Redeeming Free Grace: Thomas Hooker and the Contested Language of Salvation

Abstract

It was with a flourish of grace-borne optimism that Thomas Hooker opened his massive redaction of a career's worth of “preparationist” theology, the posthumously publishedApplication of Redemption. The sermons in which this two-volume work consists were published in London in 1656, under the editorial direction of the Independent divines Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, but had been preached in New England in the aftermath of the “free-grace controversy” of the mid-1630s and rewritten by Hooker in the 1640s in order to “refine and expand” his previous explications of soul work. Setting concerned sights upon old England's luxuriant antinomian problem, Goodwin and Nye turned to Hooker, late of Chelmsford and Connecticut, in hopes that a strong dose of spiritual discipline might restore moral order to a disordered land. The God of the preparationists, it has been remarked, contributed centrally to an “emerging culture of stamina and rigor”; by the 1650s, however, the God who made his orderly favors known “by a long procession of hints, of interpretable suggestions” had relinquished the reins of moral control. None was better qualified than Hooker to interrogate fault for the sake of the regaining of favor.