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EARLY NEW ENGLAND

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

All ends of th' earth remember shall and turne unto the Lord: and thee all heathen-families to worship shall accord. Because unto Iehovah doth the kingdome appertaine: and he among the nations is ruler Soveraigne. (Psalm 22:27-28; Bay Psalm Book)

The framework of the ecclesiastical organization, and some of the civil organization, of early colonial New England had its origins in the parochial system of Europe and Old England. Since many who came to New England were unhappy with both the church and the state in Old England, they abandoned many of the ecclesiastical and civil institutions of the English world that they associated with the oppression of the Stuart regime. Nevertheless, at the most fundamental level most early New Englanders thought like the Europeans that they were, and when it came time to arrange the institutions of church and state, all of the colonies except Rhode Island unconsciously adopted the European arrangement of a state church. The manner in which that system functioned is foreign to many people of modern times.

Ever since the first century the Christian church has struggled over its organization, particularly when Christianity left the eastern Mediterranean and spread to the Roman Empire, eastern and western. The early church was a tiny minority in the empire, and its members joined voluntarily. Nevertheless, the Old Testament could not be forgotten. In the two millennia before Jesus Christ, the Israelites had conquered Canaan, divided it, and constructed a worship center in Jerusalem. Support for the temple in Jerusalem was not voluntary, but coercive; every obedient Israelite had to give a tenth, or tithe, of the produce of the land to the Lord. Often through the centuries the Israelites failed to obey this law; but early Christians who studied the Old Testament could not forget it.

Because early Christianity had a voluntary, often persecuted membership, it did not have to face problems of compulsory support, though it did, however, develop an episcopal government, and located church centers in major cities where a bishop supervised surrounding smaller churches in other parts of the city, the suburbs, or the rural countryside. But after Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and led many of his followers into the church, the status of Christianity as a minority religion changed, and the Roman civil regime started to support the church. Emperor Theodosius eventually made Christianity the official religion of the empire, the western side of the empire fell to the barbarians, and the barbarians adopted the Roman religion - now Christianity. In the same way that Romans followed Constantine into the church, the barbarian tribes followed their leaders. Mass baptisms were common, and by A.D. 500 the church had to train vast numbers of people - both barbarian and Roman - who knew little about Christianity, its canonical Scriptures, its worship, its doctrines, or its behavioral standards.

To cope, the church adopted the governmental divisions of the empire, a system developed by Diocletian at the end of the third century. Each part of the empire was divided into tiny paroikii, or parishes, and the church adopted this division as it secured hegemony over the European and Mediterranean world. Each parish was linked to a bishop in a larger city, and the bishops were linked by patriarchs, who resided in five cities: Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. The church therefore moved from an organization based on voluntaristic principles to a compulsory organization including all the citizens of a geographical region, whether willing or unwilling. Unexpectedly, the church found itself repeating the experience of the Israelites who established dominance over Canaan. Although they had no divine command to extirpate all current inhabitants, dealt with a geographical area vastly larger, and had in the New Testament no explicit instructions as to how Christians were to conduct themselves in positions of power, they did discover in the Old Testament ideas about power, and they debated for the next 1,500 years how the Old Testament should be used in the Christian era. One facet of Israelite experience adopted by the European Christians was the financial practice of tithes, or tenths. The European church required that all citizens of a parish - including such minorities as Jews - remit 10 percent of their income to the local parish priest and church.

For a millennium and a half after the conversion of Constantine, the church upheld the political regimes and they upheld the church. At times the two battled ferociously, but both ecclesiastical and civil control were exercised at national and local levels by officials usually committed to upholding the power of both ecclesiastical and civil regimes. Alternatives were available-monasteries took over huge expanses of land, town guilds often had their own chapels, and the elite nobility had private chapels-but every Christian in Europe was answerable to some form of ecclesiastical authority.

England was no exception. By 1086, the Domesday Book indicated that the realm was divided into about 8,000 parishes. Each parish had as its nerve center one - and only one - church, which all the people in the parish were obligated to attend and support. The boundary lines between parishes were somewhat fluid, but every scrap of land in England was accounted for either parochially or monastically. Each parish reported to its bishop in its episcopal city: the bishop reported to the archbishop of Canterbury; and the archbishop reported to the pope in Rome and the Crown in London. The system of tithes was entrenched, and depending on the size of the parish the tithes could generate large or small amounts of income. To found a new church in England during the medieval and early modern periods required establishing a new parish, which entailed an act of parliament. To establish a church independent of parliamentary, episcopal, and royal authority was illegal, and an act of treason against Crown and church.

The early modern period saw the beginning of the end of the parochial and diocesan system that had embodied "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church" for 1,000 years. The European expansion into the Americas opened up vast tracts of land for settlement by Europeans unhappy with either their financial condition or the spiritual condition of their churches. The Spanish conquest of South America resulted in a flood of gold and silver into the European economic system, bringing long-term inflation. This economic change made it harder for peasants to stay on the land on the basis of the old medieval prices, for landlords to keep the old medieval rents and to refrain from enclosing the land for more efficient agriculture, and for the church to collect the medieval tithes.

Second, Martin Luther in 1517 launched the Reformation that split Western Christianity and led to the fierce wars between 1540 and 1648. Finally, while Henry VIII of England at first condemned the Protestant revolt he ended up joining it as a matter of convenience, to justify his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to produce a male heir. Consequently, the Roman Catholic Church in England became the Protestant Church of England, and between 1529 and 1536 the king and parliament severed all ties with Rome. England retained an episcopal polity and the parochial system for the new national church, but by 1546 the king had dissolved the monastic system. Its lands were given to royal favorites or sold off to the highest bidder, and were not used to form new parishes. Apart from the brief reign of Mary Tudor (1553-58), England became a Protestant country with a national church that was episcopal in government and geographically and parochially structured. All English people were obligated to support a church that, by the decree of the king but not necessarily the desire of its members, was now Protestant.

After the death of Henry VIII in 1546/7 three of his children, all different in religious conviction, came to the throne. Edward VI, the only son, set England moving in a Protestant direction during his brief reign, 1546/7-53. At his death, his half-sister Mary took the throne for an even briefer reign, 1553-58. The daughter of Catherine of Aragon, she was a staunch Roman Catholic determined to return England to the papal fold. Two decisions especially alienated Mary from her people: her decision to marry the Catholic king of Spain, Philip II, and her policy of publicly burning defiant Protestants at the stake. With Mary's reign the population began to lean toward Protestantism, and when Elizabeth I came to the throne at Mary's death in 1558, Elizabeth adopted a mild form of Protestantism that was specifically vague in its doctrine and restrained in its program of reformation.

It was disappointment in the Elizabethan reforms that started the fragmentation of English Protestantism and led to a Puritan movement that took on many forms over the next century. Historians still argue about its definition. For this section of our study, we shall concern ourselves only with the Puritanism of Old England in the period 1560-1640, concentrating on the ideas and practices that influenced the Puritanism of New England.

English Puritanism after 1560 developed at a time when the practices and theologies of the Reformation churches were coming to maturity. Luther was now dead, and Calvin had just finished the final 1559 edition of his Institutes. The Catholic Council of Trent was concluding, and it allowed no concessions to the Protestants. Although the Treaty of Augsburg (1555) recognized Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire, the struggle between Protestants and Roman Catholics was being taken up by the magistrates as well as the theologians. Protestants, with their emphasis on the lay understanding of Scripture, quarreled among themselves over the Lord's Supper, providence, predestination and foreknowledge, the atonement, the church, baptism, the relationship between the church and the civil magistrate, ecclesiastical polity, apostolic succession, ordination, reason and rationality in theology, worship and its regulation, Christian experience and conversion, the Holy Spirit in the Christian life, and the millennium and what would happen at the end of the world.

In England, variations on these problems tried the Church of England between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Anne - the years 1558 to 1714. The Puritan movement began with an argument over vestments in worship. It was transformed in the 1570s by disputes over church government: many who identified themselves as Puritans stood for a presbyterian form of church polity. Others thought that the Church of England was beyond hope of reformation, and so, in scattered parts of England, but particularly around London and in the southeast, some withdrew from the parochial church and formed their own churches without episcopal, legislative, or monarchical approval. For these Separatists, who now adopted congregational church government, the church depended not upon parochial geography but on a covenantal bond rooted in an intense religious experience and a commitment to Protestant doctrine. Members came from several parishes; the criterion for admission to these voluntary groups was not geographical proximity but submission to a written covenant.

The Crown deemed such actions as treasonous against a divinely sanctioned Church of England. While Separatism attacked the national polity, it also tore at the fabric of the local social polity, both civil and ecclesiastical. It threatened the system of compulsory tithes, and strained the local communal structure of early modern agricultural society. To withdraw from the local parish was a bold step indeed. Sometimes it was done secretly, with Separatists supporting two churches financially. Others publicly took the step, or were exposed publicly, and died for it, condemned as traitors. Still others fled to the European continent, particularly Holland.

After the suppression of the Presbyterian movement in the early 1590s, Puritanism turned their attention in other directions. Inspired by the preaching of William Perkins, the minister of the Parish of Great St. Andrews in Cambridge, a generation of Puritan clerics trained at Cambridge University became preoccupied with conversion. They concluded that many in England, perhaps the majority, considered themselves Christians when in fact they were not. These "experimental Puritans" thought that the problem was not simply church government but hypocrisy. Since the parochial system counted all but the most scandalous as Christians - and could be lax with discipline - hypocrites abounded within the Church. The Puritan preachers remembered the Sermon on the Mount:

Not euery one that saith vnto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdome of heauen: but he that doth the will of my father which is in heauen. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, haue we not prophecied in thy name? and in thy name haue cast out deuils? and in thy name done many wonderfull works? And then wil I professe vnto them, I neuer knew you: Depart from me, ye that worke iniquity. (Matthew 7:21-23)

For the experimental preacher, therefore, it was incumbent upon the church to restrict admission to baptism and the Lord's Supper, excluding not only "open and notorious evil livers" but also everyone who gave only assent to Christian belief (a type of faith called "historical faith") but who gave no evidence of having "saving faith," or a living faith wherein a person experienced the presence and power of the living God, realized his wickedness, repented of sin, embraced Jesus Christ, claimed Christ's righteousness in order to stand before God, and sought to live a holy and godly life. According to experimental Puritanism, to admit unworthy members to the Lord's Supper and to baptize their children would simply allow them to "drink damnation unto themselves" and to bring God's judgment on the entire parish (1 Corinthians 11:27-32).

The zeal of the experimental Calvinists, however, led to dilemmas. While such concern could protect the Lord's table validly and could drive home to the scandalous the danger of eternal damnation, it could also lead to pastoral problems. The first was the problem of assurance. Experimental preaching had the potential to keep worthy partakers from the sacraments and throw them into anxiety about their salvation. The sensitive conscience might ask: "Am I really saved? Have I deceived myself all of these years?" Second, if Jesus said that "faith as a mustard seed" could save some (Matthew 17:20), how much was enough for justification before God and the gift of eternal life? How is such faith measured?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from EARLY NEW ENGLAND by David A. Weir Copyright © 2005 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co..
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