Janice Knight. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism. Harvard University Press, 1994. See here to purchase the book.
Janice Knight teaches English at the University of Chicago.
This book challenges what Knight believes is a monolithic scholarly
view of Puritanism in the seventeenth century. Knight essentially
argues that there were two kinds of Puritans.
Knight occasionally calls the first kind of Puritans the
“legalists.” They appealed to logic rather than emotion and stressed
God’s sovereignty more than God’s grace. They gave stern “jeremiads”
that threatened people with God’s wrath if they did not stay on the
straight-and-narrow. For them, God’s covenant was conditional: one has
to stay on the straight-and-narrow to be saved. Knight frequently
refers to them as “preparationists”: they exhorted people to prepare
themselves spiritually for saving faith and grace by cleansing
themselves of sin and doing what is right, and they saw Christian living
as a gradual, uphill process. People who followed them often were
uncertain if they arrived. Exemplars of this line of Puritan thinking
include William Ames and Thomas Hooker. John Winthrop, the Puritan
leader in America, leaned towards this school.
Knight often refers to the second kind of Puritans as “spiritists.”
They emphasized God’s love and grace in transforming and regenerating
people, enabling them to believe. God’s covenant was more of a
testament and a promise, in their eyes: God regenerated Christians and
would uphold them until the end. Emotion and mystical union with Christ
played a greater role in their sermons and outlook. Adherents to this
line of thinking included Richard Sibbes and John Cotton. Knight also
argues that Jonathan Edwards was an heir to the spiritist Puritan
outlook. It was controversial on account of its association with the
antinomians in seventeenth century New England.
You might think that the “legalists” were exclusive and conservative,
whereas the “spiritists” were inclusive and liberal. But that was not
entirely the case, in Knight’s picture. The legalists supported
including the grandchildren of believers as members of the church, even
if their parents displayed no evidence of personal conversion. The
heirs of the spiritists, by contrast, saw that as abhorrent: they wanted
the church to be a holy community of regenerated people, however small
the community might be.
Knight draws other distinctions between the legalists and the spiritists:
—-The legalists included a lot of application in their sermons. The spiritists preferred to linger in the text of Scripture.
—-The legalists had a practical view of love of neighbor. They
acknowledged that people should love themselves, and exhorted people to
prioritize loving their family over others. The spiritists had more of
an emotional, effusive picture of love: the Christian felt affection
towards others, and the truly regenerate person would be full of love
and pour it out to everyone he or she encountered.
—-The legalists thought that God could be effective in a person’s
spiritual growth even if that person read a sermon at home. The
spiritists thought that there was greater power in gathering with other
Christians to hear the Word preached. You would think that the
spiritists had a stronger view of the church and the clergy than the
legalists, but the situation was messier than that. The legalists
regarded ministers as authorities, whereas the spiritists did not as
much, stressing instead the community of the saints.
—-The legalists did not focus on conversion testimonies. The
spiritists did, thinking they could encourage and foster community and
mutual identification within the body of Christ.
—-The legalists were tribalistic, in that they believed in the
importance of the Puritan community in North America. Some scholars
have argued that the legalists paved the way for Manifest Destiny. The
spiritists, by contrast, encouraged Christians to see themselves as part
of a worldwide body of believers.
—-Some scholars have argued that the legalists supported capitalism
and financial success. The spiritists, by contrast, saw the pursuit of
wealth as a possible hindrance in one’s relationship with God and
preferred a more “primitive” society.
—-The legalists were bolder and more open in their dissent from the
establishment English church, so they were eager to start anew in North
America. The spiritists tended to be discrete about their dissent, rose
in the ranks of the establishment English church, and were reluctant to
leave their congregations in England to come to North America.
—-The legalists were pessimistic and stressed God’s wrath. The
spiritists had an optimistic postmillennial perspective: God was at work
in history, drawing closer to creation, and the millennium would
precede Christ’s second coming.
Knight engages in some psychologizing of the legalists and
spiritists. The spiritists were often lucky in life, gaining the renown
and the position that they sought. The legalists were not as
successful in life. Some of them were itinerant preachers rather than
having an actual ministerial position. The spiritists, Knight seems to
imply, naturally transferred their life experiences onto their theology:
they saw themselves as blessed and assured of salvation. For the
legalists, by contrast, the spiritual life was more of an uncertain,
uphill journey.
Knight’s thesis has been controversial. My suspicion is that some
scholars have wondered if Puritans can be divided into such neat
categories. Knight herself acknowledges places where the distinction
can get rather messy:
—-Did the preparationists reject the Calvinist idea that God needed
to regenerate a person for that person to believe? Indeed, some have
accused the preparationists of Pelagianism, Arminianism, or
semi-Arminianism. Knight is rather unclear here. She states that the
preparationists did believe that God made the first move, but they
simply did not emphasize that, stressing human effort and activity
instead. At other times, though, Knight seems to portray the
preparationists as thinking that people needed to muster up their own
faith and clean themselves up before God could save and dwell in them.
—-Knight cites an example of a legalist who was quite mystical in his
private journals, even though he did not bring that mysticism into his
public sermons.
Here are other possible areas of messiness, in my estimation (not that I am Knight’s peer on this subject, by a long shot):
—-Did not the optimistic postmillennial view that Knight associates
with the spiritists contain the tribalism that Knight associates with
the legalists? The Puritan settlement in North America was deemed to be
a crucial part of God’s positive work in history, culminating in the
millennium.
—-Conversion testimonies and stress on spiritual transformation,
which Knight associates with the spiritists, could coincide with the
spiritual insecurity and fear of hell that Knight associates with the
legalists. People could look at their lives and see no evident powerful
spiritual experiences or much evidence of the fruit of the Spirit, and
they could despair that they are unsaved and on their way to hell.
—-I am slowly going through Sibbes’ “The Bruised Reed,” and he does
depict spiritual growth as a process: God does not transform a person
all at once, but a person grows gradually. Maybe he did not portray the
spiritual life as an uphill, uncertain journey, but there was an
element of gradualism in his conception of it.
—-I sometimes got the impression in reading Knight that the
preparationists believed that people should prepare themselves for an
intense mystical experience, which may imply that mysticism played some
role in their thought.
There may have been more messiness and overlap between the two
schools of Puritan thought than Knight presents. At the same time, she
does well to identify tensions within Puritan thought: for instance, a
belief in God’s unconditional election of the Christian, co-existing
with conditionalism and uncertainty about whether one is saved. And
different Puritan thinkers probably had different emphases, as some
stressed God’s grace and love, whereas others focused on God’s judgment.
From my personal perspective, what is ironic is this: you would
expect me to sympathize more with the spiritists than the legalists. I
crave God’s love and grace and detest spiritual uncertainty. And yet,
there is a strong part of me that gravitates more towards the legalists,
as Knight presents them. The legalists offered a practical, realistic
picture of love, in contrast to the nebulous, touchy-feely, “love
everybody” approach of the spiritists; I find the same sort of
distinction between Christians today, as the conservative
“fire-and-brimstone” types present a practical picture of love, whereas
the “God-loves-you” free grace types are more touchy-feely and emphasize
extroversion. The former appears more attainable to me, as one who has
Asperger’s and struggles socially. Yet, I will admit that Jonathan
Edwards had beautiful things to say about the community of saints, and
how the saints mutually glorify one another before God, as the stars are
beautiful when they shine together.