Puritan Missions

New England Puritans as the Grandparents of Modern Protestant Missions

New England Puritans, the grandparents of modern Protestant missions. Protestant mission history, from the Reformation to the Great Century, is often told as an overwhelmingly European affair. The American contributions to setting up the missionary explosion of the 19th century are often minimized, if not ignored.

Stephen Neal's respected A History of Christian Missions dedicates less than a page to American missionaries John Elliott and David Brannard combined. But as we shall see, these two products of New England Puritanism, along with the last great Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, were instrumental in setting the stage for the Great Century.

Missionary Motives in the Puritan Settlement of New England

The Puritans began their errand into the wilderness of America for ostensibly missionary reasons. Beyond the high-flown rhetoric of John Winthrop's call in a 1630 sermon for a city upon a hill, they had an immediate goal to reach the savages, as they called them, for their brand of Christianity.

The more immediate mission to the indigenous people of New England had not only the goal of bringing the gospel and civilization to them, but the long-range target of demonstrating God's blessing upon the Puritan experiment.

While results of this immediate mission were disappointing, the forces they set in motion in the wilderness of New England eventually changed the world, especially the world of missions. Through trial and error, the New England Puritans blazed trails for Protestant missions and shaped the way missions would later be done in the Great Century.

Perhaps naively, the Puritans believed that the indigenous folk of New England would be so attracted to their way of life that they would flock to their churches to hear the gospel. This is missions as a city upon a hill.

Richard Cogley calls this effective missions. King Charles I described it best in granting the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter that the people from England quote, may be so religiously, peaceably, and civilly governed as their good life and orderly conversation may win and incite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind and the Christian faith, unquote.

Are we to take these statements of missions seriously? Richard Cogley has uncovered several pieces of evidence that lead him to believe that the Puritan founders of New England saw missions as one of the primary motives for planting the city upon a hill.

First, John Winthrop put Indian evangelism as the top reason on several lists on why to go to New England. Second, Puritan leaders personally drafted the missionary purpose statement. Third, they designed the seal with an explicit missionary meaning.

Fourth, they composed the governor's pledge, quote, to draw the natives of this country to the knowledge of the true God. And fifth, John Cotton's farewell sermon to the initial great migration fleet exhorted them to, quote, win the Indians to the love of Christ, unquote.

And remember that God may have, quote, reared up this whole plantation for such an end, unquote. John White, writing to justify and recruit for Massachusetts, heavily emphasized the opportunities for native evangelism.

For example, he ruled out Virginia as a destination for the Puritans because the Virginians had so alienated the natives there that they would not be receptive to the gospel. Certainly there were strangers among the founders of New England who did not share any missionary concern, as even the founders admitted.

Nevertheless, it is the founders to whom we should look for defining the colony's purpose, not the occasional opportunist. That the founders assumed an evangelistic mission to the Native Americans to be part of the broader purpose of New England is well illustrated by the apostle to the Indians himself, John Eliot.

Seven years after he began his missionary work, John Eliot explained that his reason for coming to America was, quote, to enjoy the holy worship of God, not according to the fantasies of man, but according to the word of God without human additions and novelties, unquote.

That the man who did the most for Puritan missions would echo nearly the same words that some used to narrow the Puritan purpose to exclude missions demonstrates the breadth of their purpose for planting the city upon a hill.

There is no doubt about Eliot's commitment to missions, and yet he described his reason for coming to America just as Samuel Danforth did in Aaron into the Wilderness. When Puritans stated their reason for migrating as the enjoyment of God's ordinances, quote, without human additions and novelties, outreach to the Indians was part of it.

Why Puritan Mission Was Slow and Often Ineffective

Why, then, did the New England Puritans take so long to evangelize the Native Americans, and why did they send out so few missionaries? The city upon a hill model of missions, by example, hardly as effective, proved to be very ineffective.

Like most Protestants, the Puritans had not developed the church structures to carry out mission. Quote, in the beginning of New England, conversion of the native population was a goal for the entire community.

Everyone was to be a missionary, at least by example, unquote. Merchants were especially encouraged to take the gospel along with the commodities they traded with the natives. Little seems to have come of this.

Though they were congregationalists, they were not Quakers. They held to the need of leadership by highly educated, ordained clergy. Though they had the highest percentage of clergy to populace in the European world, they were handicapped by their assumption that a true minister must have a church.

John Robinson, the leading pastor in the Netherlands of the separatist Puritans, otherwise known as the Pilgrims, who planted the Plymouth Colony, had taught that the minister's office is, quote, confined within the circle of a particular congregation, unquote.

The Cambridge Platform in 1648 stated, quote, church officers are officers to one church, even that particular over which the Holy Ghost hath made them overseers, unquote. Eventually, John Eliot's contemporary, Richard Baxter, would appeal for, quote, unfixed ministers, unquote, to meet the missionary need.

The forbidding language barrier, numerous difficult dialects, each spoken by a small number of people, also stood in the way. John White, recruiting for the colony in 1630, refuted the objection that, quote, winning the heathen to the knowledge of God is a mere fantasy, unquote.

He admitted that thus far the Pilgrims had not succeeded in mission, but chalked it up to the language barrier. He noted that thus far the English have only understood enough of the natives' language to trade with them, quote, but how shall a man express unto them things merely spiritual, which have no affinity with sense, unless we were thoroughly acquainted with their language, and they with ours, unquote.

It is easy to look back and assume that Protestants should have intuitively known how to organize mission structures and go about the work, but in reality, the lessons we take for granted today had to be hard won, and the New England Puritans were among those who first learned those hard lessons.

Those who criticize the ineffectiveness of the mission probably do not appreciate the extraordinarily difficult task that cross-cultural missions can be. In my missionary experience, a John Elliott with 14 praying towns and several planted churches, meeting the Puritans' membership standards, is a phenomenal success.

Even David Brainerd's few score of converts, which many consider a failure, would today be looked at as a remarkable achievement for a missionary. In fact, Massachusetts had a higher number of Indian converts than any of the other English colonies, where even less had been achieved.

Perhaps nothing shows the sincerity of their missionary goals more than their self-criticism, despite their relative success. Samuel Wigglesworth, in the Election Sermon of 1733, scolded New Englanders for not laboring enough for the, quote, conversion of the miserable natives if we can content ourselves with doing so little for God and the eternal happiness of our fellow creatures.

What a symptom is it of the weakness of those principles which we fondly boast of, unquote. It was far from self-evident to Western Europeans as they began the era of colonization that all men were created equal.

Indeed, some doubted whether native peoples in the Americas were made in the image of God at all, questioning in that pre-biology period whether theologically the Indians, as they were called, were of the same spiritual species as themselves.

The Image of God, Human Equality, and Puritan Holistic Mission

This cultural backdrop should be kept in mind as we see what Puritanism contributed to modern missions. While it's easy to relegate Puritan missions to the bygone age of Christendom, in reality the Puritans treated the native peoples in accordance with the Golden Rule, as they would expect to be treated.

Paul Hebert has described the implication of globalization for Christian missions in a way that remarkably fits Puritan missions' practice. First, the Puritans assumed from the onset the humanity of the Native Americans, and thus demonstrated a belief in the unity of the human race which runs deeper than the surface differences of culture, language, race, and gender.

In missions' practice, this means going beyond contextualization to enculturation. Of course, the Puritans could be criticized for never getting to contextualization, for never being open to reciprocity, that is, learning from the people that they were witnessing to.

They could be accused of being simply imperialistic. Such criticism fails to understand Puritanism and the Puritans on their own terms. It is ironic, if not hypocritical, to simply dismiss all attempts at holistic missions, missions including social transformation, as an imperialistic imposition of Western values.

Such an approach assumes that our current values of cherishing all cultures, our assumed relativism today, as though all cultures are equal, such an approach assumes that that attitude is normative, just as much as the Puritans assumed that their cultural values were normative.

But more to our point, such an approach in its haste to criticize, quote, imperialistic missions, misses the important achievements along the way. Here, the achievement was the implicit belief that the native folk were equally human.

Robert Cushman specifically called the Native Americans, quote, the sons of Adam in that new world, and hence appealed that knowledge and salvation be furthered among them. The incorporation of the indigenous people under pure theocratic legislation, especially the conclusions and orders of 1646, was a significant element of the mission.

It demonstrated Puritan belief that the, quote, Indians were fully human beings. The Puritans were treating the native people just as they expected to be treated themselves. Both English and Algonquian were included indiscriminately in the prohibitions against blasphemy, heresy, swearing, criticism of the clergy, powwowing, and violating Sabbath.

In the Puritan context, it would have been a statement against the humanity of the natives to have excluded them from the legislation. Furthermore, the Puritans assumed that the native folk were just as capable of cultivation under the right guidance as they saw themselves capable of.

Whether one sees Puritan civilization as superior is irrelevant here, for the question is whether the Puritans saw the Indians as equal human beings or something else. Eliot, in a 1654 letter to Jonathan Hammer, wrote about the Indians that, quote, there is in them a great measure of natural ingenuity.

Only it is drowned out in their wild and rude manner of living. But by culture, order, government, and religion, they shall be furbished up, unquote. When Natick established its own legal code, it copied much from the English and even added special prohibitions such as against biting lice, tailored to meet Algonquian customs.

The praying Indians adopted the Puritans' conviction that family and faithfulness and a calling were the primary means of social control. Puritan missionaries, especially John Eliot, taught Native Americans to train their children in the Puritan way with the goal of breaking their self-will.

The law that perhaps most aimed directly at changing native customs, both sexual and economic, required every young man, if not another man's servant, to set up a wigwam and plant for himself. He was not permitted to live, as in former times, floating from wigwam to wigwam.

This is just as how we would expect Puritans to treat Indians if they considered them equal human beings, because this kind of thoroughgoing economic and cultural criticism is what they practiced on themselves.

Eliot, for example, castigated the emerging English trend of men wearing wigs. In a 1653 letter, he described men's wigs as, quote, a commission to pollute the body with the like lust, unquote. Twenty years later, he pointed to men's wigs as the possible source of, quote, all other lusts which have so encourageably broken in upon our youth, unquote.

Eliot was, hence, not simply an imperialist, but a Puritan social reformer. Augustinian spectacles, that is, seeing people through the lens of the Bible's teaching on depravity, made uncultivated, unregenerate human nature appear repulsive.

Indeed, it made uncultivated nature itself seem abhorrent. A venerable Puritan minister and son of New England, William Hubbard, preached, quote, it was order that gave beauty to the goodly fabric of the world, which before was but a confused chaos without form and void, unquote.

The same nature that the 19th century romantics would pine for, whether it's Henry David Thoreau's retreating to Walden Pond, or Paul Galgun painting the glories of the natives of Tahiti, the 17th and 18th century Puritans saw as something demented and dangerous, depraved and destructive.

For the Puritans, it was a howling wilderness. Puritan ministers concluded that their experience with the, quote, Indians, that those most natural of men validated their doctrine of original sin. David Brainerd reported that the natives were open to the proposition that all people are born sinners.

Their experience with their own children, Brainerd and other Calvinists noted, was just more testimony to the truth of Puritanism's Augustinian foundations, that is, the doctrine in Calvinism of total depravity.

Before we conclude that this, quote, holistic mission was merely an excuse for oppressing and denigrating the native people, we need to be aware that some key Puritan leaders were aware of the anomie, that is, the sense of rootlessness, of being without standards or ideals, that gripped the native tribes that they came in close contact with.

They were concerned about that. Cotton Mather noted that the Indians who remained after the decimating plagues that struck just before the pilgrims arrived, quote, were smitten into awful and humble regards of the English, unquote.

Puritan missionaries were aware of the state that we now call anomie and sought with genuine disinterest and benevolence to solve it. In the late 18th century, Samuel Hopkins, one of the founders of the New Divinity Movement, which saw itself as the rightful heirs of Puritanism, heartily advocated missions to the native people.

He wrote that Puritan missionaries, quote, will tend to make them the people and prevent their viewing themselves as underlings despised by the English, et cetera, which would be of very ill consequences and even frustrate the whole design, unquote.

If his inculturalist mission could overcome native anomie, Hopkins believed, several Indian Bible commonwealths could spread throughout Indian territory. In other words, full ecclesiastical political Puritanism could be reborn among the native people.

Work, Civility, and the Puritan Reform of Native Life

Especially important to the Puritans was transforming the natives' economic values. This, too, demonstrates their belief in the full humanity of the Indians. The Puritans, from William Perkins' own vocation onward, saw working faithfully in a vocation as an essential part of the Christian life.

They expected a cultivated work ethic from each other, and applying the same standards to their new neighbors, they expected it from them, too, from the natives. The Puritans objected to the Algonquian subsistence economy.

Richard Mather wrote, quote, if there be any work of grace amongst the remnants of the Native Americans, it would surely bring forth and be accompanied by the reformation of their disordered lives and in other things, so in their neglect of labor and in their living in idleness and pleasure, unquote.

When John Eliot reported, quote, the glorious progress of the gospel among the Indians, he described the newly developed industriousness of one elderly convert as proof of genuine regeneration. Over a generation later, Cotton Mather taught the Indians that the Eighth Commandment against stealing calls them to be honest in increasing and preserving our estates, quote, the Eighth Commandment will condemn you if you live in idleness, unquote.

A few decades later, the missionary John Sargent showed that he still held Puritan convictions. In a published letter to Benjamin Coleman, Sargent developed a master plan for transforming the Indian children into the condition of a civil, industrious, and polished people.

Key to this transformation was a rigorous plan to raise a group of Native children under two masters who would regiment their lives around learning and labor, quote, that as little time as possible may be lost to idleness, unquote.

Thus transforming the economic life was a prominent part of Puritan missiology, just as it was a prominent part of their view of sanctification. To dismiss these concerns as patronizing colonialism misses the fact that for the Puritans, not to hold the Indians to these standards would have been, from their perspective, a denial of the equal humanity, and hence equal responsibility before God, of the Native Americans.

John Eliot, Praying Towns, and the First Organized Native Churches

John Eliot and other Puritans interested in missions began groping toward understanding the need of the missionary organization. From early on, Eliot and other interested Puritan leaders sought English support of their mission to the Algonquians, and 1649 the Long Parliament, after much delay, founded the New England Company, which helped fund Eliot's work and continued encouraging Native missions until the American Revolution.

Eliot soon became a figure exemplifying the global expansion of Puritanism. In the long run, Eliot contributed to Protestant missions, contributing a model of hard work and devotion, a set of techniques that mission leaders later came to believe might work better overseas.

Among these techniques was the transcribing of native languages, at which Eliot excelled. When William Carey wrote his inquiry, though English-speaking Protestants still had much to learn about missions, the lessons gained from John Eliot were not lost.

The Purit mission was trying to separate the praying Indians from their ethnic relatives in order to attach them to the worldwide reformed community. Crucial to achieving that for Eliot were the praying towns.

Those who chose to reside in them would be enculturated through the ministry of the church in submission to biblically-based civil codes, to the laws. Striving to enculturate civilization with Christianity, Eliot, with astonishing energy, organized the praying Indians into 14 towns where they would divest themselves of their native culture to become, quote, red Indians.

Eliot wrote, quote, unquote. Eliot's appeal here shows that we cannot simply sweep all Puritan missions under the rug of imperialism. If he had only wanted to deprive the native people of their culture, he would have wanted to keep them close and integrated them with English settlers.

Instead, fearing the poor witness of the carnal colonials, he wanted to keep them separate. Some may point to the conscious application of the Puritan work ethic as proof of naked imperialism, but it must be remembered that Eliot's vision for the praying towns is exactly the same vision for society that the Puritans went to New England to achieve for themselves.

Having chosen the same for themselves, they sought to raise up native society on the same foundations. For them to have done anything less would have been, from the Puritan perspective, a denial of the natives' equal humanity.

This Puritan view of missions, for so long out of fashion, is much closer to the new, quote, global, unquote, view articulated by Paul Hebert than it was to the dualistic view of missions in which evangelism is divorced from social transformation.

It was also much closer to the practice of seminal missionaries like William Carey, who, besides evangelism, were concerned about raising agricultural productivity and ending social injustices, even if those injustices, like seti, that is, widow-burning in India, were long-established cultural practices.

The goal of evangelism is not individual salvation or even the planting of churches, but the erupting reign of Christ on earth and the glory of God, said Paul Hebert. Key to this social transformation were the praying towns.

The Puritans had a theocratic essence to their missions theology. They were holistic, that is, engaging all of life, holistic in missions, and that they believed that every part of every culture must be transformed to be like the heavenly kingdom.

For example, Thomas Shepard assumed that civility, that is, English culture, was important to inculcate, either along with or before evangelism. Thus, when they encountered Indian practices that were at variance with any part of what they considered the living law of God, those practices would have to be changed.

Going deeper than mere doctrines, John Eliot sought to inculcate the Western mind into the Algonquians. He wrote the logic primer and interlinear of both Algonquian and English to teach the Indians the basics of European cognitive style, that is, ways of thinking, philosophy.

The express purpose, though, was not to learn Western philosophy, but, quote, whereby you may open the word of God, the Bible, Lord Jesus help us, unquote. From John Eliot. Puritan historian Sidney Rui notes the gospel, as the Puritans understood it, was a way of life, not simply a few doctrines to be accepted.

No appeal to preservation of native cultures could deter this drive to hold all things together under the rule of Christ. They instinctively strove to create a global community under Christ. The postmodern belief that all cultures are of equal and intrinsic value and must be preserved under the banner of, quote, diversity was not a Puritan value.

Their pervasive fundamental assumption, according to historians, Henry W. Bowden and James P. Ronda, was that Native Americans must either adopt European standards of living or suffer gradual attrition because there were no other practical alternatives.

The Puritan missionaries did not segregate cultural uplift as a secondary goal of mission. In John Eliot's words, it was, quote, absolutely necessary to carry on civility with religion, unquote. While modern critics like to blame them for destroying Native American culture, we must ask whether in the real world the preservation of Indian society was possible.

If John Eliot had not reached out to the Massachusetts, English immigrants of far less religious sincerity would have continued to come and would have continued to encroach on tribal lands. Indeed, they would have done so more ruthlessly, and the Indians would have had less protection than they already had.

Though the Puritans may appear to be cultural imperialists by some modern standards, Eliot's work gave the natives the first tools to preserve their culture. The first Bible printed in America was Eliot's Indian Bible.

He printed catechisms and other works in their language. In the real world, Eliot and the other Puritan missionaries were the best chance the indigenous folk had of continuing as a society, radically changed perhaps, but still living together and speaking their own tongue.

In the summer of 1650, Eliot founded the first praying town, Natick. Eventually he would found 14 of them and have as many as 1 ,100 native folk who would choose to live in them. Because Puritan standards of church membership were so exacting, even white Puritan churches were having problems in keeping membership levels up.

Thus, it's not surprising that it took a while for the first recognized independent church to be founded in Natick. That the natives were able to found such churches on the exacting standards of New England Puritanism's first generation is the surprising event.

Red Puritans were a fact. James Axtell figures that at its peak Natick had between 190 to 220, over 40 of the town's population, as baptized church members by Eliot's Puritan standards. John Eliot's intentions, as well as those of the Puritan establishment, are demonstrated in the case of the town of Dedham versus the Indians of Natick.

The neighboring towns fell into a boundary dispute. Eliot interceded strongly on behalf of the Natick praying Indians. Besides answering the case of the colonials of Dedham point by point, Eliot also reminded the jurors that the city upon a hill had a responsibility to the native peoples.

The magistrates, at least in this period and for this case, also showed a bias for the natives. During three trials in 1662 in Suffolk County, the juries, composed of the white men from the colonials, found for the farmers, other colonials, of Dedham, despite Eliot's appeal.

But three times the same occurred. A jury found for the English towns and the magistrates threw the verdict out. Judges eventually gave the land to Natick. Nearly a century later, Jonathan Edwards would likewise be an advocate for the Stockbridge Halcitonics.

Jonathan Edwards and the Rise of the Great Century

John Eliot, through his writing's reputation, created a legacy as the apostle to the Indians. Jonathan Edwards was the catalyst for the Great Awakening and the ministry of David Brainerd and for effecting the coming great century.

He was a missionary in his own right in Stockbridge, and his followers, the New Divinity, cultivated zeal for missions. His own sharpened evangelical Calvinism was also decisive in lighting the fuse that eventually set William Carey heading to India.

Edwards's theology and the example of David Brainerd became two major factors in the ignition of Anglo-American missions that began with Carey. David Brainerd, supported by the Society in Scotland for propagating Christian knowledge to be a missionary to the Indians, is more important for how he was immortalized than what he actually achieved.

Jonathan Edwards particularly admired Brainerd for carrying out in practice what he believed in his heart. Edwards was hosting him when he died. One of Brainerd's last deeds was to give Edwards his diary, telling him to do with it as he thought best.

Edwards edited it and published it and made it into an inspirational classic that inspired not only local Indian missions, but also John Wesley and the Methodist and a Calvinist Baptist cobbler in England known as William Carey.

Through Wesley, Edwards's biography of Brainerd became an evangelical classic in England before becoming popular in America through John Stiles' abridged popularized edition. William Carey considered the life of David Brainerd to be a sacred text.

Thomas Coke, lived from 1747 to 1814, was a founder of Methodist missions around the world, was inspired by it. Henry Martin, lived from 1781 to 1812, was an Anglican missionary to India, also inspired by it.

These were two other leaders of the 19th century missionary movement who were inspired and shaped by Edwards' life of Brainerd. Others of this era who testified to the importance of Brainerd, who was popularized by Edwards, were Samuel Marsden, missionary to Australia and New Zealand, Robert Morrison, Scottish missionary to China, Samuel John Mills, American missionary to India, and Christian Frederick Swartz, German missionary to India.

The work was so influential that by the mid -19th century, Joseph Tracy, in his landmark The Great Awakening, felt compelled to warn zealous missionaries away from emulating Edwards' portrayal of Brainerd too closely, lest they follow him to an early grave.

Charles L. Cheney believed that the biography of Brainerd was THE work that provided a model for a truly Protestant missionary. This monumental work in the history of Protestant missions is the product of New England Puritanism, the fruit of a self-conscious Puritan revival in America.

Edwards created a following that carried on the missionary impulse. Besides David Brainerd, New Divinity theologians helped found Andover Theological Seminary in 1808, the theological seedbed of America's initial foreign missionaries.

Historian Douglas Sweeney writes, quote, in the field of foreign missions, the boys of Andover could not be beaten. Another product of the revival, William College was home of the Haystack Prayer Meeting in 1806, which gave birth to America's foreign missionary movement.

Jonathan Edwards' grandson, Timothy Dwight, made Yale into a missions training center well into the 19th century. Besides cross-cultural missions to their neighbors, awakened Puritans had grand visions of crossing to other continents.

Samuel Hopkins, one of Edwards' most devoted followers, after moving to Newport, Rhode Island, mixed his drive for cross-cultural evangelism with his concern for African slaves. He planned and worked for an African mission led by freed slaves for 30 years.

Much like his vision for Indian Bible commonwealths, Hopkins envisioned a mission for the Christianizing of Africa. He recruited two African slaves, members of Hopkins' church, helped arrange their emancipation, and sent them to Princeton to train for the mission.

The Revolutionary War intervened, however, distracting supporters and resulting in the death of one of their prospective missionaries as a sailor fighting for America. Finally, well after Hopkins' 1803 death, 30 freed slaves sailed from Rhode Island to Africa in 1826.

This was all the fruit of Jonathan Edwards' Puritan vision. Quote, then many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines and excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Tartary, that's North Africa, and other now most barbarous countries, unquote.

Though little was achieved in Hopkins' lifetime, this Puritan conceived vision of using, quote, means for the conversion of the heathen in other continents was born well before William Carey wrote his famous tract.

Jonathan Edwards' ability to make the sovereignty of God a basis for evangelism had a major impact in sparking the era of modern missions. The Puritan mind combined their convictions about the unity of humanity with their convictions about the sovereignty of God.

This mixture helped to spark the great century. In 1784, the Scot John Erskine sent some of Edwards' writings to a group of English particular Baptists. These are Calvinistic Baptists, Reformed Baptists.

The particular Baptists at that time were struggling with the theology that critics today label ultra-high Calvinism or simply hyper-Calvinism. The pervasive idea was that since the non-elect could not receive grace even if they heard the gospel, they could not be held morally responsible for not responding to the message, and therefore the church had no obligation to proclaim the message to them.

John Ryland, Jr., pastor of College Lane Church in Northampton, England, received Erskine's package. He carefully read Edwards' Freedom of the Will. In it, Edwards had argued that there was a distinction between natural and moral ability.

Since all people have a natural ability to repent and believe, they are responsible for their refusal to do so. Two other books by Edwards had an enormous impact on the missionary awakening in Britain later in the 18th century and in the early national period in the United States.

Freedom of the Will, although addressing Arminianism, challenged the deterministic turn that English Calvinism had taken by the late 18th century, barricading themselves against the assaults of the Enlightenment.

Belief in human depravity had become more hardened. Edwards did not necessarily seek to soften Puritanism's Augustinian pessimism toward human nature, that is, their doctrine of total depravity. He believed in it.

He didn't try to soften that. But he wanted simultaneously to reinforce that theological conviction while reconciling it, again, to a willingness to use means to convert the heathen. Ryland introduced Edwards' ideas to Robert Hall, and Hall introduced them to Andrew Fuller, both leading particular, that is, Reformed Baptist pastors.

Fuller, pastor at Kettering, England, developed the conviction on the basis of Edwardsian theology that, quote, Calvinism and evangelism not only could be but should be reconciled, unquote. Thus, Edwards' careful harmonization of an overriding divine sovereignty with human cooperation appealed immensely to these young, moderate Calvinist pastors.

The next year, 1785, Fuller wrote, under Edwards' influence, the book The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. This book prepared the ground for Baptist missions because it enabled particular Baptists to reconnect insistence on human responsibility to the center of their theology of salvation.

Fuller not only based his work on Edwards' freedom of the will, but also claimed the support of the 16th century Puritans. One of his frequent hearers, by the way, was a young cobbler, William Carey. Another Edwards book, A Humble Attempt, created enormous energy in stimulating missions' interest, which in turn spawned organizations and support networks in the early United States.

The book developed a logical and aesthetic and typographical consistency of missions, revivals, and the concert of prayer. This work had a profound impact on Ryland, Fuller, and their pastor friend John Sutcliffe.

His support for the Scottish-initiated concerts of prayer and his very Calvinistic belief that divine sovereignty necessitates, not negates, the use of means, motivated prayer and work. Ryland, Fuller, and Sutcliffe's young disciple and not yet ordained pastor, William Carey, not only soaked up the Edwardsian theology coming from New England, but also read the lives of Eliot and David Brainerd.

These two Puritans, along with the Apostle Paul, became his canonized heroes, his enkindlers. In 1788 he met a wealthy member of Cannon Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, England, Thomas Potts, who had remained interested in missions since being exposed to the Indians as a young man in New Orleans.

Potts, along with particular Baptist pastors, urged Carey to publish something on missions. A treatise written by a New England congregationalist in support of Scottish Presbyterians, reprinted by English Baptists, who were inspired by it to launch a world missionary movement, the wind bloweth where it listeth.

Thus Edwards, the last great Puritan, became the link between the original New England Puritanism and the great century on missions. William Carey wrote his groundbreaking inquiry into the obligation of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathen in 1792.

He was being carried along by the momentum of Jonathan Edwards and through him of New England Puritanism. He seemed aware of this Puritan heritage. In his inquiry he listed both John Elliot and David Brainerd as models.

The only book besides the Bible mentioned in the inquiry is Edwards' book on prayer. To the degree, then, that William Carey is the father of modern missions, New England Puritanism is its grandfather.