Rev J R Tallach
The controversy involving John Cotton and Mrs Anne Hutchinson, noted in the previous article, had its roots among the Puritans in England. Ephraim Pagitt, a Puritan and a teacher of John Eaton writes, “The first Antinomian among us (that I have heard of) is John Eaton, a scholar of mine”. Life of John Eaton (c1575-1631). Not much about this man’s life has survived but it is known that he was born in Kent and graduated MA from Oxford in 1603. Around 1610 he became vicar of Wickham Market, Suffolk, and soon thereafter developed the doctrine that God saw no sin in the believer. For this he was disciplined in 1614 and his teaching denounced as “strange, pernicious and heretical”; it was claimed that “he plainly avouched this special doctrine was revealed to him by prayer”. He continued to propagate his views, suffered further discipline, and was required to undergo further education in order to rectify his errors. Little is known about Eaton’s latter years but two of his books were published posthumously: The Honeycombe of Free Justification by Christ Alone and The Discovery of the Most Dangerous Dead Faith. Eaton occupied such a dominant position in this controversy that the term Eatonist was coined to describe those, such as Roger Brierley (1586-1637), Robert Towne (1593-1663) and Tobias Crisp (1600-1643), who followed his views.
As a measure against which to assess Eaton’s views, Jonathon Beeke uses the teaching of William Ames on Federal Theology. Federal Theology was in their time coming fully of age in Reformed thinking but, while Ames accepted Federal Theology, Eaton did not. In his Medulla Theologiae, published in 1623, Ames states that God entered into covenant with Adam as federal head of all humankind. Ames writes, “Adam’s posterity were to derive all good and evil from him”, depending on his fulfilment of, or failure to keep, the commands of God. Based on Adam’s performance, humanity would either experience God’s blessing or His curse.
In Ames’ view, the two sacraments of Eden – the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – respectively embody the reward of eternal life on keeping the commandment and the punishment involved in failing to keep the terms of what Ames calls the “old covenant”. All humanity fell “root and head” in Adam’s disobedience. God graciously provided a way of restoration in Christ. Ames divided this way of restoration into two parts, redemption and application, with the new covenant operating as a covenant of reconciliation between enemies. Christ as mediator has satisfied the law and this permits the application of it to His people – evangelical obedience to that law is required of them. This mediation of Christ was necessary for all ages in the history of redemption.
The Covenant of grace has been one and the same in all ages, since the mediation of Christ was necessary through the whole of redemptive history. Each individual is chosen in Christ and is united with Him in the fullness of time. From this union flows the blessing of justification, adoption, sanctification and glory. The first two of these blessings, justification and adoption, are relative changes while the last two, sanctification and glory, are absolute or real. It was with this federal order of things that Eaton took issue.
Free Justification in John Eaton’s Theology.
In his The Discovery of the Most Dangerous Dead Faith, Eaton expresses concern over those who are deluded into thinking they have a real living faith but whose faith is a mere illusion or a “dead faith”. Eaton divides those having a dead faith into “hogs” and “dogs”. The hogs are easily distinguished as they are attracted to the mire and trample the pearl of the gospel (free justification) under their feet. Those termed dogs are more difficult to recognise as they feed on the carrion of good works, obedience and well-doing, “while snapping furiously at those who teach the doctrine of free justification”. Paul’s, “Beware of dogs” (Phil 3.2) is, in Eaton’s estimate, applicable to them.
Eaton described many as “in name Protestants, and [by] profession themselves utter enemies to Papists, in that (as they say) they will not give the least piece of justification to works and holy walking,” yet such persons, in establishing their own righteousness, in fact “shake hands” with the Roman Catholic Church. They are to be “roundly and roughly dealt with”. Instruction in the doctrine of justification was the cure prescribed by Eaton for such. He saw justification – the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to a sinner – as “the very sum of the gospel: yea, as the very sum of the benefits of Christ”. The active and passive obedience of Christ, Eaton was saying, by which He satisfies the demands and the wrath of the Father, is imputed to believers and constitutes the formal cause of the believer’s justification. In this way the justified believer is clothed in the wedding garment of Christ and thus wholly clear of any sin in the sight of God.
A large part of Eaton’s Honeycombe enlarges on this effect of the wedding garment. Where the Bible makes plain that God did see sin in His people, as in the case of David, Eaton lays out a three-stage redemptive history. The doctrine of free justification is in the first stage “hid and veiled”, so that God did indeed see David’s sin. The Old Testament saints lived during the first stage; they were as slaves under the whip for their faults. The second stage was from the time of John the Baptist to the crucifixion of Christ. Thus God did see and punish the sin of Peter. “The maturing bride is readying herself to put on fully the wedding garment.” The third stage far exceeds the other two in glory, and so the figure of the child in school is past with the death of Christ. Why then, asks Eaton, should we regress to the Old Testament and demand strict and legal obedience? This would constitute a denial of the presence and blessing of the wedding garment of free justification.
Eaton’s three stages of redemptive history are what principally separate him from Ames. Ames sees the one Covenant of grace effecting, in the believer, first union with Christ, and then justification and sanctification. Eaton, as outlined below, reverses the order. Eaton’s former teacher Pagitt sees Eaton’s views as “a fiction and vile aspersions”. Eaton looks only at the covering over of sin that he finds in justification. Sanctification becomes an imperfect expression of this righteousness before man. For Ames, justification and sanctification are both benefits arising from being united to Christ. By contrast, Eaton holds that sanctification is a mere “filthy rags” interior covered over by the objective exterior righteousness. In this way, Eaton speaks as though there were two souls in the believer: “as if a Christian had two souls in him, first as he is a man, and secondly as he is a Christian; his soul as he is a man is his natural soul, by which he lives truly only to this world; but his soul as he is a Christian is Christ’s righteousness”.
Ames speaks of sanctification effecting “a real change of qualities and disposition in the believer and this person being . . . freed from the sordidness and stain of sin”. Eaton then seems to believe that the believer has two different modes of existence: one objective before God (justification) and the other subjective and imperfect before man (sanctification). Though Eaton speaks strongly of the union of the believer with Christ, he speaks of this union arising from free justification. In other words, union with Christ comes after justification, “when all our sins are abolished and we are made perfectly holy and righteous from all spot of sin, in the sight of God, freely”. “Then the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in us and knits us, and unites us, as fit members, into the blessed body of Jesus Christ.”
Since the believer is covered with the perfect robe of Christ’s righteousness, Eaton believes that the Christian becomes Christ so that the union blurs the distinction between creature and Creator. “This union and conjunction then is the cause that I am separated from myself and translated into Christ and His kingdom, which is a kingdom of grace, righteousness, peace, joy, salvation and glory.” The spotless garment of Christ’s righteousness acts as a shell, covering over a central corrupt and putrifying sore. Taken overall, Eaton’s views were a significant departure from those of the mainstream Puritans and, more importantly, from the Word of God.
Having given a historical overview of Antinomianism in last month’s article, this second part is intended to give a clearer view of this error by providing an account of John Eaton as “the father of Antinomianism”. This section draws freely from a paper by Jonathon D Beeke in the Puritan Reformed Journal for July 2012, “Hogs, Dogs and a Wedding Garment: John Eaton, His doctrine of Free Justification, and Covenant Theology within the Godly Puritan Community”.