From Founding Fathers to Old-Boy Networks: The Declension of Perry Miller's Puritans.

In this fast-paced age of e-mail and the fax, most scholars struggle just to keep up with their own fields, and feel constant pressure to follow (if not anticipate) the latest intellectual trends. Puritan specialists share these pressures, but face an additional challenge exemplified by the appearance of two new studies that speak directly to Perry Miller’s 1933 classic, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts. Despite decades of revisionist work, Miller’s massive writings still dominate American Puritan studies, adding their considerable weight to the burden of anyone who wishes to engage the most recent scholarship in the field. It is pointless to wonder whether more books on Puritanism are really necessary; historians have been obsessed with this subject for centuries, independent of Miller’s influence. But we might well approach these latest revisions of Miller by asking, what more can be gained by continuing to frame the most innovative scholarship on Puritanism within Miller’s paradigm?

By its title alone, Janice Knight’s Orthodoxies in Massachusetts announces itself as a response to Miller, and on one level the title says it all. Where Miller described the New England Way as the product of a single mentality shared by “nonseparating Congregationalist” Puritans, Knight argues that these same orthodox founders were divided against each other. Miller’s unitary New England Mind contained a variety of internal tensions. Knight locates these tensions in two distinct parties of ministers and their followers, and claims that their polemics constructed a system that included a dominant voice along with a subversive alternative; not one orthodoxy, but “twin orthodoxies.”

Orthodoxies in Massachusetts traces the roots of this division to English clergymen who recruited their own networks of disciples. The primary mentors of Knight’s two camps, William Ames and Richard Sibbes, emphasized different aspects of orthodox Calvinism. Ames and his followers (whom Knight calls “Amesians” or “Intellectual Fathers”) focused on God’s sovereignty. They often described God’s covenant with humanity as a bar gain requiring individuals to prepare themselves to receive God’s grace, and they viewed a person’s godly behavior (or “good works”) as potential evidence that salvation had been granted. The mystically inclined “Sibbesians,” on the other hand, emphasized God’s love and mercy rather than his power, and understood grace as God’s free and unconditional gift. These “Spiritual Brethren” recognized conversion as “a new perception or sensibility, a new relish for divine things” (p. 21), and required no further assurance of salvation through good works.

Knight’s argument relies heavily on close readings of the works of three leaders of each group: John Cotton, John Davenport, and John Norton among the New England Sibbesians; Thomas Hooker, Peter Bulkeley, and Thomas Shepard among the Amesians. The book begins with a retelling of the Antinomian controversy of the 1630s when these divisions rose to the surface, then presents a “speculative genealogy” of the personal allegiances that bound the two camps. Knight contrasts the two sides’ opposing views of the nature of God and mankind, describes their distinct positions on the covenant of grace, and explains how these differences shaped their respective visions of the ideal church and state. A chapter on the Half-Way Covenant controversy of the 1660s stresses the enduring significance of these divisions, a theme reinforced by an epilogue that claims Jonathan Edwards for the Sibbesian camp.

The basic argument of Orthodoxies in Massachusetts is easily summarized, but no summary can capture the elusive quality of Knight’s interpretations, which are grounded in brilliant explications of the most subtle rhetorical and theological nuances imaginable, distinctions so fine that John Winthrop himself could not always perceive them. ¹ Knight reads Puritan prose with an ear poised to detect the faint undertones that distinguish the sermons of John Cotton from...