Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (43 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 246
among the last of the faculties to be renewed by grace when conversion occurred. The process of conversion, most Puritan divines agreed, began with the understanding, which then enlightened the will, and finally ended with the transformation of the affections. Thus, Mather postulated, if a person in examining himself found that he desired to be saved, he could be certain that his affections had been reconstructed, and if the affections, then the entire set of rational and sensible faculties must have been reborn beforehandfor desire was always changed after these major faculties.
38
Desire had yet another meaning with its own peculiar resonance in Mather's mind. As a quality, desire approached love; and a true longing for salvation did not transpire in a selfish spirit. It involved a profound yearning for union with God. Pious desires were a sign of life, of grace, Mather explained, because the Holy Spirit of God worked in them; they were a response to the Spirit, an aching need to be "
swallowed up in Him
."
39
Mather expressed all this most clearly late in his life, when he was obsessed with the ecumenical spirit. The congruence of the set of ideas about Christian Union and his psychological assumptions was not accidental. The same spirit informed each and in fact his psychology of conversion served as an analogue to his theory of the union of the faithful, joined among themselves and to God. The psychological theory obliterated the self; the ecumenical, the sects. The psychological re-emphasized the centrality of faith in Christian life; the ecumenical made faith the only enduring principle of holy organization. Mather, one suspects, saw the analogy, but even if he did not, he knew at least that he was influenced by a powerful strain in Protestantism, a hope to see things whole in the reduction of man's pride and the glorification of God. This hope inspired all his preaching to his people.
 
Page 247
14
Christ and the Covenant
Through the psychology of abasement, Cotton Mather reaffirmed two of the regnant doctrines of Puritanismthe omnipotence of God and the helplessness of man. Translated into psychology, the theology described an arrangement in which a man's only hope of salvation lay in his ability to divest himself of his sinful will. Only then, when he could say that he had given himself up for lost and was willing to receive Christ, was there any hope for him. He could do nothing efficaciously without the assistance of God of coursenot wish, not :desire, not hope, not even pray. All he could do was to beg for the strength to loathe himself and to seek the Lord. When he found he could act, he might entertain the hope that he was saved.
This doctrine of God's sovereignty in conversion virtually filled Mather's preaching to his people. In the eighteenth century when he was inspired by the new evangelicalism, he made adherence to it the first of the "MAXIMS OF PIETY." The fear of the sovereign God, which gives glory to Him, the first Maxim held, is the essence of piety. The conclusion from this proposition seemed obvious to him"PIETY" begins with man's recognition of his corruption and his need of the grace of God.
1
 
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Cotton Mather did not choose to preach to his church only in the terms supplied by the faculty psychology. Had he done so his fame as a teacher would have turned into notoriety, and his church would have abandoned him. The psychology was not dry, abstract stuffnot in the sermons he deliveredbut it was not supple enough either in conception or language to furnish the fare a church required every Sabbath. For, a minister in the ordinary course of his preaching had to accomplish three tasks: converting the unregenerate, giving believers the assurance that they were saved and thereby nourishing their faith, and establishing the basis of moral obligation or of right conduct in life.
Like his father and grandfather, and virtually every other Congregational minister in seventeenth-century New England, Cotton Mather dealt with these problems by preaching the covenant theology. In its classic form, as developed by Preston, Perkins, Ames, and Sibbes, this theology, with its juridical bias, its suggestion that God offered man an escape from the determinism of predestination, proved as unsuitable to Cotton Mather's understanding of religious life as it had to his father's. The inventors of the Federal Theology, as the covenant theory is sometimes called, had suggested bluntly that God had so confined Himself by agreeing to live up to the terms of the covenant that man might bargain for his salvation. To be sure, the covenant did not alter God's election, but in dealing with men through contractual terms He has agreed to explain the qualifications for eternal glory and to live up to the promise He makes. The covenant theologians took great comfort from the conviction that one who demonstrated the qualifications could be assumed to be in contract with the Lord. Believers could attain absolute assurence; the covenant's terms could not be broken for, as John Cotton said, "If we be hemm'd in within this Covenant, we cannot break out." Nor would God violate its terms. Peter Bulkely asserted that God "cannot be a covenant breaker." The terms of the offer indeed might be pushed by a faithful man to force the Lord, under legal means, of course, to offer the covenant. John Preston urged men armed by faith to "sue him of his own bond written and sealed, and he cannot deny it." Preston's reasoning extended the idea as far as any of the Federalists dared: ''When faith hath once gotten a promise, be sure that thou keepe thy hold, pleade hard with the
Lord
, and tell him it is a part of his Cov-
 
Page 249
enant, and it is impossible that he should deny thee. . . . When thou art on a sure ground, take no denyall, though the
Lord
may defer long, yet he will doe it, he cannot chuse; for it is a part of his Covenant."
2
As interpreted by the Federalists, the covenant theory reassured men who were distressed by the iron inflexibility of predestination and election. These men of the early seventeenth century yearned for some comfort, and they received with sighs of thankfulness the news proclaimed by the divines of the first generation that God had agreed to operate in the world of men according to the logic and reason of a contract, similar to any they might sign in the world of commerce. But, as Cotton Mather reconstructed history in New England, thankfulness soon gave way to complacency, and by the appearance of the third generation, security and pride had replaced both. Mather looked with regret on the lack in New England of the mystery and the terror and the omnipotence of God. He considered the proud men of his day deluded in their confidence that their belief was meritorious, even, as Puritan theologians said, the procuring cause of God's grace.
3
In his own preaching he readily conceded that advocates of more than one "
Form
of coming into the Covenant" existed in New England, but he announced his preference for the "consenting and Receptive and Relying way of Procedure; this Method of making
Self
to be
Nothing
, and Jesus to be all."
4
Unlike Increase, Cotton Mather did not hesitate to use the commercial metaphors of the founders in describing the covenant relationship. But with a differencethe founders' sermons portrayed the believer binding God with terms, promises, and legally enforceable bargains; the implication of such efforts was that man in covenant dealt with the Lord as a virtual equal. Mather's sense of the gulf between nature and grace; and the helplessness he felt as a man before the authority of the Divine curbed whatever impulse he might have had to approach God in anything but the most abject frame of mind. It is not man who ''redeems" his soul unaided, he explained in a typical sermon, but Christ who "redeems an estate from forfeiture" and a man from destruction. As for bargaining and equality, the covenant permitted neither to man. A believer aspired to wear the livery of Christ. "Yea, He is One, whose Ear is
bored
, unto the
Service
of the
 
Page 250
LORD, he will never go away from
Serving
of his Beloved LORD." Lest the gap between service and equality be underestimated, Mather declared that "Our SAVIOUR is then the
Owner
of the Christian. The Christian is His Possession." How was this arrangement made, or in Mather's phrase, How did Christ come to get "title" to the Christian? Again the language of business proved convenient, as Mather explained that Christ bought the believer by His sacrifice and thereby redeemed him. Business terminology evidently could be used by a divine to demonstrate subordination as well as equality.
5
Of course, it may appear that Mather's discussion here pertains most directly to the Covenant of Redemption, the transaction between God the Father and God the Son in which Christ pays off the debt of sin by His own sacrifice. Mather may have attributed greater significance to this covenant between God and Christ than to the covenant of grace, but he did not choose to elevate the role of the believer in the second covenant. The Christian's part in the covenant of grace was hardly one which should fill him with a sense of his own importance. He must give his "consent" to the contract. Like hundreds of other New England parsons, Mather used the word, and repeated it in sermons covering more than half a century. But he always explained that consenting meant "surrender." And believers should not inflate the importance of their consent in the covenant, for as a return to the glorious mercy of the Lord it was a "very poor one." In giving it, "servants" must recognize what they do: "Coming into the
Covenant
of God, they then sign Indentures for the Service of the Saviour.''
6
Nor should they deceive themselves about the source of the power that enabled them to consent, which came from God. The original Federalists had sometimes neglected to state that God supplied the divine energy. Their oversight was understandable; their eagerness to rescue desperate men from Calvinism's rigidity made them forget to make explicit every premise of their theory. The men of their generation, they knew, possessed an abiding sense of their own depravity and weakness anyway.
7
Cotton Mather faced a different sort. As far as he could see, a minister must remind men that though their strength was more than enough to settle the land and make it thrive, to build towns
 
Page 251
and give them life, and to push ships and goods all over the Atlantic and beyond, it availed them nothing in the world of the spirit. The old exhortation to love the world with weaned affectionsto live in it but not be of itapparently left men cold. So in preaching about conversion and the peace that accompanied it, he never allowed his listeners to forget that they could not enter the covenant under their own power. At the beginning of his ministry he insisted that "No man can come except the Father draw him," and at the end that the sinner was, of course, "
Unworthy
that He should Enable you." His advice remained unvarying, as he urged the sinner to beg Christ to "make me willing" to enter the covenant.
8
Once made willing, according to the theory of the Federal Theologians, the believer could obtain assurance through his honoring the promises of the covenant. When he did so by living according to the law, he demonstrated the holiness of his faith and he could demand that God give him the comfort his actions deserved. After all, the Lord had granted men His covenant, and He had pledged Himself to keep its promises. In this mood, Mather occasionally urged that men plead the promises of the covenant to alleviate the sadness they felt in their earthly condition. But he did not ordinarily use the language of law because he did not conceive of the covenant so much as a legal instrument as one that ratified man's total dependence upon the Divine. In it men could test themselves, and others who wished, for example to enter the churches of New England; yet while they did so, they must recognize the opportunities of outwardly counterfeiting good behavior.
9
Nor did Mather ever suggest that the believer in the covenant could require assurance from God. The obligation of attaining it, he suggested, rested with the believer, who might beg for divine assistance, but who should never expect to obtain comfort by merely reminding the Lord of the promises of the covenant. The believer's obligation arose in the covenanthe must plead his lack of merit and his inability to achieve good by his own efforts, but he must never stop trying. In the covenant he pledged his faith, depending always of course upon the gift of God, not the efficacy of his own prayers. His most reliable resource was subjective and hence not to be clearly seen by his friends or his
 
Page 252
church. He must examine his soul, test his affections, his disposition to come to God. The covenant required this internal action from him, not from the Lord.
10
By reminding men that in entering into the covenant they pledged themselves to prove their faith by leading holy lives, the Federal Theologians established the basis of moral obligation. These theologues also saw the possibilities the theory presented for ecclesiastical and social organization. Here, of course, they may have followed the lead of medieval political thinkers; in any case, the Federal Theologians wrote dissertations expounding the covenant as the basis of all societies, including the Church order.
11
In appropriating the theory to their own purposes and in developing the sermon form called the jeremiad, the New Englanders in the Federal tradition devised a means to whip their society into line. Yet over the course of a generation they discovered the practical limits of the entire conception. Men could be threatened; they could be enticed into renewing the covenant in their churches; they could even be persuaded to reform temporarily. Then they would return to their old ways, like a dog to his vomit, Puritan pastors sadly noted. No one saw this more clearly than Cotton Mather, who nonetheless preached jeremiads by the score. But even he could tire of ramming his head against a brick wall, and by the late 1690's he was working a new emphasis into his homiletics.
12
Increase Mather may have given Cotton the new direction. Although always more of a traditional covenant theologue than his son, Increase had begun to protest early in his career against the neglect of Christ in favor of "meer morality," which, he said, filled much of the preaching of his day.
13
A Christian minister should concentrate on the sacrifice of Christ, emphasizing that the righteousness of the Saviour justified believers, not their own righteousness. This simple proposition had in fact disappeared from much Puritan preaching, replaced in the first generation by exhortations to assume legal obligations, to pay the price, to press the "promises," to fulfill the terms of the contract, and in the second by reasuring claims that men could take comfort from leading moral lives, that the external gave evidence of the internal condition.
14
Neither technique comported easily with Cotton Mather's psy-
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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