The Saturday Review of Literature claims “John Dewey is alive and well in New England.” Could the same be said for Calvinism? A score of American Indians arc not the only ones to desecrate Plymouth Rock on Thanksgiving day. Boston mourns the loss of its greatest churchman, a Roman Catholic cardinal; and at Yale a march is staged to support the counter culture of the Black Panthers.
Hardly “alive and well” – The Puritans have been more often hated than loved. England ejected both the separatist and reforming varieties. Thomas Jefferson abhorred everything “Calvinistic,” John Adams was a deist, Ben Franklin a pragmatist. No one has lampooned the faith of the Pilgrim Fathers more than their children. In this, the Puritans have shared the fate of Calvinists everywhere—only more so. They held to ideas and ways which made them particular objects of ridicule, and even today some trivia about the puritanical fanatics is good for a laugh in the Thanksgiving issue of Time.
Warren Sweet is kinder. He speaks of a happy revisionism resulting in a better evaluation of the Pilgrims. “New England was founded,” he writes (Religion in Colonial America, p. 118), “as an experiment in Christian living. It was an experiment in applying Christianity as they saw it to every interest and concern of daily life.” He ascribes its failure to the “heights they set themselves to scale.”
Puritanism is hardly “alive and well” in New England. Still someone ventured to call John F. Kennedy”s famous challenge “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” as reflection of New England Calvinism. Men do not speak thus in Spain or Latin America. The concern for the common welfare, however modified by other forces, is part of our Calvinistic heritage. Much of the “Puritan ethic” takes on a secular form. It is still with us. But it may not be so for long.
Acids of modernity – The acids of modernity are eating away our heritage. Long ago the heritage of sovereign grace gave way to liberalism and Unitarianism. At Yale in 1800 Timothy Dwight found hardly an evangelical Christian, and Harvard was no better. Two mighty revivals stemmed the tide of secularism, but the process continued. Something of the Puritan “world-and-life” view seemed to live on and spread through the United States. There was the Puritan Sabbath. The biblical sex laws, the sense of decency, the respect for law and order, the priority of the Ten Commandments were all elements of the Puritan moral code. Nineteenth Century New England Calvinists were caught up in the philosophy of “universal benevolence” and led the nation in founding a host of societies for the common good. Secularism swallowed most of these, too, although they had a Calvinistic beginning.
Peter N. Carrol attributes the thrift and “work ethics” of the hardy New Englanders to the hardship of the rocky soil. “Entering upon uncultivated lands inspires frugality and invention” (p. 15, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 1969). H. Schneider suggests the same (A History of American Philosophy). Indeed Yankee ingenuity was not exactly a Calvinistic invention. The Yankee boy Ben Franklin already divorced the “work and save” ethic from any theological foundation (ibid, p. 35). Franklin wrote: “Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such. Experience proves temperance, silence, order, industry, frugality payoff.”
The fact remains that it was the New England Calvinist who proclaimed man’s God-given duty to work hard. Therefore the advocates of a counterculture have renewed their attacks upon the “Calvinistic conscience” and the “Puritan work ethic.” In a desperate effort to justify a neo-pagan, post-Christian life style—philosophers, psychologists, and even theologians are seeking to destroy every trace of the “Puritan mentality.” All must go—the pornography laws, the Sabbath, biblical sex morality, heaven and hell, and the Puritan or neo-Puritan “work ethics.”
A marvelous minority – One marvels how so small a minority as the Calvinists in New England could have put their stamp on America. What other nation has thought of itself as the Kingdom of God? The Pilgrims’ dream still lingers on. We are still the “land of the Pilgrim’s pride.” Very little of the Calvinism, however, remains.
The first settlers of New England were indeed Calvinists. Even the Baptist, Roger Williams, continued to believe in sovereign grace. Sometimes pictured as hyper-Calvinists; those first settlers were rather high-Calvinists. They wanted God to be the Alpha and the Omega and conceived of His sovereignty both as His electing will and moral will. In their “Covenant Theology” they leaned toward human responsibility.
The marvel is not that such a venture in high-Calvinism failed, but that it ever should have been tried. As Sweet suggests, such high idealism was doomed to fail (Religion in Colonial America). Like Calvin’s Geneva it could exist only as an ideal, and only for a brief moment in this evil world.
New England was a theocracy. To maintain a virtually coterminous Church and State was impossible. H. P. Scholte warned the “pilgrims of the West” against the Puritan mistake of identifying Church and Community. But what Christian colony can escape some of the Puritan community spirit?
Covenant theology – The problems were accentuated among the Puritans because of their voluntary and experiential qualification for church membership. Their Calvinism had been mediated through the Puritan Ames and the Dutch Pietist Van Mastricht. From them had also come the development of the Covenant theology.
In his study of The Covenant Idea in New England Theology, Dr. Peter Y. De Jong traces the difficulties which developed in the application of covenant theology. He finds the crucial difficulty in the experimental nature of conversion. This is incompatible with the covenant approach. Hence one compromise followed another as the New England communities tried to keep the citizens in the congregation. The “half-way” covenant came in 1662; acknowledging historical faith and the baptism of the children of baptized members. This was followed by Stoddardianism, the view of Rev. Solomon Stoddard that the Lord’s Supper is a “converting ordinance” and is therefore open to the unconverted.
Evil times – The New England colonies were experiencing evil times around 1660; spiritually and otherwise from Indian war, fire, and pestilence. The office of elder had fallen into neglect. The growing number of indifferent church members began to make itself felt in community and congregational life. In spite of the efforts of a reforming Synod of 1679 and the determined opposition of the Mathers, the Brattle Street Church of Boston lowered the standards for Communion and baptism. Meanwhile Yale had been formed because Harvard was becoming liberal (1701).
Puritanism was becoming secularized. Perry Miller, in his penetrating study of The New England Mind sees a subtle shift from electing grace to a conditional covenant with the whole community. “As the New England Church covenants gradually became secularized and were increasingly indistinguishable from town ordinances,” the Puritan stressed the general providence of God and moral duty (Schneider, H. W., History of American Philosophy, p. 12). Later as the people prospered “they did not seem to need God—there followed a growing tendency to preach morality—The Christian came to be more and more identified with the decent, industrious and prosperous citizen” (De Jong, above, p. 124).
In 1734 Jonathan Edwards began his Great Awakening. New England congregationalism was revived. About forty thousand confessing members were added to the churches. One hundred fifty new congregations were formed, bringing the total to 530. Edwards was a Calvinist, but his revival split the Calvinists into two schools.
Unbelief and secularism – Ultimately, neither the Old or New school Congregationalists were able to stop the tide of unbelief and secularism in New England. Puritanism continued to put its social and cultural stamp on the colonies, but the number of church members declined. By 1760 only one out of five persons in New England was a church member. (Sweet, above, p. 335.) Many churches had become liberal Arminians, soon to become Unitarians. For half a century Congregationalism was in turmoil.
Calvinism virtually disappeared from New England. “The short ‘Statement of Doctrine’ of 1883 contains no single distinctively Calvinistic doctrine” (De Jong. above, p. 223).
Lubbertus Oostendorp is teacher of Doctrine at the Reformed Bible Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Hardly “alive and well” – The Puritans have been more often hated than loved. England ejected both the separatist and reforming varieties. Thomas Jefferson abhorred everything “Calvinistic,” John Adams was a deist, Ben Franklin a pragmatist. No one has lampooned the faith of the Pilgrim Fathers more than their children. In this, the Puritans have shared the fate of Calvinists everywhere—only more so. They held to ideas and ways which made them particular objects of ridicule, and even today some trivia about the puritanical fanatics is good for a laugh in the Thanksgiving issue of Time.
Warren Sweet is kinder. He speaks of a happy revisionism resulting in a better evaluation of the Pilgrims. “New England was founded,” he writes (Religion in Colonial America, p. 118), “as an experiment in Christian living. It was an experiment in applying Christianity as they saw it to every interest and concern of daily life.” He ascribes its failure to the “heights they set themselves to scale.”
Puritanism is hardly “alive and well” in New England. Still someone ventured to call John F. Kennedy”s famous challenge “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” as reflection of New England Calvinism. Men do not speak thus in Spain or Latin America. The concern for the common welfare, however modified by other forces, is part of our Calvinistic heritage. Much of the “Puritan ethic” takes on a secular form. It is still with us. But it may not be so for long.
Acids of modernity – The acids of modernity are eating away our heritage. Long ago the heritage of sovereign grace gave way to liberalism and Unitarianism. At Yale in 1800 Timothy Dwight found hardly an evangelical Christian, and Harvard was no better. Two mighty revivals stemmed the tide of secularism, but the process continued. Something of the Puritan “world-and-life” view seemed to live on and spread through the United States. There was the Puritan Sabbath. The biblical sex laws, the sense of decency, the respect for law and order, the priority of the Ten Commandments were all elements of the Puritan moral code. Nineteenth Century New England Calvinists were caught up in the philosophy of “universal benevolence” and led the nation in founding a host of societies for the common good. Secularism swallowed most of these, too, although they had a Calvinistic beginning.
Peter N. Carrol attributes the thrift and “work ethics” of the hardy New Englanders to the hardship of the rocky soil. “Entering upon uncultivated lands inspires frugality and invention” (p. 15, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 1969). H. Schneider suggests the same (A History of American Philosophy). Indeed Yankee ingenuity was not exactly a Calvinistic invention. The Yankee boy Ben Franklin already divorced the “work and save” ethic from any theological foundation (ibid, p. 35). Franklin wrote: “Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such. Experience proves temperance, silence, order, industry, frugality payoff.”
The fact remains that it was the New England Calvinist who proclaimed man’s God-given duty to work hard. Therefore the advocates of a counterculture have renewed their attacks upon the “Calvinistic conscience” and the “Puritan work ethic.” In a desperate effort to justify a neo-pagan, post-Christian life style—philosophers, psychologists, and even theologians are seeking to destroy every trace of the “Puritan mentality.” All must go—the pornography laws, the Sabbath, biblical sex morality, heaven and hell, and the Puritan or neo-Puritan “work ethics.”
A marvelous minority – One marvels how so small a minority as the Calvinists in New England could have put their stamp on America. What other nation has thought of itself as the Kingdom of God? The Pilgrims’ dream still lingers on. We are still the “land of the Pilgrim’s pride.” Very little of the Calvinism, however, remains.
The first settlers of New England were indeed Calvinists. Even the Baptist, Roger Williams, continued to believe in sovereign grace. Sometimes pictured as hyper-Calvinists; those first settlers were rather high-Calvinists. They wanted God to be the Alpha and the Omega and conceived of His sovereignty both as His electing will and moral will. In their “Covenant Theology” they leaned toward human responsibility.
The marvel is not that such a venture in high-Calvinism failed, but that it ever should have been tried. As Sweet suggests, such high idealism was doomed to fail (Religion in Colonial America). Like Calvin’s Geneva it could exist only as an ideal, and only for a brief moment in this evil world.
New England was a theocracy. To maintain a virtually coterminous Church and State was impossible. H. P. Scholte warned the “pilgrims of the West” against the Puritan mistake of identifying Church and Community. But what Christian colony can escape some of the Puritan community spirit?
Covenant theology – The problems were accentuated among the Puritans because of their voluntary and experiential qualification for church membership. Their Calvinism had been mediated through the Puritan Ames and the Dutch Pietist Van Mastricht. From them had also come the development of the Covenant theology.
In his study of The Covenant Idea in New England Theology, Dr. Peter Y. De Jong traces the difficulties which developed in the application of covenant theology. He finds the crucial difficulty in the experimental nature of conversion. This is incompatible with the covenant approach. Hence one compromise followed another as the New England communities tried to keep the citizens in the congregation. The “half-way” covenant came in 1662; acknowledging historical faith and the baptism of the children of baptized members. This was followed by Stoddardianism, the view of Rev. Solomon Stoddard that the Lord’s Supper is a “converting ordinance” and is therefore open to the unconverted.
Evil times – The New England colonies were experiencing evil times around 1660; spiritually and otherwise from Indian war, fire, and pestilence. The office of elder had fallen into neglect. The growing number of indifferent church members began to make itself felt in community and congregational life. In spite of the efforts of a reforming Synod of 1679 and the determined opposition of the Mathers, the Brattle Street Church of Boston lowered the standards for Communion and baptism. Meanwhile Yale had been formed because Harvard was becoming liberal (1701).
Puritanism was becoming secularized. Perry Miller, in his penetrating study of The New England Mind sees a subtle shift from electing grace to a conditional covenant with the whole community. “As the New England Church covenants gradually became secularized and were increasingly indistinguishable from town ordinances,” the Puritan stressed the general providence of God and moral duty (Schneider, H. W., History of American Philosophy, p. 12). Later as the people prospered “they did not seem to need God—there followed a growing tendency to preach morality—The Christian came to be more and more identified with the decent, industrious and prosperous citizen” (De Jong, above, p. 124).
In 1734 Jonathan Edwards began his Great Awakening. New England congregationalism was revived. About forty thousand confessing members were added to the churches. One hundred fifty new congregations were formed, bringing the total to 530. Edwards was a Calvinist, but his revival split the Calvinists into two schools.
Unbelief and secularism – Ultimately, neither the Old or New school Congregationalists were able to stop the tide of unbelief and secularism in New England. Puritanism continued to put its social and cultural stamp on the colonies, but the number of church members declined. By 1760 only one out of five persons in New England was a church member. (Sweet, above, p. 335.) Many churches had become liberal Arminians, soon to become Unitarians. For half a century Congregationalism was in turmoil.
Calvinism virtually disappeared from New England. “The short ‘Statement of Doctrine’ of 1883 contains no single distinctively Calvinistic doctrine” (De Jong. above, p. 223).
Lubbertus Oostendorp is teacher of Doctrine at the Reformed Bible Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan.