Ruling Passion: Consent and Covenant Theology in Westfield, Massachusetts, August 1679

We mistake both the Puritan past and America's present when we concentrate on the discontinuities between the two, at the expense of comprehending their continuities. Such a focus appears often, in fact, to have led Puritan studies to construe the narrative of Puritanism in America as a story of fault lines and fractures. While Perry Miller first established the chronicle of Puritan declension from the fathers' ideals in New England, even two of the most capable recent accounts of Massachusetts Puritanism continue to illustrate this habit of mind. Ivy Schweitzer, in The Work of Self-Representation: Puritan Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England, maintains that Edward Taylor, like other Puritans, practiced a soteriology "geared [exclusively] toward male saints, who were compelled by the logic of spiritual conversion—figured as a rape or ravishment, or at the very least, an irresistible intrusion—to position themselves in relation to God and Christ as feminized, deauthorized, self-denying souls" (87). Jeffrey Hammond, in very much the same manner, holds that Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations exemplifies a failed cultural quest for an ineffable personal identification premised upon a theological covenant of God's grace (20).

I am not, I should state, suggesting that these examinations are neither useful nor insightful. Their effect in sum, though, is to imply that the Puritans were almost entirely an alien people, wholly an other. Furthermore, to the precise degree that we take history as nothing more than a record of change over time, we risk impeding our ability to understand both alteration and duration. Put differently, it seems very difficult to assess how far we have come from the past, without some concomitant appreciation of how close we are to it.

This is why it is important to observe again how the work of a putative cultural conservative like Edward Taylor is both committed to and critical of its own past. Analyzing the complex of expressions in the documents Taylor prepared, assembled, and recorded concerning the Foundation Day of the Westfield church, for example, reminds us of the extent to which he foreshadows a figure like Jonathan Edwards, while remaining distinct from him. The disagreements between them, as well as between Taylor and his own contemporary (and Edwards's ancestor) Solomon Stoddard, were subtle and thus significant in American religious history: they all depend upon certain logical assumptions, which together reinforce exactly how many American denominations and doctrines yet rely on Ramist and scholastic modes of thought.

Secondly, if Taylor does anticipate Edwards, then both simultaneously indicate how challenges to Puritan orthodoxy were assimilated into orthodox belief. As Taylor formulated his responses to the doctrinal controversy Stoddard was already fomenting in 1679, he also highlighted the measure of mysticism and experientialism infused into Puritanism after Hutchinson was exiled and her followers tamed. The experimental theology that would inspire the revivals of the 1740s might have been conceived in England's Cambridge, as Janice Knight asserts (Knight 35, 199); it was by no means absent from Westfield.

Lastly, clear cognitive effects that are worth noting follow from such beliefs. Even though explorations of Ramism, the operative logical principles of the New English Puritans, have been extensive over the past half-century, including not only the major treatises of Samuel Eliot Morison, Perry Miller, and Walter Ong but encompassing several more modest studies as well, particularly the essay of Alan Pope into the Ramist construction of Michael Wigglesworth's poetry (see White 210–26) and that of John Charles Adams into the figurations employed by the English Ramist Alexander Richardson (Adams 58–68), none of these works has treated Ramism as itself a coherent endeavor at philosophy, with plain philosophical implications. The texts from the Foundation Day at Westfield in August 1679—the profession of faith Taylor prepared, the sermon he preached, and the confession narratives he collected and transcribed—all act to emphasize these implications. As a group, the Foundation Day records suggest how Puritan ideas of knowledge and language both lent themselves to a close range of imaginative expression and seemed to dictate a decidedly fatalistic political philosophy...