The “Antinomianisme” Of The “Red Dragon”: John Goodwin’s Flight From The Moral Law -- By: David Parnham
Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 79:2 (Fall 2017)
Article: The “Antinomianisme” Of The “Red Dragon”: John Goodwin’s Flight From The Moral Law
Author: David Parnham
WTJ 79:2 (Fall 2017) p. 267
The “Antinomianisme” Of The “Red Dragon”:
John Goodwin’s Flight From The Moral Law
David Parnham is an independent scholar who lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Abstract
It was as England’s premier seventeenth-century “Arminian” that John Goodwin acquired the greater part of his theological notoriety. But Goodwin had been raising the hackles of Puritan brethren for a decade prior to his Arminian turn of 1647. In the 1630s and early 1640s, Goodwin had been bothered by the moral law. This drew him, quite professedly, into disagreement with “orthodox” divines. Scarcely, if ever, noticed in the scholarly literature is Thomas Edwards’s reprobation of Goodwin’s “antinomianisme.” Historians, justifiably, exercise caution in the presence of Edwardsian rancor, but there is reason for thinking that Edwards had spotlighted a tendency, or drawn attention to a disposition. In elaborating practically and doctrinally upon a deep suspicion of the moral law—articulated very clearly in utterances concerning conversion and justification—Goodwin landed himself in antinomist territory. Herein, he was taking cues from a Puritan predecessor, Anthony Wotton, who, in 1613, had been tried for heresy, and who, it was said, provided inspiration to antinomians. Goodwin fully expected that the “zealous” would accuse him of “Heresie,” and so it turned out. The pejorative eponyms “Socinianism” and “Arminianism” were hurled at Goodwin throughout the 1640s and 1650s, in relation to various points of doctrine; but the matter of his “antinomianism” places a particular focus on the consequences of Goodwin’s flight from the moral law.
John Goodwin loathed antinomians. Frequently and famously at loggerheads with colleagues in the Puritan pastorate, Goodwin stood as one with fellow ministers against antinomian error. He eyed the spectral horrors that false doctrine spawned: what was a Ranter “but an Antinomian sublimated”?1 This was a question for the 1650s, when avatars of “free grace”
WTJ 79:2 (Fall 2017) p. 268
were sinking to unprecedented depths of moral depravity. But long before the lurid stories of Ranters burst upon mid-century news-print to assault the keepers of England’s godly consciousness, Goodwin had been dispensing antidotes to antinomian soteriology.2 He turned Arminian in 1647, but since at least 1644 he had been urging parishioners to use the “power” that they possessed in order to “improve” the “abilities” with which God had vested them—a kind of self-help corrective to the “humankind-need-do-nothing” since ...
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