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The Expansion of the Visible Church in New England: 1629–1650

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

David Kobrin
David Kobrin
Affiliation:
Graduate Student in History, University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

Recent Puritan historiography has stressed the characteristics peculiar to the New England churches during the 1630's and 1640's. Historians have noted that while the Puritan church was the central religious institution in a religiously oriented society, it did not have the same importance for its members that the Roman Catholic church, for example, has for its communicants. Since the Puritans believed that God had irrevocably predetermined who would be saved and who damned, they did not need their churches to insure salvation. On the contrary, rather than being a means of gaining salvation, Puritan theory clearly defined the church as a fellowship of those already saved under covenant with God. By excluding all others the New England Puritans attempted to narrow the apparently inevitable gap between the visible and the invisible. In a world where salvation belonged to a minority and where man could do nothing to change his spiritual state, the Puritan church, these historians continue, was not an institution which included all those living within a certain geographical area, such as a parish, or even all the obviously pious within such an area.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , June 1967 , pp. 189 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1967

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References

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