Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism. - book reviews

Christian Century, Oct 5, 1994 by W. Clark Gilpin

IN HIS CLASSIC study The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, Geoffrey F. Nuttall emphasized the authority the Puritans gave to religious experience in their exposition of scripture and their application of Christian doctrine to faith and practice. They believed that the God of the Bible unfailingly pursued divine purposes in the history of the world and the pilgrimage of the self. Hence, the conduct of life required faithful attentiveness to scripture and experience in order to discern the hand and judgment of God. "There is no other principle to prove the word," declared the English Puritan Richard Sibbes, "but experience from the working of it." The authority that Puritans attributed to experience meant that a preacher's particular religious sensibilities shaped the interpretation of doctrine and that doctrinal controversies manifested underlying differences of piety.

Janice Knight, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, illustrates the consequences of this experiential piety by recovering "varieties of religious experience within Puritanism" that produced competing "orthodoxies" in 17th-century Massachusetts. "What is usually read as the univocal orthodoxy of New England," she writes, is better understood as two contending versions of orthodoxy, "two communities within the larger Puritan household." these differing versions of Puritan faith first became manifest in the antinomian controversy of the 1630s, reverberated in later debates about the half-way covenant, and exhibit suggestive parallels to the later theology of Jonathan Edwards.

Knight begins her "literary history of the affections" in England, where she identifies two lineages of Puritan preaching. One, indebted to William Perkins and William Ames, was represented in New England by Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard and Peter Bulkeley. The other party among the "spiritual brethren" looked to Richard Sibbes for inspiration and was represented in Massachusetts by John Cotton, John Davenport and John Wheel-wright.

The "Amesians" cultivated a piety of spiritual discipline, emphasizing devout "preparation" of the heart for reception of divine grace, the importance of covenantal obligations, and power or sovereignty as the essential divine attribute. The "Sibbesians," on the other hand, "set their spiritual clocks" not on preparative religious disciplines but on the direct experience of the Spirit's indwelling, the joys of Christian fellowship and the divine attribute of overflowing love. In the 1630s these doctrinally encoded pieties clashed, with the Sibbesians warning the Amesians against a legalistic "covenant of works" and the Amesians sounding the alarm of "antinomianism," lest Cotton's followers shipwreck on the waves of immediate spiritual experience.

Knight's fresh retelling of a familiar history not only enhances our understanding of New England Puritanism but, more broadly, demonstrates the extent to which "orthodoxies" are polemically constructed. Her own preference is for the relatively neglected "Sibbesians," whose theological vision she describes as global, expansive and joyous in contrast to an Amesian piety she finds localistic, contracted and anxious. She argues the case on both sides with clarity, balance and erudition.