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Henry Hammond and Covenant Theology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
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Henry Hammond (1605–60), the learned and practical English priest who during the Interregnum did as much as any man and a good deal more than most to reinforce and renew the ideational underpinnings of his Church, is a familiar figure in seventeenth-century Anglican studies. Historians speak of his captaincy of a circle of Anglican divines. One names him the “oracle of the High Church party”; another sees him as the principal transformer of Anglicanism. The Independent John Owen likened him to a clerical Atlas bearing on his shoulders “the whole weight of the episcopal cause.” The scholars just quoted call Hammond a “Laudian” but are uneasy with the label and loath to defend it. He appears in their work as an exemplary High Churchman standing for de jure episcopacy, Prayer-Book piety, the Eucharist, and royal headship of the Church. His intransigent Churchmanship contrasts in some degree with his character and temperament. He comes down to us as “the spokesman of those who would make no concession,” yet Richard Baxter, who thought him “the fons et origo of the prelatical bigotry of his day, wrote that he “took the death of Dr. Hammond … for a very great loss; for his piety and wisdom would sure have hindered much of the violence” of the Restoration.
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References
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24. Ibid., 31, 46.
25. Ibid., 52, 71, 75; bk. 2, 4–5.
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31. See, for example, Ussher's, Eighteen Sermons Preached in Oxford, 1640 (London: J. Rothwell and W. Churchill, 1659), esp. 76Google Scholar ff., where hyperconversionist preaching of the law is disapproved and the covenants of nature and grace are highlighted.
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34. Millar Maclure's useful but limited register of The Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534–1642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958)Google Scholar, omits this one as well as another that Hammond certainly preached there, namely, “Sermon XII. The Poor Man's Tithing,” Hammond, , Works (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1849), vol. 3, pt. 1,239–69Google Scholar, probably because the caption in the 1664 edition of his sermons names Paul's church as the venue. For the correction, see ibid. (Oxford, 1850), pt. 2, x. Fell states that Hammond “frequently preached” at the Cross (“Life of Hammond,” ibid., 1:xxvi) but gives no titles or dates.
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37. ibid., 489, 492, 493, 496.
38. ibid., 496.
39. ibid., 498, 503. This clichéd language bespeaks the psychopathologies of piety that Theodore Dwight Bozeman examines in The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. chap. 9.Google Scholar
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41. I am referring to the mid-seventeenth-century emergence in English and Scottish Reformed thought of the covenant of redemption, which can be found in Donne and flashes out in Thomas Goodwin: see The Works of Thomas Goodwin (Eureka, Calif.: Tanski, 1996), vol. 5: Of Christ the Mediator, 1–437, and The One Sacrifice, 479–98. The doctrine came to Britain in competing forms from Olevian of Heidelberg and Arminius of Leiden.Google Scholar
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43. Hammond, , “Sermon XXIII,” Works, vol. 3, pt. 2, 505Google Scholar, referring to the covenant of redemption.
44. ibid., 504–6.
45. For Hammond's mature doctrine of predestination, see Of Fundamentals, ibid., vol. 2, chaps. 15–16, and his “A Letter to Dr. Sanderson Concerning God's Grace and Decrees,” in The Works of Robert Sanderson, D.D., ed. William, Jacobson (Oxford: n.p., 1854), 5:290–35, esp. 320–21Google Scholar, where the divine action shifts from decree to covenant.
46. Hammond, , “Sermon XXIII,” Works, vol. 3, pt. 2, 504–5Google Scholar. Hammond, also castigates any who, by resisting grace, “frustrate the sufferings of Christ,” 497.Google Scholar
47. Packer, , Transformation, 27Google Scholar, drawing on Fell, “Life of Hammond,” in Hammond, Works, 1:xxxi.
48. Green, , Christian's ABC, 55, 200.Google Scholar
49. Packer, , Transformation, 27Google Scholar, drawing on Fell, “Life of Hammond,” in Hammond, Works, 1:xxxi, and quoting Whiston, , Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston (London: for the author, 1749), 1:10.Google Scholar
50. Green, , Christian's ABC, 280.Google Scholar
51. Hammond, , A Practical Catechism, Works, 1:2.Google Scholar
52. It is conceivable that Hammond borrowed the first part of this plan—the two covenants, Christ's offices, the three graces—from Sparke's Mystery of Godliness.
53. The depleted state of Hammond's literary remains precludes tracking the movements of his mind during this critical passage, when he realized, as I suppose, that he could no longer be out of step with the Church. The only pertinent document, a Kentish visitation sermon of 1639 (which we will glance at presently), shows him already staking out a future in the Church.
54. Hammond, , “Sermon XI. The Pastor's Motto,” Works (Oxford, 1849), vol. 3, pt. 1, 226, 228.Google Scholar
55. Ibid., 229.
56. Hammond, Catechism, ibid., 1:3–4.
57. Ibid., 5–6, 8–9, 10–11.
58. See on this point Lettinga, , “Covenant Theology Turned Upside Down,” 659Google Scholar. See also Hammond's, assertion in A Paraphrase and Annotations upon All the Books of the New Testament (London: J. Fletcher for Richard Royston, 1653), 1Google Scholar, that (contrary to puritans like Ames and Anglicans like Sparke) the covenant of grace in the New Testament, whether called berith or diatheke, is always bilateral and conditional “and never a testament.”
59. Lettinga, , “Covenant Theology Turned Upside Down,” 663.Google Scholar
60. Hammond, , Catechism, Works, 1:79.Google Scholar
61. Ibid., 81, 82. Hammond was contending here against the antinomian drift of the High Calvinist doctrine of justification from eternity by decree “before we convert to God and resolve new life,” 81.
62. Ibid., 82–83.
64. Hammond, , Catechism, Works, 1:83.Google Scholar
65. Ibid., 351 ff. Lettinga points out (“Covenant Theology Turned Upside Down,” 665) that Hammond's discussion of baptism in Of Fundamentals, a decade later, integrates it “more closely into his central concern with the Covenant of Grace.” See Of Fundamentals, Works, 2:175 ff.Google Scholar
66. Hammond, , Catechism, Works, 1:cxxix.Google Scholar
67. Hammond, , “Sermon XXI,” Works, vol., 3, pt. 2, 457, 464Google Scholar. This counsel is embedded in an attack upon puritan criticism of the “mere moral man,” ibid., 460. Cf. Practical Catechism, ibid., 1:57 ff., on preparatives to repentance and regeneration. One may discern in Hammond's positioning of “rack” a rhetorical echo and perhaps a moral hinge.
68. Hammond, “Sermon XIV,” ibid., vol. 3, pt. 1, 299.
69. Ibid., 301, 303. Key texts include Phil. 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me”; John 1:12: “As many as received Him, to them gave he power”; Rev. 2:7: “To him that overcometh will I give.”
70. Ibid., 304–8. “[W]hole duty of a Christian” undoubtedly nods to Hammond's friend Richard Allestree's The Whole Duty of Man.
71. Ibid., 315.
72. Hammond, , “Sermon XXV,” Works, vol. 3, pt. 2, 549.Google Scholar
73. Hammond, , A Pacific Discourse of God's Grace and Decrees, in a Letter of Full Accordance Written to the Reverend and Most Learned Dr. Robert Sanderson (London: R. Davis, 1660), 21–22Google Scholar, citing Mark 16:15–16.
74. Hammond, , Of Fundamentals, Works, 2:169–73.Google Scholar
75. Fell, “Life of Hammond,” ibid., 1:xli, lxi–lxii.
76. Lacey, T. A., Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672) (London: SPCK, 1929), 29.Google Scholar
77. Thorndike's theological works were published in six volumes, 1844–56, with a life by the editor, Arthur W. Haddan. See also Miller, Ernest Charles Jr., “The Doctrine of the Church in the Thought of Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672)” (D.Phil, diss., Oxford University, 1990)Google Scholar. W. B. Patterson's article in the ODNB passes too lightly over Thorndike's covenantal pitch and drive.
78. [Allestree, ], The Practice of Christian Graces, or The Whole Duty of Man (London: n.p., 1657), a6r–a7v, 65–66Google Scholar. The work, minus its main title, went on to nearly sixty editions by 1700.
79. Taylor, , Unum Necessarium, or, The Doctrine and Practice of Repentance (1655), in The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, D.D., ed. Charles Page, Eden (London: Longman, 1850), 7:189Google Scholar; “The Invalidity of a Late or Death-Bed Repentance,” ibid., 403; “Of Growth in Grace,” ibid., 4:449–50.
80. Taylor, “The Faith and Patience of the Saints; or, The Righteous Cause Oppressed,” ibid., 7:434.
81. Littleton, , Twenty-One Sermons upon Common Subjects of Christian Doctrine (London: S. Roycroft, 1679), 13–20Google Scholar, bound with Sixty-One Sermons Preached Mostly upon Public Occasions (London: S. Roycroft, 1680).Google Scholar
82. Twenty years ago, Wallace, Dewey D. Jr., noted in Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 197Google Scholar, that “[t]he use of the covenant by Anglican anti-Calvinists is a story yet to be told, and one that might well be long.” I must leave that telling to others.
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