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Herbert Thorndike and the Covenant of Grace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2007

MICHAEL McGIFFERT
MICHAEL McGIFFERT
Affiliation:
102 Old Glory Court, Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA; e-mail: mcgi.@widowmaker.com
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Abstract

Herbert Thorndike's Of the covenant of grace (1659) was the largest and last substantial word on its subject from a priest of the seventeenth-century English Church. Recasting elements of practical divinity that are commonly associated with evangelical Puritanism, attacking the error of absolute and immediate predestination by decree and shifting stress from baptism to regeneration, Thorndike defended God's honour and majesty by affirming human freedom of choice in the ordo salutis and the moral life. His argument centred in a programme of reciprocal ‘helps’ that unites Arminian synergism with the early modern scholastic concept of scientia media, God's ‘middle knowledge’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , July 2007 , pp. 440 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 Herbert Thorndike, Of the covenant of grace, in The theological works of Herbert Thorndike, ed. Arthur W. Haddan, iii/2, Oxford 1851, 472.

2 John Donne, The sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, Berkeley, Ca 1962, x. 164–5. E. Randolph Daniel, ‘Reconciliation, covenant and election: a study in the theology of John Donne’, Anglican Theological Review xlviii (1966), 14–30, overstates the case for the centrality of covenant in Donne.

3 John Preston, The new covenant, or the saint's portion, 7th edn, London 1633 (RSTC 20245), 351; Richard Sibbes, ‘Two sermons upon the first words of Christ's last sermon, John 14:1’, in The works of Richard Sibbes, ed. A. Grosart, Edinburgh 1862–4, vii. 352; Francis Roberts, Mysterium & medulla bibliorum. viz. God's covenants with man, London 1657 (Wing R1594), A2v. Won Taek Lim, ‘The covenant theology of Francis Roberts’, unpub. PhD diss. Calvin Theological Seminary 2000, is a faithful commentary.

4 This story is told in M. McGiffert, ‘Grace and works: the rise and division of covenant divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism’, Harvard Theological Review lxxv (1982), 463–502; ‘From Moses to Adam: the making of the covenant of works’, Sixteenth Century Journal xix (1988), 131–56; and ‘The Perkinsian moment of federal theology’, Calvin Theological Journal xxix (1994), 117–48.

5 Arthur Lake, Ten sermons delivered on the nineteenth chapter of Exodus, in Arthur Lake, Sermons with some religious and divine meditations, London 1629 (RSTC 15134), 1st pagination, 418.

6 William Sparke, The mystery of godliness: a general discourse of the reason that is in Christian religion, Oxford 1628 (RSTC 23026). I do not find this title mentioned in studies of Anglican thought. For mid seventeenth-century Anglican adoptions of double-covenant or federal divinity see M. McGiffert, ‘Henry Hammond and covenant theology: from Puritan to Anglican’, Church History lxxiv (2005), 255–85.

7 The thesis that Hammond adapted his concept of the covenant of grace from Puritan sources and that he seems himself to have been something of a Puritan early on is developed in McGiffert, ‘Henry Hammond’. For the standard interpretation see especially John W. Packer, The transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1662, London 1962.

8 John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689, New Haven, Ct 1991, 394–5.

9 Arthur, N. Haddan, ‘The life of Herbert Thorndike, M.A.’, in Works of Thorndike, vi, Oxford 1856, 156Google Scholar; T. A. Lacey, Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672), London 1929, 29.

10 W. B. Patterson, ‘Herbert Thorndike’, ODNB, liv. 595–8. For Thorndike's purpose in writing the Epilogue see Works of Thorndike, ii, Oxford 1845, 3ff. Commentaries and critiques include C. F. Allison, The rise of moralism: the proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter, New York 1966, 106–17, criticising Thorndike, Hammond and Taylor for founding the ‘new moralism which [was] to have sinister consequences for Christian orthodoxy’ (p. 117); Kenneth Stevenson, Covenant of grace renewed: a vision of the eucharist in the seventeenth century, London 1994; Bryan D. Spinks, Sacraments, ceremonies, and the Stuart divines: sacramental theology and liturgy in England and Scotland, 1603–1662, Aldershot 2002; and Ernest Charles Miller, Jr., ‘The doctrine of the Church in the thought of Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672)’, unpubl. DPhil diss. Oxford 1990.

11 John Ball, A treatise of the covenant of grace, London 1645 (Wing B579); Peter Bulkeley, The Gospel-covenant; or the covenant of grace opened, London 1646 (Wing B5403); William Strong, A discourse on the two covenants, London 1678 (but preached c. 1650) (Wing S6002); Anthony Burgess, Vindiciae legis, or, a vindication of the morall law, London 1646 (Wing B5666); Thomas Goodwin, Of Christ the Mediator and The one sacrifice, in The works of Thomas Goodwin, Eureka, Ca 1996, v. 1–436, 479–98.

12 Thorndike, Covenant of grace, in Works of Thorndike, iii/2, 528–30, quotation at p. 529.

13 Predestinarian preaching and debating were banned by the king in the mid-1620s. Puritan federalists did not dispute the ban; rather, they knew it for an opportunity.

14 David Zaret, The heavenly contract: ideology and organization in pre-Revolutionary Puritanism, Chicago 1985, gives evidence for a normative presentation of covenant in terms of contract or bargain that is fairly thick for the century's first quarter but then quite suddenly runs thin.

15 John Preston, ‘A table containing the sum of theology’, Cambridge University Library, ms 181.3.1.13, unpaginated. This was written for students of Emmanuel College.

16 It is also noteworthy that the covenant of redemption, which emerges as a sidebar or afterthought in Preston's New covenant (and also appears in Donne's sermons) will in theory bring the process of displacement to a logical terminus. For Thomas Goodwin and a number of his fellow Independents, the pretemporal covenant of the Trinity effectively supplanted the electoral decree in defining the grand plot of grace. The doctrine appears in dramatically entangled form in the ‘debate in heaven’ in Milton's Paradise lost, bk iii, lines 80–343.

17 Miller, ‘Doctrine of church’, 9; no evidence is offered.

18 Thorndike, Covenant of grace, in Works of Thorndike, iii/2, 400.

19 Ibid. iii/2, 534. Note also that Thorndike's denigration of the ‘base alloy’ of Holland's Remonstrant churches of the 1660s was aimed not at their founder but at his successor Episcopius and at those churches' admission of Socinians to communion: Of the laws of the Church, ibid. iv/1, 175, and A discourse of the forbearance osr the penalties which a due reformation requires, ibid. v. 439, 481.

20 Thorndike, Covenant of grace, ibid. iii/1, Oxford 1849, 15.

21 For Thorndike on the continuity and uniformity of the covenants see ibid. iii/2, 418, 479.

22 Ibid. iii/1, 28, 382.

23 Ibid. iii/1, 26.

24 Ibid. iii/1, ch. xviii passim. This is the standard operating procedure, but Thorndike makes clear that the sovereign God, in exceptional circumstances, bestows saving grace immediately and apart from the covenant (p. 482).

25 Ibid. iii/2, 430.

26 Ibid. iii/2, 420.

27 Ibid. iii/1, 326. In Puritan heads this reference might have prompted thoughts of the covenant of redemption, but not in Thorndike's.

28 Ibid. iii/2, 496–7.

29 Ibid. iii/2, 496.

30 Ibid. iii/2, 494.

31 Ibid. iii/2, 430.

32 Ibid. iii/2, 501.

33 Ibid. iii/2, 497–8.

34 Ibid. iii/2, 502, 430.

35 Ibid. iii/2, 498.

36 Ibid. iii/2, 502.

37 Ibid. iii/2, 493.

38 Ibid. iii/2, 493, 415, 462. Repelling the objection that ‘God's predestination must of force appoint salvation to them that are to be saved in the first place’ (i.e. elected before time), Thorndike here overrules the ‘monstrous imagination’ of supra- and sublapsarians along with the necessitarian principles of Stoics, Gnostics and England's own contemporary Presbyterians (pp. 498, 506ff.).

39 Ibid. iii/1, 355.

40 Ibid. iii/2, 402.

41 Ibid. iii/2, 409.

42 Ibid. iii/2, 418, 419.

43 In Thorndike's words, ‘it hath, on the one side, that knowledge whereby He comprehendeth the natures of all things and the possibilities of all events, [and] on the other side, the view which He hath from everlasting of all things that have been, are, or shall be’: ibid. iii/2, 465.

44 Founding texts also include Franciscus Suárez, De vera intelligentia auxilii efficacis (written 1605; pub. 1655). For Richard A. Muller's thorough exposition of the debate, with bibliography, see his Dictionary of Latin and Greek theological terms drawn principally from Protestant scholastic theology, Grand Rapids, Mi. 1985, vide ‘scientia Dei’, at pp. 274–5; ‘Arminius and the scholastic tradition’, Calvin Theological Journal xxiv (1989), 263–77; God, creation and providence in the thought of Jacob Arminius, Grand Rapids, Mi 1991, ch. ix; and Post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics: the rise and development of Reformed orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, iii, Grand Rapids, Mi 2003, 411–32. See also William L. Craig, The problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom from Aristotle to Suárez, Leiden 1980. Muller's canvas misses Thorndike, and Thorndike's treatment of scientia media does not conform to Muller's understanding of it as ‘a knowledge of events that take place outside of divine willing’: God, creation, and providence, 156 (emphasis original). See also Dictionary, 275. Thorndike, moreover, adds a practical dimension to Muller's theory-oriented account.

45 For Twisse's position see Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics, iii. 114–15, 422–4, and Sarah Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelian’, Journal of the History of Ideas xxxix (1978), 635–52. John Strang of Glasgow rebutted Twisse in De voluntate et actionibus Dei circa peccatum, Amsterdam 1657, which Thorndike cites approvingly in Covenant of grace, in Works of Thorndike, iii/2, 399.

46 Muller, God, creation, and providence, 154.

47 James Arminius, The Works of James Arminius, ed. and trans. James Nichols and William Nichols (1825), Grand Rapids, Mi 1999, ii. 123, 124 (public disputation 4, emphasis original). See also private disputations 17–18, ibid. 341–4, and Muller, God, creation, and providence, 155–6.

48 Thorndike, Covenant of grace, in Works of Thorndike iii/2, 447 (emphasis added). ‘Outward objects I call the things themselves, that present themselves to man's senses: inward, the representations of them laid up in the storehouse of man's mind (whether for the fancy or understanding)’: ibid

49 Ibid. iii/2, 464.

50 Ibid. iii/2, 448.

51 Ibid. iii/2, 448–53, 457. `According to Molina, God's knowledge of conditional contingencies belongs to a third category of knowledge: God knows that David would not stay [overnight at Keilah] and would not be betrayed, but he knows it without decreeing the condition or willing the contingency’: Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics, iii. 421.

52 Thorndike, Covenant of grace, in Works of Thorndike, iii/2, 461 (emphasis added).

53 Ibid. iii/2, 455, quoting St Peter from Acts ii. 23.

54 Ibid. iii/2, 465.

55 Ibid. iii/2, 471, 426.

56 Ibid. iii/2, 470–1.

57 Ibid. iii/2, 471.

58 Ibid. iii/2, 461, 502.

59 Ibid. iii/2, 514.

60 Ibid. iii/2, 533. Muller notes Richard Baxter's citing of Durandus apropos scientia media: Post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics, iii. 422 n. 306.

61 Thorndike, Covenant of grace, in Works of Thorndike, iii/2, 534.

62 Ibid. iii/2, 439, 444.

63 Ibid. iii/2, 473. In the early 1660s Thorndike summarised the whole argument here reviewed in Just weights and measures, a work for lay readers: Works of Thorndike, v. 158–64.

64 Adam Littleton, Twenty-one sermons upon common subjects of Christian doctrine, London 1679, bound with Sixty-one sermons preached mostly upon public occasions, London 1680 (Wing L2572), 3–20 (on the covenant of the Trinity); Ezekiel, Hopkins, ‘The doctrine of the two covenants’, in Works of Ezekiel Hopkins, ii, London 1809, 299–398Google Scholar.

65 A survey by Corneilius Hyman Lettinga in ‘Covenant theology and the transformation of Anglicanism’, unpubl. PhD diss. Johns Hopkins 1987, ch. v, covers Hammond, Allestree, Taylor, Thomas Pierce, Peter Gunning, Gilbert Sheldon, John Cosin, Robert Sanderson, Lawrence Womock and Thorndike.

66 Arminius argued in his Modest examination of Dr Perkins's pamphlet, in Works of Arminius, iii. 249–484, that ‘the decree of predestination sets no bounds to the universality of the price paid for all by the death of Christ. For it is posterior to the death of Christ and its proper efficacy’ (p. 325).

67 Thorndike, Covenant of grace, in Works of Thorndike, iii/2, 447.