Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Historical, #United States, #Leaders & Notable People, #Religious, #Christian Books & Bibles, #History, #Americas, #State & Local, #Christianity, #Religion & Spirituality, #test

The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (11 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
9.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
Page 45
though their callmediatelycame from the people. Ministers preached, administered the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, catechized children, and provided moral and religious leadership and supervision in the community. Their flocks, the laymen of the Church, held a kind of power from Christ to call their leaders, though once in office ministers were to be obeyed, and at "liberty" to give their consent to major decisions taken by the eldersthe admission of new members and the discipline of strays among the faithful.
This system, if it may be called that, proved more susceptible to amendment and change in practice than in theory. A strong pastor could render the liberty of the lay brethren almost meaningless if he chose; and in a few cases, the church expanded their liberty from consent to an authority to rule. Ministerial associations, and synods, special meetings of pastors and lay representatives, also presented a challenge to the autonomy of the individual church. The relationship of these bodies and of the competing authority of clergy and laymen preoccupied churches and their leaders throughout the seventeenth century. In a variety of forms, the same questions were asked in New England's churches: What authority did ministers have? Should not lay members participate in the governing of the church? And where could the associations of churches and ministers enter the ecclesiastical arrangement, if indeed they could at all?
Richard Mather possessed the qualities which equipped him to make an important contribution toward the resolution of such questions. And his belief that the survival of Christ's Church was intimately tied to its fate in New England gave the task its importance. In his first years in America two kinds of questions were heard often in discussions of the Church. One, sounded in England and Scotland by Presbyterians, challenged the Congregational dedication to the autonomy of the particular church. News of New England's practices had reached nonconformist ears in England soon after the founding. To those still in the mother country, the news was disturbing and smacked of repressionand, at the same time, of anarchy as well. Two of the leading critics of the New England way were Charles Herle, a Presbyterian minister who preached before the Long Parliament, and Samuel Rutherford, a Scottish divine who had lost his pulpit for opposition to the extension of Episcopacy to Scotland and
 
Page 46
then became a Professor of Divinity at St. Andrews. Their attacks on New England were considered serious enough to draw answers from Thomas Hooker and John Cotton, as well as Richard Mather.
28
Mather rooted his replies in the sources Puritans respected: his studies are especially rich in the citation of New Testament Scriptures. But his work does not display either the massive scholarship of the comparable studies by Thomas Hooker,
A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline
(1648), or the originality of John Cotton,
The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven
(1644).
What distinguished Richard's work was its judicious quality and its devotion to finding the truth. Thus he rose above mere defense; he provided more than a rationale of a system; he sought as honestly as possible to discover what Christ intended for His Church in the world. One other characteristic marked his effortsthe concern that the true wayChrist's waysurvive in order that His coming might be hastened by the certainty of a holy reception on earth.
In his heart of hearts, Richard Mather was absolutely convinced, of course, that Christ's Church would surviveit could depend upon Christ's promise for its being. What he, and others like him, faced in the Presbyterians was an indirect challenge to demonstrate that the New England way embodied the continuity of the Church from Israel's day to their own. The Presbyterians Herle and Rutherford indicated that they were skeptical about this contention. If New England was the Gentile version of Israel, they asked, why did it not hold true to the Jewish ecclesiastical pattern and establish a hierarchy of synods and classes which could review the practices of local churches and weed out the errors that inevitably sprang up in bodies with no checks on their autonomy? Israel had its judicatory in Jerusalem, Herle pointed out. The implication was plain: New England needed synods, located, perhaps, across the ocean. If the Church embodied the saving remnant, it must not depart from this Holy patternpresumably the pattern set by Israel. Richard conceded that self-governing churches might make mistakes; the concession came easily to him for he was then enabled to point out that review bodies would fall prey to the same inherent propensities. The Presbyterian argument on the grounds of effi-
 
Page 47
ciency might be dismissed on those same grounds of efficiency. Could New England continue as the Lord's Israel without following exactly the Israelites' ecclesiastical practices? Richard believed emphatically that it could. The polity of Israel resided in the nation and hence was inapplicable; the Gospel had opened the Congregational way, a way unknown to the Church of the Old Testament. The judicatories in Israel included civil authorities and extended to civil administration; and besides, they met on a regular basis. Judicatories were not synods then; the Presbyterians ought to resist whatever inclinations they had to wrap themselves in Jewish banners. Nor should the particular congregations of the Jews be regarded as churches invested with the authority to administer the ordinancesnone could administer the Passover which was reserved to the supreme body in Jerusalem. Yet, though New Testament Church polity differed greatly from Old, the covenant cherished by saints everywhere remained the same in substance as that of the Israelites. The covenant, Richard expained, would endure until the Second Coming of Christ even though it was embodied in a Congregational rather than national polity. More light on true Church organization had appeared with Christ, and more shone forth as the end of the world approached. It would be unforgivable not to revise the constitution of churches in accordance with this brighter knowledge of Christ's desires. Mather announced all these views in a series of tracts written over a twenty-five-year period and in the definitive statement of the Congregational way,
A Platform of Church Discipline Gathered Out of the Word of God
, which he composed under the direction of the Synod meeting at Cambridge in 1648.
29
The Synod did not spend most of its time on matters dear to the hearts of Herle and Rutherford. Questions about the organization and the government of churches concerned it deeply, as they had Presbyterians, but it recognized that for most men in New England, these issues were largely theoretical. Not that disputes between ministers and their people did not occur in New England's churches. They did, and they caused concern; and men felt troubled when they attempted to define the jurisdictions of the synods that occasionally met to ease conflicts. But most such contests involved the wills and characters of the participants and victory in them depended upon powernot upon
 
Page 48
scholarship and theology. For these reasons the brotherly exchanges in tracts which solemnly examined Old Testament precedents for synodical authority probably did not obsess most laymen in Massachusetts Baynor did the precise constitutional lines drawn in the Cambridge Platform. The other issue taken up by the synodthe question of Church membershipdid, however.
30
Along with every member of the Synod, Richard Mather also pondered the question: what made a man a member? How did a man qualify? What separated him from the sinful world? Could anything separate him in the reality accessible to mere mortals? After all, every man in this life carried the original corruption in his heart and this corruption sprouted each day as surely as the seeds in springtime.
The official answers to these questionsso far as any answers could be official in Massachusettshad been pretty well given by the time of Richard Mather's arrival in 1635. Accepting the Augustinian distinction between the invisible and the visible Churchthe first composed of the truly pure of all times and places, the second of those claiming to be saintly (though in fact the claims were not equally true)these Puritans in New England resolved to make the visible conform to the invisible as closely as possible. Christian churches had always excluded the obviously profane, but despaired for the most part of isolating hypocrites from the genuine saints. Not so the non-separating Congregationalists of the Bay who worked out tests of saving faith which they hoped would lend themselves to the task of making certain that visible saints would be drawn from the invisible.
The tests of saving faith, which were just being established in practice when Richard Mather arrived in 1635, reflected the suspicions of his ministerial colleagues that by themselves good behavior and professions of belief told little about a man's internal state. Good behavior might help in identifying the elect, but it could originate in morality as well as graciousness; the claim to believe accompanied by knowledge of the Scriptures, testified to a good disposition, but it, too, could be faked. A few miles from Boston the Puritans of Plymouth stopped with these testsgood behavior and profession of faithand built their churches on them. It may seem curious that the Puritans of the
 
Page 49
Bay carried the search for purity farther than the Pilgrims of Plymouth. The Massachusetts group seems less intense in most respectsthey refused to separate from the Church of England and they did not bounce from Amsterdam to Leyden to the New World to avoid the world's taint. Yet they attempted to make the visible and the invisible Church congruent by means of a test of internal experience. By 1636 they had institutionalized a requirement that candidates for membership describe the inner experience that convinced them that saving grace had entered their souls. Only the context of the founding of Massachusetts Bay, the sense of exile in America of these men, and their powerful conviction that they must preserve the Church in the world can explain the framing of this requirement. For they believed that if escape from Antichristian England was worth the effort, the Church they sought to save must be made to conform to the elect as closely as human means could contrive. The men who could tell of Christ working in their souls were the Church; they were for substance the seed of Abraham. They continued the true Churchthe Church God had located first in the Jews, and then in the Gentiles. God had chosen to deal with His Church through His covenant; He had promised Abraham that His covenant would be ''everlasting,'' extending to "thy seed after thee."
31
Giving a description of one's conversion experience provided the key test for saving faith and seemed at first to provide the solution to the problem of identifying the visible Church. A people who used this test and who insisted that it be accompanied by a knowledge of the Scriptures and by sanctified behavior surely had discovered the means for making the visible conform to the invisible. But whatever comfort the first-generation divines may have taken from this conviction did not last, for their "system" soon came to be questionedfrom without, by their English brethren, and from within by their anxious flocks.
32
The issues raised from both outside New England and within it began, and in a sense ended, with children. The nature of Church membership seemed clear, deceptively so, Puritan divines came to realize. All agreed that the Church should admit only visible saints, and to make certain that it did, churches and the State worked out the tests of inner experience, all designed to make the invisible visible to rational charity. But what should be done about the children? At first the answer was easily given
 
Page 50
baptize the babies born to members. The churches proceeded in this way until they discovered that many of these children, as they carne of age, failed to give evidence of their inner worth. The painful necessity of denying them the Lord's Supper was then recognized in practice and institutionalized in the Cambridge Platform of 1648.
33
No one proposed denying these unconverted, but baptized, persons marriage; and marry and procreate they did. Because of disagreements within itself, the Cambridge Synod remained silent about the children born of these marriages, but the question remained: should the children of unconverted, but baptized, members receive baptism? Their parents were usually good, although perhaps over-scrupulous of their own fitness for membership, and could not accept lightly the prospect that their children would burn in Hell, which was exactly the fate implied by the denial of the sacrament of baptism.
34
Richard Mather read of these issues before he faced them in his own ministry. In his first great tract on Church government he begged off questions about the intentions of New England toward its children with the claim that the churches were too young to know.
35
He apparently never had any doubts about qualification for the Lord's Supper and throughout his career insisted that only the fit, those who demonstrated that grace resided in their souls, should eat of the body of Christ. All the founders agreed, and he wrote their judgment into the Cambridge Platform. In 1636, twelve years before the Platform was drafted, Mather had professed uncertainty about baptizing the children of baptized, but unconverted, adults. But sometime in the next seven or eight years he shed enough of his uncertainty to announce in his most ambitious study of Church polity, "A Plea for the Churches of Christ in New England," that he believed such children should receive baptism.
36
Mather did not make this announcement full of confidence; The entire matter was "dark and doubtfull," he wrote in the "Plea."
37
His doubts did not extend to adults who offered themselves for membership, and who thereby requested the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. He never believed that they should be admitted.
38
Mather had come to New England convinced that the Church of Christ must be preserved in all its purity. In the Spring of
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
9.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky
Spirit's Princess by Esther Friesner
Besieged by Bertrice Small
Sterling's Reasons by Joey Light
Ever After by McBride, Heather
Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington
The Great Hunt by Wendy Higgins