Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (review)

Lisa Gordis's book confirms what many of us have long suspected: that the so-called first generation of New England Puritans, both ministry and laity, were able literary critics. Imagine one of those high-octane "state of the field" panels at the MLA, replete with the cranky respondent (whom you suspect is the smartest and the scariest of the bunch), and you have a contemporary version of this seventeenth-century scriptural debate. Even as ministers began to place "decreasing emphasis on a consensus of individual lay and clerical readers, and greater emphasis on the authority conferred by interpretive expertise" (11), John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Thomas Hooker, and Roger Williams believed they were, each and all, "interpreting in the Spirit . . . [T]hey could not accept the possibility that competing doctrines might be derived by legitimate and Spirit-guided exegesis" (150). In a move that will surprise some, Gordis persuasively argues that the ministry extended this privilege to the laity: "If New England's literary theorists elevated the status of reading experts, they nevertheless upheld the importance of lay reading and interpretation" (216). To be sure (one hopes), the spiritual stakes were higher in the seventeenth-century encounter of competing reading and preaching practices than they are at our professional exegetical encounters today. One of many rewards to be claimed by reading Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England is an understanding of the vibrantly interactive interpretive relations between preacher and congregation; church elders and the regular laity; and men and women.

Gordis tracks the emergence of a complex culture of biblical literacy in the Bay Colony's first 40 years or so. In the first part of the book, she provides three extremely subtle and persuasive accounts of the surprisingly different exegetical and preaching practices of Cotton, Shepard, and Hooker. She observes that Cotton's practice of "collation" (yoking apparently unrelated biblical texts together) "allowed him to build arguments that seemed to emerge naturally from his sermons, creating a sense of interpretive inevitability" (38). Thomas Shepard developed a theory of Scripture's personal accessibility: he "believed that the Holy Spirit could choose to inhabit the word, so that scriptural language offered the possibility of intimate, even mystical closeness to God" (57). Hooker propounded a more "fluid" concept of Scripture, "forc[ing] his listeners to identify powerfully with the biblical figures he invoked and develop a sense of personal interaction with the text" (74). When she turns, in part two, to lay and dissenting responses to the preached Word, we discover that Roger Williams believed his colleagues to be entirely cracked; he denied the privilege of historical typology tucked inside an emerging New England orthodoxy, and insisted that no products of depraved humanity, including sermons preached by the "Godly," could afford access to the Divine (124, 127).Where his colleagues "assumed biblical clarity,Williams found the experience of interpretive difficulty compelling and theoretically significant" (140).

Gordis's mature and considered book moves beyond this richly acute, closely read, and tightly argued discussion of these well-known seventeenth-century divines to consider the impact of these sermonic styles on the laity. In a much needed consideration of the impact of Reformation sermon method on New England exegetical technique, Gordis argues that such method "emphasized techniques that minimized the minister's role and privileged interpretive tools that, at least in theory, allowed the text to interpret itself " (24). Such a skeptical view of human capacity was, of course, central to the Calvinist Reformation, and the New Englanders agreed that "the only interpretive assistance truly necessary was the assistance of the Holy Spirit" (3). The revisionist gesture here is striking: against a long tradition of focusing on clerical consensus-building and teleological authority, Gordis asserts "a more fluid view of Puritan interpretative practices, and thus of Puritan interpretive authority" (4). Precisely because most Puritans believed "that each text had a single, clear, and literal meaning" (18), these preachers employed tactics of collation...