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h Chapter 4 Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling While studying at Harvard College, Thomas Weld iii kept a small commonplace book in which he recorded pious, secular, academic, and administrative miscellany. at the beginning of the volume, Weld transcribes multiple pages of jokes and humorous anecdotes. Much of the humor turns on verbal play and punning, as in one joke about a minister who“had a great mind to cite the originall” Greek text in his explication of an epistle wherein Paul “speakes perticularly to one man συ γαρ .” The Greek phrase might translate roughly as “indeed you” (with the coordinating particle γάρ intensifying the second-person pronoun συ) and can be transliterated as“su gar.” Weld’s punch line requires but minimal familiarity with Greek; he describes how the explicating minister “burst out with a great exclamation. how sweetly doth ye apostle speake, tis sugar [in the] originall.”1 The sweetness humorously attributed to the Pauline text might remind the reader of the nightly reading habits of John Cotton, who reputedly claimed, “i love to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before i go to sleep.”2 indeed, the sensual corporeality of human-sacred texts (whether of Paul or of Calvin) apparently is a trope common enough to help drive the humor. The obvious butt of Weld’s joke on scriptural translation may be the pretension of the minister, but—perhaps more precisely—the punch line also suggests the ease with which pious attention to the letter of the Word might lead to misprision. at the heart of the joke lies the problem of where exactly a commitment to the literal sense of scripture might lead. Other stories in Weld’s compendium turn on similar cases of clerical enthusiasm for explicating the letter of the Word. in another joke, for example, a man preaching on the verse “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (rom. 14:23) Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling 141 is challenged by his “learned auditory” for running “praeter textum” (outside of his text, presumably in violation of the directives of plain style) and replies that his justification for wandering explication is“contained in the first word of his text, viz. whatsoever.”3 Weld’s jokes presume a certain nimbleness of scriptural literacy among the laity, as evidenced, for example, in the story of a hungry Harvard waiter who, too impatient to wait for leftover scraps after the students finish their meal, eats the meat out of their pie, replacing the filling with grass and inscribing the crust with the motto “all flesh is grass” (isa. 40:6; 1 Pet. 1:24).4 The latin “alia” (“another”) precedes each subsequent entry in Weld’s compendium of humorous stories, as if the surprisingly jovial third-generation Puritan punctuates each laugh with the proverbial “i’ve got a million of them.” Weld’s notebook is as unusual as it is exemplary, revealing a third-generation Puritan who is simultaneously pious and irreverent. apparently, Weld records the jokes and anecdotes about the first few generations of New england Puritanism because the humorous stories suit his temperament, but clearly he does not invent these stories himself. rather, he seems to record jokes that are already in circulation. While it is tempting to compare Weld with his firstgeneration grandfather (contributor to The Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, & Libertines as well as the Bay Psalm Book), such a contrast would only superficially suggest, yet again, declension in the Bible commonwealth. taken on its own, Weld’s collection of jokes suggests a shared understanding in seventeenth-century New england sermon culture that close attention to scriptural language is necessary but also problematic. The point is not that Puritans developed a sense of humor by the third generation5 but, rather, that the problematic relationship between human and divine language was a common concern that created a shared sensibility for particular kinds of verbal play in the theory and practice of sermon language. Weld records humorous anecdotes that turn, in part, upon the deceptive simplicity of plain-style explication of the literal sense and, more fundamentally, upon the complicated implications of the five solas of reformation theology. indeed, the proverbial spiritual empowerment of Protestant principles such as sola fide and sola scriptura proves to be a double-edged sword, particularly with the Calvinist emphasis on innate depravity. Faith and scripture are gifts, not the tools, of redemption. The ordinary means to salvation require an enabled understanding, so the spiritual journey is implicated...

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