Motions Of Law And Grace: The Puritan In The Antinomian

By David Parnham

[David Parnham is an independent scholar who lives in Melbourne, Australia.]

The Puritan divine Anthony Burgess once remarked that every man’s belly housed a pope and an antinomian. Each occupant of the belly had a truth to tell, but trouble lay in the wake of imprudent privileging of the one over the other. To trust too much in “godlinesse” was, with papists, to play the “Pharisee”; to separate sanctification from justification was to tread, with antinomians, in the lawless footprints of the “Publican.” Burgess exhorted his audience, “Follow holinesse as earnestly, as if thou hadst nothing to help thee but that; and yet rely upon Christs merits as fully, as if thou hadst no holinesse at all.” The exhortation was spiced with practical implication: the coupling of doctrinal and moral considerations gave notice that much was at stake. For all that one’s “intent” might be “to set up Christ and Grace, yet a corrupted opinion may soon corrupt a mans life; as rheume, falling from the head, doth petrifie the lungs, and other vitall parts.”[1] Of Burgess’s troublesome twins, it is the antinomian who will claim our attentions here. Interestingly, Burgess proceeded to specify the credentials of his incubating bellies. The “every man” who hosted the antinomian within makes his way through Burgess’s Vindiciae Legis as the “orthodox” proponent of grace and defender of law. That Burgess would publicly imagine his own kind as potential nurturers of interior antinomians testifies to the dangers that were perceived to follow upon plausible mishandling of, or defection from, doctrinal and moral truth. For while Burgess proved himself something of a bloodhound in pursuit of the exploitations of the theology of grace that rendered antinomianism so enticing a heresy, he was interested—for the sake of prosecuting truth’s case—more in obscuring than in clarifying the lines that connected Puritan and antinomian.

I would like to hazard a filling in of some of those lines. Much of what follows will attend to Puritan and antinomian ruminations on law and grace. On the antinomian side, my ruminants will be Tobias Crisp, who shot to notoriety in London in the early 1640s as a powerful enunciator of the antinomian word; John Eaton, whose hefty Honey-Combe of Free Justification by Christ Alone has been described as “the fullest and most systematic statement of early English antinomian opinion”;[2] and Robert Towne, a veteran of heated theological disputes that raged among the godly of London during the 1620s and early 1630s, and, as legatee of Crisp and Eaton, author of vigorous mid-century defenses of antinomian theology. If Puritan innards can be said to have throbbed with antinomian potential, what signatures of Puritanism might have marked mature specimens of the antinomian offspring? What—if any—pockets of Puritanism might the antinomians have absorbed and repatriated? Among Puritan advocates of the giftedness of grace, William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, and John Preston might suggest answers, as might brethren, such as Thomas Hooker and Anthony Burgess, who devoted relatively more mind to matters of law. Hooker intimated that in repudiating the moral law, antinomians ripened themselves for the day of divine wrath. But, unsettlingly for Hooker, the antinomians had been motivated by concerns over legalistic corruption of the theology of grace—so considered, law-severing upstarts might present themselves with sufficient plausibility to be apprehended as purifiers of prodigal Puritanism. Hooker’s worry here is akin to Burgess’s: no doubt the antinomians are heretics and scoundrels, but they speak the language of grace with a fluency that springs from their proximity to truth’s guardians.

The antinomian repudiation of Puritan legalism might be thought of as an intensification of Puritans’ concerns at a law that, in evoking its duties and administering its disciplines, was apt to betake itself—illegitimately, antinomians averred—into the province of grace. The saint with a Pharisaical heart is a false saint, held in trammel to a law that retards the benefits of the gospel. We will see that grace-loving Puritans, such as Richard Sibbes, pegged a line somewhat in this antinomian direction, though this, of course, is to state the case with the facile coherence offered by retrospection. For Sibbes, to be sure, was not inclined to give comfort to antinomians, whose doctrinal and moral wrongs he deplored. But the “free grace” of which Puritans such as Sibbes spoke was available to antinomians as a profoundly positive resource with which to validate the negativities of anti-legal polemic.

It will be necessary in what follows to linger over the doctrine of free grace, and to pause in order to take stock of the manner of its congress with the pietistic rigors that might—or might not—have been legitimated by the moral law. For antinomian theology burst out of the tensions that pulsed through Puritan undertakings to effect a satisfactory integration of the one with the other—to craft a doctrine of grace that accommodated the obligations of the law, and to orchestrate a penitential praxis that honored the soteriological preeminence of grace. Antinomians were quick to insist that, in cultivating their law-defined pieties, Puritans were debasing the freeness of the grace whose proponents they purported themselves to be. This amelioration of free grace, as will be seen, can be thought of as a “Puritan cameo” within antinomian discourse; but not all such cameos—surprisingly enough—were calculated to play hard with the moral law. The “wilderness” of the law seemed, to antinomian minds, to be devoid of remedies for postlapsarian humankind. The fallen, to be sure, were in need of a grace so “free” as not to require the application of such pious energies as Puritan pastors demanded of their flocks. For this was to negotiate with God, to offer sin-infected acts as tokens of compliance capable of reward. And yet, we will see, the Puritan law was not wholly removed from antinomian aspiration.

I. Legal Paths and Antinomian Provenance

One sermonic commentary on the means and ends of religion in seventeenth-century England fixed, with intense horror, upon its dangers. Here, spread out before the unsettled viewer, was a terrain dotted with deadly traps. The commentary was a warning sign; Tobias Crisp, preaching antinomianism in London during the early 1640s, was educating the needlessly intrepid and admonishing them to about turn and go back. One might not proceed onward into the Puritan land of law in genuine hope of passing through it. Travelers down the legal path would find themselves caught in the glare of God’s “frowning” gaze.[3] To Crisp’s mind, Puritan abusers of the moral law had much to answer for. Admonitory commentary was issued with polemical intent: Crisp was watching out for the unwary, educating the unknowing; he was also beating Puritan legalists with their own rod of law. And Puritans fought back. Crisp’s sermons, it was observed by a fellow antinomian a decade later, had been “thronged with pikes of despite ever since their publication.”[4] It might therefore be imagined that we will search in vain for the Puritan in Tobias Crisp’s belly.

For Crisp was nauseated by the Puritan mobilization of Moses. Puritans were too Hebraic for their own good, too inclined to permit their dedication to the moral law to obscure the sacrifice of Christ. And Crisp was determined to ensure that the Puritans’ Hebraic propensities stretched no further, set no more souls on the immiserating edge of Deuteronomy’s curse. Puritans were children of bondage. Pressured into piety by the law’s insistence on “diligence and sincerity,” they specialized in the enunciation of its terrors. Far more given to dispensing maledictions than mercies, they set themselves against Christ and his grace by assembling en masse within the Mosaic covenant of works.[5] Crisp’s Puritans resolved to apply whatever “strength of the Creature” they could muster in a Christ-ignoring endeavor to “establish” the “idol” of “our righteousness” and “do” as the law commanded.[6] Crisp was fashioning a tendentious simulacrum of the Puritan devout. This was a tribe trekking the “long way” to salvation— the “Old Way of the Law.” In these “Labyrinths,” Crisp contended, “men lose themselves”; in these “Boggy Quagmires” they sink. In their “sweat and toile and moile,” Puritans tried to satisfy for sins that can only be multiplied by “rigour.”[7] Divine wrath, moreover, was “multiplied” by devout observance of “practical righteous means,” themselves “multipliers” of the very sin that they were purposed to “expiate.” The hammer-hand of the Puritan God is scandalously ham-fisted; it smashes the soul and refuses to permit grace to relieve its agonies. Puritans propagated the falsehood that it was the law, rather than Christ, that breaks the “Rocky heart before the Plough can come over it.” Christ, so conceived, was an absentee: “forgotten” and “neglected” by the Puritan devout. And his quiet grace was being drowned out by ministerial ventriloquists of Sinaitic thunder.[8]

But Puritans, even those of more legalistic stripe, such as Thomas Hooker, had spoken out in not dissimilar strains against the autonomous application of creaturely strength, against the routinized doing of the law’s works in abstraction from the life-giving grace of Christ. Even Hooker, who was deemed by his Puritan editors inadvertently to have converted humbling into drowning by ministering too much of “John Baptists water,” knew that good works were “bare husks” in the absence of Christ and that by “our owne strength” we would not prevail in the “great day of accounts.”[9] Hooker dwelt upon the profundity of the difference between the devotions of a soul made “ready,” supplied with “a kind of abilitie, and cheerfulnesse in attending upon God in any service,” and those of a soul resting “upon some rotten indeavours, and because he can heare and pray and fast, he thinkes this is enough to save him.” Hooker was identifying the difference between the fruits of grace presented to the Father in the “merits and righteousnesse” of Christ and the graceless works of a “naturall man” that, more odoriferous than “carrion in a ditch,” “loathsomely” assault the nostrils of the Almighty.[10] Christ, moreover, dispenses immanent as well as forensic benefits: he is the sacrifice whose merits are imputed, but also the physician who, in his spiritual immanence, ameliorates. “One touch of Christ” can “cure” the “bloudy issue” of drunkards and adulterers—this was a Puritan message of grace that antinomians would take to heart, though for them the deliverance of the sinner did not proceed down the Puritan’s curative and regenerative by-ways, for these, inevitably, transmuted into paths of law. For Hooker, however, legal paths become dangerous only in the absence of Christ, in which case, “if thou makest [duties] independent causes of salvation; all the promises in the Gospel shall never establish thee.”[11] The soul “may pray, and heare, and receive the Sacraments, and yet go downe to hell for all these.”[12] Hooker sought the “meate of the Soule,” which turned out to be neither “bare Word” nor “bare Sacraments”; instead, the meat is Christ, who is also “the prop of the Soule: all the bare duties in the world cannot succour us, if we rest upon them, without justification through Christ.”[13] Once fitted for Christ, however, the soul is ever in his comfort-engendering company: ministering to the consciousness of misery and sin, Hooker evokes Christ as “God of all mercies” and “God of all grace,” a God who, “though thou wert banished, … will wander up and downe all the wildernesse, … will find thee and bring thee upon his shoulders, to cheare thee, and comfort thee here, and give the end of thy hopes hereafter.”[14]

Even Hooker, notwithstanding all the duties and disciplines that constellate around his image of the Christian life, could rejoice in Christ the lifter of burdens. “You must not thinke to goe to heaven on a feather-bed,” Hooker admonished;[15] and yet the Christ who became “such a curse for us as the law did require” is for Hooker a bringer of “ease” and “cheer” to the “drooping heart,” a mollifier of “miseries,” a substitute in the paying of sin’s debt onto whom “thy care” can be “hurled.”[16] Hooker’s spiritual liberator seems not to be distantly removed from the Christ who, cutting ties with the moral law, would ground the antinomians’ “easy” way to heaven. Perhaps the ideological proximity accounts in part for the ferocity of Hooker’s law-minding assault upon haters of the law: the “knife of the Law” was needed for the cutting away of natural rebellions and corruptions; accordingly, to reject the knife was to conjure an “Egyptian fog” of antinomian “delusion.”[17]

Nevertheless, there was much in Hooker to draw out empathy from the likes of Tobias Crisp. Like Hooker, Crisp was deeply troubled by the capacity of duties and ordinances to accumulate misplaced estimations of efficacy—both men counseled that godly doings were not to be “rested in” and that human “strength” will not suffice; like Hooker, Crisp stressed the difference that Christ had made in putting his merits to work for the benefit of sinners; like Hooker, Crisp offered a way of hope for the worst of sinners, though the hammer of the Puritan law habituated Crisp to retreat from curative projects, for with the cure comes the correction, behind which looms the punitive incentive of the law.[18] Brooding upon the unforgiving, law-laced ways of Puritan discipline, Crisp came to realize that Deuteronomic deterrents to obnoxious behavior had a way of imprisoning the penitent in never-ending cycles of sweat and suffering that, in their relentless affixing of the responsibilities of self-discovery, self-hatred, and self-renewal, served no properly conceived evangelical purpose. The gift of grace has been fended off by the law’s rods and whips. And if the “wilderness” could appear to Hooker a place of cheer and comfort, Crisp could not ignore its “dangers”—its labyrinths and quagmires—nor could he forget that Puritan terrain was patrolled by taskmasters who used a reverberant law to break “rocky hearts.” Hooker, moreover, had been discriminating in sketching the crimes of legalists: the works of the “natural man” offended God, not those of the duly humbled. Crisp, redirecting Hooker’s image of olfactory offense, brought Puritans to mind. The “pure” radiated a legalist “stink”; to such, Crisp delivered despairing counsel: “all our righteousness at best, is such a menstrous cloth in God’s Eye, and so certainly in it self; there is dung cast in God’s Face … [our works of righteousness] send him up an ill savour into his Nostrils, smelling rankly of the Flesh when they proceed from the purest Heart.”[19]

We see Crisp, here, making deft use of the resources of Puritan language to reprobate Puritan “righteousness”—turning a lexical template on its head. In recent times, scholars have offered two ways in which to ponder the provenance of English antinomianism. One way finds in grace-focused Puritanism a nursery for the antinomian rethinking that emerged, according to Michael McGiffert, as the “characteristic and defining heresy” of Puritan theology. Antinomians followed through on the urge felt by the intellectual heirs of William Perkins to “confirm and defend the very graciousness of grace.”[20] The law, here, posed a problem. Guardians of orthodoxy needed to take care lest grace become rigidified by the sway of rules or paralyzed by preceptive rigor and retributive menace. The law’s threats and protocols were useful, but their excessive deployment might topple the delicate balance of doing and receiving, of obeying and believing. Incisive antinomian minds had become contemptuous of balancing acts. Telling a cultural tale of the antinomian as aggrieved insider, David Como has shown how one strain of antinomianism parried the over-elaboration of Puritan law by appropriating and manipulating the doctrine, powerfully articulated in Puritan soteriology, of the divine imputation of Christ’s righteousness.[21] The attentions of “imputative” partisans could thus be shifted from the thunder and lightning of Sinai and settle instead upon the substitutionary self-offering of Golgotha; and if Puritans were appalled by displays of antinomian insouciance, Como might be at rights to reply that these were in-house aversions, the affective predicament of a “heterogeneous” community learning to loathe the fragments into which it had self-divided. Puritans, on this reading, had constructed the means of sociability and the shades of sensibility to vivify the bold and learned antinomianism that rippled through London in the 1620s and early 1630s before setting off the sensations of the 1640s.

The other way of pondering antinomian provenance tends not to reckon with a “fractured landscape” of Puritanism. Theodore Dwight Bozeman explores the homogeneous culture of Puritan self-excruciation and self-rectification. We encounter, in Bozeman’s Precisianist Strain, neither the antinomian possibilities of the Puritan grace with which McGiffert dealt, nor the heterogeneous scene that Como recovered from his researches into Puritan London. Bozeman’s Puritan Christ is a recessive protagonist, his promises seldom intermitting the governing grind of the “Israelite paradigm” and its “strategies of consolation.” “Precisianists” honed their control of the self by calibrating their actions against a “moral calculus of faults and penalties” in pursuit of a “contractual, law-oriented, ethically stringent faith.” These lukewarm solifidians progressively qualified their faith by convoluting its evidences into markers within a ritualistic code of behavior. In the context of the distended Puritan law and its forbidding devotional repertoire, the antinomians voiced their alternative way to salvation in a disabusing mood of “backlash.”[22] Como is more inclined than Bozeman to entertain the possibility of the law’s integration with grace, though he shows this to have been no easy fit: it was a fertile yet highly problematic legacy of Pauline ambiguity. For Como, the pressure that the law applied in its governance of Puritan praxis tended to undermine the integrity of Puritan espousal of the Refor-mation’s solifidian bequest, thus putting piety visibly out of step with doctrine. As Bozeman presents it, the juridical center of precisianist religion is solidly filled, scarcely softened by Como’s tints of Pauline ambiguity.

A Puritan milieu whose defining obsession revealed itself in an efflorescence of legal codification can scarcely accommodate the “maverick” phenomenon of Christ-soaked antinomianism. Bozeman’s antinomian “insiders” push through to an outside where the law no longer compels and punishes.[23] This may be so, but we need to consider how, theologically, they broke through, and what they took with them as they left. What is insufficiently allowed for in Bozeman’s reading of “precisianist” culture is that Puritan discourses of Christ and grace offered resources that, when redeployed in particular concentrations and with particular inflections, could be turned against the language and praxis of righteousness and discipline that appeared as Puritanism’s odious hallmarks. Finding room within Puritanism for Christ and his grace, we might happen upon subtle and surprising ways in which antinomians betrayed their Puritan provenance.

Anthony Burgess was a Puritan rehabilitator of the moral law, the perpetuity and graciousness of which he defended against antinomian “errours.” Burgess acknowledged, however, that his “orthodox” co-religionists were in some sense residually—if exiguously—”antinomian.” Yet one needed to beware the plausibility of the antinomian: worthy motivations, truthful insights, and right-sounding discourse could be carried too far, transgressing boundaries of heresy and blasphemy. Burgess’s recognition of occasional “wholsome and good passages” in antinomian books is sounded against the observation that a forest “full of shrubs and brambles” will contain some “violets and primroses.” Antinomians appear, here, as errant and erstwhile members of the fold, though Burgess relates that his own acquaintance with them extends no further than “their Books which they have written.” Those books spoke in torrents of free grace, but the words were empty that were penned by such as urged “no use of the Law,” obliterated the “sense or bitternesse of sin,” denied “humiliation.” It was necessary to fight on the battleground of the moral law if antinomians were to be reclaimed, or if Puritans were to be prevented from turning antinomian.[24]

II. The Law—Simply a Curse?

Antinomians found little to salvage from the rules of obedient living that Moses enumerated in his holy books. When they focused upon the moral law, antinomian eyes were accustomed to seeing the danger of the Deuteronomic curse. Even where not “expressely set down,” the curse “is implicite and necessarily included, wherever the law is mentioned, taking it for law moral.”[25] The law, ominously preceptive, is beheld as a trigger to the unleashing of divine wrath; it “smites terrour and despaire” into the sinner’s soul. The consequences of a sinner’s failure to satisfy legal precept are almost too horrible to contemplate; but the contemplation, in truth, is needless, for the free grace of Christ is available for the ungodly, ensuring the salvation of sinners. “Men dally and trifle” with the law’s “fearfull sentence,” John Eaton averred, which plucks from them “the assurance of the righteousnesse of life”; but once “enlightened with Free Justification” they “apprehend Christ and his benefits, to free us from our misery,” and so are released from their fears and horrors. The law, now, need no longer “beare rule in our conscience”; God’s anger is “pacified and asswaged,” displaced by his “infinite and unmeasurable free favour”—and, with a flourish of Perkinsian audacity, “there can be no place for sin, or feare of death, or hell.” Such, for Eaton, is the “Christian liberty” that Christ’s blood had secured.[26]

In soliciting its works and terrifying its workers, the law deflects attentions from Christ; and yet—given the depravity of fallen humankind—the law’s precepts cannot but be broken. Into this breach steps Christ the assuager and pacifier. Christ’s free grace disarms the Mosaic law of obedient living, the pushing and punishing regula vitae. Here, in an almost ostentatious extension of the logic of Christ’s conquest over the law’s curse, is the outrage of antinomianism: Christ, necessarily, is a justifier of sinners, even the vilest of sinners. Well beloved of Puritan divines, the doctrine of free grace becomes an anti-Puritan insurgency, an Ur-script for the propagation of “ills” and “errors.”[27]

Anthony Burgess could appreciate the wellspring of antinomian motivation, though he was not inclined to excuse its harvest of error. Burgess recognized that antinomians were rightly impatient with the law-wrought misconceptions of Papists and Pharisees. He knew that antinomians came forth from an environment in which the law was “pressed” by zealous preachers. But the antinomian reaction was insufficiently sophisticated and alarmingly “dangerous.” Antinomians had baked less than half a loaf of law. They turned “that which would be a rod into a serpent.”[28] Deeming the moral law to consist in nothing else than its curse, they registered a plea for its “totall abrogation.”[29] Burgess was prepared to concede that in one sense “we are all Antinomians,” namely, in reprehending the great “errour”—sponsored by “pharisaical, Popish, formall men”—”that the Law can justifie.” Against the aforementioned “we doe therefore desire to lift up our voices, as vehemently as any Antinomian,” and in discounting the efficacy of works at point of justification, Burgess flirted briefly with one of Tobias Crisp’s and John Eaton’s signature Pauline designations: the “dung” of human doings.[30]

So, the antinomian asked, why submit to the rigors of a law that, in failing to justify, failed also to save? Why not simply accept the good news that Christ’s blood purchased justification and salvation even for the egregiously sinful? For the antinomian, sin could be cast from human remembrance, as it was from was God’s remembrance, precisely because Christ—in a singular act of substitutionary atonement—had paid the law’s price in blood and secured God’s favor for the fallen. Sin was a fact of fallen life but need not be minded: to shed sorrowful tears for the sake of one’s “forlorn condition” was but to “pine away” in one’s “iniquities,” to “hasten death,” to “tend utter despair.”[31] But the Puritan, always exercised by sin, was ever accommodating of the law’s duties and directives. Faith might function “instrumentally” in applying the benefits of Christ, but this Puritan commonplace was not designed to supersede the practical advantages of legal compliance. Christ’s message was not antinomian. The “longest sermon” that Christ preached, Burgess put it, “was to vindicate the Law, and to hold forth the excellency of it.” The law inculcated love, and God used it to “quicken” grace, though, to be sure, it continued to operate by way of pain and provocation. Burgess embraced the law as a God-given standard of  “honest discipline”; he knew it to be “an outward whip and scourge,” away of restraining and limiting the sin of the ungodly. And the need for legal damage-control extended further, to the ranks of the godly, who were to be quickened against “sin and corruption”—for the sake of which the law was a “bit and bridle” to believers.[32]

This was good and useful as far as it went, but to view seriously the doctrine of human depravity entailed recognition that rods, whips, and bridles could never maintain the house of discipline’s purity. The point of challenge for the likes of Burgess was that antinomians were nothing if not serious proponents of the doctrine of human depravity. Why bother to discipline the sinner if sin was ever at the point of breaking bridles? The law, so conceived, is simply a curse—in no respect can it be lauded as a corrective.

At this point, Burgess adverted to an elemental difference dividing antinomian from “orthodox.” The antinomian eviscerates the law by treating it as “curse,” as “damnatory power” and “killing letter,” as “some horrid Gorgon or Medusa’s head.”[33] Reclaiming for the orthodox the gracious and promissory dimensions of the law, Burgess sidesteps the delicate question of the Perkinsian bequest to antinomianism. William Gouge, for example, when “touching mans misery,” had summoned the law to benchmark the “wretchednesse” of human sin and the “cursednesse” of its punishment, and had spoken of the law, further, as that which revealed sin’s punishment to be no less than “Gods infinite wrath for the least breach of any one branch of the commandements: for it [Deut 27:26] saith, Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of the Law.” Hell-beholding Perkins had been but a degree more thunderous in ranging divine wrath against the unrepentant.[34] And antinomians caught the Perkinsian drift: they would notice the use and abuse of Old Testament severity, laying the blame for pandemic misery at the door of cursing preachers who used the law to cudgel their flocks into purity. Burgess papered over the Deuteronomic communion of Perkinsian and antinomian. He glanced at the “terrible manner” in which the law was given at Sinai, noticing too that the Old Testament was “fuller of terrour” than the New and that, additionally, it “did gender more to bondage.” But these potentially explosive illustrations of dispensational difference could be rendered anodyne with an evocation of the anonymous unanimity of the orthodox. Thus, Burgess delivers a brisk “we all acknowledge” concerning the ways of God in the Old Testament; the acknowledgement rubs away the hard Perkinsian lines that sketched double-covenant divinity and dissevered the killing letter of the law from the vivifying gift of grace.[35] “We” orthodox know that God descended upon Sinai with awesome trappings of majesty, but this should not muffle the telling of the law’s doctrine of love and its conversionary partnership with grace.

Burgess here leaves unsaid the Perkinsian story of the Mosaic law as agent of damnation, allowing the conclusion to be drawn that the mania for tearing the old legal dispensation away from the new evangelical thrives outside orthodox bounds—specifically, in the minds and utterances of antinomians. The acknowledging “we” are not complicit in antinomian error, yet Burgess is painfully aware of the falsehoods that can be wrought by those who make too much of the “terrour” and “bondage” that “we” orthodox must necessarily accept in confronting the contrast between law and gospel. The antinomian Robert Towne had stressed the foundational significance of this contrast, and in so doing had wrapped himself in the mantle of European and English Protestants, including Calvin and Perkins;[36] but rather than inquire into the contestable matter of the antinomians’ credentials, Burgess prefers to leverage orthodox solidarity in the face of a manifest assault upon the moral law. Because the law is a covenant of grace, Moses’ killing letter is seldom sighted in Burgess’s treatise; and the “antinomian distinction” that sets off the law of Moses from the grace of Christ “must fall to the ground” at the realization that “Christ was the Mediatour of the Law as a Covenant,” that, on Sinai, “the Law was in the hand of Christ.”[37] Towne, trading in Perkinsian currency, judged Burgess’s coupling of the Mosaic law and the covenant of grace “a new-coyned and bold assertion, lately come out of the mint.”[38]

Stripping his antinomian interlocutors of their Perkinsian pedigree, Burgess made them appear the creators of their own provenance. “Some,” unnamed, will make the law a covenant of works, but Burgess does not dwell on them nor sound out their divinity.[39] To do so, presumably, would place him in the predicament of reflecting upon Puritans’ arrogation of the killing letter of the law, and upon their progenitive responsibility for heresy. He hurries past the heirs of Perkins, intent on targeting the mournful consequences of the antinomians’ conception of Sinai as a place of sheer curse. Antinomians erred in stressing the co-extensiveness of the law’s “damning act” with its “commanding act”; to curse and punish, Burgess observed with a discriminating touch of scholastic nuance, “is but an accidentall act, and not necessary to a law.”[40] The absence of due nuance occasioned troubling behavioral and soteriological corollaries. In considering the law to be necessarily punitive, antinomians did no less a disservice to the Holy Spirit than to deny that it “worketh the heart to love and delight in” God’s commands. Declining this spiritual benefit, antinomians spoke volumes in saying nothing—they will “alwaies speak of those places which declare God’s grace to us, but not our duty to him.”[41] When they do speak, antinomians brazenly contradict Scripture in removing holiness from the steps to salvation.[42]

The good works of the law, when brought forth by faith, can deliver certainty of one’s election, just as, by their absence, a man “may conclude his damnation”:[43] what, for the Puritan, was comfortable evidentiary divinity was, for the antinomian, a law-wrought passage to despair. Though observing that nothing was “more ordinary, even in the New-Testament, then to awaken Believers with sad, and severe threatenings,” Burgess considered it a nettling challenge for the preacher to recognize the season of the law, when “deep incisions and wounds” were to be preached into pliable consciences.[44] Appreciative of antinomian disrelishing of superfluous discipline, Burgess would grant that “a Minister may as unseasonably press the Law upon some humbled Christians, as if the Samaritan had taken salt instead of oil, and poured it into the wounds of that man of Jericho.” But this was to reflect more upon the physician’s level of skill than upon the medicine’s intrinsic value. And Burgess had already refused to endorse the antinomian reaction to the blundering physician, asking his opponents to consider whether their “Gospel-liberty” was not “prophane Licence,” whether their “Gospel-grace” was not “a cloak for thy more secure and loose walking.” “Take heed of temptations,” Burgess cautioned, “and being drunk with this sweet wine”; to renounce the disciplines of humiliation was to eat “into the vitals of godlinesse.”[45] Because, though regenerate, we are yet fleshly and corrupt, our “waies of piety” depend upon the provocation of “sharpe goads,” of legal “threatnings.”[46]

God used the moral law, Burgess maintained, “to begin and increase grace”; though these qualities of incipience and intensification, he hastened to add, “cometh wholly by Christ.” It therefore followed that the “practical observations” of both clergy and laity should be structured by “an harmonious accord of Law and Gospel.”[47] The law functioned “instrumentally to work conversion,” the scope of which work Burgess would not restrict to the “preparatory” phases of contrition and humiliation, when the preacher’s voice filled the air with “terrours about sinne.” Rather, law and gospel would play off each other as joint-converters, operating in mutual “subservience.”[48] Burgess is ever folding the law into the conversionary process, holding it at bay only at the special point at which Christ justifies. Contrariwise, the antinomian imagines the law as an alien, an artifact of another place—its being elsewhere thus disobliging it and putting it out of mind. It was in a “very wild comparison,” Burgess noted, that Tobias Crisp had insisted that the “man under grace” was no more obliged to the moral law than was an Englishman to the “lawes of Spain or Turkie.” The flaw in the analogy hung upon Crisp’s totalizing of the cursedness of the law. Crisp erred in supposing that the law was nothing more than the inscription of God’s curse, and that grace’s vanquishing of the curse had the simultaneous effect of decommissioning the law. Against this, Burgess insisted that the sins of the godly continued to incite God’s condemnation and to deserve His wrath, even though “this guilt doth not redound upon the person.”[49] One could not, therefore, properly make the leap from non-redounding guilt to non-applicable law. But this was Crisp’s momentous impropriety, and it had the sorry consequence of releasing sinners from their bridles and depriving them of the pietistic delights engendered by Burgess’s Holy Spirit.

To fail to apprehend the ongoing regulatory uses of the law was to be blind to the incarnational reality of Christian righteousness. Crisp was no proponent of the imitatio Christi, but Burgess—coupling law and grace—set to rights the antinomian oversight: “as Christ, while he remained the second Person, was invisible, but when he was incarnated, then he became visible; so must thy faith be incarnated into works, and it must become flesh as it were.”Paul, that spokesman of grace—and that go-to apostle for the antinomians—had discountenanced the baking of less than a full legal loaf: “the Law of God still remaineth as a rule and directory: And thus Paul professeth hee delighted in the Law of God in his inward man; and that place, Rom. 12. presseth our renovation, comparing us to a sacrifice, implying we are consecrated, and set apart to him.” In addition to which, Matthew 5:19 seemed to speak with antinomians in mind:”He shall be least in the Kingdome of heaven, that breaketh the least commandement; how much more inexcusable is the Antinomian, who teacheth the abolition of all of them?”[50]

III. Using and Not Using the Law: Free Grace and Its Implications

Perhaps not surprisingly, Puritans were reluctant to acknowledge consanguinity between their theology and that of the antinomians. Their reluctance might bear consequences for their own sense of themselves—might dispose them to suppress dangerously exploitable configurations of their discourse of grace, and encourage revisions designed to foreclose on potential accommodations with dwellers beyond the theological pale. Burgess, for one, preferred not to depict antinomianism as symptomatic of a tendency within Puritanism to shield the purity of grace by limiting the scope of its associations with the law. McGiffert’s observation that antinomians “had the courage of Perkinsians’ convictions”[51] could not sit easily with guardians of Puritan orthodoxy—such an insight finds heresy and blasphemy rubbing uncomfortably near to the bone of a venerable tradition of English divinity; better to hush than to explore the contours of such a lineage. Puritan free grace left the door ajar for notions of divine beneficence that operated without reference to the soteriological utility of divine law. As will be seen, some Puritans, having accustomed themselves to regard prolonged and intensive preparation as a burdensome competitor to free grace, felt the pull of what might be considered an incipient antinomianism. And the antinomian, voluble in expounding the freeness of grace, plays true to the Puritan word, making grace merciful enough to forgive in an instant what the law would either peremptorily condemn or subject to its penitential economy. Burgess knew the threat posed by this plausible species of new prophet, this pure-seeming disseminator of moral obliquity.

If Burgess refused to recognize the Puritan in the antinomian, he nevertheless conceded that the antinomian’s motivation was in an important sense assimilable to the Puritan’s—for the one, no less than for the other, the graced soul appeared before God’s sights without merit of its own making, and was unencumbered by the unrealizable aspiration to earn by due obedience the blessing of divine favor. Accordingly, the law found itself deprived of employment in the great matter of a person’s justification. But this, the Puritan was relearning in London’s heady atmosphere of the 1640s, was an insight that needed to be contained, that became destructive upon bursting its bounds; it was not within the rights of the doctrine of justification to ride roughshod over the considerable stretches of Christian experience wherein the law ministered its own—valuable—gifts. As Burgess knew, “error” thrived when theology lost its integrating balance and when overblown grace retrenched the giftedness of law.

For antinomians, it was the primacy of justification that permitted breakage of other links in the Puritan chain of salvation. The obtruding moral law appeared to spoil the operation of grace once the full repertoire of Puritan practical divinity is brought into view. The more insistently that justification is presented as a link in a chain, the more calamitously the law’s “Do this and live” imperative emboldens itself. Antinomians would excavate full value from the Perkinsian stance that the redeemed are “freely pardoned, and justified in Christ,” that a “free gift” is in its nature blessedly insulated from any “morall condition.”[52] With free grace turned against it, the Puritan law could be set forth as playing a needlessly cruel game in crushing souls during the inchoative exertions of preparation and in sending them to the edge of despair during the evidence-seeking self-inspections of sanctification. Antinomians readily drew such conclusions from their experience of the Puritan praxis. But Puritan proponents of the freeness of grace were not strangers to the antinomian consciousness of the law’s potential for overdrawing its own zeal.

Among Puritans, Richard Sibbes came closer than most to partaking of the antinomian flight from the law’s terrors. He commended a way of “forbearance and moderation,” and held with Paul that the penitent “should not be swallowed up with too much grief.” It was not Christ’s way to use a mallet “to kill a fly on the forehead.”[53] But Sibbes knew that to abandon the terrors was to give libertinism its unholy chance. For all his love of “free grace” and “free mercy,”[54] Sibbes remained wedded by temperament to the law as a rod of humbling and a rule of duty. The antinomian threat fortified the starchiness of an evangelical legalism. In a lesson of grace that may well have resonated with Crisp, Sibbes counseled that God, unlike Pharaoh, does not oblige Christians to “make brick without straw.” For Crisp, as we shall see, the text from Exodus told of the law’s slavish pietism, though Crisp did unlock here a message of grace—a message that, intriguingly, first overturned but ultimately endorsed the imperative of dutiful obedience that the likes of Sibbes contended was a necessary product of grace’s operation. For Sibbes, the Exodus text spoke pure grace; it proclaimed God’s promissory disposition and his giving of the Spirit. The outcome, nevertheless, was pietistic, a convergence of promise and obligation, of receiving and doing: “If men did believe” that God did not, like Pharaoh, set us to work without promising help, “they would go about God’s work without dulness and staggering.”[55] Against such as make Christ “an abettor of a lawless and loose life,” Sibbes stood firm in the name of a Christ who, in “ruling” and “governing” the soul, “mouldeth it to all duty and acceptable manner of performance of duty.” A soul “looking for mercy” should also “submit itself at the same time to be guided,” for “government”—no less than “meekness and mercy”—had been “implied” by Christ’s relations with his spouse, his body, his flock.[56]

Sibbes, indeed, adduced Christ’s “government” in correcting the “imputative” error of the antinomians: “those are misled,” he insisted, “that make Christ to be only righteousness to us, and not sanctification, except by imputation.” As against this, Sibbes offered the assurance that it was “a great part of our happiness” to be governed by a “sanctifier.” Christ’s “throne,” his “absolute government,” would be established “in our hearts.”[57] But Sibbes’s keynote was the “free offer of grace,” and his Christ made good the saving covenant’s grace by becoming “a curse for us” and, collaterally, by taking away the downbeat streak of the law-crushed sinner: in Christ are “heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy … above all the depths of our sin and misery, Eph. iii.18; that we should never be in such a forlorn condition, wherein there should be ground of despair, considering our sins be the sins of men, his mercy the mercy of an infinite God.” “Where sin abounds,” Sibbes remarked, “there grace superabounds.”

The law might seem to have become superseded in the flow of superabundant grace, but the point where the antinomian takes leave of Sibbes is precisely here, at a legal crossroads of sorts, wherein Sibbes insists that the soul who makes plea for mercy must be “a broken spirit.”[58] The soul will be encouraged to suffer its preparatory “bruising” if it knows that “holy despair in ourselves is the ground of true hope.”[59] The logic of free grace moves in a promissory direction, pointing to the sufficiency of Christ’s work on behalf of sinners and to the remedy on offer for the despairing heart. And yet the “governor” requires order, and may use a whip to remediate. For all that Sibbes prefers Christ’s “sweetness” and “mildness” to the law’s “smoke” and “fire,” prefers his quietism—the noiselessness of the “meek lamb”—to its “thunder,” prefers his “blessing” to its “curses,” the clearly exhibited preferences do not follow through in renunciation of the “terrors and fears” of the law’s humbling hammer blows.[60] Having broken the law, the penitent soul will feel the “anger and vengeance” of an “offended” God.[61]

Tobias Crisp could join Sibbes in reflecting invidiously upon the law by setting it in stark juxtaposition with Christ, the gift-giver of the covenant of grace; in repudiating legal “noise” for evangelical quietude; in singing a “sweet song” of substitutionary atonement; in stressing the freeness of grace and its uplifting of sinners.[62] But Sibbes understood the need for blessedly hurtful discipline as an antidote to the impieties of unregulated grace, notwithstanding his concurrence with the Puritan commonplace that conversion might be arrested by the “Gulphe of despaire” that attends too fierce an application of the “terrours of the Law.” The “Rocke of presumption” was the other great Puritan impediment to conversion, formed by excessive or precipitate administration of “mercy, and the comforts of the Gospell.”[63] Sibbes, revealingly, professed not to be building “a shelter for the presumptuous,” but only opening “a harbour for the truly humbled soul to put himself into.”[64] Puritan free grace, even in its sweetest articulations, cannot do without the law; it needed the law’s rules as well as its terrors, and refused to nurture the “presumption” that knows only a lawless gospel.

Significantly, Crisp’s free grace was unaccompanied by the imitatio Christi. Sibbes and John Preston, specialist purveyors of the imitatio, show why this should be. To experience Puritan free grace was to be remade in the likeness of Christ. The remaking was a reassemblage of contrite and humbled resources; once mortified, in replication of Christ’s death, the soul’s resources would be renewed, their sanctifying vivification replicating Christ’s resurrection.[65] In this setting we hear again from Sibbes of Christ’s “government,” a regime of grace that works grief, sorrow, and self-denial, a regime that will “help us” in the fight against sin until such time as Christ “hath made us like himself.”[66] The imitatio enacted a beneficial suffering, an extended process of purification effected by grace and founded on the holy violence of the law’s preparatory tutelage. For Preston, “sound humiliation … makes a man prize Christ above all other things, then faith proves effectual.”[67] Preston adverted to “sharp” and “troublesome” remedies, “yet the end of the Physitian in using them is health, and help.” Spiritual “cordials” follow a curative “method”; the more bitter the self-abhorrence the greater the improvement.[68] Likewise, Sibbes commended the “sharpest things” as “best” effecting the soul’s assimilation to God’s “image.” The Lord, here, “prepares” by “rending,” “tearing,” and “shaking” the conscience, by revealing the law’s threats, opening hell’s mouth, kindling “a sense of wrath present and to come.”[69] Having stirred medicinal “troubles” in the humbled heart, Preston’s God sends his Spirit, “and this spirit gives us ability, making us like Christ, changing us, and causing us to delight in the duties of new obedience in the inward man.” The imitatio sets the soul in steadfast pursuit of love’s obligations: “love is diligent in adorning it selfe, and beautifying the Soule for the approach of the Lover,” Preston counseled, and followed with an imperative: “expresse your diligence therefore in labouring to adorne your hearts with graces, that the Lord may take a delight to dwell in you.”[70] Bejeweled by grace, Sibbes’s spouse of Christ would “examine” the heart for “some mark of regeneration,” some “evidence” of a secure estate.[71]

The antinomian will accept the free grace but not the subjectivity of the imitatio. Crisp spurned experimental talk of beautification and adornment—his Christ was not interested in “handsome” or “lovely” souls.[72] Eaton lamented the subjective misdirection of sanctification—though it “flowes infallibly” from justification, as the moon’s light from the sun, sanctification is “filthy and loathsome in the sight of God,” and declares “that we are Saints to manward: wherein men are much and often deceived, taking them for Saints which are no Saints.”[73] Antinomian free grace sounds the “objective” notes of Puritan soteriology: Christ, as redeemer of the “elect,” “satisfies” the justice of God, who, in turn, undertakes to “forget” or “abolish” the sins of the redeemed and to “impute” to them the righteousness of Christ, leaving them “whiter than snow … in the sight of God.”[74] One might “row too long in this sea of happiness,”[75] reaching the point at which free grace cares not a whit for the pursuits of its beneficiaries—a position that Crisp was particularly disposed to adopt. The antinomian Christ atoned for the sins of the “ungodly”—of rebels, harlots, thieves, drunkards, murderers, and adulterers.[76] The “communicating” of Christ, Crisp remarked, occurs on the basis “merely of gift, without consideration of any thing in the World”; Crisp’s Lord “doth give Christ, and portion in Christ, without any regard in the world to anything that a man doth.”[77] Christ “doth not look” to extend his mercy to those who undergo the rites of preparation, who seek to “come forth and meet with him, to mediate, or intercede, or beg, or bring a price.”[78] “Righteousness” performed with expectation of “acceptance with Christ” will cause “separation between Christ and a People ...whereas no sinfulness in the World can debar a People.”[79]

For the antinomian, the justifying of the worst of sinners illustrates the unconditioned efficacy, the sheer giftedness, of free grace; for the Puritan, concerned at the resultant opening of immoral floodgates, the ongoing sins of the justified reveal the need for the legal “bridle.”[80] Depravity, for Crisp, was a datum; and, since Christ enforced no covenantal “condition” upon the depraved soul, so he required from it no fruit of “qualification.” Sibbes and Preston, among Puritans, might commend the covenantal premise but discountenance the lawless consequence. Indeed, Sibbes made a point of condemning the antinomian disgracing of grace that “neglects sanctification and mortification of lusts, and beautifying the image of God.”[81]

The subjective warrants of a man’s “godly life,” the “evidence of grace in his own heart,” lacked the interest for Crisp that compelled the attention of experimentalists like Sibbes and Preston.[82] The “imputative” strand of antinomianism retreats from the remaking of souls. Crisp could concur with Sibbes and Preston that the Spirit operates “immediately” upon the soul, but for Crisp the purpose of this operation was strictly revelational: the Spirit came to reveal to the sinner’s soul that Christ had secured the gift of justification.[83] Absent from Crisp are the concerns with the “repair” and “new moulding” of souls that occupied Preston when he turned to the Spirit’s “immediate” infusions.[84] Nor is Crisp given to the intimacies between “Christ the pattern” and the Christ-like soul over which Sibbes perceived the Spirit to preside in “sanctifying Christ first, and then us.”[85] Why bruise the soul with the law’s humbling hammer, and then beautify it with the law’s rules of duty? If Christ’s blood secured salvation, and if his free grace released the law’s hard yoke, why confect the Puritan compounds of the graced law of preparation and the legalized grace of sanctification?

It was an experimental dividend of the law’s pre-conversionary “bruising” that such treatment “maketh us set a high price upon Christ.” Sibbes’s graced law, then, is legalistic in application but evangelical in orientation: grace’s method was to bruise preparatively but to heal definitively. The process of healing worked its own experimental dividend, that of assurance of salvation— attained via the “hellish terrors” that God uses “to school,” “to humble,” and “to prepare” the wayfarer.[86] Sibbes took care to notice the “danger” that vitiated prolongation of the “bruising” course; but, equally, he insisted that recalcitrant self-regard was a misplaced love that needed to be legally lashed: apostasy loomed for those who “never smarted for sin at the first; they were not long enough under the lash of the law.” Sibbes confided that the law’s pains can be eternally therapeutic: “It is better to go bruised to heaven than sound to hell.” Grief and sorrow hone appreciation of the “value” of Christ’s “grace and mercy”; “God makes sin bitter, that Christ may be sweet.”[87] That God “often worketh by contraries” who uses the law for evangelical purposes: as Sibbes put it, “he doth cast us down, to raise us up, and empty us that he may fill us”; ”when he means to comfort, he will terrify first.”[88] God “affrights” us in wielding the law but afterwards causes us to “delight” in it, having set us free from its “curse” and “whip.”[89] Out of “sorrow,” joy springs.[90] The graced law that prepares and the legalized grace that sanctifies are instruments in Christ’s bruising and healing hand—means available to a curative method. But the compounding of “contraries” keeps alive an infernal threat. To be sure, the threat is only barely alive, emaciated by comparison with the rich stock of Christ’s grace. Sibbes assuaged troubled affections by proclaiming the advantage of promise over threat; he assured the miserable that “the depths of misery are never beyond the depths of mercy.”[91] But the likes of Crisp would worry about the torments that were self-cultivated by those who, in their own miserable estimation, had not been rightly prepared by the law’s bruising, or had not satisfactorily calibrated their deeds against the law’s rules. How would such as these rise from the furnace of hell to partake of Christ’s deep mercy?

Even Sibbes, then, and the similarly Christ-focused John Cotton—for whom aspirants to heaven “must sail by hell gates,” finding themselves “driven” to Christ by the “sentence” and “terrors of the law”[92] —were prepared on occasion to deploy the mixed retributive and gracious discourse that, to antinomians, wrongfully raised hell’s profile, and displaced heavenly hopes with infernal fears. The problem, as Robert Towne put it in recalling his dialogs with “old and zealous professors,” was that the God of the legalists “would accept of them for their good works and duties.”The preacher should not hold the law on his tongue while he spoke of gospel matters: this, for the antinomian, was unwarrantably to press hell into the discourse of heaven. The “compounding” of the retributive stream with the gracious wrought confusion. If Christ and law, as Towne put it, could not be “reconciled” by “way of mixture” at point of justification, nor could this “strange” alchemy or “Chymical Divinity” deliver the truth of sanctification. But if—to maintain the integrity of the streams—the law be preached “for death” rather than “for life,” it would be evident to people that “nothing but the curse and wrath could be had in their works and ways.”The law, so preached, would be known exclusively for its capacity to kill. The advantage in ministering the fatality of the law of Moses, Towne averred, is that its role as a stimulant of duties would not need to be set forth in unproductive competition with faith in Christ.[93]

“Reasserting” grace against Burgess’s “capacious” remaking of the law, Towne denied that the law can “aide” and “quicken” faith. Rather, the law’s effect was to “dampeth and deadeth the spirit of faith and love” and to “vivifie the corruption in nature.” Crisp’s “Gospel-Cordials,” Towne noted, do not accommodate the penitential disciplines of the law’s “walk”; such an accommodation would be tantamount to confederating with the “impossible.” Towne himself concluded from Pauline bases the same “impossibility,” namely, “that Christ should any way be included in the Law.”[94] Towne would go so far as to concede that the law “worketh preparatorily in the soul” by plunging it into the “great depth of woe and horror.” But this concession to practical Puritanism evaporates once “repentance,” conceived as an evangelical “promise,” finds itself dissevered from legal preparation. The nasty upshot, which Towne presents as an entailment of Burgess’s brand of Puritanism, is that the sorrows of the sin-wracked legalist end in despair that consorts with death rather than life. We see the Puritan dialectic of law and grace wrenched into separate “kingdoms”[95] —into the sheer dichotomy of salvation and damnation—under pressure exerted by uncompromising application of the logic of free and particularized grace. Exclusively hell’s servant, the antinomian law bore no evangelical commission. Legal “forcing and terrifying,” Towne urged in “hyper-Perkinsian” mode, “can provoke onely unto an externall and hypocriticall obedience, such as is in the Children of the Bondswoman.”[96] Here was the “righteousness of works,” which “carrieth the soul” to hell. The “marks and signs” of law-based sanctification bring no “true and grounded rest”; rather, as Crisp put it, they needlessly “troubled” and “puzzled” the votaries of penitential rigor.[97] Antinomians turned hell on its head; it became a persuasion for abandoning— rather than for cultivating—the law’s governorship of the repentant.

In this context, the Sibbesian Christ who undertakes “to purge his spouse, and make her fit for himself “ might seem, to some sights, out of keeping with his freely given grace, for the purging and fitting are regulatory operations, effecting an accommodation of sorts between law and sinner. With “purging” and “cleansing,” Sibbes linked covenantal law.[98] But how can the depraved human heart rectify itself into legal compliance? For the antinomian, the insoluble problem afflicting the various penitential ordeals formulated in Puritan practical divinity was that they amounted to an endlessly self-subverting cycle: every good work needed, on account of the sin with which it was defiled, to be repented of before it might serve as evidence of divine favor; but to repent was to be bound by the law’s order of “works righteousness,” and every sinner’s work, Crisp insisted, was itself infected with sin, for the sake of which repentance “must begin again.” To be “purged and cleansed” was to abandon grace for works, gift for debt.[99]

Sibbes, so interested in purity, also spoke, in clipped terms, the idiom of filth in which Eaton and Crisp, articulating disenchantment with purity’s possibility, effused their shared sensibility of omnipresent noxiousness. Dismayed by the consequences of human depravity, Sibbes spoke of “performances” as “dung,” as well as “idols,” and thrust forward the covenant of works when warning of the danger of excessive reliance on the “graces and gifts” of sanctification. But whereas Sibbes quickly pulls on his lexical rein and qualifies himself, attending to the need for growth “in holiness” and “signs” of “comfort,” Crisp exploits the polemical potency of the covenant of works, and carries the excremental and idolatrous themes to the point of reprobating the strenuous regime of Puritan legalism. The Puritan is offended by the blemishes in human agency, but hurries to insist that the “new creature” must “walketh by rule.”[100] The antinomian sees rule-walking as a “stumbling-stone” and a “rock of offence,” for it deflects the soul from Christ, engenders despair at the law’s looming curse, and disgorges the filth of legal “performances”—thereby insinuating the very sin that abidance by rule is calculated to conquer. Puritans were making an “idol” of their penitential “righteousness” by putting it in the “room and place of the Righteousness of God “; but Christ is not interested in such painstaking— “he doth not look for your pains,” but will “save those that could not tell which way to turn themselves.”[101]

IV. Puritan Cameos

We are back, then, with the antinomian refusal to grant the law any functionality beyond its executive responsibility for God’s wrath. This retributive telling of the law’s work was a Puritan, or Perkinsian, truth, ripe for anti-legal use by evangelical heretics—for whom the law as rule of purity was a Puritan oxymoron. What point the athletic piety of legalists, who engage their own “strength” to “run” with Moses in the ways of “inherent righteousness”? Crisp’s partisans of “free grace” keep themselves at arm’s length from the law, out of harm’s way: resting on gospel promises, they are at liberty to “sit,” sparing themselves the needless exertion of the Mosaic “run.”[102] Consequently, the athletes of purity—those, like Paul Baynes, who announced that “the life of the Christian is the running of a race, not sitting or standing still”[103] —were setting themselves up for unavoidable failure. To succeed was to rely utterly upon Christ, who liberates sinners from legal bondage in spite of their impurity, who gives sinners leave to remain seated—unmoved by the impulse to purify—when the law demands that they be up and running.

Punctuated as it is with swaggering condemnations of Puritan contradiction, antinomian discourse betrays occasional residues of Puritan commitment. From time to time, in antinomian books, we happen upon Puritan-sounding surprises of sanctification, of law-mindedness, of surging religious subjectivity, far removed from the starkly objective notes and the excising of the law’s sanctificatory claims that generally articulate the principal antinomian truths and revisions. At moments such as these we are face to face with surviving flickers of a provenance. As we shall presently see, the pressure of Puritan law-mindedness left an eloquent imprint in the writings even of Tobias Crisp, that vigorous campaigner against the contagion of Puritan law-keeping. The imprint is all the more valuable for its bewildering evocation of the “running” of the law’s race, its seemingly anomalous ratification of zealous and punctilious dedication to a behavioral code.

Antinomians sieved in the complex heritage of Puritan divinity. Insofar as they adopted Puritan conceptions of the moral law, they did so for the sake of legitimating their disavowal of its capacity to shape their lives; preaching free grace, they defused the law’s dangers and slighted its demands. But in one, astonishing, meditation on the persistence of the law, Tobias Crisp offered a cameo of the Puritan sense of the sanctificatory coupling of law and grace. In a sermon headed “Christian Liberty no Licentious Doctrine,” Crisp turns his mind to Exod 5 and the illustration of the merciless law manifested in the discipline of the Egyptian taskmasters. In transit, Crisp can be observed applying himself with some avidity to Burgess’s brief for antinomians, draining away all possibility for gracious operation on the law’s behalf by stressing the ferocity that animates the tableau. To the Puritan, the law serves a necessary pedagogical office; to the antinomian, it is a harmful obstructer of Christ. What is common to both is the doctrine that Christ, not the law, secures salvation; what sets them apart is the law’s manner of validating this doctrine. For the Puritan and the antinomian, Exod 5 is both a door to communion and a flashpoint.

Thus, the law that commands the brick-making work but gives no straw is for John Preston a curse that “humbleth a man.” “Necessitie” hedges humbling: without it, “men will not seeke out for and come unto CHRIST.”[104] The antinomian knows the soul to be utterly reliant upon Christ, but abominates the Puritans’ “hard Labour,” their “menacings and threatnings,” “tribulation and bitterness.” Crisp, unlike Preston, sees only malevolence in the law’s curse—its embittering ministry “terrifies,” “racks,” “scourges” the soul. The law, so considered, is an impediment, not a Prestonian motivator; it is a “prison” that prevents access to Christ’s “comforts,” not a means by which Christ will be savingly sought out. In tracing the lineaments of liberty, Crisp needs to rehearse the marks of bondage: the “load” of the law’s obligation and the “blows” of its retribution, the curse whose imprecation ceaselessly batters the “Ears of the People,” the command to “Do this and Live” that “requires such doings that are impossible to be attained.” Like Job, the man in bondage hears “nothing but execrations”; it is his torment “to have the Law to Tyrannize and Domineer over him.” The “privation of comfort,” Crisp warns, is self-perpetuating: this is the message of Exodus—you are lashed for failure to obey, “strictness and exactness” will not deliver you from “the Rod of the Law.” Even the “exactest, strictest, precisest” were destined to feel the law’s “darts”—the law “will pick a quarrel” with the “best” penitential “performances.” Preston might not have strung out the soul’s preparatory experience in the manner of Hooker, but he envisaged a series of conversionary thresholds to be crossed under the joint tuition of law and Spirit. For Crisp, it was Christ who played the “Lookingglass” to the filthy; Puritans erred in attributing this service to the law, erred in calling for coerced rectitude. And so the protracted passage through humiliation becomes indefensible.[105]

And yet contrary to all expectation—against the grain of his sermon and evidently in spite of himself—Crisp alters course. He appears, momentarily, on behalf of the law as regula vitae, his newfound nomistic stance seeming to interdict an often flamboyant antinomianism. And, as any Puritan might, he spies an opening for grace in the hole of the law’s lack. Christ, “bringing from the Bosome of his Father” the latter’s “great and unsearchable love,” purchases “real and true Liberty” and gives it “to all his Members.” He is the liberator from the law’s curse; for his “free men” he will “disannul” punishment, regardless of how “scandalous” their failings. But now, too, he establishes the law’s claim to measure righteousness. In its regulatory demeanor, the law lacks the capacity, in and of itself, to effectuate the compliance that it demands; but Crisp configures the law’s lack as Christ’s opportunity to distribute the fulfilling gift of his grace. This might pass by without comment were the gift of a piece with Crisp’s usual substitutionary and forensic construal of its generation and conveyance. Which, indeed, is the direction in which Crisp’s discourse of “freedom” sets out: the righteous “doing” of the substitutionary Christ operates “as if “ his “free men” had done as God had required, “ as if” a man who had done “nothing himself” were deemed to have brought in the thousand bricks actually delivered by his all-doing substitute.[106] Hence the surprise that grips when Crisp, adopting the regula vitae, sets aside his standard—the Christ whose all-fulfilling righteousness obviates the disciplines of Puritan law-keeping.

Indeed, Crisp now evokes a pietistic scenario that is redolent of normative Puritan aspiration and perspiration. Thus, having sighted legalists trying to build bricks without straw, Crisp introduces Christ, bringing oil for wheels and wind for sails. “Running” with the law, now, ceases to be the curse-driven labor that Crisp has elsewhere led us to expect. Instead, Crisp puts Christ to the task of enabling the Christian to out-work the legalist, and to do so not bitterly and under punitive duress, but with evangelical cheer: the Christian, in Crisp’s Puritan vignette, “shall run and not be weary, walk and not faint. So then the free men of Christ, having Christ and his Spirit for their Life and Strength, they may go infinitely beyond the exactest Legalist in the World, in more cheerful Obedience then they can perform.” Crisp refers to his sanctified “free men” as such who obediently and thankfully perform “services” and “duties” and, with the Spirit’s help, “do the will of God”; more than this, he appropriates for present descriptive need the adverbs “sincerely,” “exactly,” and “strictly”— words that in usual course will serve the task of vilifying the zealous deeds of Puritan legalists.[107] An abrupt interjection delivered with some panache, this residue of Puritan praxis seems to bask in the expectation of strain that it will place on the credulity of auditors and readers: why here, why now, is the ineradicable Puritan law proclaiming its steadfast morality out of the mouth of an antinomian preacher?

Crisp doubtless speaks hyperbolically, but seemingly without irony, of grace that is not simply forensic—rather, its sanctificatory virtue drives its recipients “infinitely beyond” the athleticism of less gifted rigorists. As the sermon on Christian liberty draws to its close, Crisp permits himself an uncharacteristically law-fixed conception of Christ’s grace. He allows grace to pass over, as agent of Christian “liberty,” from the gift that works on behalf of sinners to that which stimulates their compliance with a rule. A flickering surge of piety, it seems, has breached the wall of Crisp’s redemptive code—dominated as it is by the all-doing Christ whose righteousness is imputed to the simply passive, unmoved sinner. But, briefly, Crisp radiates the glow of Puritan practical divinity, its austere log of commands warmed and softened by the Christ who, as John Preston had put it, “rivets” the law onto the newly created and “tractable” heart, which comes to serve the Lord with “alacrity and cheerefulnesse,” recognizing in the law “a wholsome and profitable rule of direction.” Preston’s way of “free grace and mercy” took the terror out of the do-or-die “injunctive”—”Do this, and live”—enabling the soul to hold fast to the law without needing to cringe before God as before a “hard and cruell Master.”[108] If the law were ever to stake a claim to Crisp’s heart, it would be Prestonian law.

Another Puritan cameo suggests that Crisp could adopt Prestonian insights for a contrary purpose, to proclaim the unprofitability of the law as rule of direction for pious living. Preston, like Sibbes, pointed the way to free grace, but then fell back on the law, keen to find a route to cheerfully pursued purity. Crisp, to use McGiffert’s phrase, showed that he had the courage of Preston’s conviction: if grace indeed runs freely, it effaces the dialectical tension with the law in which the Puritan captures its purifying operation. By Crisp’s lights, the capturing is contradictory, for it is in grace’s nature simply to accept the sinner, not to defer to contingent purifications that interrupt the freely drawn line that runs from acceptor to accepted. If Crisp’s little meditation on “cheerful obedience” seems anomalously Puritan in conception, his more in-character suspicion of the Puritans’ penitential piety is not without Puritan resonance. It is one of the oversights of Bozeman’s study of Puritan legalism that it scarcely notices the Puritans’ conception of Christ’s soteriological centrality, and, with it, the urge that Puritans felt to extinguish the law’s influence when they perceived legalistic subjectivities threatening to intrude upon the grace of Christ.

Thus, Christ presented himself as a “free” remedy to the human predicament. In this, Puritans and antinomians concurred. Treatments of Isaiah, however, evince “practical” tensions vitiating the in-principle concurrence. In one of his stronger rehearsals of prevenient grace, Preston appealed in The Saints Qualification to the first verse of Isa 55 as a “proclamation” of “free” access to the “water of life.” The new creature was not to look to fruits of sanctification—”godly sorrow,” “ability to repent,” “disposition of heart”—prior to justification. The prevenience of Christ disallows such legalistic scrupulosity: “wee must first bee in Christ before we can be New Creatures.”This would look promising to the antinomian: Christ eradicates the penitential regime, pays no mind to creaturely sin, requires no “money” from the thirsty aspirant to covenant blessings. And yet, before his paragraph is completed, Preston has shifted Christ’s attention and altered his function: he becomes a physician with a keen eye to sin and a capacity to “heale” the “disease,” to “take away” the “hard heart” and “remove” the “deadnesse of spirit.” Crisp would not tolerate such dwelling upon penitential subjectivity. Preston might approve the free-grace lesson—destined in the near future for a spectacular antinomian career—that the giftedness of Christ removes bars even to the vilest of sinners, and that “no one Qualification or Spiritual Disposition” will be expected prior to the “communicating” of Christ. But the lesson seizes its “prior to” as an incipit for sanctifying grace beyond which moral enormity will not be tolerated: the communicating of Christ is a ministering of qualifications and dispositions, a union of grace and law. Crisp, deploring the Prestonian incipit, proposes a mischievous addition that effects a moral subtraction: to the “prior to” he subjoins a system-shattering “upon,” thus denying the need for qualifications and dispositions both before and after the dispensation of grace.[109] The effect—an illustration of uncompromising application of the doctrine of free grace—is to forbid Preston’s medicinal regimen any place at all in the saving covenant. Free grace, for the Puritan, might be maintained in a context of Christian duty by distinguishing between (laudable) penitential “qualification” and (pejorative) legalistic “cause,”[110] but the antinomian opines that the very presence of “qualification” denotes a reversion from grace to law. The “breaking,” “cleansing,” and “changing” of the heart, for Crisp, import the making of “a meer bargain and sale,” a sordid exchange of spiritual reward for legal compliance.[111]

Crisp has appropriated a set of Puritan idioms in order to display their dissonance. So conceived, the Puritan discourse of the soul’s humbling and remaking ramifies into a practical divinity that cannot but put conditions upon the conveyance of grace. But how “free” is a grace that can be conveyed only to a “broken” heart, and that bears necessary relation to a heart destined to experience “cleansing” and “changing”? Does this not oblige grace to accommodate a suite of occurrences that precede and solicit its arrival and then condition, and thus constrain, its operation? For Crisp, the Puritan doctrine of “inherent righteousness” puts salvation on a footing of “debt.” The “presumptuous pride” and “gross ignorance” that motivate the medicinal aspiration “do directly overthrow the nature of a gift.” In itself, the antinomian took care to observe, the “gift” of free grace is devoid of the bonds of mutual obligation that reciprocally indebt giver and receiver. Accordingly, Puritans could be depicted denaturing the gift by rendering its offering contingent upon disciplines of preparation and sanctification, as though Christ indebts himself to the sinner by rewarding the latter’s pious response to a prior apprehension of indebtedness to Christ. Given the doctrine of total depravity—which Eaton and Crisp evoked to stunning effect—the antinomian will wonder how a sinner’s putrid deeds could trigger grace and indebt Christ. If free grace is a gift, it is unidirectional and unconditional, flowing from Christ to sinners and refusing to transact with sinners’ efforts to suppress their sins and ameliorate their depravity. Self-purification, then, stands in relation not to grace but to law, and its terrible reward is in keeping with the purifier’s relentless corruption. This is the minimalist logic of free grace that the antinomian will accept from the Puritan: if the gift is true to itself it carries no debt, and if grace is a gift it evades the demand for purity with which the law pursues its evangelical masquerade. Adding legal supplements, Puritans had needlessly complicated their own logic. “Work mongers,” Crisp warned, would not get what they “bargained” for: “A Whip you shall have as soon as a Christ, in regard of your works.”[112]

John Eaton evinces a more Puritan-minded sense of the value of the legal whip. As one will “marre” black and white by “mingling” them, so the minister must “not mixe and mingle the Law and the Gospel,” or “turne Christ into Moses, and Moses into Christ.”[113] Towne would follow Eaton here, as he would in acknowledging the “preparatory” work of the killing law, but Eaton is readier to posit a continuum in elect souls that leads from legal humbling to gracious sanctification. Eaton deploys the Puritan commonplace of the “schoolmasterly” law,[114] the “rods” and “lashes” of which will cultivate the self-loathing and “fearfull danger” of divine wrath that, together, “drive” the soul to Christ, propel its “flight” to him.”Legal rebukes, afflictions, and corrections” are “medicinable,” they are “token of Gods love.” Striking an accord with Preston, Eaton might have proceeded to set the disciplined soul on a saving course. But Eaton checked himself, his ear too alert to reverberating tensions in the Puritan outlook sustained by the law’s irreducible danger. The Deuteronomic drama was no place to introduce the consolations of grace. Rather, the law corrals itself in its wilderness, and must be preached in thunder, lightning, earthquake, and fire.[115]

Speaking, then, as if in full concurrence with the likes of Preston, Eaton could rhapsodize on the “cheerful” obedience to divine command that was the consequence of the joint operation of Christ and Spirit.[116] But it was necessary to approach with extreme caution the matter of compliance with command: the law’s satellite estates confederated under Mosaic auspices into a wrongful penitential regime. This was a Puritan temptation that had the dire effect of transposing Christ’s saving grace with Satan’s pure-seeming zeal for godliness. One must beware, Eaton counseled, the “Pharisaicall mortification” upon which the fraudulently righteous build “a preposterous holy walking” piety: Satan’s “bond-slaves” appear “to be by their legall, zealous, holy, and godly living, the most religious, and holy men in the world, yet they are nothing so in truth.”[117] Puritan humbling bears the sorry potential to become terminally Hebraic, too given to “sharp exacting of works and legall righteousnesse”; Eaton warned of a “backsliding” ministry that, in promising rewards to the righteous and threatening transgressors with punishments, “hide & darken, if not put out the benefits of Christ.”[118] We “do cause but a constrained hireling sanctitie, which is hypocriticall holinesse,” by dispensing “legall threats or rewards.”[119]

Turning from “legall threats” and opening their minds to the “benefits of Christ,” Preston and Crisp commented interestingly on Cant 2. Consistently forensic in his view of Christ’s work, Crisp shied away from “experimental” religion. One need not experience the lashes of the law’s whip, since it was Christ’s office to fulfill legal demands on the sinner’s behalf; nor, likewise, was it necessary to feel the mystical enjoyments of the Christ within, since this might provoke aspirations to Christ-like purity, thus recalling the aspiring purifier to the law’s humbling hammer. But, surprisingly, Crisp’s remarks on Canticles show him more sensitive than Preston to the subjectivity of the Christ-filled heart. Where Preston discovers a heart “gladdened” by the flagons and “consoled” by the Spirit, Crisp ventures into spiritual “inebriating” and finds “rivers of pleasures” and “delights in Christ.” Preston is interested in the flow of the Spirit that enables obedience, that “quickens” the wayfarer, making “him zealous, and ready to every good worke … into holinesse of life.” This, however, is where Crisp smells danger: his sermon’s lead text is John 14:6, the running head proclaims Christ as “the Onely Way,” and the way of Christ, for Crisp, refuses to consort with Prestonian zeal for sanctification. To be sanctified is to engage in penultimate “business,” for the sake of which Christ “Oyls the Wheels of our Spirits”; but when viewed from the ultimate point—the heavenly destination—sanctification shrinks to less than a “jot”: “all this Sanctification of life,” Crisp grumbles, “is not a jot the way of [the] justified person unto Heaven.” “Business” must be “dispatched,” but Christ is the provider. Towne spoke likewise: good works are “our imployment or business in the way,” but the soul in Christ “is at her journies end, and need not work to go further for attaining life, as if it were far off, and good works a way to carry and bring us unto it.” Christ’s singularity puts the antinomian on the offensive, sniffing out false prophets ministering Mosaic law. Sanctification is a Puritan deception: there are sheep-seeming prophets, Crisp warned, who feign “austerity,” appearing to preach “nothing but Righteousness and Holiness; but yet they are Ravenous Wolves; How so? They make them build upon a Mans own Righteousness, and not upon Christ, and so destroy poor Souls.”[120]

V. Conclusion

Crisp’s “ravenous wolves” were presiding occupants of his own provenance. If Burgess was disinclined to dwell on the Puritan assumptions that informed antinomian theology, nor was Crisp given to acknowledging his Puritan debts. Antinomians appropriated the Perkinsian profile of the cursing and killing law in order to sustain the logic of the giftedness of Christ’s free grace. This was a logic, as we have seen, with which Sibbes and Preston exercised their minds as they wrestled to integrate the gifts of Christ with the soul’s preparation and sanctification. But the logic of the Puritan gift permits the antinomian to discard the regime of Puritan piety, since the piety, if retained, denatures the gift—deprives it of its unconditionality. Puritan disciplines of “humiliation” and “tears of repentance” breach the truth that the “polluted” soul, utterly reliant upon free grace, cannot “purge and cleanse” itself in acts of preceptive performance.[121] Thus did Crisp and Towne marshal Puritan doctrine against the misdirection of Puritan devotion. And even Eaton, more inclined to allow a humbling role for the law, admonished his contemporaries to beware the false godliness of Pharisees and bondslaves: Puritan disciplines must not be permitted to become superciliously puritanical.

The Puritan in the antinomian also appears in other, more unlikely, ways. A residue of the regulatory law is evident in Crisp’s meditation on the “cheerful obedience” of the “running” and “walking” Christian. And while the law inscribed the requirements of the holy walk, it was Christ who gave strength to sanctified legs. So frequently the advocate of a starkly forensic grace, Crisp, in one fleeting moment, fixes upon the infused grace of Christ the sanctifier. And in another moment, equally fleeting, he surrenders to the inebriating pleasures of the Christ within. In these moments, Christ comes down from the cross in order to treat, with holy walkers and their yearning hearts, in a recognizably Puritan manner. But the moments pass rapidly, leaving Crisp to sing his usual “sweet song” of substitutionary atonement.[122]

Tobias Crisp was a user of a heavily templated lexicon. “Joy,” “free grace,” the “poison” of sin, the imputative justification of “sinners” and the redemption of the “elect,” the Spirit’s “immediate witness,” the priority of “faith” over “works” and of the “covenant of grace” over the “covenant of works,” the law’s “curse,” the creaturely “strength” that designates impotence and depravity: in similar frequencies do these words mark the pages of Crisp’s sermons and the works of covenant-minded Puritans. Such words speak, with bipolar force, of human debility and divine agency, of the pre-eminence of grace and gospel and the suspicion to be afforded to works and law. Contrariwise, other staples of Puritan discourse proved useful to Crisp, but they were conceived in disapprobation and deployed with polemical intent. Thus, he speaks, but usually in order to reprobate, the language of “qualifications,” “dispositions,” and “performances,” of “holy walkings” and the meeting of covenantal “conditions,” of the signs of “humiliation”—the “mourning” for sin and the shedding of sorrowful “tears.” Crisp was repelled by the morbidity of Puritan subjectivity. He removed himself from the Puritans’ affective “clouds”—Puritans had needlessly vexed the heart, requiring that it “first” be “holy” in order to be “fit” for Christ, that it bring “a price to Christ” despite knowing that its sin disqualified its offering. Christ might “change” hearts and “work upon” spirits, but not at the cost of legal prepa-ration—the “Stripes and Blows” of “Cruelty and Rigour.”[123]

Emphasizing Puritan severity, Crisp obscured Puritan grace; he condemned Puritans’ austere practices, and refused to acknowledge their focus upon Christ. In a sense, Bozeman’s Precisianist Strain resuscitates the perspective of Crisp. Robert Bolton appears among Bozeman’s gallery of punctilious and self-reflective toilers. Bolton, to be sure, recommended the long and hard look into the “cleere Cristall of Gods pure Law.” The “crookednesse” of the natural disposition was to be “discovered” here, along with the “villanies and scarlet abominations” of the “unregenerate time.” Hooker was similarly minded: “labour to looke your face in the glasse of Gods Law, and see your own spots.” Yet self-perusal “by this heavenly Looking-glasse,” Bolton declared, is a peaceful and comforting experience if the other hand—the hand of faith—lays hold upon Christ “hanging, bleeding, and dying upon the Crosse.” Christ’s blood and merit afford “an everlasting impregnable protection … from the curse and rigour of the Law.” Having seized Christ, Bolton can privilege “mirth” over “mourning,” favor ravishment by “spirituall joy” over dejection by “griefe,” find “melancholicke matter” to be “mollified and moderated by spirituall delight.”[124] Bolton’s was a soul in “fright”; there were “feares and terrours” for it to elude, and it would shed showers of “penitent teares.” But the “clifts” of Christ the “Rocke” afford refuge from “the stormes of Gods fiercest and fiery indignation.”[125] Though Crisp obviates the need for tear-shedding and eluding of divine ferocity, his base, like Bolton’s, is Christocentric. Christ bears the “indignation of the Lord,” freeing the soul from the need to flee, in terror, from it: the “burthen” is Christ’s alone to bear. Then follows the antinomian corollary that so disturbed Puritan moralists: the “bounty” of Christ’s grace lies in its incognizance of creaturely subjectivity, for Christ “saves from sin, without respect of any thing in the Creature.” There is “no sinfulness” sufficiently virulent to extinguish Christ’s mercy.[126]

For all the penitential exertions to which they resorted in order to medicate their brimstone wounds, Puritan divines placed Christ at the center of their conception of salvation. Preston, for example, confronts his auditors with the corruptions of human nature and makes them “tremble” at the thought that the least breach of the law “shall be surely required to the uttermost”; but, alleviating the law’s burdens and dissipating its bleakness, Christ arrives with a singular remedy: “as we are condemned for Adams sin, though we did not commit it, so we are saved by the righteousnesse of Christ, though we did not performe it.”[127] Perkins strikingly—and ominously, perhaps—acknowledged that sin had met its match in grace: Christ, he avouched, will receive even the devil’s “vassals and bondslaves”; likewise Preston, for whom Christ “came to save sinners … the price that was paid answers for the greatest sinnes as well as the least.”[128] Christ’s death brings sight of a “God, who goeth betweene us and God “—a divine “screene,” as Paul Baynes put it, that insulates the soul from the “wild” and “consuming” fire of God’s wrath, that settles the conscience “in the perswasion of our reconcilement.”[129] Christ, a chorus of Puritan brethren proclaimed, had “satisfied” justice, “appeased” wrath, “cancelled” the law’s curse; his “perfect righteousnesse” was available to be “put on” by faith; his “meritorious Blood” was to be applied as “a soveraigne Plaister to heale the wounded conscience, to turne Crimsin and Scarlet into snow and wooll.”[130] For William Pemble, “this plea alone”—to Christ’s all-sufficient righteousness—”can stop up the mouth of Hell, confute the accusations of Satan, chase away the Terrors that haunt a guilty conscience, and appease the infinite indignation of an angry Judge.” Awareness of the contagion of sin now consorts with relief that destiny is unaffected by legal negligence: heaven will not be forfeited by breach of “obligation unto a necessary fulfilling” of the moral law.[131]

One can imagine that such soundings on salvation rang, as it were, crisply in antinomian ears, stimulating the theological positions, departures, and polemics that we have touched on in the foregoing. Christ’s grace formed the beating heart both of Puritan and of antinomian theology. And, so considered, the likes of Tobias Crisp retained and modified a Puritan inheritance—though, in Crisp’s case, this was not an admission that he chose to make.

Notes

1. Anthony Burgess, Vindiciae Legis: Or, a Vindication of the Morall Law and the Covenants, from the Errours of Papists, Arminians, Socinians, and More Especially, Antinomians (London, 1647), 48–49.
2. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 188.
3. Tobias Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted: Being the Compleat Works of Tobias Crisp, D.D. (London, 1690), 426–27. This posthumous sermon collection was compiled by Samuel Crisp, the preacher’s son; I have used it throughout the present article when referring to the writings of Crisp (hereafter cited as Compleat Works).
4. Robert Towne, author’s preface to A Re-Assertion of Grace (London, 1654). Towne adverted to two other textual victims of the “pikes”—his own Assertion of Grace (London, 1644) and John Eaton’s Honey-Combe of Free Justification by Christ Alone (London, 1642).
5. Crisp, Compleat Works, 4, 116–23, 153–55, 191, 463–65.
6. Ibid., 108, 126, 134–35, 442.
7. Ibid., 40-41, 49–50, 108, 116–17; also Towne, Re-Assertion, 25.
8. Crisp, Compleat Works, 235–36, 108, 191. For Crisp as quietist, see David Parnham,” The Covenantal Quietism of Tobias Crisp,” CH 75 (2006): 511-43.
9. Epistle to the reader by Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, in Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption by the Effectual Work of the Word, and Spirit of Christ, for the Bringing Home of Lost Sinners to God. The First Eight Books (London, 1656). On “bare husks” and human “strength,” see Thomas Hooker, The Soules Ingrafting into Christ (London, 1637), 2; Thomas Hooker, The Soules Humiliation (London, 1638), 21–22, 45.
10. Hooker, Soules Humiliation, 187, 9, 72, 34.
11. Ibid., 50-51; see Thomas Hooker, The Soules Preparation for Christ: Or, a Treatise of Contrition (London, 1632), 90, where drunkards and adulterers are humbled by self-inspection in “the glasse of the law”: a foreclosing of any incipient antinomianism.
12. Thomas Hooker, The Soules Vocation or Effectual Calling to Christ (London, 1638), 154–55, also 369–70. See similarly William Perkins, The Whole Works of That Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, M. William Perkins (3 vols.; Cambridge, 1631), 1:382.
13. Hooker, Soules Humiliation, 21–22.
14. Hooker, Soules Ingrafting, 26, also 9.
15. Thomas Hooker, The Christians Two Chiefe Lessons, Selfe-Deniall and Selfe-Tryall (London, 1640), 64.
16. Thomas Hooker, The Soules Exaltation (London, 1638), 188, 201–3.
17. Hooker, Application of Redemption, 157–60. For an accomplished theological exposition of the antinomians’ “easy” way, see William K. B. Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978).
18. Such “duties” as fasting, prayer, and mourning for sin do not “prevail with God,” nor do they “move him”—rather, God “moves them in us” through the Spirit. But such ordinances, Crisp constantly affirms, are not the “ground of forgiveness,” and so “you must not rest upon your performances to get [salvation].” Crisp, Compleat Works, 141–43, and passim, for the punitive law and the Christ whose merits will save the sinful.
19. Ibid., 39-40, 49–50, 230, 239–40. The “menstrous cloth” of human righteousness was one of Eaton’s stock anti-Puritan images: see his Honey-Combe, 10, 17, 47, 77, 87, 154, 323–24, 349, 371–72, 374–75, 405, 447, 468.
20. Michael McGiffert, “The Perkinsian Moment of Federal Theology,” CTJ 29 (1994): 117-48 (quotations at pp. 131, 135).
21. David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004).
22. Bozeman, Precisianist Strain, 38, 137, 139, and passim for the “Israelite paradigm.” Part 3 covers the “antinomian backlash.” For an earlier statement of the paradigm, seemingly less morbid than the full-scale study and more disposed to accent the blessings of the (Elizabethan Presbyterian) “contractual” arrangement with God, see Bozeman,” Federal Theology and the ‘National Covenant’: An Elizabethan Presbyterian Case Study,” CH 61 (1992): 394-407.
23. Bozeman, Precisianist Strain, 198.
24. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 278, 281.
25. Towne, Re-Assertion, 87.
26. Eaton, Honey-Combe, 403–4, 410, 423, 449, 451–52, 464–65, 477–78; see similarly Perkins, Works, 1:478.
27. Richard Sibbes, Works (ed. Alexander Grosart; 7 vols.; Edinburgh, 1862–1864), 2:316–17.
28. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 14, 153, 24.
29. Ibid., 165, 208, 211, 267, 278.
30. Ibid., 159, 168, 214; see Crisp, Compleat Works, 50, 92, 137, 225, 228–35, 239–40; Eaton, Honey-Combe, 94, 168, 268, 349, 383, 406, 457; also Towne, Re-Assertion, 14, 51, 93, 179; and Perkins, Works, 1:660; 2:372.
31. Towne, Re-Assertion, 172; also Eaton, Honey-Combe, 140.
32. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 181–82, 183, 8–9.
33. Ibid., 6, 51, 55, 97.
34. William Gouge, Works (London, 1627), 1:108–9. “The pangs, terrours, and feares of all impenitent persons,” wrote Perkins, “are as it were, certaine flashings of the flames of hell fire. ... The miserie under his feete, is, hell fire for every man till he repent” (Perkins, Works, 1:463–64; see also 1:70; 2:232, 275, 299, 306–7, 364–65; 3:33 [1st pagination]). For Perkins and his ambience, see the articles by Michael McGiffert, “Perkinsian Moment”; “Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism,” HTR 75 (1982): 463-502; “From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 129-55.
35. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 173, 254–55.
36. Towne, Assertion, passim; and, a decade later, his Re-Assertion, passim. See also Como, Blown by the Spirit, 185.
37. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 236.
38. Towne, Re-Assertion, 85.
39. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 232.
40. Ibid., 61, 237, 279.
41. Ibid., 43, 280. Thomas Blake would warn of “the severing of the promise from the duty, so that Christ is heard only in a promise, not at all in a precept, when they heare that Christ will save; but are never told that they must repent. These are but delusions; promise-Preachers, and not duty-Preachers; grace-Preachers, and not repentance-Preachers” (Vindiciae Foederis [London, 1653], 144).
42. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 43: “Without holinesse no man can see God: now, by the Antinomians argument, as a man may be justified while he is wicked, and doth abide so; so also he may be glorified and saved: for this is their principle, that, Christ hath purchased justification, glory, and salvation for us, even though sinners and enemies.” Also Hooker, Application of Redemption, 159.
43. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 42.
44. Ibid., “additional lecture” pagination: 164; Anthony Burgess, The True Doctrine of Justification Asserted and Vindicated, from the Errours of Papists, Arminians, Socinians, and More Especially Antinomians (London, 1651), 221, also 271–72.
45. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, “additional lecture” pagination: 169; Burgess, True Doctrine of Justification, 59.
46. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 219, 263.
47. Ibid., “additional lecture” pagination: 169, 164.
48. Ibid., 195-96, 261–62.
49. Ibid., 15, “additional lecture” pagination: 169–64 [sic]; for Crisp, see Compleat Works, 123; also Towne, Re-Assertion, 7–8.
50. Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 44–45.
51. McGiffert, “Perkinsian Moment,” 131.
52. Perkins, Works, 1:369; 2:244.
53. Sibbes, Works, 1:55.
54. See, e.g., ibid., 1:39; 4:241; 6:126; 7:268.
55. Ibid., 3:413.
56. Ibid., 1:39–40; 4:258.
57. Ibid., 1:77–79.
58. Ibid., 1:39, 231–32; also 2:303, 307, 385.
59. Ibid., 1:48.
60. Ibid., 1:29–30, 43, 55; 4:254; 5:12–13; 6:47, 375–76.
61. Ibid., 2:305–6.
62. See Parnham, “Covenantal Quietism.”
63. See, e.g., Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences (London, 1631), 274; John Downame, The Christian Warfare against the Devill, World and Flesh (London, 1634), 860, 864; John Downame, The Summe of Sacred Divinitie Briefly & Methodically Propounded: More Largly & Cleerly Handled and Explaned (London, 1625), 283–84; John Preston, A Liveles Life: Or, Mans Spirituall Death in Sinne (London, 1633), 54; Hooker, Soules Vocation, 119–24, 538–40; Thomas Hooker, The Poor Doubting Christian Drawn to Christ (London, 1629; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 30–31.
64. Sibbes, Works, 1:232.
65. For authoritative pronouncements on the imitative valence of mortification and vivification, see Perkins, Works, 1:83, 178, 185–86, 209, 231, 243–45, 457, 628–29, 664–66; 2:215–17; Downame, Summe of Sacred Divinitie, 452–54; William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1642), 144.
66. Sibbes, Works, 1:236–37.
67. John Preston, The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love (London, 1634), pt. 2: 16, 30–31; pt. 3: 13.
68. Ibid., pt. 1: 122–23; pt. 2: 15–16; Preston, Liveles Life, 100; 2d pagination: 12–13; John Preston, Sins Overthrow: Or, a Godly and Learned Treatise of Mortification (London, 1633), 26; John Preston, The Saints Qualification (London, 1634), 2, 6, 31, 420–22, 447–48; John Preston, Foure Godly and Learned Treatises (London, 1636), 112; see also John Cotton, The Way of Life (London, 1641), 63, 197.
69. Sibbes, Works, 7:374. The utterances of Sibbes and Preston—relatively occasional though they be—on God’s violent preparatory measures require us to treat cautiously Knight’s interesting distinction between Amesian “preparationists” and Sibbesian “spiritists.” See Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). For a useful and economical exposition of the Sibbesian idiom of preparation, see Mark E. Dever, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000), 128–32.
70. Preston, Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, pt. 1: 23–24; pt. 3: 155–56, 173.
71. Sibbes, Works, 3:19.
72. Crisp, Compleat Works, 256, 265.
73. Eaton, Honey-Combe, 350, 372, 339, 453.
74. These are constantly rehearsed antinomian themes. For some examples, see Crisp, Compleat Works, 10, 51, 124, and passim for the series of sermons that appear as the “second volume”; Eaton, Honey-Combe, 20–22, 25–26, 28, 33, 36, 181, 183, 237, 254–57, 270–72, 288–92, 332–33, 335, 347.
75. Eaton, Honey-Combe, 334.
76. Crisp, Compleat Works, 33, 43–44, 95–96, 103, 106, 122–23, 144, 165–66, 270, 409, 429, 43536, 441–43; Eaton, Honey-Combe, 465; Towne, Re-Assertion, 29–30, 48, 52, 72.
77. Crisp, Compleat Works, 94, 440.
78. Ibid., 128.
79. Ibid., 97. Similarly 90: Christ as gift “imports that there is no vileness, no sinfulness, no kind of wretchedness of Men, that can be any bar to a Man from having a full part, and portion in this Christ.”
80. Burgess, True Doctrine of Justification, 229–30.
81. Sibbes, Works, 2:317. For Crisp’s removal of conditions from the covenant of grace, see Parnham, “Covenantal Quietism,” and for Sibbes’s and Preston’s leaning toward an unconditional covenant, see Sibbes, Works, 1:58; 3:17, 433, 394, 442, 521; 5:18, 342, 347; 6:4, 19, 31, 542; 7:270–71, 483; John Preston, The New Covenant, or the Saints Portion (London, 1629), 91–92, 107–8, 387–88; John Preston, Life Eternall, or, a Treatise of the Knowledge of the Divine Essence and Attributes (London, 1631), 2d pagination: 86–87. See, now, on Preston’s soteriology, Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).
82. Sibbes, Works, 7:485.
83. Crisp, Compleat Works, 127, 169, 462–77, 578.
84. Preston, Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, pt. 2: 50–54, 82–83. “It is onely the Author of Nature that can change Nature, hee that made it can renue it … the Holy Ghost must breathe this breath of life in thee” (Preston, Saints Qualification, 406). See also Sibbes, Works, 4:256–57. For an antinomian concession to this kind of discourse, see Crisp, Compleat Works, 34.
85. Sibbes, Works, 1:17–18; 4:268.
86. Ibid., 1:44; 3:467; 5:243–45.
87. Ibid., 1:44, 47, 235.
88. Ibid., 1:85, 122, 207, 227; 4:285.
89. Ibid., 4:203–4, 216, 219, 223.
90. Ibid., 2:484.
91. Ibid., 1:244; cf. Hooker, Application of Redemption, 358.
92. John Cotton, A Practical Commentary, or an Exposition with Observations, Reasons, and Uses upon the First Epistle Generall of John (London, 1656), 325; John Cotton, The Way of Life (London, 1641), 237–38.
93. Towne, Re-Assertion, author’s preface, 12–13, 15, 162, 176; Towne, Assertion, 18.
94. Towne, Re-Assertion, 9, 3; and see Crisp, Compleat Works, 119.
95. Towne, Re-Assertion, 169–72, 182. See also Perkins, Works, 2:363, where the law’s “killing letter” no longer operates in the “kingdome of grace.”
96. Towne, Re-Assertion, 145, also 106, 108; and McGiffert, “Perkinsian Moment,” 130, for antinomianism as “hyper-Perkinsian alternative.” See Perkins, Works, 2:213, 298 on legally wrought and infernally destined repentance (against which he counterpoises an “evengelicall sorrow”) and on the accursed estate of the “bond woman.”
97. Towne, Re-Assertion, 21; Crisp, Compleat Works, 441, 457, 460–61.
98. Sibbes, Works, 1:238; 4:258, 261.
99. Crisp, Compleat Works, 54, 91–92.
100. Sibbes, Works, 1:138–39; 2:384–85; 5:395; 6:193. For Crisp and Eaton on pietistic “dung,” see Crisp, Compleat Works, 50, 92, 137, 225, 228–35, 239–40; Eaton, Honey-Combe, 94, 168, 268, 349, 383, 406, 457. For idolatry and the covenant of works, see Crisp, Compleat Works, 134–35, 155.
101. Crisp, Compleat Works, 118, 134–36, 128.
102. Ibid., 108, 442, 460; also Eaton, Honey-Combe, 218, 425.
103. Paul Baynes, A Commentarie upon the First and Second Chapters of Saint Paul to the Colossians (London, 1635), pt. 2: 202.
104. John Preston, The Golden Scepter Held Forth to the Humble (London, 1638), 69, 79–80 for Exod, and 69–85 for humiliation as a process; Preston, Saints Qualification, 37–38; also Sibbes, Works, 1:58–59, where the “wounds” of Exod 5 are “healed” by Christ’s “balm.”
105. Crisp, Compleat Works, 116–21, also 24; 2d pagination: 94–95.
106. Ibid., 110, 114, 123–25.
107. Ibid., 125-26, also 110.
108. Preston, New Covenant, 321–25; John Preston, Remaines of That Reverend and Learned Divine, John Preston (London, 1637), 263.
109. Preston, Saints Qualification, 475–76; Crisp, Compleat Works, 36, 90–93.
110. Burgess, True Doctrine of Justification, 152–53.
111. Crisp, Compleat Works, 91. For an unguardedly transactional construal of the “bargaine” of salvation, see Robert Harris, A Treatise of the New Covenant (London, 1632), pt. 1: 42–43. Perkins could frame the relations between Christ and penitent as a “bargaine,” in which “heaven is bought and sold betweene Christ and us,” though he noted, in a turn of phrase on human debility far more acceptable to the antinomian mentality, that the penitent are recipients of gifts conveyed by the Spirit and that, in this one-sided transaction, they “can give nothing unto Christ” (Perkins, Works, vol. 3, 2d pagination: 363–64). For Eaton, “the Gospel giveth freely, and requireth of us nothing else, but to hold out our hands, and to take that which is offered” (Eaton, Honey-Combe, 83). Crisp, thumping the lesson of “nothing” required, drew out the Perkinsian formula of free giving with no strings attached: “In the participation of Christ, God requires nothing of Man, he expects nothing from Man in consideration of that Christ he bestowes upon him. I say, he doth require nothing, he doth expect nothing, he will take nothing; nay, he will not give Christ unto Men, except they will take him freely, without bringing any thing for him” (Crisp, Compleat Works, 90).
112. Crisp, Compleat Works, 92.
113. Eaton, Honey-Combe, 124, 381, also 75, 83–86, 135, 137, 465.
114. The law as “schoolmaster” from Gal 3:24 is frequently to be encountered in Puritan discourse, where it mixes threat with grace, serving as spur and point of departure. See, e.g., Perkins, Works, 2:250, 252; Sibbes, Works, 4:223; Preston, New Covenant, 391, 406–7, 424–25; Preston, Liveles Life, 44–45; Preston, Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, pt. 2: 15, 79, 85; Preston, Saints Qualification, 11, 308; Preston, Remaines, 188; Preston, Golden Scepter, 69; Cotton, Way of Life, 99, 233.
115. Eaton, Honey-Combe, 121–25, 75, 86, 7–8, also 20, 133, 135–37, 463–64.
116. Ibid., 457-58, 466–67, 479–80. See also Bozeman’s commentary in Precisianist Strain, 188–96 and in his “The Glory of the ‘Third Time’: John Eaton as Contra-Puritan,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996): 638-54.
117. Eaton, Honey-Combe, 169–73, 218, 47, 78, 140–41.
118. Ibid., 113-14, 223, 462–63.
119. Ibid., 115, also 86, 145–46, 211.
120. Crisp, Compleat Works, 53–54, 46–47, 57; Preston, New Covenant, 421; Towne, Re-Assertion, 20.
121. Towne, Re-Assertion, 75; Crisp declaimed at length along such lines.
122. See, e.g., Crisp, Compleat Works, 126–27, 276.
123. Ibid., 15-16, 35, 116–17.
124. Robert Bolton, Some Generall Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God (London, 1626), 34245, 364, 377; Bolton, Instructions, 198; Hooker, Soules Preparation, 39, 60–61, 90, 105; also Perkins, Works, 2:369; Sibbes, Works, 4:266–67; John Preston, Sermons Preached before His Maiestie; and upon Other Speciall Occasions (London, 1630), 41.
125. Bolton, Generall Directions, 317–19, 322.
126. Crisp, Compleat Works, 10, 15–16, 90, 94, 127, 440.
127. Preston, Saints Qualification, 37, 39.
128. Perkins, Works, 1:237; Preston, Sermons Preached, 139.
129. Baynes, Commentarie upon Colossians, pt. 1: 113–15; Paul Baynes, A Helpe to True Happinesse (London, 1618), 132–33; also Sibbes, Works, 3:384–88.
130. Downame, Warfare, 24, 54–56, 90, 93, 203, 208, 214–20, 852–54; John Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse: Or a Treatise of a Christian Life (London, 1622), 57, 82; Bolton, Generall Directions, 93, 132, 388, 391; Bolton, Instructions, 132, 170, 189, 326; Cotton, Way of life, 113, 329; Preston, Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, pt. 1: 13–14; Preston, Golden Scepter, 255. See also, e.g., Perkins, Works, 1:4, 27–28, 79–81, 186, 368, 567–68, 659–61; 2:205–6, 228–29, 238–39; Sibbes, Works, 2:307–8; 5:244–45; 6:190; 7:267–68; Ames, Marrow, 87–88, 112–13.
131. William Pemble, Vindiciae Fidei, or a Treatise of Justification by Faith (Oxford, 1629), 21, 172, 174. I offer deeply felt thanks to Michael McGiffert for his remarks on a draft of this article.