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The Glory of the ‘Third Time’: John Eaton as Contra-Puritan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

T. D. Bozeman
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Extract

As Elizabeth's reign neared its end, the futility of Puritan efforts to restructure the Church of England finally became apparent. By the early 1590s, with a strong conservative shift in the ecclesiastical leadership, the death of powerful patrons and friends at court, and the decisive defeat of the Presbyterian movement, the effect upon Puritan fortunes was devastating. What conservative churchmen did not suspect, however, was that even as they savoured victory, a creative rechannelling of the quest for further reformation was underway. In some quarters, frustration over the failure to gain power had led in different directions, to more radical moves like separatism or the Martin Marprelate project; but non-separating Puritans, few of whom had tied their fortunes to dogmatic Presbyterianism or were prepared to abandon the national Church, improvised a quieter response. If the Church was unreformable, they would reach the citizenry at personal and local levels with a ‘more spiritual and interior religion’. Thus the paradox that ‘the miscarriage of the further reformation coincided with the birth of the great age of Puritan religious experience’: coincided, that is, with the rise of a new, introspective, pietist phase of Puritan initiative.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 638 - 654
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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8 On assurance see Stoever, William K. B., ‘A faire and easie way to heaven’: covenant theology and Antinomianism in early Massachusetts, Middletown Conn. 1978, esp. pp. 138–60Google Scholar. Christopher Hill emphasises the Antinomian reaction against ‘the revival of justification…in [Puritan] covenant theology’: Collected essays, ii. 143–4, 165, 165. Yet covenant theology was but one element in the larger pattern of Puritan disciplinary religion which drew Antinomian fire.

9 Of the six figures cited below, Brierley, Traske, probably Eaton and Towne, and possibly Crisp were disillusioned veterans of Puritan piety. For Brierley's Puritanism, for example, see Marchant, , Puritans and the church courts, 233Google Scholar. The brief tract by ‘Antinomus Anonymus’ provides insufficient information.

10 Huehns, Gertrude, Antinomianism in English history, London 1951, 47Google Scholar. See Biographical dictionary, i, s.v. ‘Eaton, John’. Eaton is treated sketchily in Stoever, , Covenant theology, 138–41, 225–6Google Scholar. See also Graebner, Norman Brooks, ‘Protestants and dissenters: an examination of the seventeenth-century Eatonist and New England Antinomian controversies in Reformation perspective’, unpubl. PhD diss. Duke University 1984Google Scholar.

11 Pagitt, Ephraim, Heresiography; or, a description of the hereticks and sectaries of these latter times, London 1645 (Wing P. 174), 89Google Scholar; Gataker, Thomas, Gods eye on his Israel… London 1645 (Wing G.321), 2Google Scholar. Bakewell, Thomas also saw Eaton as the first notable Antinomian publicist: The Antinomians Christ confounded, London 1644 (Wing B.527), 28Google Scholar.

12 Geree, Stephen, The doctrine of the Antinomians confuted: in answer to the sermons of Dr. Crisp, London 1644 (Wing G.606), 5Google Scholar.

13 Calendar of state papers, domestic series, James I, 1619–1623, 4; Reports of cases in the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, ed. Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, London 1886, 320Google Scholar. Sometime after his degradation from the ministry, Eaton was readmitted to a curacy, but he was soon removed and punished for ‘broach[ing] all his opinions (formerlie denyed) againe’: Reports of cases, 320. For his vehement manner see Gunter, Peter, A sermon preached [against]…hereticall positions…held…by a certaine factious preacher of Wickam Market, London 1615 (RSTC 12526), 6Google Scholar, and Burton, Henry, The law and the gospel reconciled, London 1631 (RSTC 4151), 22Google Scholar; but cf.Reports of cases, 320.

14 Eaton probably did not die in 1642, as claimed in the DNB and in Biographical dictionary. A deponent before the High Commission in 1631 reported recent receipt of a letter from him ‘a little before his death’: Reports of cases, 317. See also Foster, Stephen, ‘New England and the challenge of heresy, 1630 to 1660: the Puritan crisis in transatlantic perspective’, William and Mary Quarterly xxxviii (1981), 633 n. 20Google Scholar. Gunter's Sermon preached [against]…hereticall positions shows that Eaton's principal concept – that God neither sees nor punishes sin in the justified – was fully formed by 1615. Gunter also reported (sig. B) that in previous years neighbouring clergy and other ‘friends’ had organised a number of private conferences in an effort to persuade him of his ‘dangerous and blasphemous’ course.

15 Reports of cases, 320. Few of the records of High Commission survive. Surviving records for 1631 and 1632, including partial transcripts of the trials of several of Eaton's followers, are published in ibid.

16 On predestination see Eaton, John, The honey-combe of free justification by Christ alone, London 1642 (Wing E.115), 206, 270. Predestination was matter-of-factly affirmed byGoogle ScholarCrisp, Tobias, Christ alone exalted, London 1643 (Wing C.6955), i. 289–90, 304Google Scholar; Towne, Robert, The assertion of grace, London 1644 (Wing T.1978), 11, 111Google Scholar; Brierley, Roger, A bundle of soul-convincing, directing and comforting truths, London 1677 (Wing B. 4659), 14, 20Google Scholar, and ‘Of true Christian liberty’, poem appended to Bundle, 9. In Bundle, 8, 15–16, 21, 223, Brierley attacks Arminianism, as does Crisp, in Christ alone exalted, i. 441Google Scholar. With nearly forty citations, Calvin was the second most frequently cited authority (after Luther) in Honeycombe. For a sampling see pp. 2, 20, 63, 107–8, 250, 381. Beza is cited at pp. 177, 205, 227, 246; Zanchi at pp. 22, 31, 36, 260, 266, 309, 318. Eaton also appealed frequently to the church fathers Augustine and John Chrysostom, apparently seeing no basic difference between their doctrine and Luther's.

17 Eaton, , Honey-combe, sig. A, 164Google Scholar. See also pp. 149, 223, 469.

18 Ibid. 170.

19 Eaton regarded Puritan separatists as the worst offenders and as outright Pelagians, but although he avoided naming individuals, non-separating Puritans were his principal target: ibid. 148, 454.

20 Ibid. 86 (and see p. 137), 221–2, 172–3. There is a particularly vigorous diatribe against disciplinary, devotional religion on pp. 169–73. For sharp comments on the Puritan clergy and their godly spawn, ‘hot as a toste against outward vices, and earnestly calling for all active moral duties, which they call holy walking in all Gods commandments’, see also Eaton, John, The discovery of the most dangerous dead faith, London 1642 (Wing E. 112), sigs A7–A12, 4–11, 23–4, 30–4Google Scholar. The quote is from Honey-combe, 223.

21 Taylor, Thomas, Regula vitae, the rule of the law under the gospel, London 1631 (RSTC 2385), 53Google Scholar (and see P 191); Geree, Doctrine of the Antinomians, sig. D4. See also Baker, J. Wayne, ‘Sola fide, sola gratia: the battle for Luther in seventeenth-century England’, Sixteenth Century Journal xvi (1985), 115–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Honey-combe, 95, 4, 5.

23 Ibid. 160.

24 Ibid. 20 (the emphasis on ‘objectively' is mine), 272, 273, 285, 133. The removal of sin from God's sight is Eaton's central teaching, not the ‘doctrine of universal grace’ as claimed by Haller, William in The rise of Puritanism, Philadelphia 1937, 213Google Scholar. Haller there misconstrues the meaning of ‘free’ justification in Eaton's thought and overlooks his approving references to the doctrine of election as cited in n. 15 above. Struck by Eaton's emphasis upon ‘reall’ justification, J. F. H. New attributes to him the very view that he most opposed: that the justified are made just in fact; they are not ‘merely accounted righteous [but] made…anew – for only the absolutely sinless could be admitted to God's sight’: Biographical dictionary, i, s.v. ‘Eaton, John’.

25 Honey-combe, 62–3, 420. For the divine glory see also p. 52. Likewise, to speak in the Puritan manner of God's all-seeing power and of his constant surveillance of the saints is to ‘prattle… by the light of nature’. God does not see and ‘search’ Christians because their sins are removed from his sight: ibid. 52 (and see also p. 58).

26 Ibid. 449, 450. On repentance see also p. 95.

27 Ibid. 98, 111, 110, 113. Deuteronomic punishments had already ceased in the second time: ibid. 103. The sharp divergence here from Luther's teaching is noted in Sippel, Theodor, Zur Vorgeschichte des Quäkertums, Giessen 1920, 15–16Google Scholar.

28 Eaton, , Honey-combe, 75Google Scholar.

29 Reports of cases, 316; Burton, , Law and the gospel reconciled, 14Google Scholar; Taylor, , Regula vitae, sig. A5, 88Google Scholar. Gataker's, tract was Gods eye on his Israel, London 1645 (Wing G.321)Google Scholar.

30 Honey-combe, 75, 116,27, 142. For gratitude see pp. 144, 169, 211, 457. See also idem, Dead faith, 77–9. Stoever's judgment that for Eaton ‘the individual's corrupt human nature…is not really regenerated at all’, which differs from the position taken here, seems to contradict his statement that ‘Eaton admitted that justification produces sanctification…in the form of zeal for obedient walking in God's commandments’: Covenant theology, 139–41.

31 Honey-combe, 457, 84. Eaton devoted a chapter (pp. 120–47) to Deuteronomic punishments.

32 Ibid. 146.

33 Ibid. 466, 75, 466, 474, 78. For the saints as ‘haeredes adulti et emancipati’, see pp. 110–11, 117.

34 Ibid. 457. The experience of justification makes people ‘walk in all Gods Commandments zealously’ (p. 29). This qualifies the judgment that ‘Antinomians stressed the complete freedom of the regenerate-restrained by no law’: Hill, , Collected essays, ii. 162Google Scholar.

35 Honey-combe, 84–5.

36 Ibid. 85–6. Eaton found the ‘voyce of the Gospel’, for example in David's plea to God to ‘wash…me and I shall be whiter than snow’: ibid. 81 and Psalm li.7.

37 Nevertheless Eaton held a strikingly high doctrine of baptism as the moment when justification occurs (for elect infants). Thus the adult experience of conversion – upon which Eaton equally insisted – is styled a ‘return’ to or full realisation of baptismal justification, but Eaton does not clearly harmonize the infant and adult phases of this process: Honey-combe, 26, 31–2, 152, 185–98, 242, 293, and Dead faith, 119–21.

38 Honey-combe, 279, 7. Eaton, like any Puritan, scorned the ‘luke-warme carelesse life’ of the average parishioner: sig. b2. For preaching the law to the unconverted as the ‘hammer of death, [and] the thundring of Hell’, see ibid. 464. In this context Eaton urged a review of self by the touchstone of the Decalogue: ibid. 10–17.

39 Ibid. 75, 124, 75, 84. By Eaton's reckoning, the class of the unconverted also included the Puritan godly. The second audience also included those newly ‘humbled and terrified’ by the killing message and ready to learn of justification: ibid. 74, 136.

40 Ibid. 322, 140, 44. See also pp. 145, 162, 222, 379, and Dead faith, 27, 33.

41 Honey-combe, 380, 145.

42 Eaton, , The true treasure of the heart, appended to Dead faith, 198Google Scholar.

43 Honey-combe, 206.

44 Ibid. 114. God might bring afflictions upon the saints, but these were ‘trialls’ and ‘exercisings’ of faith, not punishments (p. 135).

45 Ibid. 223; Dead faith, 14. Eaton appealed to texts from John Downame and William Perkins. Perhaps he was aware of Downame's exceptional solifidian emphasis, but he cited selectively to show that ‘the best orthodox Writers in the church’ supported his view of justifications: Honey-combe, 97. For Perkins see ibid. 23, 75; for Downame pp. 31, 253, 306, 315, 321; for other jibes at ‘holy walking’ pp. 60, 78, 140, 145, 206, 218, 223, 379.

46 Ibid. 138, 62–3, 98, 138.

47 Ibid. 178, 59, 78 (and see p. 50). On making God blind and weak see pp. 52, 63.

48 Ibid. 154, 81, 114, 75.

49 Ibid. 86, 114.

50 To the best of my knowledge, the earliest tracts are Gunter's Sermon preached [against]…hereticall positions, Hinde's Office and use of the morall law, Burton's Law and the gospel reconciled, and Thomas Taylor's Regula vitae. Hinde's tract dealt with Antinomus Anonymus.

51 McGiffert, Michael, ‘The Perkinsian moment of federal theology’, Calvin Theological Journal xxix (1994), 131Google Scholar.