Title: Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea

Author: Edmund S. Morgan

Year of Publication: 1963

Thesis:

Argues essentially that we can find subtle roots in the way Puritans operated in New England by looking at the Separatists in England, who wanted the Anglican Church to reform itself under Queen Elizabeth. Key in their argument was to decouple default church membership with affiliation in a parish and wanted the ability to exclude folks. Not having developed or reformed Anglican churches to their satisfaction, Puritans attempted to insert themselves into the British court. Pushes back on the notion that Plymouth was the genesis of New England Puritans, placing it instead in Mass., where they developed the idea of admitting people to the church based on specific criteria - essentially their voluntary professing of a love of God at the center of that. Embracing a doctrine that pointed out human frailty, their goal was to get folks as close to holiness as they could. The "visible saints" were the parishioners who attempted to get as close to the "invisible church" as possible. One of their challenges was how to get members in and how not to lose them all by attrition, but they made a law that essentially brought in the children of those who were deemed worthy in the church, even though they had fewer rights--they got baptized, followed the doctrines, and professed their fealty to God. Church membership was key for membership in society (voting, etc.). After this period of consolidation, Morgan ends with a brief chapter on how ministers began to interpret their roles outside of the church community (essentially, to help it grow).

Time:

1620-40s, ish

Geography: New England, with a focus on MA & CT.

Organization:

Preface

1. The Ideal of a Pure Church

- St. Augustine - the predestined church for all (dead, alive, unborn) (3)

- vs. visible church - those alive & professing belief but not all pure (3)

- Henry VIII dumps Aragon to consolidate power

- Also translates authorizes Bible translation to English

- Queen Elizabeth not happy with Puritan critiques (assailing clergy, lack of religiosity on the part of Q.E. (6)

- Puritans also criticize ministers who have other positions (barbers, etc.) (7)

- Idea was: corrupt leadership = corrupt members of Ch. of England (9)

- Puritans enter politics as their churches not supported by the Crown/no sufficient reformation of the Anglican Church (14)

- 1580 - see: Robert Browne - a Separatist (establish a church w/out waiting for the Crown - folks lose the battle but later called "Brownists" (18)

- Argument: Separatists driven out/excluded developed much thinking that influenced Puritans to follow (18-19)

- Separatists seek to have a "company of the faithful" and folks who joined voluntarily (31-32), so deciding who gets to join forms part of their main preoccupation.

2. The Separatist Contribution

- No such thing as a pure church, but it needs to be purer than the Anglican Church (32)

- Critiques: membership by parish, no ability to expel (33)

- Determined who was faithful & holy (see quote below)

- Being a member of the Anglican Church was grounds for exclusion

- Criteria: self-proclaiming of faith, covenant, behavior (58)

- These criteria move to the "new" world

- By 1630s membership criteria is solidified (63)

3. The New England System

- Winthrop proclaims fealty to Church of England, but establishes Separatist-looking churches anyway (even though Mass. Bay recognizes the legitimacy of the C.O.E., contrary to Puritans (64)

- Research Question: How did the process of determining worthiness for the Church develop? Argument: NOT from Plymouth, to MA, but begins with NON-separatist Puritans in MA, then Plymouth, etc. (65-66)

- Believes non-separatist Puritans developed admittance criteria. (66)

- Predestination a feature of Protestants, Calvinists, Puritans (67)

- MA churches pledge not to separate in 1636 (

- Membership in church meant civil rights (vote, holding office) - so essentially fealty to the church means a visible connection, in some sense, to the Crown? (104)

- Winthrop actually ousted before this happens (106)

- Ct - divided - Windsor doesn't require membership for freemanship, but New Haven yes (begs the question what else was going on) (108)

- Anne Hutchinson - R.I. - seems as though this group can determine without more bureaucratic measures the faith of someone.

"The main group of emigrants to Rhode Island were fol lowers of Anne Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson was an ad mirer of John Cotton, and she carried Cotton's insistence on unmerited saving grace far beyond her master, to the point where she ultimately claimed to be in direct com munication with the Almighty. Her followers allegedly maintained that God enabled them to tell with absolute certainty whether a man had saving grace or not. They therefore proposed to make their own discernment of this quality the only basis for admission to the church. " (109)

- New England Puritans communicate with English Puritans and influence them (110)

- The question was: autonomous churches or all affiliated Presbyterians? (Independents in England demur). N.E. favors autonomous, English favor all under an umbrella (111) <-- this begins to look similarly to the liberty vs. power question / Federalists vs. anti-Federalists

4. The Halfway Covenant (This chapter covers the how of the choosing, especially when you have imperfect leaders)

- "Visible Saints" refers to the members of the church. This is the new thing happening in the colonies. (113)

- Differentiates from early separatists, who looked at exclusion of those who didn't fit. So the new model is really one of selecting in people vs. selecting them out. The idea of this initially resting on parish boundaries makes this question really interesting - where are these geographical (and other boundaries) and who is included in them?

- "How to discharge this basic responsi bility of the church became an increasingly difficult prob lem for the New England Puritans as they developed their idea of restricted church membership: their churches must not only be gathered out of the world but must continually gather in the world, continually search for new saints. " (116)

- Separatists don't really have an answer for inclusion, only exclusion (118)

- Puritans think they are leaving the bad for the good & get a wake-up call. (120)

- Cites the difference as those who profess in their hearts their love of God, so sinners & "civil" people alike can be kept out of the Church. (121) <--so I said this elsewhere with some skepticism that it seems like there is another piece of the puzzle governing people's belonging to the Church.

- Can't get baptized if out of church - NE rules appear harsher than England, as you are default in church by parish membership (and is this only a geographical question? (121) 

- Evangelical role important b/c you can't profess love for God without knowing about it. Nice way to employ the church as both messenger and adjudicator of legitimacy for membership (123)

- What to do? Educate children? Baptists handle the loss of folks due to death by converting adults (leaving out children) (125)

- Church leaders then struggle with the question of hereditary faith (saving faith) - you aren't born with it, so you have to do something to demonstrate it later - & when was it appropriate to include/exclude based on their development? (125-127)

- Turns out children who grow up in church & are baptized can lead a faithful life (more or less) free of sin & learn/profess Christian doctrine don't get kicked out - HOWEVER, they didn't have voting power in the church & couldn't attend certain rites & rituals - they are 1/2-way members (131-2) <--- this is the meaning of the title of the chapter

- "The halfway covenant, while wholly insufficient as a 

recognition of the church's relationship to the world, was 

probably the most satisfactory way of reconciling the Puritans' conflicting commitments to infant baptism and to a church composed exclusively of saints. " (133)

- The half covenant is the answer to the problems specific to NE Puritanism (137)

- Decline in conversions not necessarily indicative of decline in membership precisely because of these half-conversions (137)

"The halfway covenant brought into the open the diffi 

culties that had been lurking in the Puritan conception of church membership from the beginning. From the time when the first Separatists left the Church of England until the establishment in Massachusetts of tests for saving faith, 

1 that conception had developed toward making the visible A J church a closer and closer approximation of the invisible. I With the halfway covenant the Puritans recognized that 

i they had pushed their churches to the outer limits of visi bility; and the history of the idea we have been tracing reached, if not a stop, at least a turning point. " (138)

5. Full Circle

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Anabaptists
Donatists
Presbyterians/Independents (13) - some split in 1640s
Anglican Church
Saving grace
Saving faith
Congregationalism
The Puritan Dilemma: "the problem of doing right in a world that does wrong." Involves the necessity of trying to be perfect but realizing those efforts limitations because interacting with the world involves sin - this is Winthrop (114)
Synod
Lord's Supper & Baptism (the former a stronger demonstration of membership)
Open communion (147)

Themes:

Critiques:

Anne Hutchinson gets short shrift here (and women in general not a significant part of this study given their significant roles).

Questions:

So curious how economics had a role in the dynamics of who was included. Thinking about Ruth Herndon's book - where people are warned out & kicked out for not being able to care for themselves economically... I mean, Separatists in England seem like they are answering a social question of how to exclude as they lose social (and perhaps specie) capital by having people that damage their reputation inside the church.

Quotes:

On reconciling the "invisible" with the "visible" church (thus, visible saints, the title...)

"These later Congregational ists, like the Separatists and like all other Puritans, began with the premise that human merit is negligible and that salvation depends entirely on saving faith, which cannot be attained by human effort but comes only from God's free grace. Or to put it another way: though no human deserved salvation, God in his mercy had chosen to save a few, and to them He gave saving faith. They belonged to his real, his invisible church. To make the visible church as much as possible like the invisible, the later Congregationalists argued that the visible church in admitting members should look for signs of saving faith. Granted that the signs would be fallible, for only God knew with certainty whom He had saved and whom He had not, the church should nevertheless try to form an estimate, try to assure itself of the probability of faith in every candidate it accepted. Men, being human, would make mis takes, and the visible church would therefore remain only an approximation of the invisible; but it should have in appearance the same purity that the invisible church had in reality: it should admit to membership only those who appeared to be saved, only those who could demonstrate by their lives, their beliefs, and their religious experiences that they apparently (to a charitable judgment) had received saving faith. (34-35)

On who is "faithful & holy" and who isn't:

"The Separatists, in defining church membership, gen erally used the same language as other Puritans. The church was to be "a companie and fellowship of faithful and holie people." 3 The crucial question is what they meant by "faithful and holie." They answered in part by stating what they did not mean: outside the church were to be "dogs and Enchaunters, and Whoremongers, and Murderers, and Idolatours, and whosoever loveth and maketh lyes." 4 They answered also in indictments of the English parish churches or "mixed assemblies," as they insisted on calling them. They condemned these assemblies for "their generall irreligious profannes ignorance, Atheisme and Machevelisme on the one side, and publique Idolitrie, usuall blasphemie, swearing, lying, kylling, steal ing, whoring, and all maner of impietie on the other side." (35)

"it is necessary to begin with a consideration of the attention given by English Puritans, before the settlement of New England, to the problem of attaining and recognizing saving faith. By the time Massachusetts was founded, two generations of Puritan writers had devoted themselves to describing the proc esses through which God's free grace operates in the sal vation of men. They had not addressed themselves to this question with a view to establishing tests for church mem bership. In their writings on the subject they were con cerned with the individual rather than the church. They wished to trace the natural history of conversion in order to help men discover their prospects of salvation; and the result of their studies was to establish a morphology of conversion, in which each stage could be distinguished from the next, so that a man could check his eternal con dition by a set of temporal and recognizable signs." (66)

On the limitations of causality in membership in different states:

"I do not wish to imply that the settlement of Connecticut and Rhode Island were the result simply of a disagreement about the new test for church membership. This was only one element in a complex situation. It however, an element that may help us to understand the distinguishing characteristics of the several New England colonies." (110)

On the children of the church:

“Proposition 3d. The Infant-seed of confederate visible Be lievers, are members of the same Church with their parents, and when grown up, are personally under the Watch, Dis cipline and Government of that Church. 

Proposition 4th. These Adult persons are not therefore to be admitted to full Communion, meerly because they are and continue members, without such further qualifications, as the Word of God requireth thereunto. 

Proposition 5th. Church-members who were admitted in minority, understanding the Doctrine of Faith, and publickly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the Covenant before the Church, wherein they give up themselves and their Children to the Lord, and subject themselves to the Government of Christ in the Church, their Children are to be Baptized. " (130)

Notes:

- Not sure I ever realized some of the implications of the term "ministry" until reading this. As in - to minister outside of the church (see last chapter)

- See Winthrop's "City on a Hill"

- See: Through Women's Eyes, DuBois, et.al. 5th edition, pp.61-70. Notes:

- Contradiction: women seen as equal before God to Puritans; however, it notes the difference between their religious "radicalism" and their social conservatism. Unclear what this radicalism refers to - if anything, given Morgan's book, the Puritans were fairly conservative, and like so many other reformers sought to correct a wrong they saw in the Anglican Church in England while simultaneously dealing with the on-the-ground realities in New England. Anne Hutchinson seems like the answer to that dichotomy, though. Society ordered around the family with the father at the hed & everyone having their prescribed roles, plenty of children/fertility, so it shows folks are coming to settle. Women cheating is adultery, and for men it's just fornication. Notes a rise in discipline of women in the courts during the "crisis" Hutchinson causes. Alludes to Norton's In the Devil's Snare as it mentions anxieties about frontier wars with Native Americans & the emphasis on old, poor, powerless, salty, or women with prestige & authority. Doesn't mention male witches as a key factor as Norton does.