American Jeremiad

4. The Typology of America’s Mission

4 The Typology of America's Mission The Puritan jeremiad set out the sacred history of the New World; the eighteenth-century jeremiad established the typology of America 's mission. That outlook, to be sure, had become almost explicit by the last decades of the seventeenth century. But the Puritans were careful to make Scripture the basis of their figuralism. They always rooted their exegeses (however strained) in biblical texts, and they appealed to (even as they departed from) a common tradition of Reformed hermeneutics. Because they believed the Reformation was reaching its fulfillment in America, and because they identified themselves primarily in religious terms, they found it necessary to include all the standard landmarks of Protestant historiography. Their Yankee heirs felt relatively free of such constraints. During the eighteenth century, the meaning of Protestant identity became increasingly vague; typology took on the hazy significance of metaphor , image, and symbol; what passed for the divine plan lost its strict grounding in Scripture; "providence" itself was shaken loose from its religious framework to become part of the belief in human progress. The Yankee Jeremiahs took advantage of this movement "from sacred to profane" 1 to shift the focus offigural authority. In effect, they incorporated Bible history into the American experience - they substituted a regional for a biblical past, consecrated the American present as a movement from promise to fulfillment, and translated 93 94 THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD fulfillment from its meaning within the closed system of sacred history into a metaphor for limitless secular improvement. All this was a matter of extension and adaptation, not of transformation . The Puritan clergy had set out to blur traditional distinctions between the world and the kingdom. Their rhetoric issued in a unique mode of ambiguity that precluded the conflict of heaven's time and man's. "Canaan" was a spiritual state for them, as it was for other Christians; but it was also (in another, but not conflicting sense) their country. They spoke of the mutuality (rather than the coexistence) of fact and ideal. By "church-state" they meant a separation of powers in the belief that in the American Canaan, and there only, the ecclesiastical and the civic order were not really distinct. By their very contradictions they were made to correspond. And in the course of time the correspondence yielded the secular basis of multidenominational religion and the sacral view of free-enterprise economics. Both these developments were rooted in the heterodox tenets established a century before: the moral distinction between the Old World and the New (as between Egypt and Canaan), the interrelation of material and spiritual blessings, the concept of a new chosen people whose special calling entailed special trials, and above all a mythic view of history that extended New England's past into an apocalypse which stood "near, even at the door," requiring one last great act, one more climactic pouring out of the spirit, in order to realize itself. Recent scholars have recognized the importance of millennialism in our religious and social history. But by and large they have begun their account not with the Puritans but with the Edwardsian revivals. Their dating is based on what they have assumed to be a fundamental theological shift. Technically speaking, the seventeenth-century colonists (like most Protestants of their time) were pre-millennialists. That is, they believed that the descent of New Jerusalem would be preceded and attended by a series of cataclysmic divine judgments and followed by a universal change in all things. Jonathan Edwards, on the contrary, was a post-millennialist; he posited a final golden age within history, and thereby freed humanity, so to speak, to participate in the revolutions of the apocalypse. Students of the Great Awakening have used this distinction to make Edwards out to THE TYPOLOGY OF AMERICA'S MISSION 95 be a radically innovative historian, the first New World spokesman for an optimistic view of human progress. The distinction is a questionable one. Historians of religion have long noted that pre- and post-millennialism are often present in the same movement, sometimes in the same thinker. And even if we accept a significant difference between the two approaches it is by no means certain that Edwards is the first colonial post-millennialist. David Smith, for one, has argued that that honor belongs to the latter-day theocrats (like Samuel Sewall, Cotton Mather, and Joseph Morgan), and if to them, then also...