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“The Most Glorious Church in the World”: The Unity of the Godly in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1630s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Extract

The dominant historiographical trend in Puritan studies, started by Patrick Collinson, stresses the conservative nature of Puritanism. It notes Puritanism's strong opposition to the separatist impulses of some of the godly and the ways in which it was successfully integrated into the Church of England until the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Far from being revolutionary, Puritanism was able to contain the disruptive energies of the Reformation within a national church structure. This picture dovetails nicely with the revisionist portrayal of an early seventeenth-century “Unrevolutionary England,” but it sits uneasily with the fratricidal cacophony of 1640s Puritanism.

The picture also sits uneasily with the Antinomian Controversy, the greatest internal dispute of pre-civil wars Puritanism. That controversy shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Accusations of false doctrine flew back and forth, the government went into tumult, and by the time the crisis had subsided, leading colonists had voluntarily departed or had been banished. In terms of its cultural impact in England, it was probably the single most important event in seventeenth-century American colonial history; publications generated by the controversy were reprinted in England into the nineteenth century.

The Antinomian Controversy, evoking civil wars cacophony but occurring in the previous decade, offers a bridge across the current interpretive chasm between civil wars and pre-civil wars Puritanism. The crisis has generated a wide range of scholarly interpretations, but there is broad agreement that the Boston church, storm center of the crisis, was the source of its disruption.

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2000

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References

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9 The most satisfactory account of Hutchinson's religiosity is in Maclear, James Fulton, “‘The Heart of New England Rent’: The Mystical Element in Early Puritan History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (1956): 641–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Bozeman, T. D., “‘The Glory of the Third Time': John Eaton as Contra-Puritan,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996): 638–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a brief but very useful survey of the soteriological underground and the literature on it, see Foster, “New England.”

12 Jane Hawkins in England gave trance prophecies of the downfall of the bishops while the local Puritan vicar and his curate took notes. See Public Record Office (PRO), State Papers (SP) 16/141 fols. 96–97, 16/142 fols. 24–25; Hacket, John, Scrinia Reserata (London, 1692), pt. 2, pp. 4748Google Scholar. She was denied admission to the Boston church because of “unsound opinions” (AC, p. 437). William Coggeshall emigrated from Castle Hedingham, in the vicinity of Colchester, a site of antinomian activity. Coggeshall, it was said, had been a “great professor” in England (Hubbard, William, A General History of New England: From Discovery to MDCLXXX, ed. Harris, William Thaddeus [1815, 1816; reprint, Boston, 1848], p. 343.Google Scholar He settled in Roxbury in 1632 but was dismissed to the Boston church in May 1634. Winthrop recorded that in spite of his being “well knowne & approved of the Churche,” he still had to give a “Confession of his Faithe” (Dunn, et al., eds., Journal, p. 114Google Scholar). In the 1620s William Dyer, a London Puritan (he visited William Prynne during the latter's imprisonment in 1633) had been apprenticed in the London parish of Saint Michaels, Crooked Lane, while the alleged antinomian minister, Robert Shaw, preached from its pulpit. See Dyer, William Allan, “William Dyer,” Rhode Island Historical Society Collections 30 (1937): 25Google Scholar. Mary Dyer was raised in the London parish of Saint Martin's in the Fields, where John Everard had been the vicar.

13 Johnson, Francis, The Wonder Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England, ed. Jameson, J. Franklin (1654; reprint, New York, 1910), p. 126Google Scholar. “God sees no sin in his elect” originally arose in the context of theological arguments that did not themselves appear in the Antinomian Controversy.

14 Thomas Dudley claimed at Hutchinson's civil trial in November 1637 (AC, p. 317) that within six months of her arrival, or by the spring of 1634, she “had made parties in the country.” No other statement locates the beginning of controversy remotely so early.

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17 Cotton, John (AC, p. 419)Google Scholar later claimed that only a few in his congregation adhered to doctrines more radical than his own, as opposed to admiring the individuals who held them. Historians arguing for a large body of “Hutchinsonians” cite the seventy-two signatures on a petition protesting the conviction of John Wheelwright (see below). But that petition only demonstrates support for Wheelwright; Cotton also protested his conviction.

18 Winthrop, John, A Short Story, ed. Weld, Thomas (London, 1644)Google Scholar, reprinted in AC, p. 205.

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22 On the Puritan conception of the church and the importance of orthodoxy to it, see Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lake, Peter, Puritans and Anglicans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), p. 127Google Scholar and passim; and Coolidge, John, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, passim.

23 Como, David R., “Puritans and Heretics: Antinomianism and the Contest for Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1998)Google Scholar. For the debate on promises, see n. 24. For the Nye incident, see PRO, SP 16/177/68. I thank Peter Lake and David Como for this reference. Grossart, , ed., Works of Sibbes, 1:53, 5:441–43Google Scholar; Bolton, , Some Generall Directions, pp. 327–28Google Scholar; Preston, , New Covenant, p. 402Google Scholar.

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