The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in New England

The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in New England, 1629-1729(Taylor)/1758(Edwards)

A Paper Presented to

Dr. Schumacher

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

H899: Extensive Readings in American Christianity

by

Curran D. Bishop

November 2011

Introduction

In an article discussing the views of Edward Taylor, a puritan minister in Connecticut in

the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Donald E. Stanford states, “It is my opinion

that Taylor was completely orthodox both as a minister and as a poet.... As a minister Taylor

accepted the thoroughly Calvinistic doctrines of the Westminster Confession; as a poet he wrote

nothing contradictory to those doctrines.”1 The reason for Stanford’s statement was other

modern scholars had detected in the sacramental poetry of Taylor both sensual heterodoxy,2 and

Puritan, though explicitly non-Calvinist, orthodoxy.3 Taylor’s poetry was part of a revival of

sacramental piety in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which E. Brooks

Holifield calls a “sacramental renaissance” which was “reminiscent of Calvin’s own sacramental

piety.”4 This paper intends to explore the development of Puritan sacramental theology in the

American context, seeking to determine if this flourishing of sacramental devotion before the

Great Awakening was indeed faithful to the sacramental theology of Calvin, and if either can be

considered to be in keeping with the doctrines laid out by the Westminster Assembly. In

1 Donald E. Stanford, “Edward Taylor and the Lords Supper.” American LiteratureVol. 27, No. 2 (May, 1955), 173.

2 Stanford cites the work of Kenneth B. Murdock in Literature and Theology in Colonial New England (Cambridge: I949), I68-I69 and also S.E. Lind, “Edward Taylor: A Revaluation,” New England Quarterly, XXI, (Dec., 1948), 5I8-530. See also Mindele Black, “Edward Taylor: Heaven’s Sugar Cake.” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jun., 1956): pp. 159-181. Black sees Taylor as an example of the “increasing humanization which the original austerity of Puritan thought was everywhere undergoing” (181), yet offers examples of this “humanization” which seem to have no real grasp of the theology involved (suggesting that the idea of the Covenant is foreign to Calvin’s own theology for example). Further, Black’s surprise at the sensuousness of Taylor’s poetry seems to suggest a lack of attention paid to the sensuousness of Puritan writing in general—see Belden C. Lane, Ravished by Beauty, The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

3 Stanford cites Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor (Princeton, NJ, 1939), 26, noting that Johnson’s distinction between Covenantal theology and Calvinist theology appears to be based on Perry Miller's article “The Marrow of PuritanDivinity” in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXXII, 247-300 (1938), which originates the mistake.

4 E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 224.

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examining this question it is necessary to deal with the peculiarities of the Puritans development

in the American context, especially with their theology of conversion as this doctrine had such a

heavy effect on their sacramental beliefs and practices.

Background

To assess Stanford’s claim that Taylor’s sacramental theology was perfectly in line with

both that of Calvin and of the Westminster Confession, we must briefly examine both of these

sources, to see what they claim and if they are in fact in agreement—and, therefore, if it is

possible for an individual to be in accord with both. Extensive analysis, however, is beyond the

scope of this paper.

John Calvin

Calvin defined a sacrament in his Institutes of the Christian Religion as “an outward sign

by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us in order to

sustain the weakness of our faith; and we in turn attest our piety toward him in the presence of

the Lord and of his angels and before men.”5 While this definition acknowledges that

participation in the sacraments constitutes a statement of belief and obedience on the part of the

participants, it is clear that the initiatory action and primary significance of the sacrament is on

the part of God. He wrote, “The end of the whole Gospel ministry is that God, the fountain of all

felicity, communicate Christ to us... that in a word all heavenly treasures be so applied to us that

they be no less ours than Christ’s himself.”6 This is what is meant by Calvin’s claim that the

sacraments are spiritual in nature: “We believe this communication [of Christ from God to his

5 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV, xiv, 3, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 1276.

6 Calvin, “Summary of Doctrine Concerning the Ministry of the Word and the Sacraments,” in J.K.S. Reid, ed., Calvin: Theological Treatises, tr. Reid (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1954), 171.

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people] to be (a) mystical, and incomprehensible to human reason, and (b) spiritual, since it is

effected by the Holy Spirit.”7 Calvin especially focused on the role and importance of the Holy

Spirit throughout his sacramental writing.

Calvin defined the way in which the bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus by

saying,

that the bread and the wine are visible signs, which represent to us the body and blood, but that this name and title of body and blood is given to them because they are as it were instruments by which the Lord distributes them to us. This form and manner of speaking is very appropriate. For as the communion which we have with the body of Christ is a thing incomprehensible, not only to the eye but to our natural sense, it is there visibly demonstrated to us.8

This is not a “bare figure,” rather, “the internal substance of the sacrament is conjoined

with the visible signs; and as the bread is distributed to us by the hand, so the body of Christ is

communicated to us in order that we may be made partakers of it.”9 Perhaps Calvin’s most

poignant statement of the nature of the sacrament, however, was his claim in the Institutes that,

“I shall not be ashamed to confess that it is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend

or my words to declare. And, to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it.”10

The Westminster Assembly

A century later the Westminster divines sought to codify the doctrine the Puritan

tradition had developed under the tutelage of Reformed church leaders on the Continent. Thus,

in the documents of the Westminster Assembly we actually find significant compatibility with

Calvin’s doctrine. Typical of Puritanism—though the nature of the documents must be taken

into account here—the treatment of the sacraments is relatively brief: less than 1200 words in the

7 Ibid.8 Ibid.9 Ibid., 172.10 Calvin, Institutes, IV, xvii, 32, 1403.

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Confession, for example. It is consistent in its Calvinism, though there is less sense of mystery

(the word is not used in describing the sacraments themselves), and the focus on denying

Catholic and Lutheran doctrine makes the significance of the real presence of Christ less

considerable than it is in Calvin. The chapter on the Lord’s Supper in the Confession states that

Christ instituted the sacrament,

for the perpetual remembrance of the sacrifice of himself in his death, the sealing all benefits thereof unto true believers, their spiritual nourishment and growth in him, their further engagement in and to all duties which they owe unto him, and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other, as members of his mystical body.11

The chapter goes on to deny the sacrament as a propitiatory sacrifice; transubstantiation;

private masses; the corporal or carnal presence of Christ in, with, or under the elements; or that

unworthy recipients actually receive the thing signified in the elements, though they do still

condemn themselves by partaking. While most of the chapter is spent in negative affirmations,

the Confession does state positively that worthy participants do through the visible elements,

“really and indeed... spiritually, receive, and feed upon, Christ crucified, and all benefits of his

death.”12 Thus, while much more minimalistic than Calvin, the Assembly did affirm the basic

tenants of his doctrine.

New England Puritanism

Ambivalence

Despite Calvinist doctrinal formulations, the Puritans tended toward ambivalence in their

sacramental thinking and practice over the three-quarters of a century leading up to the

Westminster Assembly. The reason for this may have been that in the English context a

11 Westminster Confession of Faith, 29.1 in The Confession of Faith; the Larger and Shorter Catechisms with the Scripture Proofs at Large: together with The Sum of Saving Knowledge (Belfast: Graham and Heslip, 1933), 93.

12 Ibid.

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memorialist Anglican sacramental theology13 had ultimately triumphed over transubstantiationist

Catholicism yet retained much of its outward forms and ceremonies. In this context the Puritans

were an anomaly. They objected to what they perceived to be Roman practices in the liturgical

behavior of the Anglican establishment, yet their eucharistic theology, schooled as it was by the

continental Reformed camp, was actually more focused on the real presence of Christ than that

of their Anglican opponents. Thus, it was far easier to focus attention on practices than to

discuss beliefs which made them appear “Papist.” John Cotton, who would become the leading

pastor of the Bay Colony after his immigration to Boston in 1633, viewed the sacraments with

the same ambiguity with which Puritanism at large viewed them in the 1620s. In a sermon in

1630 he listed sacramental freedom as one of the justifications for migrating to Massachusetts,14

yet most of the freedoms he was seeking were issues of practice: not making the sign of the cross

in baptism, or kneeling in receiving communion.15 Identifying his opponents’ Catholic practice

as a more grave danger than their Zwinglian theory, Cotton was careful to warn his congregation

to “sit loose from the Ordinances.”16

When Anne Hutchinson began to question the purpose of external sacraments at all in the

economy of the Spirit’s work in the believer, however, Cotton and the other ministers rose to 13 See Peter Brooks, Thomas Cranmer's Doctrine of the Eucharist (New York: Seabury Press, 1965). Brooks

discusses the various phases of development in Cranmer’s sacramental theology and demonstrates that the final phase, and the one which most influenced his final edition of the Book of Common Prayer, was decidedly Zwinglian and memorialist.

14 John Cotton, God’s Promise to His Plantation (London: 1634), 9, quoted in Holifield, 139. Holifield notes that this justification took on mythic proportions as a primary reason for the Puritans migration. While Cotton may have only listed it as one among several reasons, the fact that its importance grew so much to his later contemporary interpreters speaks of the significance of sacramental issues to the early American Puritans.

15 In The Way of the Churches of Christ in New-england Cotton described the manner in which the congregations celebrated Lord’s Supper, being careful to note that, “the prayers we use at the administration of the seals, and not any set forms prescribed to us, but conceived by the Minister, according to the present occasion, and the nature of the duty in hand. Ceremonies we use none, but are careful to administer all things according to the primitive institutions” (quoted in Doug Adams, Meeting House to Camp Meeting, Toward a History of American Free Church Worship, from 1620 to 1835 [Austin, The Sharing Company, 1981], 31).

16 Cotton, Christ the Fountaine of Life (London: 1651), 22, quoted in Holifield, 140.

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defend a traditional Calvinist understanding. Migrating with her husband to Massachusetts in

1634 in order to remain under Cotton’s preaching, Hutchinson had attracted a following at mid-

week meetings she hosted to discuss Cotton’s sermons.17 As her teaching in these meetings

became more and more concerned with the activity of the Spirit in the individual believer to the

exclusion of the external world, pastors apart from Cotton began to accuse her of antinomianism

and heresy. Because Hutchinson’s views only come to us through the writings of her

antagonists, it is somewhat difficult to distinguish between what she actually taught, and what

they extrapolated from what she taught. It is clear, however, that her view of the nature of the

Holy Spirit’s indwelling of the believer undermined any real value for the external world, the

church, or even the Scripture.18 In such a view, there can be little space for a robust sacramental

theology, or for the covenantal understanding which underpinned the Puritan view of the

sacraments.19 Cotton explicitly opposed such teaching, telling the ministers of the community

that, “the Spirit useth not only the word and other Ordinances but also the two seals of the

Covenant of Grace, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”20 Hutchinson was finally exhiled for her

17 Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma, the Story of John Winthrop, 3rd edition (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 126-7.

18 Morgan asks, “What reason for a church of saints, if ‘no Minister can teach one that is anoynted by the Spirit of Christ, more than hee knowes already unlesse it be in some circumstances’?” (130). While he does not identify the source of the quote, it is an opponent of Hutchinson either quoting her, or explaining an implication of her position. While it may be only a perceived implication of her teaching, it is certain that Hutchinson herself, at her trial, claimed to have received revelation directly from the Spirit which superseded the revelation of Scripture (Morgan, 142).

19 The Puritans viewed the sacraments as seals of God’s covenant with individual churches. The covenant was logically prior to the sacraments, in that the local church must have a covenant before it could baptize converts or children, or celebrate the Lord’s Supper (see Holifiled, 144). If the connection between the Holy Spirit and the believer was so great that there was hardly a need for the external world, then the local church with its very tangible covenant which all members personally entered into, was superfluous to the believer’s relationship to God.

20 Cotton, “Rejoynder to the Elders Reply,” quoted in David Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy: a Documentary History, 1636-1638 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 81. This “rejoynder” was actually a reply of Cotton to the other ministers when they raised questions about the orthodoxy of some of his statements while he still supported Hutchinson. Even in his support, Cotton was careful to make clear the importance of the sacraments in his own theology, and to oppose Hutchinson when her views went to far though, it must be noted that the sacraments were only an ancillary matter to the main discussion.

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views when she claimed her internal communion with the Holy Spirit had equal authority to

Scripture.21 After this “wake-up-call” Cotton and the other ministers were more careful to

defended the sacraments, and Cotton was able to make such statements as, “both Christ’s body

and blood [yield] plentiful nourishment.”22

E. Brooks Holifield attributes the more sacramentally defensive attitude which pervaded

after Hutchinson’s banishment in 1637 as the result of coming to the realization that,

“enthusiasm for the Holy Spirit did not require the antisacrimental spiritualization of religion.”23

It would be odd, though, if the heirs of the sacramental theology which Calvin developed—and

which placed so much emphasis on the importance of the Holy Spirit to the function of the

sacraments—should take so long to determine that the sacraments and the working of the Holy

Spirit were not at odds.

Conversion

It seems that, instead of seeing the Puritans’ sacramental ambivalence as a result of

working out how to fit sacraments into the life of the Spirit in the believer, it should be seen as a

result of working out how the church society would function in the new context of being a

“pure” and “converted” church. Under the Anglican system in England, every person was

baptized into the church at birth and became subject to its discipline. The Puritans had always

objected to this system, in part because it inherently meant placing and distributing the covenant

seals of the sacraments on and to people who were not actually covenant participants. In

migrating to the New World the Puritans wanted to establish new, purified churches, with only

21 Morgan, 142.22 Cotton, The Way of Life, or Gods Way and Course in Bringing the Soule Into, keeping it in, and carrying it on,

in the wayes of life and peace (London: 1641), 378, quoted in Holifield, 140.23 Holifield, 142.

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converted believers and their children as members. The early settlers of Boston Bay had

numerous difficulties to overcome—both anticipated and unanticipated—in seeking to do this,

however. A first difficulty was that the Bay Colony was not founded by Separatists, as the

founders of Plymouth had been ten years earlier, but by churchmen with a conviction that

voluntary separation from a legitimate church would be an act of schism and, as such, “violated

the principle of uniformity and dishonored God.”24 They had no experience forming new church

institutions because they had not done so prior to coming to North America. This meant that,

while they were concerned that their churches be limited to the elect only, they had no

experience determining who was actually a visible saint.25 A less anticipated difficulty had to do

with the social changes that Puritanism underwent as it migrated from existing as a radical

opposition to the establishment church, to being the establishment itself in New England. By the

time of the founding of the Bay Colony, Puritanism as a movement was only a few generations

old. As a young opposition movement seeking to establish new churches in the New World, the

Puritan theology of personal conversion called for each person to experience a radical conversion

in order to become a full member of the church, which included voting privileges and admission

to communion.26 The children, or “seed,” of believers who had experienced such a conversion

and demonstrated their elect status through living godly lives, received baptism which included

entrance into the visible church.27 As the establishment church, however, this system began to

experience problems. While Richard Bushman and others tend to describe these problems as a

24 Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant, Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 3.

25 Ibid., 4.26 The earliest churches actually only examined candidates for membership in their beliefs and practice; at this

early phase it was assumed that such beliefs and practices were sufficient evidence in themselves of conversion from the beliefs and practices of the broader society, though almost all Puritans were expected to struggle with doubts about their faith.

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purely social phenomena, it is also possible to understand them as matters of religious experience

as well.28

According to Bushman, Congregationalist polity, in which all members have a vote in

actions of the church—including discipline—was developed in part to resist the social control

that the Anglican episcopal system imposed. In New England the fathers of the community,

however, quickly realized the need to exercise social control, but it was difficult to do so when

the congregation had to approve discipline. Factions could develop and threaten social stability.

So they began expanding the powers of the clergy, and elevating their status in society. The

problem, however, was that with the church existing as a voluntary community of people who

had experienced conversion together with their children, more and more of the society was not

seeking to be admitted into the visible church and, thus, under the authority of the pastors.29 In

light of this situation, Bushman interprets the 1662 initiation of the “Half-way covenant”—which

provided for not only children of full church members to be eligible for baptism (and thus,

subject to church discipline), but also for the children of baptized parents who had not

experienced a personal conversion and not become full members to be eligible for baptism (and

church discipline) as well—as a move by the clergy to extend their influence over a larger

portion of society.30

27 This statement itself is problematic. While the Westminster divines were codifying baptism as including “solemn admission... into the visible church” (Westminster Confession of Faith, 28.1) in the 1640s, the Puritans of New England were coming to divorce baptism from church membership, with the claim that “only papists and Baptists... thought that the Church was ‘made by Baptisme’” (Richard Mather, Church-Government and Church-Covenant Discussed [London, 1643], 12, quoted in Holifield, 144).

28 See Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee, Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

29 Ibid., 148.30 Ibid., 147-8.

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While the problem certainly had a social factor, and while no doubt many people were

choosing not to pursue church membership because of the fact that it would also subject them to

discipline31—what we might call a social reason—it is also no doubt the case that many people

were not experiencing what their seniors called conversion because of the new context of the

church. In a society in which everyone, by virtue of their birth into that society, becomes a

baptized member of the church, becoming convinced by the claims of a radical protest group

caries with it an experience of conversion. In a society, however, where the claims of the radical

protest group are the norm under which children are raised, there is no establishment alternative

to convert from. The beliefs of the parents may easily become fully the beliefs of the children

without those children ever having believed otherwise, or their having experienced a conversion

according to their elders definition of conversion. Harry S. Stout notes that, “the sermon was as

powerful a cultural and spiritual influence on the children as it had been on the founders—

perhaps even more so”32 but, “unlike their parents, the second generation matured in an insulated

theocratic environment; from infancy they heard or read about little save the New England

Way.”33 In a church polity which has no room for children accepting their parents teaching from

birth without experiencing a subjective conversion, problems arise quickly.34 Patricia Caldwell

points to the near obsession New England’s Puritans had with the specific details and order of

31 It should also be noted that pursuing church membership was a rigorous and intimidating process, as Morgan explains in Visible Saints, The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 90-91. In light of the rigors of examination by both elders and congregation it is not surprising that a diminishing number of the population chose to subject themselves to such an ordeal.

32 Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul, Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 86.

33 Ibid., 87.34 While modern Baptists have survived rather successfully with exactly this expectation for several centuries, it

must be acknowledged, first, that they have had those several centuries to develop the system and the expectations; second, that the influence of the Baptist church in its society has been an entirely different structure from that of the Puritan system; and, finally, that Baptists do not tend to subject their children’s experiences of conversion to the rigorous and systematic notions of the Puritans (see below).

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conversion and illustrates this tension well with reference to Jonathan Edwards’ reflections, “at

the age of twenty that, ‘the chief thing, that now makes me in any measure to question my good

estate, is my not having experienced conversion in those particular steps, wherein the people of

New England, and anciently the Dissenters of Old England, used to experience it.’”35 The

problem was not merely a power struggle that happened as a result of the shift from opposition to

establishment, but also a spiritual struggle which resulted from too rigid a definition of

“conversion”: too great a willingness on the part of the earlier generation to make their own

experiences normative for following generations regardless of changes in context.

A further reason for the growth of the problem of conversion was the fact that, as the New

England churches matured in their practice of attempting to limit church membership to the

elect, the importance of the experience of conversion grew as a test for church membership.

Here again the importance of context is apparent. For the first colonists, the fact of a person’s

ascent to the doctrinal distinctives of Puritanism, coupled with the proof of their godly lives as

evidence of the “Work of grace in their Souls,”36 was sufficient to qualify and individual for

church membership. As time went on, however, it became evident that not all who believed right

doctrine and and demonstrated right practice were truly elect: they could turn from godly lives

and godly beliefs having already received the seals of the covenant! The shift from accepting

doctrinal ascent and godly practice alone as qualifiers for church membership to requiring, in

addition to these, the test of conversion was a relatively quick one, fully established as part of the

35 Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2 vols., ed Edward Hickman (London, 1835), 1:lxxiii, quoted in Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 163. While Edwards made this observation half a century after the institution of the Half-Way Covenant, he still felt the demands of his ancestors’ conception of conversion, and illustrates the tension such a culturally-bound conception created.

36 Cotton Mather, Magnalia, book V, p. 34, emphasis his; quoted in Morgan, Visible Saints, 94.

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New England Way by 1640.37 Edmund S. Morgan sees the influence of John Cotton and Thomas

Hooker as the reason the test of conversion became a societal convention so quickly.38

The process of application for church membership which Cotton and Hooker promoted

was generally as follows: a candidate would approach the elders, who would examine him

privately concerning his religious views, his lifestyle and his spiritual experience. If he passed

this interview the elder would present the candidate to the membership of the church who would

report any infractions in belief or practice they were aware of; the candidate would then either

explain or repent of the offense. If the congregation was satisfied with this, the candidate would

have several members of the congregation testify to his good behavior, and then he himself

would give a narration of the way God’s saving grace had come to him (his conversion). The

congregation would then question him concerning this. Following that the candidate would

make a statement of his beliefs concerning doctrine and, if it was acceptable, the members would

vote whether to approve him. He would then formally agree to the church covenant and

officially become a member.39 The form the narration of conversion was to take, as exhibited by

the narratives some candidates for church membership wrote out, became so regular that it was

almost a stereotype. Morgan describes the process:

37 Pope, 13.38 Morgan points to the General History of William Hubbard, a graduate of the first class of Harvard in 1642, as

the earliest discussion of the establishment of the test of conversion. Hubbard was fully convinced of the necessity of the test for conversion, and excused the mistake of early ministers in not making so rigorous a test at first because they “walked something in an untrodden path.” While Hubbard notes that one George Phillips, the minister of Watertown, advocated more strict practices, he did not have any support until the coming of Cotton and Hooker in 1633, “who did clear up the order and method of church government, according as they apprehended was most consonant with the Word of God. And such was the authority they (especially Mr. Cotton) had in the hearts of the people, that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an Order of Court, if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church, if of an ecclesiastical concernment” (Hubbard, General History, 182, quoted in Morgan, Visible Saints, 94-95).

39 Morgan, Visible Saints, 88-89.

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first comes a feeble and false awakening to God’s commands and pride in keeping them pretty well, but also much backsliding.... Sooner or later true legal fear or conviction enables the individual to see his hopeless and helpless condition and to know that his own righteousness cannot save him, that Christ is his only hope. Thereafter comes the infusion of saving grace, sometimes but not always so precisely felt that the believer can state exactly when and where it came to him. A struggle between faith and doubt ensues, with the candidate careful to indicate that his assurance has never been complete and that his sanctification has been much hampered by his own sinful heart.40

This pattern was so regular that if the candidate missed a particular step of it the elders or

congregation would question him to supply the missing part.41 With so rigorous and rigid a

system it is no wonder that the churches began having difficulty transitioning baptized children

to full members. It took only one generation from the time most scholars agree that the system

had become standard—1640—for it to become necessary to hold a synod to determine what to

do with with the growing number of offspring of people who had been baptized as infants but

had never experienced a conversion and completed the process of becoming a full member of the

church. The Synod of 1662, an assembly of eighty lay and clerical delegates from almost every

church in the colony, met at the request of the Massachusetts General Court to determine an

answer. Derisively called the “Half-Way Synod” by historians of the following century because

it essentially created a class of half-way members, the Synod’s fifth proposition called for an

enlargement of those eligible for baptism, without a corresponding change in those eligible for

church membership:

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.42

40 Ibid., 91.41 Ibid.

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This “half-way covenant,” which eventually was adopted by virtually all the churches,

gave rise to a huge class of people who were attached to the church, but could not partake of

communion. While it took several decades for the delegates of the Synod to convince all their

various congregations of the orthodoxy of the decision and make it part of the New England

Way, the debates over acceptance of the new measures were not arguments about who could

partake of the Lord’s Supper. The synod’s actions may have condoned the exclusion of a great

many church “members” from the Supper, but what the pastors were actually attempting to do

with the new resolutions—or “Result” as it was referred to by contemporaries—of the Synod,

was to include more people in baptism—from which position it seemed they would be more

likely to experience conversion. All were in agreement that only baptized, regenerate (i.e.,

converted) members of the church were eligible to partake of communion. The decision of the

Synod was a decision about extending baptism; the limitation on communion was already in

place with the institution of testified regenerate membership.

Renaissance

The imbalance of the situation, however, was guaranteed to invite controversy among a

theologically active population and clergy. The first radical solution proposed came from the

pastor of the church at Northampton, Solomon Stoddard.43 Stoddard had begun serving the

Northampton church in 1670, and was formally ordained in 1672, a full decade after the Synod 42 Pope, 63. The statement uses the term “members”—which I have used to designate those who had

experienced regeneration and could vote and take communion—to designate the opposite: people who had received baptism and were subject to church discipline, but who had not experienced conversion, gone through the candidacy process described above, and been admitted to the Lord’s Supper. By this phrase—which was not a matter of deceptive maneuvering but rather an ambiguity of the way the term “member” was used, and was apparently not a matter of confusion at the time—the statement is omitting the requirement of conversion and admission to the Lord’s Table for one to be eligible to have one’s children baptized.

43 Stoddard’s grandson, Jonathan Edwards, would pose a different solution: he sought to reverse the decision of the Synod and only permit the children of parents who had experienced regeneration to be baptized. This move proved unpopular to the people of Northampton, however, and ultimately cost him the pulpit of that church (see George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 355-61.

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took place. As the number of people admitted to baptism but still not seeking participation in the

sacraments increased, Stoddard began to develop his solution. In a sermon in 1677, “Stoddard

issued from his pulpit a decree against the prevailing sacramental piety; he denied that the

churches should—or even that they could—limit admission to the regenerate.”44 This thinking

on Stoddard’s part was the result of changes in Puritan sacramental thinking that were

anticipated, and in some ways necessitated by the Synod of 1662. It should be noted that the

Synod did not mark the moment at which New England shifted from one form of practice and

thinking to another. The very nature of the congregational system of church government

prevented anything so drastic. The Synod’s “Result” was, in fact, not binding in any way on a

single church. Because individual churches under the congregational system were entirely

autonomous, the Synod was merely a discussion among leading ministers and laymen of the

region and their advice to the churches as a result of that discussion.45 As noted above, it took

several decades for those delegates to achieve its implementation in their churches. It

represented, however, the importance of a trend which had been developing for some time

among individual congregations and ministers. This trend, and the shift in baptismal practice

which the Synod articulated, would result in a change in the attitudes of New Englanders towards

the sacraments.

The practice which John Cotton had made standard carried in it a de facto form of half-

way membership: in believing the church to be purely the community of gathered regenerate—or

presumably regenerate—saints, their baptized children only possessed a quasi-membership. In

contrast to this, the supporters of the “Result” were arguing for,

44 Holifield, 208.45 Pope, 132.

15

a broad view of the church as an institution that not only nourished the regenerate but also dispensed grace to the unsaved.... Baptized children, though barred from the Lord’s Supper, were accepted as personal and plenary Church members who might receive through the external ordinances sufficient grace to make conversion probable.46

These supporters viewed baptism as a permanent seal of membership in the visible

church; proponents of the system which had developed from John Cotton’s practices viewed

baptism as nothing more than a mark placed on children of the elect which carried with it almost

no formal significance. In this sense the Synod, far from innovating, was returning to the

original Puritan view of baptism as a seal of church membership. As such it served to point out

the discrepancy which resulted by defining the church both by covenant and as merely the

gathered community of regenerate saints; and in choosing to reaffirm baptism as a seal of church

membership, it inadvertently struck an mortal blow to the view of the church as merely the

community of the regenerate.47

With such a view of the importance of the seal, the proponents of the “new, traditional”

position naturally centered their sacramental theology on the promise which baptism entailed,

while their opponents focused on the obligations that baptism carried—namely regeneration as

identified by personal conversion—which the church members who did not experience a

conversion failed to fulfill. This difference of focus led pastors in agreement with the Synod to

hold out baptism in their sermons as a comfort to their congregations, while the antagonists of

the Synod, focusing on the obligations, moved in an increasingly Baptist direction.

As the arguments of the two groups began taking them in increasingly disparate

directions, Increase Mather, formerly a strong critic of the Synod, saw the implications of the 46 Holifield, 171.47 It should be noted that, “The synodical theologians did not claim that baptism created personal membership,

for they still believed that infants of Church members were born into the Church by virtue of the covenant. But they did insist that the sacrament sealed, established and guaranteed a permanent, distinctive, and personal membership in the visible Church” (Ibid., 172).

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dissenters’ positions and switched sides of the debate. His reasoning took him past both the

Synod and traditional New England thinking about baptism, to claim that it logically preceded

the church covenant. The congregationalist view of the church’s covenant saw individual

churches not as branches participating in a universal church covenant, but as institutions with

separate covenants;48 therefore it seemed that the covenant of the individual church must exist

prior to anyone’s being able to be baptized into such covenant. Mather’s father, Richard Mather,

had stated in 1653 that if a group of Indians were converted they must first be organized into a

covenanted particular church and then baptized into that church. Increase Mather, however,

pointed out that such a situation would, for a time at least, create an, “Instituted Church, and not

one baptized member in the Church. A thing never known in Apostolical days.” This led

Mather to distinguish between “the Church Visible” and the “particular Church strictly taken.”49

Thus baptism was beginning, in Mather’s thinking, to be not just entrance into the covenant of

the local particular church, but entrance into the covenant of the visible Church universal. This

was clearly a larger and more powerful covenant.

As such reasoning took hold of more ministers they began to increasingly use baptismal

imagery in exhorting their congregations to take hold of grace, and also to have increasing

confidence in the power of the covenant which baptism sealed to produce godly saints. Ministers

began opening baptism to any who wished it, based only on their orthodox doctrine and pious

48 See Everett Emerson, Puritanism in America, 1620-1750 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), 49-51 for a discussion of the centrality of the individual church covenant to the New England Way. Also Allen Carden, Puritan Christianity in America, Religion and Life in Seventeenth Century Massachusetts (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990), 71-73 and Morgan, The Puritan Family, Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966), 161-86 for the way this view led to a form of “tribalism.”

49 Increase Mather, A Discourse Concerning the Subject of Baptism Wherein the present Controversies, that are agitated in the New English Churches are from Scripture and Reason modestly enquired into (Cambridge, 1675), quoted in Holifield, 183.

17

behavior, and without either examination for conversion experience or concern that their parents

had been full church members. This practice represented a shift to viewing the sacrament as

“baptismal evangelism”; a visible, tangible gospel which functioned as a means of uniting people

to the covenant, from which position they would more likely come to regeneration. Thus, “a

sacramental rite became one of the mainstays of New England piety, not because of any

innovative doctrines of baptismal grace but rather through sermonic reflection on the symbolic

meaning of the ‘visible gospel.’ ”50 While Mather was uncomfortable with opening baptism so

broadly, he was a participant in a process which changed the meaning of baptism in ways that

both created a climate of renewed popular baptismal devotion and also drastically altered the role

of baptism in the theology of many pastors.

It is easy to see how in this atmosphere of re-conceiving the role of baptism, one could

begin to conceive a different role for communion as well. It seems that Stoddard was doing just

that. According to Morgan, Stoddard’s reason for instituting open communion—admitting

baptized persons of good conduct and belief to the Lord’s Supper even if they had not

experienced regeneration—was that “he thought it was impossible anyhow to determine who had

faith and who did not.”51 This would imply not so much that he was seeking to admit the

unregenerate to the table, but that he was acknowledging that it was impossible to accurately

discern regeneration beyond the objective data of a person’s beliefs and practice. This view

would be very much in keeping with traditional Calvinist orthodoxy. It does not seem, however,

that this is an accurate picture of Stoddard’s reasoning. While Stoddard did argue that the

attempt to restrict the Lord’s Supper to the converted alone was based on the false presupposition

50 Holifield, 187.51 Morgan, Visible Saints, 147.

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that the church could distinguish between converted and unconverted Christians,52 he promoted

open communion not merely to do away with a false—or at least unobservable—distinction, but

to convert the unconverted. In his “Sermon on Galatians 3:1,” preached October 5, 1690,

Stoddard made the point that “The Lords Supper is appointed by Jesus Christ, for the begetting

of Grace as Well as the Strengthning of Grace.”53 He went on to argue that, “As the Passover of

old was, the Lords Supper now is appointed for Conversion.”54 This is a very different position

from simply returning to a practice of not examining the subjective experience of individuals

before admitting them to the table; it is, rather, seeing the table as a means of converting the

unconverted. This is how Stoddard’s argument was received in his own day. Increase Mather

very quickly took up the challenge of defending orthodoxy against what he perceived as

Stoddard’s dangerous innovations, stating,

I wish there be not Teachers found in our Israel, that have espoused loose, large Principles here, designing to bring all persons to the Lord’s Supper, who have a Historical Faith, and are not scandalous in life, although they never had Experience of a work of Regeneration in their Souls.55

Edward Taylor, pastor of the Westfield church and a friend of Stoddard’s, used the event

of the gathering of the Westfield church in 1679 as an opportunity to correct his friend’s still-

recently-published views, preaching against inclusion of the unregenerate in the Supper to the

assembled Westfield congregation and representatives of other area churches, including

Stoddard. Acting in the name of the area churches which supervised the gathering of the

52 Holifield, 212.53 Solomon Stoddard, “Sermon on Galatians 3:1,” 1690, in Thomas M. & Virginia L. Davis, Edward Taylor vs.

Solomon Stoddard: the Nature of the Lord’s Supper (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 131.54 Ibid.55 Increase Mather, A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostacy, 1677, quoted in Horton Davies, The

Worship of the American Puritans, 1629-1730 (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 48. While Mather did not specifically name Stoddard, most writers agree that he had Stoddard principally in view. See also Morgan, Visible Saints, 146; Holifield, 208.

19

Westfield church, Stoddard extended the hand of fellowship to Taylor and his new

congregation;56 but he did not alter his views. More than a decade later Taylor attacked

Stoddard’s use of confusing language in appearing to agree to the general practice with the

statement, “All such, as make a Solemn Profession of Faith, & Repentance: & are of a godly

Conversation: having Knowledge to Examine themselves, & discern the Lords Body, are to be

admitted to the Lords Supper.”57 Taylor claimed that the churches of New England had no

objection to such practice but that, when Stoddard went on to define “A Profession of Faith, &

Repentance” as “an Assent unto, & Acknowledgement of the Doctrine of Faith & Repentance,”58

he was departing from not only New England tradition, but the broader Christian tradition,

pointing out that,

The Turk, that answered the King of England, that he had read Pauls Epistles, & said, that were it not for the article of his own Religion, that everyone should be saved in that Religion in which he was born, he would become a Christian, did assent to this Doctrine.... A bare assent is onely the inward act of the Rationall Faculty resting upon the thing as true. It is not much more than an opinion.59

In the accepted jargon of the day, a “profession” of faith and repentance meant an

experiential embracing, prompted by the moving of the Holy Spirit. For Stoddard to equate

“profession” with mere intellectual assent was to manipulate the common understanding of all

participants in the conversation. While ascent to the doctrine may have been enough for their

predecessors, those predecessors did not differentiate between the regenerate who affirmed right

doctrine and practice, and the unregenerate who did the same. The continental Reformed and the

early Puritans offered the sacrament to those with “Historical” faith and godly lifestyle because

56 Donald E. Stanford, ed., The Poems of Edward Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), xlv.57 Edward Taylor, “Animadversions,” ca. 1692, quoting Stoddard’s “Arguments for the Proposition” in Davis, 87.58 Ibid., 88.59 Ibid.

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they viewed them as possessing the only measurable signs of regeneration. Stoddard was still

differentiating between the regenerate and unregenerate, he was just proposing offering the

sacrament to both in hopes that the sacrament would bring the unregenerate to a state of grace.

While Stoddard’s view and practice may have departed from orthodoxy, they betray a

conviction of the significance of the sacrament: he held that the sacrament was actually

extending grace to the partaker, even the unconverted partaker. For a previous generation of

Puritan pastors this may have smacked of Catholicism. Taylor, however, was bothered by it for

an almost opposite reason:

Stoddard’s innovations, as compared to the orthodox view, represented a lower rather than a higher evaluation of the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper, according to Stoddard, was to have the same efficacy as that of a sermon or a prayer and, although Mather attacked Stoddard’s view as tending toward Catholicism... it is probable that Taylor objected to Stoddard not because he was pro-Catholic, but because he was vulgarizing a sacrament which Taylor cherished and valued as belonging only to the regenerat elect.60

Stoddard may have believed that the sacraments really carried grace, but he believed that

they did so in the same way that the preached word carried grace, as “one sermonic exhortation

among others, on exactly the same level as preaching and prayer.”61 Taylor, in contrast, while he

agreed that the sacraments were visible words, did not view them as merely tactile, sensory

appeals to the mind. He said that eating and drinking—symbolic involvement in mysterious

ritual—was the essence of eucharistic worship, and this mystery defied his ability to explain how

it specifically strengthened the grace of the faithful, he merely accepted that it did.62 This did not

mean that Taylor, in rejecting the sacrament as a “converting ordinance,” rejected that the

60 Stanford, “Edward Taylor and the Lords Supper,” 178.61 Holifield, 215.62 Ibid. In this we hear an echo of Calvin’s conclusion, noted above, that he would rather experience than

understand the sacrament.

21

ordinance could produce conversion. Taylor had written that the “main design” of the invitation

to the table was to bring men “out of a state of sin and into a state of grace.”63

While Stoddard may not have come to the appreciation of the sacraments that Taylor had

arrived at, he had underscored the importance of dealing with the issue of New England’s having

large numbers of churchmen and women who were not partaking in the sacrament. Many

pastors sought to remedy the situation by stressing the duty of believers to partake, and the duty

of those who received baptism to respond to the call of grace that would make them ready to

partake. This meant that pastors were exhorting their congregations both of the danger of

unworthy partaking, and of the danger of failure to partake worthily. In such a situation it is not

surprising that Stoddard’s reasoning convinced many in the Connecticut Valley, and the Mathers

slowly had to adapt to the reality of a diversity of sacramental practice.64

It seems that the Stoddardean controversy was born out of both differences in their view

of the essential nature of the sacrament, and also the conversionist elements of their theology;

that is, a person who had true knowledge and a godly lifestyle but who had not had an

experiential encounter with grace according to the approved form was, in the minds of all the

participants in the argument, still in need of “conversion” for them to be regenerate believers.

This distinction, seems to be unique to the early American Puritans within the varieties of the

Reformed camp up to that time, though it has had significant influence in the development of

Christianity in America ever since. Because this distinction was so significant for their

sacramental theology and for the debate the elements of their views of the essential nature of the

sacraments must be parsed from their arguments about conversion, in which they redily involved

63 Taylor, Edward Taylor’s Treatise Concerning the Lord’s Supper, ed. Norman Grabo (East Lansing, MI: 1966), 21, quoted in Holifield., 204.

64 Holifield, 210.

22

historic figures from whose theology the American Puritan concerns for conversion were almost

entirely absent.65 The distinction over the sacrament’s essence was complex in that Cotton

Mather could often sound quite Zwinglian in his description of the sacrament and seemed to

value it, “primarily for the subjective dispositions it evoked in the worshipper.”66 Meanwhile his

comrade in arms, Taylor, could say that Christ gave the souls of the partakers “His own flesh and

blood most royally served up”67 and maintained in his preaching and poetry a clear commitment

to Calvin’s doctrine of a real, spiritual presence. He was not alone in this view, as the statements

of his contemporary, Samuel Willard, demonstrate. Willard denied the physical presence, saying

that the partaker did not receive Christ “through the ‘Bodily Organs.’ Yet there was a genuine

spiritual presence: ‘Surely there is something else here to be met with than the naked Elements;

and what is that but Christ Himself?’ ”68 This something Willard took for granted to be Christ,

“in some sort here according to his Human Nature, else he would not have said, ‘This is my

Body, and this is my Blood.’ ”69 Despite the ambivalence much of their tradition had exercised

toward the sacraments, Puritan thought had, by the close of the seventeenth century, begun to

experience a wide-spread revival of a richly Calvinist sacramental piety. As Holifield notes,

When Puritans began to insist on the consecration of material elements in the Lord’s Supper, or to attribute regeneration to tangible sacraments, or even to defend infant baptism against “spiritualizers,” it was clear that the ontological chasm between spirit and matter did not for all of them entail the elimination of the tangible from the religious life. Indeed, Puritan sacramental writings can be read as a series of attempts to reduce the distance between the

65 Holifield notes that the Mathers and others commonly claimed English Presbyterians from a century earlier as experts in Congregationalist sacramental theology (Ibid., 214).

66 Ibid., 222.67 Ibid., 223.68 Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity in Two Hundred and Fifty Expository Lectures on the

Assembly’s Shorter Catechism (Boston, 1726), 867 and Several Brief Sacramental Meditations Preparatory for Communion at the great Ordinance of the Supper (Boston, 1711), 18, quoted in Ibid.

69 Willard, Meditations, 18, in Holifield, 223.

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finite and the infinite, while still affirming their ultimate incompatibility, and to grasp spiritual realities through physical means without confusing matter and spirit.70

Conclusion

It must be acknowledged that by the time of the Great Awakening the sacramental

renaissance had come to an end. Holifield points out that the publication of sacramental manuals

—produced by the pastors to guide their congregants and others into greater appreciation for the

grace offered in the sacraments—fell off dramatically; from twenty-one editions between 1690

and 1738 to a mere eight between 1739 and 1790.71 As noted above, Jonathan Edwards moved

to restrict baptism to only those who could testify to their regeneration and their children, a move

which suggested a shift in his view of baptism back to that of John Cotton. While George

Marsden contends that Edwards maintained a high view of the Lord’s Supper, preaching of, “a

presence of Christ by special manifestation of himself and tokens of his presence whereby Christ

may be said to be present with Christians and not all others” in the sacrament, and even

corresponded with Scottish ministers about the desirability of weekly communion,72 he did not

appeal to the sacraments in his revival preaching as had his grandfather’s contemporaries. This

trend was consistent in the preaching which fueled the Great Awakening, and laid the

groundwork for a declining view of the sacraments in the revivalism which came to characterize

American Christianity. John Nevin, writing in 1864, lamented the lack of mystery and miracle in

70 Holifield, 228.71 Ibid., 229.72 Sermon on Matthew 9:15 (date uncertain), quoted in William J. Danaher Jr., “By Sensible Signs Represent:

Jonathan Edwards’ Sermons on the Lord’s Supper,” Pro Ecclesia 7, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 269, and Edwards to John Erskin, November 17, 1750, Works, 16:366, both quoted in Marsden, 354.

24

American approaches to the sacraments, and the inconsistency of this minimalism with the views

of earlier Puritans.73

Despite its brevity, however, the sacramental renaissance among the New Englanders of

the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was indeed Calvinist and, while it no doubt

surpassed the Westminster Assembly in its appreciation of the mystery of the sacraments, it was

nonetheless Confessional. Stanford was right to claim, “It is the present writer's conviction,

formed after several years of study of the complete body of Taylor’s work, that there is nowhere

in these meditations any theological idea inconsistent with the Institutes or the Westminster

Confession.”74

Because the English fore-bearers of the American Puritans had developed continental

Calvinist sacramental theology in the context of Anglicanism—which might be caricatured as

Roman liturgical practice paired with Zwinglian sacramental theology75—their developments

maintained the basic essentials of Calvin’s doctrine but with a great deal of ambivalence. The

result was a change in focus, without a change in substance. Yet in changing focus—from the

mystery of the encounter with God to concerns about basic forms of outward practice—the

substance lost much of the deeply reflective nature of its continental origins. In Edward Taylor

—and some of his contemporaries—much of that reflectiveness was revived; but it still struggled

in the context of the particularly Puritan obsession with the doctrine of conversion. The great

weakness of this obsession was that it allowed many who were no doubt believers to be excluded

from participating in the Lord’s Supper—or from benefitting from the sacramental renaissance—

73 John W. Neven, The Mystical Presence and other Writings on the Eucharist. Lancaster Series on the Mercesburg Theology, Vol. 4. (Bard Thompson and George H. Bricker, eds. Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1966) 106-7.

74 Stanford, “Edward Taylor and the Lord’s Supper,” 178.75 See Brooks.

25

because of their failure to experience a culturally-bound definition of conversion. The Puritan

concern for conversion was also to heavily influence the shape of future American theology.

While the American Puritan’s practice certainly focused on ideas virtually unknown in Calvin’s

teaching in this respect, their devotion to the essential doctrines of traditional Reformed

sacramental piety was clear. To correctly appreciate the Puritan sacramental experience this

complex and multifaceted context with its diverse influences and concerns must be understood.

26

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