Herbert Thorndike's Of the covenant of grace is the centrepiece of his principal work, An epilogue to the tragedy of the Church of England, being a necessary consideration and brief resolution of the chief controversies in religion that divide the western Church: occasioned by the present calamity of the Church of England (1659). ‘Brief’ is euphemistic, for the Epilogue is a robust trilogy: Of the covenant of grace alone runs to more than 700 pages in its modern edition (helpfully inflated by the nineteenth-century editor's footnotes). This discourse stood in its day, and still stands in ours, as by far the most substantial piece of covenant theology by a churchman of Thorndike's loyal kind. Its moral emphasis recalls the work of early Stuart forerunners, but it breaks new ground, for a churchman, by keying on regeneration rather than baptism and by introducing into the fabric of federal divinity an Arminian and scholastic idea – scientia media, God's middle knowledge – for the purpose of safeguarding God's free grace while affirming man's free will. Pursuing this enterprise, Thorndike elevated the covenant of grace as ‘the whole tenor of the Bible’, ‘the tender of Christianity’ and ‘the whole Treaty of God with man concerning his happiness’.Footnote ¹

The work of predecessors in the Church offered little basis for such hegemonic claims. John Donne, it is true, had declared that ‘all that hath passed between God and man hath passed ex pacto, by way of contract and covenant’, but while Donne's sermons now and again illuminate this dictum, they do not give it much substance or coherence.Footnote ² Puritan preachers, on the other hand, developed the federal formula of works and grace with great energy and resource. Speaking of the ‘new covenant’ in the mid-1620s, John Preston told his Lincoln's Inn audience that ‘all that we teach you from day to day are but conclusions drawn from this covenant’. Richard Sibbes in the early 1630s urged his Cambridge hearers ‘above all, … [to] labour to know and understand the covenant of grace’. In the 1650s such labouring brought forth Francis Roberts's 1,721-page folio celebration of God's covenants as the ‘grand mystery and very marrow of all the Holy Scriptures’.Footnote ³ When Thorndike seized the evangelical covenant's properties and powers for his own Church-in-eclipse, he took on a truly formidable task.

Working within England's old Calvinist consensus, Puritan mentors from William Perkins onward had framed upon federal foundations a substantial body of practical divinity.Footnote ⁴ This constructive work – the defining achievement of English Calvinism – went forward virtually uncontested by official custodians of Christian faith. The Church, after all, already possessed a creed, a confession, articles of faith, a prayer book, a catechism or two and a set of homilies, none of which (apart from the sacraments) adverted to covenants or invited covenantal exegesis. Exceptionally, in the 1620s, Arthur Lake, bishop of Bath and Wells, claimed to discover the substance of the covenant of grace in the confession, articles and catechisms, but Lake's published remains exhibit no effort on his part to trace the theological filiations.Footnote ⁵

Lake was one of a handful of moderate Calvinist bishops who, like Donne in the 1620s, linked the covenant of grace to the corpus of faith as the basis of baptism and the spur of Christian duty. Others included George Downame (Derry), Henry Leslie (Down and Connor) and William Cowper (Galloway). But while Puritans expanded the federal plan by connecting the moral law to the covenant of works and energised it by subsuming the Gospel in the covenant of grace, these bishops minimised the first covenant and kept the second pinned to the sacraments. Exceptional was the conforming priest William Sparke, who in the 1620s set the covenant of grace at the heart of the ‘mystery of godliness’, but Sparke's little summa of rational theology received scant notice in its time.Footnote ⁶

Thorndike names no intellectual forerunners or creditors. A primary prompt, if there was one, would have come from Henry Hammond, arguably the Church's foremost apologist during the Civil War and Interregnum, who placed the two covenants at the head of his very popular A practical catechism of 1644.Footnote ⁷ Had he developed the covenants' implications for devotion and duty, Hammond might have given a federal turn to Anglican practical divinity, but he did not choose to trace out the applications of his premises. His book had an immediate impact and a long life: it gave a strongly covenantal lead to The whole duty of man by (in all probability) his friend Richard Allestree; it also influenced Jeremy Taylor's preaching. But Hammond himself stopped short. Herbert Thorndike, looking on from the fringe of the ‘Hammond circle’ of the 1650s, may have seen in this aborted start an opportunity to do what none of his kind save Sparke had tried to do before – to wrench the substance of the covenant from Puritan custodians, to get an Anglican grip upon its practicum and to represent both, newly and powerfully forged, to his once and future Church.

Thorndike cuts a curious figure in Anglican annals. Though voluminous in literary output and keen in apologetics, he was neither a noteworthy preacher nor a popular writer: he seems not to have much cared to be either. ‘Why’, asks John Spurr with evident exasperation, ‘does Herbert Thorndike receive such massive attention when his contorted writings were regarded with deep suspicion by contemporaries?’ The question seems ineptly put (unless suspicion then is to dictate depreciation now), and the scholarly attention currently paid is far from massive: overreacting, Spurr limits Thorndike to a mere three mentions in his broad canvas of the mentors of the Interregnum and Restoration Church. Even when we understand that his quarrel is less with Thorndike himself than with the Oxford Movement's mid-nineteenth-century Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, the eighty-eight volumes of which included six by Thorndike, such depreciation is unwarranted.Footnote ⁸

About Thorndike's literary powers there is less controversy and no praise: the grace of the covenant did not bless his pen. Of the covenant of grace is a piece of formal school-work, a tight-collared clerical performance – formidably studied, austere in mien, dogged in argument, as intricate in technical art as any maze, and ponderous to the point of being crushed by its own lumbering prose. Thorndike's nineteenth-century biographer and editor, Arthur W. Haddan, lamented his ‘cumbrous sentences and want of lucid arrangement’. His twentieth-century biographer fell back on the judgement of charity: ‘He saw clearly enough, but he saw too many things at once.’Footnote ⁹ The Epilogue is the work of a man with weighty stuff on his mind and time on his hands, a sequestered scholar unburdened, but also unanimated, by the immediate cares of a pastor's calling.

Yet although Thorndike's turgid prose belies the theatricality of his main title, his work does not lack drama of a sort. At one level it displays a rigorously doctrinaire intelligence labouring to get its judgements right and to prove contrary judgements to be mere opinions and wrong to boot. More deeply, Thorndike's discourse of grace takes the form of a modern morality play in which, as we shall see, human choices determine or at least predict and explain human destinies. God answers right choices – Thorndike is careful not to say ‘rewards’ – with the gift of the opportunity to choose again. The gift's recipients live life continuously at the crossroads of decision. Regeneration is progressive; righteousness is the sum of choices rightly made. Nor is an element of suspense lacking, for the God who writes and produces the play of grace acts in it as well, constantly creating and recreating his part as the play goes along. These histrionic elements must be teased out of the leaden lump of Thorndike's rhetoric. In their composition we see the Anglican mind struggling to compete with the far more familiar Puritan dramaturgy of spiritual struggle and pilgrimage.

Herbert Thorndike (1597?–1672) trained at Cambridge in divinity and Near and Middle Eastern languages. He made patristics a special study; Of the covenant of grace displays his long reach and large grasp. After 1645, having been ousted from his Trinity College fellowship and his Hertfordshire rectory at Barley near Cambridge, he had leisure and incentive to assail his Church's enemies – Socinians, Jansenists, antinomians and high-predestinarian Calvinists. He was fierce for king and bishops; the reward for fealty, in 1661, was restoration to his fellowship and rectory plus a prebend at Westminster Abbey, where he passed his later years. An idiosyncratic controversialist who was taken to task in his time for Romish leanings, he has been recently called ‘an original, critical, and scholarly theologian and biblical commentator who began his career as a moderate Calvinist and ended it … as a forerunner of the Tractarians’.Footnote ¹⁰

Addressing learned readers, Thorndike takes knowledge of the covenant of grace largely for granted with intent (one supposes) to get on with his own business while avoiding entanglement in others' agendas and discourse, and saving forensic breath. He makes no general reconnaissance of federal terrain, rehearses no roll of Scriptures, heeds no call to pursue the covenant motif through the Heilsgeschichte. The sources, conventions and filiations of federal truth go mostly unremarked. The structures and strategies of Puritan covenant divinity are not attacked; they are simply and largely ignored.

One would not know from Thorndike's account that the theology of the covenants of works and grace had for some time been and was still in his day a work in progress, vigorously prosecuted by masters whose busy and ingenious minds were tuned to theological trends, political and ecclesiastical conditions and lay demands. William Perkins had framed the original English model half-a-century before; his double-covenant design had been modified and moralised by William Ames in the 1620s. In the same decade Preston and Sibbes gave the evangelical covenant a Christic turn, to which Thomas Goodwin, Tobias Crisp and others added torque in the 1630s. Consolidative treatises followed from John Ball and Peter Bulkeley in the mid-1640s; William Strong opened up new dimensions of covenant divinity around 1650. The Westminster divines installed the federal principle in their confession in a form that lagged a step or two behind the boldest fronts of ideational advance, but elsewhere in London, even as the assembly deliberated, Anthony Burgess was giving a gloss of common grace to the covenant of works and Goodwin was reconstituting the covenant of grace with a dramatic account of the pretemporal pact between God and Christ.Footnote ¹¹ Covenant doctrine, when Thorndike seized upon it with larcenous intent, was thus live and, one might say, dangerous doctrine, versatile in enterprise, rich in resource, fluent and vivid in presentation and mutating even as he grasped it.

But Thorndike took no perceptible interest in any of this. He was not writing a manual of federal divinity; to be either comprehensive or current would not have served his political and polemical ends. Masters such as Perkins, Ames and Preston accordingly go unnoticed; so too do the mavericks Goodwin and Crisp. Instead, Thorndike chose to turn his face, grimly, on William Twisse (d. 1646), first prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly and England's most prominent and dogmatic defender of Calvinist predestination against Arminian error. Striking at Twisse, Thorndike was attacking not only the canons of the Synod of Dort, now four decades past, but the doctrine of Westminster as well.

Twisse was not a covenant theologian. If Thorndike had one of that ilk silently in his sights, it would have been Perkins, whose bifurcated system subordinated the covenants to the decrees of election and reprobation. What went unacknowledged by Thorndike, because it did not serve his turn, was that Perkins's successors (most notably Preston) had dramatically reshaped and reoriented the teaching of the covenants as a central topos of Puritan discourse. Dismissing their work in silence, he simply tarred his adversaries with one broad brush as absolute and immediate predestinarians whose God dictates by secret decree the destiny of every human soul. He charged the devotees of this straw doctrine with the crime of making God the author of damnation for the mass of mankind, obviating the grace of baptism, palsying the nerve of morality and subverting evangelical activity of every kind. He accused the Westminster divines, in particular, of involving their followers as ‘partizans [sic] in questions which they understand not’ and of ‘giv[ing] them the confidence to censure for Arminians, those that resolve them in such terms as they comprehend not’.Footnote ¹² All this and more Thorndike hurled at the evil priests and false prophets who had killed his king and wrecked his Church.

Such ranting obscures the fact that for some three decades the ideational captains of English Puritanism had been lowering the profile of the decrees and preaching up the covenants instead. Thorndike cannot have been ignorant of the great and still growing investment of intellect and passion in the federal ways of God. He must also have been aware that Puritan federalists, a long generation after Perkins, presented the covenant of grace not as implementing the decree of election but as standing upon its own scriptural bona fides and independently performing its salvific work. Thorndike may have been aiming at Perkins, but leading federal preachers of his own day had abandoned the stiff discourse of predestination (which in any case had never been the stuff of popular preaching) in favour of the evangelical covenant's ductile and intelligible modes.Footnote ¹³

Yet it must be said on Thorndike's behalf that the conversion was less than complete: post-Perkinsian redactors of federal grace could suppress the letter of predestination but not so easily exorcise its spirit. Nor did they desire to do so: habituated to theology as imperative, mid-century Puritans represented the covenant of grace as God's command and as Christ's last will or testament. They affirmed the conveyance of salvation as irresistible gift or legacy. Many of them drew back from baldly contractual understandings which marked federal discourse of the early seventeenth century and tended, in their judgement, to distort and vitiate the covenant's grace by turning it into a legal transaction between parties who, in their character as contractors, were arguably equal.Footnote ¹⁴

Up-to-the-mark federalists liked to say that the God who makes covenant is on either side of the bond: he both gives the gift and ensures its reception and effect. The covenant carries conditions, surely, but the strength to try to meet them comes directly and entirely from God by the mediation of the Holy Spirit. The covenant demands personal action; God supplies the ability to act. The covenant requires faith; God promises, said Preston, ‘not only to love us if we believe but also to make us to believe’.Footnote ¹⁵ Out of his ‘all-sufficiency’, Preston's proxy for determination by decree, God affords the means and underwrites the ends of grace as effectively by covenant as ever by fiat. Not only all that, but federal grace carried the bonus, for pastoral purposes, of immediacy and explicability. Its biblical base and empirical mode were conducive to religious experience that aligned the believer's interest in eternal life with the deity's interest in his own greater glory.Footnote ¹⁶

We cannot say how much of all this Thorndike cared to see or to assess, but it is plain that he saw value in the covenant bond and coveted its uses and powers for his own calamity-stricken Church. He accordingly undertook by force of argument and prayer to clear the deck for a model of federal grace cleansed of evangelical excesses and geared to ecclesial regimens and needs.

Thorndike named only two theologians of the first rank – Twisse, whose views he abominated, on the Calvinist side and Jacobus Arminius, whose intentions he found compatible with his own. It has been unwisely written that Thorndike ‘always disavowed the alleged views of Arminius’.Footnote ¹⁷Of the covenant of grace proves otherwise when, for instance, it blasts ‘puritan preachers’ who,

Far from disavowing Arminius, Thorndike held his work in considerable, though not uncritical, regard, citing especially ‘his opinion concerning election and reprobation’, which Thorndike took to be the very same that ‘all the Church hath always held for matter of faith’.Footnote ¹⁹ Above all, he shared Arminius' desire to vindicate God's honour by affirming a critical measure of human responsibility for human destiny. We will see how hopefully he coopted Arminius’ support for his own carefully calibrated account of God's management of the means of grace under the aegis of scientia media.

Thorndike grounds grace on the sacrament of baptism as the rite of admission to Christ's Church. He understands baptism as the initial act of religious commitment and the baptismal vows as enrolling the baptisee in the covenant community. So far, his thought runs alongside that of Lake or Donne or Hammond, but as his argument advances it reaches a higher pitch and demands a larger sphere. Page by page, his scripting of grace pushes toward adult religious intentionality. Infant baptism remains basic, but Thorndike's conception of Christianisation requires persons who have attained the age of reason and consent, who know themselves answerable for their actions, and who, when the Gospel is preached and the covenant tendered, can by their own volition come forward, profess faith and make ‘a sincere and resolute profession to undertake Christianity, and to live according to it (believing as our Lord Christ hath revealed and living as He hath taught’.Footnote ²⁰ Thorndike proposes to show how grace engages human intention, mandates human responsibility and compensates human effort. This purpose requires that the act of commitment be grounded in knowledge and guided by conscience.

The task Thorndike sets himself is to demonstrate the freedom of man's moral will without limiting the freedom of God's grace or compromising God's salvific care for his human creatures. Choosing the covenant of grace for his proving ground, he emphasises its character as contract and affirms the divine–human reciprocity of pledge and performance. The gracious covenant, he insists, is built upon the same plan or policy as the original covenant of nature: the parties to both are free agents who share a collaborative interest in the success of the created order.Footnote ²¹ The model of their relationship is one of divine stimulus and human response with every contingency kept open on the human side and every possibility for good or ill available at every stage until death.

The operational crux lies in what Thorndike calls divine ‘helps’, a term of art for God-given opportunities, occasions and incentives for moral action, along with the ability to act. Laid out through the middle portion of Of the covenant of grace, the doctrine of helps composes the core, and focuses the dynamic, of the treatise's practicum. The exposition begins with baptism, by which original sin is ‘utterly defaced’. The lesson addresses adults: persons ‘“baptized [sic] into Christ, are baptized into His death”, Rom. 6:3, which is to say, that God on His part granteth them power to perform that, which they on their part profess to undertake’.Footnote ²² The context is that of Christian evangelism – John baptising Jesus Christ, Christ exhorting his Apostles to baptise the nations (Matthew xxviii.19), Ananias urging St Paul to be baptised (Acts xxii.16). Thorndike is clear that ‘the gift of the Holy Ghost depends upon the water of baptism’,Footnote ²³ which by instilling the disposition of grace, prepares the soul for the reformation that is Thorndike's central subject.Footnote ²³ That latter work commences with the offer of the Gospel by the preached word, which Thorndike signals as the first and greatest of God's helps. When taken to heart, the offer touches off a train of transactions in an on-going application of helps that is Thorndike's version of the Puritan ordo salutis and the engine of his practical divinity.Footnote ²⁴

At every point of spiritual or moral decision, the human parties are at liberty to choose for better or for worse. Their choices are entirely their own. God neither dictates how they choose nor preordains the consequences. Rather, out of sheer beneficence, he has established a system in which it is possible to grow in godliness, however slowly or imperfectly, and he offers through the Holy Ghost opportunities to choose as well as ability and powerful incentives to choose rightly. It does not follow – man being man and sin, sin – that right choices are sure to be made, but when they are, they tend to confirm that habit of will which meets the condition of the covenant of grace and qualifies the possessor for further evangelical benefits and advantages here and hereafter.

‘Christianity … supposeth free choice’: regeneration hinges on the liberty of the covenanters to act or not to act – God to give or to withhold, man to accept or to reject.Footnote ²⁵ Thorndike accordingly rules out all forms of direct and efficacious pressure by vis divina. God does not infuse spiritual capabilities or join in ‘immediate concurrence’ with creaturely acts.Footnote ²⁶ Divinity and humanity encounter and interact, but the system runs on the principle of separate spheres, each party's freedom of decision and deed being of the moral essence.

One effect of this arrangement is a griping but also potentially exhilarating sense of the provisionality of present outcomes. This for Thorndike is both the necessary cost of freedom and a great motor of moral effort. Normalising the concept of provisionality, he sets it over against the intensities of the Puritan search for assurance of salvation that lead, he charges, to false security, to paralysing dread or to sacrilegious attempts to pry into God's secret decrees. He means his readers to take seriously the idea of membership in the body of Christ as a ‘tender’, neither a gift outright nor a work of divine force majeure by decree or testament, but always and only an offer and an option. Predestination is not erased – an important point as we will see – but its activity is reduced to ‘no more than the preparation of that grace from everlasting, whereby we are saved in time’.Footnote ²⁷

Thorndike values the provisionality of grace for its enhancing of the Church's ministries of watch and ward that mediate and interpret helps, guide their use and monitor members' spiritual gains or losses. Such offices (detailed by Thorndike elsewhere in the Epilogue and in other writings) implement the covenant-grounded practice of mature piety for which Of the covenant of grace offers a programmatic model. They also stand against the hypertrophic introversions of Puritan piety which Thorndike thoroughly despises.

The theological heart of Thorndike's undertaking is a proposal for settling the ‘controversy concerning the covenant of grace’ which centres on the question whether predestination ‘proceeds upon the absolute will of God’, as Twisse would have it, ‘or in consideration of man's being qualified as the Gospel requires’, as Thorndike contends.Footnote ²⁸ The argument's essence is captured in a chapter headnote furnished by Thorndike's editor Haddan: ‘Predestination to grace absolute, to glory respective.’Footnote ²⁹ Grace is here posited as consisting in God's offer of helps to all souls to whom he offers the Gospel. Glory is the affirmative effect of his ‘antecedent’ or conditional will, which is not absolute but carries ‘a term of abatement, reserving the condition upon which it proceedeth’.Footnote ³⁰ All souls receive some degree and kind of grace; the crown of glory is reserved to souls that rise to the occasion here and now, and keep on rising to the end. They do so freely, because the will of the called Christian ‘must have in it the force of choice upon deliberation’.Footnote ³¹

Helps are thus tests as well as tenders, for the divine enabling of the recipient ‘immediately to do that which God immediately requires’ leaves him without excuse if he fails.Footnote ³² Good use of first helps normally wins further helps, fuelling the reciprocative power-drive of the engine of holiness. The reason one man advances ‘in the way of Christianity’ and another does not hinges, Thorndike explains, on ‘the good or bad use of those sufficient helps which he had been presented with’.Footnote ³³ God at every juncture considers the ‘right use of His former gifts’ and normally measures out his ‘disbursements’ according to the creature's previous pattern of response, having ‘not finally determined to do it by any thing preceding the choice’.Footnote ³⁴

Thorndike takes care to safeguard the autonomy of divine action in the ordo salutis in such a way as to rebuff charges of Pelagianism and also to multiply occasions for ministerial service. Reciprocity is neither necessary nor automatic on God's part; neither immediately or directly is the deity bound to compensate human effort. It is true that ‘[t]he reason of the particulars, which He actually bestows or refuses, is to be resolved into the quality of the persons that receive them or not’.Footnote ³⁵ But God's hand cannot be forced; the modus operandi of grace is case-specific and elastic. Thorndike accordingly makes clear that God may or may not choose to help, may vary timing and portion, impose inflictions (as on Job) or temporarily overlook shortcomings; he may mandate extraordinary tests. ‘[N]othing hinders the goodness of God … to oversee [that is, overlook] those failures, for which He might justly have given over those which He had prevented by His grace, and not brought them finally to persevere.’ Contrariwise, he may ‘redouble upon them those helps’ which their ill use of graces already given ‘might justly have moved Him to refuse’.Footnote ³⁶ Either way and every way, the Lord's judgements are true and righteous. As with the process, so with the outcome: God has not ‘tied Himself’ by covenant or any other way to grant ‘everlasting happiness’ to those who do merely ‘what corrupt nature so prevented is able to do’ when helped by gracious ‘motions and inspirations’.Footnote ³⁷

Such are the aims and rules, the means and methods, of providence. Thorndike's God has arranged the moral bias of the world on a principle of freedom which is grounded in the gracious covenant. He neither compels any person to engage with him nor coerces the consciences of those who do. The bond of the covenant is the precondition of a Christian's liberty; liberty entails responsibility. By transforming believers-by-baptism into autonomous and accountable agents, the covenant underwrites their existence as moral beings. God by covenant maintains the created moral order within which grace-assisted wills may, if they so choose, work out their salvation. He does not by an absolute and immediate stroke arbitrarily assign some souls to glory and others to perdition. Rather, ‘in consideration of Christ's death’, he establishes, in the Word he publishes, and by faithful ministers he interprets the terms of grace, both prevenient and assisting, by which glory may ensue. In Thorndike's apt phrase, he ‘orders the reason of all things that come to pass’ but does not ‘by His own immediate act … determine the will of man to do this or that’.Footnote ³⁸

The question of questions for Thorndike is not whether but ‘how the act of free will depends upon God's free grace’. The challenge is to show how ‘a man becomes entitled to the promise for doing that, which without the help of God's grace he cannot do’. The resolution turns upon the effects and uses of divine helps. The stakes could not be higher: if ‘the help of grace determine the free will of them that embrace and persevere in Christianity’ – if, that is, the will is not actually free – then, Thorndike notes, the contrary disposition of those who resist help would appear to implicate God as author of sin and decreer of damnation.Footnote ³⁹ Accordingly, the giving or denying of helps must not be understood as determinative; the calculus of grace is not mechanical, evidences are not always what they seem and the ultimate reasons for God's actions are entirely his own.

The arrangement's inherent indeterminacy sharpens the issue of the honour of God. On Thorndike's agenda that issue precedes, as it logically must, the discussion of predestination to glory. God's rectitude (no matter what) is the great thing to be clarified and affirmed. To this end Thorndike conducts the reader through a series of polemical seminars in the schoolrooms of theodicy. Central to the pedagogy is a right understanding of God's foreknowledge of human events; the crucial argument, as Thorndike frames it, is that divine knowledge of everything that happens does not impose the necessity of its actually happening. St Paul, for example, was converted not ‘because God foresaw that he should be converted; but, because he was to be converted, therefore God foresaw that he should be converted’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Remarkably for an Anglican, Thorndike elects to cast the case against necessity in federal terms and to incorporate the Adamic compact into the argument. As previously noted, he presents the covenants of nature and of grace as God's successive contracts of a treaty or alliance. They stand upon the same principle of freedom – ‘freedom from necessity’ before and after original sin; freedom from ‘predetermination of the will by the immediate operation of God’.Footnote ⁴¹ Thorndike puts heavy stress upon the continuity and consistency of God's successive ways. He also does some fine fulminating against predestinarian Calvinists who, while acclaiming the ‘honour of God's justice, … make the Gospel of Christ a mockery’ by ‘mak[ing] it to require a condition, impossible to be performed by any whom God determines not to perform it’.Footnote ⁴²

The argument at this point takes a distinctive turn as Thorndike draws from the stock of scholastic epistemology an idea that engages his formidable powers of logic and polemic. He now deploys the concept of scientia media – God's middle knowledge, so called because it is conceived as intervening between his foreknowledge of possibilities and his knowledge of actualities.Footnote ⁴³Scientia media may have had special salience for Thorndike because his working out of the model of the interactivity of grace confronted him with the infinitely ramifying contingencies of human circumstances and choices, all of which God foresees from eternity in all their possible relations and permutations. Thorndike uses this scholastic tool to secure a sphere of human action that is not overdetermined by God's will or ruled immediately by God's act, a realm where human wills can work apart from and unaffected by, though never of course in contravention of, God's perfect knowledge of creaturely events and acts, both possible and actual.

A fairly recent product of continental scholastic enterprise, scientia media was in Thorndike's time rather a hot topic in the schools. Propagated in the late sixteenth century by the Spanish Jesuits Luis de Molina and his teacher Pedro de Fonseca, the idea participated in a theomachia that spread to the academies of France and England, spawned a substantial literature and contributed to the doctrinal initiatives and deviations of Arminius. Richard A. Muller has tracked the ‘vast debate’ over God's middle knowledge from its Catholic origins in Molina's Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione (1589) to its Protestant habilitation in Arminius' disputations and other writings.Footnote ⁴⁴

The British side of this story has hardly begun to be told; primary texts for the telling include treatises by John Prideaux, John Stearne of Dublin and Thomas Aylesbury. Twisse intervened with his Dissertatio de scientia media in 1639; he had already attacked the concept of God's middle knowledge in 1631 in A discovery of D. Jackson's vanity.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thorndike seems to have drawn directly on Molina and also on Arminius, who by Muller's account made scientia media ‘foundational to his revision of the doctrine of predestination and to his soteriological synergism’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Holding that middle knowledge ‘must intervene in things which depend on the liberty of a created will’,Footnote ⁴⁷ Arminius employed the idea in theodicean efforts to define, for man, a sphere of autonomous choice and responsibility by affirming, in God, a category of permissive or conditioned willing and acting.

More perspicuously than any other treatise of its time, Of the covenant of grace puts scientia media to practical advantage. In so doing, it brings us to the outermost limit of Thorndike's project of theoretical liberation, where he seems almost ready to recognise a transformative indeterminacy in God's relations with moral creation that might tend to relieve the terrific pressure of divine totality, the infinite and omnipresent weight of all-sufficiency, upon the theologising mind. Thorndike's defence of God carries him, as it had carried Arminius, to what was in that day the far edge of human autonomy. But there he pulls up short. He can fight against other men's concepts of divine determination by remote decree or by immediate act, but God must still be seen to be fully in charge of the contingencies of creaturely life. It is, indeed, the infinite complexity of those contingencies that supports Thorndike's hope to make the case for human liberty within the context of undiminished divine sovereignty.

So, I suggest, we may construe the sense of predicament that predisposed him to take hold of scientia media and to reflect that

This arresting pronouncement begins by denying God's direct determination of man's will. It then affirms a form of divine determination that, guided by scientia media, is no less controlling for being mediated and indirect. Given that God foreknows every consideration, motive and inclination of every human heart at every moment, ‘it cannot seem strange’, writes Thorndike, ‘that by this means (seeing it appears impossible that by any other means) He should comprehend what will so come to pass’ and that he should employ that comprehension to provide the objects that ‘every man in every moment shall meet with, to resolve him what to do’.Footnote ⁴⁹ God foreknows how a person who is presented with this or that object will respond, whether for good or ill. The giving or withholding of the helps of grace is governed by that foreknowledge.

Thorndike integrates this mode of operations with God's fulfilment of the promises of the covenant of grace. He offers in evidence a set of ‘Scriptures, which declare, how God brings to pass His counsels’, and he backs divine witness with arguments drawn from scientia media.Footnote ⁵⁰ Several proof texts come from the Old Testament, where God presents to this or that bad king the objects that by his own choice will confirm him in his badness: Pharaoh against the Israelites, Ahab seduced by the ‘lying spirit’ placed by God in his advisers' mouths, and the wicked royal rebels raised by Jehovah to punish Solomon's idolatries (1 and 2 Kings). Also noted is the instance of David at Keilah (1 Samuel), which Molina had made a key case of scientia media.Footnote ⁵¹

The main events of holy history lock the argument for indirect determination into the divine plan of redemption. One is Adam's fall, of which Thorndike writes that

The homely phrases that end this passage capture Thorndike's sense of God's theodicean enterprise and ingenuity. The other capital instance is the ‘godly murder’ of Christ, about which Thorndike observes that ‘[i]f we will learn “the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” from the Scriptures, we must have recourse to those means, by which the Scriptures teach us that it came to pass’.Footnote ⁵³ The Book of Wisdom yields further evidence, as do New Testament fulfilments of Old Testament prophecies.

The knowledge that ‘directs God's providence’Footnote ⁵⁴ by selecting and proposing objects to the understanding of each person at every moment of choice in such a way as effectually to move the will and direct its action without infringing, Thorndike insists, on the liberty of the willer and actor is scientia media. God's honour and glory are served by his allowing intelligent creatures to choose freely among objects and courses for better or worse. This liberty underwrites their moral being, while the arrangement is wholly efficient because God, foreknowing each choice, indirectly controls every part of the deliberative process. The happy result is that ‘His creatures’ always willingly and freely ‘serv[e] the turn of His purpose’ and ‘do what He designeth’. So Thorndike concludes: there being ‘contingence in the effect’ and ‘freedom in the cause, … therefore I say, that God determines those things that come to pass freely and contingently, so to come to pass’.Footnote ⁵⁵

It is inherent in the mentality which devises and approves this argument, in the motives which drive it and in the intellectual community which comprehends it that Thorndike did not feel obliged to address the suppositional objection that Providence, working on such principles, is nothing other than absolute predestination in a mask. No more than any Calvinist could the magisterial Anglican mind contemplate with equanimity a world where human wills, however touched by grace, performed as radically independent, self-directing agents: that way lay heresy and anarchy. God is, and must be seen to be, in charge. He has, after all, ‘from the beginning … elected a certain order agreeable to His own infinite wisdom, justice, goodness, sovereignty’, an order which he will not abandon and in which, Thorndike makes plain, ‘all things come to pass’ by ‘His own free choice’. In this well-run kingdom, God's ‘creatures serv[e] the turn of his purpose’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The ordering of secondary causes, in which divine honour and glory are engaged, is certainly different from the immediate and absolute determination which Thorndike so aggressively contradicts. Yet however subtle or veiled, because divine purpose cannot fail and still be divine, God's method partakes of ordering, and the ordering is ineluctable.

The resultant synergy of divine and human wills was perhaps a bit beyond the power of religious discourse to describe. Thorndike did his best:

It could hardly have been clearer or more apparently subversive: ‘working their own inclinations’ goes comfortably with ‘serve to do what He designeth’; man's will is free but ‘nevertheless’ the ‘instrument’ of divine purpose.

Today's reader, lightly versed if versed at all in the properties and proprieties of early modern Protestant scholasticism, might suspect a piece of supernal sleight-of-hand. The divine strategy may seem in danger of degrading into a canny, not to say crafty, set of tactical manipulations, a piece of high puppetry. But if such a notion ever crossed Thorndike's mind, he expelled it, and it must be said for him that his work is not lightly impeachable on such grounds. It should be borne in mind that Thorndike set out to prove that God rules creation neither by the predetermination of absolute decrees nor by immediate strokes of Providence, and that God's foreknowledge, while infinite, is not coercive. Thorndike did not rule out human agency; he sought, rather, to show how agency, for good or ill, cooperates freely and hence responsibly with the designing will of God. The devout interpreter's task is then to add to the vision of divine policy a cogent analysis of divine procedure. He must explain the method and means of governance, the system of helps embedded in the logic of scientia media, in such a way as to shield his doctrine against Calvinist charges that it subverts divine authority.

The sum and substance of Thorndike's proffer can now be stated as follows. The deity, being equipped with foreknowledge of the nature and destiny of every human being and of the inflection of every human will toward good or evil, so orders their lives that they ‘meet with those occurrences which, suiting with the merit of their by-past actions, He sees will determine their choice for the better or for the worse’. For the testing and proving of souls he may also parcel out ‘preventing graces’ in the form of the ability to make good use of occurrences. Positive use of such help normally elicits from God more and greater helpings of the same kind; misuse may forfeit further favours. That the gift of grace itself thus rewards the ‘right use’ of grace gives Thorndike's evangelical message a very practical bottom line.Footnote ⁵⁸

That is how the covenant of grace works when informed by scientia media. Painstakingly, Thorndike constructs for his Church's consideration an ordo salutis in which God presents things to the senses and represents them to the mind as occasions or objects of choice and hence as tests of the capacity to choose well. Out of concern for man's happiness, his wisdom picks appropriate objects from the range of possibilities; he also confers the capability without which the test would have no meaning. The choosing is unforced, and the choosers are therefore accountable; but the process runs under total and constant divine supervision and its outcomes are divinely predicted. All is contingent, but nothing is left to whatever in this conceptual system might be termed chance. Thorndike sums up in one unusually terse statement:

Thorndike did not claim finder's rights to this way of instrumenting regeneration, specifically, the ‘supposition of God's foreseeing the event of men's resolutions by the objects and considerations which He appoints them to be moved with’. The point had been ‘much maintained’, he observed, by the Jesuits who coined scientia media, though he himself had ‘collected’ his own formulation ‘out of Durandus’ (the fourteenth-century Dominican Durandus de Sancto Porciano).Footnote ⁶⁰ But the greater truth is that Thorndike owed both the substance of his idea of synergistic grace and his sense of the explanatory power of scientia media to a nearer and superior master. It is at just this juncture, while tying up the ends of his argument, that he declares his concurrence with Arminius: ‘I am confident, that Arminius doth acknowledge the calling of God's grace to become effectual by means of the congruity of those helps which God provideth, with that disposition which God foreseeth, in him whom He appointeth to be moved by the same.’Footnote ⁶¹

From first to last Thorndike's conception of the covenant of grace undergirds the elaborated structure of exegesis and application. ‘My ground,’ Thorndike declares, is ‘God's tender of a treaty and conditions of peace and reconcilement’ by which every man ‘must stand or fall, as he hath performed the terms of it or not’.Footnote ⁶² The same covenant that certifies the terms of salvation and prescribes the norms of holiness also supports and channels the quest for grace. Encompassing all divine helps, it ensures God's acceptance of human effort, not for any inherent worth but solely from his own good pleasure by virtue of Christ's sacrifice. The covenant of grace thus contains the moral sum and evangelical sense of Christianity.

It is, then, within this covenant that God helps those who help themselves unto salvation. He does this through the quiet tactics of perfectly informed and thoroughly purposive indirection, not immediately determining how any person will choose among the courses that life constantly presents but instead ordaining and providing the means – occurrences and situations, individualised objects of choice, personally adjusted capabilities – whereby each one ‘will certainly proceed to determine his own choice’.Footnote ⁶³

Herbert Thorndike's tribute to the covenant of grace was (William Sparke's early modest effort aside) the first and finest of its Anglican kind. For prolixity, but also for depth of learning, rigour of argument and energy of thought, Of the covenant of grace occupies a class of its own. Other Interregnum churchmen, notably Henry Hammond and Jeremy Taylor, kept the covenant of grace in view and use; so also did Restoration preachers such as Adam Littleton and Ezekiel Hopkins.Footnote ⁶⁴ Even so, the effort to derive a category of ‘covenant Anglicanism’ from the writings of Hammond's and Thorndike's contemporaries and successors has not prospered.Footnote ⁶⁵ Thorndike's enterprise stands as the seventeenth-century Church of England's only substantial word on its subject; it seems almost to have exhausted Anglican interest in the field of federal divinity.

It should be borne in mind that Thorndike did not intend a systematic exposition of the doctrine of the covenant. His goal was to explain God's distribution of salvation in terms that assigned contingent accountability to the human side. Anglican predecessors had emphasised the power of baptismal grace and the binding nature of baptismal vows. Thorndike for his part shifted the focus of concern from baptism to regeneration. The reason may be partly circumstantial: he took to heart the spiritual deprivation of a rising generation of English men and women too many of whom had not received baptismal grace in the old right way. Targeting these souls-at-risk, he raised the preaching of the Word to primacy among God's helps and effectively demoted the blessing of the water. His programme of self-help called, moreover, for knowledgeable adults who by responding intelligently to the tender of Christianity would assume responsibility, God aiding, for their own spiritual progress.

The forerunners of Thorndike's swaggering Puritans had incorporated the covenant of grace into their strategies of reformation at a time when darkened souls were perceived to be thick on English ground. The tables being now reversed, Thorndike went back with full presence of mind to the 1590s, to the proleptic moment when Arminius took on Perkins in epistolary combat,Footnote ⁶⁶ in order to establish a starting point for his own counter-construction of the method of grace. This decision allowed him to ignore the radical mid-century reconstructions of federal teaching by Puritan dons and, across the English Channel, by Johannes Cocceius. His choice of Twisse as sole named adversary makes the point, for Twisse clung to the divine decrees and resisted the doctrine of the covenants.

As he declined to debate, so, too, Thorndike did not put forward a rival system of his own: he may be termed a covenant theologian in a functional but not a substantive sense. Furthermore, his choice of strategy bore an ambiguous relation to the historic practice of his Church. Sound churchmen in the broad line of Arthur Lake strongly commended the life of grace and duty but did not vie with one another, like so many Puritans, in looking into and laying out the procedural details of regeneration. Thorndike for his part assumed as given the liturgical and devotional conventions of religious life. He desired England's Christians to realise themselves as active, responsible confederates of Christ, but did not attempt to operationalise the details of the programme of helps within the context of worship. Fundamentals concerned him: in Of the covenant of grace he laid down the necessary prolegomena of discipleship against the day when the true Church would resume administration of the means of grace.

Herbert Thorndike paid to Puritan custodians of covenant theology a mixed (and tacit) tribute of appropriation and contestation. Taking the saving covenant for his subject, giving it great weight and presence, focusing on the processes and regimens of grace, and targeting adult cognition and experience, in these ways he chose to grapple with his Puritan adversaries on their own ground. It was, however, in important respects a ground that their most active and aspiring thinkers no longer occupied. The Anglican was risking anachronism when he attacked the Perkinsian foundations of a decree-based construct of federal theory that vanguard mid-century Puritans largely buried or abandoned. When they perceived God accomplishing his work on both sides of the evangelical covenant, when they scotched the federal quid pro quo and disenabled the transactive model of salvation, when they invoked the sovereign compact of the Persons of the Trinity, when, in short, they erased the human factor from the immediate relation of grace, post-Perkinsian Puritan federalists were demonstrating the pressure of divine totality upon the theological consciousness. Thorndike, too, felt that pressure, so intensely, indeed, that no Arminian modifying or scholastic qualifying could in the least affect his bedrock conviction that God ‘hath determined from everlasting the events of all future contingencies’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The covenant of grace, indeed the whole fabric of covenant theology, whether Puritan or Anglican, reposed upon the confidence of that faith. Either way, it represented a triumph of first principles and predeterminant assumptions.