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John Cotton came to Massachusetts from Boston, England. He was a respected minister, although his teachings on the matter of justification and sanctification ran more towards the position that we’re calling “antinomian” than most of his fellow ministers. Anne Hutchinson, herself the daughter of a controversial minister, had been an admirer of Cotton, and sometimes a visitor to his church. She responded very strongly to the controversial elements in Cotton’s theology, being already inclined towards mysticism and at least open to some of the more controversial currents in English Christianity. Unhappy that her inspiration had gone to New England, she […]

We need to wrestle with some key concepts in puritan theology, in order to understand the crises which arise in Massachusetts Bay, and give rise to changes in colonial culture. The key question of Christian theology is, of course, “what must a man do to be saved?” The key question in the organization of a Christian society is, unsurprisingly, “how are the saints to be recognized?” The leadership of the community–ministers and secular officials, operating in a context without church-state separation–naturally have a large stake in maintaining discipline and conformity. Toleration in the Bay was frequently understood as “toleration of […]

Freedom is, on this model, freedom to do good. And good is defined as actions in accordance with God’s will. Unfreedom comes from sin, or from subjection to Satan’s power. Our natures, though fallen, are still essentially oriented towards this variety of good. We are free to pursue our true natures only when we escape the influences of sin. Depending on the specific interpretation of some of the finer points of puritan theology, this form of freedom may amount to something very like a complete surrender. The varieties of puritanism which most emphasize the competely “free” nature of God’s grace–it’s […]

We’ll have occassion to dwell quite a bit on the less positive aspects of New England puritanism, and Foner presents the puritan model of freedom as the foil for “American freedom” which, he says, “began in revolution.” But we shouldn’t lose track of the ways in which the puritans were, through a combination of adherence to Bible doctrine and acknowledgment of necessity, humane and progressive figures. It’s important to remember that there is not some catastrophic or revolutionary transformation in the colonial populace between the Plymouth Rock landing and the War of Independence. What occured was a gradual process, punctuated […]

GREAT IDEAS: SO WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT, ANYWAY? For the duration of the semester, we’re all going to be concerned with “great ideas.” Specifically, in this section, we’ll be looking at, or looking for, “Great Ideas in America.” It would be convenient if, here at the outset, we could just lay out some criteria for judging the “greatness” of ideas and go from there. With our criteria in place, we could just assemble a group of “great texts,” or Great Books, embodying ideas of unquestionably greatness, and familiarize ourselves with them. For a variety of reasons, things won’t be quite […]