I

Richard Greenham (early 1540s–1594) was one of the most significant ministers in the Elizabethan Church. Credited by his editor Henry Holland with a ‘singular dexteritie’ in curing afflicted consciences – something which Holland avers had previously been an ‘unknowne facultie’ – Greenham, together with William Perkins, has also been credited with moving English Puritanism away from its roots in ecclesiological and political protest, and toward a stress on evangelism cast within a pastorally sensitive mould.

The irony of Greenham's career was that it was extremely unsuccessful, at least in terms of his physical ministry in Dry Drayton, a Cambridgeshire backwater. Arriving there in 1570, having matriculated from Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1559 and gone on to become a Fellow in 1567, Greenham spent the next two decades trying to convert the thirty or so households in the parish to the godly cause. H. C. Porter reports the situation as ‘oddly moving’ in 1591, when Greenham, invited to move to godlier pastures in London, looked back on his years in Dry Drayton and ‘could not avoid despondency … [for] he saw no good wrought by his ministry [there], but on one family’.Footnote ¹ Little is known about his final years, spent at Christ Church, Newgate. He died, in 1594, reportedly ‘resign[ing] his spirit up to God’, exhausted in the Lord's service.Footnote ²

Greenham's reputation has been founded primarily on two factors: first, his commitment to the evangelical cause, which was embodied in his establishment of an informal academy to educate young scholars in the ways of Reformed pastoral duty; and second, his writings, which were collected together and published posthumously. The various texts which formed his Workes became the template for a sensitive yet doctrinally consistent practical theology, and were widely read throughout the seventeenth century by other Protestant ministers who sought to emulate his approach. The focus in this article will be on Greenham's Workes and what they say about the shape of his Reformed beliefs.Footnote ³

Until relatively recently, it was safe to assume that Richard Greenham was a Calvinist. Indeed, M. M. Knappen, William Haller, Harry Porter, R. T. Kendall and Patrick Collinson did exactly that, finding in Greenham a central figure within the development of a predestinarian pastoral method in England,Footnote ⁴ without feeling the need to question just how predestinarian his ideas actually were. That was in the days when all Puritans were Calvinists and when you knew a Puritan when you saw one.

Recently however, there has been a headlong retreat from such easy assumptions, and Richard Greenham has, like so many others, been stripped of the convenient labels with which he was once associated. Indeed, it is now being said that he was not a Puritan at all. This article will not revisit the much-trampled terrain of ‘what is Puritanism?’, but rather attempt to show that the old assumption was correct, and that Greenham was indeed a double predestinarian in his theology.

Two studies of Greehham appeared, almost simultaneously, in 1998. One, by Kenneth Parker and Eric Carlson,Footnote ⁵ argued that Greenham was not a Puritan, but a conformist Anglican and ‘praxis-oriented’ disseminator of God's Word. The other, by John Primus,Footnote ⁶ styles Greenham as a ‘cooperative puritan’ and highly sophisticated theologian, whose battleground was as much doctrinal as pastoral. Parker and Carlson warn against the simplification inherent in labelling the theologies of individuals, and reject the term ‘Calvinist’, even though they seem to accept that Greenham used the categories of election and reprobation in his preaching. The problem with their analysis is a vagueness when it comes to categorisation, a reluctance to say any more than that ‘Greenham stood within a broad Reformed tradition’.Footnote ⁷ This is as specific as they get, as in other places the continuity of his thought with the ‘ancient and medieval periods’ is emphasised, he is described as a ‘humanist’ and even placed in a tradition which they simply label ‘western.’Footnote ⁸ The suspicion remains that they are concerned to dissociate Greenham from belief systems to which they themselves are antipathetic. The Anglo-Catholic tradition, as Diarmaid MacCulloch has pointed out, has rarely had much time for the more confidently Reformed aspects of its history.Footnote ⁹

Working from different premises, John Primus has reached a similar conclusion, asserting that ‘Greenham [does not] deal at any length with predestination’, and that he only ‘occasionally mentions election, while rejecting foreordained reprobation altogether’.Footnote ¹⁰ Primus does not deny John Calvin's influence, but stresses instead how indebted Greenham was to a range of Reformation greats, establishing convincingly how, in different areas of his theology, he borrowed from Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer and Zanchius.Footnote ¹¹ To simply dub Greenham a ‘Calvinist’, Primus argues, would be to ignore the ‘riches of the continental Reformation as a whole’.Footnote ¹²

While not taking issue with Primus' broader account of Greenham's theological influences, this article argues that Greenham was indeed a Calvinist in his use of a double predestinarian theology, and that the term is a useful one, but should not be restrictive. Here it is used as a shorthand for a stress on the doctrine of double predestination.Footnote ¹³ Rather than slipping into the well-worn grooves of the debates surrounding the ‘Calvinist consensus’ which, depending upon what is meant by both words, did or did not exist between around 1590 and around 1625, the question of Greenham's Calvinism will be approached from a different angle: not so much in terms of the minutiae of his experimental soteriology, but rather from the perspective of how he constructed and communicated his image of God.

In offering an alternative perspective, in discussing Calvinist images of God, the aim is to provide something of a corrective to the tendency to assume that predestination pertained exclusively to the matter of salvation. Salvation was of course of great contemporary importance, hence it is understandable that historians have focused upon it. It is understandable too because, in debates about ‘how Calvinist’ the middle phase of England's long reformation was, in double predestination we can find a doctrine which was distinctively Calvinist, so, if someone is identified as mouthing the shibboleths of two immutable decrees, he has been marked down as a Calvinist, before moving on and continuing the head count. Yet, as scholars have increasingly complained, this approach is both reductive and tends to suck the life out of the subject matter.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover the tendency to examine predestination in isolation from the individual's theology as a whole has warped our understanding of the belief-system itself. As a consequence, it has become unnecessarily difficult to grasp how it was that Calvinism came to gain adherents in the first place.Footnote ¹⁵ Richard Greenham, like a great many Calvinist pastors, shaped his practical theology not primarily around the doctrine of predestination, but around his image of God: predestination was a consequence of the desire to project an idea of the deity in a certain way, before it was a causal agent within the pastoral scheme itself. Historians, therefore, may be looking at the right sorts of things, but not necessarily the right way round.

II

Greenham was known to contemporaries as an ‘affectionate’ divine, noted particularly for his ‘singular dexteritie’ in curing afflicted consciences. Not unreasonably then, Parker and Carlson assume that ‘the first step in Greenham's remedy for afflicted consciences emphasized God's forgiveness’.Footnote ¹⁶ While it is certainly true that Greenham does, in the end, stress God's capacity to be merciful, it does not follow that this is his ‘first step’. Indeed, it could be argued that very few Calvinists described their deity in terms of mercy as a primary characteristic. Rather, Greenham's approach – as for most Calvinists – was to stress God's power to be merciful. This necessarily also entailed the contrary: that he had the power not to be.

For Greenham, what both Catholics and half-reformed Protestants had in common was an arrogant assumption that God would look kindly upon their endeavours, that he would accommodate them. Indeed, Greenham thought it an error shared by Catholics, the impious and the pious-but-afflicted, that they looked too much to their own variability and not enough to God's certainty. As such, Greenham stressed both God's power and otherness to almost any audience. However, communicating the concept of divine omnipotence to the half-reformed, quarter-literate inhabitants of Dry Drayton may have proved a particular challenge, and Greenham developed a language of earthy metaphor to help him make his point more clearly. For instance:

And again, at the less technical end of the spectrum, Greenham compared God to sources of power that people could understand. Thus, ‘if we feare the anger of a man, and specially of a Prince, because the wrath of a Prince seemeth so great to us, what shall we think of the wrath of God?’ He answers that the ‘difference betweene the power of God, and the power of Princes is great: Princes can only seaze on the bodie, and all their wrath can goe no further than this life: but the Lord attacheth as well the soule … and his anger is as hot and hotter in the life to come, as it is in this life’.Footnote ¹⁸ The anthropomorphisms of God's finger and princely power can, in other places, be contrasted with more abstracted observations: ‘God will not be divided, nor quartered in qualities, because hee is indivisible in substance.’Footnote ¹⁹

It was important to impress upon people that, hundreds of years of practical and theoretical tradition notwithstanding, man could not alter God's will, or indeed do anything for him at all. For, ‘the whole earth is the Lords, and what can we give him[?] Our weldoing extendeth not to him, he needs it not, we can doe him no good’.Footnote ²⁰ Even in his Sermon of Christian warfare, the sort of piece in which Puritans often tacitly depicted God's cause as being genuinely threatened by Satan's hordes, Greenham is careful to say that Christians should fight sin because it is repugnant, not because we can materially affect the cosmic battle: ‘God's cause is defended by his owne strength.’Footnote ²¹ In this context, our inability to ‘help’ God should be a cause for comfort, because it teaches us that ‘our courage’ must not be ‘in our selves, but in God, and in the power of God, and in the might of his power’.Footnote ²²

Greenham's soteriology flows naturally from this. Echoing the core message of the Reformed faith – and its claim to historical continuity – he urged that we can ‘say with the Ancient Fathers, this is our merite, that wee have no merite’.Footnote ²³ It follows from this that he rejects synergism in favour of the view that saving faith is ‘an infusion of God into man, [rather] than an action proceeding from man to God’.Footnote ²⁴ And indeed, because man cannot cause his own salvation during his lifetime, there was no reason why God should not declare who should be elect and who reprobate before time itself: ‘God is debter to none, & therefore he sheweth mercy where he wil, against the Papists, which say that the lord predestinateth every one according to the foreknowledge of his workes.’Footnote ²⁵ John Primus' case for Greenham not holding to a true doctrine of double predestination is that ‘he consistently attributes the cause of destruction not to God, but to sinful humanity’.Footnote ²⁶ But it does not follow that ‘the wicked on whom sentence of damnation is alreadie passed’ are damned because of their wickedness.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, Greenham makes clear that ‘the heart of man to God is, as the clay to the potter’, and that in ‘our naturall condition we are all vessels of wrath’ – the elect are saved, ‘not for any wel doing’ and despite having sins ‘as black as the divels’.Footnote ²⁸ In other words, what differentiates the elect and reprobate is not that the latter are especially bad, but rather God's treatment of the former. The elect, ‘from all beginnings chosen to eternal life’, are given ‘Christ as a perfect redeemer’. Into these men is sent the Holy Spirit, and ‘in whom he hath wrought a sincere heart to please God’.Footnote ²⁹ Equally, those ‘whom the Lord hath appoynted for his glories to them he hath also appoynted the meanes to attaine thereto’.Footnote ³⁰ In sum, therefore, Greenham sees all men as being initially an undifferentiated mass before God, and as the potter casting aside some of the clay, that which is rejected is not made additionally bad; rather, that which is accepted is shaped into something peculiarly good. The only way in which Greenham's formulation of double predestination could have been more rigorous would be if he had explicitly stated that God actively reprobates in order to satisfy his justice; but even Calvin was by no means consistent in always using that formulation.

Primus is mistaken when he says that Greenham is soft on reprobation because he conflates Greenham's metaphysical logic with his pastoral emphasis. That is, Greenham certainly never says that the reprobate can be as blameless as the elect (Calvin would never have said that either) or that sin is anything other than grossly offensive to God. While Greenham does not believe that the reprobate are condemned because of their sinfulness, the purpose of his ministry was to direct men away from sinning. He has no intention of letting reprobates off the hook by styling them as blameless, nor of painting an Antinomian's picture of the elect. And this is the interesting irony in the Reformed idea of God: that while the logic of its construction pointed toward decision-making done in the timeless past, toward strict concepts of infinity and – in the longer term – toward deism, the intention behind its construction was to affirm none of these things at the expense of a deity who was, above all else, personal, moral and immanent in the present tense. In this sense, the Calvinist God was a peculiar blend of logic and psychology, with neither having an initial ruling hand, and with neither doing anything so crude as ‘selling out’ to the other. Predestination was unfurled through providence; timelessness through history. And Richard Greenham preached salvation not to metaphysicians, but to simple men and women who wanted to know whether this deity could be theirs also.

It is inappropriate to assume, as Parker and Carlson sometimes seem to, that ministers were engaged in either systematic or pastoral theology, as though the two were separate disciplines. Rather, Greenham, like most skilled preachers, did both simultaneously: for nothing was truly comforting if it was not true, and God did not design truth to act against the interests of his elect. As such, Greenham did not drop his high standards of God's omnipotence in practice, and nor did he impress those standards in a way that undermined his pastoral message. How, then, did Greenham's idea of God affect his practical theology?

III

Richard Greenham's cure for afflicted consciences began with the fact that God's ways are not our own. Indeed, his is a virtual codification of the idea that whatever we think right is wrong, and whatever we think safe is death. If Calvin famously advised men, at the beginning of his Institutes, to have ‘knowledge of ourselves’, then Greenham's coda was that whatever you found therein, you should distrust. For instance, our first instinct is wrong if we equate affliction with God's wrath. Indeed, ‘it is not possible without affliction to enter in Christs kingdome’.Footnote ³¹ To Greenham, therefore, affliction was not a sign of God's wrath, but of his favour. Indeed, ‘curses are in some measure blessings through Christ, as by sinne blessings are turned to curses’. Greenham is fond of these simple little inversions, and uses them, in part, to jolt people out of their complacency. Having established God's ‘otherness’, he is able to make use of the epistemological distance he has established to tell fretful souls that it is their fretting for which they should be grateful. From a pastoral perspective, this was inspired. If Greenham is considered in terms updated from the ‘physician’ tag of his day – as a mental health counsellor for example – then he could be said to be de-stigmatising the problems which were distressing his patients. By removing affliction from the category of the anomic, and bringing it directly under God's will, Greenham was able to reassure believers that what appeared to be a sign of God's hatred was in fact a token of his love. As he put it, ‘we must perswade the persons humbled, that their sins are pardonable, and their sores curable. And after, that this visitation is not so much a signe of Gods wrath and anger, as a seale of his mercie and favour’.Footnote ³² The worried were told that only the unworried should worry.

Whether Greenham was trying to stir up or assuage anxieties depended on who he was talking to. Telling someone possessed of the classic afflicted conscience that the elect are pre-programmed to fret for their souls would have been likely to bring them to a more even keel emotionally. Yet, the same message heard by one of a more spiritually reclined disposition may have had a catalysing effect. To take this issue in broader perspective for a moment, while it would be wrong to dismiss entirely Peter Lake's account of English Calvinism as a faith which played off ‘paradoxes’ and sought always to ‘screw up the tension’,Footnote ³³ it should also be noted that the pastoral messages which do seem to fit within this stereotype are predominantly delivered in genres aimed at those with afflicted consciences; contexts in which they may have actually proved comforting. A distinction must be made between the sometimes psychologically extreme pastoral devices used by ministers to create in believers a clear assurance of salvation, and their otherwise notable stress on the long-term, on watchfulness and on the duties of a Christian soldier in those whose belief was already solid.Footnote ³⁴ In other words, where nascent believers were encouraged to recognise their fear of reprobation, more seasoned souls were urged to seek a sense of worthiness to go along with their knowledge of undeserved election. As such, while it would be simplistic to say that Calvinists did not make use of emotional extremes, it would also be inaccurate to say that hyping anxieties about reprobation was a more common recourse than a (less drastic) pastoral language of trying, although it was impossible, to deserve God's kindness. God's soldiers could not fight if they were not sure whose side they were on and, as with initiation ceremonies, it was primarily the newer recruits whose mettle was tested with the imperative to ‘make your calling and election sure’ (2 Peter i.10). Thus, English Calvinism had a considerable appeal beyond the neurotic, even if it could increase the neuroticism of those already so inclined.

Within Greenham's scheme, what unified those of embryonic and advanced faiths was not the question of whether one faced afflictions, but of whether one reacted correctly to them. In this way, the experience of affliction itself was normalised, because God punishes everyone at one time or another, even reprobates. Thus, ‘the wicked feare not before affliction commeth, and then they feare too much: the godly feare before it comes, and then their feare ceaseth’.Footnote ³⁵ The implication is that the message behind God's providences is highly context-dependent. Indeed, ‘as the mercies of God are judgments to some that abuse his mercies, so the judgments of God are mercies to others, because they cause them to observe his will’.Footnote ³⁶ God sends afflictions upon the elect, that their faith be ‘made more pure’, like ‘gold put into the fire’.Footnote ³⁷ When God's children know this, it should stop them falling into ‘despayre’.Footnote ³⁸

However, as any mental health counsellor knows, to have a patient who is aware of the problem is only half the battle, if that. Greenham's view was that God sends afflictions specifically to divide the faithful from the faithless. It is suggestive of reprobation if ‘our afflictions do not drive us to God, nor cause us more humblie to heare and seeke his word, but rather to stoppe our eares, and runne from it, and to seeke unlawfull meanes’.Footnote ³⁹ On the other hand, ‘it is a most certaine thing in Gods children, that the more their afflictions grow, the more their faith groweth’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ministers like Greenham were explicitly evangelical in their aims, and to equate suffering with godliness is – in itself – rather a cheap means of gaining adherents; and certainly has nothing to do with predestinarian principles. Greenham nevertheless held people up to high standards, by making victory over one's travails a sign of election. He advises ‘try thyself thus: if thou profitest by Gods correction, it is a signe of grace’.Footnote ⁴¹ We have failed if ‘in time, our griefe passe away without fruite’.Footnote ⁴²

Yet what is an affliction? Greenham implies that it is a characteristic of reprobates to be afflicted and not to know it – so afflictions can be subtle then? Greenham makes no effort to dispel that worry: ‘the Lord often doth much good when wee see it not … yet this is a punishment when wee cannot see the meanes whereby the Lord doth us good: and … when the case is thus, it is dangerous’.Footnote ⁴³ For believers however, alarm bells can start to ring when they are told that God does unseen things which he might punish man for not noticing. This is almost as frightening as the idea that God might also cause you not to notice, but punish you anyway. This is where Greenham's theme that God's ways are not our own comes to have further implications. The notion of a ‘hidden, predestinating God’ had terrified Luther and forced Calvin to carve through the potential dark a very deep logical light. For B. A. Gerrish, the faith of both men was ‘a flight from the hidden God’, from the idea that his unrevealed will might render revelation meaningless.Footnote ⁴⁴ While most Christian theodicies suggest, at least tacitly, that God is called good because he always does good things (thus implying that there is a standard of goodness external to God to which he conforms), Calvinists instead tended to imply that God does as he wills, and calls what he does ‘good’. Greenham made the distinction in these terms: ours is ‘not the God of truth, but truth itselfe’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Majesty is always in danger of becoming mystery and ‘God's unknowability [could seem] perilously close to an escape clause into which not just the entire contract but one of the contracting parties may disappear’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This was one danger implicit in imagining a predestinarian deity, and Richard Greenham – no less than the reformers who had gone before him – was extremely anxious to communicate the point that even though God, rightly, plays by his own rules, he is not so unsporting as to keep them wholly to himself. Greenham thus needed to show that God used predictable means to bring his saints to salvation.

John Primus has written in some depth about what he terms the ‘law-gospel dialectic’ in Greenham's thought; here, it will suffice to summarise this idea only insofar as it relates to his construction of God.Footnote ⁴⁷ Greenham envisaged the dynamic working like this: ministers must first ‘lay open the righteousnes of the law that men may see their sinnes; and then the righteousnes of Christ, that men may see their sins discharged in him’.Footnote ⁴⁸ To Greenham then, the Law and Gospel functioned in fundamentally different ways, with the former revealing sin and inducing guilt for sin, and the latter assuaging that guilt by revealing forgiveness.

Within this model was also a clear pastoral approach. The most obvious goal was to prevent people from hitting upon easy answers. He warns that ‘the divels policie … is to sing us songs of God[’s] mercy’, and to offer us ‘sugred consolations’ which, Greenham warns, are poisonous if taken.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, he mocks those who would say, ‘Why are you heavy brother? … take it not so grievously. What is there that you should feare? God is mercifull, Christ is Saviour.’Footnote ⁵⁰ While he proclaimed that ‘I desire preachers to be builders, and not butchers’, he by no means intended that they should be bland comforters.Footnote ⁵¹ In a sense, though, the Law-Gospel dialectic demanded that ministers be both butchers and builders; for the purpose of the exercise was to differentiate the elect from the reprobate, and it was only the former who would survive the harsh treatment that the law would mete out. Within Calvinist pastoral theology, a universal characteristic of hypocrites was a refusal to root out every single sin: they always had ‘one old favourite’ to which they dearly clung. God prompts attention to such sins by setting forth some form of affliction and to fail to respond on a systematic basis suggested that you had some sin to hide. To take the Gospel, but not the Law, was to assume that the decree was not double: only reprobates paid no heed to reprobation.

The Law-Gospel dichotomy also assumed two different images of God: one a harsh, fearsome figure capable of convincing the believer that they deserved to go to hell, and the other more forgiving, who offered reassurances that men were never condemned on account of their sins. Greenham was quite aware that he represented God in starkly different ways, and that these light and dark sides of the deity were intimately connected:

Through the Law-Gospel dialectic, Greenham's God, however eye-poppingly powerful, proved himself to be self-regulating in his conduct toward the created: thus, not ‘hidden’, but immanent and personal.

IV

Ford Lewis Battles once identified three major motifs in Calvin's image of God: God as father, as teacher and as physician.Footnote ⁵³ Greenham also used these metaphors. For instance, he often used medical analogies to describe God's treatment of affliction: ‘as it fareth with sores, it commeth to passe in sinnes, wee are loath to have our wounds often grated upon … but would [rather] have them plaistered with sweet promises, and bathed in the mercies of God’. He warns, though, in line with contemporary medical theory, that ‘it is farre safer before incarnative and healing medicines, to use corrosive and mundifying waters, without which though some sores may seeme to close … they may prove worse, being rotten still at the core’. God, the physician, applies ‘the burning iron of the Law … to cleane the wound of the soule’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The physician may be acting for your good, but it is not necessarily his job to make you feel good. Even within this metaphor of the healing God, there is inevitably a sense of distance and control, of his power over you, to ‘administer Physicke’ as he sees fit.

Equally, while Greenham could talk in comforting terms of God's ‘Fatherly providence watching over us’, this did not necessarily conjure up the associations then that it would now. One's father was not first and foremost an affectionate being, but rather one who had the legitimate authority to correct disorders as he saw fit. Within this understanding, beatings were kindly corrections, not abuses of human rights. Thus, when Greenham says that ‘God dealeth with us as a loving father with his prodigall sonne’, he means that the disobedient child is brought into line with ‘sharp scourges’ and other ‘loving corrections’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Just because we may react to these descriptions with some discomfort, does not mean that Greenham's readers did. The point about fatherly discipline here is that the purpose is ultimately loving: fathers only correct their children for their own good. In order to make this point more gently, Greenham occasionally substituted motherly love:

The purpose of these varied metaphors is clear: pain, punishment and affliction are not anomic forces, but rather rest at the centre of God's scheme, and are designed specifically for our spiritual benefit. This was an important calculation within pastoral Calvinism: that it is more comforting to know that ‘there is no evil in the city but the Lord hath done it’ (Amos iii.6, 7) than to fear that God is not powerful enough to bring chaotic elements into order. Only if God was powerful enough to forgive all could His forgiveness mean anything. As Greenham put it, ‘His judgements be as a great deepe, but the deepe of his mercies swallowes up that deepe … God is able to forgive us more than we are able to sinne. And indeede mercie is the gate of the Almightie.’Footnote ⁵⁷

Wherever there is ‘mercy’ in Greenham's scheme, ‘judgement’ is rarely far behind. Indeed, the images of the light side of God are somewhat double-edged: not much tweaking would be required to make the physician into a torturer (see p. 743). Nevertheless, in order that the believer might have something unambiguous to look to, Greenham's Christ is a figure of forgiveness, willing to defend man against the charge of moral guilt.

Greenham's Christ functions as an intermediary between the decretal God and fallen creation. He cares for the individual, and ‘may come from heaven and returne againe often before we seeke him or call upon him’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Greenham contrasts here the images of the Father and Son:

This is Yahweh moderated by the placatory Son, but there is no sense in which the latter is made to ‘appeare’ at anything other than the former's behest. Greenham intentionally racks up the ‘horrour and feare’ because he knows that his depiction of a sympathetic Christ is able to soften that edge – the bad cop makes one want the good cop all the more, and encourages the thought that their roles are competitive rather than complementary. By portraying different ‘personalities’ of the godhead, Greenham may have been able to satisfy the differing emotional needs of his audience.

Greenham's Christ was, broadly, portrayed as a human and suffering figure, a source of empathy and support rather than a guarantor of election per se. But this last role should not be discounted entirely, not least because the conviction that Christ was on one's side could release the aspiring saint from a trap of circular anxieties. Something of that liberation from doubt may have been communicated through this paean of biblical ‘free-styling’:

It would seem then that Greenham introduces an agent of unalloyed mercy into his scheme, capable of sheltering the saints from Yahweh's rage, fighting off Satan and instilling in his charges a profound confidence in salvation. However, this represents not so much a ‘theological’ addition to a scheme which otherwise places all power in the hands of a decretal deity, as a rhetoric aimed at strategically softening that truth.Footnote ⁶¹ Put simply, Christ's sacrifice was rendered symbolic by the double decree, because it did not and could not alter predestination: by definition, everything which occurs ‘in time’ is an effect of the decrees and so cannot change them. Further, Christ did not die for all men, but ‘all kinds of men’ – some rich, some poor, some from this nation, some from that. As R. T. Kendall has argued, the doctrine of limited atonement – the belief that Christ died only for the elect – meant that Calvinist Christology was dead in the water, because the believer could not be certain that he died for him personally. English Calvinism was thus made pastorally awful.Footnote ⁶² Without engaging in the debate on that level, it can be accepted that Christ's sacrifice was a relatively minor theme within English Calvinist pastoral theology, simply because it did not seem to ‘fit’. What serious use could be made of Christ, if he could only ever be a ‘yes man’ of the Calvinist God; a mere smiling face upon the emotionless decree?Footnote ⁶³ All of this said, piety is not conditioned by logic, and Greenham knew that to talk of Christ in dramatic and forgiving terms was to make the willing feel more loved, and thus more connected, and so more assured of their salvation. In this context, it is not surprising that the general tenor of Greenham's rhetoric is of Christ as a friendly supporter, rather than as a victor or lord.Footnote ⁶⁴ In sum, Greenham used Christ as a practical boost to faith, not as a metaphysical explanation for it.

Greenham's treatment of the Devil was similar to his account of Christ. That is to say, his rhetoric was subject to the recognition that there were logical limits to what the Devil could do within the Calvinist scheme. The Devil could not, properly, be said ‘to do’ evil independently of God, or against God's ultimate will.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this sense, the Devil could be said to do harm only in the same way as the sparrow could be said to flap its own wings: they were, in the end, both only secondary agencies fulfilling God's providential will. Informally, the Devil could be said to ‘cause’ afflictions, and for his own malign reasons; but it is God who structures the event, and makes the Devil an aspect of the affliction: ‘though the Lord be the supreme worker, yet Satan is the instrument’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Man sees the Devil as a tormentor because God has decreed that he acts like that and that men interpret his actions as they do. Greenham is quite clear about this: God ‘would rather make Satan a surgeon to shew us our sinnes, than a sergeant to arrest us to perpetual imprisonment for our sinnes’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Because Greenham's deity does not delegate, Christ and the Devil become little more than prominent facilitators of divine instruction, their actions more effects than causes.

Like Luther – although without his emotionalism – Greenham wanted men to understand that God was the ‘naked absolute’, and double predestination was just one expression of this fact. The fact of God was something from which there was no escape, and Greenham used some of his most extreme language to convey this point:

God present in hell? This is more than a loose metaphor. In his treatise, ‘Of Gods wrath, and justice, and mercie’, Greenham shows how far he was willing to take this impulse. God is not only familiar with hell, but also designed its architecture. Thus:

This is Thomas Aquinas's ‘abominable fancy’ in all but name,Footnote ⁷⁰ what William Empson called ‘the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man’.Footnote ⁷¹ Why did Greenham invoke this outcast notion? No explanation presents itself beyond the drama conveyed by the statement, in the service of a wider point: that men should fear God because there is nothing beyond his control. There was no question of evasion: either the believer was on his good side or was not. On this account, even hell was no escape. And yet, only one page later, Greenham was discussing economic, rather than spiritual, poverty. The disjunction was not obvious to Greenham, because his idea was in fact very linear. Understanding the relationship between man and God lay at the heart of his message about how the world should be approached. God ‘might have made all rich, as well as one rich, but he left some poore to try us’.Footnote ⁷² Before one knows how to act toward the poor, one must understand that ‘the whole earth is the Lords’, and that all that exists, even hell, is in accordance with his will.

It is interesting to note that this ferociously powerful deity was being communicated specifically to readers who were weak in faith or possessed of afflicted consciences. In other words, this image of God was not some additional understanding to be impressed upon advanced believers, but an absolutely basic cornerstone of the pastoral method, essential knowledge for both the ignorant and the fretful. While it may be true that a wholly other and unbounded deity was not in itself conducive to establishing a stable and social pattern of religious life organised around a personal deity, this does not mean that this extremity of power was something that ministers felt the need to apologise for or explain away. Pace Perry Miller, the Calvinist God did not necessarily need to be brutally regulated, even if some devices were needed to conceptualise his relationship with the created world.Footnote ⁷³ As counter-instinctive as it may seem, Greenham used this image of the deity to highlight both the inevitable punishment of the reprobate and the patterns of godliness prerequisite among the elect. Greenham believed that it was comforting to know that God's ways are not our own, and he used a language of simplicity to explain this point of mystery.

In this context, the doctrine of predestination functions as a way of reminding the audience of the vastness of the epistemological gap between themselves and God. Human perception is faulty and cannot see that God rests at the centre of all things in the Calvinist universe. Using the extreme example of hell allows Greenham more easily to make the point that, in life, the earnest believer can always be assured that the governing principle behind their lives is not chaos but order. He encourages believers to think, not about Satanically-generated evils, but about theistically-driven afflictions, and in turn to associate these with the law, which itself is just the necessary flip-side of the Gospel. Believers should never despair, because they can never be sure that they are not partaking of the means to salvation.

Greenham was not a man who tried to please, but rather one whose utterances invariably bore a sting; some jolt or challenge beyond simple reason. And he painted God in terms both pure white and pitch black, to ensure that he was looked to before anything else. His deity is by no means ‘distinctively’ Calvinist on account of his stress on God's omnipotence, for that is a necessary trait of all monotheistic deities. However, Calvinists stressed this generic characteristic in a distinctive way. Pace Parker and Carlson, this key figure within the English Reformed tradition was no Anglo-Catholic pillar, but rather a full-blooded predestinarian, who believed, most fundamentally, that it was more pastorally comforting to know that God was in control than it was to have to rely on one's own free will.