Before the Beginning : “Winthrop, Miller, & Noll”

Before the Beginning:“Winthrop, Miller, & Noll” “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” (Sociology 159)

Mission and Identity • Miller: “They say, unanimously, that New England was sent on an errand, and that it has failed.” • Errand • To perform a task for a superior • The task itself • “Now in the 1660's the problem was: which had New England originally been-an errand-boy or a doer of errands? In which sense had it failed? Had it been despatched for a further purpose, or was it an end in itself? Or had it fallen short not only in one or the other, but in both of the meanings? (3-4)

The previous migrants, the Pilgrims, had been driven out of England, but The Great Migration of 1630 was different: • “It had a positive sense of mission—either it was sent on an errand or it had its own intention, but in either case the deed was deliberate. It was an act of will, perhaps of willfulness. These Puritans were not driven out of England (thousands of their fellows stayed and fought the Cavaliers)—they went of their own accord.” (5-6) • A contract between the community and God • Winthrop: “Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing.” • Community emphasis pervasive

Winthrop • “Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; • but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.”

Miller: MA bay had its own errand, to set up “ecclesiastical government [...] the pure Biblical polity,” the body of Christ • Winthrop: “among the members of the same body, love and affection are reciprocal in a most equal and sweet kind of commerce. The mouth is at all the pains to receive and mince the food which serves for the nourishment of all the other parts of the body; yet it hath no cause to complain; for first the other parts send back, by several passages, a due proportion of the same nourishment, in a better form for the strengthening and comforting the mouth.” • Social unity through shared belief • Covenanted communitya • Wealth not a result of labor, but of divine favor (7-8)

But in the 1630s, the “errand” into the wilderness had not been for the wilderness: • “This was the large unspoken assumption in the errand of 1630: if the conscious intention were realized, not only would a federated Jehovah bless the new land, but He would bring back these temporary colonials to govern England. In this respect, therefore, we may say that the Migration was running an errand in the earlier and more primitive sense of the word—performing a job not so much for Jehovah as for history, which was the wisdom of Jehovah expressed through time.” (14)

Winthrop • “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. • We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.”

The mission had been to demonstrate the possibilities of Puritan government for imitation in in Europe • Winthrop: “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘may the Lord make it like that of New England.’” • Miller: “If the due form of government were not everywhere to be saluted, what would New England have upon its hands?” • But victorious English Puritans moved to toleration, abandoning the political project of the New England Puritans • NE Puritans like actors on empty stage (15-16)

Miller: “There is nothing but tragedy in the realization that one was in the main path of events, and now is sidetracked and disregarded. One is always able, of course, to stand firm on his first resolution, and to condemn the clown of history for taking the wrong turning: yet this is a desolating sort of Stoicism, because it always carries with it the recognition that history will never come back to the predicted path, and that with one's own demise, righteousness must die out of the world.” (17)

For the descendents of 1630, “His greatest difficulty would be not the stones, storms, and Indians, but the problem of his identity. In something of this sort, I should like to suggest, consists the anxiety and torment that inform productions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries-and should I say, some thereafter?” • “In the self-condemnations of later generations, “There is bewilderment, confusion, chagrin, but there is no surrender. A task has been assigned upon which the populace are in fact intensely engaged. But they are not sure any more for just whom they are working; they know they are moving, but they do not know where they are going. • They seem still to be on an errand, but if they are no longer inferiors sent by the superior forces of the Reformation, to whom they should report, then their errand must be wholly of the second sort, something with a purpose and an intention sufficient unto itself. If so, what is it? (19)

Why had the mission failed? • “These citizens found that they had no other place to search but within them-selves,-even though, at first sight, that repository appeared to be nothing but a sink of iniquity. Their errand having failed in the first sense of the term, they were left with the second, and required to fill it with meaning by themselves and out of themselves. Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America.” (19)

Mark A. Noll • John Edwards • Evangelical leader during Great Awakening • Rejected notion that New England was itself a covenanted society, demanded that individuals visibly and individually form a sincere personal covenant with God • ‘Purified’ church • End of the “Puritan canopy” • But the shadow of the covenanted community remains • His writing had the effect “of weakening one era’s theological canopy without offering anything to take its place and so opened thought to a subtle, yet powerful, move from theology to politics, and intellectual leadership to a shift from the clergy to men of state.” (44-50)

Christian Republicanism • “In the thirteen colonies that became the United States, republican and Protestant convictions merged as they did nowhere else in the world.” • “By the early decades of the nineteenth century, it had become a matter of routine for American believers of many types to speak of Christian and republican values with a single voice.” • Initially, concerns with transcendental religious concerns leaves republicanism a secondary concern • Yet the terms of slavery, citizen, freedom, virtue and vice become key terms of colonial Christianity • Nonetheless, “Despite these early indications of shared Protestant-republican perception, colonists until the middle of the eighteenth century were more likely to view radical Whig [republican] principles as opposed to religion than supporting it.” (73-75)

Republicanism • Antimonarchical • Citizens & citizenship • Rights as citizens • Liberty vs. slavery • Virtue vs. vice • Law and consent

Mid-18th C. conflicts between France and Britain in N. America • “The importance of ... Anti-Catholic convictions must be stressed.” • Samuel Davies, 1755: “‘Our religion, our liberty, our property, our lives, and everything sacred to us are in danger,’ especially of being ‘enslaved’ by ‘an arbitrary, absolute monarch’ enforcing conformity to ‘the superstitions and idolatries of the church of Rome.’” • A fusion of republican and religious values (78-82)

George Whitfield • Evangelist • “Plowed a cultural terrain in which republican Christianity would later flourish.” • “Must we submit to their commands / Presumptuously they say / No, let us break their slavish bands / And cast their chains away.” • More anti-Catholic than republican, focused on spiritual liberty more than political • But his disciples were strikingly more political. • At 1770 funeral: “He was a warm friend to religious liberty, but he was no less a friend to the civil liberties of mankind. He was a patriot, not in shew, but in reality, and an enemy to tyranny. He abhorred episcopal oppression. [...] Under God it was in no small measure owing to him that the Stamp act, that first attack upon our liberties in these colonies, was repealed.” (75-77)

The fusion of religious and republican language acted as a ‘disinfectant’ for republican ideas of which believers might have otherwise regarded with suspicion. • Thomas Paine, Common Sense • Religious language used to generate support for the revolution • “a new Israel” • “In the immediate context, the argument against parliament acquired the emotive force of revival. In the longer term, religious values migrated along with religious terms into the political speech and so changed political values. • But the migration also moved the other way: A religious language put to political use took on political values that altered the substance of religion.”

Before the Beginning : “Winthrop, Miller, & Noll”