We all know the story of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts and what they meant to do in the New World. There are generally two versions to this story. In one version, the Puritans came to the New World in order to have freedom to practice their religion. However, once here, they forgot the golden rule and didn’t allow others to have the freedom to practice their religions. So there was a bit of nastiness with the expulsion of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and some other dissidents, but eventually we sorted it out and passed the First Amendment to the Constitution, and ever since religious liberty has been a great pillar of the American experience. The second version of the story, proposed by Perry Miller, is that the Puritans came to the New World on an errand, fleeing persecution yes, but primarily to set up a Reformed commonwealth that would serve as an example for the imitation of Reformed churches throughout Europe, terminating in the establishment of a fully reformed Protestant Christendom. Miller pulls a couple of examples at random, including John Winthrop’s sermon that he gave aboard the Arbella, “A Modell of Christian Charity”, in order to substantiate this thesis. This sermon is where we get the “city on a hill” motif that is so prominent in our social studies textbooks in elementary school.
Now, both of these interpretations have a degree of merit to them, and both of them have a certain explanatory power, but both of them fail for the same reason–they are origin stories. We have an indefatigable urge to understand ourselves, and our intuition is to look for precedents in the past to explain the path we took to get to where we are as a culture. We feel that in so understanding ourselves by reference to our history, we might be able either to draw upon the resources of the past as we try to figure out how to move ahead or to figure out where everything went wrong and how we might retrace our steps to fix the problem. But in this task we necessarily misunderstand and distort the historical record, because we ask questions of it that past figures weren’t asking–that they couldn’t have asked–and so introduce our modern consciousness with its conceptual categories into the historical record. I have just begun to ruminate upon the fact that to the extent that there is something like a ‘corporate mind’ in each period of history (and even this idea of dividing time into ‘periods of history’ is artificial, of course), that mind has continuities and discontinuities with what came before and after it, and that the continuities grow fewer as the eras studied get further apart. So that to try to understand, say, the Puritans is a very difficult task indeed.
My sense is that the social context for Puritans was such that modern individualism would have been unthinkable for them. While in some sense it is true that the Puritans made modernity possible (though of course not by themselves, and especially not simply through their writings), they were not themselves modern. The chasm that we crossed as a culture to get from their age of kinship bonds and communitarian efforts like the joint stock company and the town corporation to our age of social dislocation and the autonomous self is enormous. And much of what we consider natural and normative would be utterly foreign (and likely horrifying) to them. And precisely for this reason, an encounter with the Puritans awakens something in us–is it loathing? admiration? both? And if we wrestle with the strangeness of these people, if we take them seriously instead of immediately classifying everything foreign in them as benighted and superceded, then the dominant idols of the age might be challenged and perhaps even displaced within us. As Karl Barth once wrote: “As regards theology, also, we cannot be in the Church without taking as much responsibility for the theology of the past as for the theology of our present. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Schliermacher and all the rest are not dead, but living. They still speak and demand a hearing as living voices, as surely as we know that they and we belong together in the Church….There is no past in the Church, so there is no past in theology” (Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 3).
In my last post, I wrote that the church must recover practices like hospitality that will enable to it embody the conviction that the ultimate beatitude for human beings is communion with God lived out in the fellowship of the saints. For convictions never gain traction in our lives as mere thoughts, but only as they are expressed concretely in activity. Thought longs for consummation in activity. Activity incorporates thought into our being. So as we think of God glorified in the communion of saints, and we perform practices that embody this thought, that thought becomes constitutive of who we are. We become communal beings communing with God. And here I think the encounter with the Puritans in their historical strangeness is helpful for us. John Winthrop, in his sermon aboard the Arbella (which, for the record, has almost nothing to do with being a “city on hill”–the main point is that in the hardship of the new world, the Puritan community must be like the apostolic community, with each looking out for the welfare of the other), draws out the connection between the our earthly and heavenly communions:
*”For as of things which are turned with disaffection to each other, the ground of it is from a dissimilitude or arising from the contrary or different nature of the things themselves; for the ground of love is an apprehension of some resemblance in the things loved to that which affects it. This is the cause why the Lord loves the creature, so far as it hath any of his image in it; he loves his elect because they are like himself, he beholds them in his beloved son. So a mother loves her child, because she thoroughly conceives a resemblance of herself in it. Thus it is between the members of Christ; each discerns, by the work of the Spirit, his own image and resemblance in another, and therefore cannot but love him as he loves himself. Now when the soul, which is of a sociable nature, finds anything like to itself, it is like Adam when Eve was brought to him.”
The concrete practice of hospitality leads us to see the common image we share with the other, and the common image of the divine that we both instantiate. Thus Winthrop helps us to see how we might be led from thought to practice to embodiment within a communal context. He shows us that hospitality cannot be carried out merely on an individual level, since that would exhaust us, but it must be performed by the community of the church, not only so that each might bear the burden, but also so that the Spirit might be manifest in our midst.
* I modernized the spelling here.