Grace and Works The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism

Harvard Divinity School
Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism
Author(s): Michael McGiffert
Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1982), pp. 463-502
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School
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HTR 75:4 (1982) 463-502
GRACE AND WORKS: THE RISE AND DIVISION OF
COVENANT DIVINITY IN ELIZABETHAN PURITANISM*
Michael McGiffert.
Institute of Early American History and Culture
In a handbook of 1607 for students of divinity and lightly

learned clergymen, the puritan Richard Bernard gave pride of place
to the works of continental theologians. For the best catechisms
he cited Calvin and Ursinus; for "the definitions and distribu-
tions of the principal heads of theology," Polanus; for common-
places, Musculus, Martyr, and Szegedinus; for commentaries, Calvin,
Martyr, and Musculus. These writers had each contributed to the
systematizing of covenant exegesis and doctrine (though Bernard
did not pick them for that reason), and it was no accident that
this naming of great names did not include a single Englishman.
These observations are germane to an essay that explores the
development of conceptions of covenant in the religious thought of
sixteenth-century England because England's divines learned cove-
nant theology from the continental masters who founded and framed
it. Their own work was mostly plain, practical, occasional stuff,
usually aimed at a lay audience and yielding a rather patchy re-
cord for the historian's use. Though the documentation thickens
after about 1570, for the period as a whole we must piece out the
story from odds and ends, and study to collect their meaning from
how they fit to what is known of the evolution of covenant theory on
2
the continent. But it also appears that in one highly significant
*I am grateful to J. Wayne Baker, Norman S. Fiering, Richard L. Greaves,

John F. H. New, and Harry S. Stout for comments on a draft of this essay; to
Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr., and John C. Livingston for conversations on the
subject; and to the Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Col-
lege of William and Mary, and the National Foundation for the Humanities for
grants of money and time.
Richard Bernard, The Faithful Shepherd (London, 1607) 40. Quotations from
the sources, as well as titles, are modernized throughout this article.
The principal studies of Elizabethan covenant thought are Leonard J. Trin-
terud, "The Origins of Puritanism," CH 20 (1951) 37-57; Jens G. M11er, "The
Beginnings of Puritan Covenant Theology," JEH 14 (1963) 46-67; and Richard L.
Greaves, "The Origins and Early Development of English Covenant Thought," His-
torian 31 (1968) 21-35. The present essay builds appreciatively on these, es-
pecially MOller, but varies from them in approach and interpretation, especially
from Trinterud (see n. 92 below). We lack a genetic history of continental
covenant thought for the period under study, though two or three of the chief
contributors have been well served. J. Wayne Baker (Heinrich Bullinger and the
464 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
respect English thought may have preceded the continent, namely,

in giving early definition to the dualistic formula that every-
where became a hallmark of covenant divinity in the seventeenth
century.
We have here a problem in the history of ideas. The origina-

tors of covenant theory knew only the single post-lapsarian cove-
nant of grace, which they found differently administered before
and after the Incarnation, yet being one and the same in substance,
having reference at all times to Christ alone. By the 1590s,
however, theologians were beginning to speak of covenant in quite
another form: the covenant of nature or works, embodying the moral
law. These revisers retained the covenant of grace for the elect;
they brought in the covenant of works to justify God's way with
the mass of humankind who were slated for spiritual execution for
violations of the law, and who, in the calculations of ministers,
had little if any chance of gaining sanctuary within the pale of
grace. This was much more than a mere extension of the theory. It
represented a conceptual transformation that meshed the history
of covenant theology with one of the central issues of modern
thought. The covenant of works, unlike the covenant of grace,
became distinctive as a contract with the conditions of a legal
quid pro quo relationship. It evidenced the tug of contractual
principles upon the theological mind of the era.
The mutation has not been definitively traced through the con-
tinental literature, but the English record, spotty though it is,
proves informative. In pulpit and press, Elizabethan clergymen
activated covenant doctrine in efforts to build Jerusalem in their
land. Taking the doctrine out of the books and schools, and ap-
plying it to the saving of the nation, they gave it ideological
work to do and thus exposed it to the possibility of change. The
fact is that covenant teaching in England was never cloistered,
nor in the sixteenth century did it become cribbed in a creed;
rather, it responded to the challenges of the country's adaptation
to Protestantism. Nor surprisingly, the preachers who found
greatest use for its sanctions and persuasions were those who,
while trying to remain within the church, had greatest cause to
contend that the reformation of the church was incomplete.
Conceptions of covenant were at first the common property of
Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition [Athens, OH, 1980]) supplies a comprehen-
sive bibliography, to which may be added Douglas Andrew Stoute, "The Origins
and Early Development of the Reformed Idea of Covenant" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge
University, 1979). I am obliged to Geoffrey Elton for calling this dissertation
to my attention.
MICHAEL MCGIFFERT 465
English Protestants, but as discontent with the Elizabethan Settle-

ment grew sharp, covenant took on the stamp of party dogma. Its
keenest exponents were Cambridge-trained Calvinists who gave puri-
tanism punch: learned preachers such as Edward Dering, Dudley
Fenner, Thomas Cartwright, and preeminently William Perkins. It
is true that none of this circle made covenant his ruling idea
and that, in addition, covenant figured hardly at all in the think-
ing of other leaders of the movement, such as Richard Greenham,
William Whitaker, and "silver-tongued" Henry Smith. Therefore if
you scratch a puritan, you may or may not find a man with covenant
on his mind. But scratch a man who had something to say about
covenant, and you are quite likely to find a puritan. During the
last third of the century, covenant doctrine tended to become
puritan doctrine and, to a degree, the doctrine of puritans of the
hotter sort.3 One of that lively lot was the first theologian
anywhere, as far as present evidence goes, to do interesting things
with the covenant of works.
These men's sense of the values of covenant divinity can be

gauged from their uses of it. Laboring for England's soul but
repulsed by officials of state and church, puritan pastors under-
took to recruit constituencies of the godly whom they could bind
to God's cause by the covenant of grace. At the same time, they
put covenant ideas to polemical purposes-to lash papists or sec-
taries-in ideological exercises intended to inspirit the party of
reform and sanctify its program. These strenuous activities, which
may be viewed as efforts at collective self-recognition, furnished
the preachers with opportunities for drawing invidious distinc-
tions and expressed the dichotomizing impulse that made them recep-
tive to Ramist logic and Calvinist double predestination. Perhaps
no trait so inwardly defines the puritan as this compulsion to
divide everything-persons, actions, institutions, thoughts--into
antipodes and to invest the division with ultimate significance.
As much as they could, they ran the line and raised the wall be-
tween the realms of grace and nature. To pursue this idea would
take us far afield, but it may be illustrated from the history of
On the question of the theological distinctiveness of puritanism, this

essay sides with John F. H. New, Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of Their Op-
position, 1558-1640 (Stanford, CA, 1964), in dissent from Charles H. George and
Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation (Princeton,
NJ, 1961). SeeDavid Little's comments on the general issue of intellectual dif-
ferences within the English church in Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-
Revolutionary England (New York, 1969) 250-55.
Michael McGiffert, "Covenant, Crown, and Commons in Elizabethan Puritan-
ism," Journal of British Studies 20 (1980) 32-52, esp. 48-50.
our subject during the time when the covenant of works came into
being.
We want a satisfactory genetic explanation of the covenant of
works. The biblical base of this new conception was entirely
inferential: it did not leap straight from Scripture to the minds
of exegetes. Therefore we are led to seek its origins less in
the Word (though dogmaticians busied themselves to ground it there
after they had installed it in their systems) than in the charac-
ter and experience of the minds that germinated it, in the general
drift of the early modern age from prescriptive toward contractual
ways of organizing thought, and, not least, in the structure of
covenant theory itself. Given the practical vitality of covenant
ideas, it is not surprising that they changed; but we must look to
the original theory to find out why the splitting occurred where
and how it did. We see covenant theology dividing in the late
sixteenth century; we ask why the older formula did not persist
intact; we are cued by the invention of the covenant of works to
perceive strains in the old scheme. These strains were aggravated
by events-in England, especially the evangelical and critical
thrust of puritanism-until at length the venerable edifice needed
the flying buttress of a new idea to sustain it.
The thesis, documented from England, is that theologians who
took up the covenant of works did so primarily to ensure the in-
tegrity of the covenant of grace. They seem to have been troubled
by a deepening sense of incongruity between God's two ways of
dealing with humanity, the way of mercy communicated by the gospel
and the way of judgment enforced by the moral law. Their inclina-
tion was to distinguish the gratuity of the first quite sharply
from the conditionality of the second. This tendency had no single
theological locale, but evidence suggests that Calvinists of what
may be called the third generation were more prone than other kinds
of Protestants to make a problem of the relations of law and gos-
pel. The problem was certainly not confined to covenant thought;
nonetheless, its appearance there, and the ways theoreticians of
the covenant tried to solve it, may be taken as paradigmatic.
At stake was the covenant of grace with all the dogmatic and
affective freight that Calvinists could load on it. If on God's
part the covenant were anything but absolutely gracious and gratui-
tous-if, in a word, it partook to the least degree of a condi-
tionality that let God's determinations depend in even the slightest
way on man's doings -then it would be void. Sola gratia would
still be sustained by other means, no doubt, but it would become
harder to explain God's operations or even, perhaps, to justify

his character. God would not be God unless the promise of his
covenant were free and absolute. Or so it seemed to men whose
minds were tuned to the high-strung Calvinism that in their time

perfected double predestination, accented the fiats of redemption
and reprobation, and at every point set man's nature at odds with
God's grace.
In covenant divinity the problem arose because the first
framers of the theory wedded law and gospel covenantally in a way
that greatly disconcerted their successors. The expansive prin-
ciple in this relationship proved to be the conditionality of the
law, which invaded and infected the sphere of grace to the point
of threatening to subvert it. The upshot was the covenant of
works. This device was designed to keep the covenant of grace
pure by restraining the law within a parallel covenant of its own.
It can probably be shown that the higher the Calvinist- as measured
by zeal for sola gratia--the more likely he was to prize the cove-
nant of works as a means of preserving the perfect gratuity of
God's salvific action.5
This interpretive line leads round again to the situation in
England when the covenant of works was created. At first glance,
that conception might seem to signify ascendant legalism in the
minds that produced it, since it raised the law to covenantal
status at the same level of theoretical parity with the covenant
of grace that the decree of retribution had with the decree of
redemption. But appearances may deceive: if the present argument
rings true, the covenant of works sprang from the desire to curb,
not enhance, the law's power in the spiritual lives of people who
had to be taught that, although they must obey God's orders, their
obedience would never get them to heaven. These English folk, we
must remember, were all more or less Catholic, some by personal
commitment but most in a vestigial way that came perhaps from
nostalgia for a merrier England or from having an unconverted
grandparent in the house. Moreover, they were people who, when
they saw a good thing (in this instance the pearl of great price),
naturally did what they could to grasp it. In other words, from
the standpoint of the Protestant priests, they were too law-
centered, work-oriented, and merit-minded for their own good. The
covenant of works would show them the error of their ways. Because
those who lived by the law would die by it, this covenant would
Baker (Bullinger and the Covenant, app. C) finds support in Olevianus and
Gomarus for the same line of argument for the continental side in connection
with the rise of Calvinistic scholasticism.
send adamant recusants to hell. It would thus give warning to

persons who were not yet too far gone in sin to be reckoned past
saving. At the same time, the covenant had a use for the patently
godly. These saints could be taught to labor as God's moral con-
federates without having to worry lest their works be "legal" and
therefore damnable. Only if they were under the covenant of works
would their doings be held against them; but because they were
enrolled in the covenant of grace they could do a good day's moral
work and still enjoy a night's spiritual repose. When the curse
of the law was safely locked up in the covenant of works, puritans
were freed to be as puritanical as they pleased-to do helpful
and holy things, to serve God and love neighbor, without running
the risk of a bad conscience. The point here is not paradoxical.
The mentors of the puritan psyche knew well that nothing dis-
tressed-or should distress--their charges more grievously than
the right deed done for the wrong reason. The distinction between
the covenants helped them to clarify the grounds on which the
godly could do good without thinking to impose on God.
Projecting along these lines, English theologians came to en-
vision two ways in which God entered into covenantal relations
with humanity. One conveyed the promise of the gospel; the other
enacted the contract of the law. With Perkins this formula became
one of the insignia of puritanism. The explanation offered here,

with its interweaving of ideational and experiential factors, must
be appraised in the light of the English evidence, and the English
evidence must be set in the perspective of continental covenant
thought.
The Covenant of Grace: Continental Theory
Ideas of covenant in the early Reformation were always unitive.

Zwingli and Bullinger devised a covenantal hermeneutic to link
the Old and New Testaments in a sequential sacred history and went
on to make covenant the bond of their church. Calvin gave the
thesis of testamental unity broad currency in his Institutes; and
his sermons on Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, among others, set forth
the warmly evangelical terms of God's covenantal engagement with
the elect. Tyndale's exegeses of Matthew in the 1530s treated
Scottish thought also advanced from the strict single-covenant Calvinism

of Knox to the double-covenant teaching of Robert Howie and Robert Rollock.
See G. D. Henderson, The Burning Bush: Studies in Scottish Church History
(Edinburgh, 1957) chap. 4; and Richard L. Greaves, Theology and Revolution in
the Scottish Reformation (Grand Rapids, MI, 1980). A full study is needed,
especially for the sixteenth century.
covenant as the key to all Scripture. Whether seen as a unilater-

al divine promise or as a bilateral pact, league, bargain, or
treaty-whether called foedus, testamentum, berith, or diatheke-
covenant served a harmonizing purpose. It signified union between
God and man, and stood accordingly for the correspondence of gos-
pel and law, for the continuous historical action of grace, and
for the fellowship of the faithful in Christ. Indicative of its
spirit is the fact that covenant, unlike predestination, stirred
no dispute between Zurich and Geneva but formed part of the broad
common foundation of Reformed divinity.
Reformed thought on the subject began with the single covenant
of grace by which God ruled the great sweep of the Heilsgeschichte,
from the first promise to fallen Adam forward through the age of
the law to the Incarnation and beyond to the end of the world.
Though diverse in execution--being administered under the succes-
sive dispensations of the law and the gospel, the "old" and "new"
covenants of Jeremiah and Hebrews -the covenant was one in sub-
stance and purpose, and there was only one covenant. This concep-
tion took shape from Zwingli's and Bullinger's contests with the
Swiss Anabaptists as well as from their struggle against Rome.8
Zwingli proposed to conserve the Old Testament for Christian
use against opponents whom he considered to be blinded by the
glory of the gospel. "I make a great difference," declared an
Anabaptist preacher, "between the Old and New Testament, and be-
lieve that the New Covenant, which was made with us, is much more
perfect than the Old that was made with the Jews."9 So grea
that difference that Zwingli exaggerated only a little in attribut-
ing to his adversaries the view that "the Old Testament is anti-
quated and the testimony adduced from it is void."10 Anabaptists
7
Michael McGiffert, "William Tyndale's Conception of Covenant," JEH 32
(1981) 167-84, supplies a curtain-raiser for the present article.
The question of which man was principal author of the conception is can-
vassed by Baker (Bullinger and the Covenant, chap. 1), who stresses the harmony
of the two reformers and concludes that "the development of covenant thought in
Zurich in the 1520s was a joint effort, with Zwingli apparently taking the lead"
(p. 18). Jack Warren Cottrell ("Covenant and Baptism in the Theology of Hul-
dreich Zwingli" [Ph.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1971] 302-14)
dispels the notion that Zwingli took the idea of.covenant from the Anabaptists.
Cottrell's essay informs the following paragraphs on Zwingli.
John Horsch, "The Faith of the Swiss Brethren," MQR 5 (1931) 22. For com-
mentary on covenant in Anabaptist thought, see William Klassen, Covenant and
Community: The Life, Writings and Hermeneutics of Pilgram Marpeck (Grand Rapids,
MI, 1968); Lowell H. Zuck, "Anabaptist Revolution through the Covenant in Six-
teenth Century Continental Protestantism" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1954);
and John Wenger, "The Theology of Pilgram Marpeck," MQR 12 (1938) 205-56, esp.
207-11.
10Ulrich Zwingli, Refutation of the Tricks of the Baptists (1527), i
employed Jer 31:31-33 and Heb 8:6-16, where the old and new cove-
nants are contrasted, to denigrate the one and exalt the other.
To Zwingli, this was using Scripture to destroy Scripture; it was
tantamount to atheism because it made "no account of him who is
God both of the Old Testament and the New."11 Issues of the highest
urgency were at stake, for the Old Testament supplied authority
not only for infant baptism but also for the reformers' conception
of the church and the relations of church and state. It measured
Zwingli's sense of the crisis that he introduced covenant in order

to confirm the integrity of God's word, thereby to verify the
stability and reliability of God himself.
Covenant theology was thus from the start a theology of his-
tory--the history of the chosen people, first Jews, then Chris-
tians, to whom God bound himself by promise, oath, and sacramental
seal. "The same covenant which he entered into with Israel he has
in these latter days entered into with us, that we may be one
people with them, one church, and may have also one covenant." As
God's people were one people, so was their faith one faith. "It
is one and the same testament," Zwingli proclaimed, "which God had
with the human race from the foundation of the world to its dis-
solution. . .. The same mercy of God promised to the world through

his Son saved Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, which saved also
Peter, Paul, Ananias, Gamaliel, and Stephen. ... One and the same
testament has always been in force."12
Anabaptists distinguished between the testaments as between
shadow and substance. Zwingli demurred; in point of salvation, the
distinction really made no difference at all: "the chief thing is
the same today as it ever was."13 Such differences as did exist
were therefore merely "accidental" or accessory. Having nailed
down that premise, Zwingli could confidently lay out the differ-
ences in a scheme that stressed the sureness, clarity, and scope
of the gospel. The elect before the Incarnation were saved by
believing in Christ to come; those of the Christian era, by faith
in the Christ who has come and now reigns. The Old Testament set
forth the promise not only in direct words but more characteristi-
cally also in types and figures; when Christ appeared, the types
were fulfilled and therefore vanished. The covenant of the Old
Selected Works (ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson; Philadelphia, 1901) 146-47.

1Ibid., 152.
12 Ibid., 227, 229, 233, 234.
1Ibid., 234.
Testament belonged only to Israel, but the New Testament accepts

no ethnic bounds: the gospel must be "expounded to all nations,
while formerly one nation alone enjoyed it." Ethically, the New
Testament transcended the Old, since the latter "never set forth
for men a model for living as has now been done by Christ." This
scheme sustained the supremacy of the gospel by allowing for con-
trasts between the testaments but diminished the importance of
the contrasts in order to affirm the continuity of grace. Zwingli
ended with a triumphant QED: "since therefore there is but one
immutable God and one testament only,. . . God is as much our God
as he was Abraham's and we are as much his people as was Israel"--
14
in fact a good deal more so.4
This thesis of unity and continuity, with this model of the
relations of the testaments, swiftly became common coin among
Reformed theologians. Bullinger, Zwingli's lieutenant and succes-
sor, built from it the first treatise of covenant, De Testamento
seu Foedere Dei Unico et Aeterno (1534), traced the biblical his-
tory of the covenant of grace in Der Alt Gloub (1539), and schema-
tized its theory in his third Decade, where "the old fathers"
under God's "league or covenant" are held to have been "one and
the same people that we are, living in the same church and com-
munion, and saved. . . in Christ alone." Writing against Servetus
and the Anabaptists, Calvin traced the same history to the same
conclusion, "that all the men who from the beginning of the world
God adopted into the estate of his people were with the same law
and with the bond of the same doctrine which now remaineth in
force among us bound in covenant to him."16 This point, which

Calvin called "very important," introduced in the second book of
the Institutes his refined codification of the relations between
the covenants of law and gospel that became standard for his suc-
cessors.
14
Ibid., 235. Zwingli also noted that those who died in faith before the
Advent "did not ascend into heaven but to the bosom of Abraham; now he who
trusts in Christ comes not into judgment but hath passed from death into life."
By Abraham's bosom Zwingli meant "the sodality of the early believers to be
everywhere preserved for the coming of Christ" (ibid., 235, 230). This thought
was not continued by his successors.
Bullinger, The Decades II (ed. Thomas Harding; Cambridge: Parker Society,
1850) 168-72, 283-93; quotation p. 283. See also Bullinger, A Most Godly and
Learned Discourse of the Worthiness of the Holy Scripture (trans. John Tomkys;
London, 1579) 17r-19r; and idem, Commonplaces of Christian Religion (trans.
John Stockwood; London, 1572) 42v-43r.
1John Calvin, The Institution of the Christian Religion (trans. Thomas
Norton; London, 1561) 2.10.1. Henceforth: Institutes.
On the doctrine of the covenant, there needed no Tigurian Con-

sensus to reconcile the Reformed communions. Bullinger and Calvin
agreed in establishing the oneness of the Word on the covenant of
grace and in treating the revealing of the covenant as historical-
ly progressive. Both distinguished between the essence of the
covenant, which never changes, and its accidents (such as the
ceremonial law), which are adapted to the enlarging comprehensions
of the faithful. Both could therefore speak of the covenant of
grace as single in substance and dual in form. It is true that
their accord was imperfect in details: Bullinger made greater use,
for example, of a typological exegesis than did Calvin, who thought
poorly of the ancient types; Bullinger commenced the history of
redemption with the protevangelion, calling the promise of Gen
3:15 "the foundation and the whole sum of our holy Christian
faith," whereas Calvin found that first promise only a "feeble
spark."17 But such disagreements were not capital. On the main
elements of covenant teaching its originators stood as one. His-
torians have spied a divergence between Zurich and Geneva on the
nature of the covenant -Bullinger holding essentially to the idea
of a conditional bilateral pact, Calvin essentially to the free
evangelical promise and gift-but this difference was not acknowl-
edged at that time.18
Bullinger's Der Alt Gloub deserves attention as the first work
on covenant to be translated into English. Miles Coverdale's
preface of 1547 identified "the old faith" with Protestantism and
urged England's converts to prove their mettle "by virtuous con-
versation and good Christian works," like "God's true servants"
19
in the elder times.9 The tract suited Coverdale's purpose
1Cf. [Bullinger], The Old Faith (trans. Miles Coverdale; London, 1547) in
George Pearson, ed., Writings and Translations of Miles Coverdale (Cambridge:
Parker Society, 1844) 32, 37, 38-39, 44, 50, 66, with Calvin Institutes 2.11.4-6;
and Old Faith, 21, 24, with Institutes 2.10.20.
18
See Gottlob Schrenk, Gottesreich und Bund im alteren Protestantismus
vornehmlich bei Johannes Coccejus (Gutersloh, 1923) 44. Baker's assertion that
Bullinger's "was a mutual or bilateral covenant, while [Calvin's] was a uni-
lateral testament" (Bullinger and the Covenant, xxii), rests on a distinction
between covenant as pact and as promise that has become well entrenched in the
interpretive literature at least since Trinterud's ground-breaking article of
1951 (see n. 2 above). The validity of this distinction, in the extreme form
it often takes, is questioned for the early Reformation in McGiffert, "Tyn-
dale's Conception of Covenant," 167-84. Stoute's discussion of Zwingli, Bul-
linger, and Calvin in "Origins and Early Development of the Reformed Idea of
Covenant" tends to collapse the differences between the Reformed persuasions.
19 [Bullinger], The Old Faith (trans. Coverdale; in Pearson, ed., Writings
of Coverdale) 11, 7. Coverdale published the work during exile in Germany. It
because, though it conventionally slammed Anabaptists as "foolish

people" who "cast away the Old Testament," it had a sting in its
tail for Rome: the popes over the centuries had defiled and all
but destroyed the ancient truth, so that "the singleness of faith
was forgotten."20 The Old Faith thus illustrates the versat
of covenant as polemic: Anabaptists lacking, as in England, pap-
ists would do.2 With Catholicism as primary target, coven
divinity made its way to England.
Addressing "simple Christian men," Bullinger told in simple
words the story of the Old Testament promises of the Incarnation.
He proposed not to worry points of exegesis but to enlist recruits
and set them marching in the steps of the patriarchs. His focal
figures-whom he used to periodize the evangel-were Adam (and
Seth), Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, with the prophets grouped
thereafter and the good kings turning up along the way. Trusting
the promise of the Messiah, Adam and Eve became the "first faith-
ful Christians," who saw Christ's "passion and cross afar off."
The promise grew clearer as Christ's time approached but was at
22
all times conveyed by "one covenant only."2 In mid-course
linger tackled the problem of the law, which he framed in a ques-
tion: "Seeing that the salvation is clearly enough expressed afore
the law [in the age of the patriarchs] and is ascribed only unto
the grace of God, why would God then add the law? why was he not
content with the testament alone?" Taking his answer from "holy
Paul" in Galatians 3 on the evangelical functions of the law,
Bullinger held that the law "confirmeth the first promise concern-
ing the blessed Seed" and that, in addition, it was the rule of
life for the elect, whom Bullinger stirred up to fight against
world, devil, and pope.2
was reissued in 1581, and again in 1624 under the title Look from Adam, and
Behold the Protestants' Faith and Religion, still as Coverdale's, "his only
name" being "a sufficient credit" (sig. Alr), although the bookseller Andrew
Maunsell's The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Books (London,
1595) had ascribed it to Bullinger.
2[Bullinger], Old Faith, 82.
2Separatists would later be made to stand in for numerically deficient
Anabaptists, although, as George Williams points out (The Radical Reformation
[Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962] 188), English separatism was rather analogous
than "genetically related" to continental Anabaptism.
22 [Bullinger], Old Faith, 20-27, 32, 35.
23
Ibid., 41-43. In other writings on covenant, Bullinger emphasized the
conditions on man's side but in The Old Faith the promissory character of
covenant is accented and conditionally is muted in keeping with his message,
cast against Rome, that the elect were saved "not through the law, nor by their
own strength and deserving," but by faith alone. Faith and love were required
Covenant came to England not only from Calvin and Bullinger

but also in the writings of systematizers such as Peter Martyr
Vermigli and Wolfgang Musculus, both of whom figured in Francis
Hering's list (1609) of "foreign lights the chief," whose works
went "in English weed. .. from place to place in every shire and
town, /To teach the truth and throw all errors down."24
commentaries on Romans (Zurich, 1558) and Judges (Zurich, 1560),
which were translated into English in the 1560s, shrank to the
vanishing point the differences between the old and new covenants:
"the thing and substance of the old league and the new is all
one. . .. The difference was only . . . as touching largeness and
perspicuity," a matter merely of "qualities and proprieties."
Martyr brushed aside the problematic passages in Jeremiah and
Hebrews, and though he distinguished between the promises of the
law and of the gospel-the first conditional, the latter absolute-
he held that for sinners who fled from Moses to Christ the "prom-
25
ises of the law are made promises of the gospel."25 Musculus's
commonplaces were published at Basel in 1554 and translated into
English in 1563 and 1578. Though Musculus gave greater weight
and particularity than Martyr to differences between the testa-
ments, he held firm to the main points, that the law was "a parcel
of God's covenant" and that "Abraham, Moses, and the apostles
were all made partakers of that heavenly grace by one covenant,
that they were justified and saved by one faith."26
The same themes run through the marginalia of the Geneva
Bible, first printed and borne to England in 1560, and re-issued
in over 120 editions during the next half-century. These explana-
tory notes- a theological primer in themselves- flagged God's
single-hearted constancy to his covenantal promises, employed typ-
ology to unite the testaments, and discounted Jeremiah by noting
that "though the covenant of redemption made to the fathers, and
this which was given after, seem diverse, yet they are all one and
by the covenant, but Bullinger here made clear that neither lay within the
power of men who, with Adam, had fallen "utterly into the bondage of the devil
and darkness" (ibid., 37, 17).
24
Francis Hering, "An Epigram. . . ," in John Calvin, A Commentary upon the
Prophecy of Isaiah (trans. Clement Cotton; London, 1609) [A6r].
25
Peter Martyr Vermigli, A Most Fruitful and Learned Commentary . . . (trans.
John Daye; London, [1564]) 74r, 175v, and The Commonplaces . . . (trans. Anthonie
Marten; [London], 1583) 582-83. The latter work received a Latin edition,
London, 1576.
Wolfgang Musculus, Commonplaces of the Christian Religion (trans. John
Man; London, 1563) 120v, 123v. See Robert Ives, "The Theology of Wolfgang
Musculus (1497-1563)" (Ph.D. diss., University of Manchester, 1965).
grounded on Jesus Christ," The immutability of God, ever true to

promises secured by covenantal oath, was consistently affirmed
by the Geneva translators.27 Accordingly, they conflated th
and the gospel covenantally as, for example, in their gloss on
Deut 7:11-12. Moses in this passage enjoins Israel to keep the
commandments, "for if ye hearken unto these laws, and observe and
do them, then the Lord thy God shall keep with thee the covenant
and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers." The Genevan note
saved the text for Protestantism: "This covenant is grounded upon
his free grace; therefore in recompensing their obedience he
hath respect to his mercy and not to their merits." But in sani-
tizing the text the annotators showed how easily Moses's covenant
of the law could be mated with Abraham's covenant of grace, even
though the one hung on merit and the other flowed solely from
mercy.
The Covenant of Grace: English Practice
English theologians had constantly before them these models

in the commonplaces and institutions of the "best divines" of the
28
age.2 It is a fair guess that by about 1570 the thesis of cove-
nantal unity had achieved the grandeur of a truism, needing little
exposition and less defense because never doubted or denied. The
continental masters had established their handiwork; if England's
preachers had few reasons to rehearse it, they had many occasions
to employ it. Tne uses were largely polemical, to judge from
the scraps of evidence from which we must try to reconstruct the
English side of the story. The antagonists were Rome on the one
hand and, on the other, the Protestant left in the persons of
separatists, England's home-grown counterparts of the continental
Anabaptists. Champions of the church, including a number of more
or less conformable puritans, deployed the covenant of grace on
both fronts. For the early period the exemplary figures (after
Tyndale) are John Bale and John Bradford; for the Elizabethan
decades we may instance principally John Knewstub, George Gifford,
and Josias Nichols, puritans all and warm ones.
See, e.g., the glosses for Deut 31:11, 1 Kgs 8:54, and 1 Chron 29:33, as
well as for Jer 31:31-33, quoted here. Cf. Judah J. Newberger, "The Law of
the Old Testament in Tudor and Stuart England" (Ph.D. diss., New York Univer-
sity, 1976) 127-32.
28
See the cut-and-dried synopsis of single-covenant teaching in William
Bucanus, Institutions of Christian Religion, Framed out of God's Word and the
Writings of the Best Divines (trans. Robert Hill; London, 1606) 209-22.
Playwright, literary annalist, and controversialist whose pen

was ever quick against the "Romish fox," Bale cast biblical his-
tory in theatrical form in God's Promises, which his players
performed probably in 1538, and again that same year in A Comedy
Concerning Three Laws. Adapting the medieval morality play to
the New Learning, Bale staged the progress of the promises, termed
covenants, from Adam to Christ by way of Noah, Abraham, Moses,
David, Isaiah, and John the Baptist. Noah, for example, was made
to rejoice that "faith in that promise preserved both me and
mine. / So will it all them which follow the same line."29 In one
of his polemical works, Bale wrote of "the sure belief in Christ's
birth and passion, which Adam and Noah sucked out of the first
promise of God, Jacob and Moses out of the second, David and the
prophets out of the third, and so forth the apostles and fathers
out of the scriptures"; and he extended the line to the English
martyrs John Lassels and Anne Askew, whom "the bloody remnant of
Antichrist put unto most cruel death at Smithfield" in 1547.30
In 1551 the protopuritan saint John Bradford spent the last
weeks of his life, in jail, debating "the sweet doctrine of
God's election" with a fellow-prisoner, Henry Hart, and Hart's
"free-will" companions, whom Bradford viewed both as "plain
papists," because they made room for human ability in the work
of redemption, and as Anabaptists, because they appealed "to
the Spirit without the scriptures." Attacking predestination,
Hart called in the "covenant between God and man," which he termed
(with a mind to free God from calumny as the author of damnation)
a "conditional promise." Bradford countered by declaring it an
unconditional "free promise" that had no regard to man's putative
John Bale, A Tragedy or Interlude Manifesting the Chief Promises of God

unto Man by All Ages in the Old Law, from the Fall of Adam to the Incarnation
of the Lord Jesus Christ (Wesel, 1547) B3r. A convenient edition of Bale's
plays (text modernized) is John S. Farmer, ed., The Dramatic Writings of John
Bale (London, 1907). The best study of his thought is Leslie P. Fairchild,
John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette, IN, 1976),
with an interesting discussion (chap. 3) of Bale's periodization of church his-
tory that stresses his apocalypticism but misses the covenantal reference.
Fairchild mentions Bale's sense of the unity of Scripture and connects it to
his "former mind-set as a Carmelite hagiographer" (p. 83). See also Jesse W.
Harris, John Bale: A Study of the Minor Literature of the Reformation (Freeport,
NY, 1970 [1940]), and W. T. Davies, "A Bibliography of John Bale" (Oxford Bib-
liographical Society, Proceedings and Papers 5/4; Oxford, 1940) 201-79, with
an account of Bale's life and work.
3Bale, Select Works . . . (ed. Henry Christmas; Cambridge: Parker

1849) 138.
"power and ableness"- as free and absolute as election itself.

Through that covenant grace entered history: Bradford and Hart
agreed in dating it from the protevangelion.31 Another of
ford's writings linked the covenant of Christ's blood, sealed by
baptism, to the Abrahamic covenant, sealed by circumcision, and
settled both, as a single covenant in substance, on the veracity
of God, whose "covenant is a covenant of peace infallible and
everlasting."32
The record of single-covenant teaching that survives from the
last third of the century exhibits a marked imbalance between
clergymen who settled easily into Elizabeth's church and the much
smaller number who wanted to renovate the institution. One may
look long among the writings of the former class and come away
with nothing interesting. Alexander Nowell's official catechism
of 1570 touched but did not amplify the theme of covenantal unity;
the same was true of a sermon of 1576 by Archbishop Edwin Sandys.
More substantial is a 1584 sermon by John Tomkys of Shrewsbury
that presented Bullinger's views to an audience headed by the
earls of Leicester and Essex. There is also a Paul's Cross ser-
mon of 1587 by William Gravet ("drunken Gravate" of Marprelate's

sneer), but this anti-Catholic utterance merely plodded through
the formulas.33 On the puritan side the evidence is much thicker.
Such preachers as Knewstub, Gifford, and Nichols wielded covenant
doctrine in combats left and right. Though these men were identi-
fied with puritanism, when they took up the cudgel of the covenant
Aubrey Townsend, ed., The Writings of John Bradford (2 vols.; Cambridge:

Parker Society, 1848-53) 1. 306, 322-23, 326-27, 329. On Bradford see Philip
F. Johnston, "The Life of John Bradford, the Manchester Martyr, c. 1510-1555"
(B. Litt. thesis, University of Oxford, 1963). On the dispute and particularly
on Hart, see 0. T. Hargrave, "The Doctrine of Predestination in the English,
Reformation" (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1966) chap. 3; idem, "The
Freewillers in the English Reformation," CH 37 (1968) 271-80; Irvin Buckwalter
Horst, The Radical Brethren: Anabaptism and the English Reformation to 1558
(Nieukoop, 1972) 122-36; and J. W. Martin, "English Protestant Separation at
Its Beginnings: Henry Hart and the Free-Will Men," Sixteenth Century Journal
7 (1976) 55-74.
3Townsend, ed., Writings of Bradford, 1. 149.
33
33Alexander Nowell, A Catechism Written in Latin (ed. G. E. Corrie; Cam-
bridge: Parker Society, 1853) 150-51. John Ayre, ed., The Sermons of Edwin
Sandys (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1856) 32-33, 180-81. John Tomkys, A Sermon
Preached the 26 Day of May, 1584, in S. Mary's Church in Shrewsbury... (Lon-
don, 1586): for the single-covenant base, see esp. A7v, A8r, C6v, Flv; for Old
Testament prefigurations see C7v-C8r, D2v, F4v. Tomkys translated several
minor works of Bullinger. William Gravet, A Sermon Preached at Paul's Cross on
the XXV Day of June, Ann. Dom. 1587 (London, 1587) 8, 11. The Just Censure
and Reproof of Martin Junior (n.p., [1589]) B4v, C2v.
they did so in the common cause of their church. They did not
use it to bash bishops; we are still in time and temper a great
distance from the Long Parliament.
In the late 1570s Knewstub, pastor at Cockfield, Suffolk, set
forth the harmony of law and gospel in a set of lectures on Exodus
20. This veteran pastor had a hand in nearly every venture of
reform from the vestments controversy of the 1560s to the Hampton
Court Conference of 1604. His lectures expressly followed Martyr
in stressing the gracious intent of the law, "contrary to that
damnable opinion" of Anabaptists "who hold that the fathers of the
Old Testament had no [spiritual] promises" but only temporal ones.
With an eye to familists, viewed as antinomians, he held that
the covenant of grace required obedience to the law, while at the
same time he noted with an eye to papists that ability to "walk
in [God's] statutes" flowed wholly from the "free fountain of
grace."34
The rise of separatism in the following decade roused the
combative Gifford, one of the "painfullest ministers in
to invoke the "stableness of God's covenant toward the church" in
order to prove that England's parishes, where the wicked mingled

with the righteous, composed as true a church as the ancestral,
model church of Israel. Against the separatists, whom he despised
as Anabaptists, Gifford contended that because the covenant was
"founded only upon free grace, it is detestable impiety to hang
it upon the works of men, as the Brownists do when they affirm
that where there is any open sins suffered in an assembly, the
covenant is disannulled."36 One need not follow Gifford far into
the tangle of his exchanges with Henry Barrow to catch the thread
of his thought. Whether he reasoned down from the stability of
covenant or up from the manifestly unstable behavior of his oppo-
nents-a "bedlam" of "ignorant, rash, and heady" fools of low
degree--he came to the same error at the foul center of the sepa-
ration: its assertion of the conditionality of the covenant.37
34
John Knewstub, Lectures . . upon the Twentieth Chapter of Exodus and
Certain Other Places of Scripture (2d ed.; London, 1578 [1577]), in Leonard
J. Trinterud, ed., Elizabethan Puritanism (New York, 1971) quotations pp. 323,
322. See Trinterud's introductory commentary on covenant theology.
35
Albert Peel, ed., The Second Part of a Register (Cambridge, 1915) 2. 261.
See Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., "George Gifford, Puritan Propagandist, and Popular
Religion in Elizabethan England," Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978) 27-50.
3George Gifford, A Short Treatise against the Donatists of England, Whom
We Call Brownists (London, 1590) A2r.
37 Ibid., A2v.
Barrow and company went damnably astray just at the point where
they made "the stableness of God's covenant not to depend upon
mercy and free grace . .. but upon our works [and] the works of
others whom we must judge"-that is, our friends and neighbors in
the parish.38 Gifford revealed the single-covenant basis of his
argument when he justified the baptizing of church members' chil-
dren, no matter how ungodly the parents, on the principle that
the children's "interest" in the covenant depended not on the
parents but by birthright on "the ancient Christians their fore-
fathers" in unbroken line from Abraham.39 Barrow for his p
wholly accepted the premise of God's covenantal stability but
maintained that Abraham's lineage included only a tiny minority
of the Israelites and, by extension, of the English.0
Gifford's charge that separatists hung God's covenant on men's
works connects the puritans' assault on the sectaries to their
repudiation of Catholicism, for Catholics were no less guilty of
the error- lese majesty in the ultimate degree. This line was
pursued by Nichols in an anti-Catholic tract of 1602 that seems
to take cues from Bullinger's The Old Faith. A ringleader of the
Kentish puritans, Nichols intended his three-hundred-page polemic,
Abraham's Faith, to prove the "antiquity" of the "faith . . . now
professed in England" in opposition to the novelty of "bastard...
upstart" popery. The demonstration rested on the premise that
"God always set forth and allowed but one faith," namely, "the
doctrine of the covenant of mercy and grace," from which Nichols
derived both the Apostles' Creed and the Lambeth Articles.41
Protestantism generally, and English Protestantism especially,
flowed from "the ancient covenant which God gave and taught Abra-
ham both for Jews and gentiles, and which Moses and the prophets
declared and expounded, and Christ fulfilled and established, and
38
3Ibid., 66.
Ibid., 50. See also Gifford, Four Sermons upon Several Parts of Scrip-
ture (London, 1598) 80.
4Henry Barrow, A Plain Refutation of M. Giffard's Book ... ([Amsterdam?],
1605) 163, 115-19. See also Gifford, A Short Reply unto the Last Printed Books
of Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, the Chief Ringleaders of Our Donatists in
England (London, 1591) 42-43, and Leland H. Carlson, ed., The Writings of John
Greenwood and Henry Barrow, 1591-1593 (London, 1970) 108, 121, 165-69, 177-78.
On separatist covenant thought, see B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradi-
tion from the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (London, 1971) chaps. 3-4,
and George Selement, "The Covenant Theology of English Separatism and the Sep-
aration of Church and State," JAAR 41 (1973) 66-74.
41
Josias Nichols, Abraham's Faith (London, 1602) A2v, title page, 17, 8.
See also in the same vein Edward Bulkeley's anti-Catholic An Apology for Reli-
gion (London, 1602) 5.
his holy apostles published to all the world." Uniform in "sub-

stance and essence," varying only in "accidents and ornaments,"
this covenant was administered in three periods--from Adam to
Moses, from Moses to John the Baptist, and from the Resurrection
to the millennium. Abraham figured in this history as founder
of Christ's church, to which his good seed belonged to the latest
generation. Evangelically and discriminatively, Nichols addressed
his tract to "the holy and Christian congregation of England..
for the gaining of some to Christ."42
Puritans appear to have valued the idea of covenant unity as
a strong argument not only for the truth of the English church but
also for the special truth of their own position in the church.
That the church was a true church they did not doubt: it possessed
the Word, administered the sacraments, and exercised discipline.
But the discipline, to their minds, was egregiously defective, and
the common preaching of the Word left much to be desired in point
of zeal and learning. Accordingly, they sought a rationale cap-
able of warranting both their commitment to the "congregation of
England" generally and their own personal nonconformity as Abra-
ham's godly heirs. Covenant served that dual need by validating
the Old Testament model for the national church as well as the
remnant ecclesiola in ecclesia. Consequently, the argument from

covenant history had durable utility: with Edward Topsell, who
vowed to preach the plain "language of Canaan" though "all the
world cry out, puritanism, puritanism," the puritan saints found
it sustaining and gratifying to contemplate the direct descent of
God's "covenant and promises" from Abraham to themselves.43
The Problem of the Covenant
While they dismissed the conditions that their adversaries

attached to the bestowal of grace, England's churchmen never meant
their teaching of the covenant to slip over into antinomianism.
Though awarded without respect to merit, grace laid a debt of
gratitude on its recipients, which they were to pay by good and
holy works in keeping with the moral law. Membership in the cove-
nant could not be earned but had to be exhibited and certified
by deeds. The covenant could thus be said to have conditions con-

sequent (as distinct from antecedent), which grace itself gave
4Nichols, Abraham's Faith, B2v-B3r, 6-7, 19-20, A4r, A3r.

43
3Edward Topsell, The Reward of Religion (London, 1601) 66, 103, 118,
301-2. Topsell's dedication is dated 1596.
power to perform. In theory, a persistent failure to meet the

conditions would not disqualify the man or woman whom God had
elected. But it taxed credulity to suppose that God would suffer
an iron sinner to flaunt the seals of the covenant in this life
and go to heaven in the next. In short, the covenant of grace

admitted its members to the privilege of bearing Christ's yoke.
Freed from the sanctions of the moral law, they remained under its
regulations as the standard of the godly life.
It was in this connection that conditionality became proble-
matic. From early on, there were divines in England who fully
accepted the foundation principles of the covenant of grace but
bent them toward moralism. This commonly meant holding that the
grace of the covenant could be forfeited; apostasy was conceiv-
able. These ministers' concern focused on the question of ulti-
mate breakability; from the standpoint of high Calvinism, they
were solid on election but soft on perseverance. To a degree this
sense of the frailty of the saint's hold on the covenant (which
paid tribute to God's grace in holding the saint within it despite
sin) reflected Zurich. Discoursing on the Decalogue in 1548, the
Henrician refugee and Marian martyr John Hooper, who adopted his
friend Bullinger's single-covenant design without qualification,
advised readers to "look not only upon the promise of God but also
what diligence and obedience he requireth of thee, lest thou ex-
clude thyself from the promise."44 This anxious note also sounded
in the sermons of Bullingerians like John Tomkys, who pointed the
logic of covenant conditionality toward Arminianism.4
Here entered the thin edge of legalism. Because the moral
law defined the terms of covenant-keeping, it was unlawful behav-
ior, if egregious and incorrigible, that broke the covenant and
threw away its blessings. A little tract of 1554, The Humble and
Unfeigned Confession of the Belief of Certain Poor Banished Men,
illustrates the hazard at an early stage. Signed by Nicholas
Dorcastor but attributed (by Christina Garrett) to John Ponet,
this work affirmed that the patriarchs were saved by their faith
4John Hooper, Early Writings ... (ed. Samuel Carr; Cambridge:

Society, 1843) 257-59, 267. See W. Morris West, "John Hooper and the Origins
of Puritanism," Baptist Quarterly 15 (1954) 346-68, esp. 356-59; idem, 16 (1955)
22-46, 67-88.
4Tomkys, Sermon, passim. Baker suggests that the "other reformed tradi-
tion" flowed into Arminianism and cites the speculative literature of the
subject in Bullinger and the Covenant, 28-29, 200, 210ff. On English "Armin-
ianism" before Arminius, see T. M. Parker, "Arminianism and Laudianism in
Seventeenth-Century England" (Studies in Church History 1; ed. C. W. Dugmore
and Charles Duggan) 20-34.
in Christ through the covenant of grace and then, in almost the

same breath, went on to liken the covenant to a land deed with
"conditions which, if they be broken, . . the farmer forfeit[s]
his lease." The homely simile gives grace an earthy grain; more
important is the Confession's frank insistence on the breakability
of the legal contract between landlord God and tenant man. The
author made emphatically clear his view that Christ's covenant, no
less than Moses's, imposed stipulations that "we . . . are bound to
keep ... or else become unworthy receivers, to our damnation."46
The stress on obligation became importunate in the writings
of separatists, who appear in this history as practitioners of a
radically mutualistic version of the covenant of grace. Henry
Barrow and Robert Browne shared with their puritan foes a cove-
nantal sense of Scripture, which, however, they drove to extremity
in one direction. Both men accented conditionality: God's promise
waited on man's compliance. Contending with Gifford, Barrow ar-
gued from the example of Israel that "we may forfeit this covenant
by breaking and contemning the law of God, in whose love we cannot
remain except we remain in his obedience," and proceeded to chal-
lenge his opponent to "show one place in Scripture through the
whole Bible where the Lord's covenant is not made unto us without
this condition."47 Even while they repudiated the Old Testament

model for church and state, and for the composition of the church,
separatists infused the covenant of grace with Old Testament
legalism. In Browne's words, "if we keep [God's] laws, not for-
saking his government, he will take us for his people and bless
us accordingly," but if we fall short in any point, he will "no
longer" be our God.48 This was the sort of thing that provo
Gifford to charge, as we have seen, that the separatists denied
the covenant in the very act of affirming it because they hung its
49
fulfillment on man's works.49 Puritans resisted this legalization
of grace, this capitulation (as they saw it) to Rome, this threat
to the stability of the plan of redemption.
Nicholas Dorcastor [John Ponet?], The Humble and Unfeigned Confession of

the Belief of Certain Poor Banished Men (Wittenberg[?], 1554) C8r-v, D4v, D7r-
D8v. See Christina Garrett, "John Ponet and the Confession of the Banished
Ministers," CQR 137 (1943/44) 47-74, 181-204.
4Leland H. Carlson, ed., The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1590-1591 (London,
1966) 117.
Albert Peel and Leland H. Carlson, eds., The Writings of Robert Harrison
and Robert Browne (London, 1953) 255, 257. For Browne's view of the covenanted
community, see White, English Separatist Tradition, chap. 3.
4Gifford, Short Treatise, 65.
A greater threat rose within the scheme itself. To see it

emerging we turn to a work from late in the century, The Covenant
between God and Man Plainly Declared in Laying Open the First and
Smallest Points of Christian Religion. This volume of 1596 rep-
resents the first known English effort to arrange Protestant faith
in an order "most natural and most agreeable to the covenant of
God." It was dedicated to the mayor and magistrates of Faversham,
Kent (where the lectures the substance of which it contained had
been delivered), and to "all others there and thereabout" who
looked for the Second Coming. The author signed himself J. F. On
Edward Leigh's authority we may identify him as John Ford, until
1593 the vicar of Goodnestone, next door to Faversham, who wrote
a commentary on Revelation and got into intermittent trouble for
nonconformity.5 The discussion of covenant, in question-a
answer format, occupies some thirty octavo pages near the front
of the book.
Ford held true to the central motif of single-covenant exege-

sis by maintaining "the stableness of God's covenant" from the
protevangelion onward but varied signficantly from the traditional
course by running the historical line of grace, not through the
51
promise, but through the experience of Israel. He drew his
account of the covenant of grace almost exclusively from God's
renewals of it with his chosen people. The effect was to collapse
the "old covenant" into the covenants of the Jews under which the
law held the key to God's favor. Though Ford made clear that
"faith must needs be set before the works of the law," he weighed
down the scales on the side of obedience. Thus he stated that
"when God calleth man with an holy calling, . . there are as it

were indentures drawn between God and man" with "conditions on
both sides agreed upon," and he piled up texts to show that "the
condition of obedience which God requireth and man promiseth is
the chiefest thing which is urged and required of us in scripture,"
in both testaments alike. "The meaning," he remarked, "is very
plain": the Fall made man the devil's slave; the covenant of grace
recovered him-but only "if so be that he continue in the covenant
J[ohn] F[ord], The Covenant between God and Man Plainly Declared in Lay-
ing Open the First and Smallest Points of Christian Religion (London, 1596) 55,
A3r. A second edition was printed in London in 1616. In others of his works,
and in other records, Ford appears as Foord, Foorth, and Foorthe; his sobriquet
was Joannes de Vado. I am indebted to Arthur Percival of Faversham for assist-
ance in the search for J. F. and for information about Ford. Leigh's identifi-
cation is in A Treatise of Religion and Learning (London, 1656) 198.
Ford, Covenant, 33.
and obey the commandments of God." Ford had antinomians on his

mind. If we owe salvation wholly to Christ, he had his questioner
object, then "it is no matter whether we sin or not; we may take
our pleasures of this world, for we are not under the law but
under grace." Not so, replied the answerer; if it were so, "our
condition should be far worse and more damnable" than before.52
Salvation for this preacher was risky business. Being under
the law meant that the grace of covenant depended on man's per-
formance, but all men, Ford observed, break covenant more or less
every day, and renewals of it could flow from God's wrath as well
as from his mercy. In his merciful renewals, God repledged him-
self to his whole people; in his wrathful ones, he "weeded out
the chief rebels and great sinners" and by chastisements brought
back the survivors-only a handful as a rule-into "the bond of
the covenant." This was "a terrible kind of renewing," and Ford
urged his countrymen to avert it by prompt repentance and reform.
Individually as well as nationally the case was critical. Ford
gave the questioner the straight line: "By this you have said, it
appears to be a most fearful thing to enter into God's covenant.
Were it not better to be out of the covenant?"5 The answer was
ready: be out and be damned; but it would be hard to imagine a
less comforting version of grace than this one, legalized to the
point of terror.
This sort of preaching gravely distorted the single-covenant
formula. Ford's purpose was to show mankind's need for Christ,
but Christ's covenant in his hands took on the aspect of a con-
tract that mingled law and grace in such a way as to condition
salvation on obedience. The deviation stemmed from the use of
Israel's record as the main line of covenant history, so that the

promise of Christ became tangled and warped by legalistic con-
siderations. Ford exemplified the strong strain of prophetic
nationalism in English thought. By the time he wrote, a genera-
tion of preachers had grown practiced in applying to England the
legal injunctions and moral lessons abundantly stored in Israel's
history, to which they attributed the power of a paradigm. Teach-
ing themselves to believe that England was God's new Canaan, its
folk his chosen people, and its church his church above all
others, proponents of the paradigm put it to their countrymen
that God would be their God and they his people only as they
52Ibid., 56, 23, 24, 26.

3 Ibid., 35, 40, 43.
strove to keep the covenant of the law. If they made a habit of

breaking it, as Israel had done, and went shamelessly on their
wicked way, God in the end would cast them down and out. In short,
they were bound as strictly to their sacramental vows of service
and duty as ever Israel had been. It was the preachers' part to
call their obligations to mind; a good many clergymen took up the
role with truly prophetic zeal in both country churches and the
grand national pulpit of Paul's Cross.
For covenant divinity, as a structure of thought, this laying
of the law upon the land had unsettling effects. The English
history of the Israelite paradigm remains to be written, but it
is clear that its logic moved opposite to that of the covenant of
grace. The paradigm, backed by the law, pointed toward the con-
ditionality of man's obedience; the covenant pointed toward the
unconditionality of God's determinations. English reformers ac-
cepted both logics as normative and binding; it was only as the
record of Israel came in for closer scrutiny and broader implemen-
tation that the inherent contradiction became troublesome. In the
event, theologians began to look about for ways to maintain the

rule of the law without subjecting grace to legalistic contamina-
54
tion.5 Along one main line, viewing baptism as the seal o
covenant and also as a vow of obedience, they labored to shape a
doctrine of this crucial sacrament that would answer to both
principles; it is hardly surprising that before the close of the

century baptism became a hot theological topic in Engla
another line, theorists sought to immunize the covenant of grace
against contractual infection from the paradigm. In the upshot,
the duality that the fathers of covenant divinity had thrust out
at the door would be brought back through the window. Needing
the law, but needing also to keep the law in its place, English
Calvinists split the system. In taking up the covenant of works,
they did not mean at all to displace or degrade the covenant of
grace but rather to enhance it, free it from strain, and secure
it against danger.
54
I am indebted to Harry S. Stout for helping to clarify my thought on this
point.
See E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan
Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720 (New Haven, 1974).
The Covenant of Works
The covenant of works had a two-generation gestation. It

appeared in the late sixteenth century as the denouement-the for-
mal recognition and acceptance-of a drift toward duality in
covenant divinity that can be traced back to Calvin-indeed, to
Calvin's very formulation of single-covenant theory. The divisive
impulse can be followed in English writings, where it breaks
through in some of the same sermons and tracts that dominantly
affirmed the oneness of the covenant.
Book two, chapter eleven, of the Institutes specifies within

the frame of unity several differences between the testaments as
differences between law and gospel. These focus in the Pauline
assertion that the law lays on all mankind the curse of death,
from which the gospel frees the elect. It is essential to recog-
nize that Calvin supposed himself to be merely defining differ-
ences within the continuous dispensation of grace, but his
contrasts cut too sharp and deep to be contained for long within
the single-covenant plan. In addition, he linked the fate of
reprobates to Israel's history, construed as a repeated sifting
of Abraham's good seed by his wife Sarah from his bad seed by his
bondswoman Hagar. The holy line of Isaac perpetuated the herit-
age of grace; the evil line of Ishmael "fell from the adoption by
their own fault and guiltiness, because there was a condition
adjoined that they should faithfully keep the covenant of God,
which they falsely broke." Covenant intersected in Calvin's mind
with the divine decrees; drawing on Paul, instructed by Augustine,
and thinking of two decrees, he could hardly help thinking of
two covenants. In Israel's history "there were very few, or in a
manner none," who genuinely "embraced the covenant of the Lord."
All were called, but the great majority fell under a merely "com-
mon covenant" and therefore lacked the gift to "continue in the
covenant to the end."56 The remote sources of double-covenant
theology will be found in these discriminations.
Calvin's views took root in English soil already watered by
Lutheran writings in which the split between gospel and law was
quite strongly marked. In 1538 Richard Taverner translated the
commonplaces of Erasmus Sarcerius, fresh from the press at Basel
and the first of that genre (as Taverner noted) to be published
in England. Covenant figured only faintly in Sarcerius's system-
5Calvin Institutes 2.11.9, 8; 3.21.7.
as in Lutheranism generally--but where it appeared his emphasis

was dualistic. He found the promise of grace in the Old Testament
from Adam onward but stressed the differences between the new
covenant and the old. Citing Jeremiah 31, he wrote of "a new
testament or covenant of grace whereby we be made free from the
tyranny and curse of the law." The curse was conditionality:
Jeremiah (in Taverner's clumsy translation) "understandeth by the
covenant made with the fathers that covenant conditional by which
was sought righteousness upon condition, and yet was not found
without the promise of the new covenant of grace, in which freely
sins be forgiven without condition."57
A dozen years later John Foxe addressed to "the whole English
congregation" a translation of Urbanus Regius's An Instruction of
Christian Faith from the German edition of 1529. Foxe's preface
accented Regius's "appeal from the law to the Son" and to "the
everlasting covenant of grace made to us in Christ" that gave "a
safe conduct and passport through all the perils of death and
damnation. . . though we fall never so heinously .. ." For Regius,
trust in God's promise rested on the fact that, unlike the "law
58
of our works," it had no condition. Foxe turned his text to
challenge and assurance: "What containeth the old testament but
only promises? Whereupon be these promises grounded? Upon the
law? How so, were not these promises made to Adam and to Abraham
freely long before the law came?. . . [W]hy then do we not believe
God? Why do we yet stand in fear and doubt of our salvation, as
though we had no promises but only our own deservings to stay
59
upon? Is God a dissembler?"59 A similar distancing of the testa-
ments between law and gospel can be seen in The Sum of Divinity,
a handbook for curates and students by another Lutheran, Johann
Spangenberg, that received English translation in 1548 and several
reprintings in the 1560s60
John Bale's propaganda plays of the 1530s had struck the same
7Erasmus Sarcerius, Commonplaces of Scripture (trans. Richard Taverner;

London, 1538) 100r-v; see also 65v, 66v. See Henry Eyster Jacobs, The Lutheran
Movement in England (rev. ed.; Philadelphia, 1916) 140ff. I am obliged to
James C. Spalding for sharing with me his unpublished paper, "The Commonplaces
of Erasmus Sarcerius: The First Systematic Theology in the English Language."
Taverner's Sarcerius was reissued in 1553 and 1577.
Urbanus Regius, An Instruction of Christian Faith How To Be Bold upon the

Promises of God and Not To Doubt of Our Salvation (trans. John Foxe; London,
[1550?]; orig. German ed., 1529) B5r-B6v, C2v-C6r, D4r.
9Ibid., A2v-A3r.
60 [JohannSpangenberg], The Sum of Divinity (trans. Robert Hutten; London,
1548; orig. Latin, 1540) K8v-L2v.
note con brio. Though Bale deployed the single-covenant plot,

having God in Three Laws declare that "our laws are all one," he
contrasted the "laws of nature, of bondage [Mosaic], and of grace,"
with special emphasis on the harshness of the Mosaic law. Thus
in God's Promises John the Baptist explains that
In Moses's hard law we had not else but darkness,
Figure, and shadow. All was not else but night,
Punishment for sin, much rigor, pain, and roughness.
An high chance is there, where all is turned to light;
Grace and remission anon will shine full bright.
Never man lived that ever see God afore, 6
Which now in our kind man's ruin will restore.
Bale's theological sources escape easy classification, but this

smacks, one would think, of Wittenberg.6
John Bradford, like Bale, adhered to the single-covenant
standard but also parted the law from the gospel, assigning the
first to the "old man," the second to the "new" creature, and
dividing the testaments accordingly. One of his last letters (to
Hart and the free-will men) laid out the difference plainly: "the
one is a doctrine which demandeth of us our duty, but giveth no
power thereto; the other is a doctrine which not so much demandeth
as giveth. The former is called the law, which hath its promises,
conditionals, and comminations or threats accordingly; the other
is called the gospel, or rather the free promise, hanging not on
conditions on our behalf but simply on God's verity and mercy,
although they require conditions but not as hanging thereon."
Bradford's sermon on repentance of 1553, which became a devotional
classic of puritanism, used similar terms to describe "two kinds
of promises," though promise was coming to seem an incongruent
designation for the comminatory rule of the law that threatened
to hang men for their least misstep.63
Bale, A Comedy Concerning Three Laws, in Farmer, ed., Dramatic Writings

of Bale, 5, 3; God's Promises, ibid., 122-23. On the hardness of the Mosaic
law, see also Three Laws, ibid., 28, 31.
6The depth of Bale's Lutheranism is debatable. He hailed Luther as "the
capital enemy of antichrist's bishops" and held the catechisms of Melanchthon
and Sarcerius in highest regard (Yet a Course at the Romish Fox [(Antwerp,
1543)] 51r, 51v, 53r). He was responsible for translating and sending into
England the German accounts of Luther's death, with the eulogies from his
funeral (The True History of the Christian Departing of the Reverend Man D.
Martin Luther... [n.p. (1546)]), leading Bishop Stephen Gardiner to remark
that "Bale praiseth Luther . .. with commendation of a saint . .." (Harris, Bale,
135). Fairchild (Bale, 34) detects Lutheran influence in Bale's conversion.
Still, Bale touched several continental bases, and his Protestantism was eclec-
tic. In The Pageant of Popes (trans. John Studley; London, 1574), which he
dedicated to Bullinger, he spoke warmly of Basel and Zurich, as well as of
Wittenberg, and called Geneva "the wonderful miracle of the whole world" (sig.
D4v).
6Townsend, ed., Writings of Bradford, 1. 299; 2. 196; 1. 66.
Whatever their theological tilt, England's pioneer Protestants

wanted not only the grant of grace for themselves (hard-won in
their conversions under perilous circumstances) but also the law-
the hard, rigorous, rough law -with force to batter down Rome's
English walls. Their spirit was intensely discriminative; among
their cardinal authorities was Galatians 4, where Paul, reflecting
on Genesis 16-17, observes that Sarah and Hagar "are the two
testaments." The Genevan gloss identified Hagar with the cruel
bondage of the law, Sarah with the lovely liberty of the gospel.
Elizabeth's preachers used this and other texts, backed by the
paradigm of Israel, to spur England to God's Protestant truth.
Puritan reformers, in particular, took care to winnow Sarah's
descendants, the godly few who were in the covenant of grace, from
the numerous posterity of Hagar who were not.
No work more clearly documents the dualistic tenor of covenant
thought than Richard Cavendish's treatise, The Image of Nature
and Grace, Containing the Whole Course and Condition of Man's
Estate, published in 1571, the year of the first Admonition to
the Parliament. The author was not a clergyman but a lawyer who
sat in Parliament and spent his leisure translating Euclid and
dabbling in divinity. He presented the book as a defense of
justification by faith and addressed it to ignorant Catholics.
Cavendish's views are somewhat eccentric: he appears an autodidact
who read the Bible through the lens of his legal training with
eyes opened by Augustine; he may well have been largely ignorant
of the continental systems. Though hardly noticed by historians,
The Image of Nature and Grace was England's first substantial
contribution to covenant theology-more exactly, to covenant con-
troversy-since Tyndale.
Augustine on the title page establishes the theme: "The ene-
mies of grace do lurk under the praise of nature." Tracing man's
"course and condition" from Adam's fall, the Image dichotomizes
nature and grace most thoroughly: "there is no middle estate
between God and the devil." Adam was made in God's image, but
his sin cancelled all his goodness; he plunged from spotless per-
fection into "a full corruption of his whole nature." Thus "the
excellency of man's creation and horror of his transgression"
contrast absolutely. Grace and nature- man's wholly ruined nature,
gone to the devil-are antithetical. Though Adam received the
promise of Christ-to-come and had "the instinct of the law en-
grafted by nature," he proved both graceless and lawless: "on
trotted he in the highway of wickedness," and all his progeny
after him. Even the renewal of the promise to Abraham had no

lasting good effect, for no "free promise could wake [man's]
sluggish heart."64
So far Cavendish was sketching a history of the promise, ac-
centing God's fidelity and man's failure. When he got to Moses,
he introduced the covenant, calling the law "the first covenant
made between God and man concerning man's restitution." The law
demanded perfect love to God, "a natural and absolute righteous-
ness," on pain of damnation, and its covenant laid down "the
absolute rule of righteousness which challengeth to the fulfilling
thereof the full obedience, willing desire, and natural proneness
of the whole man." This was the ground of Cavendish's case against
Rome, for no man by nature could meet this challenge: "a natural
and absolute righteousness" was a contradiction in terms. Hence
came God's offer of the new covenant, described in the Image as
"the accomplishment or end of the old covenant, and yet called
new in respect of the old promise."65 Here Cavendish seems
to the single-covenant model, though his language is confused;
but in fact only the merest vestiges of the model appear in the
treatise. His account of the old and new covenants entirely
omitted the apparatus of essence and accidents. He said nothing
of the holy line from Adam through Abraham to Christ. Most fun-
damental, he drew an absolute distinction between the "old" or
"first" covenant of the law, with lethal conditions, and the
"new" or subsequent covenant of grace that has no conditions at
all on man's side but is founded solely on God's truth and favor.
Faith can be called a condition of the new covenant but only on
God's side as the free gift that makes the covenant operative.
Though it received a second printing in 1574, The Image of
Nature and Grace seems to have sunk quickly from sight. Contem-
poraries passed it by, and later writings yield little evidence
that it was read and valued, perhaps because of its exegetical
idiosyncrasies.6 For our purposes, then, the book is important
not as influence but as sign. To save the purity of grace-the
specifically Protestant grace of sola fide -Cavendish broke the
covenantal system. He placed the old and new dispensations of the
covenant on the radically different footings of nature and grace.
Richard Cavendish, The Image of Nature and Grace, Containing the Whole
Course and Condition of Man's Estate (London [1571]) 67r, llv, 19v, 32r, 33r.
65 Ibid., 28r, 28v-29r, 45v.
It did not, however, escape William Prynne's large bibliographic net in
The Church of England's Old Antithesis to New Arminianism (London, 1629) 64,
74, 90.
He emphasized the conditionality of the first and the gratuity of

the second. He identified the old covenant of grace with the
law, and the law with the works-righteousness that sent papists
to hell. While the Image asserted the continuity of God's promise
and retained the law as glass, goad, and rule for the elect, this
splitting of the covenant was prophetic.
Opening a wide door to grace, Cavendish held that God had
"bound himself" by the new covenant to "justify the multitude and
bear away their sins."67 That was good news, no doubt, for the
Church of England, but men of puritanical stamp were meanwhile
beginning to lay possessive hands on the covenant of grace in ways
that both constricted its coverage and fractured its continuity.
One such was young Edward Dering, Cartwright's lieutenant in the
Cambridge broils, whose bold sermon to the queen in 1570 heralded
the presbyterian drive for church reform. In 1572 Dering gave
a series of lectures on Hebrews at St. Paul's. Published in 1576,
the year of his death, and reprinted some seven times during the
next quarter-century, these lectures struck like Cavendish against
the Roman slaves of the covenant of the law but devoted much
greater interest to securing covenantal grace for persons of the

preacher's own persuasion.
Expounding Heb 1:1, quoted from the Geneva version-"At sundry
times and in diverse manners God spake in the old time to our
fathers by the prophets. In these last days he hath spoken unto
us by his Son"-Dering underscored the differences between the
prophets' teaching and Christ's. His argument mounted to the
declaration that the humblest of Christ's folk at present "are
greater than all patriarchs and prophets" because they can claim
the surety of the new covenant: "if once I be in this covenant,
it is an everlasting covenant. I was not taken under condition
of time, nor no time shall prevail against me." Christ abolished
the old covenant. Therefore "I need not say now, O Lord, remember
David and the covenant made with Abraham, but, O Lord, remember
me and the covenant which thou hast made with my father's house."
Search your hearts, Dering told his audience, to learn "whether
the covenant is made with us or no, for as not all that were born
of Abraham were the children of Abraham"-most having been Ish-
maelites -"so not all that shall profess the gospel shall have the
salvation of the gospel."68 Such preaching put covenant fairly
7Cavendish, Image, 46r.

Edward Dering, Praelections . .. upon Certain of the First Chapters of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, in M. Dering's Works (2d ed.; London, 1597) A5v-7r,
in the way of becoming party doctrine. Just before Christmas 1572,

Dering's lectures were abruptly halted by the queen. It may be
no coincidence that Archbishop Matthew Parker warned Burghley the
next spring of Anabaptist impulses in nonconformity; he perhaps
perceived incipient Miinsterism in Dering's elevation of the new
covenant at the expense of the old.69
The evidence thus far reviewed makes clear that the weak link
in the covenant chain was the Old Testament administration of
the covenant of grace that carried justification by faith all the

way back to Adam and Eve. It should not be supposed that the
great single-covenant platform of sola fide was razed or aban-
doned: witness the Westminster Confession. But the old form of
the covenant proved vulnerable to the kind of vulgar legalization

that is strikingly illustrated by Cavendish and Ford, and was
carried to the outer limits by Browne and Barrow. It can be ar-
gued that the old covenant was preserved- and with it the panoply
of types and figures that helped save the Old Testament for Chris-
tianity-by the innovation within Calvinist theology that issued
in the covenant of works.
That idea made its entrance- for the first time, apparently,
under that name-in Dudley Fenner's Sacra Theologia, printed in
Geneva in 1585 and 1589.70 This systematic treatise by anot
Plv-2r. See Patrick Collinson, A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life

and Letters of "Godly Master Dering" (London, 1964).
John Bruce, ed., Correspondence of Matthew Parker (Cambridge: Parker
Society, 1853) 426, 476. See also ibid., 437, and Bishop Robert Horn's warning
to Bullinger in Hastings Robinson, ed., The Zurich Letters (Cambridge: Parker
Society, 1842) 1. 277.
More or less contemporary MS translations are in the British Library, the
Lambeth Palace Library, and Dr. Williams's Library. Quotations in the follow-
ing paragraphs are from the first of these, Harleian MS 6879. For the contin-
ental background of the covenant of works, see Schrenk, Gottesreich und Bund,
passim; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance;
Edinburgh, 1956) 4/1. 54ff.; and William K. B. Stoever, "A Faire and Easie Way
to Heaven": Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middle-
town, CT, 1978) chap. 5. The earliest continental writer to use the term
foedus operum seems to have been Amandus Polanus in Partitiones Theologicae .. .
(London, 1591), trans. Elijahu Wilcocks as The Substance of Christian Religion
(London, 1595) 88. The two-covenant formula was also well defined in Francis-
cus Junius, Theses Theologicae Leydensis (1592), in Opuscula Theologica Selecta
(ed. Abraham Kuyper; Amsterdam, 1892) 184, and Franciscus Gomarus, "De Foedere
Dei" (1594), in Opera Theologiae Omnis (Amsterdam, 1664) *2v.
There is no foundation whatsoever for the supposition of some scholars that
the covenant of works descended from God's general covenant with creation as
set forth in Musculus, Commonplaces, 120v-21r; Stephanus Szegedinus, Loci Com-
munes (Basel, 1593) 71; and Lucas Trelcatius, A Brief Institution of the Com-
monplaces of Sacred Divinity (trans. John Gawen; London, 1610; orig. publ.
Leyden, 1604) 277-78. Nor is there a thematic affinity between these two cove-
nants (pace R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 [Oxford, 1979]
Cartwright's young adjutants, then in exile, represents the first

attempt by an Englishman to match the common place divinity of
the continent. The fourth book of Sacra Theologia took up the
"foedus Dei . . cum homine," and the second chapter of that book
introduced the foedus operum. Though the presentation cannot
properly be said to constitute a "systematic covenant theolog
Fenner gave the topic a sure, if terse and dry, exposition.
Sacra Theologia exhibits the impact of Ramist logic, which
Fenner advocated in his textbook on The Arts of Logic and Rhetoric
72
(1584, 1588). Linking Calvinist substance to Ramist technique,
with its persistent dichotomizing, Fenner settled covenant on
double predestination as the agency of the decrees and affirmed
accordingly that "the covenant is twofold"; it divided into the
covenant of works and the "covenant of free promise" or "free
grace." Similarly, he split the law, assigning its disciplinary
effects to the covenant of works while keeping it positively ac-
tive for the elect. This arrangement made the covenant of works
identical with Calvin's common covenant of the Israelites as a
contract on Mosaic terms "wherein God covenanteth and promiseth

that the Jews shall be his peculiar people, ... if they should
continue in all things that are written in the book of the law."
Ratified "by the mutual actions of God and the people," it condi-
tioned its blessings on the people's performance of duties to
which they had expressly consented. It gave "gifts of faculties
andpowers"-for example, to feel sin and fear God's anger-but
these were only temporary, and the reformation they prompted was
merely external. The covenant of works was thus made for spiritual
hypocrites -for those who could not and would not endure to the
end. And all this, Fenner explained, represented "the common work-
ing of the spirit, whence it cometh to pass that reprobates may be
39n), for the covenant with creation (epitomized by the postdiluvian promise to
Noah) was always defined as an absolute promise, a sort of temporal covenant of
grace.
Scholars have hypothesized connections from the radical nominalism of the
fourteenth century. See, e.g., Heiko Augustinus Oberman, Forerunners of the
Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought (New York, 1966) 132-50, where
Robert Holcot and Gabriel Biel are made precursors of the covenant of works.
But Holcot's sense of the covenant partnership between man and God, as Oberman
describes it, only superficially resembles the Calvinist covenant of works, and
I have not been able to find confirmation in the Elizabethan literature for the
thesis of linkage.
7Pace Trinterud in Elizabethan Puritanism, 311.
72
Walter J. Ong, S.J. (Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue [Cambridge,
19581 passim) names Fenner among the early Cambridge Ramists but does not pur-
sue his theological uses of the method.
in the church" undetected and unevicted.73

In addition to bringing out the contractual character of the
covenant of works, Fenner's argument made clear the provenance of
the idea. He kept it firmly attached to Sinai; he did not base
it back in prelapsarian Eden. The covenant of works, in other
words, did not spring from theological rumination on the original
relation of mankind to God. Rather, it evolved from the "old
covenant" of grace by transit through the Mosaic covenant of the
law and received its description and function from the latter.
At the same time, Fenner took care to guard the graciousness of
the "new covenant." To do this, he had to drive against the grain
of his basic idea of any covenantal relationship as requiring
conditions on both sides. He began the fourth book of Sacra Theo-
logia with a general definition of covenant that accented con-
ditionality. God would bless his people "if so they shall fulfill
the condition annexed" to their covenant; "if not, then contrari-
wise" -and he would extend the blessing only as far and as long as
they "shall fulfill the condition." Fenner's initial statement
of the covenant of "free promise" reflected this generic concep-
tion: it "freely promised" Christ "if he be received." But a few
pages later, when he came to contrast the "faculties and powers"
granted by the covenants of grace and works, Fenner restricted
effective conditionality to the latter. He held that the "gifts
proper to the elect" in the covenant of grace owed nothing what-
ever to human nature but were "altogether supernatural" in source
and consequence. Chief among these gifts was ability to receive
Christ; accordingly, the covenant of grace was only nominally con-
ditional, for it fulfilled its own condition.74
Puritanism's dons seem to have recognized a proximate summa in
Sacra Theologia: it was said to have gained a place in "the studies
and closets of the learned."75 That was surely due in part to
73Dudley Fenner, Sacra Theologia (trans.), 71, 243, 237, 88-89. Fenner
supplied five citations specifically for the covenant of works (in contrast to
over twenty for the covenant of grace). All are New Testament texts-Rom 3:19-
20, 7:7-11; 11:32; Gal 3:2; 5:23-and most deal either with the functions of
the law or with the universality of condemnation under it. See also Fenner,
Certain Godly and Learned Treatises (Edinburgh, 1592) 113.
7Fenner, Sacra Theologia (trans.), 69, 71, 89-90.
7[Henry Finch], The Sacred Doctrine of Divinity ([Middleburgh], 1599 [sic:
1590]) A4v. Finch's text is devoid of covenant matter, but Fenner's covenant
teaching found its way into the margins, which are garnished with abridgments
from Sacra Theologia. For Finch see Wilfrid R. Prest, "The Art of Law and the
Law of God: Sir Henry Finch (1558-1625)," in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas,
eds., Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978) 94-117. M0ller's "Beginnings
of Puritan Covenant Theology" (JEH 14 [1963]) confuses this work with The Sum
MICHAEL MCGI rl'EKl'i: 495
Cartwright's commendation of the work. Cartwright seems to have

had a hand in composing it, and he doubled the covenant in his own
writings, some of which he cast as catechisms for the laity. Un-
published while he lived, these appear to date from the 1590s,
when he was ministering to the presbyterians of Guernsey in the
quiet evening of his career. His teaching paralleled Fenner's:
the names and definitions of the covenants are the same; though
the unity of grace is acknowledged, the Bible is divided between
"the law and the gospel, otherwise called the Covenant of Works and
the Covenant of Grace." In one highly important respect, however,
Cartwright went beyond his protege. His A Treatise of Christian
Religion, published by William Bradshaw in 1616, a dozen years
after the author's death, founded the covenant of works in Eden
before the Fall. The premise was that Adam and Eve had the law
written on their hearts at Creation. Accordingly, the law "was
before the gospel, for it was given to Adam in his integrity, when
the promise of grace was hidden in God."76 There is nothi
the Treatise to suggest that Cartwright had an inkling of the
momentousness of this transfer of the covenant from Sinai to Eden.
From the context one infers that he thought he was simply trans-
lating into doctrine the common strategy of preaching the law
before the gospel. At any rate, he did not expand the idea but
went on to use the covenant of works as an umbrella for the Com-
mandment s.
Completing a shift that began in Cartwright's time, the mature

covenant theology of the next century discovered the covenant of
works in Genesis. Perhaps the earliest suggestion of an Edenic
provenance is to be found in Tomkys's 1584 sermon where, reflect-
ing on the Fall, the preacher showed "how the case stood: God kept
of Sacred Divinity (London, [ca. 1613-21]), also by Finch but edited to an in-
determinate degree by John Downame. Moller quotes from Sum but cites Sacred
Doctrine. This has the unfortunate effect of retrojecting the mature doctrine
of the later work into the earlier period, where it makes covenant thought
appear richer than it was at that time. I am indebted to Jens Glebe-M0ller for
information relating to these writings.
6 Thomas Cartwright, "Short Catechism," in Albert Peel and Leland H. Carl-
son, eds., Cartwrightiana (London, 1951) 159, and Cartwright, A Treatise of
Christian Religion. .. . (ed. William Bradshaw; London, 1616) 86 (mispaginated
74). See also another Cartwright catechism, ibid., 361-78, first printed in
John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Com-
mandments (London, 1612) and reprinted anonymously as Methodical Short Catechism
(London, 1623). The Treatise, which had appeared in a defective edition in
1611, was heavily edited but by persons-Bradshaw and one other-who knew Cart-
wright well and had access to his manuscripts. It is nonetheless possible that
an editorial hand is responsible for the Edenic provenance of the covenant of
works.
his covenant which he made with man. Man brake the covenant which
he made with God." Similarly, in 1591 Edmund Bunny's very popular

Protestant redaction of one of the devotional manuals of Robert
Parsons, England's foremost Jesuit, took note of God's "first

covenant to Adam" that punished disobedience with death.77 These
allusions, if not inconsequential, were certainly casual and,
like Cartwright's, were left undeveloped. Possibly the writers
took for granted something that has not yet come fully to light
in the continental record; but, if so, they were manifestly unpre-
pared to follow it up. For the time being, the new-fledged cove-
nant was set in Exodus on Sinai. When Perkins stamped his authority
on the two-covenant formula in the early 1590s, he did not pin
the covenant of works to Creation but kept it cinched to the Deca-
logue.78
William Perkins and the Two Covenants
The factors that shaped covenant thought in England-the pres-

sure of the Israelite paradigm; the quarrels with Catholics and
separatists; the applying of Ramist logic to Scripture; the crys-
tallizing of double-predestinarian dogma; the evangelical campaign
to gather the godly -all come into focus in the mastermind of
puritanism, William Perkins. His chef-d'oeuvre, the Armilla Aurea
of 1590-translated into English in 1591 as A Golden Chain-
resembled Fenner's Sacra Theologia in laying down a general defi-
nition of God's covenant as "his contract with men" that imposed
mutual obligations. "God's promise to man," Perkins wrote, "is
that whereby he bindeth himself to man to be his God, if he per-
form the condition. Man's promise to God is that whereby he
voweth his allegiance unto his Lord and to perform the condition
between them." These promises represented the ultimate and abso-
lute form of contract, for while ordinary civil covenants "made
of man to man . . . may be changed by the makers or by their succes-
sors if gains or losses arise," the covenant with God "may not be
changed.... though great losses ensue," even loss of life itself.79
Perkins's language reflects medieval precedents of contract; he
Tomkys, Sermon, Elr; R[obert] P[arsons], The Second Part of the Book of
Christian Exercises Appertaining to Resolution (London, 1591) 197.
7William Perkins, A Golden Chain, in Works (Cambridge, 1616-18) 1. 32. See
Victor Lewis Priebe, "The Covenant Theology of William Perkins" (Ph.D. diss.,
Drew University, 1967) 40-44.
79
Perkins, Golden Chain, Works, 1. 32, and A Commentary .. . upon . . .Gala-
tians, ibid., 2. 242.
may also have been affected by influences flowing from the identi-
fication of covenant with contract in the law of his time. Not
only was the marriage contract termed a covenant (one that recog-
nized mutuality while upholding the supremacy of the husband in
a way analogous to theological conceptions of the espousal of
Christ with church or with believer), but handbooks for lawyers
made the same association generally. Typically, William West of
the Inner Temple, in a guide for writing instruments of law, linked
covenant to contract as "the consent of two or more... to give
or to do somewhat" and drew a line between contract, on the one
side, and testament or promise, on the other, that resembles the
80
theological distinction between the covenants of works and grace.8
Perkins embraced duality. "There is," he declared, "a double
covenant, legal and evangelical," each having God's glory and
81
man's good in view but wholly disparate in nature.8 The
cal covenant, with the sacraments, was "the outward means of
executing the decree of election."82 The legal covenant was on
with the Mosaic law. Expounding Galatians, Perkins found that
Paul made these "two in substance or kind. The law, or covenant
of works, propounds the bare justice of God, without mercy. The
covenant of grace, or the gospel, reveals both the justice and
mercy of God, or the justice of God giving place to his m
They were also different in that, while the evangelical covenant
was selective, the legal covenant had universal scope. Perkins
went on the premise that the latter bound "the consciences of all
men at all times, even of blind and ignorant persons that neither
know the most of it nor care to know it."84
We may see here what Perkins and his colleagues stood to gain
by turning the moral law into a covenant on this general basis.
The charm of the covenant of works -this transvaluation of the law
80
William West, The First Part of Symboleography (rev. ed.; London, 1598)
Alr-A3r. See John Rastell's definition of contract as "a bargain or covenant
between two parties, where one thing is given for another, which is called quid
pro quo," as a horse sale or land lease (An Exposition of .. Terms of the Law
of This Realm [London, 1598] 49v), and his definition of covenant, 54v. These
parallels are suggestive; a full study of interpenetrations of law and theology
in that period is wanted. See also Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabetical .. of
Hard Usual English Words (London, 1604) C6v (contract as "bargain or covenant"),
and John Cowell, The Interpreter . . (Cambridge, 1607) 53r (contract as "cove-
nant or agreement").
8Perkins, Galatians, Works, 2. 227-31.
82Idem, Golden Chain, Works, 1. 31, 76.
83 Idem, Galatians, Works, 2. 299.
84
Idem, A Discourse of Conscience, Works, 1. 520; see also ibid., 164,282.
from command to contract-consisted in the imputation of personal

and collective consent to its conditions. "All men at all times"
were presumed to have freely entered into the bond and could
therefore be held stiffly to the consequences. This put the damna-
tion of papists on the basis of consent: their slavery to the
law was self-imposed, for they willingly embraced the legal cove-
nant, and their resulting execution by the law could thus be
considered a kind of suicide. More important, the preachers of
the paradigm of Israel, Perkins among them, sensed the moral
advantage of postulating the voluntary consent of England's people
to the terms of the covenant that propounded divine justice. Here
was a rationale for regulating the morals and manners of the
general run of worldlings, with incentives to deflect both per-
sonal and national calamity by timely capitulation to God.
Treating the covenant of grace, Perkins merely glanced at the
old theses of unity and continuity.5 These had sunk so far i
the bedrock on which Calvinists built that he could take for
granted what Calvin had undertaken to prove. More interesting in

his thought are the impingements of contractuality into the sanc-
tum of testament, and his resistance to these incursions. In
Golden Chain Perkins defined the covenant of grace as a transac-
tion "whereby God, freely promising Christ and his benefits,
exacts again of man that he would by faith receive Christ and
repent of his sins."86 Here we seem to catch him on the brink
his essential Calvinism drew him back; abruptly he shifted his
definitional ground. This saving step is signalled by his choice
of biblical credentials- Hos 2:18-20, Ezek 36:25-27, and Mal 3:1,
all texts of pure promise that undergird the sense of covenant
as testament, with grace as legacy. Even so, Perkins appears to
hedge: the covenant of grace, he wrote, "hath partly the nature
and properties of a testament or will" in relation to which "we do
not so much offer or promise any great matter to God as in a man-
,87
ner only receive." Here he aims at exactness but runs into
ambiguity. The zig-zag equivocations suggest difficulties arising

from the general definition that conditioned God's fulfillment of
his promise on the performance of the human party. It should be
85
Idem, Galatians, Works, 2. 227-31, and An Exposition of the Symbol or
Creed of the Apostles, ibid., 1. 164.
86 Idem, Golden Chain, Works, 1. 70. See also his Exposition of the Synbo
ibid., 164, where the covenant of grace is called "nothing else but a compact
made between God and man touching reconciliation and life everlasting in
Christ ."
8Idem, Golden Chain, Works, 1. 70.
noted, however, that the equivocations-if such they were-were

more apparent than real. No one at any time, then or later, ever
mistook William Perkins for a crypto-Arminian.
Perkins gave greater prominence to covenant than any English
theologian before him. It is true that he devoted no single
treatise to it and that he did not frame his teaching in its terms
(though he embodied the law in the covenant of works and followed
Olevianus in presenting the Apostles' Creed as "the substance of
the covenant" of grace);8 but he went far beyond his pr
in taking covenant out of the schools and into the pulpit, where
he energized it for evangelical and pastoral purposes. He em-
ployed the law less to condemn than to convert, and he set forth
above all the grace of covenant. "How," he asked, "doth Christ
save man?" The answer endowed covenant with the power of piety:
According to that order which God hath set down in the covenant,
not of works but of grace, wherein God promiseth to give Christ with
all his merits and graces to every believer. Now according to the
tenor of this covenant, first Christ with his merits is given unto
the believer; he again is given unto Christ, by virtue of which donation
a man may say Christ is mine, his benefits are mine also, as truly and
surely as my land is my own. Hereupon, to make this mutual donation
effectual, followeth a second thing, which is the union of us with him
by the bond of the spirit, and this is a mystical union but a true
union, whereby he that is given unto Christ is made one with him.89
This union is created by "mutual consent according to the tenor

of the covenant": the believer is made willing to receive grace
and able to perform his "restipulation" of repentance and obedi-
ence, so that "we begin to become coworkers with the grace of God."
The moral ability of the godly flows from this source, for "all
we have or can do that is good" must be credited "wholly to the
90
grace of God," the power being given with the promise.9
Considerations of conditionality fell away whenever Perkins
warmed to the work of jointing broken souls. The covenant of
grace answered formally to the idea of a voluntary contract, based
in "mutual consent," but should not be understood, he insisted,
88
8Ibid., 32, and Exposition of the Symbol, ibid., 165. The significance of
covenant in Perkins's thought is debated in I[an] Breward, "The Life and Theolo-
gy of William Perkins, 1558-1602" (Ph.D. diss., Manchester University, 1963);
Breward, ed., The Work of William Perkins (Appleford, U.K., 1970); Priebe,
"Covenant Theology of Perkins"; and Robert Charles Munson, "Willipm Perkins:
Theologian of Transition" (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1971).
See also Robert Orkney Stuart, "The Breaking of the Elizabethan Settlement of
Religion" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976) esp. chaps. 3-4.
89
8Perkins, Exposition upon the Epistle of Jude, Works, 3. 594.
Idem, Exposition of the Symbol, Works, 1. 299, 165, and A Treatise of
God's Free Grace and Man's Free Will, ibid., 736, 719.
as a "bare agreement." Rather, it signified the spiritual union

of "the whole person of every faithful man" with "the whole person
of our Savior Christ" as "members of his mystical body."91
thus transformed the covenant into a compelling metaphor for the
profoundest religious experience. What puritanism received from
him was less a covenant theology than a covenant piety of rich
resource, with all the assurances of grace and inducements to
godliness that piety abundantly supplied. We may conjecture that
he also helped free covenant doctrine from pejorative association
with the narrow precisionism of Cartwright and Fenner. Their
writings tended to make it a shibboleth of the faction, but Per-
kins's influence would give it much broader acceptance and saved
it not only from dogmatic rigidity in general but from puritanical
rigidity in particular.
Prospect
The Elizabethans supplied motifs and figures for the orches-

92
trated covenant theology of the next century. Stuart divines
91
Idem, Golden Chain, Works, 1. 77, 78.
92
9Nothing herein should nurture an impression that covenant doctrine or a
covenantal way of ordering doctrine had attained a high place by 1600. John
F. H. New's observation that "covenant theology does not seem to loom so large
in English puritan thought as has been suggested" by such scholars as Trinterud
certainly applies to the sixteenth century (Anglican and Puritan, 93).
The ground and range of my disagreement with Trinterud should now be stated.
His "Origins of Puritanism" (CH 20 [1951] 37-57) signalled (with Perry Miller's
well-known studies) a revival of interest in covenant theology among American
historians and, I believe, fundamentally misdirected it. (1) Trinterud over-
stressed the legalistic character of continental and English covenant thought.
(2) Believing the "law-covenant principle. .. to be the organizing principle of
the entire Rhineland reformation," he exaggerated the differences between the
Rhineland and Geneva, and the influence of the former on puritanism. (3) So
doing, he overstated the prominence of covenant ideas in the writings of a
large number of early continental Protestants. (4) He mistakenly maintained
that "the covenant scheme became fixed in English theology" as early as the
reign of Edward VI. (5) Citing Miller, he surmised a contest in England between
covenant theology and "the Geneva Bible and Calvin's theology," overlooking the
covenantal content of Calvinism and failing to note the Calvinist stance of such
Englishmen as Fenner and Cartwright. (6) His rather spare commentary on the
English sixteenth-century record managed to omit Perkins. See "Origins of
Puritanism," 37, 41, 44, 50, 52.
Trinterud's introduction to Knewstub's lectures in Elizabethan Puritanism,
302-14, modifies or buries some of these errors but makes too much of Knewstub
as an exponent of covenant theology. The mistake-not uncommon and therefore
worth a caveat-arises from his supposition that Knewstub was thinking covenant-
ally, even when he was not speaking thus. "Knewstub took the covenant pattern
so completely for granted that the word itself appears only now and then, quite
casually. It receives no more definition or analysis than do 'good,' 'nature,'
or 'conscience'--terms that are essential to the entire covenant theology" (p.
313). The interpretive risks of this question-begging loose constructionism
need no underscoring; they had been unwisely taken in the 1951 article.
improved the score along the main lines of piety and morality.
Foremost in their minds, when they dwelt on the subject, was the
spiritual stabilizer of the covenant of grace, by which they af-
firmed God's constancy to the promises given in his Word, sealed
by his sacraments, and manifested in the history of redemption
from the protevangelion to the present. Making this covenant
evangelically operative, puritan pastors in particular worked
long and hard to enlarge the cohorts of the godly by winning con-
sent to its privileges and discipline. Thus engaged, they wove
into the fabric of practical English piety the bright Perkinsian
threads of conversion, conscience, and assurance. They could do
so with uninhibited forward zeal because the gratuity of grace-
signifying the mystery of God's absolute power to save and perfect
freedom to choose--was guaranteed by the newly coined covenant
of works. When the poisoned bait of conditional merit was put
away within the covenant or contract of works-a fatal trap for
papists and any others who undertook to work their passage to
heaven -the preachers could use the law without fearing its curse
in order to press their people to labor for the proofs and bene-
fits of grace. The covenant of works thus served the pursuit of
holiness by ensuring the evangelical efficacy of the covenant
of grace. The question is moot whether the covenantal system
could have long survived without it.
The covenant of works also strengthened the hand of preachers
who used the example of Israel to crack the law over England.
The Israelite paradigm rose concurrently in English thought with
the covenant of works, and for good reason, since the covenant
furnished the necessary theoretical nexus for the paradigm. To be
effective, the moral history of Israel had to be freed from the
specifics of its cultural context and rendered relevant to English
gentiles who were alien by epoch and ethnicity from the ancient
covenants of the Jews. The covenant of works performed this ser-
vice by giving universal force to the moral substance of the Old
Testament. On the principle that it bound the consciences of
all men at all places and-times, Perkins in the 1590s thought of
applying it as a blanket national contract to lay the puritan
code on England.93 In the next decade John Downame's highly re-
garded commentary on Hosea clinched the ideological linkages by
93McGiffert, "Covenant, Crown, Commons," Journal of British Studi

(1980) 48-50. In this connection Perkins pinned the covenant of works to Adam
(as he had not done in Golden Chain) but did not pursue the thought to the
point of making the covenant deadly in itself and therefore morally otiose.
showing how Israel and England were each in turn God's chosen na-
tion and church by right of membership in the covenant of wor
Propelled by the double-barreled charge of morality and piety,
with the law of works for all and the gift of grace for some,
covenant divinity made its way into the new century.
94
John Downame, Lectures upon the Four First Chapters of the Prophecy of
Hosea (London, 1608) 106-7.

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Harvard Divinity School

GRACE AND WORKS: THE RISE AND DIVISION OF

COVENANT DIVINITY IN ELIZABETHAN PURITANISM*

Institute of Early American History and Culture

In a handbook of 1607 for students of divinity and lightly

*I am grateful to J. Wayne Baker, Norman S. Fiering, Richard L. Greaves,

respect English thought may have preceded the continent, namely,

We have here a problem in the history of ideas. The origina-

English Protestants, but as discontent with the Elizabethan Settle-

These men's sense of the values of covenant divinity can be

On the question of the theological distinctiveness of puritanism, this

harder to explain God's operations or even, perhaps, to justify

minds were tuned to the high-strung Calvinism that in their time

send adamant recusants to hell. It would thus give warning to

one of the insignia of puritanism. The explanation offered here,

The Covenant of Grace: Continental Theory

Ideas of covenant in the early Reformation were always unitive.

Scottish thought also advanced from the strict single-covenant Calvinism

covenant as the key to all Scripture. Whether seen as a unilater-

10Ulrich Zwingli, Refutation of the Tricks of the Baptists (1527), i

Zwingli's sense of the crisis that he introduced covenant in order

solution. . .. The same mercy of God promised to the world through

Selected Works (ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson; Philadelphia, 1901) 146-47.

Testament belonged only to Israel, but the New Testament accepts

force among us bound in covenant to him."16 This point, which

On the doctrine of the covenant, there needed no Tigurian Con-

because, though it conventionally slammed Anabaptists as "foolish

Covenant came to England not only from Calvin and Bullinger

grounded on Jesus Christ," The immutability of God, ever true to

The Covenant of Grace: English Practice

English theologians had constantly before them these models

Playwright, literary annalist, and controversialist whose pen

John Bale, A Tragedy or Interlude Manifesting the Chief Promises of God

3Bale, Select Works . . . (ed. Henry Christmas; Cambridge: Parker

"power and ableness"- as free and absolute as election itself.

mon of 1587 by William Gravet ("drunken Gravate" of Marprelate's

Aubrey Townsend, ed., The Writings of John Bradford (2 vols.; Cambridge:

order to prove that England's parishes, where the wicked mingled

his holy apostles published to all the world." Uniform in "sub-

remnant ecclesiola in ecclesia. Consequently, the argument from

The Problem of the Covenant

While they dismissed the conditions that their adversaries

by deeds. The covenant could thus be said to have conditions con-

4Nichols, Abraham's Faith, B2v-B3r, 6-7, 19-20, A4r, A3r.

power to perform. In theory, a persistent failure to meet the

and go to heaven in the next. In short, the covenant of grace

4John Hooper, Early Writings ... (ed. Samuel Carr; Cambridge:

in Christ through the covenant of grace and then, in almost the

this condition."47 Even while they repudiated the Old Testament

Nicholas Dorcastor [John Ponet?], The Humble and Unfeigned Confession of

A greater threat rose within the scheme itself. To see it

Ford held true to the central motif of single-covenant exege-

"when God calleth man with an holy calling, . . there are as it

and obey the commandments of God." Ford had antinomians on his

Israel's record as the main line of covenant history, so that the

52Ibid., 56, 23, 24, 26.

strove to keep the covenant of the law. If they made a habit of

event, theologians began to look about for ways to maintain the

principles; it is hardly surprising that before the close of the

The Covenant of Works

The covenant of works had a two-generation gestation. It

Book two, chapter eleven, of the Institutes specifies within

5Calvin Institutes 2.11.9, 8; 3.21.7.