The “Antinomianisme” Of The “Red Dragon”: John Goodwin’s Flight From The Moral Law

By David Parnham

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

Abstract

It was as England’s premier seventeenth-century “Arminian” that John Goodwin acquired the greater part of his theological notoriety. But Goodwin had been raising the hackles of Puritan brethren for a decade prior to his Arminian turn of 1647. In the 1630s and early 1640s, Goodwin had been bothered by the moral law. This drew him, quite professedly, into disagreement with “orthodox” divines. Scarcely, if ever, noticed in the scholarly literature is Thomas Edwards’s reprobation of Goodwin’s “antinomianisme.” Historians, justifiably, exercise caution in the presence of Edwardsian rancor, but there is reason for thinking that Edwards had spotlighted a tendency, or drawn attention to a disposition. In elaborating practically and doctrinally upon a deep suspicion of the moral law—articulated very clearly in utterances concerning conversion and justification—Goodwin landed himself in antinomist territory. Herein, he was taking cues from a Puritan predecessor, Anthony Wotton, who, in 1613, had been tried for heresy, and who, it was said, provided inspiration to antinomians. Goodwin fully expected that the “zealous” would accuse him of “Heresie,” and so it turned out. The pejorative eponyms “Socinianism” and “Arminianism” were hurled at Goodwin throughout the 1640s and 1650s, in relation to various points of doctrine; but the matter of his “antinomianism” places a particular focus on the consequences of Goodwin’s flight from the moral law.

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John Goodwin loathed antinomians. Frequently and famously at loggerheads with colleagues in the Puritan pastorate, Goodwin stood as one with fellow ministers against antinomian error. He eyed the spectral horrors that false doctrine spawned: what was a Ranter “but an Antinomian sublimated”?[1] This was a question for the 1650s, when avatars of “free grace” were sinking to unprecedented depths of moral depravity. But long before the lurid stories of Ranters burst upon mid-century news-print to assault the keepers of England’s godly consciousness, Goodwin had been dispensing antidotes to antinomian soteriology.[2] He turned Arminian in 1647, but since at least 1644 he had been urging parishioners to use the “power” that they possessed in order to “improve” the “abilities” with which God had vested them—a kind of self-help corrective to the “humankind-need-do-nothing” since “God’s-grace-does-all” teaching of antinomian soteriologists. One contemporary responded, in 1645, by telling Goodwin that he was already in the clutches of Arminianism.[3]

Goodwin, a product of Queens’ College, Cambridge, found a national audience during the years of his London ministry. From 1633 the vicar of the populous parish of St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, Goodwin made a virtue out of doctrinal reconsideration. He was not one to rest on his own, or on anyone else’s, soteriological laurels. Nor was his rethinking stifled by the prospect of the sort of obloquy that patrolling dogmatists—arrayed, during the 1640s, in “strong and thick” phalanxes—might pour upon utterances deemed noxious and notorious.[4]

The Arminian of 1647 moved past the moral “improver” of 1644, but one enemy noticed an altogether different vein of thought. Thomas Edwards, lathering Goodwin with unbecoming epithets, called attention to the man’s “antinomianisme”—one of the several pejoratives that the author of Gangraena fathered upon the “Great red Dragon of Coleman streete.”[5] Edwards’s rebuke merits consideration. Modern scholars do not readily number Goodwin among the “antinomians”; it is as an “Arminian” that Goodwin the theologian tends nowadays to be recalled. But the contention of this article is that Edwards had hit upon a truth.

On antinomianism and on John Goodwin, our leading scholarly lights, respectively, are David Como and John Coffey. Both notice Goodwin’s legalistic diffidence, though neither pursues Goodwin’s soteriology to its antinomist core. Coffey has Goodwin sailing “between the Scylla of legalism and the Charybdis of antinomianism,” while Como finds him “to have flirted with anti-legal opinions” and to have manifested “a discomfort with the legalistic ways of mainstream puritanism.”[6] Such descriptions understate Goodwin’s disposition.

Simply put, Goodwin fully renounced the soteriological credentials of the moral law. The idiom he spoke was antinomist.

Neither Como nor Coffey, moreover, pays close attention to the formative sway that Anthony Wotton held over Goodwin’s doctrinal mind. Wotton is absent from Como’s story, and but momentarily participant in Coffey’s.[7] When reworking the doctrine of justification during the second decade of the seventeenth century, Wotton took a long step away from the moral law, and Goodwin, surveying Wotton’s example, would trace out a similar trajectory. Goodwin’s soteriology was multistranded. By the early 1640s, the antinomian strand was fully fledged. Nor, moreover, was Goodwin the only Wottonian maverick in mid-century England.

It seems possible, then, to uncover a subplot within the engendering and flowering of English antinomianism. John Goodwin, and a community of Somerset antinomians, took doctrinal instruction from Anthony Wotton, who, for a brief time, was the star turn in a mid-Jacobean soteriological ruction. Wotton, indeed, may turn out to have been an unnoticed antinomian wellspring.

I. Darkness And Light, Law And Grace

John Goodwin discovered that his mind had been marred by errors. Persistent errors rigidify, becoming artifacts of unthinking transmission, deficits of land-locked repetition. Toughened by time’s passage, hardy errors sink deep roots in custom-borne intelligences. And doctrine fashioned by such intelligences may become frigid and lifeless, its inertia buttressed by “orthodox” self-regard—complacency supercharged by custom. Errors thus environed are difficult to give up. But they may be seen, perhaps only by the self-inspecting gaze of the revisionist, to have been deeply laid agents of “storm” and “tempest,” so the tranquility that attends their renunciation will be felt, in the end, as a boon.

Goodwin had a job on his hands to spotlight the boon, since much of his energy would be invested in dissolving the long roots of the errors. For errors held current by custom are likely to be misapprehended for truths by those who commend the dicta of time-tested authorities. Goodwin himself revered the authorities of the Reformation, but he came to see that thick crusts of authority, however worthy of reverence, inhibit the emergence of truth. This realization defined Goodwin’s task—to evict from his own mind the errors that he there detected.

It was a task to be performed as a duty consequent upon divine illumination. Of this, intelligences hamstrung by customary notions were unlikely to be persuaded. Heresy hunters would speak in black and white, refusing to tolerate shades and ambiguities. Goodwin sketched his heritage in shades. He adjudged the masters of the Reformation estimable and usable authorities, but they were not to be held aloft unquestioningly as standard bearers of pure truth.

Some were stung by the audacity of Goodwin’s correcting pen. George Walker, for one, wondered how Goodwin could so shamelessly yoke John Calvin to the enterprise of producing such an unCalvinist work as Imputatio fidei. Satan himself, Walker remarked, would not have been so bold.[8] But correction, for Goodwin, may depend upon careful attention to the nuances of terms, to the shades of meaning that a given word may discharge as it moves from one locus of argumentation to another. A term that in one place may valuably serve an explanatory purpose may elsewhere lose traction, giving rise to saying and unsaying, to judicious engagement with the layers of language. For Goodwin’s enemies, however, the yes-and-no fabric of his thought raised questions about sanity and sobriety—Goodwin’s pages, Walker smirked, were redolent more of Bedlamesque uproar than of learned divinity.[9]

A valuable service of light is that it facilitates interrogation of error. And error interrogated can in turn be consigned to the “darkness” that the interrogator can now see to have been its provenance. Taking this line, Goodwin could speak chiaroscuro in as full a throat as any heresy hunter. He gloried in being able “to cast away even long-endeered and professed opinions, when once the light hath shone upon them, and discovered them to be but darknesse.” The upshot was a pulsating testament to the corrigibility of a mind plagued by too stubborn an attachment to venerable falsehoods. It was an utterance designed to put heresy hunters on edge. Speaking of “dragons” well before Thomas Edwards trundled out his famous put-down phrase, Goodwin intimated that those “opinions” deserved to be “abandoned” upon which heresy hunters would erect their mislaid fortresses of the mind. Theological error belonged to “that region in the soul,” he declared in 1642,

wherein only dolefull creatures, as Owles and Satyrs, and Dragons, I mean feares and terrors and distractions, spirituall tumults, and stormes and tempests are ingendred and begotten. If all were light and truth in the judgment, all would be peace and sweetnesse and joy in the heart and soule. Therefore to me it is no more grievous to abandon any opinion whatsoever, being once cleerly detected, and substantially evicted for an error, then it is to be delivered out of the hand of an enemy, or to take hold of life and peace.[10]

The becalmer of tempests is a synecdoche. The “I” who evicts error and vanquishes dragons is a model for the wider world. It was a “benefit” and “blessing,” and, indeed, a “joyfull” undertaking, to rethink doctrine, to emerge from dawn’s half-light in order to see with the clarity afforded by the noon-day sun. But clerical colleagues, Goodwin lamented, were still groping at daybreak for dimly lit verities, swallowing “many of those misprisions and mistakes in matter of Religion, which were found in our first Reformers,” and teaching “them for Doctrines and Orthodox truths. As if it were not lawfull to thinke that there may be more light in the aire when the Sunne is risen in his might upon the earth, then there was at the first dawning and breaking of the day.”[11]

The “first Reformers,” though, brought light to their times. On what pretense, Goodwin asked, did the “Synagogue of Rome” put Luther’s “glorious light” under the “censure and condemnation of darknesse?” Is “any tenet or opinion in Religion” rightly to be held erroneous or novel “only because we never saw the face or heard the name of it till yesterday?”[12]

The new blessings of momentous yesterdays portend the as yet undelivered “treasures” of apocalyptic tomorrows. God’s word was still to show the full measure of its self-diffusiveness; yet that showing could not but occur, since its very occurrence was the substance of the word’s own foretelling. The Scriptures offer their own “propheticall intimation” that “their foundations (as it were) shall be discovered, and their great depths broken up.” The moment was at hand when many “shall discourse and beate out the secrets of GOD in the Scriptures with more libertie and freedome of judgement and understanding.” Little may be said about what was to be known, since there was no saying how much of the knowable dwelt, as yet, under depths and shadows. The learned, then, were unknowing, and unknowingly so, for they lacked even the light that made manifest their ignorance; only with the shedding of new light was there brokered the expectation of unprecedented knowledge. “Many truths,” Goodwin advised, “may be yet unborne, and not come forth out of their Mothers wombe (I mean the secrets of the Scriptures) to see the light of the Sun.”[13] The seers, by virtue of their apprehension of a light still unglimpsed by the common eye, must perforce be extraordinary.

That John Goodwin was somewhat out of the ordinary was brought home by a retrospective narration from William Kiffin. An elderly Kiffin recounted the tremulous passage of his younger self’s quest for spiritual consolation and assurance. Kiffin betook himself to various ministers in London during the late 1620s and 1630s. The fiercely “preparationist” physic of Thomas Hooker proved fruitless—and fruitless in a way that made plain Goodwin’s point of pastoral differentiation. Hooker, in concurrence with “the best and ablest Ministers,” had been “pressing” a penitential discipline; the ministers’ medication for Kiffin’s “sorrow and distress” was to exploit an evident disposition for self-humbling. They avowed “the necessity of deep humiliation by the law.” Kiffin turned to Goodwin, and found that Goodwin could give what others couldn’t. A large part of Goodwin’s gift was negatively conceived by Kiffin; Goodwin made headway on the back of an absence, taking his charge forward on the strength of a withholding. Goodwin refrained from administering the preparatory moral law. Of “great use,” Kiffin recalled, was Goodwin’s insistence that “the terrors of the law were not of necessity to be preached to prepare the soul for Christ; but rather, in the nature and tendency of them, did drive the soul farther from Christ.”[14]

Goodwin was no devotee of the grace of law. Why pay obeisance to Moses, and make “a John Baptist” out of him, when the better offerings of Christ were available?[15] Goodwin addressed the currency of Mosaic piety in an epistolary response to the inquiry of a “freinde” who wished to know “whether the preaching and the pressing the lawe upon the conscience for the humbling and terrefying of a sinner, be absolutely necessary before the preaching of the Gospell.”[16]

Goodwin adjudged that no necessity obliged such preparatory “pressing.” The law was more impediment than preparation; to be terrified by legal threats was to be needlessly “taxed” or “encumbered,” to be prevented by “conditions and qualifications” from entering “into the doore of life” that Christ “himselfe hath left open and free.”[17] Only by scattering the “incongruous” and “superfluous” conditions of the law would opportunity arise for questing souls to approach the “open and free” door of life. So Goodwin spoke in negatives for the sake of clearing a cluttered path. “There is noe preparatory worke,” he announced, “that hath any necessary, infallible or universall connection with faith.” Prior to the budding of faith, nothing of salvific value would be found in “any preceding Act, Disposition or Assertion”; and “the Kingdome of God” is not hastened by cultivation of “feare, terror for sinne, sorrowe, Afflictions, and punishments for sinne.” Goodwin spied no life in law: “terrors & horrors of conscience and apprehensions of the wrath of God and feare of being damned for sinne, and the like”—affections of such stripe “are noe advantage at all toward the worke of Faith,” but tend, rather, “to death, and despaires, and not to life.”[18] Simply put, one does not acquire “right or title of beleeving in Christ” by virtue of having been “smitten or wounded by the Law.”[19]

The flow of negatives delivered a prized positive. God tenders grace as freely and readily to “the most unworthyest of men” as to “the worthyest.” The tender is swayed by nothing that the law might engender—by “noe qualification, noe preparation or disposition whatsoever, noe freedome from any sinne in one kinde or other, noe antecedent sorrowe or remorse for sinne, or the like.”[20]

What is more, the grace that God tenders is so capacious that “noe sinne or sinnes whatsoever or how many soever, or of what continuance soever, can make a man uncapable of the pardon and forgivenes there offered.” Grace was available for the “accepting,” and it propagated no requirement that one who accepts ought first be fitted or swept clean by preparatory humbling: “a hundred or a thousand of the greatest and foulest sinners in the world accepting of this grace and beleiving, shall be as readily and as certainely pardoned and saved, as any smale number of the lightest offenders that ever were.”[21] Goodwin’s letter has the look of an antinomian manifesto. Grace, here, pays no mind to saintliness, legally defined—to preciseness of piety, to purity of morals, to stamina in the observance of penitential procedure.

Piety shaped by what has been called the “precisianist strain” insisted that the haughty sinner first be broken by an instrument that cannot through its own efficacy heal the damage by itself inflicted.[22] The law’s hammering might at least ready the sinner for spiritual progress—by deflating pride and self-righteousness and vain confidence; thus might sin’s grip be loosed. Goodwin demurred. Sin might be too virulent to be contained by disciplinary mechanisms, which, in themselves, impeded the passage to grace. Better, then, to seek out heaven directly via an evangelical port. Goodwin, preferring the direct route, offered sharp reflection on the “tyme and labour and opportunity lost, to make any solemne & entire worke of preaching and urging the law upon the consciences of men, before the preaching of Jesus Christ, and the Gospell.” The point was that the gains of the law “will be gotten and that in a more efficacious way, and by a higher hand of Authority and with more advantage, by the preaching of the Gospell.” Herein was the way to “knowledge of sinne, and of a mans lost nature.” One doubled one’s payoff in preaching pure gospel. “He that preacheth Christ formaliter,” Goodwin counseled, “shall preach Moses eminenter.”[23]

Matters such as these formed the epicenter of soteriological trouble in Caroline London, and Goodwin behaved courageously, perhaps recklessly, in adopting an antinomist technique for the winning of questing souls. As important hallmarks of divinity became contestable, so were brotherly relations fractured and the forensic interest of ecclesiastical authorities pricked. New-fangled articulations of “free grace” and of the sheer fatality of the moral law elicited solid yet subtle rebuttals from Puritan paragons. There had been, as Como shows, clamorous vindications of entrenched positions and rancorous exchanges between the apostles of kindred yet irreconcilable truths; legal proceedings had been brought and convictions secured; and, in the end, the godly ministry closed ranks, determined to shore up the undoubted sanctity and utility of the moral law as an operative within the staging of the sinner’s conversion to saving grace.[24]

In this context, Goodwin—plowing antinomist furrows in the field of the sinner’s justification—looks like a crafty survivor from the losing side. Though differing from Como’s “Eatonist” antinomians, Goodwin, like them, could parade the authorization of irreproachable authorities. John Calvin himself could fittingly commend the law’s exclusion. “Now there is an utter and evident impossibilitie,” Goodwin intoned in Imputatio fidei, “that Justification by Christ should be procured or attained by the Morall Law. Neither obedience nor disobedience thereunto, hath any relation of causalitie to such an effect, a man being never the neerer Justification by Christ, either for the one, or for the other.”[25] The division between the law’s righteousness and the righteousness of faith was nothing less than elemental, in expressing which, Calvin, commenting on Galatians, was ready to hand. Such was “the repugnancie betweene the Law and faith, in the matter of Justification,” Goodwin put it in Calvinist tongue, that “fire and water” may sooner be coupled than that the following marriage of opposites hold true, “that men are righteous by faith, and yet by the Law too.”[26]

Goodwin would enlist the masters of the Reformation to do on his behalf the work of eclipsing the force and abbreviating the reach of the moral law. He set himself to flow, not uncritically, in a magisterial stream. But there was one divine—accused of heresy, no less, and tried in the presence of a judiciary of his peers—whose good theological offices Goodwin was content to acknowledge.[27] This divine was Anthony Wotton, whose heresy proceedings were conducted in 1613, and whose principal statement of his revisionary soteriological position, the De reconciliatione peccatoris, appeared in print in 1624. It transpired that Wotton, posthumously, had much to teach Goodwin about law and grace. And, as identified under Wotton’s learned gaze, the law–grace flashpoint drew fuel from the doctrine of the justification of the sinner.

II. Anthony Wotton: Law Checked By Grace

Born around 1561, Anthony Wotton was a Cambridge-educated divine who, as lecturer at All Hallows, Barking—a post that he held for more than a quarter of a century until his death in 1626—became an esteemed member of London’s Puritan community.[28] In waging an early-Jacobean war against popish works-mongering, Wotton gave vent to deeply felt suspicions about the moral law as a soteriological operative. One who began with a mind suspicious of matters legal might finish in antinomian maturity, though Wotton’s worry—initially, at least—was animated more by the faults of law-loving papists than by the harms of the law as such.

It became standard antinomian fare that the greatest of sinners might be saved by the light touch of free grace. Wotton had permitted himself a gesture in this direction in a work of 1609. Speaking in adulation of Christ’s “infinite sacrifice,” he hazarded the view that the beneficiary of such a blessing would be so securely inducted into eternal life that “the greatnesse of sin cannot make any man despaire, that knows the price of his redemption to be the blood of God infinit in valew.”[29] It was a commonplace, if not a platitude, to strike a middle course between despair and presumption. Platitudinous was the view that presumption was an entailment of popery; and it is here that Wotton’s antinomist-looking utterance acquires its valence. The point that Wotton makes about the avoidance of despair was not that one ought insouciantly to disregard the gravity of one’s sins, but that one ought not to presume, with papists, that justification depends upon the cultivation of “inherent righteousnesse” and the commission of “actuall obedience to God.” Papists gratified base presumption in holding that wayfarers “must by their works truly and wholie merit everlasting life, and receive it, not as joint heirs with Christ by the right of sonnes, but as hirelings for wages due to their works.”[30] One ought not be “puft up with an overweening” of one’s “owne righteousnesse,” Wotton admonished; look, then, for “pardon,” not for “reward.”[31]

Wotton would say, with Luther and Perkins, that legal works may be permitted “no place” in the sinner’s justification.[32] Impermissible, indeed, is justification “by workes preparatorie, before a man is at all justified, & by workes meritorious, after he is begun to be justified.”[33] The refusal of preparatory works may seem to deflect Wotton from the professedly Perkinsian course that he was trekking in the wake of William Perkins’s death, but what he was wishing to stress, in his Defence of Perkins, was the anti-papist point that we may not offer the plea of “our owne imperfect righteousnes before God, to our justification.”[34] And if papists ventured to smear Wotton with antinomian tar, a pious rejoinder was at the ready. Faith begotten of “free grace” avoids vainglory and “popish good works” by “applying” the sufferings of Christ.[35] Faith’s “rest” is not idle; its “vertues” deliver it from sloth. “Plainely” in sight “both before and after justification,” Wotton assured the papist, were “true repentance, sorrowe for sinnes, mortification of passions, and all other vertues.”[36]

“Both before and after justification”: preparation, it is evident, has its place after all. Interestingly, it was reported around mid-century—nearly three decades after Wotton’s death—that a community of Somerset antinomians had been schooled in soteriology by the writings of Wotton. The Wottonian “light” that dazzled Somerset eyes emanated from the period of Wotton’s soteriological rethinking, which seems to have had its beginning around the turn of the second decade of the seventeenth century. It would carry Wotton to a crisis point in 1613, when George Walker—the belligerent Walker who, as we have seen, would go on to spit gall at Goodwin in the 1640s—made moves to have Wotton tried for heresy. The Somerset antinomians, as reported by John Crandon, made savage pronouncements concerning the obsolescence of the moral law—and flow-on redemptive effects of that obsolescence—some of which could plausibly be saddled upon Wotton. Included among them was the view that “the Law is totally abrogated now under the Gospel, and that not onely as a Covenant of Works, but also from being any more the rule of righteousnesse,” along with the contention that “we are justified by the Passive, not the Active obedience of Christ.” Possibly Wottonian, too, is the opinion that “God seeth no sinne in the justified, he knows indeed when they sinne, and that they have sinned, but he doth not see it because themselves and it are covered under the righteousnes, and cross of Christ, so that the Father doth not, will not see it.”[37] Phrases from one of Wotton’s position papers addressing sin, sacrifice, and the Fatherly optic were vulnerable to this sort of resaying—Wotton had declared that sins are “removed out of Gods sight,” that the Father looks “upon the sacrifice of Jesus Christ which hee accepteth,” that Christ’s redemption “dischargeth us from all our sinns and sets us just in Gods sight,” that our sins are “washed away” in the “pure sacrifice” of the redemptive blood.[38] And Wotton’s contention that a person “pardoned” on account of Christ’s blood is not also imputatively “punished” (as recipient of Christ’s imputed righteousness) may have informed the antinomians’ notion that God does not punish his people’s sin because “he seeth not sin in his people.… He hath punished it upon Christ, therefore are they free from punishment.”[39]

By the time that George Walker had descended upon London from Cambridge, in around 1611,[40] Wotton had already commenced his doctrinal rethinking. He was drawing out implications of an appreciation that the law had no business excreting its influence—soliciting its works, plying its pains—in the region of grace.

In a position paper drafted early in the 1610s, Wotton confessed that he had become a doctrinal “dissenter.”[41] As regards the doctrine of justification, he could no longer share the collective mind of his brethren. The grounds of dissent were expressed more expansively in a follow-up paper, in which Wotton drew out the biblical foundations of his doctrine. Wotton’s dissent triggered the spring of George Walker’s predatory instinct, and during the resultant trial, of which Walker was prime mover—and in which, to his deep exasperation, insufficient evidence was brought to uphold the heresy charges laid against Wotton—further discourse of a dissentient cast was uttered before the impaneled judiciary. Walker continued to hound Wotton from the pulpit; and Wotton went on through the 1610s researching and writing, and eventually, in 1624, publishing the treatise De reconciliatione peccatoris, in which he set forth the views of the Protestant masters for the sake of demonstrating the unity of mind that prevailed between them and him. The dissenter, evidently, had returned to the embrace of his fellows.

But the doctrine of the dissenter of the early 1610s differed scarcely at all from that of the collegial treatise writer of 1624. Wotton maintained, and continued to maintain, that the orthodox doctrine of justification hosted a significant etiological error, a misconstrual of the “cause” that defined justification’s very nature; and the orthodox, moreover, were having the verb “impute”—that crucially important term—take the wrong object. The “formal” cause of justification and the “imputation” that mechanized the sinner’s reconciliation with God had, according to Wotton, been misarticulated. Fundamental elements of doctrine, in consequence, had been improperly socialized, obliged to keep the wrong company and to perform the wrong tasks. The upshot was that the law was allowed to infiltrate the territory of grace.

The doctrine of justification accounts for how it is that the unrighteous person may be deemed righteous, and therein (i) is released from the obligation to infernal punishment and (ii) is accepted into celestial favor. One of Goodwin’s contemporaries—a divine sensitive to the danger posed by both Wotton and Goodwin—lengthily rebutted the underminers of justification, a doctrine that he considered “the soul and pillar of Christianity.”[42] This soul and pillar would neither live nor stand without the concept of “imputation.” What is it that God does when he “imputes” righteousness to the sinner? One commonplace held that God deems the sinner to be righteous in the manner in which Christ himself was righteous—both in obeying the law of God and in suffering the dread penalty of the law’s curse—and that so valuable was the “imputation” of Christ’s righteousness that a particular form of speech was warranted, namely, that it were “as if” the sinner had obeyed and suffered as Christ had obeyed and suffered. For the orthodox masters, the “formal” causality of justification resided precisely in the imputation of Christ’s law-fulfilling righteousness.[43] Suspicious minds, like Wotton’s, might spy metaphysical misadventures.

It could be said that the sinner is made righteous in a way analogous to the way in which the application of white paint to a wall makes the wall itself become white.[44] Wotton noticed this analogy, as construed by Zacharias Ursinus, and allowed it to rest, in his treatise of 1624, as a lexical marker of the day’s doctrine.[45] But the conception of justification that the analogy served could not lie uncontested once Wotton’s treatise entered its phase of argumentative exchange with views that the author considered too nomistic for the good of the faith. Were imputed righteousness rendered to a beneficiary who receives it in such a way as paint is applied to a wall, would that beneficiary—that imputee—not somehow acquire law-fulfilling qualities inherent in the one whose “legal” righteousness has been imputed? Does an imputative act not make a doer out of an imputee if what is imputed is the righteousness of a doer of deeds? And were it to be said that God, having imputed Christ’s righteousness to the sinner, viewed the latter “as if” in possession of the wherewithal to do as Christ had done, would it not follow that the sinner, the imputee, was now inherently righteous because “formally” vested with Christ’s righteousness, and was therefore capable of atoning for the sins of the sinful? Wotton extinguished this flicker of nonsense: “we cannot be considered formally righteous such that we may be perceived redeemers of the world. It is for Christ to redeem the world through his own obedience.”[46]

A further complication of orthodox doctrine is that the sinner experiences anomalous exposure to the moral law and the legal covenant, and so is required, in one breath, both to fulfill the law and to be liberated from it, to be graciously “pardoned” and yet legally “punished.” The sinner, having been released from the law’s retributive power, is, at the very moment of release, made subject to the retribution that seems to be unconquerable—all because the turning circle of imputation restores the law to a place in the region of grace from which it seemed to have been dislodged by virtue of the obedience of the redeemer.

Such, in brief, was the law-wrought tenor of Wotton’s imputationist worry. So Wotton made plain his Pauline disapprobation of soteriology that consorts with the moral law: “the law of God in the Decalogue is not the rule of that righteousness by which God, through the mode of justification and adoption, wills to make heaven available to humankind.”[47] Paul had cancelled the currency of the legal covenant’s performative—“Do and live”—provisions for justification.[48] The outrage of the Mosaic “Do and live” is that it voided the gospel’s simple requirement of faith in Christ. It also constrained God to oblige a “necessity” that obtrudes upon his will. For the God who justifies the legally compliant is a God who must, perforce, defer to the doings of creatures. Such a God becomes dependent upon what his creatures “determine.” This debases the operation of divine “grace and benevolence,” thereby disabling God from honoring “the counsel of his own will.”[49] The law, in effect, disgraces grace and undoes God.

Wotton was not putting himself wholly outside a majority stream. The Protestant masters, too, were wary of the law. “This place”—justification—“admits no disputation concerning good works,” and from it, Luther would sever “all laws and all works of the law.”[50] Since “no one performs or can perform” the “perfect obedience” that the law requires, the law’s office is to condemn rather than to justify.[51] Given our unworthiness, the matter at issue as Calvin framed it was “how we may be reckoned righteous,” not “how we may become righteous.” The works of the moral law are not accounted for in God’s justifying of the sinner.[52] Believers withdraw from the law, finding righteousness in faith and renouncing the law’s righteousness.[53]

Having been broken, the moral law must yet be fulfilled. But, unable to meet the law’s standard of indefectible observance, the believing sinner must rely upon a substituted righteousness. By faith, the sinner cleaves to the righteousness of Christ that, as gracious object of God’s imputing, covers the sinner’s sins. Blessed by imputation of law-fulfilling righteousness, the sinner may be regarded as having performed the deeds of obedience that Christ himself performed.

This scenario called into service a term of art that looked, to Anthony Wotton, like a sleight of hand. The “as if” drew the sinner both into Christ’s company and into that of the law whose hard terms Christ dutifully obeyed. For Wotton, this was a misbegotten collusion of the gracious and the legal.

The righteousness that is “reputed as ours” is measured by the burden that Christ had accepted in fulfilling the moral law in our place—an office whose reconciliatory outcome was such, Calvin opined, that it were “as if” we ourselves had discharged the requisite obedience.[54] Christ, David Pareus concurred, could be said to have fulfilled the requirement of the law “in us,” and the imputing of Christ’s “satisfaction” would be such that it were as though we ourselves had satisfied the law.[55] Our righteousness consists in Christ’s “perfect obedience” or “satisfaction” through which he “fulfilled the law on our behalf,” and which God “freely imputes.”[56] Such was the register of the imputing that, as William Perkins, Andrew Willet, Robert Abbot, John Downame, and Amandus Polanus averred, it must be considered “as if” the obedience were our own or “as if” we ourselves performed it—and, as Johannes Scharpius put it, “as if” we, like Christ, had endured the “penalty” for sin and could, with him, claim the reward of the legal covenant.[57]

Yet, according to the masters, imputation does not bear ontologically upon the justified sinner. “Imputed righteousness is not legal conformity or inherent perfection,” Pareus counseled in venerable juridical idiom, “but free remission of sins and acceptation of the believing sinner, according to God’s judgment and on account of Christ’s merit.”[58] Nor, moreover, is justification a “physicall transmutation” of the heart’s “quality” and “disposition,”[59] nor the imputation of righteousness an act of “infusion” or “transfusion” of “qualities” from redeemer to sinner.[60] Imputation superintends a forensic reckoning, not a physical remaking. It is a phenomenon emanant of the divine tribunal, and its purpose is to acquit, to remit, to accept. Appeased by a sacrificial offering, “God is propitious to us,” and so “we are counted righteous in his sight.”[61]

For Wotton, however, Christ’s righteousness is simply unimputable; and even if the imputing of it were possible, such an occurrence would occasion no benefit—quite the contrary. Certainly, Christ’s legal obedience—his “active” righteousness—“fitted” him for priestly office and rendered him “pleasing” to God the Father,[62] but in no respect does that righteousness present itself as something to be “counted unto us either for justification or for the attaining the kingdome of heaven.”[63] Christ’s obedience is imputable neither formally, since his inherent qualities are his alone, and serve as no measure in the “counting” of the righteousness of others; nor legally, since it is not in terms of the law of works that sins are remitted and believers justified. Rather, reconciliation is purchased by blood, by a propitiatory mediation.[64]

Wotton ventured upon the removal of an orthodox impertinence. The “as if” that travels with the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, Wotton determined, cannot but cast us into the orbit of a colonizing law. “Some men say” that the law must “be performed either by us in our persons or for us in Christ and accounted to us as if wee had performed the same, which if it be true then are wee justified and saved by the law.”[65] Obliged by the “as if” to do the law’s bidding, the imputee will be saved not by the “pardon” of grace but, instead, by the “reward”[66] of the works in which imputed righteousness consists. For the righteousness is legalistic that fulfills the law, notwithstanding that the works that perfectly fulfilled it were Christ’s.[67]

The grimness of the “as if” sprawls across the face of doctrine, turning wayfarers into law-fulfillers. From the contention that Christ’s active righteousness “is counted unto us,” it follows that “wee stand before God as having fulfilled the law and therefore by our keeping of the law in Christ have true clayme to everlasting life and receive it also as the reward of our works in Christ.”[68] But the “as if,” stocked with elements of doom, blows a colder chill than this. Only because we obey the law is heaven-winning work within our capability, but an unsettling addendum upturns this entire seam of thought. Not to be forgotten is that hireling legalists, seeking reward rather than pardon, are liable to the wrath laid up for sinners.[69] Paul had alerted wayfarers’ attentions to the deadly outcome. Wotton has the apostle summon “all men before the judgment seat of God to be tryed according to the law.” All are found guilty; the law passes its sentence; and Paul “pronounceth peremtorily that all mens works, being examined by the law of God in this course of tryall, no flesh living can be cleared, acquitted, discharged, or justified in his sight.”[70]

It must be argued—lest the law impose itself in contradiction of God’s “purpose from all eternitie to save man by favour”[71]—that Christ’s active righteousness is not imputable. It cannot be imputed in a formal respect, and, even if it could be, such a process would serve no purpose, for its legal complexion estranged it from the grace that justifies evangelically. And the price of such grace is blood, not works—it requires “passive” obedience, not “active.” But nor is Christ’s passive righteousness imputable, since the redemptive “price” that Christ pays purchases the pardon of sin.[72] And one whose sins have been pardoned cannot justly be burdened with an imputed load of punishment. A person consigned to punishment has not been acquitted, whereas acquittal cancels the punitive obligation. Except by supposing that someone may be partially punished and partially spared, a sinner cannot simultaneously partake of the incompatible states experienced by the victim of punitive law and the beneficiary of redemptive grace. For punishment and pardon, Wotton put it, “are contraries.”[73]

Were this not so, God’s knowledge would be compromised by flagrant self-dissembling. God, indeed, would be complicit in the deceiving of his own scientia visionis were he to connive at the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. For the imputing of that righteousness would require God to apprehend a person’s being righteous with, by virtue of having entered into the possession of, a righteousness that was in no position to be formally communicated to, and possessed by, the person in question. God, moreover, cannot know a person to have fulfilled the law if the person has not in fact fulfilled it. Nor can God unknow what he knows about the covenant of works, which is that the stipulation of obedience addresses itself to discrete individuals, not to a representative surety.[74] Wotton would praise Johannes Piscator for having begun the work of sinking the fictions wrought by the law—namely, by asserting the priority of pardon over imputation and by denying the imputation of Christ’s active righteousness. But Piscator, still crediting imputation of the passive righteousness, disregarded the testament of Scripture.[75]

The Scriptures “absolutely disclame the lawe in justification”:[76] herein, Wotton trumpeted the rationale for doctrinal revision. Scriptural testament carried Wotton with, and then beyond, Piscator. It allowed Wotton to make two law-toppling conclusions: first, that God, as the apostle had taught, imputes for righteousness the faith of the gracious covenant,[77] which is not the same thing as saying—some Protestant authorities to the contrary[78]—that in so doing God imputes Christ’s righteousness to the faithful; and second, that the formal cause of justification consists, as Paul had also taught, not in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, but in the remission or pardon of sins—this being the principal fruit of Christ’s merit.[79]

Imputation of faith and the formal causality of remission: these were Wotton’s elemental correctives to orthodox legalism. They were lengthily argued, with aid from judiciously edited expressions of the orthodox masters themselves, in Wotton’s work of 1624, De reconciliatione peccatoris. In this work, Wotton showed himself more inclined than previously he had been to speak of the imputability of Christ’s righteousness. Given that herein he weaves a tapestry of Protestant voices, and that he is addressing a continental audience, Wotton obliged himself to make use of what, in the Protestant discourse of the age, was a near-omnipresent phrase. But the intent is to drain the phrase of its conventional register. The “imputation of Christ’s righteousness” does not denote an act on God’s part in which he deems others to be righteous according to the measure of the righteousness of Christ. Rather, the phrase adverts to the blessing acquired by Christ’s merit. It articulates God’s merciful “pardon,” or “non-imputation,” of the sins of sinners. At the level of the formal cause, to speak of the “imputation of Christ’s righteousness” is to speak simply of the “remission of sins.” Justification’s form is utterly remissive because utterly gracious; it is a work of forgiveness, and tolerates no thought of the law and its burdens and penalties.

Anthony Wotton’s De reconciliatione peccatoris, according to George Walker, was smuggled from its continental publisher into England, where a singularly receptive reader lay in wait. That reader was John Goodwin, whom Walker disparaged as a “lover of novelties, and strange doctrines.”[80]

III. John Goodwin’s Imputatio Fidei

Anthony Wotton had remarked on the “strangeness” of his brethren’s doctrine[81]—from which, he professed himself a “dissenter.” He muffled his dissent later, in De reconciliatione peccatoris, though that book’s studied participation in a chorus of Protestant masters did not denote a doctrinal backing down; Wotton’s points of differentiation, there, were more orthodoxly spoken than previously they had been, and his text found ways of incorporating language that, earlier, he had been disinclined to use. Like Wotton, John Goodwin draped himself in the heritage of the Protestant masters—they are ever-present voices in Imputatio fidei—but Goodwin did not replicate Wotton’s final resolve to assemble the masters in order to minimize the degree of his departure from entrenched doctrinal norms. Goodwin made all too clear that doctrinal demolition formed a large part of his purpose.

For some years preceding the appearance of Imputatio fidei in 1642, Goodwin had been a target for nettlesome brethren.[82] He knew that the big book of 1642 would not silence his adversaries, for doctrinal backing down in tempestuous circumstances was a course of action that ill consorted with Goodwin’s temperament. His concern, like Wotton’s, was the moral law. Goodwin was alarmed by the migration into the region of grace that the law had been undertaking via the doctrinal utterances and pastoral procedures of nomistically minded Protestant divines. Justification, he declared in Imputatio fidei, was a doctrine of such “weightinesse and high importance” that its articulation ought neither be severed from Scripture nor diverted from “the truth and mind of God.”[83]

There was no room, here, for legalistic slippage. Yet “the blessing or promise of the Law, Doe this and live,” was given opportunity by the imputation of Christ’s active obedience. That weighty outcomes followed—themselves undesirable in high degree—Goodwin was keen to advertise. Under the law’s tutelage, there could be no doing and living. No wayfarer may fulfill the law, and the law breached was a bringer of death. Hell and the law’s curse would fall “heavy and terrible” upon noncompliant doers.[84]

And upon negligent theologians: if we are kept “from being consumed” by virtue of “laying the right foundation” for doctrine, “yet will it not keepe us from being scorched with the fire of Gods displeasure, if we miscarie in the walls.”[85] Imputatio fidei put theologians on notice: too many of them were too enamored of a law that “knowes no forgivenesse of sinnes,” and that instead “speakes of the curse, death, and condemnation of a sinner.” It is for God, as justifier, “freely” to forgive; he is not bound to “make” or “pronounce” the defendant “legally just, or declare him not to have offended the Law.”[86] Goodwin was drawing the difference between a God who does not, and a God who does, impute to the wayfarer the righteousness of Christ. Only the non-imputer retained the discretion that enabled “free” justification. But if, having received Christ’s imputable righteousness, the believer is deemed to have done “all that Christ did in obedience to the Morall Law,” and if, hereupon, God pronounces that person “righteous with the selfe same righteousnesse wherewith Christ was righteous,” God must “make himselfe countable unto him for such obedience imputed, in as great matters of reward as he would have beene for the like obedience personally performed by himselfe.”[87] The law compels God; and God is compelled because the legalist obeys the law. For the legalist, on this view, is “as rigidly, literally, and peremptorily righteous, constituted and made as perfectly, as compleatly, as legally righteous, as Christ himselfe is.”[88]

“Reward,” thereupon, is due to the compliant legalist. God is bound to repay the doing of Christ-like deeds. With the God of Wotton’s adversaries, who found himself constrained by misconceived imputation to act in respect of creaturely “determination,” Goodwin’s law-serving God deprives himself of discretionary liberty. So the law must be removed. It was a message that Goodwin would unload in the scornful presence of unsympathetic colleagues.

An immediate provocation was Wotton’s nemesis, George Walker, with whom Goodwin, too, conducted a toxic doctrinal engagement. Walker, unsurprisingly, placed centrally within the texture of justification’s causality the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Invidious consequences flowed, and Goodwin mocked them in a devastating critique of 1641. Walker makes himself vulnerable to the suspicion that he would have a person, made “legally righteous” by virtue “of such imputation,” able to “claime Heaven in right of the first Covenant, Doe this and live.”[89] Since, moreover, “workes are the very substance and essence” of Christ’s righteousness, how could it be that Walker may plausibly hold faith with Paul, who taught that righteousness is imputed “without works”? But Walker’s “as if” seals his Pauline infidelity. Christ’s righteousness, Goodwin grimaced, “becomes or is made ours,” on Walker’s account, “so, or upon such termes, as if it were in deed, and in truth, properly and personally ours, and performed by our selves.”[90] But there was no advantage in this. If, with Christ, “wee had fulfilled the Law in our owne persons, it would stand us in little stead for our justification,” the reason being that a single sin renders the law unfulfillable, even were a person thereafter to keep it “as perfectly as Christ did, a thousand times over.”[91]

As imputees, then, we are impotent. And yet, viewed from a different angle, Walker’s “as if” makes us sufficiently potent to supersede Christ himself. Goodwin, now, revives Wotton’s worry about the imputation that turns wayfarers into redeemers. What need for Christ’s “satisfaction, or attonement by blood,” if the believer “hath a perfect legall righteousnes imputed unto him upon as good termes, as if he had performed it in his owne person”? If the believer may do and suffer “the things which Christ did and suffered,” it follows that “all the fruites and effects” of Christ’s merit are brought forth by that same believer. The appalling corollary is that “God shall accompt every true believer to have redeemed, justified, and saved the world.”[92]

Imputatio fidei, published in 1642, fed off, and sharpened its argumentative virtuosity upon, points of doctrinal concern such as these. We meet, once more, the invocation of “perfect agreement” between Christ’s righteousness and the works of the law,[93] along with the exemplar who illustrates the attenuated value of that righteousness conceived as imputed—that is, the sinner who, though rendering legal obedience “ten thousand” times, cannot profit from the imputation of Christ’s legal obedience.[94] Returning, too, is the recipient of Christ’s imputed merit who is vested with responsibility for “the redemption and salvation of the world.”[95] The “golden apple” of imputation concocted other outrages.[96] If the sinner enters into imputative “communion” with Christ, one outcome of the exchange will be that Christ himself, as sinner’s substitute, becomes as needful of the grace of justification as is the sinner; and yet, given that the form of justification consists in the righteousness of one “who never sinned,” another outcome allows the sinner to be “reputed never to have sinned” by virtue of being “reputed righteous, with the same righteousnesse wherewith Christ was righteous.”[97] Doctrinal ground was crumbling under theologians’ feet.

Ultimately, the overly intrusive law was the catch-all offender within Goodwin’s powerfully argued script. The law ended up tying itself in knots. In sponsoring the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, it both obliged doers to do as it demanded and then exonerated them from doing what it required to be done. In effect, it converted assiduous compliers into unwitting antinomians—an irony indebted to the fiction that the “as if” facilitates the law’s fulfillment by the works of observant wayfarers.

Piety so yoked to law makes for the impious neglect of the sedulous pietist. This was the massive anomaly confected by a dangerous triangular compound—namely, that of the law, the “as if,” and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Goodwin evidently enjoyed casting the anomaly at his opponents. By their doctrine, those opponents were putting at risk the obligatory basis of their own praxis. Goodwin was doing some heavy polemical hitting in arguing that the penitential diligence of the nomist colludes in the undoing of repentance itself. He conjured a scenario in which nomism-by-fulfilling-praxis morphs into antinomianism-by-praxis-fulfilled. This was the unlooked-for self-bequest of unthinking dogmatists. “Such an imputation of the righteousnesse of Christ, as is pretended and pleaded by some,” Goodwin let fly in Imputatio fidei,

wholly dissolves and cuts off the necessity of Repentance. For he that hath a perfect and compleate righteousnesse of the Law imputed unto him, upon such termes, that it shall be as much his, being imputed, as if he had personally wrought and fulfilled it by himselfe, what colour or pretence can there be, why or how, he should stand in need of repentance?… He that is as righteous as Christ is (which those must needs be that are righteous with his righteousnesse) needs no more repentance then Christ himselfe needeth.[98]

This was the second cautionary lesson of its kind that Goodwin directed to orthodox nomists. He had already pointed out that it was a fault of “the Antinomian Sect among us” that “personall sanctification or inherent holynesse” could be bypassed as non-necessary.[99] Again, wrongful imputation was working its malice. Metaphysics might correct the false foundation of this divinity. “The same individuall forme” cannot inform “severall subjects, really distinguished one from the other.”[100] “Imputation” was never going to effectuate this sort of negotiation, and imputation’s failure was theologically consequential.

“Heat,” Goodwin observed, “gives the denomination of hot, to the fire, and learning, the denomination of learned, to the man endued.” In giving its subject a “sutable denomination,” the formal cause makes an entity to be the kind of thing that it is. But “imputation” does not do this: “men are not said to be imputed this or that, for any imputation made.”[101] Rather, it is remission of sins that “gives the denomination of justified, to those that are justified,” and the concurrent “alteration or change in the condition” of the beneficiary—caused by the “act whereby God justifieth him”—is none other than justification’s formal cause. That cause is simply an acquittal “from the guilt of sinne, and punishment due unto the same.”[102] The apostle had not attributed to the wayfarer “any righteousnesse … by the imputation of the righteousnesse of Christ”; instead, righteousness would be “through Faith of Christ, or by believing in him.”[103]

The form of Christ’s righteousness, then, is his alone; it does not migrate from one possessive agency to another. Christ was fitted for sacrifice by the “qualification” of his moral rectitude, but this was righteousness matched to the unique circumstances of a mediator. His works were not endued with representative salience,[104] and they ought no more to be ascribed to a justified sinner than ought “the labor and skill of the Bee … be ascribed unto him that eates the honey.”[105] Allied with this was Wotton’s lesson that migratory righteousness, even were it possible, would not be profitable, since Christ’s works are works of the law, and sinners, on account of their having sinned, can never fulfill the law. Christ does not “change the nature or property of the works” simply by virtue of his “greatnesse or holinesse … but they are the works of the Law, whosoever doeth them.”[106]

Christ’s passive righteousness, too, required nuanced treatment. In suffering, the sinless Christ was bound by no precept of the moral law, which requires the death of none but sinners.[107] He suffered, instead, in respect of the “peculiar Law of Mediation,” which did not oblige him to stand “in the place or stead of all Beleevers.”[108] Christ’s compliance with the mediatorial law bears upon God’s administration of the moral law; penalties emanant from the dread letter of the latter may be suspended in the wake of prudential reflection on “the ransome and attonement” called forth by the former. It is more as governor than as judge—as a wielder of discretionary pardon—then, that God is positioned to manage the harms of the moral law, whose curse “was not properly executed upon Christ in his death, but this death of Christ was a ground or consideration unto God, whereupon to dispence with his Law, and to let fall or suspend the execution of the penalty or curse therein threatened.”[109]

The law of mediation, which obliged the mediator alone, removed one of the props of the imputation of his passive righteousness—that is, the theory that Christ’s substitutionary suffering of the moral law’s curse was so applicable to the members of his mystical body that it were “as if” they suffered as he had suffered. Goodwin disdained this sort of mystical “identitie,”[110] and upped the ante by deploying Wotton’s dictum that a person pardoned could not undergo simultaneous punishment. It follows from the imputation of Christ’s “death and sufferings” that the imputee may “be reputed to have died or suffered in Christ.” This was to overlook the point of the mediator’s passion, which was the procurement of the believer’s pardon. One made “friends” of “light and darknesse,” Goodwin asserted, in seeking imputative reconciliation of pardon and punishment—such an objective required the theologian “to unsay, or gainsay, what the Gospell every where speaketh touching our Redemption and deliverance from punishment by Christ.” If in Christ we are “absolved from punishment” we cannot, therefore, “be said to have been punished in him.”[111]

So the misadventures of the moral law left pock marks across the face of soteriology. Goodwin responded, as a remaker of doctrine, in Wottonian idiom. It was faith, conceived as the gracious covenant’s “condition,” that God imputes for righteousness; and it was in the “remission,” or “non-imputation,” of sin—or in the “absolution and acquitting from punishment”—that the sinner’s justification found its form. With Wotton, Goodwin accepted that the “imputation of Christ’s righteousness” may be salvaged—so long as this is understood in a “meritorious” rather than in a “formal” sense, wherein the phrase simply denotes the “privileges, blessings, and benefits” that Christ has “procured and purchased.”[112] But God accounts us righteous “upon our believing,” for our faith is that which “should be imputed for righteousnesse to us”; and remission of sins is the righteousness itself that is given by way of Christ’s “merit” and “satisfaction.”[113]

The moral law has vanished from the justification of the sinner, just as it vanished from the conversion of the sinner. Goodwin eradicated the law, somewhat systematically, for it was to God’s “unspeakable free grace and goodnesse,”[114] and to the gospel purely preached, that the conversion and justification of the sinner belonged. There would be, for Goodwin, no bond of law presuming to certify the dazzling fictions of the orthodox “as if,” just as there would be, for him, no terrorization by law consecrated to the task of plowing the resistant soil of the unhumbled heart, and therein preparing it for the seeds of grace. It was for grace to prepare its own entry to sinful hearts, and it was for grace—not works—to justify sinners.

Notes

1. John Goodwin, Cata-Baptism; or, New Baptism, Waxing Old, and Ready to Vanish Away (London, 1655), i3v. John Coffey embeds Goodwin in the affairs of his age: John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006); a strictly theological focus is pursued in David Parnham, Heretics Within: Anthony Wotton, John Goodwin, and the Orthodox Divines (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014).
2. J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), appendix 4, p. 98.
3. Samuel Lane, A Vindication of Free-Grace (London, 1645), A4r, 20-21, 58.
4. John Goodwin, Imputatio fidei; or, a Treatise of Justification (London, 1642), b3r–v, pt. 2.187-90.
5. Thomas Edwards, The Second Part of Gangraena (London, 1646), 31, 37; Thomas Edwards, The Third Part of Gangraena (London, 1646), 114.
6. Coffey, John Goodwin, 55; David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre–Civil-War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 448-49.
7. Coffey, John Goodwin, 37, 55-56, 69, 135.
8. George Walker, Socinianisme in the Fundamentall Point of Justification Discovered, and Confuted (London, 1641), 337; also George Walker, A Defence of the True Sence and Meaning of the Words of the Holy Apostle Rom. Chap. 4. ver. 3.5.9. (London, 1641), 50.
9. Walker, Socinianisme, 152; Walker, Defence of the True Sence, 31-33.
10. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, a2v–a3r.
11. Ibid., e2v–e3r.
12. Ibid., b3v–b4r.
13. Ibid., b4r–c1r.
14. William Kiffin, Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin, ed. William Orme (London: Burton & Smith, 1823), 6-11.
15. John Goodwin, “A Satisfactory Letter of Mr John Goodwin, Minister in Coleman Street; at the Request of a Freinde, Concerning Pointes of Religion,” British Library, London, Harleian MS 837/151, 53v–54r.
16. Ibid., 51r.
17. Ibid., 54v.
18. Ibid., 51v–53r.
19. John Goodwin, Christ Lifted Up (London, 1641), A4r–v.
20. Goodwin, “Satisfactory Letter,” 57r.
21. Ibid., 57v–58r.
22. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
23. Goodwin, “Satisfactory Letter,” 53v–54r.
24. Como, Blown by the Spirit.
25. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, pt. 2.158.
26. Ibid., pt. 1.97; John Calvin, Commentarius in epistolam ad Galatas, in Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss, 59 vols. (Brunswick: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863-1900), 50:209 (hereafter, CO): “… repugnantia legis et fidei est in causa iustificationis. Facilius enim aquam igni copulabis, quam haec duo concilies: homines fide et lege esse iustos. Lex ergo non est ex fide: hoc est, rationem iustificandi hominis a fide prorsus alienam habet.”
27. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, pt. 2.110, 120; John Goodwin, Impedit ira animum (London, 1641), pt. 2.47-49, 51, 53, 55-56, 71.
28. Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560-1662 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 199, 223; Peter Lake and David Como, “‘Orthodoxy’ and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of ‘Consensus’ in the London (Puritan) ‘Underground,’” JBS 39 (2000), 34-70, esp. 38-48.
29. Anthony Wotton, Sermons upon a Part of the First Chap. of the Gospell of S. John (London, 1609), 82-83, 85.
30. Ibid., 454; Anthony Wotton, A Defence of M. Perkins Booke, Called A Reformed Catholike (London, 1606), 323.
31. Wotton, Sermons on John, 339; also Wotton, Defence of Perkins, 132, 381.
32. Wotton, Defence of Perkins, 226.
33. Anthony Wotton, An Answere to a Popish Pamphlet, of Late Newly Forbished (London, 1605), 114; also Wotton, Defence of Perkins, 205.
34. Wotton, Defence of Perkins, 168.
35. Wotton, Sermons on John, 83, 282-84, 387-94, 433-40, 447-48, 455, 457-59, 470; Wotton, Answere to a Popish Pamphlet, 90, 98; Wotton, Defence of Perkins, 82, 146, 159, 196-97, 203-5, 233, 323.
36. Wotton, Answere to a Popish Pamphlet, 113.
37. John Crandon, Mr. Baxters Aphorisms Exorcized and Anthorized (London, 1654), pt. 1.264-66.
38. Anthony Wotton, “Of the Justification of a Sinner out of Pauls Epistle to the Romans,” Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 288, 74v, 71v, 72r, 69v–70r, 77r–v, 80v.
39. Crandon, Baxters Aphorisms, pt. 1.265-66.
40. George Walker, A True Relation of the Chiefe Passages betweene Mr. Anthony Wotton, and Mr. George Walker (London, 1642), 1, 19; Thomas Gataker, An Answer to Mr. George Walkers Vindication, or Rather Fresh Accusation (London, 1642), 26.
41. The paper survives in three versions: Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Ward MS O.11 (unfoliated), first and second folios; Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson MS D. 1331, 75r; Trinity College, Dublin, Henry Airey Papers, MS 233, 62r.
42. Anthony Burgess, The True Doctrine of Justification (London, 1655), pt. 1.3.
43. On which, see Parnham, Heretics Within, esp. 69-72, 80.
44. Zacharias Ursinus, Doctrinae Christianae compendium (London, 1586), 523: “Iustitia est ipsa conformitas cum lege, ipsa legis impletio, et res qua iusti sumus coram Deo. Ipsa satisfactio Christi in cruce praestita. Iustificatio est illius iustitiae applicatio, atque hac applicatione res qua iusti sumus, illa scilicet iustitia et satisfactio Christi, sit nostra, et nisi illa fiat nostra seu nobis applicetur et imputetur, non possumus esse iusti, sicut neque paries sit albus, nisi albedo ei applicetur.”
45. Anthony Wotton, De reconciliatione peccatoris, ad Regium Collegium Cantabrigiense, libri quatuor. In quibus doctrina Ecclesiae Anglicanae de iustificatione impii explicatur & defenditur (Basel, 1624), 34: “Nisi Christi obedientia fiat nostra, seu nobis applicetur, non possumus ea esse iusti; sicut paries non sit albus, nisi albedo applicetur.”
46. Ibid., 150: “... singularem obedientiam Mediatoris propriam; qua formaliter iusti esse non possumus existimari, ut non etiam mundi Redemptores esse sentiamur. Nam illa certe obedientia mundum Christus redemit.”
47. Ibid., 132-33: “Etenim lex Dei in Decologo non est illius iustitiae regula, qua Deus per modum iustificationis et Adoptionis, hominibus ad coelum aditum patere voluit. Absque lege iustitia Dei manifesta facta est, Roman. 3, 21. Colligimus fide iustificari hominem absque operibus legis. Rom. 3, 28. Non per legem promissio cessit Abrahamo et semini eius, ut haeres esset mundi, sed per iustitiam fidei. Rom. 4, 13. Si ex lege est haereditas, non iam est ex promissione: Abrahamo vero per promissionem gratificatus est Deus haereditatem.”
48. Ibid., 207: “... nihil in scripturis reperiri posse, ex quo certo et necessario concludi queat, Ipsam Domini ac Servatoris nostri obedientiam, qua legem implevit, peccatori ad ipsius formalem iustitiam esse imputandum, ut per eam ius habet vitae eternae consequendae ex foedere Hoc fac et vives.” See also 120-22, 127-37, 146, 152-58, 165, 180, 184-85, 192-93, 208.
49. Ibid., 139: “Si quicunque peccat, eum necesse sit condemnari; quicunque vero legem praestet, eum servari necesse sit, non est mera Dei gratia et benevolentia, quod hic servetur, ille autem condemnetur: sed voluntas Dei de singulorum hominum salute vel damnatione, ab ipsorum actionibus proficiscitur, et ex iis pendet, quae illum ita determinant, ut aliter velle non possit. Haec autem a veritate prorsus aliena sunt; ipso teste Apostolo, qui Ephes. I, 11. Deum dicit omnia efficere ex consilio voluntatis suae.”
50. Martin Luther, Commentarium in epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas, in D. Martin Luthers Werke, 73 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883-2009), 40(pt. 1):240: “Is enim locus nequaquam admittit disputationem de bonis operibus. Abscindimus igitur in hoc proposito simpliciter omnes leges et omnia opera legis.”
51. Ibid., 257: “Lex enim requirit perfectam obedientiam erga Deum et damnat eos qui hanc non praestant. Certum autem est, quod nemo hanc perfectam obedientiam legis praestat aut praestare possit, quam tamen Deus praestari vult. Ergo lex non iustificat, sed condemnat.”
52. John Calvin, Institutio, 3.19.2, in CO 2:614: “Non enim illic quaeritur quomodo iusti simus; sed quomodo, iniusti licet ac indigni, pro iustis habeamur. Cuius rei si certitudinem aliquam assequi volunt conscientiae, nullum legi dare locum debent.”
53. Ibid., 3.17.2, CO 2:591: “Si fideles a lege in fidem demigrant, ut in hac iustitiam inveniant, quam abesse ab illa vident, certe iustitiae legis renuntiant.”
54. Ibid., 2.17.5, CO 2:389: “Nam si observatio legis iustitia est, quis neget Christum, dum hoc onere in se suscepto nos Deo perinde conciliat ac si essemus legis observatores, favorem nobis promeritum?” See also 3.11.23 and 3.17.8, CO 2:552, 596.
55. David Pareus, In divinam ad Romanos S. Pauli apostoli epistolam commentarius (Geneva, 1617), 515: “Altera causa finalis liberationis nostrae per Christum fuit, ut ius legis impleretur in nobis, hoc est, ut maledictioni legis maledicta morte crucis Christi satisfieret, eaque satisfactio nobis imputaretur, non secus atque si a nobis impleta fuisset.”
56. Ursinus, Compendium, 219, 233, 238, 523.
57. William Perkins, A Golden Chaine (London, 1612), 501, 492, 386, 493-94; William Perkins, A Commentarie, or, Exposition upon the Five First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1617), 105, 128; Andrew Willet, Hexapla (Cambridge, 1611), 200; Robert Abbot, The Second Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholicke (London, 1611), 422-23; John Downame, The Christian Warfare (London, 1612), 654-55, 658-59; Amandus Polanus, Syntagma theologiae Christianae, 2 vols. (Hanau, 1609), 2:2947; Johannes Scharpius, Tractatus de iustificatione (Geneva, 1609), 14, 166-67, also 141-42, 180.
58. Pareus, Romanos, 271: “Iustitiam imputatam non esse legalem conformitatem aut inhaerentem perfectionem, sed gratuitam remissionem peccatorum, et acceptationem peccatoris credentis, in iudicio Dei propter Christi meritum.”
59. Perkins, Galatians, 101.
60. Calvin, Instit. 3.11.5, CO 536; Ursinus, Compendium, 228, 523, 526; Wolfgang Musculus, Loci communes sacre theologiae (Basel, 1567), 591; Perkins, Galatians, 232; Perkins, A Reformed Catholike (Cambridge, 1611), 61-63; Pareus, Romanos, 225, 270, 403-4, 750, 786; David Pareus, Miscellanea catechetica, in Corpus doctrinae Christianae ecclesiarum a Papatu Romano reformatarum (Hanau, 1602), pt. 2.173; David Pareus, Roberti Bellarmini Politiani Societatis Iesu theologi cardinalis: De iustificatione impii, libri V. Explicati et castigati (Heidelberg, 1615), 31, 365, 388-89, 484; Guilielmus Bucanus, Institutiones theologicae (Bern, 1605), 333, 339, 341-42; Polanus, Syntagma, 2:2935-36.
61. John Calvin, Acta Synodi Tridentinae. Cum antidoto, in CO 7:450: “… propitium nobis esse Deum, quia Christi morte placatus nobis fuerit: ideo nos reputari iustos coram ipso, quia illo sacrificio expiatae fuerint nostrae iniquitates.”
62. Wotton, “Justification of a Sinner,” 76v, 77v, 84r.
63. Ibid., 76v, 78r.
64. Ibid., 69r–v, 71r, 72r, 73r, 76r, 77v–78r, 80r–v.
65. Ibid., 81v–82r (punctuation added).
66. Ibid., 79v–80r, 81v–84r.
67. Ibid., 82r–v.
68. Ibid., 79v–80r, 81v–84r.
69. Ibid., 70v.
70. Ibid., 71v (punctuation added).
71. Ibid., 82v, 84v–85r.
72. Ibid., 76r, 77v–78r; Wotton, De reconciliatione peccatoris, 62-70, 92, 95-96, 185-89; Thomas Gataker, Mr. Anthony Wotton’s Defence against Mr. George Walker’s Charge, Accusing Him of Socinian Heresie and Blasphemie (London, 1641), 33-34.
73. Wotton, De reconciliatione peccatoris, 157, 211: “Qui vere erant in Christo in omnibus perpessionibus, iis Deus in iustificatione non ignoscit. Neque enim intelligi potest ullum veniae relictum esse locum, quam in iustificatione consequatur, qui poenas in Christo persolvendo, irae divinae satisfecisse, et supplicium peccatis debitum pertulisse existimatur. Nam poena et venia adversa sunt; ita plane ut qui poenas dederit, non sit absolutus, qui absolutus est, supplicio affectus non fuerit … qui poenas dedit, veniam non est consecutus; qui veniam adeptus est, poenas non dedit, nisi partim poenas persolvisse, partim veniam consecutum esse dixeris.” See also Gataker, Wotton’s Defence, 19-20; Henry Airey Papers, MS 233, 63r; and a Wotton manuscript quoted in Henry Roborough, The Doctrine of Justification Cleared (London, 1643), pt. 1.120.
74. Wotton, De reconciliatione peccatoris, 192-93: “... Quos Deus legem revera praestitisse existimat, ii revera illum praestiterunt. Quod si non fecerint, id Deus verum esse iudicat, quod plane falsum est. Hoc autem fieri non potest, quum iudicium eius sit prorsus secundum veritatem rei: et haec, de qua loquimur, Dei existimatio, sit scientia, quam vocant visionis, quae rei visae vel cognitae existentiam supponit. Iam vero neminem per alterius obedientiam legem revera praestare posse, satis liquet: quoniam haec est legis pactio, Hoc fac et vives; in qua cuiusque a singulis obedientia flagitatur, et singulis ex ea sola obedientia vita aeterna promittitur.”
75. Henry Airey Papers, MS 233, 62r; Ward MS O.11, first and second folios; Rawlinson MS D. 1331, 75r; Gataker, Wotton’s Defence, 11-12. Perhaps Wotton consulted Piscator’s AphorismidoctrinaeChristianae (London, 1595), 41-46, or his De iustificatione hominis coram Deo (Herborn, 1599), 86, 92-100, or his Analysis logica omnium epistolarum Pauli (London, 1608), 50-54, 58, 66, 353. See Heber Carlos de Campos Jr., “Johannes Piscator (1546-1625) and the Consequent Development of the Doctrine of the Imputation of Christ’s Active Obedience” (PhD diss., Calvin Theological Seminary, 2009), esp. chs. 4-5.
76. Henry Airey Papers, MS 233, 62r; Ward MS O.11, first and second folios; Rawlinson MS D. 1331, 75r.
77. Wotton, De reconciliatione peccatoris, 96, 151, where Paul states the case and Wotton adverts to the covenantal grounding and the reconciliatory consequence: “Rom. 4, 3Credidit Abraham Deo, et imputatum est ei ad iustitiam. Et vers. 5. Credenti in eum, qui iustificat impium, imputatur fides sua ad iustitiam.… Quod enim ad iustitiam imputari affirmat Apostolus, id non est impii iustitia formalis; sed conditio tantum, quae ex pactione praestanda est, ut remissionem peccatorum consequatur, adeoque integram reconciliationem cum Deo. Credenti in eum, qui iustificat impium, fides ipsius reputatur ad iustitiam; ut nihil ab eo amplius ad iustificationem acquirendam postuletur. Etenim obedientia Christi non est id, quod loco iustitiae impio dicitur imputari, sed fides ipsa.” See also 30, 99-106, 166-80; Henry Airey Papers, MS 233, 62v, 67r, 70v; Ward MS O.11, third and fourth folios; Rawlinson MS D. 1331, 75v; Wotton, “Justification of a Sinner,” 68v–73v, 77r–85v.
78. Noted in Parnham, Heretics Within, 69-70, 81, 83.
79. Wotton, De reconciliatione peccatoris, 54-55, 148: “At remissio peccatorum est illa iustitia, quae tota iustificatio a Spiritu sancto Rom. 4.6.7.8. describatur. Ergo remissio peccatorum est tota iustitia, quae ad iustificationem flagitatur.... Remissio peccatorum est beatitudo hominis, cui Deus imputat iustitiam sine operibus. Nam per remissionem peccatorum ea beatitudo describatur a Davide Ps. 32, 1.2. teste Apostolo Rom. 4.6.7.8. Ergo remissio peccatorum est iustitia imputata.… Impius enim Christi iustitia donatus, ut causa iustificationis meritoria, formaliter remissione peccatorem iustus evadit, quam propter Christi obedientiam illi concedit Deus.” See also 8-12, 21-23, 38-53, 56-70, 85, 91-96, 102, 110-11, 151, 165-66, 170, 177, 179-82, 197, 209, 212-14, 235, 265, 287, 373-77, 379-80; Henry Airey Papers, MS 233, 62r; Ward MS O.11, third and fourth folios; Rawlinson MS D. 1331, 75v; Wotton, “Justification of a Sinner,” 73r, 74v, 78v.
80. Walker, Socinianisme, 6-8, 88; Walker, Defence of the True Sence, 18-26; Walker, True Relation, 25.
81. Wotton, “Justification of a Sinner,” 74r, 78r–v, 80r, 81v, 85r–v.
82. Edwards, Third Part of Gangraena, 114; William Laud, Works, ed. William Scott and James Bliss, 7 vols. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847-1860), 4:82, 5(pt. 2):356, 362.
83. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, d2v–d4v.
84. Ibid., pt. 2.169-72.
85. Ibid., a4v.
86. Ibid., pt. 1.2-4.
87. Ibid., pt. 1.16-18.
88. Ibid., pt. 1.7-8.
89. Goodwin, Impedit ira animum, pt. 1.6.
90. Ibid., pt. 2.41-42, also 17, 50, 80; Walker, Defence of the True Sence, 20.
91. Goodwin, Impedit ira animum, pt. 2.50.
92. Ibid., pt. 2.31-32, also 52: “I shall still thinke it safer, both to thinke and say, that Christ satisfied the justice of God for me, then I my selfe satisfied the justice of God for my selfe.”
93. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, pt. 1.55-67, 70-72, 159.
94. Ibid., pt. 1.182.
95. Ibid., pt. 2.102-3.
96. Ibid., pt. 2.196.
97. Ibid., pt. 2.94-96, 102.
98. Ibid., pt. 1.145-46.
99. Ibid., pt. 1.55-58.
100. Ibid., pt. 2.100, 93-94.
101. Ibid., pt. 2.96, 105, 113-14.
102. Ibid., pt. 2.114-16, also pt. 1.4-5, 11-12, 75-83, 119-21, 179, pt. 2.3-10, 37-40, 108-13, 117-26, 167, 195, 212-16; Goodwin, Christ Lifted Up, A5v–A6r; Goodwin, Impedit ira animum, pt. 2.43, 53.
103. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, pt. 1.85-86, also 5-6, 9-11, 14-15, 20-54, 75-76, 87-92, 148, pt. 2.21-33, 55-56, 81-83, 176-87; Goodwin, Christ Lifted Up, A5r–A6r; Goodwin, Impedit ira animum, pt. 2.24, 26, 44-45, 54, 67-69, 85-88, 98-102.
104. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, pt. 1.16-17, 100-15, 132-33, pt. 2.45-46, 69, 148, 203-6.
105. Ibid., pt. 1.93, 115.
106. Ibid., pt. 1.71. As Wotton put it in “Justification of a Sinner,” 82r: “... wee are justified by [Christ’s righteousness] so imputed unto us & so by the law still for whether it be by the law fulfilled by ourselves or by another it is by the law still.”
107. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, pt. 2.10, 33, 36, 48.
108. Ibid., pt. 2.224, also 9, 46, 141, 199, 219, 223-25.
109. Ibid., pt. 2.33, also 34.
110. Ibid., pt. 1.113-15, also pt. 2.11-13, 218, 223.
111. Ibid., pt. 1.167, 172.
112. Ibid., pt. 1.8-9, 175, 193, and pt. 2.18, 43, 55, 141, 192; Goodwin, Impedit ira animum, pt. 2.51-53.
113. Goodwin, Imputatio fidei, pt. 1.10, 175.
114. Ibid., pt. 2.121, 131, 180; Goodwin, Impedit ira animum, pt. 2.68-69.