Fatherhood Quote by Thomas Goodwin

Goodwin is doing something quietly radical for a 17th-century English pulpit: stripping spiritual entitlement down to size. The sentence reads like a legal disclaimer, but it lands like a warning. He invokes Abraham not as a flattering ancestor for Christians to appropriate, but as a boundary marker. Abraham is the father of promise in Scripture; you, listener, are not. However much you might want to inherit that status by proximity, tradition, or national religion, Goodwin insists the original covenantal “promise” was not yours to transmit as if grace were property.

The syntax matters. It’s knotty, almost self-thwarting, because it enacts the theological point: the promise cannot be handled casually, cannot be passed along by ordinary family logic. He’s speaking into a culture obsessed with lineage and legitimacy (politically and spiritually), where church membership and salvation were often treated as communal inheritance. Puritan debates over baptism, covenant membership, and who counts among “the godly” sit behind the phrasing. Goodwin, a major Independent voice, is pressing against any assumption that being born into the right household, parish, or nation makes you a stakeholder in divine favor.

Subtext: stop confusing collective belonging with personal faith. He concedes a tempting counterargument (“although the promise... had belonged to us”) only to undercut it with the Abraham clause: even if you could claim it in aggregate, you still wouldn’t wield it like Abraham did. It’s pastoral and polemical at once, a sentence designed to unsettle comfortable Christians who mistake inheritance for conversion.