New England Theology Lecture 4_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 England, Farewell the Church of God in England and all the Christian friends there.” We do not go to New England as Separatists from the Church of England, though we cannot but separate from its corruptions in it (Winthrop Hudson, Religion in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), pp.37.

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 battled ferociously but both ecclesiastical and civil control were exercised at national and local levels by officials usually committed to upholding the power of both ecclesiastical and civil regimes (Ibid.,p.17).

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, explicit or implied Such a congregation or particular church is a society of believers joined together in a special bond for the continual exercise of the communion of saints among themselves…This bond is a covenant, expressed or implicit, by which believers bind themselves individually to perform all those duties toward God and toward one another which relate to the purpose of the church and its edification (pp. 179-180).