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Richard Greenham and the Calvinist Construction of God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 September 2010
Abstract
Richard Greenham has traditionally been depicted as a ‘comfortable’ or ‘affectionate’ divine, and in recent years it has even been suggested that he was not predestinarian in his theology at all. This article seeks to show that not only was he indeed predestinarian in his theology of salvation, but that the concept of an all-powerful, all-determining deity was central to his pastoral method. Greenham is used as an example in demonstrating that English Calvinism could be pastorally adaptive and successful, not by softening its core ideas, but by strongly emphasising man's inability to earn his own salvation and God's power over both heaven and hell.
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References
1 H. C. Porter, Reformation and reaction in Tudor Cambridge, Cambridge 1953, 218.
2 These biographical details are borrowed from the ODNB article by Eric Carlson.
3 Little or nothing is known about the circumstances of the composition of the great majority of treatises and commonplaces which comprise Greenham's Workes. Most were probably written in the 1580s and many were aimed at specific persons who had a particular spiritual anxiety. Certainly, Greenham did not intend his writings to be published and so left little contextual information about them. It is therefore not possible to provide source analysis.
4 For technical reasons, R. T. Kendall did not use the word ‘Calvinist’. He referred to Greenham, though, as ‘the first pastor of prominence and influence of the experimental predestinarian mould, and was a patriarchal figure within the tradition itself’: Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, Oxford 1981, 45.
5 K. L. Parker and E. J. Carlson, ‘Practical divinity’: the works and life of Revd Richard Greenham, Aldershot 1998.
6 J. Primus, Richard Greenham: portrait of an Elizabethan pastor, Macon 1998.
7 Parker, ‘Practical divinity’, 119.
8 Ibid. 103.
9 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘The myth of the English Reformation’, History Today xli (July 1991), 28–35Google Scholar.
10 Primus, Greenham, 126–7, 187.
11 Ibid. 179 and passim.
12 Certainly Primus himself seems unwilling to let go of any designations which he deems useful, entitling his concluding chapter ‘Greenham's Anglican Puritan Protestantism’, 100–78.
13 There has been a great deal of debate about whether this, in the English context, is rightly to be called ‘Calvinism’ at all. Some have suggested that the English interpretation stems not from Calvin but from Perkins and Beza. Others have pointed out that Peter Martyr Vermigli held to a similar doctrine and was at least as influential in England as Calvin. Still others have preferred to move away from name-checking altogether. It seems perfectly reasonable to use the term ‘English Calvinism’, but the term is less important than what it describes. Throughout this article, the words ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Reformed’ will be used interchangeably.
14 Peter White made this point quite effectively in ‘The rise of Arminianism reconsidered: a rejoinder’, Past and Present cxv (1987), 217–29.
15 Even to argue, as Peter Lake convincingly has, that predestination was not a desperate doctrine is, to some extent, playing into the myopia that the idea was an exclusively soteriological one. That it may have had a useful place within the wider theology of the individuals that are studied is rarely seriously considered.
16 Parker, ‘Practical divinity’, 91.
17 R. Greenham, ‘A treatise of Gods feare’, in The workes … of Richard Greenham, 4th edn, London 1605 (STC 12317), 508.
18 Ibid. 509.
19 ‘Of knowledge and ignorance’, ibid. 382.
20 ‘Of Gods wrath, and justice, and mercie’, ibid. 346.
21 ‘The sermon of Christian warfare’, ibid. 746.
22 Ibid.
23 ‘Of predestination, perseverance, and presumption’, ibid. 414.
24 ‘Of prayer and meditation’, ibid. 424.
25 ‘Of prosperitie’, ibid. 418.
26 Primus, Richard Greenham, 187.
27 ‘Who be swine, and who be dogges’, Greenham, Workes, 821.
28 ‘How we must narrowly watch over our heart’; ‘Grave counsels’; ‘Who be swine’, ibid. 352, 730, 821.
29 ‘Of prayer and meditation’, ibid. 424.
30 ‘Of predestination, ibid. 412.
31 ‘Of regeneration and perseverance’, ibid. 455.
32 ‘First treatise of the afflicted conscience’, ibid. 161.
33 See, for instance, Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans in the Elizabethan Church, Cambridge 1982, 116–69, and The boxmaker's revenge: ‘orthodoxy,’ ‘heterodoxy’, and the politics of the parish in early Stuart England, Manchester 2001, 16–53.
34 L. Dixon, ‘Predestination and pastoral theology: the communication of Calvinist doctrine, c. 1590–1640’, unpubl. DPhil diss. Oxford, 2007, passim.
35 ‘Of faith … and of feeling’, Greenham, Workes, 331.
36 ‘Of Gods wrath’, ibid. 348.
37 ‘Of affliction’, ibid. 288.
38 Despair was often treated as an estate indicative of reprobation. The problem was not so much the emotional state itself as the fact that the believer would often profess that God's mercy was not sufficient to forgive their sins. As was often the way in the Calvinist scheme, it was not the action that mattered as much as the reaction. As one minister, very emblematically, put it, ‘Judas sinned more hainously in despairing of his Masters pardon, then in betraying his Masters person’: S. Gardiner, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 9. of June. 1605, London 1605 (STC 11581), Ir. This is why the Calvinist emphasis on God's power to be merciful is stressed in this article: for to despair of the power was also to surrender the mercy.
39 ‘Of affliction’, Greenham, Workes, 287–8.
40 ‘Grave counsels’, ibid. 1.
41 ‘Of Gods free grace, justice, and mercie’, ibid. 342.
42 ‘First treatise’, ibid. 160.
43 ‘Of magistrates and government’, ibid. 389.
44 B. A. Gerrish, ‘To the unknown God’: Luther and Calvin on the hiddenness of God', in his The old Protestantism and the new: essays in the Reformation heritage, London 2004, 131–49 at pp. 137, 148.
45 ‘Of truth and errors’, Greenham, Workes, 465.
46 Jack Miles, God: a biography, London 1995, 310.
47 Primus, John, ‘Lutheran law and the Gospel in the early Puritan theology of Richard Greenham’, Lutheran Quarterly viii (1994), 287–98Google Scholar. Kendall also argues that this is the central schematic in his pastoral system: Calvin and English Calvinism, 45.
48 ‘The first treatise’, Greenham, Workes, 157.
49 ‘Of gods free grace’, and ‘First treatise’, ibid. 341, 158.
50 ‘First treatise’, ibid. 156.
51 Ibid. 161.
52 ‘Of the judgement of God’, ibid. 371.
53 Battles, J. F., ‘God was accommodating himself to human capacity’, Interpretation xxxi (1977), 20Google Scholar.
54 ‘First treatise’, Greenham, Workes, 153.
55 ‘Grave counsels’, ibid. 68.
56 ‘Second treatise of the afflicted conscience’, ibid. 166–7.
57 ‘Of Gods free grace’, ibid. 342.
58 ‘Of our generall and special calling’, ibid. 293 [mispaginated as 263].
59 ‘Of Gods free grace’, ibid. 342.
60 ‘First treatise’, ibid. 166.
61 Richard Muller has argued, not wholly convincingly, for the strength of Christocentric ideas within predestinarian theology post-Calvin: Christ and the decree: Christology and predestination in Reformed theology from Calvin to Perkins, Michigan 1998. I would suggest however that some ministers talked about Christology a great deal not because it represented a strength but a potential weakness. Peter Lake, in an approving review of Muller's book, said that we ‘need to think not in terms of a simple opposition between predestinarian and Christocentric styles of divinity, but in terms of different styles and languages of Christocentricity’: ‘Review article: Protestants, Puritans and Laudians’, this Journal xlii (1991), 618–28 at p. 624. I would agree with Lake that an array of Christocentric ‘styles and languages’ were used, but stress, as well, that these strategies were in part a response to a genuine and underlying theological problem.
62 Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, 32.
63 The argument here is specifically with regard to early modern English Calvinism. Karl Barth is just one example of a Calvinist who retained a strong Christological emphasis by subtly re-working his metaphysical premises: The humanity of God, trans. J. N. Thomas and T. Weiser, London 1967.
64 Primus, Richard Greenham, 82–3.
65 Parker, ‘Practical divinity’, 89.
66 ‘Christian warfare’, Greenham, Workes, 750.
67 ‘Divine aphorismes’, ibid. 35.
68 ‘First treatise’, ibid. 150.
69 ‘Of Gods wrath’, ibid. 344.
70 As D. P. Walker has convincingly argued, it was a trend greatly embodied by the reformers to describe hell less in terms of physical torment, but as an agony stemming from permanent separation from God: The decline of hell: seventeenth-century discussions of eternal torment, London 1964, 59–67. Yet Greenham's invocation of the abominable fancy is just about unique among English Protestants. Sadly it is not recorded whether or not Greenham was aware of the irony that he was using a Catholic idea to demonstrate the extent of the Reformed deity's pursuit of justice.
71 William Empson, Milton's God, London 1965, 251.
72 ‘Of Gods wrath’, Greenham, Workes, 346.
73 See, most famously, Miller's seminal ‘The marrow of Puritan divinity’, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts xxxii (1937), 247–300.