Theopedia

Stephen Charnock

“The being of a God is the guard of the world: the sense of a God is the foundation of civil order: without this there is no tie upon the consciences of men.” Stephen Charnock, on the practical necessity of belief in God1

Overview

Stephen Charnock (1628-1680) was an English Puritan divine, best known for The Existence and Attributes of God, a series of lectures delivered at Crosby Hall in London and cut short by his death, first published posthumously in 1682.2 The work runs to fourteen extended discourses on God’s existence and thirteen of his attributes. Matthew Barrett names Charnock, alongside Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Herman Bavinck, among the historic “greats” whose doctrine of God is classical theism.3

Life and Ministry

Charnock was born in 1628 in the parish of St Katherine Cree, London.2 He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was converted, then held a private tutorship and a ministry post in Southwark before gaining a fellowship at New College, Oxford, where he served as senior proctor.2

In 1656 he moved to Ireland as chaplain to Henry Cromwell, governor of Ireland, and preached regularly in Dublin to a socially and denominationally mixed congregation.2 The 1660 Restoration of Charles II ended his public ministry under the restored penal laws, both in Ireland and after his return to England, and he spent the following years in private study.2 In 1675 he became co-pastor with Thomas Watson at Crosby Hall, London, where he preached the lectures that became The Existence and Attributes of God until his death on 27 July 1680.2

Theological Contribution

The Existence and Attributes of God

Charnock’s major work opens with two discourses on atheism: Discourse I argues from Scripture and reason that there is a God, and Discourse II, “On Practical Atheism,” distinguishes speculative unbelief from the more common failure of professed believers to live as though God is real, present, and aware of them.4 The remaining twelve discourses treat God’s being a spirit, spiritual worship, eternity, immutability, omnipresence, knowledge, wisdom, power, holiness, goodness, dominion, and patience.1

Charnock is careful to distinguish attributes that are easily confused. On power and dominion, he writes that “we must know the difference between the might or power of God and his authority”: omnipotence is God’s “physical power, whereby he is able to do what he will,” while dominion is his “moral power, whereby it is lawful for him to do what he will.”5 On the incarnation and divine immutability, he holds that “there was no change in the Divine nature of the Son, when he assumed human nature. There was an union of the two natures, but no change of the Deity into the humanity, or of the humanity into the Deity: both preserved their peculiar properties.”6 Peter Sammons cites both passages as clear statements of divine omnipotence and impassibility respectively in his own contemporary defense of the classical divine attributes.7

Charnock also wrote at length on regeneration; a later collected edition of his works groups this material into its own volume, The New Birth.8

Historical Significance

Charnock’s formulation of the covenant of redemption, the pre-temporal agreement between the Father and the Son over the elect’s salvation, became the subject of a direct, dated dispute within the early Particular Baptist movement. In his Display of Glorious Grace (1698), Benjamin Keach argued that Charnock’s presentation made “too hard of a division between” the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace, treating them as though they were two essentially distinct covenants rather than “distinct parts of the said one intire covenant”; Keach classed Charnock’s formulation, along with the Baxterian developments it suggested, among the more theologically dangerous versions of the distinction current in his day.9

Charnock’s discourses are still cited in contemporary Reformed retrieval of classical theism. Barrett’s 2019 None Greater places him in company with Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Bavinck as a historic guide to the doctrine of God,3 and Sammons’s 2023 The Forgotten Attributes of God draws directly on Charnock’s discourses to defend divine omnipotence and impassibility against contemporary objections.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), 1: Discourse I, “On the Existence of God,” 23-88. ↩ ↩2

  2. “Stephen Charnock,” Wikipedia, accessed September 19, 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), “Introduction: Surprised by God.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Charnock, 1: Discourse II, “On Practical Atheism,” 89-175. ↩

  5. Charnock, 2: Discourse XIII, “On God’s Dominion,” 356-471. ↩

  6. Charnock, 1: Discourse VI, “On the Immutability of God,” 339-340. ↩

  7. Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 8, “Impassibility,” 168, and chap. 11, “Omnipotence,” 221. ↩ ↩2

  8. Stephen Charnock, The New Birth, vol. 3 of The Works of Stephen Charnock, cited in Matthew Barrett, Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), bibliography. ↩

  9. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), chap. 2, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” 42-44. ↩