Semester in Review

So, what have I learned about the witch-burning, shoe-buckled, solemn Puritans? 

In my first post back in February, I posed several questions about these colonists, with the overarching goal of overcoming stereotypes by reading their own works.  Here I cull through my answers, as well as reflect on new themes that have emerged.  This is not a final commentary, but a pulling together of what I’ve learned thus far.  My intertwining thoughts follow a sort of “idea chain,” as you will see below…

My reading encompassed a variety of genres—sermon, ecclesiastical history, poetry, and personal narrative—which illumine the role of words in New England culture.  Sermons are highly structured presentations, easy to remember and repeat, voicing a message around which the community could gather, especially on noteworthy dates like election-day.  The jeremiad functioned as a call to renew the covenant with God.  As Bercovitch pointed out, jeremiads are forward-looking; condemnation is always followed by a call to renewal.

Sermons were not the only words meant to stir the people’s covenantal memory.  Mather emphasized remembering the covenant in the Magnalia, his work of ecclesiastical history.  With public agreements like the Salem Covenant of 1629, the colonists founded their communities on a covenant to live holy lives before God.  They continually affirmed these compacts through church and sermons, reminders in the church calendar, and home worship.  As the children born to original settlers grew older, however, they lost sight of what their parents taught.  Many did not “own” the covenant personally, so they lacked the passion for holiness.  I wrote that they needed to be reminded of the covenant, their history as a people, and their charge to live for God’s glory. Danforth used sermons and Mather used history to re-instill Christian commitment in those who were “lukewarm.” 

What did it mean for some Puritans to not “own” the covenant?  Christians needed to have a personal experience of salvation and profess their faith publicly in order to “own” the covenant.  Thus, Puritans were very concerned with the state of their souls, ascertained through self-examination.  Self-examination could be public, through sermons and covenant-readings, or private, as seen in devotional poems (Taylor and Bradstreet) or Rowlandson’s experiences.  Taylor and Bradstreet work through their spiritual struggles in verse form, praying and quoting Scripture to themselves.  Danforth presents self-examination as a remedy to spiritual lukewarmness.  From his sermon, I noted that self-examination is based not on empty meditation, but on specific remembrance.  The mind is focused on God’s mercies, as well as on life purpose and a comparison with former spiritual diligence.  These meditations convict and restore the soul.  I wrote, “A life lived fully in God’s service, such as Danforth and his congregation desired, is not achieved by default. Self-examination and remembrance—leading to renewed vision—were keys to the Puritans’ perseverance through horrible circumstances.” 

For Rowlandson, self-examination was linked with the Bible, the central Puritan text upon which all other texts are based.  Rowlandson’s meditation spiraled into negativity, until Scripture came to mind and gave her hope.  Quiet moments with her Bible enabled her to survive mentally and emotionally.  This semester’s writers all drew heavily on Scripture.  Some modeled Biblical forms, like the jeremiads.  Others were particularly heavy in Biblical allusions and illustrations, like the Magnalia.  Much of Puritan poetry is a reformulation of Scripture, particularly Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, or another bestseller I didn’t write about, The Bay Psalm Book.  Further, the Bible was the source of Puritans’ self-definition as a people: the Israelites, the wilderness, and the Promised Land.

The Puritans identified themselves strongly with the ancient Hebrews, God’s chosen people who wandered through the wilderness to the Promised Land.  This explains why the Puritans called their enterprise “an errand into the wilderness.”  But why exactly did they board ships to America?  Danforth and Cotton Mather both address this issue.  In his sermon “An Errand into the Wilderness,” Samuel Danforth identifies the cause of emigration as liberty of conscience and purity of religion.  Similarly, according to Mather, they came to “seek a Refuge for their Lives and Liberties, with Freedom, for the Worship of God, in a Wilderness, in the Ends of the Earth."  Mather also emphasizes historical context: the Reformation and Protestant in-fighting. The American Puritans wished to be an example of pure Reformation to the European Protestants, to establish what John Winthrop called “a city upon a hill,” shining its beacon across the Atlantic.  I have purposefully left alone the most popular Puritan topics—witch hunts and heretical disputes.  Now that I have a basic understanding of the Puritans’ concern for purity of religion and for God’s wrath and mercy, I’m interested in dealing with their infamous shortcomings.

By reading their own words, I am gaining insight on how the Puritans saw themselves and their God.  Wrath and mercy are inseparable concepts.  Both Danforth’s “Errand” and Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” contain sections detailing the two concepts.  On the other hand, Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom is all about the wrath to come, in which there will be no mercy.  So how is that consistent with mercy?  Like the jeremiads, this poem ends with a fervent call to readers: come now to the merciful God, while you can still obtain pardon! 

Yes, the Puritans admit, we have sinned.  But He has promised pardon. The promise is central—to heal (Danforth), to restore (Rowlandson), to make of you a great nation and a light to the world (Magnalia).  “You shall be my people and I shall be your God” is an Old Testament promise to which this community clung (Ezek. 36:28).  “God is but waiting for an opportunity of our thankfulness and humility,” cried Hubbard, “to turn his face toward us that we may be saved” (“The Happiness of a People” 53). To enter into God’s promises, a people must humble themselves and live a pure religion of Christian charity.

Pardon from sin is not exemption from life’s hardships.  Even in the midst of war, famine, and sickness, Puritan writers point out the reality of affliction, as well as its attendant blessings!  The jeremiads are expressions of hope in the mercies of a fatherly God, who sends afflictions not to destroy but to correct.  For Bradstreet, in the battle between “flesh and spirit,” balance requires loving God more than all; afflictions are the test that shows whether we do.  She further believes that hardships are a form of God’s love, to draw one closer to Him.  Mary Rowlandson, too, turns her story of affliction into a lesson on gratitude.

Puritan writing is noticeably affective, or reader-oriented.  Every Puritan text asks for reader response at the heart/soul level.  Mather’s “Life of John Winthrop” calls readers to examine their lives, whether they are as godly and loving as Winthrop.  Even Rowlandson’s first-person narrative was more about impacting readers with God’s goodness than about recording a war experience.  Wigglesworth’s poem was aimed at convicting his readers and drawing them to the mercy-seat.  The personal and devotional poems of Taylor and Bradstreet are perhaps the least reader-oriented, for they focus on the writer’s soul experiences.  Yet, as Jeffrey Hammond explains, Puritan readers would meditate on these poems with eyes focused inward, applying the truths to their own Christian experience. 

Puritan writing is an integral part of remembering and personally fulfilling the covenant, an act of self-examination for both writer and reader.  In public sermons and personal texts, Puritan writers exhort patience in affliction, fear of God’s wrath, trust in His mercy, and faith in Biblical promises.  What attracted me to this community are qualities that are rare today: strong personal discipline, covenantal community, and the willingness to be quiet with one’s own soul. 

As the settlers cultivated the harsh New England wilderness using saws and hoes, many among them wielded pens to tame the wilderness of the soul.  And, centuries after the Puritans writers wielded their pens, I approach their texts with a willing mind and humble pen, aware that I’ve cleared only a corner of the wilderness.  At times I feel like an Israelite wanderer, but golden glimpses of the Promised Land of learning quicken my steps.  Hesitant to push the metaphor any further, I lay down my pen [laptop] for now, “blushing” like Bradstreet at this “ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain.”