A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England

CHAPTER THREE: Godly Rule Empowering the Saints

chapter three GODLY RULE Empowering the Saints Explicating the book of Revelation to a lecture-day audience in Boston, John Cotton urged the colonists to “raise up” their “hearts in holy thankfulnesse to God” that they had been “delivered ” from the “great beast” of Roman Catholicism. The central theme of his sermon series on Revelation was power, just and unjust, limited and unlimited: the unjust and virtually unlimited power asserted by the Papacy over churches, civil societies, and the consciences of Christians, as contrasted with the “simplicity” of the apostolic or “primative” church, its leaders exercising limited authority, its communities enjoying a cluster of “liberties,” and the churches as a whole renouncing any role in civil government.1 Appropriate to an exegesis of Revelation, Cotton sketched a politics of authority rooted in a broader story of “warre” between the saints and the forces allied with the Antichrist and Satan. In his telling of this story, conflict had broken out in the fourth century, when, despite the seeming triumph of Christianity under Constantine , the true saints had fled into the “wilderness.” For centuries thereafter, a saving remnant had undergone great sacrifice and suffering . This struggle held two lessons: first, that a lust for power arising out of human sinfulness was always and everywhere directed against the saints, and, second, that the day was coming when, as prophesied in Revelation, Daniel, and Isaiah, the tyranny associated with the Antichrist would give way to a church liberated from such abuse and accepting Christ as its sole head.2 The people listening to these lectures also heard him say that in 96 New England ministers and people had collaborated to restore the form of church government practiced by the earliest Christians— that is, not “nationall” or “Diocesan” but “congregational.” Warranted by the New Testament, the Congregational Way (as Cotton and others named the New England system) eliminated the abuses of power that had infiltrated Christianity, doing so by the simple steps of allowing every congregation the privilege of self-rule and giving every minister the same rank. All unlawful and corrupting hierarchies thus dispensed with, the saints could look ahead in time as well as back, for the Congregational Way betokened the emergence of the fuller “libertie” Christ had promised those who were participating in the “first Resurrection,” the long-awaited moment when churches would cast off “Idolatry and Superstition.” Using slightly different language, a lay colonist declared in 1638 that the “endes of Comminge into these westerne partes” were “to establish the lord Jesus in his Kingly Throne as much as in us lies here in his churches and to maynteine the Common Cause of his gospel with our lives and estates.” So it also seemed to an Englishman who sympathized with the colonists; evoking the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21, he wrote one of the Winthrops that “the harts of all Gods people here are all bent toward your Syon.”3 For him as for many of the colonists, the church stood at the heart of their project of reform. During the same period when Cotton was delivering his lectures on Revelation (1639–41), others in England were voicing similar hopes for reform within the framework of apocalyptic prophecy. Before 1641, the possibilities for doing so publicly were few, for the regime of Charles I had ordered the book trades not to publish any commentaries on Revelation. When Thomas Goodwin predicted the coming “reign” of the “saints” and the overthrow of the Antichrist , he was living in exile in the Netherlands, and English readers had to wait for a posthumous printing of his sermons on Revelation. Ephraim Huit’s explication of the book of Daniel, completed in 1632, was not printed until 1643, four years after Huit had immigrated to New England.4 Speculation on the signs of the times persisted in private letters, as when an English correspondent of one of the colonists identified Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus, whose Godly Rule 97 army was contending against Catholic forces on the Continent, as “an instrument for the fall of Antichrist.” The Scottish Covenanters who revolted against Charles I in 1638 were more daring. Inserting themselves into the scenario in Revelation of the Antichrist “assaulting our Christian liberty,” they likened their cause to Christ’s “hunting and pursuing the beast,” to them both sign and symbol of the king’s mistaken policies.5 With the calling of...