Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T02:29:34.130Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Covenantal Quietism of Tobias Crisp1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

David Parnham
Affiliation:
independent scholar in Australia.

Extract

As England's public upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century were turning ominous, the antinomian preacher Tobias Crisp set his own stamp upon tempestuous times. Christ Alone Exalted comprises a series of sermons that Crisp delivered, “in or neare London,” in the early 1640s. The collection oozes discontent. Excrescences theological and devotional, Crisp had decided, needed to be removed, for they were imperiling vulnerable souls. Christian truths were now contending with “brethren” too smitten by the “righteousnesse of the Law” to stand in any but an adversarial relationship with “the free grace of God which is by faith.” Crisp offered a reparative blade. He repaired by cutting and thrusting, and in so doing sought to make amends for a host of puritan horrors. And for all the quietism that informed his alternative covenantal vision, Crisp did not operate softly. He had targets in his sights; he would dislodge from its place of security in the hearts and minds of the brethren a world of religious thought and action. The seethingly indignant responses of his critics testify to the bang with which Crisp had arrived. Crisp delivered a combustible mix of acrid polemic and nonconforming theology. He let it be known that an overly legalized soteriology had precipitated a pandemic of religious troubles; a desiccated, formulaic piety was smothering the spiritual life out of the gospel message. In short, Crisp was issuing a vigorous challenge to the legitimacy of a pietistic tradition that was overly elaborated and destructive of souls.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

2. Crisp, Tobias, Christ Alone Exalted; in Seventeene Sermons: Preached in or neare London, by the Late Reverend Tobias Crisp Doctor in Divinity, and Faithful Pastor of Brinkworth in Wiltshire (London: n.p., 1643), 455 (Hereafter cited as Christ Alone, with occasional irregular pagination silently corrected).Google Scholar

3. Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 198, 204–5Google Scholar; Como, David R., Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 6364, 70, 445–46, and passimGoogle Scholar. See also Hill, Christopher, Collected Essays (Sussex: Harvester, 1986), vol. 2, chap. 9.Google Scholar

4. On bellies bearing antinomians (as well as popes), see Burgess, Anthony, Vindiciae Legis: Or, a Vindication of the Morall Law and the Covenants from the Errours of Papists, Arminians, Socinians, and More Especially, Antinomians (London: Thomas Underhill, 1647), 48Google Scholar; also quoted in McGiffert, Michael, “The Perkinsian Moment of Federal Theology,” Calvin Theological journal 29 (1994): 134.Google Scholar

5. Crisp, as Lamont put it, “provided the intellectual crutch for a Coppe.” Lamont, William M., Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism in the English Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 135, also 140Google Scholar. For a sensitive rehabilitation of Coppe, see Davis, J. C., Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. 48–57Google Scholar. And for Coppe as antinomian illuminist, see Smith, Nigel, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. 54–65, 9091.Google Scholar

6. Lamont, William, “Pamphleteering, the Protestant Consensus and the English Revolution,” in Freedom and the English Revolution: Essays in History and Literature, ed. Richardson, R. C. and Ridden, G. M. (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1986), 79.Google Scholar

7. Important studies of Rutherford, and Edwards, are Coffey, John, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Hughes, Ann, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 382, 449Google Scholar; Crisp, Tobias, Christ Alone Exalted: Being the Compleat Works of Tobias Crisp, D.D. Containing XLII. Sermons, on Several Select Texts of Scriptures: Which Were Formerly Printed in Three Small Volumes, by That Late Eminent and Faithful Dispenser of God's Word: Who Was Sometime Minister at Brinkworth in Wiltshire; and Afterward Many of the Sermons Were Preached in and about London (London: William Marshal, 1690), 116, 118, 122 (Hereafter cited as Compleat Works).Google Scholar

9. Bedford, Thomas, An Examination of the Chief Points of Antinomianism (London: Philemon Stephens, 1647), 33.Google Scholar

10. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 522–23Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 115, 557–58.Google Scholar

11. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 273.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, ibid., 328–31.

13. Ibid., 245–54, and also, on the “elect” status of the redeemed and the prevenient divine action that election enables, see 64, 78, 97–100, 111, 213, 258–59, 267, 270, 272–77, 293–94, 328–31.

14. Ibid., 64, 78, 98, 251–55, 258–59.

15. Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939; repr., 1954), 5556.Google Scholar

16. Kaufman, Peter Iver, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 21, 41, 121–22.Google Scholar

17. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 132.Google Scholar

18. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 455, 423Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 108, 126Google Scholar. John Eaton drew out the affront that a Mosaic renaissance was posing to “the voice of the Gospel”: “Moses with his Law is a severe exactor, requiring of us by feare, and hope of reward, what we should work, and that we should give: briefly it requireth by precepts, and exacteth threatenings: Contrariwise, the Gospel giveth freely, and requireth of us nothing else, but to hold out our hands, and to take that which is offered.” Eaton, , The Honey-Combe of Free Justification by Christ Alone (London: Robert Lancaster, 1642), 83.Google Scholar

19. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 185.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., 455. Crisp could be quite explicit about the need for fidelity to principles: “All men receive this principle, that the promises of the Gospel are the objects or grounds of mens believing, and the promises of the Gospell are nothing else but the free grant of God to men, of his own accord, for his own sake; now to turne the free grace of God granted unto men into the righteousnesse we performe in ourselves … the ground of our faith, what is this but to destroy the life of our faith, and so it must needs bee a faith indeed?” ibid., 521.

21. Ibid., 29–30; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 6, 13, 2324, 34, 50, 96, 104, 108, 137.Google Scholar

22. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 4, 2627, 435.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., 421, 24; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 84, 91.Google Scholar

24. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 134–35.Google Scholar

25. Crisp, , Christ Alone, sermon 1, passim.Google Scholar

26. Sibbes, Richard, Works, ed. Alexander, Grosart (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 18621864), 3:1819.Google Scholar

27. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 493–94, 403–4, 431, 449, 455, also 386–87, 391–92, 394, 409–10, sermon 15, passim, 490–91, 513Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 129–35, 140, 146.Google Scholar

28. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 460–63Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 4, 1314, 116–23, 153–54.Google Scholar

29. Rutherford, Samuel, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (London: Andrew Crooke, 1648), pt. 1, 193.Google Scholar

30. Sibbes, , Works, 3:3739, 19.Google Scholar

31. Preston, John, A Heavenly Treatise of the Divine Love of Christ (London: n.p., 1646), 9.Google Scholar

32. Preston, John, The Saints Qualification (London: N. Bourne, 1633), 3Google Scholar; Preston, John, The New Covenant, or, the Saints Portion (1st ed. 1629; London: Nicolas Bourn, 1655), 166.Google Scholar

33. Ball, John, A Treatise of Faith (London: E. Brewster, 1637), 132.Google Scholar

34. Sibbes, , Works, 5:243.Google Scholar

35. Preston, John, The Churches Carriage or Duty (London: N. Bourne, 1638), 139.Google Scholar

36. Sibbes, , Works, 3:443; 1:87.Google Scholar

37. Preston, John, Sins Overthrow: Or, a Godly and Learned Treatise of Mortification (London: A. Crooke, 1633), 6, 39Google Scholar; Preston, John, An Abridgement of Dr. Preston's Works (London: Nicholas Bourn, 1648), 700Google Scholar; Sibbes, , Works, 5:368–69Google Scholar; Perkins, William, The Works of that Famous Worthie Minister of Christ, in the Universitie of Cambridge, M. W. Perkins (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1608), 1:84.Google Scholar

38. Preston, , Sins Overthrow, 38Google Scholar; Preston, , New Covenant, 189, 286–87, 294Google Scholar; Preston, , Abridgement, 741Google Scholar; Preston, John, The New Creature: Or a Tratise [sic] of Sanctification (London: N. Bourne, 1633), 67Google Scholar; Preston, John, Remaines of that Reverend and Learned Divine, John Preston (London: A. Crooke, 1637), 146–48.Google Scholar

39. See, for identification and analysis of Perkinsian federalism, McGiffert, “Perkinsian Moment,” 117–48. On regeneration and the nonviolation of faculties, see, for example, Sibbes, , Works, 1:87; 2:332; 4:224–27Google Scholar; Ball, , Treatise of Faith, 1112, 16, 137–38Google Scholar; Perkins, , Works, 1:15, 551, 653, 703–4, 715–21; 2:353, 704–7; 3:210–11.Google Scholar

40. Preston, , New Covenant, 103.Google Scholar

41. Preston, John, The Position of John Preston Concerning the Irresistiblenesse of Converting Grace (London: Nath. Webb and Will. Grantham, 1654), 11, 13Google Scholar; Preston, , New Creature, 32, 6162Google Scholar; Preston, , Remaines, 148Google Scholar; Preston, , Abridgement, 692–93Google Scholar; Preston, , New Covenant, 276–78, 286–87Google Scholar; Preston, John, The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love (London: N. Bourne, 1630), 27, 40.Google Scholar

42. Preston, , Sins Overthrow, 56, 40Google Scholar; Preston, , Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, 38.Google Scholar

43. Preston, , Churches Carriage, 7677.Google Scholar

44. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 1, 380Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 137.Google Scholar

45. For “comfort” and “joy,” see, for example, Crisp, , Christ Alone, 233, 284, 292, 308, 338, 359, 381–89Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 27, 5152, 124.Google Scholar

46. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 65, 25, 53.Google Scholar

47. Though see ibid., 12–13, 46, 82.

48. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 98, and throughout Crisp's sermons.Google Scholar

49. Ibid., 291, 414–18.

50. Ibid., 280; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 511, 83, 97.Google Scholar

51. See Parnham, David, “The Humbling of ‘High Presumption’: Tobias Crisp Dismantles the Puritan Ordo Salutis,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 56 (2005): 5074.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 50, 324.Google Scholar

53. Ibid., 88–89, 360–61, 399, 410–12, 422–24, 426; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 33, 4344, 9596, 103, 106, 122–23, 166.Google Scholar

54. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 113–14, 141, 149, 286–87, 411–12.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., 207.

56. Ibid., 219.

57. Ibid., 99, 384.

58. Ibid., 137, 141.

59. Ibid., 50, 52; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 73.Google Scholar

60. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 5758.Google Scholar

61. Ibid., 66.

62. Ibid., 22.

63. See, esp., McGiffert, , “Perkinsian Moment,” and the following articles by him: “The Problem of the Covenant in Puritan Thought: Peter Bulkeley's Gospel-Covenant,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 130 (1976): 107–29Google Scholar; “Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism,” Harvard Theological Review 75 (1982): 463502Google Scholar; “From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 129–55Google Scholar; Greaves, Richard L., “The Origins and Early Development of English Covenant Thought,” The Historian 31 (1968): 2135CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coolidge, John S., The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Stoever, William K. B., “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; von Rohr, John, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars, 1986)Google Scholar; Cohen, Charles Lloyd, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, “Federal Theology and the ‘National Covenant’: An Elizabethan Presbyterian Case Study,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 61 (1992): 394407CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knight, Janice, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Still to be read with profit are Perry Miller's seminal writings on covenant theology.Google Scholar

64. Bozeman, Precisianist Strain. Como's puritans, too, are cut from preponderantly rigorist Mosaic/Pauline cloth: Blown by the Spirit, esp. 117–37. See also Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, “The Glory of the ‘Third Time’: John Eaton as Contra-Puritan,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996): 638–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winship, Michael P., “Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 70 (2001): 462–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 87.Google Scholar

66. Ibid., 35, 21–22, 108.

67. Crisp tended to shift the covenant of works back to Eden, but its polemical salience was not easily resistible by a dichotomizing mind: “Either we are the Ministers and Messengers of Christ, or the Ministers of Moses; we are either the Ministers of the Covenant of Works, or the Messengers of the Covenant of Grace”: ibid., 155.

68. Sibbes, , Works, 1:7980.Google Scholar

69. Preston, , New Covenant, 103Google Scholar; Preston, John, The Churches Marriage; or, Dignitie (London: N. Bourne, 1639), 34.Google Scholar

70. Preston, John, The Doctrine of the Saints Infirmities (London: H. Taunton, 1638), 56Google Scholar. See also Cohen, , God's Caress, 78.Google Scholar

71. Ball, , Treatise of Faith, 375.Google Scholar

72. Ball, John, A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace (London: Edward Brewster, 1645), 155.Google Scholar

73. Sibbes, , Works, 3:394, also 1:58; 3:17, 433, 442, 521; 4:122; 5:18, 342, 347; 6:4, 19, 542; 7:483.Google Scholar

74. Ibid., 3:442.

75. Ibid., 2:332.

76. Ball, , Treatise of Faith, 12.Google Scholar

77. As Perkins announced, faith and good works are not the causes, but rather “the fruites and effects of Gods election. Paul saith, he hath chosen us, not because hee did foresee that we would become holy, but that we might be holy.” Perkins, , Works, 1:287.Google Scholar

78. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 189.Google Scholar

79. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 9899, 612–13Google Scholar; Bakewell, Thomas, The Antinomians Christ Confounded, and the Lords Christ Exalted (London: Thomas Bankes, 1644), 35Google Scholar; Blake, Thomas, The Covenant Sealed (London: Abel Roper, 1655), 447Google Scholar. See also Burgess, , Vindiciae Legis, 84, 100Google Scholar; Geree, Stephen, The Doctrine of the Antinomians by Evidence of Gods Truth, Plainely Confuted (London: H. Blunden, 1644), 107–10Google Scholar; Blake, Thomas, Vindiciae Foederis (London: Abel Roper, 1653), 87Google Scholar; Stoever, , “Faire and Easie Way,” 144–45Google Scholar; Rohr, von, Covenant of Grace, 135–37.Google Scholar

80. McGiffert, , “Perkinsian Moment,” 135–36.Google Scholar

81. Preston, , Churches Marriage, 11.Google Scholar

82. See Parnham, “Humbling.”

83. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 63, 65.Google Scholar

84. Ibid., 443, 431–32.

85. Ibid., 460, also 490.

86. Ibid., 15.

87. See, for example, ibid., 236–37.

88. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 81.Google Scholar

89. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 45, and sermon 2, passim.Google Scholar

90. Ibid., 380, 423–27. Crisp cites Revelation 22:17 and John 6:37.

91. Ibid., 420.

92. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 3839, 8184, 136.Google Scholar

93. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 5860, also 199, 291, 476Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, sermons 67, passim.Google Scholar

94. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 42, 8283, 8687, 90.Google Scholar

95. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 236Google Scholar. See also 64–65, on the “bitternesse” and “disquieting” that the “dust of sinne” occasions Perkinsian spirits and consciences.

96. Ibid., 14.

97. Ibid., 419; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 94.Google Scholar

98. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 399Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 43.Google Scholar

99. Crisp's assimilation of gratuitous and covenantal themes bears out his puritan credentials, and the vehemence of his hostility to rigorist ways suggests a rejection of core values that he had long carried with him—a repudiation of an ideological provenance in which he himself had been shaped. Crisp illustrates McGiffert's observation that antinomianism flowed from the puritan heart “as its characteristic and defining heresy”: McGiffert, “Perkinsian Moment,” 131. Como places Crisp within an antinomian network that he shows, brilliantly and exhaustively, to have emanated from the culture of early Stuart puritanism (see note 3 above).

100. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 27, 435.Google Scholar

101. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 54: “there is not one work [a man] doth, but he commits sin in it.”Google Scholar

102. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 52, 198Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 84Google Scholar. This is where Bozeman seems to misrepresent Crisp. If, as Bozeman suggests, Crispian faith is a “medium of certainty” by virtue of its capacity to “join to Christ” (Precisianist Strain, 269), it would follow that the subject of that faith was discharging the secondary, instrumental causality in a condition-meeting scenario that Crisp was interested only in abandoning.

103. See, for example, Crisp, , Christ Alone, 266–67, 497, 506, 514–15.Google Scholar

104. Ibid., 466, 475, also 457–522; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 169, 578.Google Scholar

105. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 394–95.Google Scholar

106. Ibid., 61.

107. Sibbes, , Works, 3:470, 472–73.Google Scholar

108. Ibid., 3:444; 4:130.

109. Ibid., 4:135.

110. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 6.Google Scholar

111. Sibbes, , Works, 2:316–17.Google Scholar

112. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 1617, 390–94, 446–47, 452, 493–94.Google Scholar

113. Ibid., 8, 11, 16, 187, 369; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 92, 96, 137Google Scholar; Eaton, , Honey-Combe, 10, 17, 47, 77, 87, 154, 323–24, 349, 371–72, 374–75, 405, 447, 468.Google Scholar

114. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 79.Google Scholar

115. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 57.Google Scholar

116. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 185, 159–60, 394–96, 523Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 4446, 114–15, 557–58Google Scholar. For some examples of the puritan understanding of the ability of prayers and tears to solicit God's favor, to “bring downe all mercies” and “stay” the divine “hand,” see Graham, John K., “‘Independent’ and ‘Presbyterian’: A Study of Religious and Political Language and the Politics of Words During the English Civil War, c. 1640–1646” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1978), 1:104, n. 51.Google Scholar

117. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 17, 423, 2930, 370–71, 442–43Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 46, 73, 125.Google Scholar

118. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 95.Google Scholar

119. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 272.Google Scholar

120. Ibid., 10: the pietist is presented as an agent of “pride,” a man who, on account of the sin of his “best work,” forfeits earthly and heavenly “blisse” and finds himself cast “into utter darknesse.”

121. Ibid., 88: this is the “sweet song” that consumes Crisp's voice throughout the bulk of the collection.

122. Crisp exhibits an unflagging stamina in developing the theme of Christ's forensic advocacy on behalf of his sinful “clients.”

123. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 310–14, 338, 399, 520, also 367, 371Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 50, 70, 558Google Scholar. Even when the “husband” does appear, he is “rock”-like: more agent of forensic righteousness than intimate spiritual companion and source of infused habits and qualities. See Crisp, , Christ Alone, 380–81.Google Scholar

124. See, for example, Eaton, , Honey-Combe, 429–44.Google Scholar

125. Ibid., 78.

126. See, for example, Geree, , Doctrine of the Antinomians, 6984, 103Google Scholar; Rutherford, , Survey, part 2, 3940, 171.Google Scholar

127. On the puritan response to Crisp, see Parnham, “Humbling.”

128. Geree, Doctrine of the Antinomians, Epistle to the Reader; Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 15, 48.

129. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 100, 118, 317, 381Google Scholar; Crisp, , Compleat Works, 158, 169, 623.Google Scholar

130. Crisp, , Compleat Works, 58.Google Scholar

131. Crisp, , Christ Alone, 500.Google Scholar