NEW ENGLAND THEOLOGY Lecture 4 The Ecclesiology of the Pilgrims and Puritans

NEW ENGLAND THEOLOGY
Lecture 4
The Ecclesiology of the Pilgrims and Puritans


As we have seen the first settlers in New England were the Pilgrims. They
were Separatist Puritans who had been “harried” out of England by the
repressive ecclesiastical policies of James I. Via an eleven year long stop-over in
The Netherlands they sailed to America where they founded the Plymouth
Plantation and established a church with a congregational form of government.
The Pilgrims believed that the NT model for churches is to organize as
independent assemblies consisting of true believers and their children They are
known as Congregationalists to distinguish them from the Church of England
and the Presbyterian Church both of which have a hierarchical or “from the top-
down” type of government.
The Plymouth settlement grew from 102 persons in 1620 to ten “plantations” of
2500 people by 1643.
Much more numerous and influential were the Puritans of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony (1629).Most of them had left England for similar
reasons as the Pilgrims, namely the ruthless policies of Charles’ I and his
henchman Arch bishop Laud.
Yet, as one of their leaders, Francis Higginson is reported to have said as
he boarded the ship that was to take him and his party to America:
We will not say as the Separatists are wont to say at their leaving
England, “Farewell Babylon, Farewell Rome”; but we will say, “Farewell dear Engl

Differences between Pilgrims and Puritans
According to Hudson the difference between these non separatist Puritans
and the separatist Pilgrims was not great but this statement has to be qualified.
While still living in England they strongly disagreed in their attitudes to the
Anglican Church, the non-Separatists condemning the Separatists for what saw
as the sin of schism while the latter regarded the former for staying in what they
believed was a thoroughly corrupt Church But after they got settled in New
England they not only learned to live with their differences but eventually they
came to a virtual agreement There were two reasons for this. First because the
Pilgrims, inspired by John Robinson, were not as radical as some of their other
separatist brethren were. Robinson, e.g., did not forbid his people to hear godly
non separatists ministers preach on a weeknight or some other special occasion.
Second, in New England the old issue that had divided them in the mother
country lost its relevance because they both were determined to establish
churches modeled after the Biblical model. As a result both groups eventually merged into one Congregationalist federation of churches.
This merger of two formerly opposing factions within the Puritan
movement was to have tremendous ecclesiastical and political consequences not
only for New England but for America as a whole. It also impacted the character
and influence of the Reformed Faith in the English speaking world.
For what exactly is congregationalism? What are its main features and
how different is it from English Anglicanism, Scottish Presbyterianism or
Continental Calvinism? What all these churches had in common was that they
were governed in varying degrees by centralized judicatory structures whether
bishops, presbyteries, synods, or general assemblies In other words, they all
include some form of higher or broader authority structures.

Origin of Congregationalism
The Congregationalist form of church government is a relatively new
phenomenon in Church history. The Roman Catholic Church was and is the
complete opposite of a Congregational Church. But the Church that Luther
founded wasn’t Congregationalist either; neither was the Reformed Church of
Geneva, the Anglican Church in England or the Presbyterian Church of Scotland
To get a handle on this subject we have to go back to the early centuries of
the Christian Church. One of the most difficult problems the Church had to deal
with as she moved from a small band of disciples in Palestine to a fast growing
international movement, was its organization. The Church began as a tiny
minority of volunteers who had heard to call to follow Jesus of Nazareth. Three
hundred years later they were the fasted growing religious movement in the
Roman Empire. It need not surprise us that this rapid growth brought with it
many growing pains After Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity many
Roman citizens followed him into the Church and when later Emperor
Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of his realm many more
pagans entered the Church. When later the western part of the empire fell to the
barbarians these conquerors also adopted Christianity. Mass baptism took place
and entire tribes converted so that by 500 A.D the church was faced with the task
of teaching vast numbers of people who in most cases knew next to nothing
about the new religion.

To meet this challenge the Church adopted the Roman structures of
government. Each part of the empire was divided into small paroikii, from
which we get the word parishes and the church made use of this system to
organize itself. Each parish was linked to a bishop in a larger city and the
bishops were linked by patriarchs who resided in the five most populous cities:
Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria.
This change in government structure resulted in a fundamental change in 
the nature of the church. As David Weir explains: “The church moved from an
organization based on voluntaristic principles to a compulsory organization
including all the citizens of a geographical region, whether willing or unwilling”
(Early New England, A Covenanted Society, p.16).

Suddenly the church found itself in a position of power. No longer a small
persecuted minority they were now the majority invested with both spiritual and
political authority and given the means to impose their will on the masses. To
implement this new power they looked to Scripture for guidance and found it in
the O.T. story of the Israelites’s conquest of Canaan and the subjugation of its
inhabitants. Having looked in vain for explicit instructions from the New
Testament regarding this matter, they did discover in the Old Testament ideas
about power that they could adapt to their own new situation. The result was that
For a millennium and a half after the conversion of Constantine, the
church upheld the political regimes and they upheld the church. At times
the two ba

According to Weir, England was divided into some 8,000 parishes, each of
which had “as its nerve centre one-and only one-church, which all the people in
the parish were obligated to attend and support.” Therefore, any attempt to
establish and attend a church other than the official “State Church was deemed
illegal and seen as an act of treason against both the Crown and the Church.
(Ibid).
When Henry VIII severed all ties with Rome and turned England into a
Protestant nation this brought about significant changes in what the church
taught doctrinally but not in how the church was governed. The new Church
continued to be episcopally governed and parochially structured and all English
people were expected to support and attend it at the risk of being fined or
imprisoned.

The debate over church government
This was the situation in England when the Puritan movement began. It all
started with arguments over vestments and other worship related issues that
smacked of Roman Catholic ideas and practices. But soon the focus of the
reformers shifted to the matter of church government. All agreed that the Church
of England still retained too much that reminded of Rome, but there was no
agreement on what needed to be changed, including the way the church should
be governed. There were those who wanted to adopt the Presbyterian form of
church polity and for a while it looked as though they might get their way. After
the Puritans, led by Cromwell, had defeated Charles 1 and his Royalist armies,
the Long Parliament controlled by the Presbyterians called the Westminster
Assembly for the purpose of creating a Presbyterian Church for both Scotland and England But the plan failed because Cromwell did not relish the prospect of
seeing the Anglican Establishment replaced by a Presbyterian Church which he
feared had similar hierarchical tendencies The real reason for its ultimate failure
was that outside of Parliament there was not much grass root support for the idea.
At the opposite pole there were those who were so convinced that the
Church of England was beyond repair that they had begun to withdraw from
local parochial churches to form their own alternative churches. These were the
Separatists and they chose what later came to be called a congregational form of
church government. The essential characteristics of this type of government is
that church membership is voluntary and restricted to those who can give a
credible account of their conversion and that the authority of the church resides
in the local church governed by godly elders who are chosen by the membership.
Perhaps the best description of congregationalism is found in Henry
Barrows’ 1589 pamphlet A True Description of the Visible Congregation of the
Saints. Barrow, one of the earliest leaders of the separatist movement in England
held the position that each church should be an independent religious community
composed of “gathered” believers only, in other words, those who were
consciously and conscientiously Christian in their convictions Those who are
united in such a covenant with Christ thus form a self-governing body, electing
their own pastor and elders according to the pattern allegedly prescribed for the
church in the NT. Neither the state nor any higher church organization should
have the power to demand conformity of any kind from such covenanted
congregations. Each congregation should be independent and of equal status
with all others and within each congregation all members were to be equal in
status and pastors and officers should have no position of prestige but only the
spiritual authority to preach and admonish.

Non-separatist congregationalists
But not all congregationalists were separatists like Barrow and Robinson.
In fact a majority of them wanted to remain in the Church of England. One of
their first leaders, named Henry Jacob, advocated an Established Church in
which each congregation or parish would be free to determine its own policies
and choose its own pastor without interference from higher church authorities.
These non-separatist Congregationalists were prepared to work within the
confines of the Church of England as long as they could focus on their own
congregations to promote godliness. They were less concerned with church
government than with conversion and therefore they, like the separatists insisted
on high standards for admission to full church membership.
In 1658 these Congregationalists met at Savoy Palace and produced the so-
called Savoy Declaration which adopted the Westminster Confession and

Catechisms minus the articles related to church government and discipline
Among the prominent participants at this meeting were John Owen, Thomas
Goodwin and Greenhill.
The Congregationalists who came to Massachusetts Bay under John
Winthrop in 1630 were the early representatives of this group. They were
Puritans who regarded themselves as part of the Church of England and under
the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London But since they were now in America
separated from England by a great distance they were able to operate under
principles very similar to those of their separatist brethren in the Plymouth
Colony. This similarity in approach to church polity as well as basic agreement
on Puritan doctrine went a long way to remove the suspicion with which they
had initially regarded each other
An advanced party of the nonseparatists had established a church on the
congregational model at Salem in 1629 on the basis of the following vow, “We
covenant with the Lord and with one another, and do bind ourselves in the
presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to
reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.”
The key sentence here is “we covenant with the Lord and with each other.”
Here we have the essence of congregational ecclesiology. Covenanting for
congregationalists was a sacred rite and an integral part of the communion of the
saints. As William Ames stated in his Marrow of Modern Divinity,
The instituted church is a gathered group of believers joined together by a covenant,