The City Upon a Hill: Generation 1

Between the Sailing of the Mayflower in 1620 to the death of Cotton Mather lies just over a century. Within that century, New England went from being a mere dream in the hearts of devout Anglican nonconformists to a thriving province in England's worldwide colonial system.

For the first half of that century, Puritanism dominated New England. For the second half, Puritanism's staying power would be tested. Hence, at the end of that Puritan century, we can gauge the potency of Puritanism by how successfully it had withstood being conformed to the wider culture.

A completely walled-off sect seeking escape from the world would have fled to New England for the purpose of avoiding engagement with the wider world. Puritanism was not such a system. A weak system would have crumbled easily and early under the pressures of the wider culture and been merely a passive object rather than an active agent of that process.

But New England's Puritan century demonstrated conclusively that Puritanism was neither escapist nor weak and passive. That century can be broken down into three parts. First, the generation of John Cotton and Richard Mather from 1630 to 1661, from the founding of the Restoration, years of virtual independence, and early autonomous development.

Second, the generation of Increase Mather from 1662 to 1689, from the Restoration and the Halfway Covenant to the Glorious Revolution, years of struggle with the British Crown. And third, the generation of Cotton Mather from 1689 to 1728, from the overthrow of Edmund Andross, of which Cotton Mather was a part, and the new charter mediated by Increase Mather to the death of Cotton Mather.

The Founding Vision of a City Upon a Hill

Generation one, quote, it was a great and high undertaking of our fathers when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean that so they might follow the Lord into his land.

A parallel instance not to be given except that our father Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees or that of a seed from the land of Egypt. In the wilderness have we dwelt in safety alone, being made the subjects of most peculiar mercies and privileges.

The goodwill of him that dwelt in that bush has been upon the head of those that were separated from their brethren. Unquote. Increase Mather. John Winthrop, somewhere between Boston, England and what was to become Boston, Massachusetts, told his fellow Puritans in a sermon entitled A Model of Christian Charity that they were going forth to plant, quote, a city upon a hill.

Drawing upon Matthew chapter 5, verse 14. A city upon a hill, like a lamp, can't be hid. Like the light that is not to be put under a bowl, a city upon a hill is posted in a prominent place for all to see.

Like salt, it is meant to preserve and season all that it comes in contact with. Winthrop was reminding the migrants of Jesus's call to, quote, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father, which is in heaven.

That is a call to global influence. The New England Puritans were not refugees fleeing to avoid persecution. They were missionaries intent on setting up a light to the nations. The Puritans ventured forth to establish a base for the conversion of the world.

Winthrop told them, quote, the eyes of all people are upon us. That this was not merely a rallying slogan, but a genuine expression of the founder's self-identity as demonstrated by his description of the guilt of Robert Keene.

Keene had not, by his price gouging, just trespassed Winthrop's vision of a revolutionary community based on love, but had brought disrepute on, quote, a church and a commonwealth now in their infancy and under the curious observation of all churches and civil states in the world, unquote.

For a Bible-centered people like the Puritans, abbreviated biblical allusions are pregnant with meaning, especially coming from their governor while on their way to plant their colony. After all, as the title A Model of Christian Charity indicates, Winthrop was laying the blueprints for an ideal society.

And to whom was it to be a model too? He said, quote, the eyes of all people are upon us. What follows is a negative warning of the effect of their failure rather than a promise of the fruit of their success.

Quote, 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 a story and a byword through the world. If Winthrop expected a worldwide discrediting of reformed Christianity upon their failure, was he not implying a shining testimony to the globe if they succeeded?

Yes, and he said as much. If they succeed, Winthrop promised future colonists will say, quote, the Lord make it like that of New England. Winthrop's warnings are a clear echo of Deuteronomy chapters 28 to 30, where Moses warns the first covenant people of what will happen to them if they betray the Lord after they take the promised land.

The sense of mission in Moses' words, hence in Winthrop's, is palpable. The chief end of New England was, as Samuel Danforth put it in his famous May 11, 1670 election sermon, a brief recognition of New England's errand into the wilderness, the, quote, liberty to walk in the faith of the gospel.

Danforth said little about a missionary purpose for New England except to say that if they return to the consecration of the great migration, their adversaries will be amazed. The implication of some in revealing this is that the migration to New England was a retreat from the world, a turning of the back and shaking the dust off the withdrawal from England and the rest of Europe.

John White, an English pastor writing to recruit colonists from Massachusetts at the very inception of the colony, demonstrated that they were indeed moving forward toward an evangelical goal. He emphasized that the purpose of planting New England was, quote, the furthering of the gospel.

Their motivation was far from a felt need of the Puritans to flee from England to a refuge. On the contrary, White found that the chief objection to the enterprise is that the Puritans were needed in England to continue the advancing of religion.

His answer, quote, here my labors that way are not so needful in the land because many others may put to their hands to the same work. In New England, there are none to undergo the task. In the eyes of the Puritan leaders, even the economic motivations of some of the settlers were part of the colony's mission.

By providing poor Englishmen with opportunities to better themselves through working hard in their vocations, the new colony could glorify God by serving their neighbor. The founders of Massachusetts Bay saw all of this as a peace, fleeing to America as an opportunity to escape Archbishop Laud's liturgical tyranny and thus setting up pure churches which, through the beauty of holiness, would attract the Native Americans to the gospel, discipline all members, White and Red, in true Christian living, inspiring all to work hard in vocations which would produce prosperity for most, shared with all, which would produce a society so attractive to England and the rest of Europe that the nations would stream to Zion.

I believe that Perry Miller in his path-breaking article, Errant into the Wilderness, had it right. Massachusetts Bay was not just an organization of immigrants seeking advantage and opportunity. It had a positive sense of mission.

This sense of to their homeland, to the indigenous folk, and particularly acute by Johnson's time, to their children and grandchildren, pervaded the first three generations. But as Miller observes, New Englanders not only had the errand but also the wilderness.

Both shaped their character so much that only 15 years after Winthrop disembarked from the Arabella, his former Puritan comrades back in England, leaders who could easily have joined Winthrop and John Cotton and Richard Mather, wrote in open criticism of the colony's intolerance toward Anabaptist.

To the leading lights of the city upon a hill, both the universality of the mission and the necessities and opportunities of the locality, the wilderness, clearly justified their stringency. The wilderness gave them the opportunity to start over, far from Frederick Jackson Turner's wilderness thesis of democracy growing spontaneously out of the forest.

For the founders of the Bay Colony, the wilderness gave them the free air to live out their universal mission to its fullest. That meant, however, if it failed, that they had no one to blame but themselves.

How could a universal, which turned out to be nothing but a provincial, be called anything but a blunder or an abortion? wrote Perry Miller. Global politics spurred on the impetus to cross the ocean, building the foundations of the Commonwealth.

In Europe, the Thirty Years' War had gone badly for the Protestants. Bohemia and the Palatinate had fallen. La Rochelle, the last stronghold of the Huguenots, Calvinists like the Puritans, fell to the Catholic king.

An English attempt to break the siege of La Rochelle had failed. John Preston lamented, are not our allies wasted? Are not many branches of the church cut already and more in hazard? Meanwhile at home, the future looked ominous.

Charles I, coming to the throne in 1625, appointed anti-Puritan William Laud, first to the Archbishopric of London in 1628 and then Canterbury in 1633. Laud, in his zeal to stamp out Puritanism, managed to radicalize moderate Puritans.

Men like John Cotton, John Davenport, and Thomas Hooker were quietly ministering until forced to give account before Laud's court of high commission. Faced with a choice of submission to the high church party or removal from ministry, they looked across the sea.

Everywhere, quote, Antichrist was advancing. New England could be a safe hiding place where, quote, ourselves and posterity may be better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world. Even the term great migration signals the religious motives of the founding generation.

Of the many migrations of English people to the colonies in the early 17th century, the move to New England was relatively minuscule. Its greatness came from its meaning. Simply a yearning to escape would not have been a great migration.

Thomas Shepherd, answering those accusing the Puritans migrants of merely fleeing persecution, replied that they came to New England so that, quote, God will have his church and the kingdom of Christ go up in these remote parts of the world that his name may be known to the heathens.

Cotton Mathers, contemporary Samuel Wigglesworth, wrote, quote, a pure and undefiled religion was the thing our ancestors had in their view when they cast their eye toward this wilderness as a habitation.

They had not, though, turned their backs on England. John Cotton demonstrated their ongoing mission for the Mother Church by concluding his defense of the New England Way with an appeal for the churches of England to learn from New England.

Likewise, Winthrop's call for a model of Christian charity demonstrates that future possibilities were guided not by a modern assumption of inevitable progress, but by a primitive quest to return to the pristine.

Towns, Harvard, and the Architecture of a Christian Commonwealth

The first practical step in building this radical city upon a hill was the architecture of the community. They were aware of the failure of Pliny's early communalism, but they also did not want to disperse willy-nilly across the land.

John Winthrop had hoped that they would all stay in one town. That proved impractical. Instead, they multiplied numerous towns and made them the center of community, and the center of the town was the meeting house, which served as both the church building and a meeting hall for civil meetings.

The town system became the foremost instrument of establishing a model of Christian charity. From the beginning of its reign, King Charles I had sought to replace local institutions, whether political or ecclesiastical, with royal prerogatives.

When Puritans came to New England, they sought to construct a polity that would prevent the subversion of local institutions. After Massachusetts had transformed its corporate charter into a governmental charter, it left a great deal of latitude up to the towns.

Once the Massachusetts Bay General Court granted a group of petitioners permission and a place to form a new town, it left the actual business of forming the town to its inhabitants with the proviso that the town not be, quote, repugnant to the Commonwealth.

Although each town had a great deal of self-rule, most New England towns shared certain characteristics. They either settled with a minister or aspired to get one as soon as possible. The founders intended on regulating the growth and composition of the town.

Springfield, for example, purposed on a minimum of 40 and a maximum of 50 families. Every inhabitant was to get a portion of land, a quote, a convenient proportion for a house lot, as we shall see met for everyone's equality and estate.

Everyone was to have something, but the status and the labor of some put into the town required that those few be given even more. For Springfield, William Pynchon deserved a special allotment. In the model Christian charity that was the Puritan town, capitalism and community were to kiss.

That New England was intent on putting down permanent independent roots shows in their determination not to be dependent on Cambridge-trained ministers. That six years into a wilderness the Puritans founded a college is not only a testimony to their high view of education, but their view of themselves as an independent Commonwealth.

There's no reason why they could not have sent their young men like Increase Mather to Cambridge or Trinity College in Dublin in order to prevent a, quote, illiterate ministry. The early founding of Harvard declared that they were intent on being a core society in the world system, not just a peripheral one.

Harvard was the institutional expression of their desire to diligently, quote, keep up learning, less degeneracy, barbarism, ignorance, and irreligion do, by degrees, break in upon us. From merry old England to a city upon a hill.

Congregationalism, Visible Saints, and the New England Church

John Winthrop observed that his group of Puritan colonists was gathered from all over England. Though some churches transplanted en masse, Massachusetts was not the relocation of an English province to America.

These people who were joined by a common faith had to be first formed into one people and create a new province. Relocation from their native England to, what was to them, the isolation of the, quote, howling wilderness, changed Puritans by enabling them to apply their particular principles with a consistency unattainable in the old country.

Puritanism ranks among the most rigorous products of the Reformation. The migrants to New England were drawn from the most dedicated and consistent of Puritans. The free air of America removed them from the, quote, mollifying influences of an old and complex society.

They were able to begin anew where they could order all things according to God's law in both scripture and nature. Their rigor was proportionally intensified. To build a commonwealth on biblical principles was, of course, their intention.

However, they clearly had not worked out a careful blueprint of exactly how the society was to be built. Winthrop's, a model of Christian charity, sermon speaks in generalities and of principles rather than specifics.

This was prudent. Unexpected innovations, like the multiplication of towns, had to be made. Church polity also called for innovations. To their English supporters, their congregationalism was one of those innovations, but in reality it was not entirely new.

They had before them the model of the separatists at Plymouth, the pilgrims of Thanksgiving fame. They seemed to have adopted the separatist polity without imbibing the separatist spirit. The Puritans slipped into congregationalism with relative ease when they arrived in New England.

They adapted the pilgrims' polity for their own ends. Soon after John Cotton's arrival, a revival ensued among the new colonists and public testimonies were common, so they soon required these revivalistic public testimonies for admission to church membership.

For the first time in Christendom, claims Sidney Alston, quote, a state church with vigorous conceptions of enforced uniformity in belief and practice was requiring an internal experiential test of church membership.

This practice preserved two Puritan traits that would be portentous for the Great Awakening, a commitment to a visible church of visible saints and to the experiential reality of God's regenerative work.

The Massachusetts Puritans' insistence that by adopting congregationalism they were not joining the separatists at Plymouth seems, at first glance, to be irrelevant. They were both separated from merry old England by an ocean.

Actually, their continued claim of attachment to the Church of England demonstrates one of the qualities of mainstream Puritan piety that made that movement so culturally potent. Engagement. John White, in his 1630 defense of the Massachusetts colonists, calls separation, quote, evil in itself.

The Puritans, he wrote, were nonconformists but still part of the English church. As late as 1691, New England Puritans were still claiming, quote, there are none in the world that do more fully concur with the doctrine of the Church of England contained in the 39 articles than do the churches in New England.

The New Plymouth men, on the other hand, felt little responsibility for those outside. Robinson himself had taught that the pastor's role was only in feeding his flock, not evangelism. This, the great body of Puritanism, could not imitate.

These Puritans had crossed an ocean so they could both continue faithful to their convictions and not separate, that is, cease to be related to and engage with the Anglican church and the rest of the world.

As inter-worldly ascetics, they committed themselves to an engaged conversionist church. The church was both exclusive in the sense of keeping certain people out and established. They were what John Eliot described as an inclusive parish church around a core covenanted group.

The true church was no less gathered company of visible saints espoused by congregational purists. The call of the church in the parish is to a, quote, universal home missionary enterprise. Eliot advocated Presbyterian style church councils and hoped, even as late as 1668, for the government to take the lead in reform.

The Puritans sought to marry Christendom's idea of a national church to a thoroughly Reformation conviction that the true church is the invisible church. This tension between the parish church and the covenanted core, the true invisible church, was a creative tension.

New England churches could not have been identifiably Puritan if they did not exclude in some way someone. A thoroughly inclusive culture was unthinkable. However, every resident was required to be under the church's ministry.

This combination of the exclusive and the national was one of their greatest achievements. By being exclusive, they helped preserve their particulars by being national, that is, requiring at first everyone to attend one of its established churches.

They guaranteed that those particulars would be presented to non-adherents, people who did not necessarily share their culture. The city upon a hill faced two nearly simultaneous and theologically related challenges, the antinomianism of Anne Hutchison and the dualism of Roger Williams.

Roger Williams rejected the synthetic and conversionist attempts of Anglicanism and Puritanism to unite politics and the gospel. Williams had further elaborated on the individualism inherent in Puritan preaching and ecclesiology with their insistence that every person must experience God's grace and quote, own the covenant for him or herself.

That individualism was even evident in the relation of the New England church to the state. New England allowed no formal authority of the churches or the ministers of the government with local church autonomy, vice versa.

Individual believers, or at least the male heads of households, were supposed to take the principles of scripture to the public square. This individualism erupted in Anne Hutchison's claims to immediate inspiration and Roger Williams' explicit separation of church and state.

However, covenant theology made the second and third uses of the law that the Mosaic Law was a means for political governance and a guide for moral living applicable to Puritan's New Israel. Hence, individualism had to be held in check.

The aversion of the leading New Englanders to Williams and Hutchison was but another expression of the Puritan insistence on engaging and transforming rather than escaping all of life that made Puritanism so resilient and influential.

Although Williams apparently had some following at Salem, his overall impact as a dissident in Massachusetts was small. In the long term, he seems to have contributed greatly to the stability of Bible commonwealths by creating the, quote, basin into which the outcasts of Puritan New England could be sent.

His Providence Plantations, later to become Rhode Island, became a kind of safety valve for New England. Anne Hutchison's antinomianism, however, appears to have been a far greater threat to internal stability.

Winthrop admits that at one point the, quote, great alienation of minds was so sharp that it began to be as common here to distinguish between men by being under a covenant of grace or a covenant of works as in other countries between Protestants and Papists.

Janice Knight sees the antinomian controversy and the strong measures Winthrop used to put it down as proof of two warring parties in New England Puritism. The Spiritists are Kantonians like John Kanton who believed in immediate conversion and the Preparationists like Winthrop himself who believed in a, quote, morphology of conversion.

I believe because of the unanimity the ministers were able to muster that the crisis really illustrates, quote, the Bay Colony's most startling accomplishment, 50 years of relative social peace. Nevertheless, Knight is right to point out that initially there do seem to have been real differences.

The differences, however, as Winthrop quotes Kanton, merely about diverse ways of magnifying the grace of God. One party focusing on justification and the other on sanctification. These are the kinds of differences that either would not have arisen back in Old England or would have not caused as much controversy.

Now that they were missing their old nemesis, William Laud's Anglicanism, the differences among themselves grew in importance. The legitimate differences between Preparationists and Predestinarians or between Intellectualists and Voluntarists were forced to the surface.

Eventually, especially after Hutcheson claimed immediate revelation, even John Kanton, her long-suffering pastor, condemned her, taking a leading role in admonishing the Antinomians. The ministers' unified action solidified in orthodoxy in Massachusetts, making New England Puritanism far more homogeneous than the Puritanism they left behind.

When later challengers arrived on the shores of New England, like the Familyist, they made little impact. This is not to deny that there was diversity within New England Puritanism, but efforts to pit John Kanton the Evangelical against a Preparationist with their theology of the covenant are broken on the rock of the founder's ultimate unanimity, John Wheelwright, an intemperate new arrival notwithstanding.

Thus ends the first generation.