; the first with Adam, the second with Israel at their going out of Egypt, and a third with Jesus Christ, the two first of Workes, and the last of Grace, and this M. Burroughes delivered in his Exposition Sermon in Cornhill in my hearing. 3. Others hold that there is but two Covenants, the one of Works, and the other of Grace; yet the first they hold was made with Israel at Mount Sinai, and no Covenant of workes before that, and now it is vanished away, and the other a Covenant of grace yet not made till the death of Christ the testator, and this is affirmed by James Pope, in a Book entitled, the unveiling of Antichrist. 4. Others hold that the Law at Mount Sinai was a Covenant of grace, implying that there is more then one Covenant of grace, and this is affirmed by Mr. Anthony Burgesse in his Vindication of the Morall Law the 24. Lecture, text the 4. of Deuteronomy. 5. Others with myselfe hold that there is but two Covenants, the one a Covenant of Workes […] then there was a Covenant of grace which God the Father made with Jesus Christ from all eternity to save some of the posterity of Adam.16

Regarding his own position on Sinai, Calamy maintains that the law given at Sinai was neither a covenant of works or covenant of grace; instead, the law was given to those already in covenant with God as a rule of obedience.17 Interestingly, in his brief taxonomy Calamy makes generalizations that need clarification. In the cases of Sidrach Simpson and Jeremiah Burroughs, Calamy relies on what he personally heard; in others, as in the case of James Pope and Anthony Burgess, he relies on their written works. There is some truth in Calamy’s description of Burroughs’ position, but in the latter’s work, Gospel Conversation (1653), the relation of Sinai to Eden does not constitute a strict parallel. His aim is to make a redemptivehistorical contrast that shows the superiority of living in the time of the gospel instead of the time of the law. He does not deny that the Israelites in the time of Moses had the gospel, “but the chief Ministration of God towards them was then in a legal way.”18 Burroughs adopts a position that is not unlike the view of John Cameron (1580–1625) who viewed Sinai as a ————— 16 Two solemne covenants made between God and man: viz. [brace] the covenant of workes, and the covenant of grace (London, 1647), 1–2. 17 Two solemne covenants, 8. 18 Gospel Conversation (London, 1653), 47.

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subservient covenant (foedus subserviens) that did not properly belong to either the covenant of works or the covenant of grace.19 Also potentially misleading is Calamy’s description of Anthony Burgess’ position. Calamy identifies the covenant of grace as an eternal covenant between the Father and the Son concerning the elect only. Many Reformed theologians would eventually identify this covenant as the eternal covenant of redemption (pactum salutis) distinct from the temporal covenant of grace. For Burgess, this eternal covenant provides the foundation for the covenant of grace, but it is not strictly part of the covenant of grace.20 Thus Burgess sees no inconsistency in speaking of one covenant of grace, which included the Mosaic covenant.21 The above shows that even a delegate to the Westminster Assembly can hear and read his contemporaries on the topic of the covenants, with particular reference to Sinai, and not necessarily provide an altogether accurate or clear taxonomy of the respective positions. Recent scholarship has fallen into the same kinds of errors.22 Sebastian Rehnman has asked an important question about Reformed covenant theology with particular reference to John Owen, namely, is redemptive history trichotomous or dichotomous?23 Rehman makes the argument that “Although criticized by the core group of Reformed orthodoxy and always a minority view, Owen follows the trichotomist federal theology, possibly in particular the Cameronian version, in his otherwise standard Reformed theology.”24 Rehnman does, however, qualify his statement by suggesting that the difference between Owen and the majority of his Reformed con—————

19 De triplici Dei cum homine foedere theses (Heidelberg, 1608), VII. Samuel Bolton (1606– 1654) provides an English translation of Cameron’s work in The true bounds of Christian freedome. Or a treatise wherein the rights of the law are vindicated, the liberties of grace maintained; and the several late opinions against the law are examined and confuted. Whereunto is annexed a discourse of the learned John Camerons, touching the three-fold covenant of God with man, faithfully translated (London, 1656), 351–401. Petto also adopts a “trichotomist” structure: “It is in no way incongruous to speak of three Covenants, seeing that with Adam is generally acknowledged to be One, and here [i.e., Gal. 4:24] the Scripture expressly speaketh of two Covenants and that with Adam is none of them.” The difference between the old and new covenant, 94. 20 The True Doctrine of Justification Asserted & Vindicated (London, 1654), 375–76. 21 Vindiciae Legis, 251. The Westminster Confession makes clear that there “are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations” (7.6). 22 See Brenton C. Ferry, “Works in the Mosaic Covenant: A Reformed Taxonomy” in The Law is Not of Faith: Essays on Works and Grace in the Mosaic Covenant, ed. Bryan D. Estelle, J.V. Fesko, & David VanDrunen (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009), 76–105. Ferry makes a number of criticisms of past taxonomies in the secondary literature. However, Ferry commits a few errors himself. Nevertheless, his taxonomy remains generally helpful in understanding the diversity of opinions on the matter. 23 See “Is the Narrative of Redemptive History Trichotomous or Dichotomous? A Problem for Federal Theology,” Nederlands archief voor kergeschiedenis 80 (2000): 296–308. 24 “The Narrative of Redemptive History,” 302.

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temporaries “is more formal than real.”25 The trichotomist label is generally helpful, but it fails to adequately understand the nuances of Owen’s covenant theology. While others, such as John Cameron, might be accurately described as reading the history of redemption in a trichotomous fashion, with regard to Owen that label places him in a category he would likely have repudiated. The following will set forth a variety of positions with the goal of showing the diversity that existed within the Reformed theological tradition concerning how best to interpret the function of the Mosaic covenant in the history of redemption.

8.3 The Majority Position: “Dichotomist” The vast majority of Reformed theologians from the Reformation onwards understood the Mosaic covenant to be an administration of the covenant of grace. As noted above, the pre-Fall covenant of works, not the “old covenant,” provides the basis for the dichotomist position, which is set forth in the Westminster Confession of Faith (7.6). Those who held to the dichotomous view of redemptive history viewed the law given at Mount Sinai to be in substance (i.e., broadly considered) part of, not distinct from, the covenant of grace in a manner that was appropriate for the church at that time. With its heightened legal demands the old covenant functioned in such a way as to drive the Israelites to seek the mercy of God in the person and work of Jesus Christ. This function of the law has been typically understood as the usus elenchticus sive paedagogicus. However, as John Ball argued, the law also proved to be a direction of “how to walk before God in holinesse and righteousnesse.”26 The Reformed typically understood this use of the law as the usus didacticus sive normativus, which has been referred to as the “third use of the law” (tertius usus legis). Most of the Reformed laid great stress on this “positive” use of the law. This helps to partly explain the divide between the Reformed and Lutherans on the role of the old covenant in redemptive history.27 As Richard Muller has noted, “this difference between the Lutherans and the Reformed arises out of the dialectical relationship of law and gospel in Lutheranism as opposed to the simple distinction of law and gospel within the one foedus gratiae held among the Reformed.”28 In connection with this, Ball notes that the “law was never given or made positive without the Gospel, neither was the Gos————— 25

“The Narrative of Redemptive History,” 302. A treatise of the covenant of grace, 102. 27 Mark Beach provides a good discussion of the “controversy with the Lutherans” on this point. See Christ and the Covenant: Francis Turretin’s Federal Theology As a Defense of the Doctrine of Grace (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 265–69. 28 Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, 321. 26

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pel [given] without the Law.”29 The positive function of the law (i.e., “old covenant”) finds its basis in the God’s gracious promises and acts of grace, which were not limited to the New Covenant era. Anthony Burgess, another proponent of the dichotomist position, recognizes that among the “Learned and Orthodoxe” there are roughly four positions concerning the old covenant: “Some […] make it a Covenant of workes, others a mixt Covenant, some a subservient Covenant; but I am perswaded to goe with those who hold it to be a Covenant of Grace.”30 He maintains that the arguments for his position outweigh the difficulties brought against it. By proving that the old covenant belongs to the covenant of grace, Burgess feels that the “dignity and excellency of the Law will appeare the more.”31 His view of the moral law, that is, its dignity and excellence, fits well within the dichotomous structure of redemptive history, and best reflects the consensus position of the Westminster documents. However, Burgess refers to several different understandings of how Sinai may be said to be an administration of the covenant of grace.32 The view he adopts belongs to that Reformed tradition found in the writings of John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), Zacharias Ursinus (1534–1583), Peter Bulkeley (1583–1659) and Francis Turretin (1623–1687), who distinguish between the law taken largely and strictly.33 So, Burgess notes that the law may be understood largely, “as that whole doctrine delivered on Mount Sinai, with the preface and promises adjoyned, and all things that may be reduced to it; or more strictly, as it is an abstracted rule of righteousness, holding forth life upon no termes, but perfect obedience.”34 Taken largely the law was a covenant of grace; taken strictly, “abstracted from Moses […] it was not of grace, but workes.”35 Francis Roberts adds another distinction to help clarify his own contention that Sinai was an administration of the covenant of faith (i.e., grace). He —————

29 A treatise of the covenant of grace, 102. See also Francis Roberts, Mysterium & medulla Bibliorum the mysterie and marrow of the Bible, viz. God’s covenant with man in the first Adam before the fall, and in the last Adam, Iesus Christ, after the fall, from the beginning to the end of the world (London, 1657), 778. 30 Vindiciae legis, 222. Francis Roberts (1609–1675) provides an identical taxonomy in his massive work on the covenants. See Mysterium & medulla, 738–39. 31 Vindiciae legis, 222. 32 Vindiciae legis, 222–23. 33 John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.7.1–9; 2.9.1–5 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008); Heinrich Bullinger, Common Places of Christian Religion, trans. John Stockwood (London, 1572), 96–102; Zacharias Ursinus, The Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. G.W. Williard (Columbus, Ohio, 1852), 23–29; Peter Bulkeley, The Gospel-Covenant (London, 1674), 196; Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology 12.8.1–25, 3 vol. Ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. and trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 1992). 34 Vindiciae legis, 223. 35 Vindiciae legis, 223.

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affirms that the Law given by Moses may be understood 1) more largely; 2) more strictly; and 3) most strictly. “More largely” includes all of the commandments, the moral, ceremonial, and judicial. “More strictly” refers to the Ten Commandments, including the preface “and the promises interwoven therein.”36 “Most strictly” may be understood as the law abstracted from Moses, which holds “forth life meerly upon terms of perfect and perpetual personal Obedience […] And in this sense the Apostle takes the word [Law] in his dispute about Justification by Faith.”37 These distinctions allowed Reformed theologians to both maintain the unity of the covenant of grace and explain certain statements in Paul’s writings that, on the surface, seem to threaten the unity of the covenant of grace (e.g., 2 Cor 3; Gal 4). Besides the aforementioned distinctions, a number of arguments were put forward to prove that the old covenant was not distinct from the covenant of grace. A few of them are worth considering in some detail.38 Although not everyone shared the same view of Sinai’s relation to the covenant of grace, there was general agreement on certain points among the Reformed orthodox. John Owen highlights some of these agreed upon truths. First, “that from the giving of the first promise none was ever justified or saved but by the new covenant, and Jesus Christ.” Second, that the Old Testament contains the doctrine of salvation in and through the person and work of Christ. Third, that the old covenant, “separated from its figurative relation unto the covenant of grace,” could not save. And, fourth, that all of the institutions in the old covenant typified Christ.39 Thus, more specific points of contention will be addressed since the arguments made by Owen are not in dispute, though the “dichotomists” no doubt felt that Owen’s arguments favored their own position. In the giving of the old covenant to the nation of Israel, God declares himself to be their God and Father. The law-imperatives are based upon the indicative that God has redeemed Israel out of Egypt (Ex 20:2; Rom 9:4). Ball argues that God’s redemption of Israel out of Egypt means that God is their “King, Judge, Saviour, and Redeemer: Spirituall Redeemer from the bondage of sin and Satan, whereof that temporall deliverance was a type.”40 Burgess asks how can God be the God of sinners unless the old covenant ————— 36

Mysterium & medulla, 659. Mysterium & medulla, 660. 38 Peter Bulkeley advances seven arguments to prove his argument that the old and new covenants are one in substance. His arguments fall under the following headings: 1) both covenants spring from God’s grace; 2) both covenants carry the same blessings and privileges; 3) both lead to Christ by and through whom the blessings of the covenant are received; 4) both covenants have the same condition, namely, faith; 5) both covenants communicate the grace of God; 6) both covenants require obedience to God’s law; and 7) the end of each covenant is salvation. Gospelcovenant, 114–141. 39 Exposition of Hebrews, 23:71. 40 A treatise of the covenant of grace, 104–105. 37

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were a covenant of grace? He adds that the language of Exodus 19:5–6, which describes Israel as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, is applied by Peter to the new covenant church; “If therefore the Law had been a Covenant of workes, how could such an agreement come between them?”41 Roberts asks a similar question: “How can the Lord be A Covenant-God to Sinners, or Sinners be a Covenant-people to God, but only in Christ by faith?”42 Moreover, he also focuses on the preface to the Decalogue where the name Jehovah is understood not only doctrinally, signifying his covenant faithfulness, but experimentally, as God fulfills his covenant promise to Abraham’s seed. Not only the preface, but also the first commandment, which concerns worship of God, proves that Sinai must belong to the covenant of grace. Roberts insists that true worship of God since the Fall can only take place through faith in Jesus Christ (Heb 11:6).43 Burgess likewise strengthens his argument by focusing on the second commandment, which speaks of God showing mercy, an attribute that refers to God’s grace in the context of redemption. Peter Bulkeley, another proponent of the dichotomous position, highlights the central place of mercy in the old covenant (Deut 7:9–12; 2 Chron 6:14; 2 Kings 13:23; Neh 1:5), which shows “that both beginning and accomplishment of that covenant was out of mercy and free goodnesse.”44 Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) provides a slightly more provocative argument about the positive aspects of God’s moral law by arguing that even in the covenant of works the “Gospel may be proven out of the Law” since the first commandment, which was written on Adam’s heart, speaks of God’s mercy, wisdom, and ability to save.45 Thus, between Adam’s sin and the promise of Genesis 3:15, he had hope of the gospel based on God’s character revealed in the law. Even God’s threats to believers, “though materially legall”, are “formally and in the Lord’s intention directed to them upon an Evangelick intention.”46 Not surprisingly, then, Rutherford held to the view that Sinai belonged to the covenant of grace.47 In addition to the moral law, the ceremonial law also provides evidence that the old covenant was part of the covenant of grace. Burgess makes the point that all divines reduce the ceremonial law to the moral law, “so that Sacrifices were commanded by vertue of the second Commandment.”48 The sacrifices, according to Burgess, did not oppose Christ, or the grace of God, ————— 41

Vindiciae legis, 224. Mysterium & medulla, 759. 43 Mysterium & medulla, 759. Burgess and Ball make the same argument. See Burgess, Vindiciae legis, 225; Ball, A treatise of the covenant of grace, 106. 44 Gospel-covenant, 116. 45 The covenant of life opened (Edinburgh, 1654), 7 46 The covenant of life opened, 8. 47 The covenant of life opened, 59–60. 48 Vindiciae legis, 225. 42

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but included them, a point that carried a lot of significance for confirming him in his opinion. Moreover, the ceremonial law foreshadowed Christ’s person and work; “it typically pointed further […] to Christ.”49 The various typologies of the old covenant cause Ball to suggest that the first covenant, which is gracious, “must bring forth a second, in which is fulfilled that which in the first is prefigured.”50 Appealing to both the moral and ceremonial law to prove that Sinai was part of the covenant of grace was a powerful argument.51 Inevitably, however, questions concerning the relationship of the law and the gospel would arise. Immediately after his discussion of the old covenant Anthony Burgess turns his attention to the law-gospel distinction, which in many ways lies at the heart of the debate over Sinai’s role in the history of redemption. Burgess notes how the Arminians, Socinians, Roman Catholics, Antinomians, Lutherans, and Reformed all understood this distinction differently. The Reformed typically understood the distinction both broadly and strictly. In the broader sense the distinction between the “law” (i.e., old covenant) and the “gospel” (i.e., new covenant) “is not essentiall, or substantiall, but accidentall […] [it] is not a division of the Genus into its opposite Species; but of the subject, according to its severall accidentall administrations.”52 On this point, notes Burgess, the “Lutheran Divines […] doe expresly oppose the Calvinists herein, maintaining the Covenant given by Moses, to be a Covenant of workes, and so directly contrary to the Covenant of grace.”53 Burgess defends his position that the old covenant was a covenant of grace by understanding the law-gospel distinction largely considered, which “doth easily take away that difference which seemeth to be among the Learned in this point.”54 The old covenant, with its emphasis on the law, was not devoid of grace. The new covenant, with its emphasis on grace, was not devoid of the law. Bulkeley highlights how this functions in the lives of God’s people by noting that concerning the doctrine of justification the law and the gospel are opposed; however, regarding the doctrine of sanctification the law consents with the gospel, “it continues as a guide and rule, even unto those that doe ————— 49

Mysterium & medulla, 761. A treatise of the covenant of grace, 119. 51 Ernest F. Kevan provides a fairly detailed analysis of this argument in his work The Grace of Law: A Study in Puritan Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1976), 119–134. 52 Vindiciae legis, 241. Richard Byfield (1598?–1664) similarly notes: “Heb 8.8.10. taken out of Jer 31.31,32,33. which speaketh of a new & old Covenant, is thus to be understood; not of two Covenants differing in substance […] but of one and the same Covenant of Grace distinguished in their different manner of Administration […] Here also we see that a proof out of the old Testament is as much Gospel if rightly applied, as any in the New-Testament.” Temple-defilers defiled, wherein a true visible Church of Christ is described (London, 1645), 38–39. 53 Vindiciae legis, 241. 54 Vindiciae legis, 241. 50

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believe.”55 On this view, regarding justification the law is an enemy, but for those who are justified (through faith in Christ) the law becomes a friend. Consequently, based on the fact that the Israelites were already God’s people when the old covenant was formally administered, the law did not oppose grace in terms of its normative function in the Christian life. In fact, as the above has shown, God’s mercy, love, and forgiveness were displayed in both the moral and ceremonial law. For these reasons, and many more, Ernest Kevan has noted that “the Puritans clearly saw how inconceivable it was to suppose that the Mosaic Covenant could be a cancellation of grace or a reversion to a basis of salvation by works. They contended, therefore, that the Mosaic Covenant could not possibly be inconsistent with grace.”56 This was indeed the case. However, not all of the Puritans would understand the old covenant and its place in the history of redemption in quite the same way as those above.

8.4 Foedus Subserviens: “Trichotomist” Sebastian Rehnman suggests that the debate over whether there are two covenants (the majority view) or three covenants (Owen’s supposed position) “is more formal than real.”57 Even if Owen does not belong in the trichotomist camp, the question of what the actual differences between the positions were, besides semantics, needs to be answered. To that end Alister McGrath posits that the foedus subserviens employed by John Cameron “appears to have represented an attempt to incorporate the Lutheran distinction between law and gospel within the context of a federal scheme.”58 In fact, McGrath adds that Cameron “seems to have regarded the harmonization of law and gospel implicit in the Orthodox Reformed two-fold covenant scheme as compromising the doctrine of justification sola fide.”59 McGrath does not provide any primary source evidence, but his conclusions warrant further exploration. Any evaluation of McGrath’s contentions depends first upon understanding the position of Cameron and those who agreed with him. Cameron’s explains his threefold structuring of the divine covenants: We say therefore that there is one covenant of nature, one of grace, and one subservient to the covenant of grace (which in Scripture is called the ‘old covenant’) and therefore we will deal with that in the last instance, giving the first instance to the

————— 55

Gospel-covenant, 129. The grace of law, 122. 57 “The Narrative of Redemptive History,” 302. 58 Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 268–69. 59 Iustitia Dei, 269. 56

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covenant of nature and of grace, since they are the chief and since they do not refer to any other covenant.60

Cameron’s trichotomist structure was innovative, but that does not mean his covenant theology was not in essential continuity with Reformed orthodoxy. Richard Muller has argued that Cameron’s federal theology, and that of his Salmurian succesors, was not in fact heresy and was “consciously framed to stand within the confessionalism of the Canons of Dort. In the specific case of Cameron’s covenantal thought, it ought to be understood not as a protest against various developments in Reformed theology but rather an integral part of the rather fluid and variegated history of early Reformed covenantal thought.”61 In proof of this it can be pointed out that a number of Reformed divines embraced Cameron’s trichotomist reading of redemptive history. For example, Owen’s close friend, Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680), refers to the old covenant as “foedus subserviens to the gospel (as learned Cameron calls it).”62 Besides Goodwin, Samuel Bolton also holds to the view that the old covenant was foedus subserviens to the covenant of grace.63 That two prominent members of the Westminster Assembly, Goodwin and Bolton, agreed with Cameron on the nature of the old covenant shows that Muller is correct to argue that Cameron’s covenant theology, far from being heretical or even in error, fits within the broad contours of Reformed orthodoxy. In Cameron’s work on God’s threefold covenant with man he highlights the manner in which the foedus subserviens shares certain similarities with both the covenants of works and grace, but the differences are substantial enough that the old covenant is distinct from them both. Whereas the theologians who follow the dichotomist structure of redemptive history emphasize the positive use of the law, Cameron views the old covenant as preparation for faith rather than the life of faith. Dichotomists also speak of Sinai’s pedagogical function, and Cameron does highlight, albeit briefly, the manner in which Sinai agrees with the covenant of grace, but the difference between the two schools of thought appears to be one of emphasis.64 Thus Cameron argues that the old covenant causes men to “fly into the arms of —————

60 De triplici Dei cum homine foedere theses,VII. Cf. Bolton, The true bounds of Christian freedome, 356. 61 “Divine Covenants, Absolute and Conditional: John Cameron and the Early Orthodox Development of Reformed Covenant Theology,” Mid-America Journal of Theology 17 (2006), 37. 62 The work of the Holy Ghost in our salvation in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 12 vol. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1861–66; repr. Reformation Heritage Books, 2006), 6:354. Francis Roberts also refers to Cameron as “learned Cameron” as he counters the idea of a subservient covenant. Mysterium & medulla, 748. 63 The true bounds of Christian freedome, 137ff. 64 De triplici Dei cum homine foedere theses, LXVII (The true bounds of Christian freedome, 392).

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Christ.”65 Cameron also highlights the discontinuities between the old and new testaments, for during the old covenant the Israelites did not possess the Spirit of adoption as those did in the new covenant.66 Moreover, in the Old Testament the measure of the Spirit was “far different then from what it is now under the New Testament.”67 Samuel Bolton in particular, and Thomas Goodwin, would follow this basic trajectory. Bolton uses almost the exact language of Cameron by arguing that the subservient covenant was given to Israel to “prepare them to faith, and to inflame them with the desire of the Promise.”68 In highlighting the similarities and differences the subservient covenant shares with the covenants of works and grace, a methodological point found in Cameron’s work, Bolton insists that the foedus subserviens “doth not stand in opposition to Grace, neither is inconsistent with the covenant of Grace […] yet it hath its subservient ends to the Covenant of Grace.”69 In particular, the old covenant had in view the land of Canaan and “God’s blessing there, in obedience to it, and not to heaven.”70 The relationship between law and gospel also comes into Bolton’s purview. He discusses the principle of “do this and live” (Lev. 18:5), and notes the varying interpretations given to this much-vexed passage of Scripture. For his own part, he notes that “in the externall view of them […] the Law and Gospel doe seeme to stand upon opposite terms,” but only if “we looke upon the Law separately [i.e., strictly].”71 When the law and the gospel are separated by distinguishing the foedus subserviens from the covenant of grace the Israelites “should have been driven to Christ by it, but they expected life in obedience to it. And this was their great errour […] seeking life by their own righteousnesse.”72 Instead, they should have recognized their inability to attain justification by the works of the law and so put their faith in Christ for their justification. Only then could the law, in its substance, function as a “Rule of obedience to the people of God, and that to which they are to conforme their walking under the Gospel.”73 Thomas Goodwin makes this same point in his short argument for a subservient covenant. He notes that Joshua, when the covenant was renewed, told the Israelites of their inability to keep the covenant (Josh. ————— 65

De triplici Dei cum homine foedere theses, XLVI (The true bounds of Christian freedome,

383).

66

De triplici Dei cum homine foedere theses, LII (The true bounds of Christian freedome,

387).

67

De triplici Dei cum homine foedere theses, LIII (The true bounds of Christian freedome,

387).

68

The true bounds of Christian freedome, 138. Cf. De triplici Dei cum homine foedere theses,

LVI.

69

The true bounds of Christian freedome, 145. The true bounds of Christian freedome, 145. 71 The true bounds of Christian freedome, 156–57. 72 The true bounds of Christian freedome, 160–61. 73 The true bounds of Christian freedome, 162. 70

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24:19). Nevertheless, the Israelites “in confidence of their strength, would take it as a covenant they were to perform.”74 Goodwin adds that in order for God to convince the Israelites of their inability to save themselves he gave the law “covenant-wise” that they, “now fallen, might […] acknowledge themselves debtors to this moral law.”75 Goodwin places significant stress on a redemptive-historical law-gospel contrast to prove his point. Both dichotomists and trichotomists agree that the components of the old covenant are typological of new covenant realities, but for Goodwin this amounts to a distinction and separation of the two covenants.76 On the other hand, the maxim distinctio sed non separatio best illustrates the dichotomist reading of redemptive history. In his rejection of the trichotomist position, Francis Roberts proves his position both negatively, by answering the main arguments of the trichotomists, and positively, by setting forth reasons why the old covenant belongs to the covenant of grace.77 A chief argument of those who call the old covenant foedus subserviens is the idea that the old covenant terrifies the conscience whereas the new covenant comforts the conscience. Roberts recognizes that the old has “much more servitude and terrour in it, then the New.”78 However, he points out that the old covenant is not only terrifying as evidenced by the preface to and promises in the moral law. Moreover, the ceremonial law provided glimpses of Christ, and God provided a number of promises in the old covenant “with sweet streams of Soul-reviving Consolations.”79 Roberts adds that the new covenant carries its own “severe threats against impenitent unbelievers.”80 Again, the issue of continuity between the two covenants plays a decisive role in understanding their relation to one another. Cameron, Bolton, Goodwin, and Owen all emphasized the differences between the two covenants, while at the same time insisting on the unity of the covenant of grace, but the majority of Reformed divines did not think the trichotomist position could be held with consistency.81 ————— 74

The work of the Holy Ghost in our salvation in Works, 6:354. The work of the Holy Ghost in our salvation in Works, 6:354. 76 Thus, Goodwin argues that God “had not made such an outward covenant with that nation as a church in such promises, such as justification, adoption, sanctification, outward and carnal, had not he therein had a farther scope in types, hereby to note out another covenant, church, promises, justification, sanctification, true and real, whereof he made this the shadow; and this he did for Christ’s sake also, whom and whose covenant these things typified out” The work of the Holy Ghost in our salvation in Works, 6:355–56. 77 Mysterium & medulla, 748–53. 78 Mysterium & medulla, 753. 79 Mysterium & medulla, 753. 80 Mysterium & medulla, 753. 81 See Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics: Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1978), 395–404; Mark Beach, Christ and the Covenant, 301–16. 75

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As noted above, McGrath makes the contention that by separating the old covenant from the covenant of grace Cameron was able to incorporate the Lutheran law-gospel distinction into his covenant theology. On this model the foedus subserviens functioned as a law covenant concurrently with the covenant of grace. In describing the covenant theology of the Salmurian theologian Moses Amyraut (1596–1664), Brian Armstrong argues that Amyraut’s “insistence upon a threefold covenant marks a major point of divergence on the part of Salmurian theology from the covenant theology within orthodoxy.”82 He also adds that Amyraut’s terminology of foedus legale “emphasized the radical opposition of the two covenants in a way which recalls Luther’s law-gospel distinction.”83 McGrath and Armstrong touch on an important aspect of this debate, but their conclusions need to be advanced more cautiously. The “Lutheran” law-gospel distinction did not only manifest itself among the trichotomists, but even dichotomists employed this distinction in their writings on the covenant. For example, Anthony Burgess devotes a whole section of his important work on the law to explaining the opposition between the law and the gospel.84 He recognizes that the law and the gospel may be understood either largely or strictly. Thus, concerning the gospel, if taken largely, “there is no question, but [the Apostles] pressed the duty of mortification and sanctification […] but if you take the Gospel strictly, then it holdeth forth nothing but remission of sinnes through Christ.”85 Burgess argues, therefore, that the law understood largely, as in the time of Moses, was a gracious covenant. Indeed, it is “folly” to make the law and the gospel, largely considered, “to hinder one another.”86 The debate, then, has to do with the application of the law————— 82

Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy; Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 144. Incidentally, Armstong’s view that places Amyraut’s view outside of orthodoxy ends up “excommunicating” a number of theologians (e.g., Goodwin) who were clearly within the “orthodox” camp. 83 Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 144. 84 See Vindiciae legis, 228–53. 85 Vindiciae legis, 250. Herman Witsius likewise comments: “It is known to all who are acquainted with theology, that the law is sometimes used in such an extensive signification, that it contains the whole system of the doctrine of salvation, the better part of which is the gospel: Isa ii 3. xlii. 4. and that also the gospel is sometimes signifies all that doctrine which Christ and the Apostles delivered, in which are comprehended both commandments, and prohibitions, and upbraidings, and threatenings, Mark xvi. 15. compared with Matth. xxviii. 20. Rom ii.16.” Conciliatory or Irenical Animadversions on the Controversies Agitated in Britain: Under the Unhappy Names of Antinomians and Neonomians (Glasgow, 1807), 180–81. 86 Vindiciae legis, 252. Samuel Rutherford holds to a view of the law and the gospel that helps explain why he viewed Sinai as an administration of the covenant of grace. Positively, the law and the gospel are not contrary to one another: “Perfect obedience, which the Law requireth, and imperfect obedience which the Gospel accepteth are but graduall differences.” Furthermore, “the Gospel abateth nothing of the height of perfection, in commanding what ever the law commandeth in the same perfection […]. In acceptation of grace, the Gospel accepteth lesse than the law, but

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gospel hermeneutic. What Mark Beach notes about Turretin’s rejection of the threefold schema could well describe the views of those in Britain who held to a twofold covenant schema: “Turretin rejects the Amyraldian scheme, for it blurs, if not obliterates, the gospel and grace present in the law.”87 Dichtomists had a strict law-gospel distinction on the matter of justification, but they also applied this distinction less strictly to the time of the law and the time of the gospel where not only justification, but sanctification was also in view. In the time of the law there was gospel, and in the time of the gospel there is law. In justification the law and the gospel are opposed, but in sanctification they are friends. Those who argued for a subservient or superadded covenant to the covenant of grace not only emphasized the distinction between the law and the gospel in justification, but they also placed great stress on the superiority of the time of the gospel (i.e., new covenant) over the time of the law (i.e., old covenant).

8.5 John Owen: Dichotomist or Trichotomist? A brief analysis of John Owen’s understanding of the relation of the old covenant to the covenant of grace may shed some light on why this debate was so complex. Rehnman’s contention that Owen adheres to a threefold covenant structure is close to the truth, but does not quite capture the nuances of Owen’s covenant theology. While his view of the old covenant basically reflects the trichotomist position, he does not actually call the old covenant a subservient covenant; instead, he refers to Sinai as a “superadded covenant.”88 More than that, the evidence suggests that Owen may in fact be a dichotomist, despite calling the old covenant a “superadded covenant.” In his comments on Hebrews 7:9–10 Owen argues the following: There were never absolutely any more than two covenants; wherein all persons indefinitely are concerned. The first was the covenant of works, made with Adam, and with all in him. And what he did as the head of that covenant, as our representative therein, is imputed unto us, as if we had done it, Rom v. 12. The other is that of grace, made originally with Christ, and through him with all the elect. And here lie the life and hope of our souls, – that what Christ did as the head of that covenant, as our representative, is all imputed unto us for righteousness and salvation.89

This statement reveals that Owen clearly held to a dichotomist reading of redemptive history. Yet, given his position on the relation of Sinai to the ————— commandeth no lesse” A survey of the spirituall antichrist opening the secrets of familisme and antinomianisme in the antichristian doctrine of John Saltmarsh […] (London, 1648), Pt. II.7–8. 87 Christ and the Covenant, 316. 88 Exposition of Hebrews, 23:113. 89 Exposition of Hebrews, 22:391.

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covenant of grace, further clarification is needed, which is precisely what he provides in his exposition of Hebrews 8:6. The old covenant referred to in Hebrews 8:6 does not have reference to the covenant of works, according to Owen, because the old covenant (diatheke) “was such a covenant as was a testament also.”90 A testament requires a death, which explains a fundamental difference between the covenant of works and the old covenant. Accordingly, for Owen, the old covenant is “not a covenant properly and strictly so called, but such a one as hath the nature of a testament also […] the first covenant made with Adam was in no sense a testament also.”91 Owen identifies, as the majority of Reformed theologians did, certain parallels between the covenant of works and the old covenant, and he even maintains that the old covenant “revived, declared, and expressed all the commands of [the covenant of works] in the decalogue.”92 However, he indicates that the moral law was revived declaratively and not covenantally at Sinai.93 If the Israelites had been placed under the covenant of works, as Adam was, the promise given to Abraham would have been annulled (Gal 3:17). All of this suggests that the old covenant operated alongside of the covenant of grace and, unlike the covenant of works, was also a testament. Owen aims to remain consistent and therefore argues that the new covenant is not strictly co-extensive with the covenant of grace. During the Old Testament, beginning with the protoevangelium (Gen 3:15), the covenant of grace consisted only in a promise. The “full legal establishment of it, whence it became formally a covenant unto the whole church, was future only.”94 The law given at Sinai became a covenant only with the blood of sacrifices. In the same way, the covenant of grace did not have the formal nature of a covenant or a testament (Heb 9:15-23) until the death of Christ.95 He adds that the “covenant of grace” implies salvation; “yet by ‘the new covenant,’ we intend its actual establishment in the death of Christ.”96 This manner of understanding the various covenants ————— 90

Exposition of Hebrews, 23:61. Exposition of Hebrews, 23:61. 92 Exposition of Hebrews, 23:77. The idea that the old covenant was “in some sense” a revival or renewing of the prelapsarian covenant of works was widely held among the Reformed orthodox. What they generally had in mind was the idea that the moral law engraven on Adam’s heart was “republished” at Sinai on tables of stone. This seems to be the intent of the Westminster Confession of Faith (ch. 19). 93 Exposition of Hebrews, 23:77. Note his comments elsewhere: “God did never formally and absolutely renew or give again this law as a covenant a second time. Nor was there any need that so he should do, unless it were declaratively only, for so it was renewed at Sinai.” Justification by Faith, 5:244. Goodwin likewise argues that the old covenant “was truly the promulgation of the covenant of nature made with Adam in paradise (in the moral part, the ten commandments).” The work of the Holy Ghost in our salvation, 6:354. 94 Exposition of Hebrews, 23:74. 95 Exposition of Hebrews, 23:74. 96 Exposition of Hebrews, 23:75. 91

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in Scripture helps explain not only Owen’s position, but also why this debate has historically been covered in confusion. For Owen, all persons indefinitely considered are guilty before God by virtue of the federal nature of the covenant of works. But, for the elect, they are saved according to the fulfilled promise of the covenant of grace. Framing it this way, Owen advocates a dichotomist reading of redemptive history. However, he also maintains the view that the old and new covenants are real covenants, that is, they are also testaments. Neither the covenant of works nor the covenant of grace, considered simply as promises in the Old Testament, is a testament. Thus there are, properly speaking, only two covenants mentioned in Scripture, the old and the new. The old covenant was confirmed by the death of sacrificed animals; the new was ratified by the death of Christ. Understood this way, one can understand why Owen persists in the opinion, even if it runs counter to the majority, that the old and new covenants “can hardly be accommodated unto a twofold administration of the same covenant.”97 Reconciliation could never come by virtue of the old covenant since it lacked the death of an atoning sacrifice, and was never intended to save the church. Believers in the old covenant were therefore “reconciled, justified, and saved, by virtue of the promise, whilst they were under the [old] covenant.”98 In terms of covenant-testaments, Owen is a dichotomist. In terms of soteric principles, only two covenants could ever save, the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. The idea that Owen holds to a trichotomist reading of redemptive history only works if one allows that the covenant of grace flowers into the new covenant whereas the old covenant is abrogated by the new covenant and remains distinct from the covenants of works and grace. Owen’s covenant theology raises questions about the strengths and weaknesses of terminology in theology. On the one hand, Owen, like his Reformed contemporaries, adopts the language of the covenant of grace to describe God’s redemptive activity through Jesus Christ in both the Old and New Testaments. The actual term does not, of course, occur in the Scriptures, but it does describe the basic way in which God relates to his people. The same is true for the prelapsarian covenant of works. Again, the term does not occur in the Bible, but theologians felt this terminology accurately conveyed the nature of Adam’s relationship to God in the garden. However, the old and new covenants in Scripture are explicitly mentioned in the Scripture. Moreover, Owen attaches to them a unique meaning because of their testamentary character. Neither the covenants of works nor the covenant of grace is a covenant in the same sense that the old and new covenants are. Consequently a dichotomist understanding of ————— 97 98

Exposition of Hebrews, 23:76. Exposition of Hebrews, 23:77.

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redemptive history characterized seventeenth-century Reformed orthodoxy, both for those (e.g., Ball, Roberts, & Burgess) who viewed the old covenant as part of the covenant of grace and for those (e.g., Cameron, Goodwin Owen, & Petto) who did not view the old covenant as an administration of the covenant of grace.

8.6 Conclusion The evidence clearly shows that Reformed theologians in Britain during the seventeenth century did not agree on how to relate the old covenant to the covenant of grace. Was this debate more formal than real, especially when certain distinctions are made? However tempting it may be to deny any substantial differences between the two sides, the debate centers on a major aspect of theological hermeneutics. In his impressive study on the seventeenth-century Antinomian controversy, David Como makes an interesting point about the debates on ecclesiology, namely, that they “masked a more fundamental intellectual and emotional bifurcation within puritanism, a split over that most basic of Christian antinomies, the relationship between Law and Gospel.”99 Como’s understanding of how various Puritans understood the “law” and the “gospel” leaves much to be desired, however. His view of the Puritan law-gospel distinction amounts to a contrast between the subjective (law) versus the objective (gospel), with the Congregationalists emphasizing the former and the Presbyterians favoring the latter. This view cannot stand up to the evidence in the writings of both the Presbyterians and Congregationalists whose law-gospel dichotomy defies such a neat categorization. Nonetheless, when the law and the gospel are understood as redemptivehistorical contrasts between the old covenant (law) and the new covenant (gospel) we are getting closer to understanding the debate regarding Sinai. Most Reformed theologians, often the Presbyterians, generally emphasized the similarities between the old and new covenants; but some significant Puritan thinkers, often the Congregationalists, were quick to point out their differences. For the likes of Owen and Goodwin, the new covenant ushered in a massive redemptive-historical shift in the history of God’s dealings with his people, and hence a stronger law-gospel (Old Testament versus New Testament) contrast. Further research may show that soteriology is not in fact the only issue at hand in this debate, but also ecclesiology, particularly the nature of worship in the new covenant as opposed to the old. To that end, the law-gospel contrast should not be understood primarily in —————

99 Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in PreCivil-War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 451.

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soteriological terms, but also ecclesiological ones too. This contention will not answer all of the questions, but it is one that ought to be considered if we are to understand why Puritan theologians disagreed on the precise relationship between the old and new covenants.

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9. The Necessity of the Atonement

Carl R. Trueman 9.1 Introduction When John Owen wrote his Dissertation on Divine Justice in 1652, he was not only attacking a view of Christ’s atonement that was held by those whom he would ordinarily have regarded as his allies, he was also in effect publishing a retraction of his own earlier position.1 The question he addressed was one of fundamental importance to the Christian faith: Given the existence of sin, was God’s vindicatory justice absolutely necessary, or could he pardon sin by a mere act of his will? The answer to this question had important repercussions for doctrines both of salvation and of Christ: If God wished to forgive sinners, was the death of Christ necessary on the basis of God’s essential justice or simply of his voluntary decree? In other words, given God’s decision to save sinners, was atonement something demanded by the very being of God or simply by a free act of his will? While the young Owen, along with many of his Reformed colleagues, had originally held to the latter position, by 1652 he had come to the conclusion that any understanding of atonement that did not insist on the absolute necessity of Christ’s death, opened the door to views of salvation that were inimical to the Gospel. Indeed, at one point in the treatise, he makes a direct connection between denial of the absolute necessity of atonement and the birth of Socinianism: ————— 1

For Owen’s writings, see The Works of John Owen, ed. W.H. Goold, 24 vol. (Edinburgh, 1850–55), hereafter cited as Works. The only modern biography is P. Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen (Exeter, 1971). For studies of his theology, see Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of Faith: Calvin, English Puritanism, and the Dutch Second Reformation (New York, 1991); P. DeVries, Die mij hefft liefgehad: de betekenis van de gemeenschap met Christus in de theologie van John Owen (1616–1683) (Heerenveen, 1999); Sinclair B. Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian Life (Edinburgh, 1987); R.C. Gleason, John Calvin and John Owen on Mortification: A Comparative Study in Reformed Spirituality (New York, 1995); Kelly M. Kapic, Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, 2007); Robert W. Oliver (ed.), John Owen: the Man and His Theology (Phillipsburg, 2002); Sebastian Rehnman, Divine Discourse: the theological methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, 2002); Alan Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology (Edinburgh, 2007); Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, 1997); idem, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (Aldershot, 2008).

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I have engaged in this task from an earnest desire of preserving undiminished the glory of divine justice, and of establishing the necessity of the satisfaction of Christ, lest the Socinians should wrest to their purpose the arguments of this learned man [William Twisse], on the principal of which they place a principal dependence, and by which they acknowledge that they have been induced to adopt heretical opinions.2

It was, he felt, a small step from denying the necessity of vindicatory justice to denying the punitive, substitutionary character of Christ’s sacrifice. This was a hallmark of Socinianism, based upon the rejection of any notion of God being essentially just. For this reason, he was quite prepared to go into print and attack men such as William Twisse and Samuel Rutherford with whose orthodoxy on other central Christian doctrines he would have had little argument.3 While the treatise itself is primarily aimed at defining divine justice both in terms of God’s own being and in its relation to the sinner, it raises a number of other questions that have an important bearing on Owen’s theology and method as a whole. This essay is therefore an attempt not simply to expound Owen’s position on this one issue, but to see how his understanding of the nature of vindicatory justice is rooted in both his doctrine of God and his understanding of revelation. It will also demonstrate that Owen’s arguments in this treatise provide a good example of how philosophical concepts drawn from scholastic authors could be used to strengthen the christocentric focus of Reformed theology rather than to weaken it, as much of the previous generation of scholarship on Reformed Orthodoxy seems to

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2 Works, 10:594.The classic Socinian statement of Christology is Faustus Socinus’s 1578 treatise, De Jesu Christo Servatore. This work was a sustained attack on the doctrine of satisfaction and does contain some indications that emphasis on God’s absolute power, an element held in common with men such as Twisse and Rutherford, was a contributing factor in this rejection of the orthodox position: see A.W. Gomes, “De Jesu Christo Servatore. Faustus Socinus on the Satisfaction of Christ,” WFJ 55 (1993): 209–31. For a good general discussion of Reformed and Socinian Christology, see R.S. Franks, A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ, vol. 2 (London, n.d.). Owen’s views, including his change of mind, are discussed on pp. 135–50. 3 Twisse’s views on this subject are expressed in Vindiciae Gratiae Potestatis ac Providentiae Divinae (Amsterdam, 1632) 1.25, digr.8 (pp. 198–207), and Rutherford’s in his Disputatio Scholastica de Divina Providentia (Edinburgh, 1649) and The Covenant of Life opened; or, a treatise on the Covenant of Grace (Edinburgh, 1654). The emphasis of these men upon God’s absolute power is a point of contact with Socinus’s De Jesu Christo Servatore, which Owen would no doubt have regarded as pointing to voluntarist theological presuppositions that could not provide a firm basis for avoiding the excesses of the Socinian position which made God’s justice merely an act of his will, not part of his essential nature, and dismissed any notion of propitiatory atonement. Thus, while the debate is primarily about the necessity of Christ’s atonement, the really important issue is the presuppositional framework underlying this: in terms of the order of being, the doctrine of God; in terms of the order of knowing, the relationship between God’s revelation and his essence. For further discussion of Twisse’s arguments, particularly in relation to his use of medieval sources, see Trueman, The Claims of Truth, chapter 3.

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assume.4 In doing this, Owen’s position will be contrasted with other Reformed theologians in an attempt to highlight the diversity of opinion on this particular theological question. First, however, it is important to see how Owen’s own view on the atonement underwent change. Only then can the significance of his 1652 treatise be truly appreciated.5

9.2 Owen’s Early Position In 1647, Owen published his most important work on the atonement, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. The treatise was an anti-Arminian polemic, aimed at asserting that Christ’s death actually accomplished salvation for the elect and did not simply make it possible. In book 2, chapter 2, Owen addresses the question of the end purpose of Christ’s death, and it is here that he deals with the teaching of “Arminius with his followers” that Christ’s death was necessary because God wished to pardon sinners but could not do so until the obstacle of sin had been removed by Christ’s atonement.6 The first criticism Owen makes of this position is that it is built on a flawed foundation: the notion that God could not have pardoned sin without Christ’s atonement. In this context, he makes the following unequivocal statement: The foundation of this whole assertion seems to me to be false and erroneous, namely – that God could not have mercy on mankind unless satisfaction were made by his

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4 For example, see E. Bizer, Frühorthodoxie und Rationalismus (Zurich, 1963); B.G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth Century France (Madison, 1969). For an example of scholarship that draws on Armstrong and that is directed specifically at Owen, see A.C. Clifford, Atonement and Justification: English Evangelical Theology 1640–1790, an Evaluation (Oxford, 1990). Clifford’s work should be read in conjunction with the critique of his views in Trueman, The Claims of Truth, passim. In recent years, the approaches of Bizer, Armstrong et al. have come under increasing criticism: see, for example, Richard A. Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’: Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities Between the Reformation and Orthodoxy,” Calvin Theological Journal 30 (1995): 345–75 and 31 (1996): 125–60. For a good synopsis of the history of scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy, and a clear exposition of the significance of the approach developed by Muller et al., see W.J. van Asselt, “Studie van de gereformeerde scholastiek: Verleden en toekomst,” Nederlands Theologisch Tijdscrift 50 (1996): 290–312. 5 Previous scholars have noted the change in Owen’s thinking on divine justice and have seen its implications as primarily Christological and soteriological. While they are substantially correct in this, they have not attempted to probe deeper into Owen’s argument and thus not noticed the wider implications of it for other aspects of his theology: see D. D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology 1525–1695 (North Carolina, 1982), 152–53; H. Boersma, A Hot Pepper Corn: Richard Baxter’s Doctrine of Justification in Its SeventeenthCentury Context of Controversy (Zoetermeer, 1993), 130–31; R.K.M. Wright. “John Owen’s Great High Priest: The High Priesthood of Christ in the Theology of John Owen (1616–1683)” (PhD dissertation, University of Denver, 1989), 142–44. 6 Works, 10:205–8.

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Son. It is true, indeed, supposing the decree, purpose, and constitution of God that so it should be, that so he would manifest his glory, by the way of vindicative justice, it was impossible that it should otherwise be [...] but to assert positively that absolutely and antecedently to his constitution he could not have done it, is to me an unwritten tradition, the Scripture affirming no such thing, neither can it be gathered from thence in any good consequence.7

It is quite clear from this passage that Owen regards the necessity of the atonement as based on God’s decree, and thus vindicatory justice as resting upon his will as expressed in his potentia ordinata, and not on his essence as such. While he does not explicitly say so, he is clearly operating with an implicit distinction in his doctrine of God between absolute and ordained power.8 According to God’s absolute power, he could forgive sin in any way that did not involve logical contradiction; thus, it is only after God has ordained, or decreed, that sin must be punished, that Christ’s atonement can be described as necessary, and then only on the basis that God is immutable and thus cannot change what he has willed. In asserting this ordained necessity, Owen actually stands within the mainstream of Western views of atonement. While Anselm had argued for the absolute necessity of the Incarnation and the Atonement on the basis of his doctrine of God and sin, his position had been considerably modified by the Medieval Schoolmen who otherwise adopted the basic structures of his argument. For example, Thomas Aquinas addressed the issue in the Summa Theologiae, and argued that while Christ’s passion was indeed the most suitable way for God to save humanity, there was no absolute need for him to have acted in this way if he wished to forgive sin.9 This tendency to make God’s will the decisive factor in the atonement’s necessity became more pronounced in the Scotist school and continued into Reformed theology, Thus, Calvin, in commenting on John 15:13, makes the following comment: ————— 7

Works, 10:205. The distinction between God’s absolute power (the set of all possibles that he could enact) and his ordained power (the subset of those possibles that he had decided to enact) had a long medieval pedigree and became in later medieval theology a means for safeguarding God’s transcendence and unknowability while maintaining the fundamental reliability of the created order. It had a somewhat mixed reception among Protestants, with some, such as Calvin, explicitly rejecting it while, arguably, implicitly assuming much of its content, On the medieval use of the distinction, see H.A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Durham, 1983); F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, 1984); Eef Dekker, “Duns Scotus over absolute en geordineerde macht,” in AiltueeI Filosoferen, ed. W. van Dooren and T. Hoff (Delft, 1993). On Calvin’s attitude to the concept, see David C. Steinmetz, “Calvin and the Absolute Power of God,” in his Calvin in Context (Oxford, 1995), 40–52, where he argues that Calvin rejects the terminology while actually employing its content. 9 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3a.46.14. 8

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God could have redeemed us by a word or a wish, save that another way seemed to him best for our sakes: that by not sparing His own and only begotten Son, he might testify in His person how much he cares for our salvation. And those hearts must be harder than iron or stone which are not softened by the incomparable sweetness of the divine love.10

Here, it is clear that Calvin grounds the necessity of Christ’s death in an act of God’s will, not in his vindicatory justice. This view was not found to be at all unacceptable amongst the Reformed orthodox in seventeenth– century Britain, and the Westminster Confession, not surprisingly, makes no explicit ruling on this issue. As noted above, it is found in the writings of such impeccably Orthodox figures as Twisse and Rutherford and is thus scarcely a peculiar or innovative position for a Reformed theologian to hold.11 Before moving to a discussion of Owen’s later position, it is worth noting one more aspect of his objection to the Arminian position that will have significance for the 1652 treatise: his attitude toward Scripture. Owen is quite confident that there is no direct scriptural affirmation of the absolute necessity of atonement and that no such inference can legitimately be drawn. In view of the fact that he is later to deploy scriptural texts and inferences to establish just such a case, it is obvious that the alteration in his understanding of atonement requires an alteration in his understanding of the general relationship that exists between God’s essence and his revelation. While the full significance of this change can only be understood from the perspective of the later treatise, it would appear that in 1647 Owen is operating with the implicit assumption that God’s revelation, in whatever form, is of his decretive will and not necessarily of his essential being. It is thus not legitimate to use this revelation to make inferences about what is and is not necessary for God in terms of his absolute power. —————

10 John Calvin, The Gospel According to St John 11–21, ed. T. F. and D. W. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1961), 100; cf. John Calvin, Institutes (Philadelphia, 1961), 2.xii.1 and xvii.1. 11 Patrick Gillespie, in The Ark of the Covenant Opened; or, a Treatise of the Covenant of Redemption (London, 1677), 35–39, offers a brief account of the range of Reformed opinion on the matter, rejecting both extremes and arguing that vindicatory justice is both essential to God but that atonement is still a free act of God’s will, and that God could have acted in another way. The marginalia to his argument indicate his dependence upon Rutherford, Covenant of Life Opened, and Anthony Burgess, The True Doctrine of Justification Asserted and Vindicated (London, 1648). It is interesting that John Owen wrote the foreword to this posthumously published treatise, indicating that he did not regard his difference with Gillespie on this point as fundamental. Indeed, the position Owen came to reject was that also held by his friend and Independent colleague, Thomas Goodwin: see Thomas Goodwin, Works, 12 vol. (Edinburgh, 1861–66), 5:72. Both Gillespie and Goodwin find a rationale for the necessity of atonement in its consequential benefits, particularly in terms of what it reveals about God. Thus, they stand close to the kind of rationale offered by Thomas Aquinas, where the atonement was not strictly necessary but had obvious advantages to commend it as a way of divine action, and not the more radical position of Scotus where no rationale was offered other than the mere will of God.

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9.3 The Argument of the Dissertation By 1652, it is clear that Owen no longer considered the Arminians as the major threat to orthodoxy, even though he still regarded them as a significant foe. Instead, his attention had turned to the Socinians, whose principle crimes included the denial of the punitive nature of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. This denial was itself rooted in their understanding of God’s vindicatory justice and thus intimately linked to their doctrine of God. What concerned Owen was the fact that some of the most orthodox of his contemporaries, in rejecting the absolute necessity of Christ’s atonement, seemed to concede just a little too much to the Socinian viewpoint. In his “Preface to the Reader,” Owen makes it quite clear that it was with some reluctance he took up his pen to write about this issue, being intimidated both by its doctrinal complexity and by the caliber of some of those with whom he had to disagree. Nevertheless, the nature of the issue compelled him to deal with it. [I]t is intimately connected with many, the most important articles of the Christian doctrine, concerning the attributes of God, the satisfaction of Christ, and the nature of sin, and of our obedience, and that it strikes its roots deep through almost the whole of theology or the acknowledging of truth which is according to godliness.12

Thus, the nature of God’s justice is of such importance that it stands at the very center of true Christian doctrine, and that a correct understanding of it is the key to a true doctrine of God and of Christ. The treatise itself is comprised of eighteen chapters that divide into two parts: The first, consisting of chapters 1 to 7, deals with the problem systematically, moving from definition to proof; the second, chapters 8 to 17, deals with the arguments alleged by specific opponents or allies of Owen’s view. Chapter 18 summarizes the applications of the doctrine. For the student of Owen’s theology, part 1 is without doubt the most significant section of the treatise. However, while part 2 is, in the main, simply an application of the principles elaborated in part 1, it does nevertheless contain pas—————

12 Works, 10:487. The opponents Owen mentions by name include his beloved Augustine, Calvin, Musculus, Twisse, and Vossius. He also lists his allies on this issue: Paraeus, Piscator, Molinaeus, Lubbertus, Rivetus, Cameron, Maccovius, Junius, and the professors at Saumur: see Works, 10:488–89. The inclusion of such as Cameron and the school of Saumur is interesting as it is the tendency of modem scholarship (e.g., the works of Armstrong and Clifford) to portray Reformed scholasticism, as epitomized by Owen, as antithetical to Saumurian Amyraldianism, especially on the atonement. Owen’s comment here clearly points to the fact that the relationship between himself and Amyraldianism is more subtle than previous scholarship has supposed, a view that is confirmed by the persuasive arguments of Rehnman for Cameron as the source of Owen’s structuring of the historical covenants in Theologoumena Pantodapa: see Divine Discourse, 164–65.

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sages of significance for an understanding of the importance of Owen’s argument.13 Owen starts his work by carefully defining the precise point at issue: the nature of God’s justice. The fundamental distinction Owen makes is between God’s justice as it is in himself and God’s justice as it manifests itself in his external acts. This is the crucial distinction in his argument on which all else depends. As we shall see, it also points to the deeper problem of the nature of revelation to which we have already referred. For Owen’s argument to work, he must not only demonstrate that God’s external acts of justice have to conform to his inner justice, but that the knowledge of God’s external acts which we have through revelation does actually tell us something about God as he is in himself. Considered absolutely, Owen regards God’s justice simply as God’s perfection: “The justice of God, absolute1y considered, is the universal rectitude and perfection of the divine nature; for such is the divine nature antecedent to all acts of his will and suppositions of objects towards which it might operate.”14 In other words, God’s justice as it is in himself, is simply the sum of all his perfections, and these perfections stand logically prior to his acts of will, acts which therefore have to be consistent with his antecedent perfection. The implications for God’s external works are immediately obvious, and Owen proceeds to make the connection explicit. God’s justice, he says, performs two kinds of external acts: those that are absolute and which he characterizes as words (i.e., when God speaks or legislates, his utterances are based on eternal, absolute truth); and those that are necessary and which he speaks of as deeds (i.e., when God acts toward an object outside of himself, he necessarily acts in a manner consistent with his antecedent perfection, e.g., he gives to each what they deserve).15 This distinction parallels another that Owen makes between the attributes: those which presuppose no external object and those which do; or, between those which simply exist in God, and those which only exist in relation to external objects. Among the former, Owen lists wisdom and power. God can be said to exercise these simply in his very act of existence. For God to be is for God to be wise and powerful. Among the latter, Owen specifies vindicatory justice: God cannot be said to exercise such sin–punishing righteousness unless one —————

13 For further discussion of Owen’s doctrine of God, see Trueman, The Claims of Truth, chapters 2 and 3. 14 Works, 10:498 15 See Works, 10:499–500. Cf. his comment on p. 503: “Justice presides as it were, in all the divine decrees, actions, works, and words, of whatsoever kind they be. There is no egress of the divine will, no work or exercise of providence, though immediately and distinctly breathing clemency, mercy, anger, truth, or wisdom, but in respect there of God is eminently said to be just, and to execute justice.”

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presupposes the existence of sin and thus of something external to the Godhead.16 The key point that emerges from this argument is the relational nature of God’s vindicatory justice. Having deemed God’s essential justice to be the sum of all his perfections, he argues that vindicatory justice is one part of the outworking of God’s perfect nature, simply the external working of God’s perfections in the manner demanded by the sinfulness of the creature. There is, in other words, no single internal attribute that corresponds to God’s justice and upon which his vindicatory justice is based. As a consequence of this, God’s vindicatory justice must be understood not as something that possesses existence of its own right but as something that exists only as part of the relationship between a perfect God and his creatures.17 This relationship of God to his creatures is defined by his omnipotent perfection. Having created rational beings that depend on him, God’s perfection first manifests itself absolutely in terms of a penal law. This is because such a penal law makes explicit the nature of the Creator-creature relationship and thus simply reflects the unalterable ontological truth of humanity’s subordination to God. Furthermore, this penal law also points to the second aspect of God’s justice: the necessity of the punishment of sin. For God to forego his right to punish the sinner would therefore amount to a denial of the relationship that exists between Creator and creature, a rejection of the immutable fact that humans are rational beings dependent upon God for their existence and answerable to him for their deeds. This relationship is ontological, rooted not merely in God’s decretive will but in the fact that he is the uncreated source of all being. Therefore, the implication of Owen’s analysis is that the position of theologians such as Twisse and Rutherford amounts to saying that God is capable of rejecting the real relation between himself and his creatures and thus, by implication, of contradicting his own essence.18 At this point, Owen anticipates a number of objections that could be directed at him. First, does he not thus make retribution something that must follow immediately upon sin?19 His answer is to assert that God’s justice demands punishment in general, but that this demand does not necessitate that this be instantaneous. God has established a dispensation whereby the need for punishment does not in itself specify the time at which such punishment must take place.20 Second, and more seriously, there is the problem ————— 16

See Works, 10:508. Works, 10:509–10. 18 Works, 10:509. 19 This point is made by Gillespie, Ark of the Covenant, 38. While this treatise post-dates that of Owen, it is indicative of the kind of argument being made in this discussion. 20 Elsewhere in the treatise, Owen also contends that he is not arguing for the necessity of any particular kind or degree of punishment, simply that punishment of some form is a general necessity: See Works, 10:613. 17

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of the implications that Owen’s view holds for God’s freedom. Indeed, God’s freedom is one of the central issues in the debate, as no orthodox divine would have denied the fact of Christ’s atonement, or its necessity in light of the decree; however, Owen’s insistence on its absolute necessity in the light of God’s decision to save could well be construed as a denial of God’s freedom to act in any other way, and thus of his omnipotence. Owen’s defense of God’s liberty against the background of such views is twofold. First, it is clear from his argument that God’s vindicatory justice is not absolutely necessary in the strictest sense, but, as its relational nature shows, it is contingent on the existence of rational, sinful creatures and, thus, on the creation. Creation, as an uncoerced, entirely voluntary act of God’s will, is not necessitated by his own being but is an act of free choice; thus, no act involving the creation is, in an absolute sense, necessary.21 Second, Owen denies that God’s freedom requires that he be able to choose whether to punish sin or not, but simply that such punishment must be performed with a concomitant liberty, i.e., in a way that is entirely consistent with his own nature.22 In asserting this, Owen argues for an intellectualist view of God in language with which any scholastic Thomist, or indeed Arminius himself, would have agreed: [T]hat God punishes sins with a concomitant liberty, because he is of all agents the most free, we have not a doubt. Thus, his intellectual will is carried towards happiness by an essential inclination antecedent to liberty, and not withstanding it wills happiness with a concomitant liberty: for to act freely is the very nature of the will; yea, it must necessarily act freely.23

Therefore, God’s freedom is not his ability to choose between alternative courses of action but his ability to will happiness without hindrance. Thus, —————

21 Works, 10:509, 511. Gillespie seems not to understand this point, arguing that those who hold to the necessity of atonement based upon the essential nature of divine justice are using logic which would demand that, because it is part of human nature to be able to speak, therefore all human beings must actually speak. The analogy is poor: all Owen is arguing is that, once the decision to save sinners is made, then God must act in accordance with his nature; by analogy, once a human being makes the decision to speak, he must speak in accordance with his nature. See Gillespie, Ark of the Covenant, 37–38. 22 Works, 10:509–10. 23 Works, 10:510. Cf. Arminius comment to Perkins: “Velim autem, mi Perkinse, ut libertatem voluntati Dei nullam tribuas, quae in ipsius justitiam impingat. Iustitia enim voluntate prior est et istius regula, voluntati libertas ut modus eius attribuitur. Quare etiam modus iste ajustitia circumscribitur. Neque tamen propterea negabitur Deum esse volens liberrimum. Quum enim volens liberrimum sit, non quod omnia vult, sed quod quaecunque vult, libere vult, quid officit libertati Dei, si dicatur quaedam non velle, quia per justitiam suam illa velle non possit, quum illa libertas non a superiore extra Deum, sed ab ipsa justitia Dei circumscribitur?” Opera Theologica (Leiden, 1629), 68. Arminius’s Aristotelianism, and his use of Thomistic and Suarezian patterns of thought is well-documented in Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought, of Jacob Arminius (Grand Rapids, 1991); also Eef Dekker, Rijlrer dan Midas: Vrijheid, genade en predestinatie in de theologie van Jacobus Arminius, 1559–1600 (Zoetermeer, 1993).

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to assert that Owen denies God’s freedom by arguing for the necessity of atonement is simply to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of that freedom. One might as well argue that the fact that God cannot tell a lie makes him less than all-powerful.24 This, then, is Owen’s argument for the necessity of atonement: God’s justice is the sum of all his perfections and has priority over his will; all of his external acts are to be consistent with this; given the existence of sinful creation, God must punish because failure to do so would amount to a denial of the necessary relationship that exists between creature and creator. Having laid out the doctrinal content of his argument in such a careful fashion, he now proceeds to justify his claims by advancing evidence, first, for God’s essential justice, and then for its necessary outworking in punishment. It is the nature of this evidence that points to the deeper shift that has occurred within his theology. However, before this shift can be examined, it is first necessary to have some overview of the kind of evidence Owen regards as proving his case.

9.4 The Evidence for Essential Vindicatory Justice In presenting the evidence for his position, Owen distinguishes between that which proves God’s essential justice and that which proves that the outworking of this justice is necessary. The former falls into four major categories: the word of God; the rational conscience; works of providence; and Christology, The latter is also divided into four: the nature of God’s hatred of sin; the scriptural description of God in respect of sin; the nature of God’s glory; and the necessity of Christ’s death. Bearing in mind that Owen had stated just five years earlier that no passage of Scripture could be adduced in support of the position for which he is here arguing, it is surprising how much scriptural evidence he now feels able to bring forward. This evidence he divides into three categories: those verses that oppose God’s holiness to sin; those that depict God as judge; and those that refer to the punishment of sin. The passages that he chooses make it clear that the reason for God’s vindicatory justice is not simply his will but the attributes of his very being. For example, in the first category he starts by commenting on Habakkuk 1:13, “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity,” upon which he makes the following observation: ————— 24 Francis Turretin clarifies the issue of God’s freedom by arguing that God has freedom of indifference in primo actu, i.e., in his decision of whether to create or not to create, but subsequently, in secundo actu, no freedom of indifference but only freedom of spontaneity, i.e., freedom from external coaction: see Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (Geneva, 1688), 1.3.14.3 and 1.10.304–5.

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The prophet here ascribes to God the greatest detestation, and such an immortal hatred of sin that he cannot look upon it, but, with a wrathful aversion of his countenance, abominates and dooms it to punishment. But perhaps God thus hates sin because he wills to do so, and by an act of his will entirely free, though the state of things might be changed without any injury to him or diminution of his essential glory. But the Holy Spirit gives us a reason very different from this, namely, the purity of God’s eyes: “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil.” But there is no one who can doubt that the prophet here intended the holiness of God. The incomprehensible, infinite, and most perfect holiness or purity of God is the cause why he hates and detests all sin; and that justice and holiness are the same, as to the common and general notion of them, we have shown before.25

As is clear from the last sentence, Owen is here expounding this text in line with his understanding of God’s justice as the outworking of his inner perfection in its relationship to sinful creatures. The other texts he lists are all dealt with in a similar fashion.26 The second and third categories, dealing with God as judge and sin as punished are also expounded as reflecting God’s essential being.27 In doing so, Owen reveals that his change in understanding of God’s justice is paralleled by a change in his understanding of the nature of revelation. Five years earlier he himself would no doubt have referred all of these verses to God’s decretive will; here he asserts that they refer to God’s essential being. Clearly, there is now a much closer correlation of God’s being and God’s revelation in Scripture than was the case in 1647. Owen’s argument from the testimony of conscience is based in part on biblical considerations and in part on reason and empirical evidence from the world around. These two strands, reason and revelation, he sees as bound together in a syllogism: “What common opinion and the innate conceptions of all assign to God, that is natural to God; but this corrective justice is so assigned to God: therefore, this justice is natural to God.”28 Owen regards the middle term of the syllogism as taught by Romans 1:32. Thus, in terms of the seventeenth–century Reformed understanding, the syllogism possesses biblical legitimacy because, although his crucial assumption in the major premise (that common consent refers to what is natural, i.e., essential to God) is a supposition based on reason rather than faith, the middle term is, in this particular instance of the argument, a truth of ————— 25 26

Works, 10:513. The other texts with which he deals are, in order: Josh 24:19; Exod 34:5–7 and 23:7; and Ps

5:4–6.

27 Under the second category, he deals with Gen 18:25, Rom 3:5–6, Acts 17:31, Rom 2:5, Rev 16:5–6, Ps 9:4–5, and Ps 119:137. Under the third category, he expounds Rom 1:32, 2 Thess 1:6, Heb 2:2, and Jude 7. 28 Works, 10:517.

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revelation.29 Again the theological model with which he is working is one whereby revelation, in this case a form of general revelation, gives insights into God’s actual being rather than merely into his will. We shall have to return to this assumption later, but for the moment it is sufficient to note that, in the form of the syllogism, it enables Owen to quote all manner of non-Christian authors, from Homer to Pliny, in support of his general thesis. He also adds an entire chapter on the prevalence of human sacrifices amongst primitive peoples. This, he argues, reflects an innate understanding of the need to propitiate God with blood sacrifice, an understanding that does not relate to what God may or may not have chosen to will, but, to what his very essence demands.30 Owen’s argument from providence starts with his defining precisely what he means by anger. Anger, he observes, is the human emotion most frequently ascribed to God in the Scriptures. As such, “anger” and its cognates actually denotes various effects of God’s being on the world around us. Evils, punishments, misfortunes–all are evidence of God’s wrath. So self–evident is this, that Owen feels no need to elaborate further, although he does make the point that such evidence reveals God’s essential character; Again, the close relationship between God as he is in himself and God as he has revealed himself to be is quite striking.31 Christology forms the next part of Owen’s positive exposition of his doctrine, and gives a clear indication that his theology is, at heart, thoroughly christocentric.32 God reveals himself through both nature and law, says Owen, but these cannot ultimately compare with Christ:

————— 29

On the use of syllogisms in Reformed Orthodox theology, see Richard A. Muller PostReformation Reformed. Dogmatics, 4 vol. (Grand Rapids, 2003), I, 403. 30 See Works, 10:541. This is one of the most interesting and unusual parts of the whole treatise. In order for this evidence to be of use, Owen has to argue that the universal existence of this tendency is the result of an innate principle implanted by God and not through contact with the Jews, as Rutherford asserted. This is a fascinating example of how primitive social anthropology was utilized by theologians in doctrinal controversy: See Works, 10:525–41. Of course, the problem with Owen’s argument from universal consent is that the very controversy in which he is engaged effectively precludes its use in establishing his case. If God’s vindicatory justice was universally acknowledged, then the controversy would never have arisen. That Socinus and others did deny it points to the inadequacy of this argument from natural theology, even with the biblical warrant of Rom 1:32, to deal with this issue in a decisive manner. Nevertheless, Owen seems to have been blissfully unaware of this difficulty. 31 See Works, 10:546 32 I use the term “christocentric” here simply on the grounds that it has been so beloved of Barthian critics of Reformed Orthodoxy. In itself, it is virtually worthless: Socinian theology, with its focus on a creature Christ as moral example, is arguably “christocentric,” even without any concept of incarnation. I suspect those who criticize Reformed Orthodoxy for not being christocentric are indicating merely that Reformed Orthodoxy disagrees with their own distinctive Christological constructions.

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[T]here are some attributes of his nature the knowledge of which could not reach the ears of sinners but by Christ, such as his love to his peculiar people, his sparing mercy, his free and saving grace, even the others, which he hath made known to us in some measure by the ways and means above mentioned, we could have no clear or saving knowledge of unless in and through this same Christ.33

One of these attributes that is revealed in nature but more perfectly so in Christ is that of vindicatory justice. In setting forth Christ as a propitiation for sin, God demonstrated to humanity that sin required punishment. In one of the most powerful and hard to refute statements in the treatise, Owen asks: “what kind of love can that be which God hath shown, in doing what there was no occasion for him to do?”34 It is only in the light of the atonement’s absolute necessity, he contends, that Christ’s death can truly reveal both God’s justice and his mercy. In dealing with the necessity of the outworking of God’s justice, Owen’s arguments add little to what he has already said. It is, however, interesting to summarize briefly the points he makes in this context. First, he addresses the nature of God’s hatred of sin: “He who cannot but hate all sin cannot but punish sin, for to hate sin is, as to the affection, to will to punish it, and as to the effect, the punishment itself. And to be unable not to will the punishment of sin is the same with the necessity of punishing it.”35 Thus, God’s hatred of sin must manifest itself in an act of God’s will to punish sin because not to do so would involve a contradiction in God’s being, implying that his intellect hated sin but that his will acted in a manner contrary to this. Such a position would be a denial of Owen’s intellectualist doctrine of God where the intellect apprehends the good and directs the will toward it. In advancing this argument, Owen is attempting to force his opponents into the embarrassing position of having to deny that God has any essential hatred for sin. The second type of evidence, that from Scripture, focuses on the description of God as “a consuming fire.” Drawing on the analogy of fire, Owen points out that fire necessarily burns all that it comes into contact with; thus, if God comes into contact with what is sinful, he too must necessarily consume it. Again, a close connection between God’s essence and his revelation is assumed, with the language of the Bible, while not precisely realist, being all the same very closely analogous to divine realities.36 The last two pieces of evidence are, in effect, reiterations of earlier statements: God’s position as a just ruler demands that he punish sin, as failure to do so would be a contradiction of his position, of his holiness, and —————

33 Works, 10:547. This passage is unequivocal evidence that Reformed orthodoxy’s so-called Biblicist emphasis on the written word of Scripture did not necessarily undermine a Christ-centred understanding of revelation. 34 Works, 10:548. 35 Works, 10:550. 36 Works, 10:553–54

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thus of his being;37 and Christ’s death, if it was not absolutely necessary, appears an unnecessary and meaningless act. In other words, theological rationality demands that atonement is necessary in an absolute sense.38 This, then, is the evidence Owen offers for his position. One central presupposition is obvious throughout: the close correlation of God’s essence and his revelation. It is this assumption that must therefore form the focal point of the final section of this paper.

9.5 Revelation and the Doctrine of God In terms of being, God obviously precedes his revelation – logically, he must first exist before he can be revealed as existing – but in terms of human knowledge, the order is reversed – we first apprehend his revelation by which we then know of his existence. In the case of Owen’s Dissertation, the content of his doctrine of God can be brought into sharpest focus by a close examination of the presuppositions that underlie his notion of revelation. While the major argument of this treatise is obviously about God’s justice and the necessity of punishing sin, it is clear that Owen’s understanding of revelation in this work of 1652 is significantly different from that expressed in The Death of Death. It is most likely that this change is a consequence, not a cause, of Owen’s broader theological and Christological shift, but without it Owen’s mature view of Christ’s atonement could claim no superiority in terms of biblical rationale to that which he had come to reject. The essence of this new position is an assumption that, just as God’s external acts conform to his internal perfection, so also his revelation gives genuine insights into the nature of his internal being. There must, in other words, be an epistemological pathway from God’s revelation to his essence. This pathway is provided by Owen’s adoption of certain metaphysical concepts that clarify the relationship between God and creation. First, this relationship is understood by Owen, as also for Thomas Aquinas and Thomism in general, in terms of the Aristotelian notion of cause and effect. Owen applies this notion particularly to the Scriptures as a way of reasoning back from statements about God’s external works to his essential being. Indeed, at one point in the Dissertation, he makes the following comment: A second act presupposes a first, and a constant manner of operating proves a habit; a sign also expresses the thing signified. Because God doeth good to all, we believe him to be good, and endowed with supreme goodness; for how could he so constantly and uniformly do good, unless he himself were good? Yea, from second acts the holy

————— 37 38

Works, 10:554–56. Works, 10:556–58.

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Scriptures sometimes teach the first; as, for instance, that God is the living God, because he giveth life to all, that he is good, because he doeth good. Why may we not also say that he is just, endowed with that justice of which we are treating, because “God perverteth not judgment, neither doth the Almighty pervert justice,” but “the LORD is righteous, and upright are his judgments”? A constant, then, and uniform course of just operation in punishing sin proves punitory justice to be essentially inherent in God. 39

The presuppositions behind this passage are obvious and undergird the crucial connection between God, being and his revelation, which Owen needs as a basis for his argument. In the order of being, God’s first acts, his attributes, determine the character of his second acts, his effects; thus, in the order of knowing, God’s second acts give real insights into his essence. The interesting thing is that Owen sees the Bible itself as teaching the validity of inferences from effect back to cause. As far as he is concerned, this is no purely rationalist theory of analogy based on the metaphysics of being but a method of doing theology that possesses clear biblical sanction. His implicit adoption of Aristotelian concepts are not here an example of any tendency to exalt human logic over against the Bible but, on the contrary, of his desire to be faithful to the Bible. Nevertheless, he does remain vulnerable to the criticism that his belief that there is such a necessary connection between God’s being and his effects, and that this is indeed a valid way of understanding the Bible’s relationship to God, is an assumption; and that nowhere in the treatise does he feel obliged to justify this. A second element in his use of Thomist patterns of thought is his reliance on analogical predication. Right at the very start of the work, Owen defines how words can be predicated of God. Discussing how definitions of justice are used by non-Christian philosophers in discussions about civil administration and government, he points out how such concepts are to be understood of God: “[I]n ascribing the perfection of excellencies to him [God], we exclude the ratio of habit or quality, properly so called, and every material and imperfect mode of operation.”40 Thus, when speaking of God, it is quite legitimate to apply to him human concepts of perfection, providing that we understand such predication is analogical and that these perfections, as they exist in God, have none of our creaturely limitations and imperfections. Thus, the works of secular thinkers on perfection and virtue in the realm of creation can become useful for gaining insights into the nature of God. This is a somewhat broader application of philosophical concepts to theology than that based on analogical reasoning from biblical texts and does appear to open the way for a more purely philosophical approach to God based on the analogy of finite being in general to the infinite ————— 39 40

Works, 10:558–59. Works, 10:558–59

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being of God. This is, of course, strongly suggestive of the influence of Thomistic patterns of thought upon Owen.41 This notion of analogy is, of course, useful both for asserting and for denying arguments based on natural theology. As in the above example, Owen can use it to legitimize use of secular philosophy in supporting his notion of justice. However, he can also deploy it as a way of delimiting natural theology when it suits his cause. For example, faced with Twisse’s argument that, as humans can forgive sin without retribution or satisfaction, then so can God, Owen denies that such reasoning is legitimate: “[D]ivine and human forgiveness are plainly of a different kind. The forgiveness of man only respects the hurt; the forgiveness of God respects the guilt. Man pardons sins so far as any particular injury hath been done himself; God pardons sin as the good of the universe is injured.”42 In this case, where the argument from analogy appears to be going against him, Owen is careful to stress that God’s forgiveness is fundamentally different from that of humans. This would seem to imply that Owen’s attitude toward natural theology is inconsistent, but this is not so. While analogy presupposes difference, it also requires similarity. What Owen is doing here is denying that there is any similarity between the actions of private individuals and those of God. He is not denying the usefulness of analogy in general. As this passage continues, he returns to a positive reliance on analogy by arguing that God must not be compared in this context with a private individual but with a civil official. A private person is free to forgive an injury, but a magistrate is bound by his office to punish; thus, God, by definition ruler of the universe, cannot pardon sin either. Of course, the epistemological reliability of the analogy of being depends entirely on the doctrine of God. As was noted earlier, Owen’s understanding of God is defined by his belief that God’s works are determined by his intellect apprehending the good and his will moving toward it. This is an essential aspect of his nature and marks a clear departure from Owen’s earlier voluntarist understanding of God.43 It is also true that God is the only necessary being. He necessarily wills himself in his trinitarian form.44 By ————— 41

At one point when he is using analogical reasoning, Owen does explicitly acknowledge the influence of Aquinas. This is in the context of a discussion concerning how tile idea of anger can be applied to God. Owen cites with approval Aquinas’s view as expressed in Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 47.1: See Works, 10:544. Regarding the scholastic framework employed by those orthodox divines maintaining the opposite position on the atonement’s necessity to that of Owen, it is interesting, though perhaps hardly surprising, that William Twisse’s use of Aristotle is shaped by Scotistic, rather than Thomistic concerns: See S. Hutton, “Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelian,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978), 635–52, esp. 649ft: 42 Works, 10:588. 43 See Works, 10:510. Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.21.1. 44 “[God is] necessary in respect of all his actions internally, or in respect of the persons in the Godhead toward one another. The Father necessarily begets the Son, and loves himself. As to

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implication, therefore, he also wills his own happiness. The logical priority of intellect to will imposes ontological limits on God’s external acts. Goodness and happiness are not arbitrarily dependent on God’s will but rooted in his own unchanging being. It is this intellectualist view of God that both ensures the objective reliability of natural theology and precludes any notion of sin’s going unpunished. In a passionate passage close to the end of the treatise, Owen makes it quite clear that sin can only be properly understood in its relationship to God: Sin opposes the divine nature and existence; it is enmity against God, and is not an idle enemy; it has even engaged in a mortal war with the attributes of God. He would not be God if he did not avenge, by the punishment of the guilty, his own injury. He hath often and heavily complained in his word, that by sin he is robbed of his glory and honor, affronted, exposed to calumny and blasphemy; that neither his holiness, nor his justice, nor name, nor right, nor dominion, is preserved pure and untainted: for he hath created all things for his own glory, and it belongs to the natural right of God to preserve that glory entire by the subjection of all his creatures, in their proper stations, to himself.45

Sin must, therefore, be understood from a theocentric, rather than anthropocentric, perspective, and its punishment must be seen as part of God’s overall purposes. As God’s primary act is to will his own happiness, his own glory, then all secondary, external acts must conform to this. Sin is, by definition, the contradiction of God, a denial of God’s own willing of his own essential glory. As such, God cannot be indifferent to it. The punishment of sin is demanded by the fact that he wills the good, which requires him to act in such a way that his purposes are not frustrated.46 As sin represents the creature’s attempts to be free of God, so punishment of sin becomes the only way in which God is able to reassert his authority and so to maintain the proper order of being that, creation being presupposed, is a necessary part of God’s glory and happiness. As with his use of analogy, Owen’s intellectualist doctrine of God shows clear affinities with Thomistic theology. This, of course, raises the question of the sources of his thinking. The Dissertation is explicitly dependent on scholastic writers at a number of points, particularly in the early chapters.47 This is hardly surprising, as ————— these and such like actions, he is of all necessary agents tile most necessary.” Works, 10:510. Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.21.1. 45 Works,10:619 46 “[T]he infliction of punishment belongs not to God as injured [...] but as he is the ruler of all and the judge of sinners, to whom it belongs to preserve the good of the whole, and the dependence of his creatures on himself.” Works, 10:567. 47 E.g., Works, 10:497 [Aristotle], 501 [Lombard, Aquinas, Cajetan, Biel, and others], 505 [Aquinas, Cajetan]. On p. 502, Owen explicitly agrees with Suarez on the formal inherence of Punitive justice in God, but, without being specific, does distance himself from his method: “His conclusions here 1do not oppose, though 1 cannot approve of many of his reasonings and arguments.”

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the debate as a whole can be seen as another example of the periodic battles between intellectualists and voluntarists that had started in the Middle Ages. In the light of his obvious intellectualism, it is not insignificant, nor indeed surprising, that Owen feels able to draw positively upon Aristotle, Thomas, and later Aristotelian traditions, particularly that of Suarez, to support his argument. While Owen is careful to distance himself from these individuals at points, it is quite clear that he is happy to use Thomist and Aristotelian patterns in his theology. This fact, perhaps somewhat ironically, brings his argument very close in terms of content, especially as regards its foundation in an intellectualist understanding of God, to the position of one for whom Owen usually reserved the greatest scorn: Jacob Arminius. This points us once again to the complexity of the historical development of Reformed theology, a complexity that defies any attempt at explanation in terms of simplistic models and categories.48

9.6 Conclusion It has become the vogue for scholars of Reformed thought to see a fundamental antithesis between Christ-centered theology and the presuppositions and methods of a Reformed Orthodoxy that employs scholastic method and borrows language and argumentation from medieval theology and from traditions of Aristotelianism. In the main, this is no doubt the result of an uncritical and unhistorical acceptance of Barth’s belligerent Nein! to natural theology, even by those scholars who do not adopt his positive theological constructions. While the whole notion of judging Reformed scholasticism by the criteria of twentieth-century theology of any variety, be it neo-orthodoxy or conservative Calvinism, is highly dubious, historical analysis of the relevant documents demonstrates that many of neo-orthodoxy’s dearest historiographical shibboleths are unsustainable in the light of the evidence. Owen’s treatment of divine justice is a case in point. Here is a theologian guilty of all the worst sins: positive use of Aristotelian categories; a disposition toward scholastic distinctions and methods of argumentation; and, worst of all, a dependence on the analogy of being, that mark of Barth’s antichrist. According to the received wisdom, the result should be a theology that undermines the Christological focus of Christianity and replaces it with a human-centered caricature. However, the end result is actually a ————— 48

Further parallels between the arguments of Owen and Arminius on divine justice can be found by comparing Owen’s arguments in his Dissertation about the priority of the divine intellect with those in Arminius’ Diputatio Privata 21, Opera Theologica; 360–62.

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theology that, on this issue at least, is arguably not less Christocentric than those of Owen’s opponents, including Calvin himself, but actually more so. Further, it is also worth noting that commitment to scholastic method and the use of broad Aristotelian categories does not mean that Owen and his contemporaries were agreed in all the details, and even in some of the major doctrinal conclusions. In fact, Owen’s critique of Twisse and Rutherford is a reminder of the diversity of theological opinion, even on relatively important matters, which could exist within both the scholastic tradition and the confessional boundaries of Reformed theology. In asserting the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice, Owen is presenting a Reformed theology that cannot displace the historical person of the mediator from the center of the drama of redemption. There can be no eternal justification based purely on the decree. Salvation is as surely linked to history as it is to eternity. It is those who predicate the necessity of incarnation and atonement solely on the decretive will of God who run the risk of marginalizing the historical person of Christ and undermining the importance of salvation history. In this context, Owen’s scholasticism serves not to eclipse Christ but to place him at the center. Indeed, as is clear from his argument, if it was not for his Thomist understanding of the epistemological implications of God’s causal relationship to creation and his acceptance of the validity of the analogy of being, Owen would have no way of attacking his opponents’ position. While it is true that his use of such arguments depends on assumptions that he does not justify, it is also true that any rejection of their validity renders his Christocentrism epistemologically unsustainable. In the context of this dispute, at least, it is the rejection or radical delimitation of natural theology, not its acceptance, that is the enemy of Christ– centered theology, This is not to say that Owen’s position is correct or in any way superior to those of his opponents; it is merely to point out that in the seventeenth century, use of scholastic argumentation, and even of the analogy of being, did not necessarily disrupt the Christological focus of Reformed theology but could in fact be used to strengthen it. Just as scholasticism should be regarded as a method rather than a result, so Owen’s use of Aristotelian language and concepts, and of a Thomist natural theology should not be prejudged by anachronistic criteria but seen as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself.

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10. “That Error and Pillar of Antinomianism”: Eternal Justification

Robert J. McKelvey 10.1 Introduction Martin Luther may never have called justification the “article by which the church stands or falls” (articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiae), yet the concept certainly belonged to him. He labels the doctrine the “head and cornerstone” (caput et angularis lapis) of the Church, and “without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour” (sine eo Ecclesia Dei non potest una hora subsistere).1 Regardless of its origination, in the seventeenth century John Owen uses the “stands or falls” phrase when referring to justification as “the main hinge” of the Reformation and “Articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiae,” the article by which the church stands or falls. “In my judgment,” claims Owen, “Luther spake the truth when he said; amisso Articulo Justificationis, simul amissa est tota Doctrina Christiana. The loss of the article of Justification, involves the loss of the whole Christian doctrine.”2 The foundation for such sweeping statements exists in the Reformation emphasis upon divine grace in salvation to the exclusion of human effort. Justification by faith alone emerged as a conscious departure from ————— 1

Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke, 120 vol. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1883–2009), 30/3:650. Though the “stands or falls” wording is often attributed to Luther, a primary source has never been cited. He could still be the originator of the phrase, as attribution to him comes as early as the seventeenth century. For example, William Eyre (without a citation) refers to justification as “articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiae, as Luther calls it.” William Eyre, Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae (London, 1654), 17. Thus, Richard John Neuhaus in “The Catholic Difference,” Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission, ed. Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus (Dallas: Word, 1995), 199, wrongly argues that the “stands or falls” phrase did not originate until the eighteenth century. 2 John Owen, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith Through the Imputation of the Righteousness of Christ (London, 1677), 83, 87. As Carl R. Trueman observes, Owen does not provide a citation of Luther for this quote “John Owen on Justification,” in Justified in Christ: God’s Plan for Us in Justification, ed. K. Scott Oliphint (Fearn, Scotland: Mentor, 2007), 81. Owen may also be calling attention to John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.11.1, ed. John T. McNeil and trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vol. (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), where he refers to justification as “the main hinge on which religion turns.”

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the medieval system of merit and the connected ideas of infused grace and imparted righteousness. While justification by faith alone received such high esteem among the seventeenth-century English heirs of the Reformation, similar tribute never came for the post-Reformation doctrine of eternal justification. The teaching emerged to protect the free and sovereign grace of justification against any perceived human contribution. In the end, anyone embracing justification in foro Dei, in the court of God and before faith, was readily suspected of embracing eternal justification. Rather than being praised as a defender of forensic justification in the spirit of Luther, they were typically maligned as antinomians in the spirit of Agricola. “The Antinomians erroneously hold,” asserted Thomas Watson (1620– 1686), “[t]hat we are justified from Eternity. This Doctrine is a Key which opens the Door to all Licentiousness; what sins do they care they commit, so long as they hold they are ab Aeterno, justified whether they repent or no.”3 The neonomian Richard Baxter (1615–1691) assigned to “justification from eternity” such a foundational role that he called it, “that error and pillar of Antinomianism.”4 This essay will explore the nature of this supposed “error and pillar of Antinomianism” and the debate surrounding it in seventeenth-century England. This will involve understanding both the convictions and misconceptions about the doctrine emerging in polemical debate. Concerning the controversy, we will examine its historical background, some highly visible deliberation within it, and some of the individuals and theological issues pertinent to it. The tendency towards broad generalizations within the debate manifests itself. The labels of antinomianism and eternal justification were given at times to being loosely defined and hastily applied. For example, David Como observes that the term “antinomian” was “primarily a hostile term of abuse, often used imprecisely, sloppily or maliciously for polemical purposes.”5 Due to its attachment to antinomianism, the doctrine of eternal justification also suffered such misapplication. For a working seventeenth-century definition of eternal justification, Francis Turretin (1623–1687) provides a helpful start in Institutio theologiae elencticae (vol. 2, 1682), where he speaks of those who “maintain that [justification] is an immanent act in God which was performed from eternity.” This differs from those who either regard justification as “transient, terminating in us and which takes place only in time and in this life,” or those “who hold that it is postponed to the last and decretory day” at the “public tribunal of Christ.” Turretin agreed that justification “was decreed ————— 3

Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity (London, 1692), 132. Richard Baxter, Aphorismes of Justification (Hague, 1655), 112. 5 David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre–Civil-War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 33. 4

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from eternity,” yet objected that, as such, it should consequently be “called eternal.” He rejected the idea that the eternal decree for what will take place in time constitutes its actual execution: “The decree of justification is one thing; justification itself another – as the will to save and sanctify is one thing; salvation and sanctification itself another. The will or decree to justify certain persons is indeed eternal and precedes faith itself, but actual justification takes place in time and follows faith.”6 This position echoes Samuel Rutherford’s (1600–1661) in Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (1648), where he maintains: “But justification in Gods decree and purpose from eternity, is no more justification than Creation, sanctification, glorification, the crucifying of Christ, and all things that fall out in time; for all these were in the eternall purpose of God.” Rutherford in this context makes an important clarification that Turretin omits. As an opponent of eternal justification, Rutherford describes as antinomian the positions that “from eternity we were justified” or “from the time that the Messiah dyed, all sins were finished, and wee justified.” As an opponent of justification from eternity, Rutherford makes a distinction between it and the connected concept of justification at the death of Christ.7 In line with Turretin and Rutherford, as seventeenth-century Reformed orthodox theologians, this study defines eternal justification as the doctrine equating the eternal decree to justify with actual justification. In line with Curt Daniel, we recognize that the controversy over eternal justification involves two main issues, “the time of justification (eternal or temporal) and its relation to faith (before or after faith).” These issues in connection with the above definition will be the preoccupation of this study. In the process, we will not regard positions showing affinity to but falling short of the above definition as eternal justification properly speaking, even though others do. For example, in spite of many past and present claims to the contrary, actual justification before faith at the death of Christ will not be regarded as eternal justification.8 As we will see, this position does not —————

6 Francis Turretin, Institutio theologiae elencticae, 3 vol. (Geneva: S. de Tournes, 1679– 1685), 2:746. Volume 2 was published in 1682. English translation from Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1994), 2:682–83. 7 Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist, 2 vol. (London, 1648), 2:19. 8 Curt Daniel, “Hyper-Calvinism and John Gill” (Ph.D. Diss. University of Edinburgh, 1983), 306. For clarification and within the context of the debate studied here, the phrase “justification from eternity” will be used synonymously with “eternal justification.” Baxter in his Aphorismes, speaking out against the doctrine, uses the phrase “from eternity” repeatedly as a primary title (e.g., 60, 112, 117, 123, 293, 318), yet also seems to equate justification as an “eternall” act, which is synonymous with justification as an act “from eternity.” This is not the same as saying that it is an eternal process. Those who held to the doctrine or something similar to it form were conscious to guard justification as one total act even if it involved progression from eternity. See also, Richard Davis, A Vindication of the Doctrine of Justification and Union before Faith (London, 1698), where the phrases are used interchangeably, yet where the title “eternal justification” is used more

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regard the eternal decree to justify as actual justification, which takes place in time only upon the satisfaction paid by Christ at his death yet prior to saving faith. For the sake of brevity and clarity, and without introducing a novel theological concept, we will at times refer to this teaching simply as “justification at satisfaction.”

10.2 The Antinomian Endorsement Discussion about justification from eternity necessitates understanding its connections to antinomianism traced back to the sixteenth century and at times given to overstatement. Prior to Martin Luther, there existed no clear teaching of justification by imputation of sin to and righteousness from Christ and received by faith alone.9 Justification in the patristic and medieval periods, while soaked in grace, was generally connected with merit and moral effort.10 Justification was viewed as a process where the individual becomes more and more righteous by way of Christ’s righteousness imparted to him and infused by grace. Luther himself only gradually developed a concept of justification by imputed righteousness. As Carl Trueman shows, it emerged in the context of union with Christ rather than the legal-forensic language later articulated by Melanchthon. After 1520 Luther increasingly prioritized justification in terms of status before and relation with God over against the medieval emphasis on intrinsic substance and moral transformation. In this manner, the believer was simul peccator et justus, sinful in the world and just before God at the same time.11 This development emerged partly from the late medieval focus on “the decisive role of the divine will in justification,” which detracted from “infused habits of grace in justification.”12 Eventually, Luther evidenced a more mature Christocentric emphasis on the divine will ————— predominantly. An example of the synonymous use in a pronounced manner occurs in John Brine’s early eighteenth-century Defence of the Doctrine of Eternal Justification (London, 1732), where in the first two sentences, he speaks of objections to the “doctrine of Eternal Justification” and his own attempts in the book to defend the “scriptural doctrine” of “Justification from Eternity.” 9 See Peter Toon, Justification and Sanctification (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1983), 45. 10 See Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2 vol. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1:17–23. 11 Carl Trueman, “Simul peccator et Justus: Martin Luther and Justification” in Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Bruce McCormack (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Books, 2006), 73–97. See p.79 for a citation from Luther’s Freedom of the Christian (1520) where imputation of sin to and righteousness from Christ emerges clearly in the transfer occurring in the union between bride and bridegroom. 12 Trueman, “Simul peccator et Justus,” 81.

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imputing an alien passive righteousness, through grace alone and by faith alone. J. Wayne Baker discusses the disagreement in seventeenth-century England over faithfulness to Luther’s sola fide, sola gratia justification. The controversy centered upon the antinomian rejection of the law’s continuing validity in the Christian life. Luther himself battled the antinomianism of Johann Agricola (1494–1566) earlier, which resulted in Luther’s Against the Antinomians (1539). Here, he maintains observance of the law does not contribute to justification, yet must be preached to stir up repentance leading to justification. Agricola believed that only the gospel must be proclaimed to elicit repentance. Luther defends the ongoing validity of the moral law, “daily preached and practiced in our churches,” and claims that believers deluded by their “sweet security” in Christ need to hear the terrors of the law. In the end, Agricola failed to understand Luther’s two-kingdom emphasis as it viewed the Christian simul justus et peccator, simultaneously righteous through Christ in the sight of God and still sinful in the temporal kingdom and so subject to the law in this life.13 With this background in mind, Rutherford in the seventeenth century resisted what he saw as an Agricola-type antinomianism in England, which he believed distorted Luther’s teaching on the law, gospel, justification and sanctification. Opposition to such thinking came from both Calvinistic and Arminian perspectives and those labeled antinomian included some high Calvinists (supralapsarians) who stressed sovereign grace and imputed righteousness to such an extent that they downplayed the role of the moral law in the Christian life.14 As Peter Toon shows, hyper-Calvinism went beyond this perspective to emphasize the eternal immanent acts of God to an even greater degree in the treatment of the covenant of grace. This stress heightened man’s passivity in salvation to the point that the free offer of the ————— 13

Martin Luther, “Against the Antinomians,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 203–207; J. Wayne Baker, “Sola Fide, Sola Gratia: The Battle for Luther Seventeenth-Century England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 16, no. 1 (1985): 115–118. 14 Baker, “The Battle for Luther,” 118–19; Rutherford, Spirituall Antichrist. While Baker provides a helpful account of the debate over Luther in the seventeenth century, he fails to understand some of the subtleties of the arguments of men such as Samuel Rutherford who may have gone too far in criticizing the perceived antinomianism of individuals such as John Eaton and Tobias Crisp yet without being guilty of an incipient moralism in his sanctification views, as Baker charges. Such a tendency is paralleled by his later claim that in England a bilateral and contractual covenant tradition traced to Bullinger and Zwingli was pitted against the unilateral and promissory tradition traced to Calvin. See J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980). For a critique of Baker’s theory as well as the unified duality of emphasis on both the absolute and conditional nature of salvation in Rutherford, see John Von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), 31–32.

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gospel was denied.15 For these two Calvinistic strains, charges of antinomianism and eternal justification abounded. Como discusses the emerging antinomian tendency by the 1620s in England that exalted the saving merits of Christ to the exclusion of human effort. Characteristics held in common in all antinomianism, especially as it flowered in seventeenth-century England, included the tendency to view the Ten Commandments as “abolished” for Christians in some sense; to reject the perceived “pharisaical” demand for piety as evidence for justification; to simultaneously stress human passivity and the power of the divine will in salvation through Christ; to claim an exalted status in believers who, in Christ, were free from the Mosaic Law; to declare that believers were effectively free from sin “in the sight of God” and to give Christians a fuller “sense of assurance and joy” based on the objective merits of Christ rather than on the subjective “hand-wringing” of self-examination.16 Such characteristics together represent the effort to exalt the grace of God in and eradicate human participation from redemption as totally as possible. Baker discusses antinomian defenders of “free grace” such as John Eaton (c.1574–1641) and John Saltmarsh (d.1647), who appealed to Luther for their distinction between the law and gospel.17 Eaton, for example, argued in his Honey-Combe of Free Justification (1642) that we receive justification by free grace without conditions, “objectively and passively” simply by feeling our lost condition and “by the power of Gods imputation” being “cloathed” with Christ’s righteousness. The justified are truly without sin in God’s sight and find assurance in Christ’s righteousness and the free benefits of salvation not in anything in them. “[T]hankful obedience” exists as the fruit from not the ground for assurance, yet justification “makes us […] to walk in all Gods Commandents zealously.” Still, contrary to Luther, Eaton as an antinomian rejected preaching the terrors of the law to believers, which only leads to “hypocriticall legall holinesse.”18 The seventeenth-century zeal in England to claim allegiance to Luther usually meant repudiating antinomianism whether from a defensive or an offensive posture. Most Protestant theologians wanted to align themselves ————— 15

Peter Toon, The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism in English Nonconformity, 1689–1765 (London: The Olive Tree, 1967), 144–45. See also Curt Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism” in The Life and Thought of John Gill (1697–1771), ed. Michael A.G. Haykin (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 171–90, for discussion of eternal justification and antinomianism within high and hyper-Calvinism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 16 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 34–37. 17 See Henry Denne, The Doctrine and Conversation of Iohn Baptist Delivered in a Sermon (London, 1642); John Eaton, The Honey-Combe of Free Justification by Christ alone (London, 1642); John Saltmarsh, Free grace, or, The Flowings of Christs Blood Free to Sinners (London, 1646). 18 Baker, “The Battle for Luther,” 121–25; Eaton, Honey-Combe of Free Justification, 7, 25– 26, 29, 115.

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with Luther not the “filthy Swine” antinomians such as Luther’s Agricola. William Eyre utilized this derogatory label while defending himself from the charge of antinomianism.19 The fact that theologians did not agree on how to recognize such “Swine” complicated the matter. Rutherford in Survey of the Sprituall Antichrist, claimed that antinomians such as John Saltmarsh, John Eaton and Tobias Crisp had distorted Luther. Rutherford argued that Luther set forth such ideas as nonmeritorious conditions (such as faith) in the covenant of grace, the sins of believers being counted as real sins, and the law remaining a rule of obedience for believers. By denying the presence of sin in the believer, the antinomians had confused justification with sanctification. In reference to the conviction that the sins of the justified are not truly sins, Rutherford calls the licentious freedom from obligation to the law, “the mother Heresie” of antinomianism.20 On the one hand, the antinomian emphasis on free grace endeavored to safeguard the sola gratia aspect of justification from the encroachment of legalism. Such remained a concern even in the mainline Puritan emphasis that good works are merely the evidence of justification. On the other hand, opponents to antinomianism sought to protect that same grace of justification from the perceived excesses that fostered licentiousness. Thomas Goodwin, for example, argues that while faith remains “the sole instrument of justification” such ought not to “cause a neglect in holiness.” A distinct yet intimate relationship existed between justification and sanctification which rises out of union to Christ: “[T]he object of faith is Christ as he is presented to us in the gospel. Now he is presented not as justification only, but as sanctification also; therefore he that takes Christ as he is given, takes Christ for both.”21 The antinomians remained concerned that an undue stress on sanctification in connection with justification dangerously allows obedience onto the ground of the believer’s hope. Jeffrey Jue calls attention to the foundational role of assurance for antinomians as they condemned not only the Roman Catholic and Arminian stress on inherent righteousness for justification but also the Reformed tendency to do the same with sanctification as the evidence of grace. As a result, self-examination became an unwelcome “barometer for justification,” as far as the antinomians were concerned. David Como and Theodore Bozeman observe a consequent “antinomian backlash” to this “precisionist” Puritan theology. The stress on practical divinity in no way meant to un—————

19 William Eyre in Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae, 21, used this title while resenting the fact that those embracing justification in foro Dei, before faith, as he did, were considered antinomian by men such as Benjamin Woodbridge (1622–84). 20 Rutherford, Spirituall Antichrist, 1.112–115; 2.19, 24–25, 225–230. 21 The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 12 vol., ed. Thomas Smith (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1861–66), 8:476, 478, 479.

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dermine the doctrine of justification by free grace, yet the heightened stress on sanctification as the proper evidence of grace became oppressive to the consciences of believers and introduced a subtle legalism reminiscent of Roman Catholicism. A renewed emphasis on free grace was meant to release Christians from this perceived bondage.22 This reaction in part helps to explain the emphasis on eternal justification in seventeenth-century England in the quest to exclude any hint of human contribution to justification. Within the controversy over one’s right standing before God due to the imputed righteousness of Christ, justification from eternity would become an issue. If one is freely justified without faith as a condition, then justification could truly occur independently of man at the time of Christ’s death or even from eternity in the mind of God. As Carl Trueman testifies, [T]he Protestant doctrine of justification by imputation was always going to be vulnerable to criticisms of tending towards eternal justification. Late medieval theologians had used the distinction between God’s absolute power and his ordained power, along with that between congruent and condign merit, to break the necessary connection between the logical priority of actual righteousness in a real sense, and God’s declaration that a particular person was justified. Thus, in placing the declaration in God’s will, not the intrinsic qualities of the one justified, it is arguable that the necessary connection not only between ontological factors and justification but also between chronological factors and justification had been decisively abolished. Given that Protestantism actually intensified this medieval emphasis, it is not surprising that some reformed theologians, […] should find themselves under suspicion of holding to eternal justification.23

With the exaltation of sovereign grace external to man and simultaneous downplay of anything inherent in him, the concept of justification before faith from eternity or at satisfaction found fertile ground in antinomianism. For example, Como calls attention to the antinomian doctrine of justification before faith by way of the disputes that John Crandon (d.1654) had with Somerset antinomians in the 1630s. Crandon in Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorized and Anthorized (1654) attests that Baxter wrongly labeled many orthodox men as antinomians and desires to show what “reall Antinomians” are. His list shows significant overlap with Como’s list above, but one item that manifests importance in relation to eternal justification concerns the proposal that the phrase, “Justification by Faith,” which attributes something to man, needs to be exchanged instead with “Justified by —————

22 Jeffrey K. Jue, “The Active Obedience of Christ and the Theology of the Westminster Standards: A Historical Investigation,” in Justified in Christ: God’s Plan for Us in Justification, ed. K. Scott Oliphint (Fearn, Scotland: Mentor Press, 2007), 110; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3–7; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 29–32. 23 Trueman, “John Owen on Justification”, 91.

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Grace, or by Christ or by being found in Christ, or by our union unto Christ, that the praise of our Justification might be reserved whole and entire to the Grace of God in Christ alone.” The function of faith was diminished to the point that its instrumental role and position as a non-meritorious condition, which was ardently defended by mainstream Puritanism, was obliterated. “Faith, on this view,” states Como, “did not really justify; rather, it recognized or apprehended a prior justification which had already been effected by Christ’s death.”24 We will see later that Crandon himself, though an antiantinomian, consciously embraced eternal justification without repudiating justification by faith. Como observes that the idea of justification before faith had already became common among antinomians by the 1620s and he notes the charges of it leveled against different individuals from 1629–31.25 Likewise, Thomas Taylor in 1631 relates his debates with London antinomians and their emphasis on union “with Christ before faith.” Como notes the connection in these antinomians with Eaton’s justification before faith at the death of Christ, the benefits of which are received at baptism. Further, Thomas Bakewell speaks of London antinomians “flying for shelter to Gods decrees” and who since 1630 had been teaching that justification occurred “actually in election.” Bakewell, in a manner that anticipates the arguments from Rutherford noted earlier, rejects this notion. God’s decrees are from eternity, but to prove that justification actually takes place from eternity, we have to say that “all the works of God were created and actually made, from all eternity.”26 Dewey Wallace maintains that Saltmarsh, along with Eaton, manifested the tendency to “push justification back into predestination” without properly teaching justification from eternity even if they did argue that justification occurred prior to faith.27 Saltmarsh taught that faith rested upon Christ for justification, which then elicited assurance through the promises of God and obedience as evidence of grace. Yet, he also maintained that justification was “antecedent” to faith. Faith and the connected grace of repentance were “fruits” of justification with faith acting as a “manifestation” of prior ————— 24

John Crandon, Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorized and Anthorized (London, 1654), 263–66; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 201. 25 High Commission Act Book, Manuscript Dd.ii.21, fols. 77v–78r, 1631 (Cambridge University Library), cited in Como, Blown by the Spirit, 202. 26 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 201–203; Robert Towne, The Assertion of Grace (1645), cited in Como, Blown by the Spirit, 201; Thomas Taylor, Regula Vitae, the rule of the law under the gospel (London, 1631), 124; Thomas Bakewell, A faithfull messenger sent after the Antinomians (London, 1644), 1. 27 Dewey D. Wallace, Jr, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 114, 118, 119–120. See also Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism,” 174, where he speaks of Crisp and Eaton as more moderate than Saltmarsh who was “more reckless and extreme.”

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justification and not related to it “instrumentally.” The imputation of righteousness that brings forth faith is transacted for the elect at the death and resurrection of Christ.28 Como testifies to the wide acceptance of justification before faith among the English antinomians. He affirms that it was very natural for them “to exclude even faith from the process of justification” as they sought to “banish any hint that that intrinsic human qualities” such as faith “might earn salvation.” However, he maintains that the doctrine of justification before faith had “grown and evolved directly out of mainstream puritanism” and “was little more than an embellishment of the utterly respectable and eminently puritan concept of justification through the alien righteousness of Christ.” Further, “the notion that the elect were justified before faith was not exclusively antinomian; it had cropped up repeatedly in the history of Puritanism and always apparently for very much the same reason – in order to eliminate any hint that faith itself might be seen as meriting or deserving salvation.”29 For example, Thomas Wilson in 1610 referred to some opponents in Kent who affirmed, “the Elect are imputed righteous and so accounted of God even from everlasting.” They also reduced faith to recognition of justification, since “Christ is mine and I have benefit of his death before faith, but I know not so much till I beleeve.”30 Likewise, Ezekial Culverwell in 1623, before Pemble’s explicit teaching of justification at satisfaction in foro divino in Vindiciae Gratiae (1627), mentioned those who, while “honestly minded” were “beguiled” into believing that someone “may be a true member of Christ, and so be justified, before he thus actually beleeue, and thereby apprehend Christ.” By apprehension Culverwell means saving faith, which may be real even if “we feele it not.” How one could be in Christ before such apprehension, muses Culverwell, “I cannot see.”31 This view of justification before faith bears some similarity to the orthodox Pemble who will be considered later. Como argues that the “honestly minded” reference is “almost certainly a coded reference to their puritanism,” though no support is given. He calls attention to other examples, yet the claim that eternal justification was mainstream Puritan could be much stronger. Still, just the early date of the citations, before any significant rumblings of antinomianism, lends support to the contention that eternal justification was not exclusively antinomian. —————

28 John Saltmarsh, Sparkles of Glory, or Some Beams of the Morning Star, 1647 (London: William Pickering, 1847), 121–23. 29 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 203. 30 T. Wilson, A Dialogue About Justification by Faith (London, 1610), 98, 102, 131, cited in Como, Blown by the Spirit, 204. 31 Ezekial Culverwell, A Treatise of Faith, 2nd ed. (London, 1623), 16–17. See Como, Blown by the Spirit, 204.

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Tobias Crisp (d.1643) emerged as one of the most prominent defenders of free justification and one of the most targeted antinomians as evidenced by his theology being labeled “Crispianism.”32 Of “the Antinomians (trulyer called Libertines),” Baxter asserted, “Dr. Crispe was the most eminent Ring-leader whose books took wonderfully with ignorant Professors under the pretence of extolling Christ and free-Grace.”33 As noted earlier, the orthodox Rutherford also accused Crisp of antinomianism, and he did not help himself with such volatile claims as, “There is not one sin you commit, after you receive Christ, that God can charge upon your person.” Still, Crisp qualifies this by noting that one “instantly justified” remains free from the condemnation of sin. Crisp also said of Christ that God “makes him as really a transgressor, as if he himself had actually committed it.” Still, for Crisp, “God reckons Christ the very sinner,” though he “is not an actual sinner” but “by imputation.” Christ is “the transgressor […] not that ever Christ was, or ever could be the actor, or committer of transgression, for he never committed any.”34 Still, Rutherford misrepresents Crisp on this issue claiming “Crispe saith,” that Christ was made sin in an “intrinsecall” manner when he was only “the sinner imputatively, not inherently, and formally.” The position Rutherford used against Crisp was the very one he held. As Daniel points out, Crisp here “is in perfect accord with mainstream Reformed theology” related to the double imputation of our sin to Christ and his righteousness to us.35 Crisp did not emphasize obedience as evidence of grace in the manner of mainstream Puritanism, but he did stress the obligation of Christian holiness as in: We must perform good works in response to redemption as “we do not the duty to be delivered, but we do the duty because we are delivered;” There exists “no believer who hath received Christ but he is created in him unto good works, that he should walk in them;” God cleanses sinners and puts a new spirit in them, “and doth cause them to walk in his statutes and testimonies;” and the Christian “must serve in duty and obedience, but look not that that duty bring any thing.” For Crisp, “sanctification of life is an inseparable companion with the justification of a person by the free grace of Christ.” Still he issues this caution to highlight the unconditional —————

32 Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism,” 172–75; See, for example, the anonymous Crispianism unmask'd, or, A discovery of the several erroneous assertions and pernicious doctrins maintain'd in Dr. Crisp's sermons occasion'd by the reprinting of those discourses (London, 1693). 33 Richard Baxter, A treatise of justifying righteousness, 2 vol. (London, 1676), 1:21. 34 Tobias Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted, 3 vol., with explanatory notes by John Gill (London, 1791), 1:7–8, 11, 16, 429–30, 437–40. 35 Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism,”184; Rutherford, Spiritual Antichrist, 2:18; From his marginal citation, Rutherford appears to be referring to the sermon, “Christ the great Paymaster of all the Debts of his people,” in Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted, 3 vol. (London, 1643), 2:90–93. All other citations to Christ Alone Exalted will come from the Gill edition.

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nature of salvation: “But I must withal tell you that all this sanctification of life is not a jot of the way of that justified person unto heaven.”36 Such statements call into question whether Crisp was properly antinomian, which becomes relevant when considering whether he embraced eternal justification as some allege. Regarding faith, he claims, “no person under heaven shall be saved till he have believed,” yet faith must not be viewed as a condition of the covenant. Christ alone justifies and an “ungodly person, after he is justified believes.” The act of justification having occurred, it then terminates in the conscience by faith at which time justification is manifested to the believer: “But he is first justified before he believes, then he believes that he is justified.” Thus, we are justified before we know it, and faith simply provides to us the knowledge or the “evidence” for our justification.37 This constitutes justification at satisfaction, which for Crisp is intimately connected to identification with Christ covenantally. We are made “partakers of the covenant,” claims Crisp, as Christ “makes us to be in covenant, for his own sake” and not due to the fulfillment of any condition. Not only does Christ bring us into the covenant, but “Christ himself can be said to be the covenant,” and such occurs three ways. First, “Christ is the covenant fundamentally” in that “[t]he covenant of grace takes its being from Christ” as the second Adam who both makes the covenant with God the Father in the counsel of redemption and undertakes to accomplish all of its conditions. Thus, as a mediator, he brings God and man together within a covenantal arrangement. Second, Christ “is materially, the covenant” as he, in his person, exists as “God unto the people” in his divine nature and “the people unto God” in his human nature. Thus, God the Father views the deity and humanity of Christ and then can embrace the members of Christ’s unified “mystical body” as “part of him,” who is head of that body. Third, Christ is “the covenant equivalently,” in the sense that the conditions of the covenant are “fulfilled to the uttermost” at his death when he redeems the elect as their surety. In this manner, Christ was “delivered over in justification” as though he were delivering money and receiving a “pawn” worth its entire value. This earnest belongs to the elect, though in time the fruits of it are yet to be worked out in them.38 This covenantal development, Trueman argues, warns against the “bald characterization” of Crisp as someone who holds to eternal justification. Instead, he manifests a detailed Christological and covenantal scheme for justification at satisfaction. The argument reflects the pains taken, as unsuccessful as they may have been, to understand how human experience in time connects to God’s relationship to it from an eternal perspective.39 ————— 36

Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted, 1:68–69, 76–77, 123 Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted, 1:143–45. 38 Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted, 1:146–52. 39 Trueman, “John Owen on Justification,” 92–93. 37

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Likewise, Curt Daniel in a similar manner discusses Crisp’s views on justification in conjunction with the quest of John Gill (1697–1771) to defend him from the charge of antinomianism. Rather than call such high Calvinists as Crisp antinomians, “it is best to refer” to them as “so-called Antinomians.”40 Isaac Chauncy (1632–1712) went a little further when he referred to men such as Crisp as antinomians “falsely so called” believing that the neonomian Daniel Williams (c.1643–1716), who took the lead from Baxter after his death (1691), misrepresented Crisp.41 In addition to some of the volatile comments made by Crisp, the opposition of Baxter to him is understandable, given his position that faith and works possess causality in justification as conditions of the New Covenant. In this scheme, faith exists as “the great principall master duty of the Gospell” (the New Law) and works as “the secondary, lesse-principall part.” Baxter thus rejected the orthodox position on good works that teaches “Faith alone justifieth, but not that faith which is alone.” He was very suspicious that this led to license in the name of free grace. For him believers are declared righteous on the basis of faith and obedience, which is called “new Covenant-Righteousness” kept under the new law of Christ. This “Evangelical Righteousness” differs from the “Legal Righteousness” proposed by Roman justification, and the former remains “the Condition upon which Christ’s Righteousness shall be ours.”42 The thinking of Baxter on justification, nicknamed “Baxterianism,” eventually became known as neonomianism.43 Daniel summarizes the system this way: “The theory was that the Gospel was a ‘new law,’ which a sinner obeyed by faith, and that this faith, together with the righteousness of Christ, was the ground for justification. But this obedience was more than merely faith in Christ; it necessarily included obedience to the law, which has not been abolished.”44 This position smacked of Arminianism and was resisted by the Reformed orthodox, which found itself battling excesses related to sovereign grace and human responsibility, on the fronts of antiantinomianism and anti-neonomianism, respectively. That justification involves ongoing gospel obedience as a condition for receiving Christ’s righteousness highlights for Baxter how loathsome justification before faith was to him. This is especially true, since he equated it ————— 40

Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism,” 185–89, 190. Isaac Chauncy, Neonomianism Unmask’d: or, The Ancient Gospel Pleaded (London, 1692), 2, 14–15; Daniel Williams, Gospel-truth stated and vindicated wherein some of Dr. Crisp’s opinions are considered, and the opposite truths are plainly stated and confirmed (London, 1692); Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism,” 177. In addition to Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism,” 171–190, see also Trueman, “John Owen on Justification,” 92–93, for a challenge to Crisp’s alleged antinomianism. 42 Baxter, Aphorismes of Justification, 72, 181–86, 191, 198. 43 See, for example, Chauncy, Neonomianism Unmask’d. 44 Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism,” 177. 41

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with eternal justification, a distinctly antinomian doctrine as far as Baxter was concerned. No individual attacked the doctrine more forcefully and accused more individuals of embracing it. This brings clarity to his insistence that “this doctrine of Christs immediate Actuall delivering us from guilt, wrath and condemnation, is the very pillar and foundation of the whole frame and fabrick of Antinomianisme.”45 The nonconformist John Bunyan (1628–1688) also emerges as an example of one with leanings towards antinomianism and eternal justification yet without firm roots in either position. Still, the latitudinarian Edward Fowler (1632–1714) accused Bunyan of “filthy libertinism and mad licentious principles,” while Baxter claimed that Bunyan “ignorantly subverted the gospel of Christ,” as an “unlearned Antinomian-Anabaptist,” even if he was “an honest, Godly man.”46 Regarding his inclinations toward eternal justification, Bunyan manifests in his writings a departure from the earlier view that faith was a necessary yet non-meritorious instrument of justification. He eventually claimed in his Discourse upon the Pharisee and the Publican (1677) that justification precedes faith and comes while one is yet “graceless.” Notes Bunyan, “Justification before God is one thing; and Justification to the Understanding and Conscience is another. Now I am treating of Justification before God, not of it as to mans Understanding and Conscience: And I say, a man may be justified before God, even then when himself knoweth nothing thereof, […] and so when, and while he hath not Faith about it, but is ungodly.” This is continuous with but not necessarily equivalent to eternal justification proper, due to what appears to be Bunyan’s emphasis on justification at the death of Christ. Bunyan seems to imply that justification in the conscience is assurance of justification, yet claims men “gather” it in time. He comes close to suggesting that actual justification or the “applying of that righteousness to the Understanding and Conscience” occurs personally only when faith is expressed: “Here you see, that to be reconciled to God by the death of his Son, is one thing; and for us actually […] to receive by Faith, this reconciliation, is another.” Bunyan does little to solidify this possible position by stating, “He then that is justified by Gods Imputation, shall believe by the power of the Holy Ghost […] because imputed righteousness has gone before.” Thus, “believing is a sign, not a cause, of his being made righteous before God by his imputation.”47 ————— 45

Baxter, Aphorismes of Justification, 319. Edward Fowler, Dirt wipt off, or, A manifest discovery of the gross ignorance, erroneousness and most unchristian and wicked spirit of one John Bunyan (London, 1672), 71; Richard Baxter, The Scripture Gospel Defended, in 2 vol. (London, 1690), 1:A2, 2:49. 47 John Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94), 10:194–95. Compare, for example, the earlier view in A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification (1672) in Miscellaneous Works, 4:18–19, 38–39, 84–91; with the later view in A Discourse upon the Pharisee and the Publican (1685), 10:176–77, 194–96; and 46

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In the end, even with the lack of clarity in his position and in a less refined manner, Bunyan’s position shows similarity to Crisp’s and may manifest awareness and even dependence upon it. Bunyan’s relationship to fellow nonconformist George Cokayne makes such a connection likely as the latter wrote an epistle dedication for the complete works of Crisp (1690), calling them “a full vindication of the truth of Christ.” Further, while denying that the works were antinomian, Cokayne boldly declares, “if the world shall baptize this Doctrine Antinomianism, the Lord grant that all the Doctrine preached throughout the world, may be deservedly called by that name.”48

10.3 The Westminster Resistance The deliberation at the Westminster Assembly in the seventeenth century over the doctrine of justification sheds light on not only the English Reformed consensus concerning justification but also the opinions on justification from eternity. The Westminster Confession especially indicates a bias against justification from eternity and anything that resembles it. The Anglican Church up to the Civil War in the 1640s upheld forensic justification by the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ as evidenced in the Eleventh Article of the Thirty-Nine Articles.49 Eventually, the Puritan heirs of the Reformers clarified this doctrine and defended it against the perceived threats of Romanism, Arminianism, antinomianism, and neonomianism. By the time of the Westminster Assembly, the first three of these were treated extensively in debate and in the resultant creed. ————— The Desire of the Righteous Granted (composed 1685), 13:110–11. Richard Greaves first called attention to the shift in John Bunyan (Berkshire, UK: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1969), 81. See also Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 532–33. Pieter de Vries defends Bunyan from eternal justification but glosses over the important statements related to justification before faith, John Bunyan on the Order of Salvation, trans. C. van Haaften (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1994), 151–53. Anjov Ahenakaa notices the distinction between justification before God and the conscience in Bunyan, but does not interact with the view that faith is a fruit of justification by imputed righteousness, which was a mark of the antinomian system from which he sought to insulate Bunyan. “Justification and the Christian Life in John Bunyan: A Vindication of Bunyan from the Charge of Antinomianism” (Ph.D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 1997), 20, 116–120, 134. 48 George Cokayne, “To all that Live Godly in Christ Jesus,” epistle dedicatory to Tobias Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted: Being the compleat works of Tobias Crisp, 3 vol. (London, 1690), 1:Aaaa2. For reference to this epistle and Bunyan’s relationship with Cokayne, see Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, 92, 126, 150, 158, 532, 595–96, 607, 619, 621. See also George Cokayne, “A Continuation of Mr. Bunyan’s Life,” in John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 171. 49 Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (1877; Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1977), 494.

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First, in early seventeenth-century England and during the Civil War, the threat of Roman Catholicism remained real and the Assembly issued strong statements against any possible role of inherent righteousness in justification. The perceived dangers of encroaching Popery had already surfaced in the previous Laudian policies of Charles I. As Anthony Milton has shown, the religious background to the Civil War consisted of more than a Calvinist-Arminian divide. The Laudian establishment showed growing adversity to continental Reformed theology and increased affinity to Rome, which catalyzed a heightened Reformed response. Second, the growing presence of Arminianism threatened to usurp the role of Christ with the human will as the ultimate ground of justification. Further, faith was viewed in part as a sincere act of the semi-depraved will graciously accounted as the believer’s personal and whole righteousness. Within the 1650s and eventual Restoration of 1660 and beyond, this threat manifested itself in the Arminian resurgence among the Caroline Anglicans, Cambridge Platonists, and latitudinarians. Third, antinomianism displayed the tendency to couple the free grace of justification with freedom from obligation to the moral law, connected with the conviction that God sees no sin in the justified.50 Baxter as a military chaplain complained about the antinomian outburst in the Parliamentary Army during the Civil War. Of personal concern were the teachings of high Calvinist and fellow parliamentary chaplain, Saltmarsh.51 As Robert Paul testifies, it is no surprise that antinomianism created a stir at the Westminster Assembly as evidenced in the petition against antinomianism (August 10, 1643) and the Parliamentary order to investigate it (September 12, 1643).52 So great was the perceived threat of antinomianism at the Assembly, Chad Van Dixhoorn maintains that in the discussion over revising just the heading of the Eleventh Article on justification, the burden was not for “a little more antipopery, but a little more antiantinomianism.”53 —————

50 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2–3, 529–546; For a discussion on the threats of Popery, Arminianism and antinomianism at the Assembly, see Jeffrey K. Jue, “The Active Obedience of Christ and the Theology of the Westminster Standards: A Historical Investigation,” in Justified in Christ: God’s Plan for Us in Justification, ed. K. Scott Oliphint (Fearn, Scotland: Mentor Press, 2007), 103–114. 51 For discussion on Baxter’s experiences with antinomians in general and John Saltmarsh in particular in the Civil War, see Hans Boersma, A Hot Pepper Corn: Richard Baxter’s Doctrine of Justification in Its Seventeenth-Century Context of Controversy (Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing, 2004), 31–32, 69; and Trueman, “John Owen on Justification,” 90–91. Baxter has in mind the views of Saltmarsh expressed in Free Grace. 52 Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985), 176ff. 53 Chad B. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly 1643–1652,” 7 vol. (Ph.D. diss. University of Cambridge, 2004), 1:276. See Van

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As a result, members of the Assembly such as Thomas Hodges objected to a heading reflecting justification “in the sight of God,” because the phrase had become a badge of honor for the antinomians. As Hodges noted, some antinomians believed that “God sees no sin in his children” and they would take the title as an endorsement for their position. Along with the other titles suggested (“before God,” or “Before Gods tribunall”), Lazarus Seaman believed they all failed to signify whether it referred to “actuall” or “intentionall” justification.54 In the Assembly minutes, no elaboration emerges upon this distinction, but John Flavel’s appendix on antinomianism in Planelogia speaks of God’s eternal “intention to justify” as his decree or purpose to justify, which is inseparable to but distinct from the actual justification that results from it. Further, he speaks of “the Intention of Christ, who died intentionally for the Sins of the Elect, and rose again for their Justification.”55 In this manner, the eternal purpose of God to justify guarantees both the accomplishment of justification and the application of it to the believer. Yet, the eternal intention to apply justification must not be confused with the actual execution of that application, which takes place within the confines of history and upon the exercise of faith. This distinction was blurred by those who held to the idea that justification could occur prior to faith. As the discussion on the Eleventh Article moved beyond the title to the contents of the article, Seaman again reveals the concern about what is “meant by actuall Justification.” The proposed revision, he maintains, “seemes to hold out that the use of faith is only to apprehend that which is already done, which doth entirely jumpe with the opinion of the Antinomians that a man is Justifyed before he repents & believes.” He desired to avoid the view that actual justification takes place in the sight of God prior to faith. Clearly, men such as Seaman alleged that anyone embracing justification prior to faith was guilty of antinomianism.56 Van Dixhoorn argues that for both justification from eternity and at satisfaction, the reduction of faith to “a recognition of earlier justification” was “a distinctly antinomian concept” at this time. He also calls attention to the antinomian opposition to the Arminian understanding of saving faith, a hostility which paralleled the Reformed orthodox concern that such fostered “a form of legalism or nomism.” Yet, antinomians so zealously sought to ————— Dixhoorn’s detailed discussion over the revision of the Eleventh Article in this volume, 1:270– 344. 54 Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 3:12–13. The deliberation here comes from the minutes of the Assembly compiled by Van Dixhoorn, with Volumes 3–7 of his thesis providing a full transcript of the extant Assembly minutes. 55 John Flavel, Planelogia (London, 1691), 334–35. The second part of the appendix is entitled, “[A] synopsis of ancient and modern Antinomian errors, with scriptural arguments and reasons against them.” 56 Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 3:13–15.

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guard the free grace of God in salvation that they denied faith any involvement at all in the actual justification of sinners. Thus, as John Lightfoot observes in his journal entries from the Westminster Assembly, they maintained a “justification without faith” with faith being only a “manifestation” of justification.57 Van Dixhoorn observes that some “labeled as antinomian by the Assembly” may have embraced only a “soteriological” antinomianism without any “anti-legal” elements in their theology. The Assembly’s original petition that the moral law was being denigrated “in different degrees” implicated the high Calvinists whose antinomian tendencies were less radical and departed more from orthodoxy than orthopraxy. This soteriological strain operated in a strongly anti-Arminian manner to protect the free grace of justification. For Van Dixhoorn, justification before faith appears to be the defining characteristic of what he calls “soteriological antinomianism.” While the perspective contained no inherent anti-legal component, it remained difficult to avoid the charge, since the radically unconditional justification before faith readily fostered an anti-legal mindset. In the end, he claims that soteriological and legal antinomianism “were psychologically inseparable.”58 Curt Daniel maintains a similar recognition in calling hyper-Calvinists and some high Calvinists “Doctrinal Antinomians” over against the “Practical” version emphasizing freedom from the moral law. For the opponents of the doctrinal strain, the “basic charge,” observes Daniel, “was that this theological movement (Doctrinal Antinomianism) was unbiblical and produced licentiousness (Practical Antinomianism). Though much of the debate was about justification, its root issue was the Law.”59 This raises the question of how helpful the distinction soteriological or doctrinal antinomianism was and can be, since its association to its legal or practical counterpart seems impossible to avoid. At the Assembly, the revision of the Eleventh Article was eventually abandoned due to the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) with the Scots and a call for an entirely new confession.60 The eventual expression of justification in the Confession of Faith reflects arduous consideration and debate on the doctrine of justification. The Confession manifests the foundational role of covenantal and Christological theology for the Puritans as evidenced in chapter seven, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” which sets forth the ————— 57

Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 1:277, 280. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 1:280–82. 59 Daniel, “Hyper-Calvinism and John Gill,” 305, 631, 645; Curt Daniel, “John Gill and Calvinistic Antinomianism,” in The Life and Thought of John Gill (1697–1771), ed. Michael A.G. Haykin (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 171, 175, 176. 60 Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. I, The History of Creeds, 6th ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977), 754–755. 58

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federal theology of the Puritans and provides coherence for the entire confession.61 With this framework in mind, chapter eleven, “Of Justification,” lies within the area focusing upon divine activity in salvation: effectual calling, justification, adoption, and sanctification. This portion is followed by one that focuses upon human activity or response in salvation: saving faith, good works, and perseverance. In this way, the covenantal relationship between God as Creator and man as creature ultimately secured in Christ forms the basis for the restoration of fallen man in salvation. In this scheme, justification abides as a display of God’s gracious and condescending entrance into a covenantal relationship with man through Christ as federal head. Chapter eleven, “Of Justification,” contains six sections, with the first two showing that justification occurs by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Section three emphasizes the imputed righteousness of Christ, which is nevertheless “proper, real, and full,” for those who receive it. Though forensic justification occurs freely by grace and “not for anything in” its recipients, it is by no means a legal fiction as the Romanists often alleged. Section five stresses that God continues “to forgive the sins” of the justified who cannot lose their salvation but can still displease God. On the one hand, continual forgiveness negates the need for the Romanist sacramental scheme of satisfaction for post-baptismal sins. On the other hand, God’s displeasure with the justified refutes the antinomian notion that God does not remain concerned with the sins of his children. Section six argues for the continuity of justification and unity of God’s people from Old to New Testaments under the overarching covenant of grace.62 Section four remains of greatest concern to eternal justification: God did, from all eternity, decree to justifie all the elect, and Christ did, in the fullnesse of time, die for their sins, and rise again for their justification: nevertheless, they are not justified, untill the holy Spirit doth in due time, actually apply Christ unto them.63

The earlier discussion over “intentionall” and “actual” justification informs us here as this section clearly links the decree or intention to justify “from all eternity” to actual justification in due time. This language manifests the goal to keep the eternal will to justify and actual justification as inseparable yet distinct as possible. Further, the section denies the possibility of justification at the death of Christ. —————

61 See Benjamin B. Warfield, The Westminster Assembly and Its Work (Edmonton, Canada: Still Waters Revival Books, 1991), 60, where he notes that the “schematization of the Federal theology” in the Westminster Confession (1646) exists as the “architectionic principle” or governing principle of the Confession. 62 The Westminster Confession of Faith (Edinburgh, 1649). 63 The Westminster Confession of Faith.

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Chapter eleven does not manifest the language of the revised Eleventh Article, which includes the idea that the “whole obedience” of Christ is “imputed to us.” This statement came after intense debate over whether passive obedience only was imputed or both active and passive.64 The Confession remains somewhat non-committal to both positions. Vagueness on this matter highlights the pronounced rejection of justification before faith whether from eternity or at the death of Christ. The position of William Twisse (c.1578–1646), the prolocutor of the Assembly who embraced eternal justification, was thus clearly rejected. The majority of the Westminster divines believed that justification must occur properly with the application of Christ by the Holy Spirit “in due time.”65 The overwhelming concern for antinomianism at the Assembly remains clear. Yet, the semi-Pelagian justification schemes of Arminianism and Rome were still perceived dangers. Further, the majority position does not indicate that antinomianism remained the greatest fear for all commissioners at the Assembly. Further, it is not the case that justification from eternity or at satisfaction were viewed unanimously as distinctly antinomian doctrines. Twisse, for example, was not regarded as an antinomian by mainstream Puritanism and yet he embraced eternal justification and apparently held Tobias Crisp in high esteem. Samuel Crisp shares the testimony concerning “the eminently famous Doctor Twiss” that “he had read Dr. Crisp’s Sermons, and could give no reason why they were opposed, but because so many were converted by his preaching, and so few by ours (saith he.)” J.I. Packer suggests that Twisse may have influenced Crisp concerning justification before faith.66 Additionally, the position of Thomas Goodwin, an Independent present at the Assembly, must be considered here. In a manner consistent with the Confession, Goodwin placed considerable covenantal and Christological stress on his doctrine of justification. Yet, there exist indications that he would have preferred an adjustment to the Confession’s statement on eternal justification. Trueman attributes to him the position of eternal justification as a Reformed orthodox theologian who was at the same time a strong ————— 64 The vote after debate on the Eleventh Article on September 12, 1643 revealed overwhelming support for including active obedience as part of justification by the “whole” obedience of Christ. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 3:77, 1:321. The absence of the term “whole” in chapter eleven of the Confession, not written until 1645, remains somewhat of an enigma with such support. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 3:27. See also Jue, “The Active Obedience of Christ,” 121–28. For the statement of the revised article, see S.W. Carruthers, The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian Historical Society, 1943), 109. 65 See Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation,” 1:277–78; and Jue, “The Active Obedience of Christ,” 115. 66 Samuel Crisp, Christ Made Sin (London, 1691), preface; J.I. Packer, The Redemption & Restoration of Man in the Thought of Richard Baxter (Vancouver, Regent College Publishing, 2003), 250

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anti-antinomian.67 We saw evidence of his anti-antinomianism earlier and need to consider his convictions related to eternal justification here. Goodwin held to a sophisticated tria-momenta view of justification in which he calls attention to “three stages of motion” in justification not “three parts,” for it is “an individual act.” The first stage occurred “at the first covenant-making and striking of the bargain from all eternity,” the covenant of redemption between God the Father and God the Son. “Justified then we were,” argues Goodwin, “when first elected, though not in our own persons, yet in our Head, as he had our persons then given him.” The second stage concerns “the payment and performance by Christ at his resurrection.” Christ at his satisfaction acted as our representative, so that “we were justified in him” and “God justified us all, when he died and rose again.” These are both immanent acts “wholly out of us” and “not acts of God upon us.” The elect are justified in “in foro Dei, in God’s court” or “Coram Deo, in the sight of God” according to his “secret will transacted in Christ” while yet unjustified according to his “revealed will.” The third stage concerns the application of justification by the Spirit to those still considered the children of wrath when, by faith, a transaction occurs to properly and personally bring us into “an estate of justification.” Against what he sees as an antinomian view of justification “in foro conscientiae,” when the conscience attains an awareness of the justification already possessed, Goodwin believes it involves an actual change of status and claim personally. Here he distances himself from the tendency to reduce faith to assurance of justification. In this manner, faith exists as a condition for the actual transaction of justification to occur personally. Thus, in one sense the elect are justified in Christ as their representative head in the pactum salutis and at his death and resurrection. At the same time they are not justified personally until they receive justification by faith.68 Goodwin’s three stages of justification were intimately connected to his views on union with Christ, which Mark Jones believes is the key for understanding Goodwin’s view that we are justified in a sense from eternity as an immanent act of God but not truly until faith receives justification as a transient act in time. Goodwin argues, “all acts of God’s justifying us depend upon Union with Christ,” which also occurs in three stages from being “one in Christ before God” by virtue of his eternal covenant, his death and resurrection, and finally through the “actual implanting and engrafting us ————— 67 Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998), 28. 68 Thomas Goodwin, The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 12 vol. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 8:134–39. I am grateful to Mark Jones for calling my attention to Goodwin’s views on eternal justification and some key passages dealing with them. This section has gleaned much from his research. See Mark Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth: The Christology of the Purtian Reformed Orthodox theologian, Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 230–38.

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into Christ” that we partake of the benefits of salvation.69 Here Goodwin’s strong Christocentric and covenantal views of justification become clear. Goodwin stands out as a high Calvinist who possessed some inclinations toward eternal justification yet without embracing eternal justification proper. Further, Goodwin, in opposition to antinomianism and without surrendering ground to Arminianism, views faith as one of the “conditions of the covenant” of grace as such were “necessary means of being made partakers of Christ, and Salvation.”70 In his commentary on Ephesians, the tension heightens. Here he discusses the distinction between being “in Christ” and “with Christ.” Before faith, Goodwin maintains that the elect are “justified in Christ” but “not with Christ; that is, it is not actually applied to the man’s person.” Such a distinction Goodwin believes would “clear the great controversy that is now between the Antinomians, as they call them, […] whether a man be justified before conversion or no?” He concludes the elaboration on this distinction with his own striking and enigmatic solution to the above question: “I say, we are justified in Christ from all eternity, and we are justified with Christ when we believe.”71 Goodwin’s contribution to the Savoy Declaration (1658), the confessional statement of the Congregational churches, should also be considered. The Declaration largely followed the Westminster Confession of Faith with some changes primarily concerning Congregational polity. Still, regarding its statement on eternal justification in chapter eleven, “Of Justification,” the Declaration inserts the word “personally,” which reflects the position of Goodwin: God did from all eternity decree to justify all the elect, and Christ did in the fulness of time die for their sins, and rise again for their justification: nevertheless, they are not justified personally, until the Holy Spirit doth in due time actually apply Christ unto them.72

Given the distinction noted above between justification in Christ and with Christ, related to personal justification, the influence of Goodwin on the Declaration is undeniable. “By adding ‘personally’” here, argues Jones, “the Congregationalists, no doubt influenced by Goodwin, still reject a form of eternal justification, but leave open the possibility that the elect are, in some sense, justified not in themselves, but in their Head before their existential coming to faith.”73 In the end, the insertion seems to attach Goodwin ————— 69

Goodwin, Works, 8:406; Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth, 238. Goodwin, Works, 9:72. 71 Goodwin, Works, 2:246–47. 72 A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practiced in the Congregational Churches in England (London, 1659), 9. This Declaration was the publication in 1659 of the 1658 statement agreed upon as the “Savoy Declaration.” 73 Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth, 234. 70

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firmly to the Westminster Confession while simultaneously alienating him from it. Tensions are evident in a system that states, “I say, we are justified in Christ from all eternity, and we are justified with Christ when we believe.” On this basis, it remains understandable that some see Goodwin embracing eternal justification. Still, his opposition to the position, his views on saving faith, and his refined tria-momenta scheme release him from the charge at least in how we have defined eternal justification in this study. Distinct from this definition, Jones maintains that Goodwin held to a “nuanced” doctrine of eternal justification based on the scheme developed above.74 Help in resolving the tension comes from Goodwin’s perspective on the secret and revealed will of God. This reflects the Reformed orthodox distinction, as observed by Richard Muller, between “the ultimate divine good pleasure” (voluntas beneplaciti) and “the outwardly designated divine will” (voluntas signi) or similarly between the “hidden will” (voluntas arcanum) and “revealed will” (voluntas revelatum). The distinctions did not allow “contrary wills in God, but only the fact that the entirety of God’s will is never revealed to finite creatures.” Among the Reformed, there existed a distinction without contradiction between an absolute and conditioned will of God, as aspects of one divine will, so long as the former was antecedent making the latter immutable as it was “willed eternally by God.” In this manner, a condition such as faith can never be outside of God and so independent of him.75 From the Reformed perspective, such an understanding acted as a corrective for both the Arminian understanding of conditions and the antinomian repudiation of them altogether. In this manner, Goodwin could without necessary contradiction speak of both the absolute and conditional nature of justification in foro Dei and in foro conscientiae, respectively. Goodwin does not equate the decree to justify with actual justification meaning “that a Man is justified from all Eternity” the way he sees “Antinomianism” maintaining. “A man, before he believeth,” argues Goodwin, “is unjustified, therefore he is said to be justified by faith.”76 In summary, ————— 74

Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth, 235, 237; Jones, 235, claims that Peter Bulkeley (1583– 1659) in The Gospel-Covenant or the Covenant of Grace Opened (London, 1646), 321–22, may be presenting a similar position as Goodwin with his three-fold understanding of justification as “purposed” eternally, “obtained” by Christ, and “applied” for actual justification in the sight of God. However, he may be simply reflecting a Reformed orthodox understanding of justification related to decree, satisfaction and application as reflected in the Westminster Confession’s treatment of eternal justification (10:4). 75 Richard A. Muller, “Grace, Election, and Contingent Choice: Arminius’s Gambit and the Reformed Response,” The Grace of God, the Bondage of the Will, vol. 2 in Historical and Theological Perspectives on Calvinism, ed. Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce A. Ware (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), 273–78. 76 Goodwin, Works, 4:277.

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we can conclude that Goodwin did not embrace eternal justification proper, even if he did admit, “Justified then we were, when first elected.” Such justification, though continuous with it, did not constitute actual justification in and of itself.

10.4 The Anti-Arminian Foundations Richard Baxter testifies to being drawn to the opinions of William Pemble (c.1592–1623) and William Twisse concerning justification from eternity, the antinomianism of which he “narrowly escaped.” Further, he expresses grief that so many endeavor “to fight against Jesuites and Arminians with the Antinomian weapons.”77 Boersma notes that Pemble and Twisse impacted many with the concept of justification before faith, including several high Calvinists, such as George Kendall, John Owen, Lewis Du Moulin, William Eyre, and John Crandon. This position included the distinction between justification in the divine forum (in foro divino) and awareness of justification in the forum of man’s conscience (in foro conscientiae).78 Pemble’s most influential works were Vindiciae fidei (1625) and Vindiciae gratiae (1627), both published posthumously. In the latter work, he proposes his double justification, in foro divino from eternity “before all our sanctification,” and in foro conscientiae in time after the elect individually receive “the grace of sanctification.”79 Justification in foro divino for Pemble means that “even whilst the elect are unconverted, they are then actually justified & freed from all sin by the Death of Christ.” God “from eternity […] did actually love the elect before Christs time,” though the “actuall reconciliation was not yet made” until Christ’s death. Thus, benefits of salvation flow from Christ as the “fruits […] of Gods actuall love.”80 Justification in foro conscientiae occurs “in our ————— 77

Baxter, Aphorismes of Justification, 318–19. Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 66–69. 79 William Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae: A Plea for Grace (London, 1627; 2d ed., 1629), 21–22. See Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 71–72. Boersma sees development in the thought of Pemble from the time he wrote Vindiciae Fidei (1625), where he speaks of faith as a condition of the covenant of grace laying hold of Christ who promises “remission of sinnes to such as repent and believe.” Pemble has something more than justification in foro conscientiae in mind here as he calls it “the gracious act of Almighty God whereby he absolutes a beleiving sinner accused at the Tribunall of his Justice, pronouncing him just and acquitting him of all punishment for Christs sake.” In this manner, he refers to justification by faith as in foro divino, since it leads to the appeasement of “the infinite indignation of an angry Judge,” which transcends awareness in foro conscientiae of justification already accomplished in foro divino (Hot Pepper Corn, 78–79). See Pemble, Vindiciae Fidei (London, 1625), 17–18, 21, 22–24, 61, 153. 80 Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 16–17, 22. 78

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owne sense” and is a “declaration of God’s former secret act of accepting Christ’s righteousness to ours.” 81 Baxter charges “Mr. Pemble” with the “error and pillar of Antinomianism,” justification from eternity, with the accusation that his position is justification as an immanent act in God’s sight.82 Baxter’s Confession of his Faith (1655), equates an immanent act with an actual one not simply in the tribunal of God. Baxter summarizes eternal justification this way: “Pardon of sin, Reconciliation, and Justification are Immanent Acts in God, and from Eternity: So that even before men believe, yea before they were born, yea before ever Christ dyed for them, the Elect were Actually Justified, pardoned, and Reconciled to God; though not manifested such, nor Justified in conscience or feeling.” He sets this perceived error against his own convictions in a parallel column: “God did of his own good pleasure Decree from Eternity, […] to give to certain Individual determinate persons, saving faith in Christ, and thereupon pardon, and Justification […] But this Decree is no Actual Justification or pardon, nor gives them the said Right; but supposeth it not yet given; else God could not Decree hereafter to give it: Justification is not therefore an Immanent act, nor is any Eternal act called Justification in Scripture, nor any Infidel or impenitent sinner, said to be justified.”83 By implication, Baxter condemns Pemble’s justification at satisfaction and identifies it with actual justification from eternity as an immanent act in foro divino. Later, in his Reduction of a Digressor (1654), Baxter clarifies his accusation of Pemble in light of his justification at satisfaction view: “Justification in foro Dei […] on Christ’s dying” is “as if he maintained it to be from eternity.”84 For Baxter, the distinction between justification from eternity or at satisfaction is not real and, once held, will not allow someone to deny that the decree to justify must be equated with actual justification. Baxter expressed similar concerns about John Owen, which we will consider later. Pemble does make “an extremely tight connection between election and reconciliation,” argues Boersma.85 For Pemble, the eternal love of God is bound up within his absolute immutable will out of which arises actual reconciliation at Christ’s death. Thus, “before conversion, much more before actuall faith, God actually loves the elect, and out of that his great love, bestowes upon them the grace of conversion” as the starting point “in time” of the “manifestation of this love to our hearts and consciences.”86 ————— 81

Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 22. Baxter, Aphorismes, 112, 123. See Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 73. 83 Richard Baxter, Rich: Baxter’s Confesssion [sic] of his Faith (London, 1655), 151–52. 84 Richard Baxter, Reduction of a Digressor (London, 1654), 6. 85 Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 72–73. 86 Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 18. See Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 72–73. 82

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Faith for Pemble is not simply awareness of justification in the conscience, since he argues for a progression in which a unified faith, an “infused grace” or “sacred Habite” arising out of prior sanctification, first makes “Legal” assent to the revealed moral will of God then embraces it with an “Evangelicall” assent to the promise of forgiveness and life in Christ revealed in the gospel. This faith or fiducia expresses itself more than intellectually as it first “casteth and reposeth itselfe onely upon Gods Promise in Christ for the obtaining of eternall happinesse.” Still, he assigns peace of conscience or the “full perswasion of the pardon of our sins” to a second aspect of fiducia, which is “the proper act of justifying faith” in foro conscientiae and emerges as a fruit to the first aspect.87 While this first aspect of fiducia sounds something like faith as an instrument resting upon Christ for the transaction of justification, Pemble’s insistence that justification occurs prior to faith negates this possibility. Still, faith necessarily occurs in the justified even “as all other Moral dueties are required of us in their degrees, as parts of our outward obedience and inward sanctity necessary to salvation.” Faith is thus “commanded” and is a “principall grace” and rightly called “Saving,” since it is, “as all other Graces are, […] required in their measure as needful to Salvation.”88 Founded upon God’s eternal and electing love, justification as an act occurs at the death of Christ which issues forth in faith and other benefits as necessary graces in the process of salvation. Faith may not be essential for justification in Pemble’s view, but it remains necessary for salvation. These convictions held in conjunction with justification before faith hardly qualify Pemble as an antinomian. For Pemble, faith as an instrument to make us partakers of the benefits of Christ is neither “absolutely necessary” nor “anteceding” for “participation in those benefites.” His conviction on justification before faith allows for the idea that elect infants dying in infancy “enjoy all the benefits of Christs merit in their Justification, Sanctification and Glorification, without this instrumentall means of their actuall faith.”89 While the Westminster Confession of Faith clearly rejects justification from eternity, it does affirm in chapter ten, section three, “Of Effectual Calling,” that some may be saved without faith: “Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated, and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, and where, and how He pleaseth: So also, are all other elect persons who are uncapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word.”90 It appears that the section teaches that elect infants and others can be justified without faith. Do these individuals possess the habit of the ————— 87

Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 244–45, 258–61. See Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 78. Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 244–45. See Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 77–78. 89 Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 22–23. 90 The Confession of Faith. 88

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grace of faith through regeneration? Possibly, but they still may be justified without the active expression of faith. If some of the elect can be justified without actually believing on Christ, why not all the elect and why not from eternity? In this manner, the Confession is not entirely free from the dilemma of how anyone could participate in the benefits of Christ without faith. Pemble, an ardent opponent against Arminianism, sees his position on justification as distinctively anti-Arminian: Our justification in God’s sight; which even long before we were borne is purchase for us by Christ. For tis vaine to think with the Arminians, that Christs merits have made God only Placebilim, not Placatum, procured a freedome that God may be reconciled if hee will, and other things concurre, but not an actuall reconciliation. A silly shift, devised to uphold the libertie of mans will, and universality of Grace. No, tis otherwise, the Ransome is paid and accepted, full Satisfaction to the Divine justice is given and taken, all the sinnes of the Elect are actually pardoned, Gods wrath for them is suffered and overcome, he rests contented and appeased, the debt book is crossed, and the hand-writing cancelled. This grand transaction between God and the mediator Christ Jesus, was concluded upon and dispatcht in heaven long before we had any being, either in Nature or Grace: Yet the benefit of it was ours, though we never knew so much till after that by faith wee did apprehend it.91

Pemble here repudiates the hypothetical universalism of Arminianism that the sacrifice of Christ makes redemption possible for all but definite for none until faith is expressed. Instead, he argues that those “actually justified & freed from all sin by the Death of Christ” before faith in foro divino are “actually reconciled” to God in an unconverted state and will then have the Spirit come into their hearts to convert them. Faith is the necessary fruit of justification declared for the elect at the death of Christ.92 Pemble’s primary focus is to defend God’s unconditional and eternal love against any contingency that might be placed on it by the will of man. Further, he seeks to safeguard the efficacy of the atonement of Christ. This being the case, we see that the earliest expressions of justification before faith did not have distinctive ties to antinomianism but to anti-Arminianism. For Pemble, in spite of God’s eternal love to the elect as “persons,” God remains “angry” with them as to their “qualities and actions” making them liable to his punishment. They do not “feele” his love until they are converted unto him. The differentiation here between what God expresses in secret and what man becomes conscious of stands or falls with the distinction between justification in foro divino and in foro conscientiae. As actual reconciliation comes only at the death of Christ, the cross of Christ still “occupies a central place in Pemble’s soteriology,” notes Boersma. Yet, the ————— 91 92

Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 23. Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 23.

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dilemma raised by an opponent such as Baxter remains. If God loved unconverted sinners from eternity and such love remains inseparable from reconciliation, does this not make the sacrifice of Christ superfluous for justification? Pemble would not surrender any ground to maintaining the inseparability of eternal love with justification while highlighting the centrality of sacrifice within time for declaration of that justification. In the end, “tension” remains in his doctrine of justification.93 Like Pemble, the high Calvinist William Twisse also set forth his doctrine of justification from an anti-Arminian position. As prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, his position on eternal justification was a minority report and rejected in the resultant Confession of Faith. Important for understanding Twisse is the distinction he made between the decreed and revealed will of God in his Discovery of D. Iacksons vanitie (1631), which was written against the Oxford Armininian Thomas Jackson (1579–1640). Here, he builds upon the scholastic distinction between voluntas beneplaciti, the will of God according to his good pleasure, and voluntas signi, the will of God according to his sign or precept. In this context, he denies the Arminian allegation that Calvinism teaches that God “willeth the salvation of any but his elect.” Twisse argued that the will of God is one, but that only voluntas beneplaciti can be called the will of God “properly so,” since voluntas signi “sheweth what is our duty” while in voluntas beneplaciti “he determineth what shall be done or not done, what shall come to passe, or not come to passe in the world.” As it relates to redemption, “from voluntas beneplaciti, whereby God doth will the salvation of one man, it followeth, such a one shall be saved; yet upon voluntas signi, whereby God doth will their salvation, it shall not follow that such shall be saved.”94 In other words, it is no contradiction that God wills the salvation of all men according to voluntas signi but only the elect according to voluntas beneplaciti. Or to put it differently, Twisse asserts that God can will (according to voluntas signi) and not will (according to voluntas beneplaciti) the salvation of one man at the same time without contradiction. From this distinction, Twisse in Vindiciae Gratiae (1632) maintains that faith is a condition of justification as it relates to voluntas signi. Yet, he simultaneously states that “even before faith” (etiam ante fidem) Christ’s righteousness is “applied” in justification on the basis of “an act of the divine immanent will, […] from eternity” (actum Divinae voluntatis imma————— 93

Pemble, Vindiciae Gratiae, 17–21; Baxter, Confession, 236; Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn,

73–75.

94 See Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2003), 331, 334; William Twisse, Discovery of D. Iacksons Vanitie, Or A perspective glasse, wherby the admirers of D. Iacksons profound discourses, may see the vanitie and weaknesse of them (London, 1631), 536–37, 546.

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nentem […] ab aeterno). Twisse also states, “before faith, this righteousness was ours” (ante fidem, haec Christi justitia nostra fuit), since it was executed for us by the “intention of God the Father and Christ the Mediator” (intentione Dei Patris & Christi Mediatoris).95 This brings us back to the debate at the Westminster Assembly and the concern of Lazarus Seaman, no doubt with Twisse in mind, to distinguish between intentional and actual justification. For Twisse, they were one and the same. Twisse concludes that while redemption occurred through Christ’s death, God could have provided remission for sin without this death, which takes actual justification back to the eternal counsel of God. As Boersma notes, in spite of the “tension between justification from eternity and actual reconciliation by Christ’s death,” Twisse seeks to “maintain both, side by side.” Twisse tries to protect, yet diminishes in the process, the role of faith in justification by arguing that through faith God declares a forensic absolution within the heart of man, which amounts to an assurance of justification in the conscience.96 The tendency of this position towards antinomianism cannot be denied. Still, given the anti-Arminian approach to this doctrine foundationally taken by Twisse, we must not conclude that eternal justification is distinctively antinomian. While all antinomians were anti-Arminian, it does not follow that all anti-Arminians were antinomian. Further, Carl Trueman observes that apart from the English, only the Dutch and not the “broader Continental tradition” set forth the concept of justification from eternity. One accused of advocating eternal justification is Johannes Maccovius (1588–1644), who taught at the University of Franeker and was charged then cleared at the Synod of Dordt (1618–19) for views related to his supralapsarianism. He proposes a unique doctrine of active justification (from God’s perspective) before faith as a transient act at the “maternal promise” of Genesis 3:15. Thus, the elect are declared righteous by God, which will be followed in the ordo salutis by regeneration, faith, and passive justification (from man’s perspective) when the justification already imputed is then applied.97 Herman Witsius (1636–1708) in his Economy of the Covenants (1677) refutes the Arminian understanding of justifying faith as he sets forth the —————

95 Twisse, Vindiciae Gratiae, Potestatis, ac Providentiae Dei (Amsterdam, 1648), 252–53. Translations by Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 84. 96 Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 84–86. 97 Trueman, Claims of Truth, 28; Johannes Maccovius, Loci communes theologici (Amsterdam, 1658), 602–603, 608, 713–14. I have gleaned much from the research of Mark Jones and Gert Van der Brink on Maccovius here in “Thomas Goodwin and Johannes Maccovius on Justification from Eternity” (Unpublished paper, 2010). The key passages considered here from Jones and Van der Brink are from Johannes Maccovius, Collegia theologica, 1623 (Franeker: U. Balck 1641), 129–30, 423–25. See also Eyre, Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae, 24; Baxter, Aphorismes of Justification, 292–93, 307 (p.307 refers to Maccovius by his Polish name, Maccowski); Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vol. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 3:583.

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ideas of general and particular justification as well as active and passive justification. The two articles or moments of general justification involve a declaration at the maternal promise, that elect debtors are freed “from all obligation to make satisfaction,” and at the death of Christ, that “full satisfaction was made.” General justification is followed by particular justification when the regenerated sinner is “united to Christ by faith” and “declared” to actually pass from condemnation into favor. Witsius makes a similar distinction between active and passive justification as Maccovius, as “the one precedes faith […]; the other follows it.” In active justification the righteousness of Christ is “even ours before faith” and is “in respect of right, because both in the decree of God the Father, and the purpose of the Son, it was wrought out for us, and the appointed time to be certainly applied to us.” Passive justification “fiducially apprehended” makes the righteousness of Christ “ours by possession, as to our actual translation from a state of wrath, to a state of grace.” This position, not eternal justification as defined in this study, shows significant overlap with Goodwin’s nuanced form of justification from eternity. The elect are justified before faith in a sense but not in actual possession of it until faith is expressed in a sense.98 Wilhelmus á Brakel (1635–1711), a contemporary of Witsius, makes a distinction between active justification from God’s perspective and passive justification from man’s perspective. However, possibly with Witsius in mind, when he argues that the two are “one and the same act” not meant to be separated: “Wherever there is active justification there will also be passive justification, and vice versa.” He then refutes eternal justification and justification at satisfaction and makes it clear that God’s eternal “purpose” to justify is “never referred to as the act of justification.” He does allow for virtual justification at the death of Christ, which “by its virtue and efficacy,” sinners are reconciled unto God. This is distinct from actual actual reconciliation or justification at faith, as the latter is the only one that constitutes proper justification according to the Scripture. Witsius may be in view to some degree, but á Brakel’s real target comes into focus. Á Brakel is attacking an antinomian sect, the “Hebrews,” who embrace eternal justification proper and, in connection with it, have a reputation for very licentious living.99 Outside the English Reformed context, the unique views of Maccovius and Witsius both arose as part of distinct anti-Arminian polemics in seventeenth-century Dutch context with no connection to antinomianism. The Dutch did have their own antinomian problem with connections to eternal —————

98 Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants between God and Man, 2 vol. (Edinburgh: Thomas Turnbull, 1803), 1.2.7.16; 1.3.8.45, 47–48, 51–52, 56–57. 99 Wilhelmus á Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, 4 vol. (Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1993), 2:376–81.

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justification. But these views appear to be rather detached from Maccovius and Witsius. Wallace discusses the high Calvinism emerging especially in the 1650s, which remained much more concerned with Arminianism than antinomianism. He asserts that while the Westminster Assembly distanced itself from the extreme emphasis of grace and predestination in antinomianism, it did so in a manner that evidenced paranoia. High Calvinism recognized the excesses of antinomianism, yet considered Arminianism to be a greater danger due to its tendency to denigrate salvation by grace with a semiPelagian emphasis on moral effort finding its logical conclusion in Socinianism. Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) and John Owen (1616–1683) emerged as leaders of this anti-Arminian stress as they highlighted the sovereign grace of justification. Still, they simultaneously stressed the grace of sanctification in a manner that safeguarded them from the charge of antinomianism.100 That did not stop Richard Baxter from calling Owen an antinomian who held to eternal justification. Trueman observes the link between Crisp and Owen on the atonement manifested in The Death of Death and the connection of this to Baxter’s charge that Owen embraced justification from eternity. For example, Baxter in his Confession (1655), speaks of “one learned man” making a distinction between justification in foro Dei and in foro conscientiae in the sense that the former denotes virtual justification while the latter actual justification. Baxter here refers to Owen who argues that, in the progress of justification, “complete justification” does not occur “before believing,” since “Absolution in heaven” and actual “justification” are not identical. For Baxter, this is a mere chronological delay and the distinction between payment and release from debt for Owen constitutes a “fiction.” Baxter here cites Owen’s Of the Death of Christ (1650), which dealt with Baxter’s arguments against him in Aphorismes of Justification (1649). There, Baxter had taken issue with Owen’s position in The Death of Death that Christ’s sacrifice “actually” brought satisfaction for the sins of the elect or “ipso facto, delivered us from the curse, by being made a curse for us.” Owen attempts to explain the position by describing a prisoner whose paid ransom gives him a right to liberty yet who has not yet experienced such freedom. Trueman finds the analogy “weak” and Boersma observes “tension” in Owen’s overall position. His interaction with Baxter does little in the end to remove the insistence that Owen’s position showed no essential no difference from those who reduce justification by faith to mere assurance in foro conscientiae.101 ————— 100

Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 134–57. Baxter, Confession, 190–91; Aphorismes, 303–20; Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William Goold, 24 vol. (Edinburgh & London: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–53), 10:268–69, 470, 471–79. See also 5:217–18; Trueman, “John Owen on Justification,” 94. For detailed discussion 101

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Owen’s brief preface to William Eyre’s Vindiciae Justificationis Gratuitae (1654), a treatise that clearly sets forth justification from eternity, provides no relief from the above charge. He commends the work as a vindication of the “absoluteness” of free grace in Christ. Eyre clearly saw Arminianism as a greater concern than antinomianism, of which he was charged and which he vehemently denied. Anglican Arminianism, observes Wallace, especially in the 1650s, responded to encroaching antinomianism by openly supporting the teachings of Arminius and rejecting the reception of justification by a faith granted solely by sovereign grace. The Cambridge Platonists supported Arminius in a more subtle fashion, yet the attack on Calvinism remained.102 Within such a context, Eyre sought to defend the free grace of justification. Owen parallels Eyre’s distinction between justification in foro Dei and in foro conscientiae as part of a refined understanding of how justification unfolded through eternity to finally come to fruition in the believer as a result of what Christ provided. However, virtual justification in the tribunal of God does not complete the transaction of justification, for the elect are “not in actual possession” of it until union with Christ and the “actual insertion into his mystical body by faith.”103 As we will see below, Eyre equated the decree to justify with actual justification. Certainly, Owen recognized the distinction between his and Eyre’s position, yet he still commended Eyre’s work. It is reasonable to assume that Owen risked identification with Eyre’s position due to a conviction that Arminianism posed a greater danger to the gospel than the supposedly antinomian inclinations of Eyre. Further, it may be possible that Owen did not view eternal justification proper as necessarily antinomian. Dissatisfied in his ongoing debate with Baxter that Baxter will not accept Owen’s claim that he does not embrace eternal justification, Owen asserts, “I neither am nor ever was of that judgment; though, as it may be explained, I know better, wiser, and more learned men than myself, that have been and are.”104 Does he possibly have Eyre in mind or perhaps Goodwin, whose position bears significant overlap with his own? Owen would not make such bold statements as Goodwin, such as “we are justified in Christ from all eternity.” It may be the case that he saw Goodwin’s unique position as eternal justification and viewed it with respect. This makes even more sense considering that Owen participated with Goodwin in formulating the Savoy Declaration with its insertion of justification in time “personally” when speaking of eternal justification. ————— on the debate between Owen and Baxter, see Trueman, “John Owen on Justification,” 90–97; and Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 68, 88, 103–108. 102 Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 112–132; Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 114; Eyre, Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae, preface opposite title page. 103 Owen, Works, 5:217–18. 104 Owen, Works, 12:596.

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Wallace, in discussing Owen’s preface for Eyre and guilt by association with him, comments on the antinomian crisis of the 1640s. He maintains that it acted as a “catalyst” for dividing moderate Calvinists who “abhorred” antinomians and high Calvinists “who found them incautious allies.” David Field, in agreement with Wallace, notes the substantial influence of Baxter in rousing antinomian suspicions in this context and the lengths to which men such as Owen went to defend themselves from what they viewed as unwarranted allegations. These suspicions certainly contributed to a jaundiced view of eternal justification in terms of what constituted it and whether it was essentially antinomian.105 In the end, affirms Trueman, Owen’s theology of justification lies within classic Reformed orthodoxy, which was “rooted in the ongoing antiPelagian trajectory of Western theology and operating within the established Protestant consensus.” The “covenantal/Christological heart of his theology” allowed him to repudiate Baxter’s longstanding allegations of antinomianism and justification from eternity.106

10.5 The Anti-Antinomian Connections As noted, Eyre denied the charge of antinomianism while insisting that the “whole Work of our Salvation” rested on “the Grace of God.” He attributed antinomianism to “filthy Swine” such as Luther’s Agricola and Calvin’s libertines, not those who affirmed “the unsoundness” of a faith that “doth not work by love” and the hypocrisy of “Believers who do not bring forth the Fruits of a holy life.” He claims that the law was used to drive men to Christ who by faith became aware of justification “in foro Conscientiae,” as “the Sentence of Forgiveness […] terminated in their Consciences.” He denies that one is an antinomian just by affirming “Justification in foro Dei,” an immanent act in eternal the tribunal of God, “without Works or Conditions performed by us.” He does admit that the “loose” lives of many professing believers has given “too much occasion” for some to “Blaspheme” the doctrine of free justification. Still, that God “imputes” the righteousness of Christ before faith, in no way remains “contrary to the Law, seeing the Law prescribes not the rules of this imputation,” which will necessarily issue forth in obedience to the law “because we are justified.”107 Eyre testifies that God “from all eternity immutably willed the Righteousness of his Son to all his Elect,” and so “we were justified in his sight when he willed […] to deal with us as righteous persons, having given us ————— 105

Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 120. Trueman, “John Owen on Justification,” 97. 107 Baker, “The Battle for Luther,” 126; Eyre, Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae, 19–26, 72– 106

73.

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the Righteousness of his own Son.” The “act of justifying, is compleat in itself, for God by his eternal and unchangeable Will.” This does not render the death of Christ “useless,” since it still remains “a meritorious cause of all the effects of this Justification.” In this manner, faith plays a role as “the Sentence of Forgiveness is terminated in [the] consciences” of the elect in their awareness of the justification they already possessed. In this manner, Eyre makes the distinction between justification in foro Dei and in foro conscientiae. He defends his convictions as he points out that many, including Pemble and Twisse, who were “never accounted Antinomians” yet embraced justification in foro Dei, with justification truly existing in the tribunal of God before faith.108 Eyre seems to equate any form of justification as an immanent act in foro Dei as eternal justification, which he attributes to Pemble’s position considered earlier. In this respect, he shows agreement with Baxter while rejecting his claim that either position is essentially antinomian.109 Rutherford, in Spirituall Antichrist (1648), and in spite of Eyre’s claim that he held to the notion, rejected as antinomian the idea that “from eternity we were justified” or “from the time that the Messiah dyed, all sins were finished, and wee justified.” We earlier noted the distinction Rutherford makes between eternal justification and justification at satisfaction and saw that he, as a seventeenth-century opponent of eternal justification, did not affix every form of justification before faith with the label of eternal justification. Rutherford himself, as a commissioner to the Westminster Assembly and in a manner consistent with the Westminster Confession, keeps the decree for justification distinct from actual justification: “But justification in Gods decree and purpose from eternity, is no more justification than Creation, sanctification, glorification, the crucifying of Christ, and all things that fall out in time; for all these were in the eternall purpose of God.” God loves from eternity and there exists a “union of love in Gods minde from eternity” yet we are not truly united to Christ and justified until faith is exercised. At his death, Christ certainly purchased for the elect the benefits of salvation such as justification and sanctification, but they will possess “none of these, till they be justified by Faith.” To make a “distinction” between “justification in, or before God” and “our own sense by faith, will not help,” for Scripture speaks of justification “by faith onely; the meritorious price of our justification is payed on the Crosse, but that is not justification.”110 A noteworthy dispute over eternal justification and its connections to antinomianism came between Crandon, a friend of Eyre, and Baxter, who ————— 108

Eyre, Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae, 21–22, 61, 62, 67. Eyre, Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae, 25–26. 110 Rutherford, Spirituall Antichrist, 19–20; See Eyre, Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae, 22, 109

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saw eternal justification and the unconditional nature of justification as the two pillars holding up antinomianism.111 These pillars, as far as Baxter was concerned, were set in place by Pemble and Twisse. Crandon as an antineonomian repudiates Baxter’s claim that embracing eternal justification makes one an antinomian. He challenges Baxter to show that justification is “conditionall” rather than “absolute” and “purchased” by Christ. Crandon defends himself against the charge of antinomianism stating that the moral law “is a perfect rule” of righteousness and no Christian is “exempt” from its “obligations” yet free from the “sting and curse” of them as they have nothing to do with our acceptance before God. He also speaks of Pemble who defends justification by the righteousness of Christ without anything of our own contributing to it against Baxter’s neonomian notion that we are not justified by the works of the law apart from grace but by gospel obedience empowered by grace. Thus, he claims that Baxter “fights the Popes battle with the Popes weapons.”112 Crandon argues that Baxter’s embrace of the eternal decree to justify yet while refusing to see it as an “immanent” act in God slanders the “Protestant Divines” who recognized such an immanent act. In other words, it is “secret, abiding, and hidden in God” before “passing into the knowledge and conscience of man.” Thus, election and reprobation have “complete being” in God before the individuals have being. Justification brought home “to the conscience of a man, […] is a transient act of God” as the individual becomes aware of his standing before God, “convinced of his sinnes, […] yet resting upon, and cleaving to Christ by faith; that his sinnes are forgiven.” Justification in the former sense is “antecedaneous, or foregoing to all covenants whatsoever.” The eternal willing of justification in the mind of God takes logical priority over the covenant of grace between the Father and Son in which he willed to accept “Christs satisfying of his justice.” Yet, the former did not precede the latter “in time” for both are “coeternal, and before all times.” Those God loved and forgave he did so “in and through Christ from all eternity” and before the temporal “Covenant of Grace, made after by Gospel promise, by Christ, or God in Christ, to us and with us. For these had all their being in time.” Still, actual justification is received by personal faith, for “[n]one else but a believer, nor he, until he actually beleeveth, is thus actually justified […] And thus to be justified in Christ, or in God, is one thing and to bee justified in our selves by God through Christ is another. The former is an antecedent, the latter an effect or consequent of the Covenant of Grace.”113 Like Goodwin, Crandon seems content to live —————

111 For the connection between Crandon and Eyre, see Boersma, Hot Pepper Corn, 54, and Packer, Redemption & Restoration, 260. 112 Crandon, Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorized and Anthorized, 115, 142. 113 Crandon, Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorized and Anthorized , 115, 231–37. See also p.256, 262.

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with the tension of embracing justification in foro Dei from eternity together with actual justification in foro conscientiae in time. In his response to Baxter’s challenge that “the Antinomians shew but one Scripture that speaketh of justification from eternity,” Crandon notes that the very words do not appear yet neither does the phrase “justification by faith” in the teaching of Christ. Still, by inference Crandon maintains, “the Scripture delivereth this doctrine which he opposeth, viz. justification from eternity.” He points to 2 Timothy 1:9, which notes that we have been “saved […] according to his purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ, before the World began.” “See,” argues Crandon, “the grace of justification and salvation was given us in Christ from eternity.” To the argument that God simply “decreed from eternity” to justify believers, but justification itself “must be in time.” Crandon argues less than persuasively that even this position does not “deny that wee were justified in God, and in Christ from Eternity.” Besides, Paul does not in this verse speak of the believer’s participation in and justification by Christ “in time” but before “we had any actual being in our selves.”114 Crandon summarizes his position in the following manner: That this immanent Act in God doth not deny his Transient Act of Justifying man when he beleeveth, any more than this latter doth that former. That the Transient Act of Justification consisteth not onely in Gods evidencing and manifesting to the believer that he was really justified in God from eternity; but also in Gods Actual, and Judiciall pronouncing of the sentence of Absolution to the soul drawn to Gods Tribunal, and gasping for pardon thorough Christ. By means whereof the poor sinner is constituted, as well as declared actually, and personally righteous, and that before God his Justifier. That as oft as the Gospel speaketh of Justification by Faith, it is in reference to this Transient Act of God, not that Immanent. That as I conceive the Covenant between God and Christ to be (if I may so term it) a fruit, in order to that immanent act in God; so I think also that the Covenant of Promise, the Covenant under the Law, the Covenant under the Gospel, and the very Covenant of Works to be subservient to this Covenant made with Christ as a publick person, representing us, to work all coordinately to the advancing of the glory of Gods Grace to this Elect, in justifying them in himself from Eternity.115

Crandon, charged with antinomianism due to his embrace of eternal justification, as far as he admits it, in turn levels the allegation against Baxter that his neonomianism is nothing more than Arminianism and papism: ————— 114

Crandon, Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorized and Anthorized, 238–40; See also 240–42; 245– 46. See Baxter, Aphorismes, 93. 115 Crandon, Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorized and Anthorized, 246.

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As to Mr. Baxter, let him pretend what he will of his zeal against this Doctrine, because it is a Pillar of Antinomianism, yet his conscience tells him that his rage against it is under this consideration, as it is a sledge to beat in peeces the conditional Justification, Election, Redemption, and Grace; together with the pride of mans Free-will, Works, and Righteousnesse, uncertainty of Perseverance, &c. Which are the Articles of Faith common to Mr. Baxter with the Papists and Arminians. If Justification, as an immanent act in God from Eternity, hold, all these must fall, and Master Baxter and his fellows bee crushed with the ruines thereof.” 116

Crandon’s connection with Eyre helps to explain some similarities between the two, though Eyre reduced faith to awareness while Crandon leaves faith a role in actual justification. Analogous to Owen and Goodwin, Crandon observed a progression in justification from eternity past with the transaction of it terminating in the conscience by faith as an instrument of actual justification. Yet, unlike Owen, he openly calls this position eternal justification. His position bears greatest likeness to Goodwin, with the exception that Crandon more boldly labels his position eternal justification. Given the Eyre-Owen link between Crandon and Goodwin, the similarities with Owen and Goodwin are not surprising. What remains striking about Crandon is the fact that, whereas many sought to distance themselves from the label eternal justification due to the ties it possessed with antinomianism, Crandon unflinchingly embraced it from both an anti-Arminian and antiantinomian stance.

10.6 Conclusion During the Reformation, the flowering of the doctrine of justification by free grace and an imputed righteousness concentrated the focus of justification on God’s eternal will as the source and Christ’s finished work as the ground of justification. Against existing Romanism and soon-to-arise Arminianism, this shift moved justification away from the semi-Pelagian emphasis on the role played by human will initiative in that justification. This context facilitated the rise of a federal theology emphasizing the Christocentric and covenantal nature of justification. The accent on the absolute nature of justification by free grace also highlighted the importance of understanding how human activity fit into the scheme. On the one hand, an over-emphasis on the divine will and the expression of free grace within it acted as a catalyst for antinomianism. On the other hand, an imbalance towards the conditional nature of salvation fostered Arminianism. In postReformation England, the Westminster Confession both defensively com—————

116 Crandon, Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorized and Anthorized, 247. See Baxter, Aphorismes, 93, 177–180.

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bated the dangers and positively articulated a theology stressing both divine and human activity within a covenantal framework cautiously connecting eternity and time, and along with it, historia salutis and ordo salutis. Within this milieu, the doctrine of eternal justification became a hot topic. As Trueman noted earlier, the heightened stress on God’s eternal decree for and sovereign declaration of a non-intrinsic righteousness affected the doctrine of justification concerning both its ontological and chronological natures. This created fertile soil out of which eternal justification and positions approximating it quickly arose. In seventeenth-century England, the quadruple threat to Reformed orthodoxy of anti-precisionist antinomianism, Anglican Arminianisn, Romish Laudianism, and Baxterian neonomianism manifested an environment in which these controversial doctrines were promulgated, popularized, attacked, defended, ostracized, and misrepresented from various angles and in different degrees. Disputes arose and theologians sought, at times in an imbalanced manner, to zealously defend their positions. In the process, generalizations and associations were made on both sides that did not fit well. Once the charge of eternal justification was leveled, the title of antinomian was sure to follow due to what appeared to be the logical inseparability of the two. Those embracing the doctrine or anything close to it were often quick to defend themselves against the charge of antinomianism and/or eternal justification, titles that continue to stick in the minds of contemporary scholars, even if the adhesion is truly of little substance. Of the list of individuals studied in this debate, which is not meant to be exhaustive, the following observations are offered. Twisse, Eyre, and Crandon all laid claim to the position, but none were antinomian. This is not meant to suggest that no antinomians held the position. Bakewell’s antinomian encounters in London and Á Brakel’s in the Netherlands show that antinomians readily embraced eternal justification. Twisse held his position from within an anti-Arminian context and no Reformed orthodox thinker has accused him of antinomianism. Eyre claimed eternal justification from a vehemently anti-antinomian posture. Still, that both men reduced faith to an awareness of the actual justification preceding it, leaves them outside the Reformed orthodox camp at this point. Interestingly, Owen may not agree with this assessment, especially considering his commendation of Eyre and men “better” than he who held the position, even though he both opposed and categorically denied it. Crandon boldly owned the position, yet from the definition used in this study he does not fit the category. By maintaining that one is not actually justified until he believes, his position more closely resembles that of Goodwin. Still, Goodwin himself opposed eternal justification as defined by this study. This warrants attributing to men such as Goodwin, Crandon, and possibly Owen, a “nuanced” version of eternal justification, as Jones

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calls it, continuous with yet distinct from the definition used here. Interestingly, such a position does not exclude these men from the boundaries of Reformed orthodoxy. All three wrote from an anti-Arminian and antiantinomian perspective, with the added feature of Crandon’s antineonomian zeal. The independent anti-Arminian approach of Witsius and his own Goodwin-like version of eternal justification bears testimony from the Dutch context to the orthodoxy of such a position. Several of the individuals examined held to the teaching of justification at satisfaction, three of whom were accused of justification from eternity. Pemble’s foundational thinking here did readily give rise to full blown eternal justification as his position was carried to its logical conclusion. He and men such as Eaton, Saltmarsh, Crisp, and Bunyan, did not embrace eternal justification even if they did believe that actual justification came before faith. Pemble’s position was held from a predestinarian antiArminian perspective. Like Twisse, the neonomian Baxter may have considered him an antinomian, but the charge does not stick. Eaton, Saltmarsh, Crisp and Bunyan have all been charged with antinomianism, though Crisp and Bunyan do not completely fit the mold. This may be due to their Christocentric and covenantal approach to justification, which develops upon yet moves beyond Luther’s law-grace distinction. Like those who adhere to eternal justification as defined, the justification at satisfaction position places these men outside mainstream Puritanism, especially the antinomian Eaton and Saltmarsh. Of the opponents to eternal justification and positions approaching it, Baxter remains the proverbial pitbull, and he did at times misrepresent those supposedly embracing the doctrine and the antinomianism attached to it. No individual did more to vilify and sound the alarm about the position than he. Still, his polemics contributed to the discussion and raised important issues. For example, in a manner that warrants serious reflection, he claimed that any focus on actual justification in foro Dei, either from eternity or at satisfaction, constitutes eternal justification. Eyre agreed as he attributes eternal justification to any form of justification before faith. However, both Eyre and Crandon resented the fact that Baxter viewed the position as necessarily antinomian. Baxter claimed as well, to the consternation of Owen, that softening the stress from actual to virtual justification in foro Dei could not keep the labels of eternal justification and antinomianism from sticking. Concerning opposition from the Reformed orthodox side, we have considered the arguments of men such as Rutherford, Seaman, Lightfoot, and Goodwin, all of whom were commissioners at Westminster. They all appeared to hold in common that any form of actual justification before faith either from eternity or at satisfaction was distinctly antinomian. By implication, anyone adhering to justification before faith, showed some affinity to

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licentious freedom from the law, that “mother Heresie” of antinomianism as Rutherford called it. Within this milieu, he, as an anti-antinomian champion, misrepresented an individual such as Crisp whom he charged with antinomianism. Still, Rutherford made an appropriate distinction between eternal justification and justification at satisfaction, both of which were forms of justification in foro Dei. Further, he confronted eternal justification with brevity, clarity and cogency with the argument that the decree to justify no more constitutes actual justification than the decree to create or crucify Christ constitutes actual creation or crucifixion. Watson provides an example of the distortion that could occur in the quote cited at the beginning of this study. The statement implies that eternal justification belongs to the antinomians and necessarily leads to licentiousness. Watson generalizes that those holding the position do not care whether they sin “so long as they hold they are ab Aeterno, justified whether they repent or no.” While such individuals may have existed, none surveyed here made such a categorical claim. In this study, we have seen that the doctrine of eternal justification fell outside the bounds of seventeenth-century English Reformed orthodoxy. Antinomians readily embraced the doctrine and it fit well with their zeal to eradicate any hint of human participation in justification. At the same time, the doctrine was neither essential to antinomianism nor exclusively antinomian. Not all antinomians embraced it and not all who held it were antinomians. Within such development, its proponents could remain not only antiArminian but also anti-antinomian. All antinomians were anti-Arminian but not all anti-Arminians were antinomian. In the end, we are led to the conclusion that the unorthodox teaching of eternal justification was not a “pillar of Antinomianism.” It was not even an essential building block.

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11. The Assurance Debate: Six Key Questions

Joel R. Beeke 11.1 Introduction The Puritans treasured assurance of salvation. They viewed the assurance of peace with God as a fountain that waters the Christian in his trials on the road to glory (Rom. 5:1–5). According to Thomas Brooks (1608–1680), assurance makes “heavy afflictions light, long afflictions short, bitter afflictions sweet.” It makes the soul “sing care away.” It also makes the believer “more motion than notion, more work than word, more life than lip, more hand than tongue.”1 Anthony Burgess (d. 1664) describes how assurance produces fruit: [Assurance] keeps up excellent Fellowship and Acquaintance with God [...]. It will work a Filial and an Evangelical frame of heart [...]. [It] makes us also have the humble disposition of Sons; hereby we are carried out to do him service for pure intentions and motives [...]. It will support, although there be nothing but outward misery and trouble [...]. It will much inflame in Prayer [...]. It makes a man walk with much tenderness against sin [...]. [The] heart will be impatient and earnest till the coming of Christ [...]. The soul is more inflamed and enlarged to love God [...]. [It] will breed much spiritual strength and heavenly ability to all graces and duties, to go through all relations with much holiness and lively vigor [...]. [It] is a strong and mighty buckler against all those violent assaults and temptations that the devil uses to exercise the godly with [...]. [It] is a special means to breed contentment of mind, and a thankful, cheerful heart in every condition [...]. [It] is a sure and special antidote against death in all the fears of it.2

Instead of making a believer proud, secure, and “presumptuous in sinning,”3 assurance helps him fervently love the Lord and carefully obey ————— 1 “The Unsearchable Riches in Christ” in The Works of Thomas Brooks (1861–1867; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2001), 3:54, 160; “Heaven on Earth” in Works, 2:41. Parts of this chapter have been adapted from my The Quest for Full Assurance: The Legacy of Calvin and His Successors (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1999). I wish to thank Paul Smalley for his research assistance on this chapter. 2 Anthony Burgess, Spiritual Refining: or a Treatise of Grace and Assurance (1652; reprint, Ames, Iowa: International Outreach, 1990), 26, 681–83. Modernized spelling is used for all quotations. Cf. Thomas Boston, The Complete Works of the Late Rev. Thomas Boston, Ettrick (reprint, Wheaton, Ill.: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers, 1980), 2:17–18. 3 The Works of Thomas Goodwin (reprint, Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2006), 3:417.

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Him.4 John Ball (1585–1640) says, “He who is best assured hath most power of God’s Spirit, and the stronger the Spirit of God is within, the more holiness and fruits and grace without.”5 The very nature of assurance cannot “breed any arrogance, or neglect of God and godliness,” Burgess says, since “it is only maintained and kept up by humility and holy fear, so that when a man ceaseth to be humble, to have an holy fear of God, his certainty likewise ceaseth, even as the lamp goeth out when the oil is taken away.”6 Humility is a special fruit of assurance. With assurance, self decreases and Christ increases (John 3:30). As Robert Harris (1581–1658) writes, “The more one grows in grace, the more he grows out of himself […]. We become more humble and low in our own eyes.”7 Puritan pastors and theologians were deeply concerned with how believers may know that they have eternal life (1 John 5:13). They often studied this subject. The Westminster Assembly met in the 1640s at the apex of Puritanism. At least twenty-five members of the assembly wrote treatises on the doctrines of faith and assurance, including: John Arrowsmith, William Bridge, Anthony Burgess, Cornelius Burgess, Jeremiah Burroughs, Richard Byfield, Joseph Caryl, Daniel Cawdrey, Thomas Gataker, George Gillespie, Thomas Goodwin, William Gouge, William Greenhill, Robert Harris, John Ley, John Lightfoot, Philip Nye, Edward Reynolds, Samuel Rutherford, Henry Scudder, Obadiah Sedgwick, William Spurstowe, William Twisse, Richard Vines, and Jeremiah Whitaker. Puritan thought on assurance was largely unified; no significant debate accompanied the writing of the Confession’s chapter on assurance.8 Chapter 18 of the Westminster Confession represents in mature form the unity of Puritan teaching on the subject of assurance.9 However, some differences do exist in Puritan thoughts on assurance.10 Some of the differences are ————— 4 George Downame, A Treatise of the Certainty of Perseverance (Dublin: Society of Stationers, 1634), 410. 5 John Ball, A Treatise of Faith (London: for Edward Brewster, 1657), 278. 6 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 679–80. 7 Robert Harris, The Way to True Happinesse (London: I. Bartlett, 1632), 2:91. 8 Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Divines, ed. Alexander F. Mitchell and John Struthers (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1874), 282. See Chad B. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652,” 7 vol. (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 2004), 6:331–33, 411–12. Debate took place on assurance issues on February 17–18, 1646, and July 24 and 30, 1646. 9 For an examination of Westminster’s doctrine of assurance, see Beeke, Quest for Full Assurance, 119–64. 10 The most reliable secondary sources on the Puritan doctrine of assurance are Richard M. Hawkes, “The Logic of Assurance in English Puritan Theology,” Westminster Theological Journal 52 (1990): 247–61, and “The Logic of Grace in John Owen, D.D.: An Analysis, Exposition, and Defense of John Owen’s Puritan Theology of Grace” (Ph.D. dissertation, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1987), 344–67; Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 34–61, 138–41; John von Rohr, “Covenant and Assurance in Early English Puritanism,” Church History 34, no.2 (1965): 195–203 and The Covenant of Grace

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fairly substantial, while others are more minor and nuanced. We will examine these differences under the following six questions.

11.2 Is the Seed of Assurance Embedded in Faith? The Puritans distinguished faith from the assurance of faith. Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) writes, “That faith is essentially a persuasion and assurance of the love of God to me in Christ, it is more than I could ever learn to be the nature of Faith, a consequent separable I believe it is.”11 “It is one thing for me to believe, and another thing for me to believe that I believe,” says Brooks.12 William Ames (1576–1633) adds, “It also appears that assurance of salvation is not, properly speaking, justifying faith but a fruit of such faith.”13 This distinction between faith and assurance has profound doctrinal and pastoral implications. To make justification dependent upon assurance compels a believer to rely upon his own condition rather than on the sufficiency of the triune God in redemption. Self-reliance is not only unsound doctrine but also has adverse pastoral effects. God does not require full and perfect faith but, rather, sincere and unfeigned faith. The fulfillment of God’s promises depends on receiving Christ’s righteousness, not upon the degree of assurance in that act.14 The smallest spark of faith is as valid as mature assurance in terms of salvation. “Neither are we saved by the worth or quantity of our Faith, but by Christ, which is laid hold of by a weak Faith, as well as a strong,” writes John Rogers (c. 1570–1636).15 If salvation depends on full assurance of faith, many believers would despair, for then “the palsied hand of faith should not receive Christ,” says John Downame (d. 1652).16 Most Puritans did not deny there was some assurance in every exercise of faith, so they could say all believers possess at least some assurance at ————— in Puritan Thought (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 155–91; C.J. Sommerville, “Conversion, Sacrament and Assurance in the Puritan Covenant of Grace to 1650” (M.A. thesis, University of Kansas, 1963); William K. B. Stoever, ‘A Fair and Easie Way to Heaven’: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 119– 60. 11 Samuel Rutherford, Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himselfe (London: J. D. for Andrew Cooke, 1647), 85. 12 Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth (1657; reprint, London: Banner of Truth, 1961), 14. 13 William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. John Eusden (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1968), 167 (I.xxviii.24). 14 Ball, A Treatise of Faith, 84–87. 15 John Rogers, The Doctrine of Faith: wherein are particularly handled twelve Principall Points, which explaine the Nature and Vse of it (London: N. Newbery and H. Overton, 1629), 201. 16 John Downame, A Treatise of the True Nature and Definition of Justifying Faith (Oxford: I. Lichfield for E. Forrest, 1635), 12–13.

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times. “There be Christians of all ages and of all sizes in God’s family,” writes Robert Harris; hence, “all God’s children have some assurance, though all have not alike.”17 Rutherford writes, “Faith is an assurance of knowledge that Christ came into the world to die for sinners, and a resting and a hanging upon Christ with all the heart for salvation.”18 Most Puritans teach that assurance grows organically out of faith like a plant out of a seed. Assurance then pertains to one’s present degree of faith. Ames writes, “Believers do not have the same assurance of grace and favor of God, nor do the same ones have it at all times.”19 Richard Hawkes rightly notes, “While the Puritans distinguish full assurance from the initial trust of faith, they will not allow a division between the two, for full assurance grows out of an assurance implicit in the first act of faith.”20 Thus Puritan divines could speak of assurance growing out of faith as well as of faith growing into assurance. For example, Brooks writes, “Faith, in time, will of its own accord raise and advance itself to assurance.”21 But the Puritans usually focus on full assurance rather than the small but growing element of assurance present in faith from its conception. They differentiate between the faith of adherence to Christ and the faith of assurance (or evidence) in Christ, whereby the believer knows that Christ has died specifically for him.22 According to Anthony Burgess, “Faith of adherence is many times where this faith of evidence is not […]. [By sin we often] chase away our assurance; many times the people of God may walk without this comfortable persuasion” of the faith of evidence.23 The Westminster Confession (18.3) states, “This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties, before he be partaker of it.” English, Scottish, and Dutch theologians have written much about the Confession’s assertion that assurance does not belong to the essence of faith. Some critics argue against it, saying the assembly denies an organic relationship between faith and assurance. As evidence, they cite question 81 of the ————— 17

Harris, The Way to True Happinesse, 2:51. Catechisms of the Second Reformation, ed. Alexander F. Mitchell (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1886), 203. 19 William Ames, Medvlla SS. Theologiae, ex sacris literis, earumque interpretibus, extracts & methodice disposita (Amsterodami: Joannem Janssonium, 1627), 1.27.19. 20 Hawkes, “The Logic of Assurance in English Puritan Theology,” 250. 21 Brooks, Heaven on Earth, 15, 21. John Dod and Robert Cleaver distinguished between “moon-shine” assurance given upon assenting to and trusting in the promise and “sun-shine” assurance attained with “full assurance” (A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandements [1603]), 10. 22 Ames, Medvlla, 1.27.16; Ball, A Treatise of Faith, 90ff.; Robert Bolton, Some General Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God (London: Felix Kyngston, 1625), 321–22; John Preston, The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, 5th ed. (London: W.I. for Nicholas Bourne, 1632), part 1, 63–64. 23 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 672. 18

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Larger Catechism, which includes the words, “Assurance of grace and salvation not being of the essence of faith.” These critics fail to recognize that in this context the Confession speaks of assurance in the sense of faith’s well-being, not of its essence or being, which must necessarily include assurance.24 Though some Puritan writings speak of assurance as the mature confidence that one is a child of God and other writings speak of assurance as something present in all faith, the organic relationship between faith and assurance shows this is not a great theological difference. As John Rogers says, “The greatest Giant was in swaddling clothes, the tallest Oak was a twig, and Faith groweth from a grain of mustard seed to a tall tree.”25 The context of the Puritan writing being examined usually determines whether the author is speaking of assurance embedded in faith in seed form or a fulsome kind of conscious assurance that reveals very mature faith. This accounts for why some Puritans speak of assurance being the possession of all believers while the majority of Puritans put the focus on assurance as a scarce gift. The latter are not really contradicting the former, but are referring to what the Puritans often called “full assurance,” which can be known by its luxurious fruits such as a profound delight and joy in God, a close life of filial fellowship with Him, a diligent use of spiritual exercises that extol Him, a big evangelistic heart for every unconverted person, and a hankering for the Second Advent and being with Christ in heaven.

11.3 Is Faith a Condition of the Covenant? The Puritan writers said assurance is based on the covenant of grace and the saving work of Christ. In turn, the covenant and redemption are grounded in God’s sovereign good pleasure and love in eternal election.26 Assurance flows out of the certainty that God will not disinherit His adopted children. His covenant cannot be broken, for it is fixed in His eternal decrees and promises. God’s covenant may be viewed as conditional upon faith, but also as unconditional by sovereign grace. On the one hand, the Puritans sometimes emphasized faith as a condition of the covenant. They cite God’s promise “that whosoever believeth in ————— 24 Brooks, Works, 2:371. Cf. Louis Berkhof, Assurance of Faith (Grand Rapids: Smitter Book Co., 1928), 27–29, 43–44; James Buchanan, The Doctrine of Justification (1867; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977), 185, 378; Alexander M’Leod, The Life and Power of True Godliness (New York: Eastburn, 1816), 246–47. 25 Rogers, The Doctrine of Faith, 200. 26 Jeremiah Burroughs, An Exposition of the Prophecy of Hosea (reprint, Morgan, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1988), 590. Cf. Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1982), 99–104.

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him should not perish, but have everlasting life,” and “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life” (John 3:16, 36). Hence faith is the condition of the covenant, and assurance depends upon the reality of faith. Ames writes, “He that doth rightly understand the promise of the covenant cannot be sure of his salvation, unless he perceives in himself true Faith and repentance.”27 Peter Bulkeley (1583–1659) says, “The absolute promises are laid before us as the foundation of our salvation […] and the conditional as the foundation of our assurance.”28 On the other hand, the Puritans sometimes emphasized the unconditional nature of the covenant. This is not a contradiction, for in the covenant God promises to give the conditions of the covenant. He says, “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26). Thus, Ames could write, “The present covenant requires no properly called or prior condition, but only a following or intermediate condition (and that to be given by grace as a means of grace), which is the proper nature of faith.”29 William Bridge (1600–1671) quips: “What if the condition of one promise be the thing promised in another promise? […] Now so it is that the condition of one is the thing promised in another promise. For example: in one promise, repentance is the condition of the promise (2 Chron 6:37, 38; Joel 2:15–19). But in another promise, repentance is the thing promised (Ezek 36:6) […]. The Lord Jesus Christ hath performed the condition of the promise for you better than you can perform it.”30 The conditional yet unconditional nature of the covenant lends itself to different emphases throughout Puritan teaching on assurance. Perry Miller says: “The end of the Covenant of Grace is to give security to the transactions between God and men, for by binding God to the terms, it binds Him to save those who make good the terms.”31 John von Rohr points out, however, that Miller overlooks the Puritan teaching that the ultimate security of the covenant rests in the one-sided action of God’s sovereign grace. Von Rohr explains: The Covenant of Grace is both conditional and absolute. Faith is required as a condition antecedent to salvation, but that very faith is already granted as a gift of election.

————— 27

Von Rohr, “Covenant and Assurance in Early English Puritanism,” 197. Peter Bulkeley, The Gospel-Covenant; or the Covenant of Grace Opened, 2nd ed. (London: Matthew Simmons, 1651), 323–24. 29 Ames, The Marrow of Theology, 151 (I.xxiv.19). See also von Rohr, “Covenant and Assurance,” 201. 30 The Works of William Bridge (1649; reprint, Morgan, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1989), 2:132– 33. 31 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), 389. 28

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As Ames put it, “the condition of the Covenant is also promised in the Covenant.” For Ames, the promise of the fulfillment of covenant conditions is itself a covenant promise. Preston designated this as a “double covenant” in which “God doth not only promise for his part, but makes a covenant to enable us to perform the conditions on our part.” In the Covenant, in this final sense, grace does all, and reliance must be upon this promise […]. The doctrines of total depravity and of total divine sovereignty could not be relinquished. Thus as God’s Covenant was also his divine gift of faith to his elect, assurance must likewise look to the absolute character of his promises and to that immutable good pleasure of his will upon which all things depend.32

Miller exaggerates the Puritan concept of covenant, saying it weakens or even usurps divine predestination. But, in reality, the Puritans taught that election and covenant reinforce each other. William Stoever notes, “Puritan covenant theology offered troubled saints a double source of assurance. It allowed them to plead the covenant with God, importuning him to fulfill his part of the bargain by performing what he had promised; and it encouraged them to seek comfort in the sufficiency of prevenient grace and in the immutability of God’s will in election, which underlay the covenant itself and their own participation in it.”33 God’s absolute promises in election and the covenant convince the believer that even if he lacks the acts of faith at a given moment, he cannot utterly lose the principle of faith, for faith is rooted in the electing, covenantal God.34 Not even sin can break that covenant.35 Nevertheless, assurance is affected by the conditional dimension of the covenant.36 The conditional promises are inseparable from the believer’s daily renewal of the covenant by means of prayer, meditation, and worship. The sacraments also offer important seasonal reminders of covenant renewal.37 “To gather up assurance from the conditions of the covenant is the highest pitch of Christianity,” Thomas Blake (c. 1597–1657) says.38 Ultimately, however, even a believer at the “highest pitch” must return to God’s absolute promises, for, as William Perkins (1558–1602) says, “the ————— 32

Von Rohr, “Covenant and Assurance in Early English Puritanism,” 199–202. Stoever, ‘A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven,’ 147–48. Cf. David C. Lachman, The Marrow Controversy, 1718–1723 (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1988), 53–54. 34 Bulkeley, The Gospel-Covenant; or the Covenant of Grace Opened, 276. 35 The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. with memoir by A. B. Grosart (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862), 1:220. 36 Bulkeley, The Gospel-Covenant; or the Covenant of Grace Opened, 323–24. 37 Von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought, 186. See E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 38–61 for how the Puritans viewed the sacraments as fostering assurance. 38 Thomas Blake, Vindiciae Foederis, or a Treatise of the Covenant of God entered with mankinde, in the several Kindes and Degrees of it (London: A. Roper, 1653). 33

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anchor of hope must be fixed in that truth and stability of the immutable good pleasure of God.”39 This “good pleasure” is not arbitrary, but testifies of God’s faithfulness to His covenant. The God of election, of the covenant, and of absolute promises also grants grace to perform the conditional promises. So von Rohr concludes: “Though grounds for assurance are in the conditional covenant, they are not removed from the covenant as absolute. Reliance must somehow be upon the promises of the latter in order that it may also be on the conditions of the former.”40

11.4 Is Assurance Primarily Grounded in God’s Promises? The Westminster Confession (18.2) says of assurance, “This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope; but an infallible assurance of faith founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God, which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.” The first foundation of assurance, then, is “the promises of salvation.” Some Puritans greatly emphasize the role of God’s promises in assurance. John Owen (1616–1683) writes, “This assurance did not arise nor was taken from anything that was peculiar unto [the believer,] but merely from the consideration of the faithfulness of God himself.”41 Puritans like Owen stress that assurance does not arise primarily by looking to oneself but by looking to God’s faithfulness in Christ crucified. The promises center personal assurance upon Christ Himself. Jesus Christ is the “sum, fountain, seal, treasury of all the promises,” Edward Reynolds (1599–1676) writes.42 In Him, the promises of God are “yea and amen” (2 Cor 1:20). Though the Savoy Declaration would more poignantly state that assurance is “founded on the blood and righteousness of Christ revealed in the gospel,” the Westminster divines viewed Christ as inseparable from a promising God. Rutherford thus states in his catechism, “The new covenant is a mass of promises laying the weight of our salvation upon a stronger one than we are, to wit, upon Christ, and faith grips [i.e., grasps ————— 39 William Perkins, The Workes of that Famovs and VVorthy Minister of Christ in the Vniuersitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins (London: John Legatt, 1612), 1:114. 40 Von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought, 190. 41 John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1976), 3:367. 42 Edward Reynolds, Three Treatises of the Vanity of the Creature. The Sinfulnesse of Sinne. The Life of Christ (London: R. B. for Rob Boftocke and George Badger, 1642), part 1, 365.

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or seizes hold of] the promises and makes us go out of ourselves to Christ as being at home [i.e., familiar] with Christ.”43 God’s promises are the pathways on which Christ meets the soul. So Thomas Goodwin writes, “For if one promise do belong to thee, then all do; for every one conveys [the] whole Christ in whom all the promises are made and who is the matter of them.”44 William Spurstowe (c. 1605–1666) writes, “The promises are instrumental in the coming of Christ and the soul together; they are the warrant by which faith is emboldened to come to him, and take hold of him; but the union which faith makes is not between a believer and the promise, but between a believer and Christ.”45 Reynolds explains: “All the promises are made in Christ being purchased by his merits, and they are all performed in Christ, being administered by his power and office […]. Promises […] are the Rays and Beams of Christ the Sun of Righteousness, in whom they are all founded and established […]. Every promise by Faith apprehended carries a man to Christ, and to the consideration of our unity with him, in the right whereof we have claim to the Promises.”46 “Let thy eye and heart, first, most, and last, be fixed upon Christ, then will assurance bed and board with thee,” says Brooks.47 Nevertheless, some Puritan treatments of assurance scarcely mention the promises of God. Instead they focus upon the evidences of grace in a person’s life. Thomas Hooker (1586–1647) spends 447 pages on describing contrition of sin, with rare mention of the promises of grace.48 He and some other Puritans may scarcely treat the subject of the promises because of practical concerns. The Puritans tended to give a topic time and attention proportionate to its difficulty instead of its relative importance. They might develop a single point at great length, while holding that point within a broader framework of theology. For example, Hooker preached his soul-convicting sermons within the framework of the doctrines of grace.49 Furthermore, Hooker did not seek to write with theological bal————— 43

Catechisms of the Second Reformation, ed. Alex. Mitchell, 176. Works, 3:321. 45 William Spurstowe, The Wells of Salvation Opened: or, A Treatise discerning the nature, preciousness, and usefulness of the Gospel Promises and Rules for the Right Application of Them (London: T.R. & E.M. for Ralph Smith, 1655), 44–45. 46 Reynolds, Three Treatises, part 1, 345, 356–57. 47 Brooks, Heaven on Earth, 307. 48 Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption: The Ninth & Tenth Books (reprint, Ames: International Outreach, 2008). 49 “His system of theology may sometimes be kept in the background but it never ceases to have a controlling influence upon his understanding” (Iain H. Murray, “Thomas Hooker and the Doctrine of Conversion: 4,” The Banner of Truth, no. 199 [April 1980], 17). In the first eight books of his treatise Hooker presented the doctrines of grace in a very Christ-centered manner. There he counseled his readers to “First look to Christ; first make sure of him, as he in whom all our good is laid up […] Look at all graces as either they lead to Christ or come from Christ, else 44

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ance as much as pastoral balance. The glaring need of the people of his time was to be shaken out of complacent, nominal Christianity.50 To emphasize the promises could sing a lullaby to those who were already spiritually asleep. Instead, Hooker shined the brilliant light of self-examination upon their souls. Did some Puritans believe that the inward evidences of grace, not the promises, are the primary ground of assurance? That might be one’s first impression of Anthony Burgess’s magnum opus on conversion and assurance, Spiritual Refining. A quick glance at Burgess’s table of contents reveals over one hundred sermons on the signs of true conversion and how they differ from counterfeit faith. Yet Burgess writes, The great work of a Christian is, out of a sense and feeling of its own want and spiritual poverty, to roll himself, and rest only upon Christ for Atonement and Reconciliation […]. Though the sight of thy graces be comfortable, yet that of Christ ought to be much more. These graces are but the handmaids and servants that wait upon Christ, they are but tokens from him, they are not himself: A man is not only to go out of his sins, but also out of his graces unto Christ. See Paul in Phil. 3. How excellently doth he debase all his own graces to be found in Christ. Let not therefore the desire after inherent righteousness make thee forget imputed righteousness, for this is to take the friend of the Bridegroom for the Bridegroom Himself.51

Here again the pastoral emphasis must not be interpreted as the theological and logical priority of personal evidences of Christ over scriptural promises of Christ. The Puritans were always people of the Book. Nevertheless their Reformed Christianity has a strong experiential emphasis, and this emphasis sometimes leads them to give greater attention to testing one’s soul. Burgess does not neglect the promises but seeks to find a copy of them written in the heart.52 In conclusion, all Puritans believed that the foundations of assurance are grounded in the promises of God and evidenced in the inward evidences of grace. Some laid more stress on the former and some on the latter. Those who emphasized the inward evidences of grace do not necessarily view those evidences as primary, however. Rather, their emphasis is on the inward evidences primarily for two reasons: (1) inward evidences require a more detailed and nuanced treatment than do the promises of God, as the inward evidences can encounter more pitfalls and dangers than the promises ————— they will lose their life and sweet, and we shall lose the comfort of them, unless we look at them thus, either as they bring us to Christ by the power of his spirit, or as they come from Christ by his spirit inhabiting in us” (Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption [...] The first eight Books [Cornhil: Peter Cole, 1657; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972), 105. 50 Iain H. Murray, “Thomas Hooker and the Doctrine of Conversion: 2,” The Banner of Truth, no. 196 (Jan. 1980): 22–24. 51 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 56–57. 52 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 5–6.

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of God; and (2) pastorally speaking, some believers who fear they are just taking the promises to themselves without warrant may actually be more helped in acquiring assurance, at least for a time, by ascertaining inward evidences of grace within themselves.

11.5 How Important is Syllogistic Reasoning for Validating Inward Evidences of Grace? The second foundation of assurance, as stated in the Westminster Confession (18.2), is the evidences of grace. These evidences were made evident to the Puritans, by the Spirit’s grace, through the logical method of syllogistic reasoning. An example of a syllogism would be: Major premise: All men are mortal. Minor premise: Socrates was a man. Conclusion: Therefore Socrates was mortal.

In the Puritan doctrine of assurance, the first premise of a syllogism would be a scriptural principle about a characteristic of a person saved by God. The second would be an observation that a person has that characteristic. The conclusion would be that this specific person has been saved by God. For example: Major premise: The kingdom of God belongs only to the poor in spirit. Minor premise: I am poor in spirit. Conclusion: Therefore I am an heir of the kingdom of God.

The syllogism grounds assurance in personal holiness and vital union with Christ, recognizing Paul’s teaching that election results in such fruit. Paul says in Ephesians 1:4: “He hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy.” So Brooks writes, “What certainty can there be of election, remission of sin, justification, or glorification, if there be not a certainty of your sanctification and renovation? If that persuasion that is in you about your grace or sanctification be false, then that persuasion that is in you concerning remission of sin, predestination, justification, and eternal salvation is false. This highly concerns all to consider, that would not be miserable in both worlds.”53 The method of syllogism can be applied to assurance in two ways, leading to different emphases among Puritan writers. Some Puritans emphasized the practical syllogism, based on such texts as 2 Peter 1:5–10, which ————— 53 Brooks, Works, 3:469. Cf. Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 102, 156ff.

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stress virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, and love—as well as a variety of texts from 1 John stressing the Christian walk. For example, “hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments” (1 John 2:3). “Whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him” (2:5). “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren” (3:14). “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God” (5:2). The practical syllogism that results from texts like these goes something like this: Major premise: According to Scripture, only those who possess saving faith will receive the Spirit’s testimony that their lives manifest fruits of sanctification and good works. Minor premise: I cannot deny that by the grace of God I have received the Spirit’s testimony that I manifest fruits of sanctification and good works. Conclusion: I am a partaker of saving faith.

The practical syllogism is evident in the Westminster Confession (16.2), which says, “These good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto, that, having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life.” Other Puritans stressed the mystical syllogism, which refers to a heart that is shaped by union with Christ through the Word. Whereas the practical syllogism emphasizes fruits that manifest themselves outside of the believer, the mystical syllogism refers mostly to internal fruits whereby Christ is exalted and the believer is abased. The mystical syllogism goes something like this: Major premise: According to Scripture, only those who possess saving faith will so experience the Spirit’s confirmation of inward grace and godliness that self decreases and Christ increases. Minor premise: I cannot deny that by the grace of God I experience the Spirit’s testimony confirming inward grace and godliness such that self decreases and Christ increases. Conclusion: I am a partaker of saving faith.

The mystical syllogistic emphasis also appears in the Westminster Confession (18.2), grounding assurance in the promises and “the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of

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God, which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.” The mystical syllogism evidences itself in a variety of ways, says William Twisse (1578–1646).54 Burgess writes: “Sometimes Fear of God is a sign, sometimes Poverty of Spirit, sometimes Hungering and thirsting after Righteousness, sometimes Repentance, sometimes Love, and sometimes Patience, So that if a godly man can find any one of these in himself, he may conclude of his Salvation and Justification.”55 Petrus Immens (1664–1720) offers this formal mystical syllogism: Major premise: The believer looking into the word of God discovers therein what is declared with respect to the heirs of salvation, to wit, that they have fled for refuge to lay hold on the hope set before them; they hunger and thirst after the righteousness of Christ; God gives to them a new heart by taking away the stony heart out of their flesh and giving them a heart of flesh; and they love God with all their strength and are inclined to follow after holiness, without which no man can see the Lord. Minor premise: I cannot deny that by the grace of God and after the strictest scrutiny of my heart that my soul has experienced all of these things in a greater or lesser degree; Conclusion: I am an heir of salvation.56

God saves His elect by means of what John Forbes calls His “experienced word.” He says, “God speaks the word of truth to the heart,” causing the heart “to believe that which it hath heard and received,” and adds “his spirit: and by the testimony thereof […] makes Adoption and eternal life, most certain and sure to the soul.”57 By the 1640s, Puritans were using both mystical syllogisms and practical syllogisms.58 Consequently, mid-seventeenth-century Puritan preachers often answered the question “How do I know whether or not I am a believer?” by offering a combination of signs containing the good works of the practical syllogism as well as the inward evidences of grace of the mystical syllogism. For example, after preaching eleven sermons on assurance, ————— 54 William Twisse, The Doctrine of the Synod of Dort and Arles (Amsterdam: G. Thorp, 1631), 158. 55 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 41. 56 Petrus Immens, The Pious Communicant Encouraged, trans. John Bassett (New York: Isaac Collins, 1801), 1:95. 57 John Forbes, A Letter for resolving this Question: How a Christian man may discerne the testimonie of Gods spirit, from the testimonie of his owne spirit, in witnessing his Adoption (Middelbvrgh: Richard Schilders, 1616), 37. 58 Cornelis Graafland asserts that in the Netherlands the mystical syllogism came to the fore after the Synod of Dort. By the 18th century, it had superseded the practical syllogism in the Dutch Further Reformation (“Van syllogismus practicus naar syllogismus mysticus,” in Wegen en Gestalten in het Gereformeerd Protestantisme, ed. Willem Balke, et al. (Amsterdam: Ton Bolland, 1976), 105.

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Burgess delivers eight messages on the true signs of grace and fifteen on the false signs of grace. True signs include obedience, sincerity, opposition against and abstinence from sin, openness to divine examination, growth in grace, spiritual performance of duties, and love to the godly. Signs that fall short of saving grace include outward church privileges; spiritual gifts; affections of the heart in holy things; judgments and opinions about spiritual truth; great sufferings for Christ; strictness in religion; zeal in false worship; external obedience to the law of God; belief in the truths of religion; a peaceable frame of heart and persuasion of God’s love; outward success; prosperity and greatness in the world; and abandonment of gross sins. The section on false signs concludes with a sermon on “the difficulty, and in some sense, impossibility of salvation, notwithstanding the easiness which men fancy to themselves thereof.”59 The foundation of these syllogisms and their reflex actions, when properly exercised, is Christ. The believer learns to count but loss and dung all that is not Christ in order to increasingly know Him and the power of His resurrection (Phil. 3:10). Consequently, with proper self-examination, believers recognize their strengths (by the grace of God) and weaknesses (due to remaining infirmities arising from the old corrupt nature) and are driven to Christ, as Perkins says, “that they might be all in all out of themselves in Christ.”60 Brooks writes: “We may and ought to make a sober use of characters and evidences of our gracious estates, to support, comfort, and encourage us on our way to heaven, but still in subordination to Christ, and to the fresh and frequent exercises of faith upon the person, blood, and righteousness of Jesus.”61 The best resolution of the objective-subjective tension in assurance is that both owe everything to Christ, receive all from Him, and end with all in Him. In Christ, objective promises and subjective experience are complementary.

11.6 Does the Inward Witness of the Holy Spirit Coincide with the Inward Evidences of Grace? The last ground of assurance, according to the Westminster Confession (18.2), is “the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God.” Here the confession alludes to Romans 8:15–16: “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ————— 59

Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 61–200. Perkins, Works, 2:44. 61 Brooks, Works, 3:237. 60

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ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” Robert Kendall is correct in saying this assurance is not explained in the Confession, but he is not accurate in implying that none of the Confession’s writers affirm the direct witness of the Spirit that John Cotton speaks of.62 The writers of the Confession knew that the most difficult ground of assurance to comprehend is the witness of the Holy Spirit. They confessed that vast mysteries surrounded them when speaking on this subject.63 One reason the assembly did not detail the Spirit’s testimony in assurance was to allow for the freedom of the Spirit. A second, related reason was that they wanted to grant freedom of conscience to those who differed about the details of the Spirit’s testimony. Most of the members of the assembly had one of two emphases. Some, such as Jeremiah Burroughs (c. 1600–1646), Burgess, and George Gillespie (1613–1648), emphasized that the witnessing testimony of the Holy Spirit coincides with assurance gleaned from inward evidences of grace.64 They believed the Spirit’s witness refers exclusively to His activity whereby He brings conscience to unite with His witness that the Christian is a child of God. According to this view, the witness of the Holy Spirit joins with the witness of the believer. Romans 8:15 and 8:16 are thus synonymous.65 Burgess argued that if this were not so, and the believer receives assurance only through the direct testimony of the Spirit, there would be no need to pursue assurance through inward graces, for such a pursuit would be “to light a candle when the Sun shineth; but the testimony of the Spirit and the evidence of graces make up one complete witness, and therefore are not to be disjoined, much less opposed.”66 These divines believed the secondary grounds of assurance do not break down because the inward evidences of grace and the testimony of the Spirit are essentially one. The syllogisms refer to full assurance. They believed this perspective is important to maintain in opposition to mysticism and antinomianism, which tend to emphasize direct testimony of the Spirit disjoined from the need to produce practical fruits of faith and repentance.67 ————— 62 Robert T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 205. 63 Cf. The Works of the Rev. John Newton (reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1985), 1:185. 64 Jeremiah Burroughs, The Saints’ Happiness, together with the several steps leading thereunto. Delivered in Divers Lectures on the Beatitudes (reprint, Beaver Falls, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1988), 196; Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 44; George Gillespie, A Treatise of Miscellany Questions (Edinburgh: Gedeon Lithgovv, for George Svvintuun, 1649), 105–109. 65 Cf. Burgess’s exegesis of Romans 8:15–16, Ephesians 1:13, and 1 John 5:8 in Spiritual Refining, 49–50. 66 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 47–48. 67 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 52.

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Other divines of the assembly, such as Rutherford, Twisse, Henry Scudder (c. 1585–1652), and Thomas Goodwin, preferred another emphasis. They say the witness of the Spirit described in Romans 8:15 contains something different than that of verse 16.68 They distinguish the Spirit’s witness with the believer’s spirit by syllogism, saying His witness to the believer’s spirit is done by direct application of the Word. As the New Testament commentator Heinrich Meyer points out, the Spirit witnessing with the believer’s spirit leaves in its wake the self-conscious conviction that “I am a child of God.” On the basis of Spirit-worked syllogisms, the believer then finds freedom to approach God as Father. This contrasts with the view that, in witnessing to the believer’s spirit, the Spirit makes His pronouncement on behalf of the Father: “You are a child of God.” On the basis of hearing about this sonship from God’s Word by the Spirit, the believer then approaches God with the familiarity of a child.69 Scudder’s teaching is typical of the second emphasis. He says, “This Spirit does witness to a man that he is the child of God in two ways: First, by immediate witness and suggestion. Second, by necessary inferences, by signs from the infallible fruits of the said Spirit.”70 Those who accept the secondary grounds of assurance differ about whether the Spirit’s testimony should be regarded as more powerful than His syllogistic testimony. The most common approach is that of Rutherford. He allows for the direct testimony, but then says the reflex act of faith is, as a rule, “more spiritual and helpful” than direct acts.71 Consequently, believ————— 68 Samuel Rutherford, The Covenant of Life Opened (Edinburgh: Andro Anderson for Robert Broun, 1655), 65ff.; Twisse, The Doctrine of the Synod of Dort and Arles, reduced to the practise, 147ff.; Henry Scudder, The Christian’s Daily Walk (Harrisburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1984), 338–42; Goodwin, Works, 6:27; 7:66; 8:351, 363. 69 Heinrich Meyer, Critical and Exegetical Hand-book to The Epistle of the Romans (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, Publishers, 1889), 316. Cf. Robert Bolton, Some General Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God (1625; reprint, Morgan, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1995), 326. 70 Scudder, The Christian’s Daily Walk, 338. 71 Catechisms of the Second Reformation, ed. Alex. Mitchell, 207; Samuel Rutherford, The Trial and Triumph of Faith (reprint, Edinburgh: William Collins, 1845), 88ff.; idem, Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himselfe, 71—also, see 94ff. for Rutherford’s fear of antinomianism. Cf. D.R. Strickland, “Union with Christ in the Theology of Samuel Rutherford: an examination of his doctrine of the Holy Spirit” (Ph.D. dissertation, Edinburgh, 1972). Burgess agreed with Rutherford, stating that if the direct testimony be “allowed” it is “more subject to dangerous delusions,” for the reflex act “goeth upon a [more] sure ground, the fruits of mortification, and vivification” (Spiritual Refining, 672). Brooks said, “Immediate revelations are fleeting and inconstant; and therefore men had need be careful how they build upon them” (Brooks, Works, 2:318n; cf. 3:251– 52 and 2:519–23, where Brooks supplied nine marks to differentiate the direct testimony of the Spirit from the whisperings of Satan). New England Puritanism also agreed: “Against the antinomian high estimation of the inward testimony of the Spirit to the exclusion of holy works as signs of faith, the orthodox Puritans turned more and more to holy practice as the principal means used by the Holy Spirit to testify to a man of his salvation [...] Edwards [...] praised his friend David Brainerd for finding assurance of saving faith in its ‘evidences’ in his sanctified life rather than in immediate whisperings of the Holy Spirit. Edwards had no patience with those enthusiasts who limited the testimony of the

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ers should be regularly praying for the Spirit’s illumination to guide them into syllogistic conclusions. Twisse and Scudder distinguish the Spirit’s testifying with our spirit from His direct witnessing of personal adoption without determining which is more valuable.72 Goodwin says the direct witness of the Spirit supersedes the co-witnessing of the Spirit and the believer through the syllogisms.73 However, Goodwin is an exception. Generally speaking, the Westminster divines do not view the direct testimony of the Spirit as superior to or independent of the syllogisms but as additions to them. Burgess summarizes the view of those who differ by saying, “Some Divines do not indeed deny the possibility of such an immediate Testimony, but yet they conclude the ordinary and safe way is to look for the Testimony, which is by the effects and fruits of God’s Spirit.”74 Most of the assembly’s divines agreed that, regardless of one’s belief about the direct witness of the Spirit, claiming it to be the most important kind of assurance is arguable, for Christians are called to live daily in the joy of assurance, and such assurance cannot be maintained on the basis of occasional experiences.75 Some Westminster divines, such as William Bridge (1600–1671) and Rutherford, believe that assurance by the Spirit’s direct witness becomes the portion of many but not all Christians before they die.76 A few, such as Goodwin, who was influenced by the Dutch Further Reformation and the ————— Spirit to inward, invisible, ‘impractical’ flashes of assurance: such testimony is too ephemeral and too often deluding” (Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966], 144ff.). See also The Complete Works of Thomas Shepard, ed. John A. Albro (Boston: Doctrinal Tract & Book Society, 1853), 1:258–59. 72 “That there is a Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba Father, is as true as the word of God is true; as also, that his Spirit doth testifie together with our Spirit, that we are the Sonnes of God” (Twisse, The Doctrine of the Synod of Dort and Arles, reduced to the practise, 156; cf. ibid., 147). Scudder’s emphasis, however, is clearly on the reflex act of faith (The Christian’s Daily Walk, 338–42). 73 Goodwin, Works, 1:233; 8:366. 74 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 52. 75 Cf. Iain Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1990), 2:483–92; Michael Eaton, Baptism with the Spirit: The Teaching of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1989), 161ff. 76 The Works of William Bridge (1845; reprint, Morgan, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1989), 2:140. The Westminster Confession does not address the question if the believer may die without attaining any degree of conscious assurance. Kendall assumes that such may be the case (Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, 203). This question should be approached more cautiously, however, as contrary opinions were held by the divines. Those who do retain the possibility usually appear to be talking about full assurance. For example, Rutherford taught that some believers retain “weak faith” throughout their lives, such that they reside “in the borders of hell, and never have fair sailing, nor fulness of assurance, until they be upon the shore” (Influences of the Life of Grace [London: for Andrew Crook, 1659], 150). Most Puritans believed that it was normative for believers to reach varying degrees of assurance though few reached full assurance (Brooks, Works, 2:132–36). For typically Puritan reasons why many don’t “attain to a distinct knowledge of their interest in Christ,” see William Guthrie, The Christian’s Great Interest (reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982), 26–36.

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John Cotton (1584–1652) and John Preston (1587–1628) tradition in Puritanism,77 place this experience far above that of the ordinary believer. Indeed, Goodwin says experiencing full assurance pronounced by the Spirit “immediately” is comparable to “a new conversion.”78 For Goodwin, full assurance is the zenith of experimental life. Such assurance is separate from the syllogisms. He writes, “This witness is immediate, that is, it builds not his testimony on anything in us; it is not a testimony fetched out of a man’s self, or the work of the Spirit in man, as the others were; for the Spirit speaks not by his effects, but speaks from himself.”79 Goodwin repeatedly uses terms such as immediate light, joy unspeakable, transcendent, glorious, and intuitive in describing the experience of full assurance. Indeed, it is beyond human description, he says, for “[t]hose who have attained it cannot demonstrate it to others, especially not to those who have no experience of it, for it is a white stone which no one knows but he that receives it.”80 The Westminster divines, however, were agreed in asserting that the Spirit’s testimony is always tied to, and may never contradict, the Word of God. With this affirmation, antinomianism can be avoided, and the freedom of the Spirit protected. For the assembly’s divines, the grounds of faith in God’s promises, inward evidences of grace, and witness of the Spirit must be pursued to obtain as much assurance as possible by the grace of God. If some of these grounds are emphasized at the expense of others, the teaching of assurance loses balance and becomes dangerous. No Westminster divine would teach that assurance can be obtained only by trusting in the promises, only by inward evidences, or only by the witness of the Holy Spirit. Rather, they teach that a believer cannot trust the promises without the aid of the Holy Spirit, and he cannot with any degree of safety examine himself without the Spirit’s illumination. Although the Confession’s divines gave the syllogisms a more intrinsic role in assurance and placed greater emphasis upon them than did Calvin,81 the promises of God continued to be regarded as the primary ground for assurance.82

————— 77 In Puritan theology, assurance by means of the direct and immediate witness of the Holy Spirit is intimately associated with the theological development of the sealing of the Spirit. Cf. The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes (reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1979), 5:409ff., 440; John Preston, The New Covenant (London: I.D. for Nicholas Bourne, 1639), 2:144ff., 172, 400ff., and The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love (1632; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1979), 2:84ff.; Guthrie, The Christian’s Great Interest, 108–109. 78 Goodwin, Works, 1:251. 79 Goodwin, Works, 8:366. 80 Goodwin, Works, 8:351. 81 Graafland, “Van syllogismus practicus naar syllogismus mysticus,” 108. 82 Burgess, Spiritual Refining, 51.

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The activity of the Spirit is essential in every part of assurance.83 Without the application of the Spirit, the promises of God lead to self-deceit and carnal presumption. Without the illumination of the Spirit, self-examination tends toward introspection, bondage, and legalism. The witness of the Spirit divorced from the promises of God and from scriptural inward evidences can degenerate into unbiblical mysticism and excessive emotionalism. These great strands cannot be separated from each other.

11.7 Is Assurance Normative? By distinguishing assurance from faith in its essence, the Puritans raised the question of how normative assurance is for believers. Generally speaking, the Puritans generally viewed assurance as a growing phenomenon in the normal Christian life, just as all graces should mature in the believer. According to the Westminster Confession, the relationship between faith and assurance strengthens over time: “growing up in many to the attainment of a full assurance” (14.3). The acorn of faith often develops into the oak of full assurance. God is sovereign over how long this takes. He is able to plant faith and full assurance simultaneously. Thomas Ridgley (1667–1734) says, “The sovereignty of God discovers itself herein, as much as it does when he makes the ordinances effectual to salvation, in giving converting grace unto those who attend upon them. Some are called early to be made partakers of that salvation that is in Christ, others late. The same may be said with respect to God’s giving assurance. Some are favored with this privilege soon after, or when first they believe; others are like those whom the apostle speaks of, who, through fear of death are all their life-time subject to bondage.”84 More typically, God works assurance by degrees so that the believer’s doubts about his salvation decrease as he grows in grace.85 Grace usually grows with age, and as faith increases, other graces increase. Young believers normally display much zeal, but elderly saints “grow more in strength and stableness, and are more refined,” says Sibbes.86 God uses conflicts, doubts, and trials to mature faith in the believer. “Assurance comes not at first when we believe, but little by little as God seeith it requisite, according to the trial he hath appointed to make of us,” ————— 83 Anthony Burgess, The True Doctrine of Iustification Asserted and Vindicated, From the Errors of Papists, Arminians, Socinians, and more especially Antinomians (London: Robert White for Thomas Vnderhil, 1648), 1:273. 84 Thomas Ridgeley, A Body of Divinity (London, 1731), 3:272. 85 Burgess, The True Doctrine of Iustification, 1:152. 86 Sibbes, Works, 7:222–23.

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Ball writes.87 Such assurance provides peace after intense spiritual warfare; it wears battle scars.88 So Goodwin writes: “A man’s faith must fight first, and have a conquest, and then assurance is the crown, the triumph of faith; but faith must be tried first; and what tries faith more than temptations, and fears, and doubts, and reasonings against a man’s estate?”89 Thus lack of assurance itself can be a trial that the Spirit ultimately uses to strengthen assurance in believers. Assurance is a fruit of faith which ripens over time. The newborn soul should not expect full assurance immediately, for, according to Westminster divine Obadiah Sedgwick (1600–1658), this would be like “the Sun at his first peeping were in the height of heaven; or that a Scholar must be placed in the upper form as soon as he enters the School.”90 Though they often wrote of assurance in an organic, growing sense, the Puritans sometimes spoke of assurance as an experience reserved for a few, mostly mature believers. Brooks actually compared it to intoxicating liquor, writing, “Many heads are not able to bear strong waters [alcoholic beverages]. Why, the very quintessence of all the strong consolations of God is wrung out into this golden cup of assurance; and can you drink this cup, and not stammer nor stagger? Believe it, assurance is strong meat for men; few babes, if any, are able to bear it, and digest it.”91 Assurance is thus the glory of glories. Here full assurance is regarded not as basic confidence in God’s faithful mercies but as a soul-ravishing experience of the love of Christ, which is rare among believers. Brooks explains, But the word that the Scripture does most fully express this by [plerophoria], full assurance, that is, when the soul, by the Spirit and word, is so fully persuaded of its eternal happiness and blessedness, that it is carried, like Noah’s ark, above all waves, doubts, and fears, and Noah-like, sits still and quiet, and can, with the apostle Paul, triumph over sin, hell, wrath, death, and devil […]. [This] is only obtained by a few. Assurance is a mercy too good for most men’s hearts, it is a crown too weighty for most men’s heads.92

However, Brooks acknowledges that lesser degrees of assurance are more possible. He writes of a man who complains about his lack of assurance. His response is, first, “It may be that thou hast assurance, though not such a measure of assurance, such a plerophory or full assurance, as thou desirest. ————— 87

Ball, A Treatise of Faith, 96. Preston, The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, 2:109. 89 Goodwin, Works, 8:346. 90 Obadiah Sedgwick, The Doubting Beleever: or, A Treatise Containing 1. The Nature 2. The Kinds 3. The Springs 4. The Remedies of Dovbtings, incident to weak Beleevers (London: M.F. for Thomas Nicols, 1641), 60. 91 Brooks, Works, 2:371. Cf. 2:316–17 92 Brooks, Works, 2:335. 88

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A perfect, complete, absolute, and full assurance is very desirable on earth, but I think few attain to it till they come to heaven.” Second, he says, “The least grace, if true, is sufficient for salvation (Matt. 5:3, 10); therefore, the sense of the least measure of grace should be sufficient for assurance of salvation.”93 This important concession allows weak believers to rejoice in the love of their Savior.

11.8 Conclusion Some Puritans spoke of assurance like the breeze that usually blows by the sea, even if at times as only a gentle whisper. Others use the term assurance as if it is the mighty wind that propels forward a fully loaded sailing ship. In either case they affirm that the Spirit blows where He wishes, and we can neither comprehend nor contain Him (John 3:8). Sometimes the Puritans wrote of assurance in mystical strains of exulting in the love of God through Christ in the Spirit. At other times, they described assurance as the result of careful self-examination. Most Puritans kept these emphases in careful balance, but each writer found his own unique way of doing so. These variations are bound together by their repeated return to the promises of Scripture as fulfilled in Jesus Christ and to the reliance on the Word and Spirit for all kinds of assurance. Regardless of how they define assurance, every Puritan invited a Christian to pursue a deeper, fuller, more satisfying, and more sanctified assurance of God’s smile upon his life. As George Downame noted, even the most assured believers may grow in assurance. He says: “Some are incipients, some proficients, some perfect or grown men in Christ […]; [nevertheless,] none are so perfect, but that their assurance may be increased.”94 Burroughs said it best when he wrote that our duty is to labor for the assurance of God’s love, for “it will assist us in all duties; it will arm us against all temptations; it will answer all objections that can be made against the soul’s peace; it will sustain us in all conditions, into which the saddest of times may bring us.”95

————— 93

Brooks, Works, 1:463–464. George Downame, The Covenant of Grace (Dublin: Society of Stationers, 1631), 109. 95 Burroughs, An Exposition of the Prophecy of Hosea, 654. Cf. Gillespie, A Treatise of Miscellany Questions, 57. 94

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12. Particular Baptist Debates about Communion and Hymn-Singing

Michael A.G. Haykin & C. Jeffrey Robinson “Nothing is more the Duty of every Christian than to inform himself of the Truth as it is in Jesus, both in the Doctrinal and Practical Parts of the Christian Faith” Isaac Marlow1

12.1 Introduction The seventeenth-century Particular Baptists regarded themselves as being very much an integral part of the wider Reformed community in the British Isles and Ireland. Their substantial employment of the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (1646) and Congregationalist Savoy Declaration (1658) in the writing of their Second London Confession of Faith (1677/1688) is but one indication of the real sense of solidarity they had with other Reformed communities in the British archipelago.2 This is not to say that they did not have some significant differences with their Reformed brethren, of which a prime example would, of course, be with regard to the subjects and mode of baptism. In fact, a number of the Baptist pastors, like Hanserd Knollys (1599–1691) and William Kiffin (1616–1701), became accomplished controversialists because of debates with Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. Within their own ranks as well, there were certain theological disputes that drove a wedge between those of “the baptized way”3 who were otherwise one in their convictions. Most of these disputes centred on worship matters. What day of the week, for instance, should be set aside for worship? While most Baptists followed the standard —————

1 Isaac Marlow, “To the Christian Reader” in his A Treatise of the Holy Trinunity (London, 1690), [1]. 2 For proof of this, see James M. Renihan, True Confessions: Baptist Documents in the Reformed Family (Owensboro, Kentucky: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2004), in which Renihan lays out the Second London Confession alongside the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration. 3 For the term “the baptized way” as a self-designated description of the Baptists, see William Kiffin, A Sober Discourse of the Right to Church-Communion (London, 1681), 3. Also see William H. Brackney, “Doing Baptism Baptist Style: Believers Baptism” (http://www.centerforbaptiststudies.org/pamphlets/style/baptism.htm; accessed August 20, 2010).

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Puritan perspective that viewed Sunday as the new covenant Sabbath, a small number of Baptists, like Edward Stennett (died c.1690) in his The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord (1664) and The Royal Law Contended for (1667), contended that congregational worship on any other day but the one appointed in the Old Testament was tantamount to manmade worship.4 Again, most Baptists did not consider the practice of the laying-on-of-hands as an essential part of Christian worship, although Peter Chamberlain (1601–83) argued against fellow Baptist William Kiffin in a public debate in November 1653 that this New Testament practice was not an adiaphora of worship.5 There were, however, two controversies among the Particular Baptists that loomed extremely large in this period. The first centered on the relationship of what the Reformation had established as the two sacraments of the Church, namely, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Was believer’s baptism, the rite of entry into Particular Baptist churches, a necessary prerequisite for participation at the Table? This controversy, which was especially acute in the 1670s, involved two of the major Baptist figures of the era, John Bunyan (1628–88), the author of the spiritual classic The Pilgrim’s Progress From this World to That which is to come (1678), and William Kiffin, who was once described by a hostile contemporary as the “ordained Mufty of all Hereticks and Sectaries.”6 The second dispute within Baptist ranks raged especially fierce in that hotbed of Dissent, London, where, during the 1690s, the Particular Baptists were deeply divided over whether or not hymns were appropriate for public worship. While many of the Baptist leaders of the day were involved in one way or another, the two main protagonists were Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), the most important Baptist theologian of the final quarter of the seventeenth century, and one of the leading members of his church, Isaac Marlow (1649–1719), a wealthy jeweler.

12.2 The Communion Controversy of the 1670s and 1680s Although John Bunyan is currently one of the most celebrated Christian authors of the seventeenth century, in his own day he had little influence amongst his fellow Baptists.7 His strong commitment to open communion —————

4 On the Seventh-day Baptist community, see Bryan W. Ball, Seventh-day Men: Sabbatarians and Sabbatarianism in England and Wales, 1600–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 5 A Discourse Between Cap. Kiffin, and Dr. Chamberlain, About Imposition of Hands (London, 1654). 6 Anonymous, The Life and Approaching Death of William Kiffin (London, 1659), 2. 7 For the life and ministry of Bunyan, see especially John Brown, John Bunyan (1628–1688): His Life, Times, and Work, revised Frank Mott Harrison (London/Glasgow/Birmingham: The

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and open membership put him out of step with most seventeenth-century Particular Baptists, who favored closed communion and closed membership. While there is no extant record of Bunyan’s baptism, his first editor, Charles Doe, who knew Bunyan well, gave 1651 as the year of Bunyan’s baptism, though he admitted that it may have occurred a year or two later. On the other hand, George Cokayne (1620–1691), Bunyan’s earliest biographer and also a trusted friend, regarded 1655 as the year in which Bunyan was baptized by his pastor John Gifford (d.1655). Whatever the exact year, there is no good reason to reject the strong tradition that Bunyan was baptized as a believer during the early 1650s and joined the Bedford Church, which would be his spiritual home till his death over thirty years later. Certainly if Bunyan had not been baptized as a believer, William Kiffin or one of his other theological opponents would have raised the fact during the communion controversy. In fact, Kiffin explicitly describes Bunyan in his treatise A Sober Discourse of Right to Church-Communion (1681) as a brother of the “Baptized way.”8 Moreover, in the preface that Kiffin wrote for Some Serious Reflections On that Part of Mr Bunion’s Confession of Faith: Touching Church Communion with Unbaptized Persons (1673) by Thomas Paul (fl.1673), the London pastor describes Bunyan as opposed to the baptism of infants and in favor of “the baptizing of believers upon their profession of faith in Christ.”9 After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Bunyan ran afoul of the state authorities when he refused to desist from public preaching. Arrested on November 12, 1660, he would spend the following twelve years in ————— Hulbert Publishing Co., 1928); R.L. Greaves, John Bunyan (Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology, vol.2; Abingdon, Berkshire: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1969); Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church 1628–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); N.H. Keeble, ed., John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Gordon Wakefield, Bunyan the Christian (London: HarperCollins, 1992); R.L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002); Robert J. McKelvey, Histories that Mansoul and Her Wars Anatomize: The Drama of Redemption in John Bunyan's Holy War (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). On the controverted question about whether or not Bunyan actually was a Baptist, see especially Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (New York: Bryan, Taylor, & Co., 1887), 529– 39; Brown, John Bunyan, 221–5, 236–8; Joseph D. Ban, “Was John Bunyan a Baptist? A CaseStudy in Historiography”, The Baptist Quarterly, 30 (1983–84), 367–76. This author would agree with the estimation of Richard L. Greaves when he states that “Bunyan is rightly regarded as an open-membership Baptist.” See Greaves’ “Conscience, Liberty, and the Spirit: Bunyan and Nonconformity” in Keeble, ed., John Bunyan, 35. In this regard, see also Kenneth Dix, John Bunyan: Puritan Pastor (N.p.: The Fauconberg Press for The Strict Baptist Historical Society, 1978), 8. 8 Sober Discourse, 3. 9 “To the Reader” in Thomas Paul, Some Serious Reflections On that Part of Mr Bunion’s Confession of Faith: Touching Church Communion with Unbaptized Persons (London, 1673), [2– 3].

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prison. For a few years prior to his release in the spring of 1672, Bunyan was particularly concerned with re-organizing Bedford Church and those churches that were in close association with it.10 The minutes of the Bedford Church during this period, for instance, reveal that many of its members had “withdrawne themselves from close walking with the Church,” while others were “guilty of more grosse miscarriages.”11 It was these efforts at re-organization that brought to the fore crucial questions relating to churchcommunion and baptism.12 Bunyan’s position on these questions is clearly enunciated in his A Confession of my Faith, and A Reason of my Practice (1672), which, in some ways, is “a faithful outworking” of the views of the first pastor of the Bedford Church, John Gifford.13 Before Gifford died in September of 1655, he left a farewell testament in which he exhorted the members of the church not to split over “baptisme, laying on of hands, anoynting with oyle, psalmes, or any externalls.”14 Similarly, Bunyan refused to make believer’s baptism, in his words, a “wall of division” between Christians.15 Thus, Bunyan rejected the argument that believer’s baptism must precede membership in the local church or any of the privileges of that membership, in particular, participation in the Lord’s Supper. As Bunyan read the Scriptures, he saw no indication that baptism is the “initiating, and entring ordinance into Church-communion.”16 Indeed, to refuse to have fellowship with other Christians simply because they have not received believer’s baptism is to perpetuate “fictions, scriptureless notions.”17 Membership in a local church ————— 10 For a good discussion of these churches, see Richard L. Greaves, “The Organizational Response of Nonconformity to Repression and Indulgence: The Case of Bedfordshire”, Church History, 44 (1975), 472–4. 11 Cited Greaves, “Conscience, Liberty, and the Spirit”, 31. Seventeenth-century spelling in texts cited will be retained. For further discussion of the exercise of church discipline in the Bedford Church and Baptist churches of this period, see especially Richard L. Greaves, “Introduction” to his ed., John Bunyan: Instruction for the Ignorant; Light for Them that Sit in Darkness; Saved by Grace; Come, & Welcome to Jesus Christ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), xxv–xxx. 12 Greaves, “Conscience, Liberty, and the Spirit”, 35. 13 B.R. White, “The Fellowship of Believers: Bunyan and Puritanism” in Keeble, ed., John Bunyan, 17. 14 The Minutes of the First Independent Church (now Bunyan meeting) at Bedford 1656–1766, ed. H.G. Tibbutt ([Bedford]: Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1976), 19. 15 A Confession of my Faith, and A Reason of my Practice, ed. T.L. Underwood, John Bunyan: A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification, by Faith; A Confession of my Faith, and A Reason of my Practice; Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion; Peaceable Principles and True; A Case of Conscience Resolved; Questions About the Nature and Perpetuity of the Seventh-Day-Sabbath (Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol.4; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 171. See also Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion, ed. Underwood, 226. References to this work will be given by the title of the work by Bunyan and the page number in the Underwood edition. 16 Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 162. 17 Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 166.

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should be open to all who are “visible saints,” that is, those who “by the word of the Gospell, have been brought over to faith and holiness.”18 Baptism, Bunyan asserted, by its very nature cannot create faith or inner holiness. Bunyan granted that baptism was ordained of Christ, and is thus “of excellent use to the Church, in this world.”19 In that it depicts the believer’s union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection, it strengthens the believer’s faith when he is baptized and it gives him confirmation of the forgiveness of his sins.20 Nevertheless, Bunyan insisted that baptism is not one of the “fundamentals of our Christianity” and thus he refused to make an idol of it.21 To support his position Bunyan had recourse to a variety of arguments. For instance, Bunyan argued that Ephesians 4:3–6 set forth the basic qualifications for church fellowship, and water baptism was not among them. The “one baptism” of verse 5 he interpreted in light of 1 Corinthians 12:13, which refers to the baptizing of believers into the Body of Christ by the Holy Spirit.22 Then he sought to distinguish between the “doctrin and practise of Water-baptism,” the inner baptism of the Spirit and the outer baptism of water. The person who truly believes in Christ but has not yet been baptized in water has the “heart, power and doctrine of Baptism;” for he has been truly united with Christ crucified, buried, and risen. What he lacks is “the sign, the shadow, or the outward circumstance” of this heart commitment.23 Moreover, Bunyan was convinced that edification of and love for fellow believers is more important than “our agreeing in, or contesting for the business of Water-baptism.” After all, “it is Love, not Baptism that discovereth us to the world to be Christs Disciples.”24 Thus, in a later work, Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion (1673), he pled not “for a despising of Baptism, but (for) a bearing with our Brother.”25 From Bunyan’s perspective, therefore, those who refused church fellowship with unbaptized believers abuse the Scriptures and “taketh away the Childrens Bread,” and in so doing, they served as “a Prop to Antichrist.”26 ————— 18

Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 160. Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 160. 20 Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 160, 164, 172. 21 Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 160. See also his remarks in Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, ed. Underwood, 250: “I own Water-baptism to be God’s Ordinance, but I make no Idol of it.” 22 Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 171; Differences in Judgment About WaterBaptism, ed. Underwood, 207–11. 23 Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 172; Differences in Judgment About WaterBaptism, ed. Underwood, 215. 24 Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 175, 178. 25 Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, ed. Underwood, 216. 26 Confession of my Faith, ed. Underwood, 182–83. 19

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Such provocative remarks did not go unchallenged. The following year, Thomas Paul, who may well have been a member of Kiffin’s congregation, wrote Some Serious Reflections On that Part of Mr Bunion’s Confession of Faith: Touching Church Communion with Unbaptized Persons, for which Kiffin provided a preface.27 Paul appealed to the text of the great commission in Matthew 28 in defense of the fact that baptism is a command of Christ not lightly dispensed with and an integral part of the worship of the Church. To have Christ one must observe his royal commands.28 Paul also indulged in various ad hominem attacks. For instance, he accused Bunyan of seeking fame through his “singular” opinions and he rebuked the Bedford pastor for going into print before speaking with his fellow Baptists in private.29 In fact, after the publication of Bunyan’s Confession of my Faith, Kiffin and other Particular Baptist leaders in London invited Bunyan to meet with them. Although Bunyan did go to London, he left without meeting them. He later explained his action thus: The reason I came not amongst you, was partly because I consulted mine own weakness, and counted not my self, being a dull-headed man, able to engage so many of the chief of you, as I was then informed intended to meet me; I also feared, in personal Disputes, heats and bitter contentions might arise, a thing my Spirit hath not pleasure in.30

Bunyan’s characterization of himself here as an unlettered, simple Christian is a feature common to many of his controversial works.31 In fact, far from revealing their author as “a dull-headed man,” his controversial works show him to be a writer brimming with energy and creative imagination.32 Bunyan’s written response to these attacks on his position was his Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion, also published in 1673. Here Bunyan defended and expanded his earlier arguments, as well as giving responses to the views of Paul. Among the latter, for example, he stoutly insisted that baptism is a completely personal matter. Unlike the Lord’s Supper, which involves the entire church, baptism is not part of the worship of the Church as a whole and thus “pressing it upon the Church is to no purpose at all.”33 The Lord’s Table, Bunyan stated: ————— 27

According to Underwood, Paul’s Some Serious Reflections is “the least articulate” of the various responses to Bunyan’s views (“Introduction” to his ed., John Bunyan: A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification, by Faith, xxxi). 28 See the summary of Paul’s position in Harry L. Poe, “John Bunyan’s Controversy With the Baptists”, Baptist History and Heritage, 23, no.2 (April, 1988), 27–8. 29 For the nature of the other attacks, see Underwood, “Introduction”, xxxi. 30 Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, ed. Underwood, 248. 31 T.L. Underwood, “It pleased me much to contend”: John Bunyan as Controversialist”, Church History, 57 (1988), 465. 32 Underwood, “John Bunyan as Controversialist”, 468. 33 Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, ed. Underwood, 222. See also Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, ed. Underwood, 244.

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Being an Ordinance SO full of blessedness, as lively to present Union and Communion with Christ to all the Members that worthily eat thereof; I say, The Lord’s-Supper being such, that while Members sit at that feast, they shew to each other the Death and Blood of the Lord; as they ought to do, till he comes […] the Church, as a Church, is much more concerned in THAT, than in Water-baptism, both as to her Faith, and Comfort; both as to her Union, and Communion.34

Stephen Mayor has argued that it is passages like this one which reveal that the “Lord’s Supper is certainly more important to Bunyan than Baptism.”35 Yet, Mayor also notes that whatever Bunyan’s “appreciation of the Lord’s Supper, it makes very little showing in his major works.”36 Bunyan included as an appendix to Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism a work by Henry Jessey (1601–63), a London pastor who had strong personal links to the closed membership Particular Baptist leadership, but whose views on the communion question were similar to those of Bunyan.37 While Jessey had come to regard believer’s baptism as the only scriptural baptism, he was unwilling to restrict the sphere of fellowship within the local church to those so baptized. Yet, Jessey was a good friend of Kiffin, and although Jessey disagreed with him over this area of ecclesiology, he kept in touch with Kiffin throughout his life.38 Bunyan must have known of this friendship. His inclusion of Jessey’s defense of open communion and open membership at the end of his tract would thus have been especially smarting for Kiffin, Jessey’s old friend. There were two replies to Bunyan’s Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism. One of these replies, that by Thomas Paul, appears to be no longer extant. The other is by Henry Danvers (c.1622–87), who had embraced the Particular Baptist position around 1651.39 Danvers’ A Treatise of

————— 34

Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, ed. Underwood, 245. The Lord’s Supper in Early English Dissent (London: Epworth Press, 1972), 99. Gordon S. Wakefield concurs with this judgment (“ ‘To be a Pilgrim’: Bunyan and the Christian Life” in Keeble, ed., John Bunyan, 126). 36 Lord’s Supper in Early English Dissent, 99. Though, cf. the remarks of Wakefield, “Bunyan and the Christian Life”, 125–26. 37 For an excellent study of Jessey’s life and career, see B.R. White, “Henry Jessey in the Great Rebellion” in R. Buick Knox, ed., Reformation, Conformity and Dissent. Essays in honour of Geoffrey Nuttall (London: Epworth Press, 1977), 132–53. Now, see also Jason G. Duesing, “Counted Worthy: The Life and Thought of Henry Jessey, 1601–1663—Puritan Chaplain, Independent and Baptist Pastor, Millenarian Politician and Prophet” (Unpublished PhD thesis, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2008). 38 White, “Henry Jessey in the Great Rebellion”, 153. 39 For two major studies of Danvers’ life and career, see G. Eric Lane, Henry Danvers: Contender for Religious Liberty (N.p.: The Fauconberg Press, 1972) and Richard L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels. Seven Nonconformists in Stuart England ([Macon, Georgia]: Mercer University Press, 1985), 157–77. 35

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Baptism (1673) is primarily a defense of believer’s baptism.40 Included in its pages, though, is a small rejoinder to Bunyan’s arguments in favor of open communion and open membership. Danvers maintained that baptism is universally regarded by both Protestants and Roman Catholics as the “entering ordinance” of the church. He thus asserted that Bunyan’s position is “contrary to all men.” Danvers found Scriptural support for closed communion primarily in the so-called Great Commission of Matthew 28 and the numerous examples of baptism in the book of Acts. Bunyan responded to Paul and Danvers the following year with what was to be his final contribution devoted to the controversy, Peaceable Principles and True (1674). Much of this treatise repeated the argumentation of his previous two works on the subject. We do learn, though, that Bunyan’s good friend John Owen (1616–83),41 the leader of the Independents, had agreed to write an “Epistle” to Bunyan’s Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, but, after pressure from Paul, Danvers, Kiffin, and possibly others, he had decided not to do so.42 To Kiffin’s Sober Discourse, issued seven years later, Bunyan made no written response. Two years before his death, though, Bunyan did return explicitly to this subject by way of a pithy poem. In A Book for Boys and Girls Bunyan gave two verses “upon the sacraments”: Two Sacraments I do believe there be, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord: Both Mysteries divine, which do to me, By Gods appointment, benefit afford: But shall they be my God? or shall I have Of them so foul and impious a Thought, To think that from the Curse they can me save? Bread, Wine, nor Water me no ransom bought.43

“The most articulate presentation of the closed membership position” in this controversy is the way that T.L. Underwood has described Kiffin’s Sober Discourse.44 Characterized by “clear logic and crisp presentation,” it is —————

40 For the following remarks about Danvers’ treatise and citations from it we are indebted to Underwood, “Introduction”, xxxiv. 41 On their friendship, see Richard L. Greaves, “John Bunyan’s “Holy War” and London Nonconformity”, The Baptist Quarterly, 26 (1975–1976), 158–68. 42 Peaceable Principles and True, ed. Underwood, 272. 43 “Upon the Sacraments” in A Book for Boys and Girls, ed. Graham Midgley, John Bunyan: The Poems (The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 6; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 212–13. For other references to this controversy in Bunyan’s later works, see Underwood, “Introduction”, xxxvi. 44 Underwood, “John Bunyan as Controversialist”, 468. On the life and ministry of Kiffin, see especially Barrie R. White, “William Kiffin—Baptist Pioneer and Citizen of London”, Baptist History and Heritage, 2 (1967), 91–103, 126; idem, “How did William Kiffin join the Baptists?”, The Baptist Quarterly, 23 (1969–1970), 201–7. For two older studies, see William Orme, Remark-

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undoubtedly aimed at Bunyan, although the Bedford pastor is never named in the work. The work opened with an epistle “To the Christian Reader,” in which Kiffin indicated why he wrote the Sober Discourse and then set forth the spirit in which his treatise was to be read. Kiffin was convinced that baptism was foundational to the Christian faith. For support, he appealed to John Owen’s understanding of the baptismal formula as found in his A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit, which had appeared only seven years before in 1674.45 In seeking to demonstrate the deity and personality of the Holy Spirit from the Scriptures, Owen had focused on, among other texts, Matthew 28:19.46 Owen argued that baptism into the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit entails being “initiated and consecrated, or dedicated, unto the service of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”47 This initial commitment to God thus lay at the heart of Christianity.48 Owen’s understanding of Matthew 28:19 in this regard was not unique to him, as Kiffin goes on to point out. For it reached back into the patristic era to authors such as the great defenders of Nicene Trinitarianism Athanasius (c.299–373) and Basil of Caesarea (c.330–79).49 With this indication of the importance of baptism, Kiffin proceeded to make clear that his reasons for writing the Sober Discourse were as a “lover of truth.” But, he pointed out, his defense of the truth was not undertaken at the expense of “love and peace.”50 He confessed that he had sought to avoid judging those who differ ————— able Passages in the Life of William Kiffin (London: Burton and Smith, 1823) and Joseph Ivimey, The Life of Mr. William Kiffin (London, 1833). B.A. Ramsbottom has written a popular, and extremely readable, biography of Kiffin: Stranger Than Fiction. The Life of William Kiffin (Harpenden, Hertfordshire: Gospel Standard Trust Publications, 1989). For a review of this book, see Michael A.G. Haykin, “The Life of William Kiffin”, Reformation Today, 119 (Jan–Feb, 1991), 23–26. See also Michael A.G. Haykin, “Kiffin, William (1616–1701)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/15521). A fresh, comprehensive study of Kiffin’s life and ministry, William Kiffen and his World, is being completed by Larry Kreitzer and is forthcoming in the series of monographs being published by the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University, Oxford. 45 “To the Christian Reader” in Sober Discourse, [4–6]. Neither this epistle nor the “Preface” are paginated. My pagination, then, has numbered each of them as if they were separate items. 46 The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (1850–53 ed.; repr. Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), III, 72–4. 47 Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit (Works, III, 73). 48 Owen’s thought is subsequently cited a number of times in the treatise (Sober Discourse, 15, 63–64]. Even as Bunyan’s use of Jessey’s tract as an appendix to his Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism could not have taken place without Bunyan’s knowledge of Jessey’s friendship with Kiffin, so Kiffin’s citations from Owen’s books must have been done with the consciousness that he was citing the words of a good friend of Bunyan in defense of his own position. 49 “To the Christian Reader” in Sober Discourse, [7–8]. 50 “To the Christian Reader” in Sober Discourse, [9].

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with him on this issue; instead, he encouraged all involved in the controversy to pray for one another “that although they differ in their light, it may not make any breach in their love.”51 Following this epistle came “the Preface.” This section of Kiffin’s work not only outlined the prosecution of the book, but it also introduced what should be regarded as a principle foundational to his entire defense of closed communion, namely, what would later be called the regulative principle of Scripture. The regulative principle, as Kiffin had received it, had been developed by the early Puritans in response to leading individuals in the Church of England who argued that when it came to the worship of the church whatever is not explicitly forbidden in Scripture is permitted. In this these Puritans took their cue from authors like the continental Reformer John Calvin (1509–64) who insisted that with regard to the worship of the church “nothing pleases God but what he himself has commanded us in his Word.”52 Similarly, the early English Reformer John Hooper (1495–1555), an important influence on the development of early Puritanism, had argued: “There is nothing to be done in the Church, but it is commanded by the Word of God, either expressly or by necessary collection.”53 Almost from the beginning of his Christian pilgrimage, Kiffin had also been determined to be fully obedient to what he believed the Scriptures taught and not accept elements in the worship and life of the church that had no warrant, either explicit or implicit, in Scripture. He viewed the regulative principle as a helpful way in which to realize that desire.54 This principle gave shape to much of his argument in the Sober Discourse, as will be seen. In the first chapter Kiffin clarified the precise areas of dispute between himself and Bunyan. Their debate was not centered around the correct subjects of baptism, for both Kiffin and Bunyan regarded believer’s baptism as the Scriptural form of baptism.55 Rather, the heart of their disagreement had ————— 51

“To the Christian Reader” in Sober Discourse, [8–9]. Daniel I (Chapters 1–6), trans. T. H. L. Parker (Calvin’s Old Testament Commentaries, vol. 20; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co./Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1993), 130. 53 Cited Iain Murray, “Scripture and ‘Things Indifferent.’ A central issue in Puritan controversy” in Diversity in Unity ([London]: The Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference, 1963), 23. 54 “To the Christian Reader” in Sober Discourse, [1–2]: “When it pleased God of his free Grace to cause me to make a serious inquiry after Jesus Christ, and to give me some taste of his pardoning Love, the sence of which did engage my heart with desires to be obedient to his will in all things. I used all indeavors both by Converse with such as were able, and also by diligently searching the Scriptures, with earnest desires of God, that I might be directed in a right way of Worship; and after some time concluded that the safest way was to follow the Foot-steps of the Flock (namely) that Order laid down by Christ and his Apostles, and practiced by the Primitive Christians in their times, which I found to be; that after conversion they were Baptized, and added to the Church, and continued in the Apostles Doctrine, Fellowship, breaking of Bread, and Prayer; according to which I thought myself bound to be Conformable […]” 55 Sober Discourse, 3. 52

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to do with “whether persons unbaptized may regularly be admitted to the Communion of the Lord’s Supper?”56 Chapter two presented four reasons as to why Kiffin believed the answer to this question must be a negative one. First, Bunyan’s position “tends to destroy the nature, ends and uses” of baptism. If those who are unbaptized were allowed to customarily partake of the Lord’s Table, did this not imply that baptism was merely an option in the Christian life?57 Then, if Kiffin and his fellow Baptists adopted Bunyan’s position, it would seem that their previous defense of believer’s baptism was “frivolous” and they themselves schismatics for refusing churchcommunion to any but those who had been baptized as believers.58 Moreover, Kiffin was convinced that believer’s baptism was the regular experience of believers in the Apostolic Church, and he and his fellow Baptists were therefore following apostolic example.59 Fourth, baptism as well as the Lord’s Supper were “positive institutions,” that is, they were institutions in which the believer must participate simply because God has so commanded in his Word. As proof Kiffin brought forward Matthew 28:19, and maintained: “To deviate from the express rule, is to be branded with the odious title of will-worship and human tradition.”60 It should be noted that the phrase “will-worship,” taken from Colossians 2:23, was commonly used by those in Puritan circles to designate practices that had no scriptural warrant in their opinion and thus were violations of the regulative principle. Chapter three adduced a number of Scriptures to support the practice of closed communion, in which argument from the regulative principle played a central role. Kiffin argued specifically that Bunyan’s position challenged the authority of Christ’s kingship in the church. As “King of his Church,” Christ has given certain laws relating to worship that are to be faithfully obeyed.61 Among these laws is the baptism of new believers. From Kiffin’s perspective, to swerve from obedience to this law “has a direct tendency to destroy all modes of worship.” For the neglect of one ordinance can easily lead to the neglect of others or even all.62 Lest Kiffin’s remarks here be considered exaggerated, it needs to be remembered that there were various sects in his day that did reject both the ordinance of baptism and that of the Lord’s Supper, for instance, the Seekers and the Quakers. In the fourth chapter Kiffin also combed through the history of Christian practice with regard to baptism and the Lord’s Table and found that Bunyan’s position was indeed something of an anomaly. In the course of citing various authors ————— 56

Sober Discourse, 8. Sober Discourse, 13–16. 58 Sober Discourse, 16. 59 Sober Discourse, 16–18. 60 Sober Discourse, 27–31. 61 Sober Discourse, 55. 62 Sober Discourse, 57–8. 57

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from the patristic era, the period of the Reformation, and that of his own day, Kiffin found that authors from all of these eras of church history uniformly maintained that “baptism is an ordinance of Christ; yea, the very first, or initiating Ordinance into Church-Fellowship, without which, no man may be regularly admitted to the Supper.”63 The fifth and final chapter answered various objections that had been raised against the practice of closed communion. Kiffin’s crisp reasoning powers were here displayed at their best as he frequently had recourse to the regulative principle. Yet, it should also be noted that on at least one occasion, his response to Bunyan’s use of 1 Corinthians 12:13, his exegesis seems rather forced.64 For Bunyan, 1 Corinthians 12:13 was a clear reference to the Spirit’s planting believers into the body of Christ, that is, the church throughout space and time, and the baptism there mentioned was a baptism of the Spirit, not water baptism. Kiffin disputed this understanding of the Pauline text. According to his reading of this text, Paul was actually referring to both ordinances: the first clause, “by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,” is a reference to water baptism; the final clause, “(we) have all been made to drink into one Spirit,” is an allusion to the Lord’s Supper. But, it should be noted, the word “baptized” and its cognates do not in themselves automatically imply water baptism (see, for instance, Mark 10:38; Luke 12:50; Acts 1:50). Moreover, Paul specifies that the baptism that he is talking about, and which all of the Corinthian believers have undergone, is a baptism by the Spirit. To what is he referring? Most probably he has in mind the one experience he knows is common to all of the Corinthians, namely, their reception of the Spirit at conversion. Kiffin’s interpretation of the final clause of 1 Corinthians 12:13 also failed to recognize that the Apostle Paul is here simply using another metaphor to refer to this experience of conversion. Moreover, nowhere else in the New Testament is the metaphor of “drink” used to refer to the Lord’s Table. And the tense of “drink” in the Greek indicates that only a single, once and for all action is in view.65 Kiffin’s exegesis of this verse seems to be shaped more by the overall argument of his book than by close attention to the Scriptural text. Eight years after he had published his Sober Discourse, Kiffin signed his agreement to the Second London Confession, in which no mention, either explicit or implicit, is made of closed communion. Moreover, the Particular Baptist Assembly at which this Confession was adopted passed a resolution to the effect that the churches were to be given the liberty to follow their own judgment when it came to open or closed communion. The resolution read as follows: “In those things wherein one church differs from ————— 63

Sober Discourse, 86–7. Page 87 is actually wrongly numbered as page 89. Sober Discourse, 132–38. 65 This discussion of 1 Corinthians 12:13 is indebted to Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987), 604–5. 64

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another church in their principles or practices, in point of communion, […] we cannot, shall not impose upon any particular church therein, but leave every church to their own liberty to walk together as they have received from the Lord.”66 A.C. Underwood and Joshua Thompson have understood this resolution to mean that while fellowship and recognition was to be extended to open communion churches with closed membership, it was not to be extended to those churches which, like Bunyan’s, held to both open communion and open membership.67 Yet, as B.R. White has pointed out, there was at least one open membership church which sent a representative to the Particular Baptist Assembly in 1689, namely, Broadmead Church in Bristol.68 Believer’s baptism and a personal profession of faith before the church were the normal requirements for admission to membership in this church, but on occasion some were received into membership solely on the basis of a personal testimony.69 It was not until 1733 that the membership of Broadmead Church was composed solely of those who had been baptized as believers.70 By 1689, therefore, Kiffin was clearly willing to agree to differ on this issue. To what degree, of course, depends on the interpretation given to the above cited resolution. At the same time, however, it is important to note that there is no evidence at all to indicate that Kiffin altered his own convictions regarding closed communion and closed membership. And his Sober Discourse, built around the regulative principle and a due recognition of the importance placed on baptism in the New Testament, remained a classic defense of those convictions.

12.3 The Hymn-Singing Controversy of the 1690s When the London pastor-theologian Benjamin Keach introduced the singing of a hymn in the Horsleydown church at the conclusion of the Lord’s Supper in 1673—claiming Matthew 26:30 as scriptural warrant—only two

————— 66

Cited Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists (London, 1811), I, 490. A. C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists (London: The Baptist Union Publication Dept. (Kingsgate Press), 1947), 129; Joshua Thompson, “The Communion Controversy and Irish Baptists”, Irish Baptist Historical Society Journal, 20 (1987–1988), 29–30. 68 “Open and Closed Membership among English and Welsh Baptists”, The Baptist Quarterly, 24 (1971–1972), 332; idem, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (London: The Baptist Historical Society, 1983), 9. 69 The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687, ed. Roger Hayden (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1974), 52–3. Kiffin’s relationship with the Broadmead Church appears to have been cordial; see White, English Baptists, 112. 70 Ban, “Was John Bunyan a Baptist?”, 373. 67

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members of the church expressed any open disapproval.71 After following this practice for six years, the congregation agreed to sing a hymn on “public thanksgiving days,” which they did for the next fourteen years. During this time, according to Keach’s son-in-law, Baptist historian Thomas Crosby (1685–1750), “some five or six dissented” from what they evidently considered a novel practice with no scriptural backing.72 Finally, at a church meeting on March 1, 1691, a large majority of church members voted to have a hymn sung at the conclusion of the service every Sunday. Despite Keach’s decision to locate the hymn at the end of the service to allow those who opposed the practice to leave before the singing, the move to weekly singing provoked furious opposition. In the end, twenty-two members left the church and joined a congregation that Keach’s friend Hanserd Knollys had pastored for many years previously, a congregation that opposed the singing of hymns.73 After a short time, the disaffected group founded a new work that met at Maze Pond where leaders drew up articles of faith that condemned congregational singing in a terse sentence, calling it “a gross error equall with common nationall Sett forme Prayer.”74 The Maze Pond church maintained its opposition to hymn-singing until 1736.75 The disenchanted group at Horsleydown was not alone in its convictions that hymn-singing was an “unbiblical contrivance.”76 Earlier Reformed theologians had also debated this question and the evidence available reveals that they reached no firm consensus with regard to exclusive Psalmody in corporate worship. For example, the influential British theologian, John Ball (1585–1640), argued for the singing of uninspired hymns in his work, A friendly triall of the grounds tending to separation in a plain and modest dispute touching the lawfulnesse of a stinted liturgie —————

71 Thomas Crosby, The History of the English Baptists (London, 1740), IV, 299. On Keach’s life and ministry, see especially James Barry Vaughn, “Public Worship and Practical Theology in the Work of Benjamin Keach (1640–1704)” (Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of St. Andrews, 1989); idem, “Benjamin Keach” in Timothy George and David S. Dockery, ed., Baptist Theologians (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1990), 49–76; Austin Walker, The Excellent Benjamin Keach (Dundas, Ontario: Joshua Press, 2004); D.B. Riker, A Catholic Reformed Theologian: Federalism and Baptism in the Thought of Benjamin Keach, 1640–1704 (Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 35; Milton Keynes/Colorado Springs, Colorado/Hyderabad: Paternoster, 2009). 72 Crosby, History of the English Baptists, IV, 299. 73 Michael A.G. Haykin, Kiffin, Knollys and Keach: Rediscovering Our English Baptist Heritage (Leeds: Reformation Today Trust, 1996), 92. 74 Murdina D. MacDonald, “London Calvinistic Baptists 1689–1727: Tensions Within a Dissenting Community under Toleration” (Unpublished D. Phil. Thesis, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, 1982), 83–108. 75 Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), I, 310. 76 For what follows in this specific paragraph, the authors are indebted to the editor Mark Jones.

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and set form of prayer (1640).77 Similarly, Edward Leigh (1603–71), who favored a Reformed episcopacy like his friend, James Ussher (1581–1656), maintained: As we may lawfully sing Scripture psalms, so also Songs and Psalms of our own inditing (say some) agreeable to Scripture, Sing unto the Lord a new Song, framed on a fresh occasion, therefore 1 Cor. 14.26. a Psalm is named among those things which they had for the use of the Church. For seeing a Psalm is but a musical praier for the most part, therefore we may make Songs for our selves agreeable to the Word of God as well as prayers, and God knowing the efficacie of Poetry and Musick, to help memory and stirre up affection doth allow his people to use it for their spiritual comfort as well as natural. The Apostle speaketh of Psalms, Hymns and spiritual Songs, Ephes. 5.19. & Col. 3.16. Who can shew any reason to limit his speech to Scripturepsalms? Why may not one praise God in a Song for our deliverance in [15]88, or the Gun pouder treason?78

The Presbyterian Thomas Ford (1598–1674), on the other hand, argued strongly for singing the Psalms, though he did make the following concession with regard to non-inspired “psalms”: I return to answer the former objection concerning singing of Psalmes composed by an ordinary and common gift, as God in his providence gives occasion. And to this I say that I am not so much against composing as imposing; when men set up their own new songs, and shut out David’s Psalms. Suppose it lawfull for men of spirituall mindes to endite a Psalm, and then commend it to others, and sing it; yet it will not follow, that therefore we must not sing the Psalmes of David.79

Ford seems to be arguing for inclusive Psalmody, not exclusive Psalmody, even though he exhibited a clear preference for Davidic Psalm singing.80 When Keach took his stand for the singing of uninspired hymnody, he was strongly opposed by members of his own church as well as by several other prominent London Particular Baptists, including William Kiffin, Robert Steed (died c.1695) – co-pastor with the pro-congregational singing Hanserd Knollys – and Isaac Marlow, a wealthy jeweller and prominent —————

77 A friendly triall of the grounds tending to separation in a plain and modest dispute touching the lawfulnesse of a stinted liturgie and set form of prayer (London, 1640), especially 54–83. 78 A systeme or body of divinity (London, 1654), 610. The two historical examples at the close refer to the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the attempted assassination of James I of England, which in the seventeenth century was often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot. 79 Singing of Psalmes the Duty of Christians under the New Testament, or A vindication of That Gospel-Ordinance in V. Sermons upon Ephesians 5.19 (London: F. Eaglesfield, 1659), 19– 20. 80 For a helpful discussion–though not without its problems–of this larger debate of what is appropriate to sing in Christian worship, see Nick Needham, “Westminster and Worship: Psalms, Hymns? And Musical Instruments?” in Ligon Duncan, ed., The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century (Fearn, Tain, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2004), 2:223–306.

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member of the Mile End Green Baptist Church.81 Although Marlow was not a member of Keach’s church, he soon assumed the leadership of those who opposed Keach.82 The well-to-do businessman proved an insatiable opponent of Keach, publishing more than eleven books and tracts during the course of the controversy, which encompassed six years (1690–1696). Perhaps the pivotal Marlow book was his 1690 polemic A Brief Discourse Concerning Singing, the main arguments of which will be considered later in this chapter. On the other hand, Keach had both the majority of his church members behind him as a well as a number of notable key Baptist allies, including the London minister Hercules Collins (1646/7–1702).83 Though the controversy was an intramural debate among Particular Baptists, the language that the two sides employed reveals that the issue generated heat reminiscent of that which emanated from the fires of the Reformation at its outset. Marlow claimed he was labeled a “Ridiculous Scribbler,” “Brasen-Forehead,” “Ignoramus,” “Enthusiast,” and perhaps, most offensive of all, “Quaker.”84 But Marlow could give as good as he got! He did not hesitate to call his opponents “a coterie of book burning papists,” for they were seeking to undermine the Reformation by endorsing a practice that had no scriptural foundation.85 So hot was the rhetoric that a committee reporting to the Particular Baptist Assembly in 1692 rebuked both sides and urged upon them charity and mutual forbearance. Moreover, this committee begged that all the books and pamphlets pertaining to the controversy should be taken out of circulation and no more written.86 In some ways, though, this decision was too late for the Particular Baptist community in London was torn asunder by the controversy. In the words of Murdina MacDonald, it “effectively destroyed the capacity of the Calvinistic Baptists as a whole to establish a national organization at this time […] the extent of the division is well revealed by the fact that the community’s two elder statesman, Hanserd Knollys and William Kiffin, found themselves on opposing sides.”87 The London General Assembly’s involvement eventually brought calm to the waters and public controversy over the issue had generally subsided by 1696. ————— 81

Haykin, Kiffin, Knollys and Keach, 92. Walker, Excellent Benjamin Keach, 275–303. 83 “An Appendix concerning the Ordinance of Singing” in his An Orthodox Catechism: Being the Sum of Christian Religion, Contained in the Law and the Gospel. Published for preventing the Canker and Poison of Heresy and Error (London, 1680). See also Michael A.G. Haykin and Steve Weaver, ed., “Devoted to the Service of the Temple”: Piety, Persecution, and Ministry in the Writings of Hercules Collins (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2007), 79–84. 84 Haykin, Kiffin, Knollys and Keach, 93. 85 Haykin, Kiffin, Knollys and Keach, 93. 86 Hugh Martin, Benjamin Keach: Pioneer of Congregational Hymn-singing (London: Independent Press, 1961), 13. 87 MacDonald, “London Calvinistic Baptists”, 69, 63. 82

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12.4 Isaac Marlow and His Opposition to Hymn-Singing At the centre of the debate were two key works by the main protagonists: Marlow’s A Brief Discourse Concerning Singing in the Public Worship of God in the Gospel Church (1690) and Keach’s The Breach Repaired in God’s Worship: or, Singing of Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, proved to be an Holy Ordinance of Jesus Christ (1691). Marlow maintained, first of all, that the use of pre-written hymns and songs produces a deadening effect similar to reading from a prayer book, a practice that he believed quenched the Holy Spirit.88 He was also convinced that examples of singing in the New Testament involved the exercise of an extraordinary special spiritual gift. Since these gifts had ceased after the canonization of Scripture, the examples of singing found in the New Testament did not serve as a valid precedent for congregational song.89 Further, Marlow insisted that congregational singing compromised the purity of the church because it might well include the hosannas of unregenerate individuals and women, the latter of which, according to 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 1 Timothy 2:11–12, are not to utter a single word in the public worship of the church. Finally, Marlow posited that public singing in the early church involved only a single voice and did not include the congregation.90 A key factor that made the dispute profoundly acrimonious was the fact that both sides believed they were adhering closely to Scripture and allowing God to set the parameters of his own worship. Marlow clearly asserted the foundational principle of his worship epistemology all the while rejecting any and all congregational singing, even the Psalms of David. Such singing of the Psalms of David is no where instituted, ordained or practiced, either by Christ or his Holy apostles; there is no instance can be given in the New Testament that any of David’s Psalms were ever sung by any persons or churches, or that Christ or his Holy Apostles when ever they had occasion to translate any one text out of the Hebrew into the Greek Tongue, did ever turn them into Metre; and therefore finding no Institution nor Example, we have no Warrant for the Singing of them.91

But if Marlow and his allies held to the regulative principle of worship, how was it that they came to an understanding so different from that of Keach? Marlow read Scripture differently than Keach in at least three fundamental ways as it applied to the regulative principle. ————— 88

Marlow, Brief Discourse, 15–21. Marlow, Brief Discourse, 15–21. 90 Haykin, Kiffin, Knollys and Keach, 93. 91 Marlow, Brief Discourse, 15. 89

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First, Marlow asserted that there was no singing instituted before David’s time. Regarding the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, for example, Marlow viewed it not as a song that was sung (and a practice to be emulated) but as merely one of the “divers manners” in which God chose to speak during Old Testament times, “divers manners” being similar to “Dreams, Visions, Words, Songs, and Music,” now fulfilled in God’s final word, his incarnate Son.92 Marlow also held that the Psalms of David that were sung in temple-worship, while “suitable to all the rest of the Levitical Ceremonial, and external instituted Worship of God in the Old-Testament Church,” were destined to pass away with the inauguration of the New Covenant.93 Marlow further argued that the Solomonic Temple witnessed only outward, formal ceremonies. These were “worldly” and “carnal ordinances,” which, though then celebrated with God’s approval, were destined to disappear with their fulfillment in Christ.94 Marlow thus dismissed singing as a “carnal” and temporal ordinance, a practice that, if allowed into a New Testament congregation, would be tantamount to reinstituting the Levitical system of worship. […] carnal Ordinances [were] a Figure for the time then present, and Pattern of Heavenly things, and [a] Shadow of good things to come; but not the very Image of the things; and were imposed on them until the time of Reformation, and change of the Priesthood, Law, Temple, and Service, or Worship of God; which things being all removed by Christ […]95

Thus, if a contemporary Christian community adopted the singing of the Davidic Psalms, Marlow reasoned that the church must also use the very instruments, and only those instruments, named in the Psalter—“Cymbals, Harps, Psalteries and Trumpets”—to accompany its singing.96 Since such instruments were for the Levitical worship of the Temple only, Marlow concluded that the Old Testament Psalms should not be sung in New Testament Gospel worship.97 Arguing from the lesser to the greater, Marlow then concluded that if the Psalms “be not fit for Gospel worship,” then “precomposed songs and hymns” are certainly forbidden.98 The New Testament in Marlow’s view also forbade the corporate use of Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs because they were instituted neither by precept nor example in the New Covenant. While Keach buttressed his case in favour of congregational singing with texts such as Colossians 3:16 and Ephesians 5:19–20, Marlow argued that, in each case the “admonishing one ————— 92

Marlow, Brief Discourse, 10. Marlow, Brief Discourse, 10. 94 Marlow, Brief Discourse, 10. 95 Marlow, Brief Discourse, 12–13. 96 Marlow, Brief Discourse, 12–13. 97 Marlow, Brief Discourse, 14. 98 Marlow, Brief Discourse, 14. 93

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another in Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” of which Paul writes is singing that is merely inward, inaudible and spiritual, not vocal and verbal.99 Marlow interpreted singing as an inward exercise of the mind and soul.100 From Keach’s perspective, Marlow’s views in this regard were indistinguishable from Quakerism in its abandonment of all material ordinances.101 Marlow was prepared to concede that solo singing might be done in New Testament worship by individuals who were specially gifted by the Holy Spirit for the task. Such corresponded to Levites gifted for singing during Old Testament times.102 Apart from this concession, though, Marlow was adamant that corporate singing was wholly absent from the landscape of New Covenant history. In a second major form of argumentation, Marlow maintained that the human composition of hymns in forms to be “imposed” on the church was to use words in the worship of God not taken directly from Scripture. It would serve to introduce formalism into the worship of God, an unbiblical innovation that quenched the Spirit and corrupted worship.103 Marlow attempted to use Keach’s distaste for prayer books and pre-written prayers to expose an inconsistency in his case for congregational hymn-singing. So he asked, “If the essence of Prayer be inwardly in the Spirit, why not Singing also? […] The Apostle expresses them alike, because their essences are alike inwardly in the Soul or Spirit.”104 One obvious problem with Marlow’s rejection of singing words not taken directly for Scripture is that of extemporaneous prayer and preaching, which, by their very nature, involve words beyond the Bible. In The Breach Repaired in God’s Worship, Keach exploited this weakness in Marlow’s case but Marlow retorted that Scripture sets forth preaching as a genuine element in the corporate worship of God because Jesus himself engaged in it. While steadfastly rejecting corporate singing as “formalism”, Marlow approved both extemporaneous prayer and preaching in his answer to Keach: I do acknowledge and assert that we should not neglect Prayer, till we have an extraordinary Gift or Impulse of Spirit unto Prayer; but we should constantly go to God as we can, not only for Continuance of those Mercies we have, but for further supplies of our inward and outward Wants, which are the chiefest part of Prayer […] a Form of preaching is not Example for a Form of Singing: if it be, why not of Prayer also? Which you deny, because there is Reason for a Form of Preaching from the

————— 99

Marlow, Brief Discourse, 16. Walker, Excellent Benjamin Keach, 294. 101 Keach, The Breach Repaired in God’s Worship: or, Singing of Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, proved to be an Holy Ordinance of Jesus Christ (London, 1691), 122. 102 Marlow, Brief Discourse, 5–9. 103 Isaac Marlow, Silvanus Heathcote and others, Truth Cleared: Or a brief Narrative on the Rise, Occasion, and Management of the present Controversy concerning Singing in the Worship of God. (London, 1692), 1–43. 104 Truth Cleared, 45–7. 100

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Word of God, and Example of Christ himself, who read a Text, and then preached from it; though as he was not, so others are not limited to that, or any other particular Forms; yet it is lawful for them, and required of them […]105

Finally, other concerns of Marlow were somewhat more pragmatic. He feared that congregational singing would give occasion for unregenerate persons to pollute Baptist bodies with their “carnal brayings” and that it would empower women to employ their voices in church, a practice he believed strictly forbidden by Scripture.106 Marlow equated singing with the teaching office and thus drew his conclusion that the mouths of women must be stopped from singing. I therefore greatly marvel that any Man should assert and admit such a practice as Womens Singing; and that any woman should presume to sing vocally in the Church of Christ, when he positively and plainly forbids them in his Word: for Singing is Teaching, Coloss. 3:16 and speaking Ephes. 5:19, both of which are plainly forbidden to Women in the Church. And besides, they are commanded to learn in silence with all subjection. And if this be not Truth, I am at a loss how to find it. And such as deny the Authority of these Scriptures to forbid Womens Singing, do of necessity destroy the Authority of the Word of God, and leave us destitute of a Rule of Worship.107

Though employing Scripture, and eager to be found under its authority, Marlow sometimes abandoned sound reasoning in his arguments, prompting Keach to lampoon his case as a “mighty man of straw you have made and set up.”108 For example, Marlow quoted 1 Peter 1:8 to prove that the essence of singing is in the heart, where one makes a melody that expresses “unspeakable joy,” which cannot be communicated by “Words of a tongue.”109 Consequently Marlow concluded that Peter’s words mitigate against congregational singing because “though vocal Joy and Singing may be teaching to others, yet the Speaking to yourselves (in your own Hearts) in Psalms and Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, singing and making Melody in your hearts to the Lord, is Musick of an higher strain, surpassing all verbal and vocal Melody in the ears of God; as unspeakable joy and rejoicing full of Glory, excels that which is speakable.”110 Another specimen of such curious argumentation is seen in the link Marlow made between hymns and the gift of speaking in tongues. Appealing to 1 Corinthians 14, Marlow believed any song was like tongues: only two or three could practice it and another would be required to interpret it. If singing could be used, it must ————— 105

Truth Cleared, 46. Truth Cleared, 21. 107 Truth Cleared, 21. 108 Breach Repaired, 122. 109 Brief Discourse, 8. 110 Brief Discourse, 9. 106

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be as tongues, requiring interpretation. If all practiced speaking in tongues – or hymn-singing – there would be no one left to interpret.111

12.5 Benjamin Keach and an Old Ordinance Reclaimed Turning to Keach’s arguments, we find that he was deeply convinced that singing was an holy ordinance of Jesus Christ and, as Crosby, wrote, “laboured earnestly with a great deal of prudence and caution, to convince his people thereof.”112 In fact, Keach traced the “want of God’s presence” in the churches to, in part, “the neglect of this great duty” of corporate singing.113 In recovering this ordinance, Keach clearly saw himself as furthering the Reformation with Sola Scriptura as the organic principle of his doctrine of corporate worship. Reformation, ‘tis evident, is a hard and difficult Work, and ever was; ‘tis no easy thing to restore lost Ordinances, I mean, such as have for many Years been neglected, and strangely corrupted, through that Antichristian Darkness that hath for so many Ages and Generations spread over the Earth […] I must confess, I my self, when first God enlightened me into his Truth, was an opposer of this Sacred Ordinance; but it was not for want of Ignorance, and partly through Prejudice, perhaps to such who I esteem, and ever looked upon since that time, a corrupt people false in their ChurchConstitution, and polluted with human Innovation, or Inventions of Men: the abuse of an Ordinance is subject to raise Mens Spirits to a dislike of the thing it self. But, blessed be God, I have, for near twenty Years last past, been fully convinced of the Truth of the Ordinance I now contend for, and have an equal esteem for it, (through Grace) as I have for any other Truth, knowing every Word of God is pure; and have found no little comfort in the practice of it, publickly in the Church, and in private also.114

Keach did not hold his view in the abstract. He wrote and published hymns for most of his adult life, penning more than five hundred songs, three hundred of which he published in a 1691 hymnbook entitled Spiritual Melody.115 Evidence that Keach was thoroughly convinced that Scripture comprehensively regulates worship is found in the way these hymns are shot through with the language, categories and theology of the Bible.116 In ————— 111

Marlow, Brief Discourse, 49. Crosby, History of the English Baptists, IV, 298. 113 Breach Repaired, 176. 114 Breach Repaired, 3–4. 115 David W. Music, “The Hymns of Benjamin Keach: An Introductory Study,” The Hymn (July 1983), 147–54. 116 While Keach was an undisputed pioneer of English hymnody, Music points out that his hymns themselves were generally dismissed as “doggerel” because of their clumsy phrasing and overall lack of beauty and symmetry. While his hymns have achieved some usefulness in North 112

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the introduction to this hymnal, Keach mentioned his hope that his hymns will “be all of use to the Reader, all being congruous with God’s Word, and according to the analogy of Faith.”117 In recovering the lost ordinance of corporate song, the crucial texts for Keach were Colossians 3:16 and Ephesians 5:19–20, which spoke of “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” and urged “singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”118 The main thrust of his argument, as stated earlier, was that the singing of Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs was a holy ordinance of God, a permanent part of Gospel worship. Contrary to Marlow, Keach saw these two Pauline texts as providing sufficient and necessary warrant for congregational singing. His argument, however, was not limited to simply two texts, but sought to account for the entire scope of Scripture. The singing of Psalms and hymns was “an ordinance of Christ from the Practice of the Saints before the Law, in the Law, and under the Gospel.”119 That singing was practiced before the law was evident from Exodus 15:1–2 where Moses and the children of Israel sang unto the Lord.120 Under the law, Scripture gives a multitude of instances in which God was worshiped through singing such as the Psalms of David and in the examples of Hezekiah, Asaph and Nehemiah.121 In the Gospel dispensation, Keach points to the songs of Zacharias and Elizabeth, the singing of Simeon and Mary, mother of the Lord, to the praises of Paul and Silas, and finally to Christ himself, who sang a hymn following the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.122 The latter text (Matthew 26:30) provided clear precedent in Keach’s mind to declare singing an ordinance of Christ. In his words: Did not Christ sing an Hymn after the Supper? Would he have left that as a Pattern to us, and annexed it to such a pure Gospel-Ordinance, had it been a Ceremony, and only belonging to the Jewish Worship? Or would the Apostle Paul have given, by the Authority of the Holy Ghost, such a Precept to the Church of Colosse to sing Psalms and etc., whom he strives so much to take off from Jewish Rites, Days, and Ceremonies? Had singing of Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs been a Jewish Ceremony, he would not have done thus. This is sufficient to convince any sober and unbiased Person, i.e. that Singing Praises to God is a Gospel-Duty; and that it did not belong to the Jews, in the Days of the Old Testament.123

————— America, Music shows that they generally failed to have much influence outside Keach’s personal range of influence (“Hymns of Benjamin Keach,” 148). 117 Breach Repaired, 3. 118 Breach Repaired, 5–15. 119 Breach Repaired, 41. 120 Breach Repaired, 41. 121 Breach Repaired, 44. 122 Breach Repaired, 44. 123 Breach Repaired, 130.

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Besides, said Keach, if the angels sang at creation as Job 38 declares, then it is the duty of men to sing because singing is an act of divine worship and an expression of joy.124 Singing of Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs was thus practiced throughout redemptive history and was not abrogated in the New Covenant. As for Marlow’s argument against the singing of Psalms, Keach noted that since 2 Timothy 3:16 teaches that all Scripture is breathed forth by the Holy Spirit, “then the Book of Psalms” is inspired in the same way “for instruction by singing the Psalms too,” else, “may you now as well say they are of no use to us?”125 And regarding Marlow’s fear about using “human compositions” in the worship of God, Keach compared hymn-singing to preaching: both were divinely-ordained elements of worship with the content of both also governed by Scripture. The content of a sermon “must be agreeable and congruous with the Word of God […] and provable therefrom, or else ’tis human.”126 In the same way, “in the compiling of a Hymn, it must be as to the matter, the Word of Christ.”127 Keach demonstrated the reductionistic manner of Marlow’s definition of the essence of singing – adoration not in spoken words but in the heart – by arguing that a melodic voice must be added for an expression of praise properly to be called singing. Keach showed how spiritualizing away a clearly-prescribed element of worship leads to a similar abolishment of all others. Our Sermons are no more made for us in God’s Word than our Hymns are, and we have equal direction in both these weighty cases; and I must tell you, this way of arguing you use is enough, if people did observe it, to overthrow all visible Worship and Ordinances, unless we could make it appear, that we had the immediate extraordinary help of the Spirit in the discharge of them. Away, saith one, with your carnal and human preaching, tis a Form invented and done by Art, will you call this Gospelpreaching? The Apostles spake as they were moved by a mighty Spirit within them; you must preach by immediate Inspiration and not precomposed Sermons, or else your sermons are formal. Thus you open a Door for Quakerism, and throw Stumbling blocks before the weak: I intreat you to consider of it.128

As to Marlow’s concern that congregational singing would include the voices of non-Christians, Keach pointed out that there were unbelievers in the church at Corinth and that singing praises to God is a moral duty that is required of every human being whom God has created for the distinct purpose of His own glory.129 Regarding the prohibition of women to speak ————— 124

Walker, Excellent Benjamin Keach, 294. Breach Repaired, 130. 126 Breach Repaired, 136. 127 Breach Repaired, 136. 128 Breach Repaired, 137. 129 Breach Repaired, 105–8, 120. 125

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in church, Keach pointed out that if Marlow pressed his case, then women would not be allowed to give an account of their conversion before the church prior to their being admitted to church membership. Keach argued that singing is not a violation of 1 Timothy 2:13, for singing does not entail female usurpation of male authority in the church. Moreover, women must participate because it is a moral duty commanded of all persons (not only those who exhibit a divine gift for it as Marlow argued), whether male or female.130 This text from the Pastorals does not utterly prohibit women from speaking before the congregation.

12.6 The Outcome During the controversy both Keach and Marlow requested a public debate about the issue and for a brief time in the early 1690s, it appeared such a dispute might take place. However, any hope of a debate disappeared when the two men reached a stalemate over the rules that would govern such an event. Keach and Marlow exchanged a number of terse letters for several months and both went so far as to appoint four “brethren” each who would meet together and examine their written works on hymn-singing.131 However, this also left Keach and Marlow at odds when Marlow demanded that Keach strike William Collins from his list of appointees because Marlow felt Collins had slandered him in the course of the controversy.132 By 1696, the furor over hymn-singing among the Particular Baptists was essentially over. That year, Marlow distributed The Controversie of Singing Brought to an End in which he conceded that singing of some type was taught in Scripture. However, congregational singing, in his mind, was not. The voice could sing but not in church with others.133 To Marlow, there was a distinct difference in extemporaneous solo singing and lined-out hymns sung by an agreeing congregation. In Marlow’s opinion, there were far too many spiritual dangers inherent in the latter.134 But, if one could lift a solo voice to God, a group effort to sing praises seemed the next logical step.135 No matter what argument Marlow marshaled, Keach had won. While ————— 130

Breach Repaired, 141–42. These letters give profound illumination into the personalities and tactics of the two men and were published in 1691 by Marlow under the title Truth Cleared. The document is quoted earlier in this work. See note 100. 132 Marlow, Truth Cleared, 9. 133 The Controversie of Singing Brought to an End (London, 1696), 3–4. As David A. Copeland notes, Marlow’s argument was similar to that of the General Baptists. See his Benjamin Keach and the Development of Baptist Traditions of the Seventeenth Century (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 139. 134 Controversie of Singing Brought to an End, 4. 135 Copeland, Benjamin Keach, 139. 131

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twenty-two members of his church left, dozens remained. And even though only a few more than twenty churches condoned hymn-singing at the outset of the controversy, most of the leaders of the London Particular Baptist churches stood with Keach, including such venerable men as Hanserd Knollys and Hercules Collins. Once the public controversy between Keach and Marlow subsided, each side pursued their own course. The hymn-singing Baptists rapidly gained ground, and by the close of the seventeenth century the use of hymns was well on its way to become a generally recognized part of public worship among the Particular Baptists. The breakaway church at Maze Pond, on the other hand, maintained its resistance to congregational singing throughout the first third of the eighteenth century. But in 1736 the body adopted congregational singing when the pastor it called refused to come unless the church agreed to reform its practice in favor of corporate singing.136 Marlow’s final word on the matter can be found in an unpublished manuscript entitled A Treatise of a Regular Gospel Church that has just come to light.137 Written in his “three and sixtieth year,” that is 1712, he remained unrepentant about the stand he had taken with regard to congregational singing: I have allwayes been well satisfied with what I have published in my severall printed Treatises and particularly with what Relates to the Controversy of Singing and believe that Christ will own it for a just defence of the Truth and hope to dye in the faith of it: and that it shall outlive all the unjust dealings it has met withal in my Adversaries printed books and papers and remain a lasting witness against the backsliders and the apostacy of our day.138

Actually Marlow was wrong. His works have been all but forgotten, and his position regarded as a mere theological curiosity. The future would lie with Keach’s position, and his defence of hymn-singing would come to be regarded as a key turning-point in Baptist patterns of worship.139

————— 136

Watts, Dissenters, I, 310. The authors are indebted for what follows about this work by Marlow to Revd. Kennedy Hart, pastor of Cradley Chapel, Malvern, Worcester, who has been doing research among some of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts held by Leominster Baptist Church, Leominster, Herefordshire. Among these manuscripts Revd. Hart discovered Marlow’s A Treatise of a Regular Gospel Church (Unpublished handwritten ms., c.1712), which may well be his final work. Revd. Hart and the authors wish to thank Rev. Derek Simpson of Leominster Baptist Church for access to this document. 138 A Treatise of a Regular Gospel Church, 5. 139 See, for example, Hugh T. McElrath, “Turning Points in the Story of Baptist Church Music,” Baptist History and Heritage, 12 (1974), 4–13. 137

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McKelvey, Robert J. Histories that Mansoul and Her Wars Anatomize: The Drama of Redemption in John Bunyan’s Holy War (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). Iain Murray, “Scripture and ‘Things Indifferent.’ A central issue in Puritan controversy” in Diversity in Unity ([London]: The Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference, 1963), 15–35. Music, David W. “The Hymns of Benjamin Keach: An Introductory Study,” The Hymn (July 1983), 147–154. Needham, Nick. “Westminster and Worship: Psalms, Hymns? And Musical Instruments?” in Ligon Duncan, ed., The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century (Fearn, Tain, Rossshire: Christian Focus Publications, 2004), 2:223–306. Poe, Harry L. “John Bunyan’s Controversy With the Baptists”, Baptist History and Heritage, 23, no.2 (April, 1988), 25–35. Ramsbottom, B.A. Stranger Than Fiction. The Life of William Kiffin (Harpenden, Hertfordshire: Gospel Standard Trust Publications, 1989). Renihan, James M. True Confessions: Baptist Documents in the Reformed Family (Owensboro, Kentucky: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2004). Riker, D.B. A Catholic Reformed Theologian: Federalism and Baptism in the Thought of Benjamin Keach, 1640–1704 (Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 35; Milton Keynes/Colorado Springs, Colorado/Hyderabad: Paternoster, 2009). Thompson, Joshua. “The Communion Controversy and Irish Baptists”, Irish Baptist Historical Society Journal, 20 (1987–1988), 26–35. Underwood, A.C. A History of the English Baptists (London: The Baptist Union Publication Dept. [Kingsgate Press], 1947). Underwood, T.L. “‘It pleased me much to contend’: John Bunyan as Controversialist”, Church History, 57 (1988), 456–469. Vaughn, James Barry. “Public Worship and Practical Theology in the Work of Benjamin Keach (1640-1704)” (Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of St. Andrews, 1989). _____. “Benjamin Keach” in Timothy George and David S. Dockery, ed., Baptist Theologians (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1990), 49–76. Wakefield, Gordon S. “‘To be a Pilgrim’: Bunyan and the Christian Life” in N.H. Keeble, ed., John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 111–136. _____. Bunyan the Christian (London: HarperCollins, 1992). Walker, Austin. The Excellent Benjamin Keach (Dundas, Ontario: Joshua Press, 2004). Watts, Michael. The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), vol. I. White, B.R. “William Kiffin—Baptist Pioneer and Citizen of London”, Baptist History and Heritage, 2 (1967), 91–103, 126. _____. “How did William Kiffin join the Baptists?”, The Baptist Quarterly, 23 (1969–1970), 201– 7. _____.“Open and Closed Membership among English and Welsh Baptists”, The Baptist Quarterly, 24 (1971–1972), 330–334. _____. The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (London: The Baptist Historical Society, 1983). _____. “Henry Jessey in the Great Rebellion” in R. Buick Knox, ed., Reformation, Conformity and Dissent. Essays in honour of Geoffrey Nuttall (London: Epworth Press, 1977), 132–153. _____. “The Fellowship of Believers: Bunyan and Puritanism” in N.H. Keeble, ed., John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1–19.

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About the Authors

Dr. Richard A. Muller (PhD Duke) is the P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rev. Alan D. Strange (Drs. Wales Evangelical School of Theology) is Associate Professor of Church History at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, Dyer, Indiana. Dr. Hunter Powell (PhD Cambridge) recently completed his PhD thesis on Puritan ecclesiology at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Crawford Gribben (PhD Strathclyde) is the Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture, School of English, Trinity College Dublin. Dr. J. V. Fesko (PhD Aberdeen) is Associate Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary California, Escondido, California. Dr. Jonathan D. Moore (PhD Cambridge) is an occasional lecturer in Historical Theology. Dr. Mark A. Herzer (PhD Westminster Theological Seminary) is Lecturer in Systematic Theology at John Wycliffe Theological College in cooperation with North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa Dr. Mark Jones (PhD Leiden) is Research Associate, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. Dr. Carl Trueman (PhD Aberdeen) is Professor of Historical Theology and Church History, Westminter Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia. Dr. Robert J. McKelvey (PhD Westminster Theological Seminary) is Extraordinary Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. Dr. Joel R. Beeke (PhD Westminster Theological Seminary) is President and Professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin (ThD University of Toronto) is Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. C. Jeffrey Robinson (PhD The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) completed his PhD at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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Index

Ahenakaa, Anjov, 237 Ames, William, 95, 100, 120, 180, 263, 265, 266, 268, 269, 271, 319, 326, 327 Amyraut, Moises, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 30, 117, 152, 160, 169, 177, 182, 206, 309, 310, 317, 320, 322, 323 Aquinas, Thomas, 11, 26, 171, 207, 208, 217, 219, 220, 323 Arminius, Jacob, 17, 18, 19, 48, 118, 121, 175, 206, 212, 221, 245, 254, 309, 310, 317, 320, 323, 326 Armstrong, Brian G., 13, 14, 15, 16, 26, 27, 29, 30, 117, 182, 206, 209, 309, 317, 320, 322, 323 Arrowsmith, John, 44, 264 Baker, J. Wayne, 227 Balcanqual, Walter, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 117 Ball, John, 25, 164, 172, 173, 177, 178, 264, 265, 266, 282, 285, 297, 319, 321, 326, 330, 331 Barth, Karl, 107, 116, 118, 121, 122, 221, 318 Bavinck, Herman, 107, 112, 118, 121, 123, 251, 318, 324 Baxter, 236 Baxter, Richard, 10, 23, 37, 40, 83, 84, 96, 126, 127, 130, 133, 134, 136, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 160, 176, 178, 206, 224, 225, 230, 233, 235, 236, 238, 242, 246, 247, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261, 311, 316, 317, 319, 323, 324, 325, 326 Beach, J. Mark, 169, 176, 177, 182, 320, 322 Beeke, Joel, 27, 28, 99, 204, 263, 264, 318, 323, 326, 328, 333 Bellarmine, Robert, 89, 120 Berkouwer, G.C., 116, 118, 120, 317 Beza, Theodore, 13, 94, 118, 120, 121, 310 Bierma, Lyle D., 15, 166, 172, 179, 309, 320 Blake, Thomas, 269 Boersma, Hans, 37, 127, 206, 238, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 257, 311, 323, 325 Bolsec, Jerome, 13, 118, 310 Bolton, Samuel, 266, 278, 321, 327

Bonaventure, 11 Boston, Thomas, 162 Brakel, Wilhelmus a, 22, 252, 260, 309, 324 Bridge, William, 151, 264, 268, 279, 327 Brightman, Thomas, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 316 Brooks, Thomas, 40, 176, 263, 265, 266, 267, 269, 271, 273, 276, 278, 279, 282, 283, 311, 319, 327, 329 Bucer, Martin, 12 Buchanan, James, 152, 267, 311, 328 Bulkeley, Peter, 164, 175, 181, 245, 268, 269, 319, 321, 324, 327 Bunyan, John, 28, 93, 177, 236, 237, 261, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 316, 319, 324, 325, 330, 331, 332 Burgess, Anthony, 50, 272, 279 Burgess, Cornelius, 42 Burroughs, Jeremiah, 177, 181, 182, 264, 267, 277, 283, 319, 321, 327 Calamy, Edmund, 38, 147, 148, 149, 321 Calvin, John, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 43, 87, 95, 97, 99, 118, 121, 124, 127, 129, 132, 144, 156, 166, 171, 172, 175, 178, 180, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 222, 223, 227, 255, 263, 277, 279, 280, 293, 309, 310, 312, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 328, 329, 330, 333 Cameron, John, 13, 25, 26, 27, 143, 160, 177, 209, 310, 319, 321, 322 Chauncy, Isaac, 235, 324 Christ, 236 Clifford, Alan, 13, 27, 127, 133, 206, 209, 309, 323 Cocceius, Johannes, 15, 97, 130, 166, 180, 310, 317, 320, 322 Collins, Hercules, 299 Como, David R., 38, 157, 224, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 311, 322, 325 Cotton, John, 40, 91, 92, 95, 97, 277, 280, 316 Cradock, Samuel, 160 Crandon, John, 10, 230, 231, 246, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 324 Crisp, Tobias, 233, 234

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335

Index Daniel, Curt, 240 Davenant, John, 24, 99, 100, 125, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 152, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160, 318 de Vries, Pieter, 237, 325 Dekker, Eef, 127, 207, 212, 323 Dixhoorn, Chad Van, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 144, 147, 238, 239, 240, 242, 264, 313, 326, 329 Downame, John, 177, 264, 265, 283, 327 Eyre, William, 223, 229, 246, 251, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 261, 324 Featley, Daniel, 32, 33, 34, 37, 45 Fenner, Dudley, 321 Fesko, J.V., 24, 43, 99, 312, 317, 318, 322, 333 Flavel, Flavel, 239, 324 Ford, Thomas, 298 Fowler, 236 Gataker, Thomas, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 264, 311 Gill, John, 28, 163, 225, 228, 231, 233, 235, 240, 310, 319, 324, 325 Gillespie, George, 149 Gillespie, Patrick, 174, 179, 181 Godfrey, W. Robert, 116, 121, 123, 144, 318 Gomarus, Franciscus, 24, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 317 Goodwin, Thomas, 20, 25, 94, 95, 149, 151, 159, 160, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182, 208, 229, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 271, 278, 279, 280, 282, 316, 319, 321, 322, 323, 325, 326, 327, 329 Gouge, William, 264 Greaves, 237 Greaves, Richard, 237, 286, 287, 290, 291, 325, 330, 331 Gribben, Crawford, 21, 22, 83, 84, 85, 86, 92, 97, 317, 333 Hales, Alexander of, 11, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 117, 121, 138, 139, 142, 145, 318 Hall, Basil, 13, 15, 16, 92, 99, 100, 310, 312, 318, 329 Haykin, Michael, 10, 28 Haykin, Michael A.G., 28, 29, 228, 240, 284, 292, 297, 299, 300, 310, 325, 331, 333 Hayne, Thomas, 92, 94 Heidegger, J.H., 25, 163, 164, 182, 319 Helm, Paul, 83, 317, 329

Heppe, Heinrich, 111, 112, 114, 163, 318, 320, 322 Hodge, Charles, 116, 163, 164, 311, 318, 320 Hoekema, Anthony, 181, 321 Hooker, Thomas, 21, 271, 272, 327, 329 Howson, Barry H., 132 Immens, Petrus, 275, 327 Jones, Mark, 10, 26, 167, 171, 173, 243, 251, 297, 321, 326, 333 Jue, Jeffrey K., 31, 35, 36, 37, 90, 229, 230, 238, 242, 312, 317, 326 Junius, Francis, 21, 95, 118, 122, 172, 176, 177, 209, 317, 319 Kapic, Kelly M., 204, 323 Karlberg, Mark, 172, 173, 180, 321 Keach, Benjamin, 29, 285, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 330, 331, 332 Kendall, R.T., 16, 28, 246, 277, 279, 310, 328, 329 Kiffin, William, 28, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 330, 331, 332 Klauber, Martin, 119, 152, 164, 182, 318, 321 Knollys, Hanserd, 284, 297, 298, 299, 300, 308, 331 Leigh, Edward, 176, 298, 320, 330 Letham, Robert, 32, 152, 322, 329 Lightfoot, John, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 149, 240, 261, 264 Lillback, Peter, 14, 171, 172, 310, 321, 322 Limborch, Philip, 174, 175, 181, 320 Lombard, Peter, 125, 220 Lubbertus, Sibrandus, 27, 101, 103, 104, 105, 119, 120, 209 Luther, Martin, 11, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 255, 261, 310, 325, 326 Lyford, William, 177, 178, 179, 320 Maccovius, Johannes, 24, 27, 100, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 209, 251, 252, 253, 318, 325, 326 Manton, Thomas, 177, 179, 320 Marlow, Isaac, 29, 284, 285, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 330 McGrath, Alister E., 226, 322, 326 McKelvey, Robert J., 27, 286, 324, 332, 333 Mede, Joseph, 22, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 316, 317 Melanchthon, Philip, 172, 226, 321 Miller, Perry, 268, 269, 328, 329 Milton, Anthony, 88, 93, 94, 100, 138, 145, 146, 238, 297, 317, 318, 326, 332

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336

Index

Moore, Jonathan, 24, 25, 124, 129, 136, 139, 142, 145, 154, 156, 158, 159, 333 Muller, Richard A., 10, 11, 13, 19, 22, 26, 28, 101, 129, 155, 156, 166, 175, 180, 206, 212, 215, 245, 250, 309, 310, 318, 321, 322, 323, 326, 333 Musculus, Wolfgang, 11, 27, 122, 209 Oberman, H.A., 207, 323 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 12 Owen, John, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 158, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 230, 234, 235, 238, 243, 246, 247, 253, 254, 255, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 270, 291, 292, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 329, 330 Packer, J.I., 242, 257, 326 Pemble, William, 232, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 256, 257, 261, 325 Perkins, William, 106, 120, 129, 130, 212, 269, 270, 276, 328, 329 Piscator, Johannes, 19, 20, 22, 27, 30, 34, 88, 89, 90, 209, 310, 313, 316 Polyander, Johannes, 101, 102, 105, 111, 112, 115, 116, 318 Preston, John, 129, 158, 159, 160, 266, 269, 280, 282, 328 Rehnmann, Sebastian, 26, 310 Reynolds, Edward, 148, 264 Ridgley, Thomas, 25, 162, 281 Rijssen, Leonard, 177, 179, 320 Rolston, Holmes, 14, 25, 175, 178, 180, 310, 321 Rutherford, Samuel, 21, 26, 27, 96, 149, 205, 208, 211, 215, 222, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233, 256, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 278, 279, 316, 322, 323, 325, 328, 329 Saltmarsh, John, 228, 229, 231, 232, 238, 261, 322, 325 salvation, 325 Scotus, Duns, 11, 207, 323 Scudder, Henry, 155, 264, 278, 279, 328 Seaman, Lazarus, 38, 149, 156, 239, 251, 261 Sedgwick, Obadiah, 264, 282, 328

Sibbes, Richard, 269, 280, 281, 328 Socinus, Faustus, 163, 205, 215, 320, 323 Sprunger, Keith L., 99, 100, 120, 319 Steinmetz, David C., 11, 207, 310, 324 Toon, Peter, 13, 16, 91, 93, 204, 226, 227, 228, 310, 316, 324, 326 Trueman, Carl, 13, 26, 27, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 155, 166, 179, 204, 205, 206, 210, 223, 226, 230, 234, 238, 242, 243, 251, 253, 254, 255, 260, 310, 320, 322, 324, 326, 333 Trueman, Carl R., 235 Turretin, Francis, 19, 22, 23, 25, 122, 162, 163, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 182, 213, 224, 225, 309, 311, 318, 320, 322, 323, 325 Twisse, William, 23, 26, 27, 33, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46, 91, 130, 160, 205, 208, 209, 211, 219, 222, 242, 246, 250, 251, 256, 257, 260, 261, 264, 275, 278, 279, 311, 323, 325, 328 Ursinus, Zacharias, 166, 172, 179, 320, 321, 322 Ussher, James, 32, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 145, 157, 158, 159, 160, 177, 298, 316, 317 van Asselt, Willem J., 15, 127, 130, 166, 180, 206 Venema, Cornelis P., 118, 181, 319, 321, 322 Vermigli, Peter Martyr, 11, 122 Vines, Richard, 33, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 149, 264 Voetius, Gisbert, 23, 116, 122, 310, 318 Von Rohr, John, 227, 268, 269, 270, 322, 326, 330 Walaeus, Antonius, 101, 102, 105, 111, 115, 116 Ward, Rowland, 162 Ward, Samuel, 145 Warfield, B.B., 38, 43, 123, 149, 150, 152, 241, 313, 319, 326 Watson, Thomas, 176 Westminster Confession of Faith, 241 Witsius, Herman, 251, 252, 253, 261, 322, 325 Zanchi, Jerome, 122 Zwingli, Ulrich, 12, 227, 329

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