Another dissenter, Anne Hutchinson, posed an even greater threat to Massachusetts Puritanism. A midwife and member of Boston’s congregation, Hutchinson wanted to take orthodoxy farther than it was willing to go. Salvation was by faith, not works, all agreed. But orthodoxy declared that after salvation, good works gave evidence of that salvation. Hutchinson challenged that assumption.
In doing so, Puritan leaders felt she broke the essential bond between morality and religion, thereby threatening to undermine the very foundation of Puritan society. She was branded an “antinomian,” literally one who is against the law.
Worse, during her trial, Hutchinson admitted to having heard “voices,” private revelations beyond the public revelation of the Bible. For Puritans, this was the ultimate presumption to be so arrogant as to claim that God spoke directly to her. She was denounced as an enthusiast – literally, one filled with God, or at least proudly pretending to be.
In 1637 the General Court brought Hutchinson to trial. John Winthrop, speaking for the Court, noted that she had “spoken diverse things … very prejudicial to the honor of the churches and the ministers thereof.” Moreover, she had “maintained a meeting and an assembly … that has been condemned by the General Assembly.” Furthermore, she had said things and done things not “comely in the sight of God, nor fitting for your sex.” The Court concluded, “She shall be banished out of our liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away.”
With her family and a significant number of supporters, Hutchinson fled to Rhode Island, where they continued to worry the authorities in Massachusetts. In 1643, after she and her family moved to Long Island, a marauding band of Mohawks abruptly ended her life.
As the decades passed, the Puritans’ original zeal began to wane. Ministers began preaching a type of sermon, the “jeremiad,” in which they lamented the loss of original fervor and exhorted people to amend their ways.
The issue of declining religious fervor came to a head in the 1660s over the issue of church membership. Initially, Church membership in Massachusetts was limited to those who had a direct experience of the saving grace of God and who appeared before the Church to tell of their wondrous conversion. By the 1660s, however, many of these converts’ children, who had been baptized as infants, failed to tell of such conversions. Thus they could not be full members allowed to participate in the Lord’s Supper.
Then, these people, though not full members themselves, brought their children to be baptized. To accept such a third-generation child for baptism was to relax the rigid rules of membership; on the other hand, to reject such an infant would reduce the scope and influence of the church over a growing society.
After much harsh debate, many Churches adopted the so-called “Half-Way Covenant,” broadening the parameters of the Church to include these children, but at cost to their pure principles.
By 1679, Massachusetts ministers were so concerned about declining faith, they felt that God had a controversy with His people, that he no longer looked with favor upon New England. They petitioned the General Court to call a “Reforming Synod.” There the ministers testified to Sabbath breaking, “Sinful Heats and Hatreds,” and most of all “A public spirit … greatly wanting in most of men.”
William Bradford’s compact and John Winthrop’s sermon seemed, if not forgotten, certainly forsaken.
When in 1691 the witchcraft episode at Salem erupted, it seemed to provide further evidence that Satan’s dominion was enlarging as the face of God turned away from New England.
A generation later, a wave of revivalism gave hope that the decline of Puritanism had been arrested or even reversed. This Great Awakening of the 1740s, recalling the vision and zeal of the 1630s, inspired many to confession of sin and godly repentance. But it was not enough.
Indeed, the Awakening, by dividing the friends of the revival from its foes, shattered the unity of the clergy and of the Churches. The New England Way, which had held for more than a century, would henceforth be a personal option, but no longer a pervading social norm.
Maranatha!
(mar-uh-nath-uh – “Our Lord Comes”)
Pastor Steve can be reached at PastorSteve@MaranathaBibleChurch.org