“This Awful Affair”: Cousins, Communion, and the Collapse of Covenant Society in

Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton

Gregory J. Campeau

Professors Martha Saxton (advisor), Monica Ringer and N. Gordon Levin (readers)

Submitted to the Department of History of Amherst College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with

honors.

April 4, 2011

2

Thus saith the Lord, No stranger, uncircumcised in heart,

nor uncircumcised in flesh, shall enter into my sanctuary,

of any stranger that is among the children of Israel. EZEKIEL 44:9

3

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It all began with a slightly tattered book in the mail. I would have been writing a very

different thesis had Stephen J. Nichols’s biography of Jonathan Edwards never come

to me in the mail last summer when I was deciding on what subject I would write this

thesis. Many warm thanks to Leah Gregg for sending it and starting me out on the

(lifelong?) project of becoming acquainted with Mr. Edwards of Northampton.

I confess that I would never have had the confidence to keep swimming in the

vast ocean of Edwards scholarship without the confidence I gained in conversation

with Drs. Kenneth Minkema and Adriaan Neele, both of Yale Divinity School’s

Jonathan Edwards Center. It was a great relief and encouragement to be welcomed

into the Center, the veritable nexus of the scholarly study of Edwards, and be able to

speak at length to the editors of Edwards’s Works. I should note that it was the

generosity of the Amherst College Dean of Faculty in the form of an award from the

Alpha Delta Phi Fund that enabled me to travel to Yale; for this I am also grateful.

To the staff of the Frost Library, especially the reference librarians and

interlibrary-loan department, I owe a great measure of thanks. Their great skill and

expedition have been much appreciated.

A special acknowledgement is due to Elise Bernier-Feeley, the local historian

and resident Edwards expert at the Forbes Library in Northampton. Her kind and

4

thoroughgoing help in pointing me to sources and ideas I had not considered—namely

the importance of the Hawley Papers and family conflicts—proved invaluable. Judging

by the acknowledgment of her aid in innumerable books by prominent Edwards

scholars and biographers, her passion and influence certainly run deep.

I am grateful as well to the Rev. Dr. Josh Moody of College Church in

Wheaton, Illinois, who is devoted to both the disciplined study and passionate

emulation of Edwards as theologian and pastor. Our correspondence on the

importance of doctrine in eighteenth-century New England shaped my thinking

immensely and helped me avoid numerous Marxian pitfalls in this project.

Many dear thanks, of course, to Professor Martha Saxton, my faculty advisor.

For agreeing to take on this disheveled and anxious thesis student, for remaining

excited through two very different thesis ideas across two very different centuries in

American history, for reading illegible drafts and notes, for listening and challenging

and extending regular hospitality and encouragement—for all of these things, I am

very grateful.

Finally, thanks to my family, who spent many hours listening to a brother and

son go on at length about a wig-wearing Puritan from the distant past; thanks to my

college pals, who have laughed with me, distracted me, and have lavished the joys of

friendship on me for four long years; heart-filled thanks to my church family, who have

prayed without ceasing and shown me love and grace time and time again; and

thanks, lastly, to my pastor, Robert Krumrey, whose passion for revival and the

powerful proclamation of the gospel in this quirky, collegiate corner of the Kingdom

ever remind me of the tenacity in truth of Jonathan Edwards.

5

This work is dedicated above all to the teachers of history, from California to

Alabama and Amherst to Oxford, who have trained me with great enthusiasm to

appreciate the theoretical explanations of the past while searching arduously for the

trillions of small stories: for the persons of the past and their most imperfect humanity.

Soli Deo Gloria.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

Perhaps the greatest difficulty for the scholar of Northampton circa 1750 is that the

primary sources which ought to illustrate the civil and ecclesiastical events of the

period are, in a word, scant. The historian is forced to rely mainly on secondhand

accounts in order to reconstruct what exactly came to pass from 1749, when the

wheels of the dismissal process began to grind, to the summer of 1750, when Edwards

preached his last sermon as pastor of the First Church of Christ in Northampton.

Time has, not unexpectedly, whittled down the sources available to the

researcher. What remains are a few noteworthy narratives that summarize the

dismissal period from various points of view. The first is Jonathan Edwards's own

Narrative, which covers the period and does an exceedingly fastidious job of quoting

extensively from the flurry of memoranda exchanged between him and the precinct

committee. There is no reason to believe Edwards falsified his account in any way, as

no other account seems to contradict his, and in the main he does not seem to have

purposefully made modifications to others’ notes and letters he quotes. Edwards’s

6

narrative is useful not only for its relation of facts but also for its reflection of his

memory of the events and his interpretation of them.1

Another important though slightly problematic narrative is Sereno (Edwards)

Dwight's. Dwight, a prominent lawyer, pastor, and eventually college president, was

great-grandson to Jonathan Edwards. Born almost forty years after the dismissal in

1750, Dwight's ten-volume Life and Works of Jonathan Edwards (c. 1830) bears the

distinctly hagiographic marks of an adoring standard-bearer of a rich theological and

familial heritage. Especially in his chapters covering the dismissal and its immediate

context, Dwight paints his great-grandfather as the inimitable saint and sage of

Northampton whose providential life and ministry were in 1750 under assault by

none other than the very forces of satanic evil. The following is how Dwight

introduces his chapter covering what he thought were the causes of "the dismission;"

it is typical of the whole biography in its defensiveness and insistence on the moral

perfection of its subject:

[I]t cannot fail to strike the reader, that, agreeably to the confession of his

most violent opposers and most bitter enemies, no solitary instance of

misconduct, on the part of Mr. Edwards, is to be enumerated among those

causes. No allegation of imprudence, or impropriety, in him or his family, no

mention of any unfaithfulness, or neglect of his duty,—of any fault, either of

1 For an interesting analysis of the Narrative, especially its use of language and how scholars ought to think about it, see Parker H. Johnson, “Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Personal Narrative’ and the Northampton Controversy,” Cithara 26 (1987): 31–47.

7

commission or of omission, is to be found in any of the documents connected

with the whole series of transactions, from the beginning to the close.2

Yet, though Dwight’s narrative is burdened with “indiscriminate detail and with a

ponderous style” and distortions and manipulations of the manuscript he quotes, his

account is “a necessary one” while the editing of the Edwards manuscripts continues.3

Much, too, can be gleaned about mid-eighteenth-century Northampton, and

the Edwards dismissal more specifically, from extant letters penned by

Northamptonites. The correspondence of Edwards himself is the most plentiful and

well-preserved of these. A good deal of it has already been published by Yale

University Press. In addition, one can find the extant letters of Major Joseph Hawley

(III) in the Hawley Papers, the microfilm of which is stored in the Forbes and the

originals of which are held in the New York Public Library.

Time may not be, however, the sole culprit in bringing about the dearth of

sources. Bizarrely, the normally trustworthy town, church, and Hampshire

Association of Ministers records fall silent in this period. The church records simply

relate, in one simple line, that Jonathan Edwards was dismissed in 1750. The town

records, similarly, say nothing. The official minutes of the Hampshire Association, the

organization of Connecticut Valley Congregationalist ministers, in perhaps the

strangest, most insidious case, have had their contents from the period from 1747

through 1750 manually excised. These records are now kept in the Hampshire Room

for Local History in the Forbes Library in Northampton, but they were not always

2 S.E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1830), 428. 3 M. X. Lesser, Reading Jonathan Edwards: An Annotated Bibliography in Three Parts, 1729–2005 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 5.

8

held in a secure archive. It is not certain whether the leaves were taken before or after

the Forbes acquired the records sometime in the late nineteenth century. What is

certain is that either an extreme lack of respect for the integrity of the records or a

conspiratorial plot to shield the activity of the valley's ministers from view was at

work. Whatever the reasons, the official records, which speak with such detail about

other periods of Northampton history, are mute in this period, and the historian is

caused to rely on other sources to reconstruct events and personages.

9

PART I: DISMISSED ‘THE ENEMY FAR & NEAR WILL NOW TRIUMPH’

On a warm July Sunday in 1750, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards climbed the pulpit to

address his flock for the last time as their pastor. Carrying with him several sheets of

scrap paper on which he had scrawled an unusually long sermon, he stood looking out

at the faces of ordinary men and women, young, old, and in middle age, whose souls

had been under his care for nearly a quarter century. The wealthy sat in pews below; the

poor stood in the wings. All of them were no doubt eager to hear how their pastor of

nearly a quarter century would say goodbye. Having arrived as a young, able provincial

pastor, he was now leaving as a famed revivalist and theologian, a veritably transatlantic

celebrity.

He wasted no time and began to speak. Reading as the text of his sermon a

single verse from Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, he launched into his lesson.

Ministers and their people, he intoned, “must meet one another, before Christ’s

tribunal, at the day of judgment.”4 This celestial meeting will be an occasion for

either celebration or mourning, he stated. Any disputes will be settled once and for

all; an omniscient and omnipotent Christ embodying and displaying forcefully all that

is true and wise will preside. Those who have been on the right side of controversy

will be exalted, and all those who have been on the wrong side will be corrected. Such

4 Jonathan Edwards, “Farewell Sermon,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 25, Sermons and Discourses, 1743–1758, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 457ff.

10

a divine filtration will, Edwards warned, leave some in Northampton outside the

Kingdom’s gates.

One would expect a minister in such a position to have preached a fairly

sentimental sermon on that day. But the Reverend Jonathan Edwards was not on this

occasion overcome with any sort of nostalgia or sentiment—or at least not the sort any

modern onlooker would have recognized. As he spoke, it became clear that the sermon

he was preaching was less about that warm Sunday in Northampton that marked his

departure than about the future—the eternal future. It was to be focused on that

fateful moment when Christ himself would judge the world—those gathered in that

very meetinghouse in Northampton—at the gates of heaven. It was to be more a

theocentric lesson in eschatology than an anthropocentric exercise in sentiment.

* * *

The sermon was decidedly unsentimental because, for one thing, Edwards was

a preacher of the older, Puritan persuasion, whose Calvinistic heritage caused the

preaching event to be mostly impersonal and centered chiefly on the more high-flown

truths of divinity. Yet in this instance the sermon was exceedingly chilly for another,

more immediate reason. Jonathan Edwards was not leaving by choice. He was not

being called to pastor a larger, more important church or being invited to join the

professorial ranks in New Haven or Cambridge to teach, write, and involve himself in

the theological disputations there, though he was eminently qualified for either path.

His career, as far as anyone knew, was not on the cusp of a great improvement.

Rather, Edwards was leaving Northampton because his flock had decided to

fire him, to abandon him as their shepherd. A small, vociferous group, led by a few

11

local social and military elites, within the space of a year, had risen up, accused

Edwards of abandoning dearly held tradition and introducing undesirable doctrinal

innovations, convinced the parish of the veracity of this claim, called a council of

regional churches to hear the matter, and then pursued the policies of church

discipline to their thorny, painful end: “separation.” And so the relationship between

Edwards and his people was dissolved.

This was not altogether uncommon in mid-eighteenth-century New England.

Ministers in the Congregationalist churches that dotted the colonial landscape were

not as secure in their employment as their peers in Britain, where established

Episcopal and Presbyterian structures kept the opinions of ordinary parishioners

relatively distant from hiring and firing decisions made by bishops and sessions of

elders. The Congregationalist system, by contrast, did away with such hierarchies and

introduced a sort of ecclesiastical democracy. Ministers in late-seventeenth-century

and eighteenth-century New England were, more frequently than has generally been

recognized in the historical literature, given the boot by their congregations. These

firings were for rather pragmatic reasons, either on account of an insoluble salary

dispute or a personal moral failing on the part of the pastor.5

In Edwards’s case, however, the firing was not about money or morality. It was

about doctrine. It concerned, officially at least, Edwards the teacher and pastor rather

than Edwards the man. This stands out as abnormal among the typical firings of

ministers in the Congregationalist world of the eighteenth century. The uniqueness of

5 For more on ministerial firings, see the first chapter of Mary C. Foster, "Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1729–1754: A Covenant Society in Transition" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1967).

12

the event merits a closer scholarly scrutiny. It poses questions: How was this dismissal

possible? Why were doctrinal matters ultimately successful in bringing about the

demise of a long-time, well-respected minister? Did other tensions merely find their

ultimate expression in the fight over doctrine?

For Edwards at least, the dismissal needed no historical contextualization or

explanation. This “separation” carried with it all the gravity of a divorce, the voiding of

a spiritual marriage. It also meant that the congregation was electing to choose

temporary spiritual orphanhood, a choice that, from the viewpoint of a rejected

Edwards, likely seemed to have its origins in the delusions of sheer childish

impertinence and ignorance. Yet it also pushed Edwards and his family into a strange

and hazardous position as social elites without a salary or significant financial support.

In Jonathan Edwards’s mind, it signaled chaos not just for Northampton but for the

Edwardses as a family, as the beleaguered minister summarized for a correspondent

just after his firing:

In this Event, we have a great Instance of the Instability & uncertainty of all

Things here below. The dispensation is indeed awful in many Respects,

calling for serious Reflection, & deep Humiliation, in me & my People. The

Enemy far & near will now triumph […]. I have now nothing visible to

depend upon for my future usefulness, or the subsistence of my Numerous.6

6 “Letter to William McCulloch, July 6, 1750,” in Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, Volume 32, Correspondence by, to, and about Edwards and His Family (Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, 2008).

13

MORE THAN DOCTRINAL

Jonathan Edwards was fired on doctrinal grounds. To be more specific, he was

charged with privately and without warning making a significant modification to the

communion qualifications in the Northampton church where he was the minister. He

had felt the need to assume greater responsibility over the integrity of the flock and

the genuineness of its membership. It was for that reason that Edwards chose as the

proof text of his tightening of membership standards Ezekiel 44:9: “Thus saith the

Lord; No stranger, uncircumcised in heart, nor uncircumcised in flesh, shall enter into

my sanctuary, of any stranger that is among the children of Israel.”7 For Edwards the

doctrine of a closed church, as opposed to an open one, was anything but a purely

theoretical matter. It protected the church and glorified God.8 For his congregation,

too, doctrine had real effects and was not merely rhetorical or superstructural (in the

Marxian sense). This is why, as will be discussed in more detail later, the doctrinal

dimension carried the day.

Yet the story of his dismissal, in all its historical, biographical, and

historiographical ramifications, is not about doctrine per se. Much attention will be

given to the element of official church teachings and the controversy that attended

Edwards’s controversial views on communion qualifications. To both minister and his

parishioners, an analysis of the end of the Edwards pastorate would seem laughably

7 See Jonathan Edwards, “Lectures on the Qualifications for Full Communion in the Church of Christ,” in Works 25: 353ff. 8 For a contemporary theological analysis of Edwards’s shift to this ecclesiological exclusivism, see Mark Dever, “How Jonathan Edwards Got Fired, and Why It’s Important for Us Today,” in John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004), 129–44.

14

incomplete without a careful explanation of the ecclesiological facet of the dismissal.

The unavoidable fact is that it was a difference in doctrinal values with regard to the

makeup and accessibility of the church as an institution and community that fueled

the dismissal proceedings against Edwards. But I will argue that Edwards was

rejected by Northampton ultimately not because of doctrine—that is, not on the

official grounds given for his dismissal—but rather because of two other factors: long-

term pastoral mistakes on Edwards’s part and long-standing family disputes and

rivalries in the town and region.

Edwards’s twenty-four year career in Northampton, though notable for its

successes in facilitating religious awakenings and for its superlative preaching, was

nonetheless tainted by several grave pastoral errors. From the forcing of a new—and

generally unwelcome—church covenant in 1742 to the infamous “bad books affair”

two years later, Edwards made significant missteps that gradually soured relationships

with more and more of his parishioners. I will argue that dismissal would have been

far less likely in 1750—even if Edwards had still taken steps to change communion

qualifications—had these mistakes not been made earlier in his pastorate.

Furthermore, and more proximately causative, envy-fraught relations in the

web of great, powerful (and mostly ministerial) families in the Connecticut River

Valley—the most prominent members of which have been aptly called “river gods”—

made the long-term pastorate of a man such as Jonathan Edwards untenable. I will

show that not only in a broad, dynastic-like manner, but also in terms of individual

familial relationships, breakdowns in support for Edwards within these families led

very directly to the dismissal of Edwards.

15

This argument will be made in the context of the doctrinal controversy as well

as in the context of existing scholarly claims regarding the factors and forces involved

in the dismissal drama. In the process, politics, socioeconomics, and the “frontier

thesis” will be explored and evaluated as historical arguments in the ongoing scholarly

debate as to why exactly Edwards’s illustrious Northampton career came to a halt in

1750. That is to say, I will survey the existing historiography and consider whether it

can rightly be said, for instance, that Edwards was fired because a capitalistic

individualism made ministerial leadership problematic, an argument that has been

put forward in various shapes. Though I will not deny that many of the factors that

historians have chosen to explain the firing were indeed active and are relevant to

study, I will show that these arguments, cast in causative terms, can in fact only prove

a correlative effect. In short, the nascent market-based economy, for example, did pose

certain problems for the ministry, but neither capitalism nor religious ideas fired

Jonathan Edwards.

Instead, his dismissal will be understood through the lens of a wholesale shift

in New England’s social order—the covenant society—with the intention of

discovering the deeper interpersonal, relational causes of Edwards’s demise in

Northampton. I will contend, in short, that the causation of the dismissal lies in the

actual decision-making and mentality of individuals, not in abstract trends or societal

shifts. I will demonstrate that Edwards was fired by persons, some related by blood

and others by covenant, who acted as agents with concrete human motivations, as

participants in—not as thoughtless pawns of—a period marked so remarkably by

16

economic, religious and intellectual, and political transition. Thus I will make a

historical argument and a historiographical one.

JONATHAN EDWARDS THE MAN

The man whose pastorate was aborted in 1750 was for the most part a stranger to

such momentous failure, which is part of the reason his dismissal is so intriguing. Born

into a family of ministerial elites from across New England, and reared to be an

intellectual (so far as that category existed at the time), Jonathan Edwards was from

youth bound for the prominence of the pulpit. His family was filled with men who

exemplified success in the religious sphere. His father, Timothy Edwards, was a

quietly successful preacher and revivalist in northern Connecticut, and his

grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, had been one of the most powerful, charismatic, and

controversial clerics in the colonies.

After being educated in his teens at Yale, at the time a zealously conservative

institution beside Harvard, the great seat of liberal-leaning New England learning and

ministerial training,9 Jonathan Edwards was for a time an instructor there and then

was installed in what would become his first pulpit in a troubled Presbyterian

congregation in Manhattan. Called there to pastor a church that had splintered after

a schism, within the space of about a year Edwards had mended the division, brought

the splintered churches back together, and in doing so worked himself very much out

of a job.

9 Connecticut was in the main more conservative theologically than Massachusetts to its north. See George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 86–7.

17

Called to the well-known and successful church in Northampton as a pastoral

assistant to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, after this, Edwards soon took over the

prestigious pulpit in 1729 when the ancient Stoddard died. There was an ongoing

practice of keeping ministerial positions throughout the Connecticut River Valley in

the powerful Williams and Stoddard families. As such, Edwards, it must be

understood, was chosen from among many cousins desirous of such a lucrative

position.10

As minister of the First Church of Christ Edwards generally excelled, uniting

his refined intellect and theological prowess with a pastoral passion for spreading and

revival—very much a Stoddardean heritage. Revival took hold of Northampton

throughout the 1730s and early 1740s, on some occasions spilling over into other parts

of the colonies. In these events Edwards positioned himself proudly at the helm,

presiding over what he considered to be the great reversing cure for a religious

“declension” that had taken hold of New England around the turn of the century.

Revival had been a key aspect of his father’s and grandfather’s fruitful careers in the

church, and Edwards, keen on carrying his share of the burden of family tradition,

pursued spiritual awakening unceasingly.

Dismissal derailed his ministry abruptly from the first rumblings of discontent

in 1748 until the nail was finally driven fully into the coffin of his pastorate two years

later. He and his family remained in Northampton long enough for Edwards to be

called upon by the elders of the church, presumably with a great amount of

10 For more on the elite families of the region, consult Kevin M. Sweeney, "River Gods and Related Minor Deities: The Williams Family and the Connecticut River Valley, 1637–1900" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1986).

18

humiliation, to preach on several instances as adjunct “pulpit supply” while the

church labored to find a suitable replacement candidate.

Soon Edwards enthusiastically led his family westward to Stockbridge, a

community dominated by Native Americans, to serve as a missionary and minister of

the Word there. In 1757, following the death of his son-in-law, Aaron Burr (father of

the future vice president), Edwards very reluctantly accepted the offer to fill Burr’s

position as president of the institution which, some years later, would be renamed

Princeton. Less than a year later, mere weeks after moving to New Jersey, Edwards

died as a result of a smallpox inoculation. He was remembered by his wife, in the style

of stark Puritan obituary, simply as a blessed instrument of God: “The Lord has done

it. He has made me adore his goodness, that we had him so long. But my God lives;

and he has my heart. O what a legacy [Jonathan] has left us!”11

Edwards has since come to be remembered for his brilliant theological

treatises. His work in philosophy in particular has gained him great renown. “Long

regarded as America’s first systematic theologian,” historian Patricia Tracy writes

representatively,

Edwards is credited by many historians with devising doctrines in the mid-

eighteenth century that represent the intellectual apogee of the Calvinism

that came to the New World with the Puritans in the 1620s and remained a

major force in American thought until the nineteenth century. Edwards’s

11 Sarah Edwards to her daughter, Esther (Edwards) Burr, quoted in Noël Piper, “Sarah Edwards: Jonathan’s Home and Haven,” in John Piper and Taylor, 75.

19

great achievement was to use the new scientific concepts of Isaac Newton and

John Locke to reformulate classic Reformed dogma.12 13

Yet it should be remembered that the majority of his great works, with the exception

perhaps of Religious Affections, were written in the frontier outpost of Stockbridge,

Massachusetts, after his church had ejected him from Northampton—that is, after

1750. Therefore, while in Northampton, during the period under examination here,

Edwards was chiefly a pastor, concerned with the ministry and work of the church

primarily and the work of writing secondarily. It was only after his long pastorate

ended that he was free to write the books that came to define him as a theological

theoretician. As J. R. Trumbull recorded in his 1902 history of Northampton,

Jonathan Edwards “was dismissed as a pastor of a small country church, of more than

ordinary capacity it is true, but not as the man of commanding influence which he

afterwards became.”14

STAKES & RELEVANCE

It may be that this topic does not immediately suggest its own relevance. To remedy

this, one might point to the seemingly endless stream of writing undertaken to explore

and explain the life and times of Jonathan Edwards as the only necessary evidence of

relevance. Scholars seem to think it is important, and so should we. But this is an

unsatisfying answer. The hard questions arise: Why should the postmodern care about

12 Patricia J. Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 5. 13 Philosopher Paul Ramsey has written that Edwards’s Freedom of the Will “alone is sufficient to establish its author as the greatest philosopher-theologian yet to grace the American scene.” Quoted in Marsden, 591, n. 33. 14 J. R. Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, from Its Settlement in 1654, vol. 2 (Northampton, Mass.: Press of Gazette Printing Co., 1902), 226.

20

the Puritan anyway, and why should the historian bother with mining the heated

controversies of the eighteenth century? Moreover, if so much has been written, then

why add to the heap of scholarship?

I do not argue that coming to grips with the end of Puritanism (if Edwards

was indeed the last Puritan15 ) or understanding the mind and career of one of the

“great men” of American history is essential.16 Indeed neither of these is the purpose

of the present argument. To argue for the relevance of the Puritan or colonial past and

its characters, among them Edwards and others mentioned here, is not the goal, for

other scholars have ably asserted this to either be the case or not.

The relevance of asking and seeking to answer the question of why Jonathan

Edwards was fired is based in an interest in biography, local and regional history, and

the problems of the historical method. The intention in posing such a question is to

address certain problems in the historical and biographical record relating to

Edwards, colonial Northampton, and colonial New England in general, and certain

problems in how scholars have sought at times to prioritize intellectual history over

social history, social history over religious history, and neat theories of historical

development over the gritty, timeless, utterly human, and in the end very much

unavoidable realities and histories of family and town. The challenge—which, it is to

be argued, most historians of this subject have failed adequately to address—is to

15 E.g., David C. Brand makes this argument in his Profile of the Last Puritan: Jonathan Edwards, Self-Love, and the Dawn of the Beatific (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991). 16 Much of Perry Miller’s work on Edwards is concerned with making case for Edwards’s significance in the development of a uniquely American nationality.

21

allow the methodological and interpretive priorities flow from and be recommended

by the facts of the event themselves, rather than choosing them a priori.

This study aims to accomplish two aims: synthesis and revision. It aims first to

synthesize the arguments and conclusions prevailing in the existing scholarship. From

the nineteenth-century histories seeking to canonize Edwards and demonize the

people of Northampton, to the very recent scholarship which has, for instance, sought

to apply demographic research to show that changing age and gender issues were

really the primary factors in the dismissal, this study seeks to weigh the assertions of

historians from throughout the Edwards historiography. At the same time I intend to

revise the major conclusions drawn from historical investigations of Edwards, his

Northampton, and the end of his pastorate. Some scholars have well understood the

influence of such factors as class conflict and the shifts in religious thought in the

period, but few if any have accomplished a helpful, accurate, and methodologically

sound holistic argument answering the why of the dismissal controversy. The

problems range from outright hagiography to overly simplistic, deterministic

explanations emphasizing economic and political momentum and ignoring human

agency.

The means of both synthesizing and revising is to put forward a new, unique

argument that relates the existing accounts of the dismissal, reconsiders the primary-

source evidence, and mediates a comprehensive new understanding. It will be argued,

in sum, that Jonathan Edwards was dismissed in 1750 because a band of alienated

Northampton elites, some related by blood to their minister and jealous and resentful

of him, were able, in the context of a shifting and uncertain social order, to persuade

22

the congregation at large that largely traditionalist, orthodox Edwards was an agent of

chaos and heterodoxy.

BRIEF HISTORIOGRAPHY

Historical interest in Jonathan Edwards burgeoned mainly in the nineteenth century

among churchmen and others, though initial biographical writing occurred almost

immediately after his 1758 death. These first sketches of Edwards’s life were written

as obituaries and as editorial prefaces to his works.

In the nineteenth century interest in Edwards lay exclusively in the resurgent

but beleaguered Calvinist churches and divinity schools in New England and less in

the secular academy. The effect of theological liberalism and modernism in general in

the region was to force traditionalists to cast their nets into the old New England for

intellectual inspiration and a taste of the richness of Puritan religious life. The

Reverend Jonathan Edwards of Northampton, in his intellectual rigor, forceful

homiletics, careful theological engagement, and triumphal yet doomed career in

“liberal”—i.e., increasingly Arminian—Northampton, symbolized for nineteenth-

century Calvinists the contemporary state of the theologically Reformed tradition in

New England. Like Edwards, it was high-minded and tenacious of orthodox dogma

even in the face of besetting liberalizing forces that threatened the very foundations of

that orthodoxy. They looked to him as an admirable coreligionist standing athwart a

tide of “religious declension.” Of such writers minister and college president Sereno

Dwight stands out as one of the most important. A kinsman of Jonathan Edwards’s by

both blood and theological heritage and conviction, Dwight wrote as a fervent

devotee, with a strong polemical bent matched only by a keen eye for historical

23

detail.17 Williston Walker wrote in the later half of the century as a church historian

concerned more broadly with the history of the Reformed churches and their “great

churchmen,” especially John Calvin and his Geneva, and, somewhat as a corollary,

Jonathan Edwards and his Northampton.

The twentieth-century surge in interest in Jonathan Edwards, and

Edwardseana in general, has its origins in the pioneering historical work of Perry

Miller, who is often said—with some amount of exaggeration—to have rediscovered

the eighteenth-century minister. It was Miller who boldly asserted on the first page of

his 1949 biography of Edwards that “[t]he real life of Jonathan Edwards was the life of

his mind.”18 Miller was intent upon exploring the intellectual, psychological, and

spiritual drama in Edwards’s life as a metaphor for the life, attitude, and mood of the

uniquely “American” mind. As Donald Weber writes, this was what energized

Miller’s scholarship: an approach that sought to deliver Edwards from obscurity and

the intellectual hinterland of the western Massachusetts frontier and present him

instead as a striking, commendable, and entirely crucial precursor of American

modernity.19 In this view Edwards was foremost a great man possessing weighty ideas

whose influence rippled outward into the fabric of American history and identity.

Unsurprisingly Miller’s account delves deeply into intellectual history while

ignoring altogether the social context in which Edwards lived. It is not hagiography,

but it is not quite biography or particularly useful history either. Though Miller’s work

17 For more on Sereno Dwight, see the “Note on Sources” in the prologue. 18 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), xxx. Emphasis added. 19 Donald Weber, “Introduction,” in Miller, Edwards, vii.

24

seems to break with the nineteenth-century fascination with Edwards as a

sympathetic comrade in the fight against theological liberalism, in reality Miller’s

portrait, and the portraits of others in the same vein as Miller, aims at a similar target.

It seeks instead to cast Edwards as a valiant patriot for the cause of an enlightened,

modern-facing idea of America as a place, people, and attitude, a saint of a sort of civil

religion. To do so Miller and others, in the words of Edward H. Davidson in his own

Miller-style intellectual biography of Edwards, focus on the narrative of his life “not

for the details of his biography nor for the impact he made on his age, but for the

drama of the man’s mind as it faced, struggled against, and rejected the major ideas of

his time.”20 Sometimes this discussion took the shape in scholarly circles of an

imagined “quarrel” between Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, (who was supposed to

have been) the other “great mind” of the late-colonial era.21 This approach—of

groping for a spiritual definition of America as a nation—dominated Edwards studies

for the next generation.

The watershed work that transformed scholarly engagement with Edwards and

his world was Patricia J. Tracy’s Jonathan Edwards, Pastor. Her scholarship ushered in a

new historical outlook. She focuses on the social history of Northampton as a necessary

frame of Edwards’s behaviors and the reactions of his parishioners. She seeks to reclaim

Edwards and Northampton from the lifeless history of ideas to which Miller and others

had relegated them. Almost immediately, the concerns in her book were emulated by

and engaged with by nearly every major Edwards scholar; her pioneering social-history

20 Edward H. Davidson, Jonathan Edwards: The Narrative of a Puritan Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), vii. 21 Lesser, 4.

25

approach has dominated the field ever since, with the only significant shift being felt in

the introduction in recent years of postmodern linguistics and social theory.

It is not an exaggeration to underline in conclusion that the historiography is

indigestibly massive. M. X. Lesser, in his helpful bibliography, makes clear exactly how

massive is the body of scholarship on Edwards just in the space of the last sixty years.22

It has ballooned as result of the seminal intellectual-history treatments of Perry Miller,

and then as outgrowths of the work of later scholars such as Harry Stout, Kenneth

Minkema, and Patricia J. Tracy, many of whom have had connections to the veritable

nexus of Edwards studies, the Yale editorship that publishes the carefully handled

multivolume Works.

22 Ibid., 323–41.

26

PART II: COMMUNION THE CONTROVERSY AT THE TABLE

The controversy that led in 1750 to outright dismissal seems to have begun, according

to Edwards, when the case of one young man seeking church membership was made

known to the church body in December 1748. This prospective member was

undergoing the kind of pastoral assessment that Edwards had adopted some years

previous after what he describes as a gradual change of mind about the process of

vetting newcomers.23 This involved an earnest inquiry into the conversional

experience of the person seeking membership in the church. If it was not satisfactorily

genuine, if it did not seem to the pastor sufficiently to be the authentic work of the

Holy Spirit, then membership was denied for the time being. This was the element of

the pre-membership interrogation that the congregation could not swallow when they

heard about it.

Edwards’s adoption of the method was nothing revolutionary outside of

Northampton. The Increase and Cotton Mather, the prominent Boston conservatives

who were radically against the liberal views of qualifications held at the time by a

majority of churches in New England, had maintained the desirability and indeed the

theological necessity of such a method since the end of the previous century. Cotton

Mather, in his magisterial and authoritative Ratio Disciplinæ of 1726 had clearly stated

the case for stringent qualifications in the sacrament of communion:

23 “Narrative of Communion Controversy,” in Works 12, 507.

27

Much evil has been found to result from the admission of persons, who have

subsequently given no evidence of renewal of heart and holiness of life, to this

solemn and distinctive ordinance. Greater evil has perhaps resulted from a

defective application of the principles on this subject, than from a defect in

the principles themselves; it having been ever established in the Usage of the

churches, that those to be admitted must be required to give some evidence of a

sense of personal sinfulness, of repentance for their sin, of faith in Christ, and also of the

nature and obligation of the duties of a particular church […].

[…] [I]ncreased caution is thought to be requisite in admitting to the

Lord’s Supper, which implies admission to full membership in a particular church.

We find in many cases, that those, who are stated to have believed in the New

Testament, were immediately baptized, and their households also were

baptized, in like manner; but those, who partook of the eucharist, were

required to examine themselves; to do it in remembrance of Christ; to shew forth

the Lord’s death thereby till he come; not to eat and drink unworthily, and thus

be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord, &c. The Scriptures, therefore, lay the

foundation of that greater caution in admitting to the Lord’s Supper, which

has been mentioned.24

Mather cited Connecticut founding clergyman Thomas Hooker (d. 1647) in support

of this conservative view:

24 Cotton Mather, Ratio Disciplinæ, or The Constitution of the Congregational Churches (Portland, Maine: Shirley and Hyde, 1829), 230–31. Emphases added.

28

“Baptism is the entrance into Christ’s family. There is much more to be looked

at, to make a person capable of the Supper of the Lord. A man must be able to

examine himself. He must not only have grace, but growth of grace; so much

as to search his own heart ; and he must be able to discern the Lord’s body.”

Cotton Mather was undoubtedly writing polemically, being perhaps the loudest and

the most respected reactionary voice in New England. The vision of Puritanism he

was drawing on, however, was not created out of his own mind but was in fact very

much a real, historical Puritanism, hence his frequent citation of the founding

generation. Mather’s, and Edwards’s, perspective on communion was not meant as an

innovation but rather was a return to an older, more traditional doctrinal standard,

agreed upon and enshrined in the Westminster Confession and, in New England, in

the Cambridge Platform. Edwards, then, was passing over the formidable

Stoddardean legacy he had inherited and had uneasily maintained for the majority of

his pastorate and was reconnecting himself—and, it was hoped, his church—to the

purer Puritan past. It was for Edwards a conscious return to orthodoxy and order.

Yet the Northampton congregation was not interested in the distant past, nor

troubled by its supposed corruption, as their pastor most certainly was. They were

wedded once and for all to the Christianity of Stoddard, their pastoral paragon. This is

why the core cabal of Edwards’s opponents drafted a memorandum to the church

committee in October stating their strong desire

that Mr. Edwards, by the precinct [i.e., parish] or by a committee which the

precinct shall appoint, may be […] entreated to recede or come back from his

29

principles, […] against his own practice and Mr. Stoddard’s practice and

principles, with respect to the admission of church members.25

The memo goes on to say that should the congregation still refuse Edwards’s views,

then a “separation” should be sought. It was in effect a warning that dismissal would

be the unavoidable result of Edwards’s inflexibility on the matter. He was acting out

of turn, acting insufficiently Stoddardean. The official controversy began, then, when

the congregation threatened to fire Edwards for changing his mind—or for having

done so in private, in the secrecy of his own thoughts.

This memo was the first such document in a heated months-long exchange of

words between a growing group of Edwards opponents and the embattled minister.

Many more would follow, all forceful and confident in separation as the solution to the

problem. They were less confident when it came to procedural issues. To put it

lightly, "[c]hurch government in Massachusetts had evolved in such a haphazard way

that it seldom was clear who had charge over what."26

Going forward Edwards was mainly concerned with explaining himself and his

views to the congregation. There is a sense of urgency and desperation underlying

these attempts. Edwards probably feared—rightly, as it turns out—that the loud

minority who was pursuing his dismissal would easily sway the rest of the congregation

if he was muzzled and unable to plead with them as their long-time pastor and leader.

So he offered to write an account and defense of his views to be published and

subsequently circulated in the Northampton church for the edification, and of course

25 Quoted in Jonathan Edwards, “Narrative,” 513. Emphasis added. 26 Marsden, 357.

30

he hoped the persuasion, of the congregation. This volume—eventually published as

An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God Concerning the Qualifications Requisite

to a Complete Standing and Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church27 —took longer

than expected to be written and printed, making the congregation restive and

suspicious. The vast majority would not read it even when published.

Sensing an opportunity, Edwards pressed the church committee for occasion

to preach on the subject, to address the church in his exhortative manner. A precinct

meeting was called, a vote taken, and it was decided that he should not discuss the

matter from the pulpit. (The meeting was apparently not fully in agreement, as it had

to be adjourned early.28 ) The next Sunday several motions were put to a vote in the

congregation, including, once again, whether Edwards should express his opinions

from the pulpit. Edwards was in favor of it, seeing “that the members of the church in

general had not been, nor were likely to be, informed of my reasons in any other way.”

The congregation voted without hesitation in the negative. Edwards was frustrated

about the decision; he asked the church and the church council whether he should

preach on his views on communion qualifications not, he would later write, because

he doubted his prerogative to do so as pastor, but rather in the interest of being

“peaceable.”29

Yet it was not peaceableness that the congregation believed to be his motive.

Someone in the congregation suggested that if he were to preach then somebody else

should be able to preach against him. He responded that the idea was not to his

27 Henceforth An Humble Inquiry. 28 “Narrative,” 514. 29 “Narrative,” 515.

31

liking. The next week a similar idea arose: he could preach on a Sabbath or give

special lectures on the subject provided the shape of his argument was provided first

so that the congregation could send it to some other (no doubt thoroughly

Stoddardean) minister for his preparation of a sermon against Edwards to follow.

Edwards thought the idea supremely unfair, since the opposing preacher would see

his argument beforehand but he would not see this other preacher’s argument and so

would be at a disadvantage. Yet his greatest objection was that it was improper “for

the precinct to take the consideration and management of this ecclesiastical affair into

their hands in the manner they had done.” They were already acting as though he

were gone and they were in charge.

By June 1750, after a dizzying exchange of memos between Edwards and

numerous ad hoc church and precinct committees, a council of regional ministers had

decided that the conflict between pastor and flock was indeed insuperable and that an

immediate “separation” was the proper course of action. The congregation—that is,

the adult male members—voted 230 to 23 to fire him.

This communion controversy was the final act in the drama of Edwards's

famed tenure in Northampton. It put a decisive end to his pastorate with what was to

his parishioners a very serious indictment: pastoral heresy. Edwards's establishment of

standards for church membership was a willful and dangerous challenge to the

Stoddardean orthodoxy that had enjoyed more than sixty years of ascendancy in the

Northampton church and a similarly significant span of time in most of the region's

other congregations. Edwards's change of mind threatened, after all, the system not

merely of spiritual relationships but also of temporal social ones. In repudiating the

32

ideal of the open church of his grandfather Edwards was fundamentally redefining the

ingroup and outgroup (so to speak) in Northampton. Or at least this was the official

reason that was registered in the innumerable memos that issued forth from the

church councils.

DOCTRINE

The narrative of the controversy highlights just how crucial it is to understand how

the theological interpretation of the sacraments changed over time in Northampton.

After all, the shifts in sacramental understandings were supposedly the main cause of

the congregation’s furor in 1748 and the subsequent dismissal proceedings of Jonathan

Edwards. That furor seems serendipitous and strange if divorced from the history of

Northampton and its church. Surely only with an appreciation of Edwards’s

predecessor and the doctrinal muscle he exerted in Northampton Christianity—and

New England Congregationalism—does the congregation’s predisposition to distrust

Edwards’s deviation from an open-membership principle, and the anti-Edwards

camp’s use of doctrine as the main prong of their attack, make sense.

New England Puritanism had held explicit views on church polity, and the

sacraments by extension, from the start. The Cambridge Platform of 1648 insisted on

a closed church, whose doors are not open so wide “that all sorts of people good or bad,

may freely enter therein at their pleasure; but such as are admitted thereto, as

members ought to be examined & tryed first; whether they be fit & meet to be received

into church-society or not.”30 Instead there was to be a burden on church leaders to

30 Walker, 222.

33

examine those seeking admission, as the “Twelve Angels are set at the gates of the

Temple, lest such as were Ceremonially unclean should enter therinto.” What a pastor

should hope to find in a prospective member are chiefly repentance and faith, and an

account of these should be made to the congregation—a “personall & publick

confession, & declaring of Gods manner of working upon the soul.” The purpose of this

stringency must be above all to preserve the holiness of the church. The “unworthy”

should not be allowed to commune with the faithful and repentant or with God

through the ordinances and sacraments, since this is unscriptural and “defiles” what

ought to remain consecrated to God.31

The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was a significant aspect of the discussion

of church membership as a whole. It was, after all, the most visible and most regular

reminder of polity and spiritual belonging, kinship, and communion among New

England churchgoers. When the established guidelines for admission to the

communion table began to be seen as the reason for the stark imbalances within the

average congregation that seemed to promote “a spiritual aristocracy,”32 rather than

previous reaons such as segregating rich from poor in church seating arrangements, the

guidelines were reconsidered by the synod of New England churchmen in 1662. In

some congregations, like Chelmsford, Massachusetts, there were so few actual

communicants that it was voted that this small group, and not the congregation as a

31 Walker, 223ff. 32 E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 160.

34

whole, should pay the diaconate—the body of lay leaders in the church that were

responsible for its material needs—for the cost of the bread and wine.33

Communion was a very public act, as is testified to by one visitor to a New

England church in 1642 in his description for his English correspondents:

Once a moneth is a Sacrament of the Lords Supper, whereof notice is given

usually a fortnight before , and then all others departing save the Church,

which is a great deale lesse in number than those that goe away, they receive

the sacrament, the Ministers and ruling Elders sitting at the Table, the rest in

their seats, or upon forms: All cannot see the Minister consecrating, unlesse

they stand up, and make a narrow shift. The one of the teaching Elders prayes

before, and blesseth, and consecrates the Bread and Wine, according to the

Words of Institution; the other prays after the receiving of all the members:

and next Communion, they change turnes; he that began at that, ends at this:

and the ministers deliver the Bread in a Charger to some of the chiefe, and

peradventure gives to a few the Bread into their hands, and they deliver the

charger from one to another, till all have eaten; in like manner, the cup, till all

have dranke, goes from one to another. Then a Psalme is sung, and with a

short blessing the congregation is dismissed.34

It is not difficult from this description of the publicity of the Lord’s Supper to

understand how sacramental rules, and the lofty thinking underlying it, might result

in social ramifications that were seen as undesirable. The notion that social and

33 Ibid., 161. 34 Quoted in Holifield, 160.

35

spiritual citizenship was to be limited to a select group was not a shock to the

Puritans, who preached and believed without exception in a Calvinist doctrine of

election. They were not universalists, claiming salvation for all. The stumbling block

to church membership, then, was not election but the visibility of it. It was the

publicity of lacking membership in the church that was distressing to the

Northamptonites. Infant baptism was seen as a right. To be a family with unbaptized

children was, in short, “a stigma,”35 though, admittedly, one not frequently found. To

be barred from the Lord’s Supper—the effect of Edwards’s policy for unconverted

parishioners—was unthinkably cruel in a social world so based on participation.

OPEN-DOOR POLICY: STODDARD & THE NEW ENGLAND WAY

This concept of the closed-door church was anathema to, among some others in New

England, a young Solomon Stoddard. A great-nephew of Massachusetts governor John

Winthrop, Stoddard graduated from Harvard College in 1662 and, after achieving a

master’s degree, became the first librarian at the college and subsequently a minister

in Barbados. He arrived in Northampton eight years after graduation to pastor the

church there after the death of the parish’s first minister, Eleazar Mather. Over his

half-century-long pastorate the church experienced three major revivals and strong

growth. Yet along with his legendary prowess as a preacher, to which one may assume

some of the impetus of early revival in Northampton must be owed, Stoddard also

brought to the church his own distinctive doctrinal bent. All of this, when added to

35 Marsden, 355.

36

the sturdy foundation of aristocratic blood, amounted to immense fame. He was

affectionately, as well as derisively, known as “pope of the Connecticut Valley.”

But one does not achieve such a momentously Romish status as a New

England Puritan without stepping on some theological toes. Indeed Stoddard had

taken his place at the cutting edge of doctrinal change in New England even as a

collegian, voicing his support then of the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, which widened

church membership and took the first steps to address changes in the makeup and

overall level of religious involvement in society. In fact, Stoddard was dissatisfied with

how restricted even this new standard of membership was. It seemed to him that the

Lord's Supper had the potential to act as more than a mere seal of a divine covenant, a

ritual reminding Christians of a fait accompli. Rather, it could aid, Stoddard came to

believe, aid in growing one's faith. Though God was ultimately sovereign and no one

could be saved by his own effort, "persons could choose Christ. They could strive fro

the faith to believe in and accept his forgiving love. They could gird themselves to take

a leap of faith, to reach out to Christ and offer their souls to him."36 This seemed

revolutionary.

In point of fact, it was not so much a theological innovation as it appeared.

Even in the 1630s and ’40s the English Puritans had openly declared that, “because

it confirmed God's promise of grace … [the Lord's Supper] could rightly be called ‘a

principall meanes that God hath ordained for the reviving, strengthening, and

increasing of our faith.’” According to another seventeenth-century English Puritan, it

36 N. Ray Hiner, "Preparing for the Harvest: The Concept of New Birth and the Theory of Religious Education on the Eve of the First Awakening," Fides et Historia 9 (1976), 13.

37

served “not onely to give assurance that your sinnes are forgiven but likewise to draw

more vertue from Christ, to make up the breache of our hearts, and to get more grace,

and bee made new creatures in a greater measure.”37 Far from a novelty, Solomon

Stoddard’s view of the sacraments as instruments whereby one could cultivate faith

and volitionally come to Christ to receive redemption was echoed in a sermon from

nearly eighty years before. John Dod, a prominent clergyman of the early seventeenth

century, said of the effects of communion on the mind of one who partakes:

Though my knowledge be small, it shall be increased: though my memory be

weake, it shall be confirmed: through my affections be out of order, they shall

be rectified … though my frailties be many, the number of them shall be

diminished: and though my graces be but few and feeble, they shall be

augmented, and still further strengthened.38

Stoddard’s firmly held conviction was that “[t]he difficulty lies in the will. … Yea faith

in Christ is an act of will. … If men were willing, the difficulty would be at an end;

they can't be willing till they are able; they are not willing until the will is

strengthened.”39 The act of coming to the Lord’s Table to take communion was one of

the will. It was the key to gaining the revelation and reality of Christ and his grace, as

John Dod had put it many years before.40

37 Holifield, 52. 38 John Dod, Ten Sermons tending Chiefely to the fitting of men for the worthy receiving of the Lords Supper (London, 1611), pp. 134, 95. 39 Solomon Stoddard, Guide to Christ (Boston: J. Allen for N. Boone, 1714), pp. 71–2. 40 The question of how progressive Stoddard really was is, for scholars, an open one. Few if any authoritative and nonsectarian scholarly works on Stoddard's life and works have been completed, which makes assessing his theology in passing a largely hazardous task for the historian. Yet this episode in Stoddard's thought does reveal one indelible theme of Anglo-American religious history in general: what seems new is usually old.

38

In this way Solomon Stoddard could be categorized as basically a Puritan

preparationist. Historian Janice Knight identifies two contingents of Puritan

preachers: the preparationists and the mystics. This roughly follows Perry Miller’s

earlier dichotomy of “Intellectual Fathers” and “Spiritual Brethren,” categories seeking

to sort the Puritans in terms of their theological emphases. The preparationists, like

Stoddard and the ministers he came to influence, laid stress on God’s power and

man’s duty to prepare his soul in light of the divine holiness though Christian works

evidencing salvation, and the mystics more concerned with God’s “divine benevolence

over power.”41 Solomon Stoddard at first glance may seem to exist somewhere

between these two extremes. The essence of his theology, however, was not mystical,

though he like the rest of the Puritans subscribed to a theology proper—that is, a

doctrinal understanding of God himself—that was highly spiritual and supernatural.

Stoddard’s main mode, displayed very obviously in his views on the sacraments, was

bald preparationism.

When Stoddard became minister at Northampton, the town was already

known for its fervent support of such “liberalizations” as the Half-Way Covenant and

for its people’s general lack of interest in religion.42 The parish had called Stoddard

precisely because of the doctrinal harmony that they expected might be struck

between town and pastor. In light of this harmony it is not surprising that by 1690

Stoddard had orchestrated the church’s formal approval of a blurring of the line

between church membership and the right to be in full communion. Northampton’s

41 Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 3. 42 Tracy, 21.

39

church thus decided that the “Lord’s Supper was rightfully available to all those with

‘a knowledge of principles of religion and not scandalous by open sinful living.’”43 Only

by these two outward signs of faith would Stoddard judge whether a parishioner ought

to be allowed to partake of the sacrament. This was a conscious challenge to the view

that dominated in more conservative congregations that a pastor could and should try

to discern God’s saving work, or the absence of it, in an individual. Stoddard believed,

and his church agreed, that such things were mysterious and no business of man to

judge. It was invisible to man on account of two main theological points that Stoddard

espoused:

The first was an essentially Calvinist emphasis on the inscrutability and

immeasurable glory of God, with its necessary corollaries of man’s relative

smallness and his inability to earn salvation in any way. As manifestations of

His eternal justice and mercy, God had sent his son to be man’s Redeemer; by

definition, therefore, Christ’s righteousness was perfect and sufficient for the

salvation of all [i.e., elect] men, who had only to believe in the truth of the

Gospel promises. […] The second principle of Stoddard’s theology was that

God had commanded that He be worshipped by all men, even those not elect,

who could still use their natural faculties (impaired as they were by Adam’s

fall) to understand the glory of God and to respond to His majesty with

outward and temporal signs of obeisance.44

43 Tracy, 23. 44 Tracy, 24.

40

Stoddard also had more pragmatic concerns: maintaining ministerial authority

and the relevance and force of New England’s millennial “errand into the wilderness.”

At the turn of the century, Stoddard and others in the ecclesiastical establishment of

New England paused and reflected on the state of the churches, and their prognosis

was generally lackluster. Ministers across the region began to decry the “great

declension” in religious piety and involvement. “The present Generation in New-

England is lamentably degenerate,” Increase Mather declared as a matter of fact.

“The first Generation of Christians in New-England is in a manner gone off the Stage,

and there is another and more sinful generation risen up in their stead.”45 It was

assumed that the decline in piety had a causative effect on involvement, that a

disinterest in the church had its cause in a falling away from its teachings. It was this

sort of shift that caused Mather and other turn-of-the-century ministers to institute

the preaching of jeremiads, a unique kind of sermon consisting of prophetic laments of

the decline of Christian society, calling for “rebuke, condemnation, and corporate

recall.”46 Churchmen, quite rationally, feared that the more New Englanders became

morally careless and uninterested in religion, the more likely was the failure of the

New England project.

COMMUNION: RITUAL AND MEMBERSHIP

The statement of the council that recommended Edwards’s dismissal in June 1750

records that the central matter in the doctrinal dispute concerned “the Qualifications

45 Quoted in Harry Stout, The New England Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 105. 46 Stout, 96.

41

necessary for full Communion.”47 It is crucial, therefore, to understand the

relationship of the sacraments and church membership, which has only been alluded

to. The Congregational churches, descendants of a broader Reformed tradition,48

observed only two sacraments: baptism and the Lord’s Supper, also called

communion.49 The former was undertaken shortly after the birth of children of

parishioners. The sprinkling of babies with water was a symbol of the covenant of

divine grace into which God’s people were sealed. In this way it stood in for the

Jewish custom of circumcision as an outward sign of a spiritual identity: membership

in the body of Christ. It signified the ingrafting of Gentiles into the spiritual Israel,

the church. In New England Congregationalism the sacrament of baptism was the

subject of controversy in two regards: as it related to a broader problem of defining

church membership, to be explored next, and as it was related to dissenting doctrines

like those of Baptists who held to a practice of credobaptism, or baptism of adult

professors rather than automatic sprinkling of unconsenting babies.

47 “The Result of a Council of Nine Churches Met at Northampton, June 22, 1750, With A Protest against the same, By a Number of the said Council” (Boston, 1750). 48 “Reformed” refers to the theological tradition arising out of the Protestant Reformation(s) of the sixteenth century. Beginning with the reformist German monk Martin Luther in 1518, the phenomenon of calls from within the church for reform of practice and doctrine extended into John Calvin’s Geneva and found expression as well in the ecclesiastical upheavals in England later in the century, in each case resulting in independent church structures. The general intention of the reform was to introduce an austere Biblicism whose consequence was supposed to be the rehabilitation of the mores of the early church, free from the encumbrances of man-made tradition. Puritanism was Reformed in that it came out of the Protestant—i.e., non-Catholic—English national church and sought Biblicist reform even of that church. An insightful and brief summary of Puritanism within the broader framework of Reformed Christianity can be found in Francis J. Bremer, Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 49 Preaching is usually not considered a sacrament but rather an ordinance. Consult E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

42

But in the Northampton congregation it was not baptism that was at issue,

but the Lord’s Supper. Like baptism, communion—the eating of bread representing

the body of a crucified Christ and the drinking of wine representing his blood—was a

symbolic act. It reenacted and encapsulated the reliance of each individual Christian

on the mercy in the substitutionary sacrificial crucifixion of the Son of God. Yet unlike

baptism, it was a corporate act, engaged in by a congregation as a whole, never

privately or in isolation. Neither was it automatic in the same way that the baptism of

infants generally was, at least for the children of church members. It was an ordinance

for the elect, those whom it was believed a sovereign God had chosen. Though this

group was ideally coterminous with the church, it was recognized by Puritans that

this was not always the case. Not every churchgoing man and woman in New England

was necessarily one of the elect.

In practice, then, the Biblical notion of the church clashed with the colloquial

understanding of church. The Greek word used in the New Testament for church was

ekklesia, meaning “the gathered” or “the assembly,” often used outside the Bible to

describe ad hoc councils—not unlike, ironically, the council of nine churches brought

together to help resolve the dispute between Edwards and his congregation. The

Germanic root of the English word “church” also came from ancient Greek, but

referred instead to a house, a physical dwelling, implying that the church was the

house of God. This linguistic tension was and is illustrative of a greater theological

tension that tried to hold together notions of both the physicality and spirituality of

the church, the temporality and eternality, the seen and the unseen. It was a matter

of considerable disappointment that these two did not perfectly correspond, that the

43

physical expression of the church might not map flawlessly onto the spiritual facts. In

short, not everyone gathered in a congregation was elected, or intended for future

glory.

This theoretical problem became more disturbing to Puritans as it began to

express itself in real life. It has already been mentioned that by the second

generation—the first natively born generation—of English colonial existence in New

England the number of professing believers had plunged.50 New England in the

pilgrim era, from the 1620s, was populated by and large by tough, genuine believers,

proving their fervency and commitment by fleeing persecution in England to come

live in the largely unsettled American wilds. A society grew up that was characterized

by that same fervency. A system of governance and order was established that allowed

for and, in most ways, expected a monoreligious experience. Ecclesiastical and civil

organs were kept technically separate but were in practice the site of a great deal of

overlap. The one looked to the other for legitimacy, and vice versa.

Nowhere in that first generation was there a great concern for apostasy or

lukewarmness. “Regenerate membership” was held by all to be “an absolute essential

to the properly constituted church.” But there was a subterranean inconsistency that

was present even then. Though church membership undoubtedly required conversion,

the church never failed to admit those whose only claim was having Christian parents.

What arose was a group of second-generation people whose parents had been active,

regenerate, enthusiastic church members but who had themselves never experienced

50 See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), 27ff.

44

Christian transformation. “It was the rise of this class that thrust” the first major

doctrinal compromises upon the churches of New England.51

The panic over this half new class expressed itself in a series of regional synods

over the ensuing decades that tried to solve the problem of a society that increasingly

included professors of genuine conversion as well as (more problematically) those who

could not or would not profess such a thing. Hard questions inevitably arose. What

was to be done, for example, when only a fraction of a congregation was able to

approach the table to receive the Lord’s Supper while a large number, and eventually

in some cases even a majority, had to remain seated in the pews? This surely was not

unity. What was to be done, more generally, about diminishing church attendance

and the spiritual ramifications of such a “religious declension” in the New England

churches?52

Yet the difficulties were not merely ecclesiastical. In 1631 the governing body

of the colony, the General Court, had legislated that only church members—those

who could make a profession of faith and of a genuine conversion experience and had

been properly baptized—could enjoy the political rights of a freeman. The General

Court intended no doubt to buttress the authority of the local churches in the face of

that set of painful sociological changes already mentioned: fewer and fewer

churchgoers were able to give accounts of conversion. The ruling aimed to encourage

an increase in conversion experiences by linking church membership, dependent upon

just those experiences, to the granting of full rights as an Englishman. So membership

51 Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969), 246–47. 52 W. Bement, “Stoddardeanism,” New Englander and Yale Review 4 (1846): 351.

45

in the political order became conditional upon membership in the ecclesiastical order.

Citizenship was to flow from church membership.53

A synod of leading churchmen in 1662 addressed these disturbances and other

manifestations of the heterogenizing population by settling on a new standard of

church membership. Known as the Half-Way Covenant, this compromise created a

category of partial membership to be extended to those who could not (yet) or would

not make a profession of conversion. The profession act had long been the requirement

for membership, and in turn membership had been the requirement for participation

in the sacrament of communion. The Half-Way scheme bypassed this carefully

constructed system and—in the opinion of some, brazenly and wrongly—cleared a

space for the unregenerate (those unable or unwilling to make a profession of a

conversion experience) at the communion table. Yet the plan went even further,

granting the children of partial members the same baptism as children of full

members. No longer were the sacraments to be set aside for the elect alone.54

The Half-Way Covenant enjoyed widespread if never unanimous support

throughout New England. Among its most vocal champions was a young Solomon

Stoddard,55 an accomplished student at Harvard at the time who would go on to take

up the pastorate in a distant western town called Northampton and would eventually

become grandfather, in 1703, to Jonathan Edwards through his daughter, Esther

53 Bement, 350–51. 54 However, two years after the 1662 synod, in 1664, the General Court bypassed its 1631 decision to limit political liberty to church members only by establishing a second route to freeman status, a property qualification. James P. Walsh, “Stoddard’s Open Communion: A Reexamination,” The New England Quarterly 43 (1970): 97, n. 2. 55 Patricia Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 21.

46

Stoddard. Stoddard wrote a steady string of pamphlets in support of the Covenant and

its benefits, as he saw them, over the decades following, often butting rhetorical heads

with conservative Boston clergyman Cotton Mather. In this grand debate, and then

due to his preaching and other successes, including revivalist activity, in

Northampton, Stoddard quickly made a name for himself both in Boston circles and

throughout the western “frontier” hinterlands where he was pastor.

POPE STODDARD

Solomon Stoddard came to define Christianity in Northampton over his nearly sixty in

the pulpit. And, as we will see, even after his death his burdensome legacy still

loomed.

Theologically he was a mixture of tradition and novelty, and this was part of

his force. Like most other Puritans, for example, he stressed the sovereignty of God

and held a belief in the enduring force of most Mosaic moral laws.56 As Stoddard saw

it, “[i]n making man dependent on the righteousness of Christ for salvation, […] the

Almighty was intent on ‘the exalting of God and abasing and emptying of man.’”57

This was standard Calvinist belief. Indeed, it was not in his theology proper that he

was innovative.

Rather, his innovations were in the areas of ecclesiology and the doctrine of

conversion. He held, for instance, much to the chagrin of his congregation, that local

churches should be constituted not by intentional covenants but by a comprehensive

56 Tracy, 24–5. 57 Robert Lee Stuart, “‘Mr. Stoddard’s Way’: Church and Sacraments in Northampton,” American Quarterly 24 (1972): 244.

47

geographic plan.58 He believed as well that what he called “visible sainthood” was

difficult if not impossible to detect. God knew who the elect were, but man was not

privy to this information. Because man now sees “through a glass, darkly,” Stoddard

reasoned, there was no certainty in one’s status before God, converted or unconverted.

The ability or proclivity to make a profession of God’s work in one’s soul did not

amount necessarily to one’s being elect. Testimonies from sinful people could be

misleading, containing little to no actual truth; therefore, there was little use in

demanding such a testimony for the purposes of establishing church membership.

“Who are visible saints?” Stoddard asked rhetorically. “This Question hath been

matter of great debate,” he remarked,

and an occasion of great contention in the Church; we may not count those

only to be Saints, who after the strictest Examination, give considerable

evidence that they are Saints: We have no such Rule, the practice of the

Apostles in admitting Members into the Christian Church doth not

Countenance any such Opinion, neither are we to make Baptized Persons and

Visible Saints to be the same; for Persons must be Visible Saints before they

are Baptized; and some that are Baptized, may cease to be Visible Saints;

neither are they only with an Holy Conversation: Some Men may behave

themselves so as to deserve a sentence of Excommunication.

“Visible Saintship and real Saintship,” he declared, “may conflict with a great deal of

iniquity in the Conversation for a time. Visible Saints are such as make a serious

58 Philip F. Gura, “Preparing the Way for Stoddard: Eleazar Mather’s Serious Exhortation to Northampton,” The New England Quarterly 57 (1984): 247.

48

profession of the true Religion, together with those who do descend from the, till

rejected of God.”59 It was for this reason that Stoddard declared so boldly that “all

should be encouraged to avail themselves of the Covenant of Grace.”60

After all, instead of being guessed about, “God delighted, Stoddard presumed,

to be discovered in the ordinances He appointed.”61 And if it was the duty of

ministers to lead men to God, then as many people as possible ought to be allowed to

partake of the ordinances, especially the Lord’s Supper. That is, as many as possible

under the constraints of a general state of morality and Stoddard’s notion of “visible

saintship” described above. Stoddard argued for this sort of “open communion” as early

as 1687 in his tract The Safety of Appearing at the Day of Judgment in the Righteousness of

Christ. He “had come as close as possible without actually doing so to saying that God

would prepare those who prepared” for salvation in this way.62

His basis for this unorthodox position, as well as others, was in his reading of

the Old Testament. Stoddard noted that many churchmen were wrong in limiting

their understandings of how the church ought to operate to instructions given in the

New Testament: “New Testament institutions, there were some institutions

appointed by Christ under the Gospel, these are few; principally, what officers shall

be in the Church, The Sacraments of Baptism, and the Lords Supper, and the first day

Sabbath.”63

59 Stoddard, The Doctrine of Instituted Churches… (London: printed for Ralph Smith, 1700), 6. 60 Stuart, 245. 61 Stuart, 245. 62 Tracy, 25–6. 63 Stoddard, The Doctrine of Instituted Churches…, 4.

49

One of the enduring and problematic virtues of Edwards's inner life was the

pioneering nature of his traditionalism. At practical questions he aimed, not pastoral

pragmatism, but original theological insights and Scriptural arguments—pointing

always to his comfort in the rational realm and his seeming inability, unlike his

grandfather, to engage with practical matters with practical solutions. "As in so much

of his thought, he seemed determined to demonstrate how the Puritan tradition he

had grown up with could work in eighteenth-century settings."64

"The great problem was how to reconcile the Old and New Testaments.

According to Puritan teaching, the church, being the 'new Israel,' was successor to the

covenant with the Old Testament nation. This point was crucial for infant baptism

because the main justification for children receiving the New Testament sign and seal

of the covenant was that God had included children in the promises of the covenant

to Israel, ratified by the sign of circumcision."65

Indeed George Marsden rightly describes the kernel of the conflict between

grandfather and grandson as one about Scripture and hermeneutics. Solomon

Stoddard’s efforts were aimed at conforming the church to Old Testament ideals. His

goal was to revive the power and force of the church as an institution by appealing to

the covenantal nationhood of Israel as the key to proper ecclesiology: the purpose of

the ordinances was to bring people into the covenant, into full membership.

Stoddard's ideal, then, had the ultimate goal of incorporating in the membership of a

64 Marsden 350. 65 Marsden, 351.

50

local church “almost every child—as in the old European establishments.”66 The

church and its minister would in this way correspond to and have the flavor and form

of Old Testament Israel, under the spiritual and moral authority of a ministerial

priesthood. Yet Edwards, by contrast, held ecclesiological views drawn more from the

New Testament. The church was envisioned more as a body drawn together by God

the Holy Spirit. “That meant that its truly full members were those whose hearts were

changed by regeneration,”67 not merely anyone, regardless of spiritual state, in the

locality.

66 Ibid. 67 Ibid.

51

PART III: THE COLLAPSE OF COVENANT SOCIETY COVENANT AS CONTEXT

It is not an overstatement to point to the covenant as the primary and at times even

exclusive understanding of social, political, and interpersonal cohesion in colonial New

England. Instead of attempting to view that world through contemporary eyes that

see economics divorced from spirituality and the church from other social institutions,

we would be wise to understand it through the lens of covenant. This is the context

inhabitants of that time and place would have understood, and it does an adequate

job of holding together concepts that the modern mind is forced to separate.

The covenant was understood to be an agreement, not so much contractual or

legal in the modern sense as a transcendent, promissory, intentional, and intensely

personal bond. Though the term eventually came to refer to agreements among men of

a legal kind, such as rent, the concept and the vocabulary derived ultimately from the

Scriptural precedent of God's revealed relationship with mankind through time. This

relationship was characterized by mutual obligation, common premises (the authority

of God, the Mosaic Law), solemnity, and permanence. The King James Bible brought

the English word into greater theological use by translating the Hebrew word bĕrīth

(rendered in the Septuagint as διαθήκη and in the Vulgate as fœdus or pactum) as

covenant. The Hebrew word in context referred especially to the pacts of God with

man through Adam, Noah, Moses, and David. In the New Testament, St. Luke's

52

term for the new relationship between God and man in the person of Christ was also

rendered in the King James Bible as covenant.68 69

This Scriptural content in turn informed the Puritans’ generally theologically

Reformed conceptions of earthly bonds, alliances, partnerships, and associations.

Marriage is one prominent example of the way in which the Puritans desired to reflect

spiritual relationships in terrestrial social ones. As influential sixteenth-century

English jurist William West defined it, the covenant in human dealings “is the

consent of two or more, in one selfe thing to giue or do some what.”70 In other words,

the covenant served an important social function, and it did this by standing “for

community and against both individual autonomy and moral expediency” in its

consensual form and its reliance on transcendent authority rather than a mere

contract whose terms come ex nihilo.71

The Puritans viewed the institution of the church as especially covenantal in

nature, in essence the most significant covenant. The church after all was a visible

representation of the invisible reality of a divine, transcendent Christian kingdom. Its

existence was the product of the new covenant (also rendered in the King James Bible

as "new testament") with God in Jesus Christ's blood, promising a new beginning. This

covenantal union would be fully consummated in the end times, at the return of

68 “Covenant, n.” OED Online. November 2010. Oxford University Press. 69 See Glenn A. Moots, Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2010), 22ff. 70 Quoted in Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 49. Original orthography maintained intentionally. 71 Moots, 160.

53

Christ, when he takes the church as his eternal spiritual bride. In effect, all

Christianity, through the covenant of grace, led to an ultimate cosmic marriage.

In New England, the new-covenantal understanding of the church was further

magnified and intensified. The Puritan project in what was viewed as the untamed

American wilderness was focused on a new genesis. The New World represented, at

least to the initial religious settlers of New England, the next dispensation in the

historic march toward full consummation of the divine Christian covenant. It was

John Winthrop, one of the prominent leaders of the Puritan migration to North

America in the 1630s and later a leader in the colonial government of Massachusetts

Bay, who set the covenantal tone of the colonial project in New England. In his

famous address A Model of Christian Charity in 1630, given aboard Arbella, an English

vessel conveying religious migrants to New England, Winthrop explained the ideals of

the nascent Christian community: “[W]e are a company professing ourselves fellow

members of Christ, […] we ought to account ourselves knit together by this bond of

love, and live in the exercise of it.” The task of the voyagers is “to seek out a place of

cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and

ecclesiastical" and "to serve the Lord and work out our salvation under the power and

purity of His holy ordinances.” The undertaking of this community is “by a mutual

consent through a special overruling providence.” That pact means that they "are

entered into covenant with Him for this work” and with each other have "professed to

enterprise these actions” because God himself has "ratified this covenant and sealed

our commission.” Winthrop is, in describing a community in which “we must be knit

together … as one man,” setting out a covenantal community, one so integrated and

54

devoid of self that it has the cohesion and integrity of a single body.72 This

covenantalism, then, was the primary conception of the proper function of New

England society from its beginnings.

Winthrop, for his part, heralded the New England enterprise as a means of

progressing to a more profound spirituality: if the settlers would suffer together in the

ideal Christian community, he said, God would in return “command a blessing upon

us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness,

and truth, then [sic] formerly we have been acquainted with.” “We shall find that the

God of Israel is among us,” he famously declared, “when He shall make us a praise and

glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it like that of New

England; for we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all

people are upon us.”73 The spiritual community that was created in New England

carried an eternal purpose along with its temporal one: it was "to accomplish the

redemption of mankind in the final hour of history."74 New England, in other words,

was envisioned as both a vehicle and physical location of God's active hand in bending

the whole of human history toward his redemptive ends.75 Love and covenanting were

entwined in advancing and legitimating relationship, spiritual, romantic, and

72 John Winthrop in Russel B. Nye and Norman S. Grabo, eds., American Thought and Writing, vol. 1, "The Colonial Period" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 57–8. 73 Ibid., 58–9. 74 Edward H. Davidson, Jonathan Edwards: The Narrative of a Puritan Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 41. 75 For a persuasive sociological account of the influence and potency of Winthrop's millennial thought in the context of American national identity, see Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus 96 (1967): 1–21.

55

political.76 New England was covenanted to God in the endeavor of creating and

managing society and in final salvation.

The covenant as the basis of social and ecclesiastical order emerged over time

in various forms and with varying emphases. Yet always it was “basic to the political

thought and social theory, as well as to the theology and church polity of the

Puritans.”77 Glenn A. Moots has explained, in his recent monograph on the influence

of covenant theology on politics, that the notion of the covenant as an ordering of

society as a whole was attractive precisely because of the rich Biblical tradition of

covenanting and because, in true Calvinist fashion, it allowed for a straddling of a

belief in the absolute sovereignty of God and in the free will, and attendant

culpability, of individual persons.78

The sacraments were seals of that covenant. They were acts of reminder and

renewal, representing the assurances of the divine covenant in earthly, visible

manifestations. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper communicated on a regular basis the

“notion of the Church itself as a society characterized by voluntary, communal assent

among its members.”79 The institutional ideology of Puritanism, in other words, was

perpetuated through these public rituals. Yet at the same time they represented an

individual and communal participation in the divine story of the Bible. In taking

communion, bread and wine, for example, “the faithful Christian received spiritually

76 Moots, 161. 77 Foster, 2. 78 Moots, 130. 79 Holified, 37.

56

not only the benefits of Christ, but also Christ himself, both as God and as man,

through the activity of the Holy Spirit.”80

COLLAPSE?

Covenant society, the covenanted social order, along with its state of transition—or, in

a sense, even collapse—at midcentury, forms the backdrop for the dismissal drama.

Reflections of this transition can be seen in religious shifts, economic strain, and

political factionalism, to which we now briefly turn.81 In each of these three sectors

there was a marked trend away from the communal, and therefore the covenantal, and

toward new, more self- rather than community-based conceptions of social

organization. That is to say, the corporate, communal mode of covenant society was

transitioning into a more modern concept of the democratic, individualistic society

where the close partnership of church and state, and the legislation of morality

through both institutions, as the foundation of social interaction and mediation was

fated for disintegration.

The religious changes and challenges of the eighteenth century have been

thoroughly documented, as typically these are understood to be the main context for

events of the period such as the Great Awakening and Edwards’s dismissal.82

Arminianism takes up most of the focus. This was the system of thought created by

the seventeenth-century Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, who attempted to carve

out a more meaningful place for the freedom of the individual will in Christian

80 Holifield, 35. 81 Mary C. Foster, "Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1729–1754: A Covenant Society in Transition" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1967). 82 Present in standard works such as Miller’s The New England Mind.

57

theology. It attempted to solve the Medean paradox (I see the good but do the evil) and

come to terms with the duality of a divine will and the wills of persons. Calvinists

found this objectionable, since it posited in effect that God was less than absolutely

sovereign.83 This was a source of great conflict and infamy in New England in the

eighteenth-century; hence the scandal of the defection of the leadership of Yale

College to Arminian Anglicanism, known to orthodox New Englanders as the “Great

Apostasy,” in the early 1720s. Regardless of how it was viewed, the challenge to the

Puritan establishment and its psychology of covenant had an undeniable effect: it

pitted Christians against one another in ways that covenant society had not

expected.84

A glimpse into the socioeconomics of midcentury Northampton also reflects

deep changes and challenges to the covenant society. Socioeconomics has been given

great stress in explaining the upheaval around Edwards in Northampton. Patricia

Tracy has shown that on almost every level the local economy had slowed, mostly due

to shortages in land. She finds that the gulf between rich and poor was growing

steadily, as landed fathers, together owning almost all the arable land in

Northampton, gave their property to their heirs, and poorer fathers passed on no real

means of self-sustenance to their sons.85 In addition to narrowing economic options,

there was also greater economic competition from outside of Northampton due to a

83 Allen C. Guelzo, “Freedom of the Will,” in Sang Hyun Lee, The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 119. 84 In fact, Edwards claimed that at least some of the ministers on the ecclesiastical council that initiated his dismissal were Arminians. Jonathan Edwards to John Erskine, July 5, 1750, Works 16: 353. 85 Tracy, 104.

58

rise in commercial activity and trade.86 All of these trends tended to increase anxiety

about the status quo and especially the more visible elements of the social order,

especially the ministry.

Political factionalism, too, was growing in this period. Factionalism was

problematic in a culture in which a desire for consensus was strong and deeply

embedded in religious values. Where the Puritan ideal was to promote agreement and

see in it God's sovereign will for the community, the difficult social and political

realities in New England, as elsewhere, often rendered this an impossible dream. It

has been thought that factionalism in Northampton was organized mainly along

traditional English partisan-political lines. This meant that the town was fractured

into two distinct groups, the "court" and "country" parties. Historically these factions

had warred in England primarily over the question of what the right balance of royal

and parliamentary authority should be. The court party tended to favor royal power

over the perceived populist chaos of a mixed-class, mixed-geography legislature. The

country party held the opposite view, favoring a more representative parliament over

what was believed to be an arbitrary authority in the king and his noble advisers.87

This factionalism, or something like it, eventually exerted detectable force in

Northampton’s local politics. Tracy gives several pieces of evidence of this. First, the

town records tell of numerous “tumults” in the town meetings after 1690 whereas

before there was no mention of these disruptions. In 1692, furthermore, a controversy

86 Gregory Nobles, “The Rise of Merchants in Rural Market Towns: A Case Study of Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 24 (1990): 5–23. 87 For more on the importation of English political factionalism into New England and Northampton in particular, see Gerald R. McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 118–20.

59

sprung up over the plan to pay the schoolmaster from public money rather than

private funds, and several wealthy men dissented and wanted no part in the

communal effort.88 A similarly unharmonious political conflict arose several years later

over the granting of military offices. Two opposing parties sprung up in the town

meeting, and an uncharacteristically bitter feud ensued.89 All of this points to

political changes, especially shifts in ideals and public ethics from shared communal

interests to competing private ones.

These trends help to reveal deeper rifts in the fabric of society in late

seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New England. Perhaps it is too much to

say that covenant society was collapsing, but it was in transition, and it was definitely

moving more willingly in the direction of individualism and conflict at the cost of the

Puritan ideal of togetherness and consensus. In part four we will consider how this

might explain Edwards’s dismissal.

88 Tracy, 43. 89 Tracy, 44.

60

INTERLUDE FINISHING THE FAREWELL

Edwards, no doubt hot from the summer humidity, moved in closer to his hearers. In

light of the coming doomsday, that undeniable eschatological fact that the Christ

would in the end judge all men, he explained the crucial nature of pastor and flock

discussing their differences now, while unfavorable judgment might still be avoided.

“[A]ll may be ineffectual, as to any conviction of the truth,” he declared. A quarreling

pastor and flock

may meet and part again no more agreed than before; and that side which was

in the wrong, may still remain so still: sometimes the meetings of ministers

with their people, in such a case of disagreeing sentiments, are attended with

unhappy debate and controversy, managed with much prejudice, and want of

candor; not tending to light and conviction, but rather to confirm and increase

darkness, and establish opposition to the truth, and alienation of affection one

from another.90

When this happens, when a people does not heed the advice and exhortation of its

minister, the sinners remain “stupid and unawakened, and their consciences

unconvinced.” But that will not be the case, Edwards reiterated, “at their last

meeting at the day of judgment.” They will then be “fully convinced of the truth of

those things which they formerly heard from him. Concerning the greatness and

terrible majesty of God, his holiness and hatred of sin, and his awful justice in

90 “Farewell Sermon,” 467.

61

punishing of it.” Their eyes will be opened once and for all to the uncontroversial

truth, and where they stand in relation to it.

No doubt fearing he might seem too harsh, that he might seem to be

exonerating himself and presuming on his hearers’ good will, Edwards admitted that

ministers themselves are also sinners—a shock, no doubt, to the ousters. Ministers, of

course, “have no infallible discerning [of] the state of the souls of their people; and the

most skillful of them are liable to mistakes, and often are mistaken in things of this

nature.” Yet all controversies, he argued again, whether originating in a minister or his

people, will be dispelled before Christ:

at the day of judgment there will be a full, perfect and everlasting decision of

them: the infallible Judge, the infinite fountain of light, truth and justice, will

judge between the contending parties, and will declare what is the truth, who

is in the right, and what is agreeable to his mind and will.

In this way all things will be put to rights: “thus justice shall be administered at the

great day to ministers and their people: and to that end they shall meet together, that

they may not only receive justice to themselves, but see justice done to the other

party: for this is the end of that great day, to reveal, or declare ‘the righteous judgment

of God.’”

Soon he shifted to application, from the Biblical precedents and doctrines to

the present situation. He spoke directly to his congregation, making clear his purposes

and intentions, a careful pleading in his voice. “It was three and twenty years, the

15th day of last February, since I have labored in the work of the ministry, in the

relation of a pastor to this church and congregation,” started Edwards. Through

62

infirmity, difficulty, fatigue “I have not neglected in idleness, nor laid out in

prosecuting worldly schemes, and managing temporal affairs, for the advancement of

my outward estate, and aggrandizing myself and family; but have given myself to the

work of the ministry,” he continued, “laboring in it night and day, rising early and

applying myself to this great business to which Christ appointed me.”

But pastor and congregation had for all intents and purposes reached the end

of their earthly relationship this day. So it was particularly important, Edwards

postulated, that on this occasion they consider their final meeting, “[w]hen I must

give an account of my stewardship, of the service I have done for, and the reception

and treatment I have had among the people he sent me to: and you must give an

account of your own conduct towards me, and the improvement you have made of

these three and twenty years of my ministry.” Then the doctrinal disagreement (never

quite mentioning its nature), attended by all kinds of additional interpersonal strife,

will be ended, and Christ will come down in favor of it or against it; either he will

“own it [i.e., the doctrine espoused by Edwards] as one of the precious truths which

have proceeded from his own mouth” or he will condemn it. He then addressed

particular groups in the congregation. To the ungodly and Christless he preached the

immediate necessity of belief. About those recently “awakened”—several waves of

“awakenings,” or revivals, had occurred during Edwards’s tenure in Northampton—he

prayed he left them on the way to gaining a fuller understanding even if at the

moment they were still without Christ. The young people he beseeched with a

“peculiar” concern to continue on in godly ways, forsaking “frolickings” and other

unbecoming activities that some wrongly thought unserious and innocuous—issues

63

that were clearly part of the controversy surrounding his departure. The children,

those younger than “young people,” he left “in an evil world, that is full of snares” and

prayed would seek God even in their childish ways, realizing that even children die

and must be accountable to their Maker.

A list of earnest yet targeted cautions to the entire congregation followed.

There were pitfalls to be avoided and trends to stand athwart. They should, he

advised, seek to preserve the family above all. Remembering all the strife of the “bad

books affair” and the moral absenteeism of Northampton’s parents, he explained that

each family ought to be “a little church, consecrated to Christ,” no less the site of

worship and teaching than the Church itself. They should seek this smallest

ecclesiological unit and endeavor to avoid further dissensions. On this point he

dwelled, reflecting—painfully—on his own time dealing with past (and present)

conflict in Northampton. He averred,

A contentious people will be a miserable people. The contentions which have

been among you, since I first became your pastor, have been one of the

greatest burdens I have labored under in the course of my ministry: not only

the contentions you have had with me, but those which you have had one with

another, about your lands, and other concerns.

Certainly with no amount of accident he turned to his supporters at this point. “Your

temptations are in some respects the greatest,” he cautioned, “because what has been

lately done, is grievous to you.” He exhorted them to remain peaceable, meek, mindful

of the greater cause than of their own interests: “let nothing be done through strife or

vainglory: indulge no revengeful spirit in any wise; but watch and pray against it: and

64

by all means in your power, seek the prosperity of this town.” One wonders if he spoke

this line with a studied stare at the several men of prominence seated in front of

him—men such as his young cousin Joseph Hawley—who had been at the center of

the disgraceful coup.

Yet undoubtedly the stress fell on his third caution—after the maintenance of

family order and corporate peace. He warned, probably with a certain fieriness,

“against the encroachments of error; and particularly Arminianism, and doctrines of

like tendency”—theological liberalism, in other words. He located the most insidious

and iniquitous hazard in the quiet creeping in of (as he saw it) unsound and

unbiblical doctrine. The congregation was “remarkably exposed” to such danger. Such

a deadly “infection” would quickly ruin all “spiritual and eternal” wellbeing, as it had,

he noted, in “another large town I could mention, formerly greatly noted for

religion”—that is, Boston.

To avoid this dangerous liberalizing he counseled his parishioners to dedicate

themselves to two more things: prayerfulness and to the hiring of a suitably pious and

orthodox replacement. On the first point he called for the establishing of town-wide

prayer societies. There the people of Northampton could better dedicate themselves

“to cry to God for his mercy to themselves, and mercy to this town, and mercy to Zion

and the people of God in general through the world.” As for the selection of a new

minister, Edwards recommended “extreme care and prudence” in finding one that

was honest and had no designs to further undermine the church in Northampton in

“such a day of corruption as this is.” He should be of true and consistent piety, able to

“withstand and oppose the torrent of error, and prejudice, against the high,

65

mysterious, evangelical doctrines of the religion of Jesus Christ, and their genuine

effects in true experimental religion. And this place is a place that does peculiarly need

such a minister, for reasons obvious to all.”

Concluding, Edwards finally bid farewell. He prayed that he would never

forget the people of Northampton, that they would not forget to dedicate themselves

to God and to the mission of being lights: “May you have truly a burning and shining

light set up in this candlestick; and may you, not only for a season, but during his

whole life, and that a long life, be willing to rejoice in his light.” Two final clauses

ended the sermon. Notice that he finally mentions the major doctrinal controversy by

name, ending with yet another spellbinding (and entirely intentional) reference to the

coming Judgment Day:

And let me be remembered in the prayers of all God's people that are of a

calm spirit, and are peaceable and faithful in Israel, of whatever opinion they

may be, with respect to terms of church communion.

And let us all remember, and never forget our future solemn meeting, on that

great day of the Lord; the day of infallible decision, and of the everlasting and

unalterable sentence, Amen.91

THE SERMON AS HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

That Edwards’s sermon took this shape surely was not surprising to anyone who knew

the brilliantly intellectual, deeply pious minister for any length of time, or knew of his

preceding years in Northampton. It should not surprise us either. For Edwards saw

91 Emphasis added.

66

and spoke through a deep reverence for, and awe of, the triune God; he had, as the

title of a modern evangelical tract on Edwards resounds, a uniquely “God-entranced

vision of all things.”92 For him, no day was without the markings of the Almighty, no

moment outside the grand and divinely predestined drama in which every man,

whether he worshipped Edwards’s God or had instead bowed the knee to a forbidden

idol, was necessarily cast.93 As he would later write of God’s ends in creating man,

All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God’s works is

included in that one phrase, the glory of God…. The refulgence shines upon

and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of

glory come from God, and are something of God and are refunded back again

to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God, and

God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair.94

This July day, then, had to be seen through the lens of God’s eternal workings if

Edwards was to be faithful to his belief in the perfect sovereignty and abundant

purposiveness of God.

One might also point to the homiletic tradition in which Edwards found

himself for an explanation of the solemn tone of his farewell sermon. That tradition

was one that emphasized the absolute centrality of Holy Scripture. His sermons,

throughout his career as a preacher, reflect this custom, each beginning with a passage

92 John Piper and Justin Taylor (eds.), A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004). 93 For a more complete exploration of Edwards’s theocentric worldview, see Michael J. McClymond’s Encounters with God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Cf. Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: the Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 94 “The End for Which God Created the World,” Works 8: 403ff.

67

from the Bible and proceeding with a detailed, systematic exposition of it. Even a

farewell sermon did not merit an exception to that form. The preaching of God’s

Word by a minister and the hearing of that preaching by a minister’s people was after

all more than a mere style or matter of taste. For Edwards, as for the rest of the

evangelical Puritan tradition, this was a commandment handed down by the Apostle

Paul from God and written in the New Testament as an instruction to the church:

“But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that

which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I

now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let

him be accursed.”95

But Edwards’s theology and homiletic philosophy were not the only reasons his

farewell sermon happened to be a study on the end of time on this occasion. Edwards

was looking forward precisely because he dared not look backward. For this moment,

this farewell, came only after many months of grueling dismissal proceedings that had

in the end favored the interests and theological position of his congregation over him—

by a depressing margin of ten to one. He was the loser—at least in this world. That he

chose to speak on doomsday on this occasion, then, is not coincidence. It was a

cautionary if at times bitter reply to the flock that had sharply rejected their

shepherd. It was his last opportunity to preach as the coarse prophet to the wayward

people of his proverbial hometown.

95 Galatians 1:8–9 (KJV); see also English Puritan William Gouge (d. 1653) on the traditional Puritan conception of the faithful preacher’s sermon as the Word of God in his Commentary on Hebrews (London: 1655), sec. 98.

68

EDWARDS’S REFLECTIONS

In the aftermath of the dismissal, Edwards reflected on the harrowing proceedings in

two very different ways: with pastoral tenderness—which had so often been lacking in

his tenure in Northampton—and with vitriolic bitterness—which he had so often had

in overabundance. “The last sabbath I preached my farewell sermon,” he told his

friend John Erskine, mere days after preaching his last sermon at Northampton as

pastor. “Many in the congregation seemed to be much affected and some are

exceedingly grieved. Some few I believe have some relentings of heart, that voted me

away. But there is no great probability that the leading part of the church will ever

change. … I desire your fervent prayers for me and those who have heretofore been my

people. I know not what will become of them.”96

Yet his tone was more acerbic in a lengthy letter sent to Thomas Gillespie—a

Scottish minister who had been embroiled in a similarly grueling ousting by his

people—a year after his farewell. In that letter Edwards enumerates several reasons

that his firing had nothing to do with his own actions and everything to do with

others. Foremost in his sumarry is the character of the people of Northampton. They

are, according to Edwards, “not the most happy in their Natural Temper. They have,

ever since I can remember, been famed for a high-spirited People, & close, & of a

difficult turbulent Temper.” This bad “Temper” in turn naturally overtook Edwards,

an exceptionally “weak” successor to the first two men to hold the position, first

Eleazar Mather and then Stoddard. Good works, “publick service,” and a general state

96 Jonathan Edwards to John Erskine, July 5, 1750, in Works 16: 354.

69

of good education served to “nourish the Pride of their Natural Temper,” which made

them “more difficult and unmanageable.”

More recently the people had “grown a much greater & more wealthy People

than formerly.” Edwards states that “spiritual Pride […] very often soon raises Persons

above their Teachers, & supposed spiritual Fathers.” They had been taught to

“imitate” Stoddard—“Especially their officers & leading men seem’d to think it an

excellency to be like Him in this respect.” All of this, Edwards continues, had for the

previous forty or fifty years fostered “a sort of settled division of the People into two

Parties; something like the Court & Country Party in England.” These groupings

were not random, but were, he suspected, organized along lines of “Authority and

wealth.” Factionalism only exacerbated certain “Counterfeits of Religion” that had

been allowed to creep into the congregation’s consciousness over time—presumably

beginning in the Stoddard era.97

Edwards remembered the dismissal in slightly more moderate terms as the

years went on, especially after moving his family to Stockbridge, where he had a

fruitful ministry among the Native Americans and wrote prolifically. He came to

terms with the events to some degree and, as we will see, came to forgive one of his

harshest enemies, his young cousin Joseph Hawley.

97 See Jonathan Edwards, “A130. Letter to Thomas Gillespie, July 1, 1751,” in Works 32.

70

PART IV: COUSINS

NOT A VICTIM OF TRENDS

One can indeed find many reasonable explanations for the failure of a pastorate in a

town such as Northampton in the mid-1700s. As has already been shown, the town

was laboring under new pressures that created agitation where it had not existed

before, at least not as forcefully. A narrowing of economic options for young men

predisposed them to a moral recklessness and a fierce antiauthoritarian bent to

accompany it. Longer-term shifts in moral sensibilities and political mentalities

throughout New England posed new challenges to the ethical church and especially

to the moralistic ministry. A burgeoning individualism took the place of communal

concern. Power and authority became problematic as the autonomous self was

increasingly asserted against traditional structures and institutions. Covenant society

was in a collapse, and ministerial men such as Edwards were doomed first to

irrelevance and then, worse, to outright rejection.

Yet this mixture of pressures was exerted generally across many, if not most,

other rural towns in the region, at least in the Connecticut Valley. If this is the reason

for Jonathan Edwards’s demise in Northampton, then how indeed did any other

minister survive in the region? If these were the forces that in the end got Edwards

fired, then why were there not more such spectacular firings? Such generalized

socioeconomic, political, demographic, and mentality reasons can only explain this

particular case if they explain other similar cases, if such cases existed.

71

Most historians do point to frequent firings of ministers in the period. Neither

the factuality nor the reported frequency of these cases can be denied. Yet the crucial

point is that none of them bear any considerable resemblance to the case of the

dismissal of Edwards by the First Church of Christ in Northampton. Salary disputes

and other routine disagreements account for most "separations" in the period. Pastors

were usually fired for demanding too high a salary, and parishioners responded as

rational economic actors in the marketplace: they fired the existing pastor and sought

one who would accept a smaller amount and still perform well. The majority of the

cases, put another way, were the result of chiefly impersonal factors.98 This cannot be

said of Edwards's dismissal. It was deeply personal, both in terms of pastor and

parishioners.

Regardless, arguments that do not account for causes of dismissal unique to

the town of Northampton and its inhabitants miss the mark not simply for statistical

reasons, but for methodological reasons. Because of commitments to using particular

historical tools unique to their subdiscipline and subfield, historians have not followed

the right clues. Intellectual and cultural historians look for change over time in ideas,

intellectual and artistic artifacts, mentalités. Social historians look for change in

socioeconomics and class relations. Neither approach looks intensely, or as more than

an aside, at the more basic relational factors at work in all historical events, perhaps

out of some false dichotomy between history and biography. As a result, crucial factors

such as kinship have largely been ignored, even though kinship might be the answer to

98 See James F. Cooper, Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) for a standard modern scholarly account.

72

a historical question. It certain was the most potent force in bringing about the end of

Edwards’s pastorate, as I will soon show. Useful historical information is difficult to

tease away from the particularities and complexities of familial and other kinds of

relationships in an entire town—and valley.99 The task of sorting out the bare

genealogical facts is complicated enough. Yet an awareness of familial relations can

only enrich the narrative. After all, kinship, as will be illustrated in the case of the

dismissal of Edwards, is a remarkable adhesive and a powerful source of conflict and

rivalry. The family ties which had held Northampton together in an enduring social

bond gradually but decisively split the town and Edwards's church. It finally

separated pastor—cousin and uncle and nephew—from flock.

PASTORAL ERRORS

Controversy visited the Edwards pastorate before the late 1740s, when the

qualifications debacle set in and soon put an end to his career in Northampton. In a

way, that career was full of controversy, from beginning to end. Pastoral errors on

Edwards’s part in the midst of these controversies, especially in the 1740s, paved the

way for his dismissal in 1750.100 Two notable pre-dismissal controversies in which

Edwards made such errors deserve particular attention; they serve to demonstrate

99 Kevin M. Sweeney has thoroughly and in a pioneering way explored and mined the subject of kinship in the Connecticut River Valley, especially its ramifications in the eighteenth century, in his doctoral dissertation, "River Gods and Related Minor Deities: The Williams Family and the Connecticut River Valley, 1637–1900" (Yale University, 1986). 100 It is “no trivial issue that we address when we pursue the interaction of a minister with his constituency.” Tracy, 5.

73

Edwards’s continual interpersonal and political missteps in his capacity as shepherd

and religious authority.101

The first of these mistakes was made in 1742. On the heels of great revival

successes from 1735 onward, in which hundreds of new members and new non-

member converts were made, there was a level of religious enthusiasm in

Northampton that troubled Edwards. One manifestation of this overzealousness was

irreverent and unregulated singing. “There is danger,” he wrote, “of its coming to that

by degrees, that a mere nothing be made of this duty [i.e., to sing in worship to God],

to the great violation of the third commandment”—unholy speech about the nature,

name, and Word of God. Relatedly, Edwards condemned the loud talk that those

under the influence of the outpouring of the Spirit begin to engage in, as well as any

talk at all during church services.102 Another, more grave hazard he remarked was

preaching and teaching on the part of laymen. Though every Christian could and

should proclaim the gospel message, laymen “ought not to exhort as though they were

the ambassadors or messengers of Christ, as ministers do.” Those who are not ordained

“clothe themselves with authority in speaking” and do so out of turn and to the

detriment of the ministry and its rightful authority.103 Revival, it seems, had

awakened the community to new exercises of spiritual autonomy, ones deemed by

Edwards to be dangerous.

101 One might add as well the Breck affair of 1735, which presaged somewhat and contributed to Edward’s dizzying loss of control later in his pastorate. See Charles Edwin Jones, “The Impolite Mr. Edwards: The Personal Dimension of the Robert Breck Affair,” in William J. Scheick, ed., Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 21ff. 102 Edwards, “Some Thoughts,” 488–89. 103 Ibid., 484–85.

74

In one of his characteristically overzealous errors, he sought to combat this

with what he thought was rational, Biblical solution: a new church covenant. As has

already been mentioned, the covenant as a concept was a powerful one in New

England; it was a pact made before God himself. In asking for a renewing of a church-

wide covenant, one which carefully “catalogued past moral failings, set forth provision

for restitution, and required extensive promises for moral behavior in the future,”104

Edwards was acting unwisely. He was falling into a kind of legalistic moralism that

was uncharacteristic of him. Edwards biographer George Marsden puts it this way:

“It was like asking the whole town to live according to his personal resolutions writ

large. Or it was like asking a town of the 1740s to become like a Puritan village of the

1640s.”105

In a sense, this can be explained by Edwards’s understanding of the church,

and his own congregation in particular. That understanding was mostly scientific, or

at least empirical, rather than compassionate and relational. His outlook on ecclesial

relationships was more influenced by his philosophical musings on the affections and

his careful notation of the emotional shifts in certain individuals under his care than

by a pastoral empathy that could really grasp the daily realities of his congregants. A

rich theology and personal aloofness kept him distant from the ordinary and the

imperfect, and this was very much the case in the 1742 covenant, which backfired on

Edwards and, though it was enacted, gained him enemies in the church. 106 In a

104 Moots, 111. 105 Marsden, 350. 106 Tracy, 155.

75

community of morally imperfect men, women, and children, Edwards regularly took

up the role of the grating prophet.107

Yet more explosive even than the 1742 covenant renewal was the so-called

“bad book affair.” In 1744 Edwards was made aware that some of the male youths in

Northampton had been circulating and reading certain “bad books” (mainly illustrated

anatomical treatises for midwives) and using them to taunt their female counterparts.

Not surprisingly, Edwards was furious, especially after the participation of so many

young people in the revivals of the past decade and the renewal of a covenant just two

years before which had, to Edwards’s mind, made Northamptonites aware once and

for all of his expectations of their morality. The controversy began when Edwards

made the judgment that the behavior of the young men was a public matter and not a

private one. Seeking to meet with all those involved, at the next meeting of the church

he read aloud a list of the names of young people he wanted to see in connection with

the affair. For whatever reason, Edwards seems to have failed to delineate the

witnesses from the suspects as he read the names.108 The investigation found at least

three men guilty of punishable crimes: “cousins Simeon and Timothy Root confessed

to ‘contemptuous behavior toward the authority of this church,’ and Oliver Warner

was charged with ‘public lewdness.’”109

Yet the greatest loser was clearly Edwards. The event not only showed that he

had failed to turn around the troublesome youth culture of Northampton with his

107 Edwards’s interest in covenant renewal was also probably an act of homage to the turn-of-the-century ministers who, desperate to preserve their authority, had attempted similar ecclesiastical strategies to combat moral failings where the civil authorities would not or could not. Stout, 97ff. 108 Tracy casts some doubt on this traditional telling of the story (163). 109 Ibid., 161.

76

sermons and pleadings, though this it did. The youth had agreed in the 1742

covenant to repent of their unwarranted meetings, their frequenting of taverns, and

their lack of sexual morality, and here they were intentionally reading materials aloud

to one another to pique their sexual interest.110 In addition, the mockery of religion

that accompanied the young people’s conduct in the affair made obvious Edwards’s

ineffectiveness in impressing upon the youth—and his congregation at large—the

virtues of piety of which he was such a proponent in the pulpit.111 The young men

called the prohibited books their “bibles” and referred contemptuously to their elder

investigators as “wigs.”112 Further cases of sexual misconduct in the 1740s revealed

more and more that Edwards’s people were not effectively under his control113 and

that he was defending an outmoded worldview, and was doing so tiresomely.114

It should not come as a surprise, then, that when the doctrinal troubles of the

late 1740s set in, Edwards approached them, and soon the dismissal proceedings, in

his characteristically (hyper)rational manner. Rather than appeal to his accusers and

the congregation at large sentimentally and apologetically, he expected his

parishioners to join him in a scholarly discourse, a theological disputation. “Even after

he had faced the force of his people's animosities, he still remained hopeful that he

might convince them if only they would read his treatise.”115 In the end hardly anyone

read the 80,000-word Humble Inquiry, yet Edwards remained convinced of the power

110 Ava Chamberlain, “Bad Books and Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts,” The New England Quarterly 75 (2002): 188. 111 Tracy, 163. 112 Chamberlain, 192–94. 113 Ibid., 199ff. 114 Ibid., 202. 115 Marsden, 349.

77

of his argument against Stoddardeanism.116 He was, even by his own admission,

hopelessly intellectual in his approach to pastoral and indeed political problems,

writing in 1750 to John Erskine that he should consider limiting his career to

theological writing.117 The mighty preacher was reduced by controversy, and by his

own errors in their course, to wonder if God would have need of him at a pulpit ever

again.118

RIVER GODS & THEIR RIVALRIES

Kenneth Minkema, in a very useful study of old age in Northampton, frames the

entire duration of the Edwards pastorate in terms of demographics. Springing from

the Great Awakening and other, smaller revivals in Northampton, Jonathan Edwards

placed a great emphasis on the significance of young people and youth in general,

Minkema argues. Edwards found in the younger generation on the whole a spiritual

amenability that was lacking in the older people. He harangued the aged for their

inflexible dearth of interest in true religion, their stubbornness, their lack of proper

suitableness as models of the wise, old Christian pilgrims on their way.

Indeed this attitude is present in Edwards’s polemical writings. “[W]hen God

has begun any great work for the revival of his church,” Edwards wrote in 1742, “he

has taken the young people, and has cast off the old and stick-necked generation.” If

116 R. David Rightmire, “The Sacramental Theology of Jonathan Edwards in the Context of Controversy,” Fides et Historia 21 (1989): 53. 117 Jonathan Edwards to John Erskine, July 5, 1750, in Works 16: 347ff. 118 After the dismissal, Edwards believed that he “had failed at his real vocation: because in eighteenth-century New England, it was almost impossible to separate theology from faith, and to separate faith from worship—that is, to separate thought from action. There was no legitimacy to the role of intellectual as separate from community leader. To be a minister was to be a pastor.” Tracy, “The Pastorate of Jonathan Edwards,” The Massachusetts Review 20 (1979): 449.

78

the “old generation and heads of families” continue to act stubbornly as did their

counterparts in the Babylonian Captivity toward the prophet Jeremiah, he warned,

“how dreadful will it be to go to hell, after having spent so many years in doing

nothing but treasuring up wrath.”119

Minkema goes on to develop a thesis that builds this theme of age and

intergenerational conflict into a full-fledged hermeneutic for Edwards's biography and

for the Edwards pastorate in Northampton. His conclusion is that age can even

explain the most vexing of historical problems in relation to Edwards: why in the end

he was dismissed. He proceeds to accomplish this by showing that Edwards himself

equated the "leading men" of the town with the older men of the town; this means

that whenever Edwards in his writings refers to trouble with or a lack of support from

the "leading men," historians should read these mentions as references to the older

generation of Northamptonites. In doing so Minkema seems to provide a means for

understanding some of the town's factionalism, the exact character of which historians

have never been able to settle upon with any amount of certainty.

The drama of dismissal is revised by Minkema. What is key, and what has

been ignored, he claims, is that old men, alienated by Edwards's ageist sermons

excoriating them for insufficient support of and involvement in revival, are at the heart

of the plot to overthrow Edwards. Most of the church committees assembled

throughout the 1740s and into the two years of the dismissal controversy, he notes,

were dominated by older men, most over fifty years of age. From the committee to

119 Jonathan Edwards, “Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4, The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 504–6.

79

determine how pews in the Northampton church ought to be distributed to the

committee that ultimately put the issue of dismissal before the congregation, old men

were making the decisions, and their decisions were meant to further their interests.

Since Edwards had made his opinions about them known—namely, according to

Minkema, that he disapproved of their hostility to God's work in New England

through the awakenings—their interests were, not unexpectedly, perfectly contrary to

Edwards's. So if Edwards's interest was to remain in control at the helm and at the

pulpit, then the desire of the older generation in Northampton was to oust him. And

this they did, at least according to Minkema, who summarizes his argument by stating

boldly that the alienated "core" of older people "ultimately proved to be the force

behind Edwards's dismissal."120

The actual mechanics of how this unfolded Minkema relays with little

specificity. The basic fact was that the older generation was loyal to Stoddard. This

intransigent support for Edwards's larger-than-life (in fact, long dead) predecessor set

them at odds particularly with the Edwards of the 1740s. It was during this latter

half of his pastorate that he began to develop theological convictions that ran counter

to those espoused by Stoddard. This may have been what Edwards mistook for an

antirevival mentality. In any case, the enmity between Edwards and the older

generation reached an apex in the controversy over communion qualifications in 1748

and 1749. Minkema, to finish his argument, notes that the "leading men" in the

dismissal committee that are most to blame for enacting the dismissal and ensuring

120 Minkema, 687.

80

that it was the course taken are Major Pomeroy and Deacon Pomeroy, two old men,

two men Edwards undoubtedly considered to be among the "leading men."

The overarching narrative, then, is that Edwards sought support in all the

wrong places and lost support in all the wrong places. Politically he sowed the seeds of

his own undoing by thrusting those with little to no power into the center of his

revivalist outlook and casting out from his vision those who had power. As Minkema

tells the story, Edwards threw in his lot with youths and women. Youths were at the

heart of his theology of revival and his strategy of bringing about true conversions.

Women, interestingly, though not intentionally sought for support by Edwards, came

to be a solid source of moral support due to Edwards's siding with them, and not with

men, in such instances as the "bad books affair." At the same time, Edwards was

distancing himself from the older members of the church by preaching what Minkema

views as nothing less than ageist jeremiads decrying the moral frailty of the elderly,

the "hinderers" of revival.121 Those "hinderers" were, however, firmly entrenched in

the power structures of the church and town, as deacons and civil officials. In

eighteenth-century New England, the demographic constituencies where Edwards

found support were also powerless ones, women most of all; young men could at least

in time have some say in civil and ecclesiastical affairs. From the perspective of

realpolitik, then, Edwards was committing power suicide, and the dismissal

controversy was simply the last act in a drama whose conclusion was anything but

surprising.

121 694.

81

Apart from some degree of oversimplification, Minkema's argument is very

compelling. It seems he has the last scholarly word on the troublesome dismissal

question. His solution seems to leave no doors open, and there seems no reason why it

should.

Yet there is at least one major, glaring problem with Minkema's demographic

theory. The Pomeroys were indeed ringleaders in the anti-Edwards camp, and they

were indeed older men. But Minkema glosses over others in that camp who do not fit

the theory. What of Joseph Hawley, for instance? Hawley was in his mid-twenties and

was intimately involved in the ministerial coup. Minkema somewhat anticipates this

objection by dismissing Hawley, a youngster in comparison with the Pomeroys, as

merely the "mouthpiece" of the anti-Edwards party.122

I will contend, however, that Hawley cannot be dismissed as an irrelevancy,

that in fact understanding his part in the dismissal of Edwards is key to understanding

the dismissal as a whole. Yet even if one accepts Minkema's designation of young

Major Hawley as the main rhetorical representative of the Pomeroys, this position

surely was not unimportant. It must be recalled that the final controversy in which

Edwards and his congregation became embroiled was foremost a battle of words, of

rhetoric, of persuasion. Edwards was not fired for a simple reason; the dismissal

proceedings did not seek to show that Edwards was guilty of a traditional crime or

ministerial misdeed. Edwards was not being charged with, for instance, greed, which

so often was the undoing of a New England minister in this economically stressful

122 703.

82

period; he was not dismissed because he wanted a salary raise. Neither was it on the

basis of a single event or instance of sin or other moral transgression.

Rather, Edwards was charged with a mysterious, nontraditional, and

exceedingly nebulous error: changing his mind. The group that was fighting to get rid

of Edwards found him at fault for failing to remain sufficiently Stoddardean. He was

breaking the mold of his grandfather and predecessor with his new view on the

sacraments, the Pomeroys and Hawley claimed, and that fact, once proved, was more

than sufficient ground to fire their pastor of nearly twenty-five years. It can be taken

for granted that this was indeed proper ground for dismissal. In a way, Edwards own

response, to write his opinions in book form in order to show that he really had not

changed his mind, supports the notion that all those involved saw a change of mind as

a valid reason for a church to reject its minister, even Edwards. This is certainly a

possibility. Nonetheless, few if any parallels throughout Congregationalist New

England can be found. The case against Jonathan Edwards was not a normal one

against a minister; it was a new sort of charge. In pursuing it, Edwards's detractors in

the congregation and town were aiming to persuade rather than prove a fact. It was a

war of words, not a trial that seeks to get to the bottom of a set of facts.

In this way it really does not matter whether Joseph Hawley was himself an

originator of anti-Edwards rhetoric or merely a "mouthpiece" of its true originators. In

either case Hawley was a member of the cabal that destroyed Jonathan Edwards's

pastorate, left the Edwards family without a livelihood, and damaged the man's

reputation, eventually sending Edwards further into the Massachusetts wilderness as

a missionary preacher—a symbolic distancing.

83

Minkema's theory, then, fails in attempting to explain the dismissal as an

action taken by the elderly. With Joseph Hawley in the position of ouster alongside

the other older men, old age cannot be considered the miraculous key to grasping the

why of Edwards's dismissal; while it may explain the Pomeroys, it does not explain

Hawley. The historian is thus forced to inquire why a Northamptonite such as Joseph

Hawley, a man more of the Revolutionary generation than the midcentury one, would

seek the firing of Jonathan Edwards. If not to seek retribution for a long-time policy of

alienating the elderly, then why? What were other motivations?

The most significant fact about Joseph Hawley is that he was related to

Jonathan Edwards in more ways than many in the congregation. He was not just a

fellow townsperson, a neighbor; he was not simply one of the flock. Hawley was

Edwards's cousin. This fact goes a long way in explaining the conflict.

It is not enough, however, to argue that Hawley was in conflict with Edwards

merely because they were related. It is necessary to understand what their

relationship was like, how it affected both of them, and why the relationship tended in

the end toward enmity on Hawley’s part toward his ministerial cousin. What did the

enmity consist of? This question provides the historian with a vision of the dismissal

proceedings as something more than an impersonal conflict acting upon

Northamptonites. It humanizes the conflict, exploring the motivations of one of the

leading men, showing that social class and religious thought, while of course

significant, were not causes but contexts of human action.123 Dismissal took place in

123 As Ludwig von Mises sagely observes, “Only individuals think and act.” Theory & History (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 191. The course of history derives ultimately from

84

the context of a collapsing social order, of an economic order in flux, of a generational

conflict, and of innumerable other shifts, clashes, and trends. Yet the causes of this

institutional act were human decisions, many volitional human acts expressed visibly

in an institutional way. This is crucial to understanding the end of Edwards’s

pastorate and, indeed, as will be discussed in the epilogue, in making sense of history

at large.

The first important aspect of Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Hawley’s

relationship as cousins is an event that occurred on the morning of June 1, 1735.

Joseph Hawley II, the younger Hawley’s father and thus Edwards’s uncle, a successful

provincial merchant and local shopkeeper who had famously pioneered the selling of

such “civilized” items as metal knives in Northampton, slit his own throat—in a

somewhat ironic twist on his claim to fame. A prominent and respected member of

the local community, he had been elected town clerk more than a dozen and a half

times and was connected by marriage to the great Stoddard family. He died a father

and a man of means, though prematurely for New England men, aged only 43.124

The coroner, like Edwards, pronounced the suicide a result of Hawley’s

insuperable madness. He had been an insomniac and constantly nervous. Yet behind

this mental wreckage seems to have been a crisis of faith, a spiritual instability.

Marsden explains that it was Edwards’s own preaching, heightened in spiritual

impact in the awakenings of 1735, that drove his uncle to insanity.125 The charge is,

human action in individuals’ decision-making, priorities, etc. For a further defense of methodological individualism, see the epilogue. 124 Marsden, 163. 125 Marsden, 165.

85

more specifically, that Edwards’s hellfire message wrought in middle-aged Joseph

Hawley a fear about his own spiritual state in relation to full salvation. He was terribly

and unsettlingly unsure whether he could ever have sufficient assurance of

redemption.

It is important to note, however, that the Calvinistic intensity in Edwards’s

preaching was not merely a phenomenon of 1735; Edwards had preached on the

themes of death, hell, and divine consequences and punishment throughout his

pastoral career. A 1728 sermon, written and preached while Edwards was still an

assistant to his grandfather, features doctrines and a cautionary fieriness that it is

tempting to think unique to the Great Awakening phase of Edwards’s pastorate. In

that early sermon the young preacher exhorts people to “consider and prepare for their

latter end.” He continues,

Be exhorted to consider of eternity, of your own eternity. Consider this, that

God has given you a being not among beasts that perish, but among those who

have immortal souls…. But those who will neither be awakened by God’s

Word nor providence are set to a great degree of hardness and have great

reason to fear, lest they should be some of those who will be suddenly

destroyed, and that without remedy.126

This rhetoric sounds not at all unlike that of the sermons of the later revival period,

and for that matter, though less developed in style and effect, is not unlike that of the

pinnacle of Edwards’s sharpness, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (preached

126 In Michael D. McMullen, ed., The Blessing of God: Previously Unpublished Sermons of Jonathan Edwards (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003), 29–44.

86

in 1741). That sermon concluded, similarly to the 1728 sermon, “Therefore let

everyone that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come.” Although

it is perhaps mistaken to attribute Joseph Hawley II’s suicide to particular awakening

sermons, it certainly may be attributed to Edwards’s preaching in general.

In the end, however, it really does not matter what was at the root of Hawley’s

mania. The fact is that many believed at the time that it was Edwards’s ministry that,

either directly or indirectly, caused the suicide; for historical purposes one might as

well take them at their word. The case for direct attribution is easy enough to

imagine: Edwards preached harshly to those who were uncertain about the state of

their souls, and Hawley, being among that group, finally killed himself under the

pressure. A man named Bernard Bartlett loudly made this charge some time after the

suicide, claiming that Jonathan Edwards “was as Great an Instrument as the Devil

Had on this Side Hell to bring Souls to Hell.”127 The more indirect case can be made

that Edwards, in pursuing revival, which without doubt he did, created a polarizing

atmosphere in which men such as Hawley were forced into a category of spiritual

inferiority.128 This is in effect the argument Minkema makes more generally about the

Northamptonites in the midst of the awakenings. He argues that the men Edwards

deemed “leading men”—which Minkema wrongly equates with the elderly, but which

probably included in the minister’s mind middle-aged men like Hawley—were

127 Quoted in Minkema, 684. 128 The scholarly consensus seems to be that a significant (though relatively small) number of Northamptonites were brought into church membership in the course of the awakenings. E. Francis Brown greatly exaggerates when he relates that in the revival of 1735 and 1735 “almost all of the adult population of the town had become church communicants” (Joseph Hawley: Colonial Radical [New York: Columbia University Press, 1931], 26). In reality, the numbers show that much more modest numbers entered the church (Table 1, in Minkema, 688), though certainly a sufficient number by 1740 to create tensions in the town.

87

alienated by Edwards by his “repeatedly casting doubts on their claims to

conversion.”129 Whichever the understanding of most Northamptonites, it is clear that

guilt for Hawley’s spectacular and tragic death was often pinned on Edwards.

It is not difficult to imagine, therefore, that the deceased Hawley’s son, Joseph

Hawley III, eleven at the time of his father’s suicide, might have grown to resent his

older cousin Jonathan, the preachers whose words had so fatally depressed his father.

There is no documentary evidence that makes certain that he was among those like

Bernard Bartlett who condemned the minister outright, but the seeds of distrust and

enmity could very plausibly have been sown by this startling event which tore father

from family in such a tragic way.

COUSIN JOSEPH

Besides one comprehensive 1931 biography, little scholarly work has been conducted

about Joseph Hawley.130 This is very surprising since Hawley’s life is not only

significant for its connection to that of his notable cousin, but is important in its own

right. One historian enumerates Hawley’s accomplishments with this lofty description

of the man: “a soldier of the king, an eminent lawyer, a counsellor and friend to the

Adamses, a thorough and statesmanly revolutionist, and a convinced democrat.”131

Indeed, after he passed out of his troubled twenties, in which he had his showdown

with his cousin Jonathan, he went on to become one of the most prominent friends

129 Minkema, 692. 130 That biography is E. Francis Brown’s Joseph Hawley, Colonial Radical (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931). 131 Charles A. Baker, review of Joseph Hawley, Colonial Radical, by E. Francis Brown, The New England Quarterly 5 (1932): 181.

88

and facilitators of the Revolutionary cause and the new republican order in western

New England.132

For our purposes, however, none of his later accomplishments matter nearly as

much as his life up to 1750. Perhaps the greatest fact is that he was a pious young

man and was trained for the ministry at Yale, where he likely took part in the religious

fervor that attended the visit of English revivalist George Whitefield in the early

1740s.133 An evidence of his unusual piety is found in his correspondence. For

instance, his letters to his brother Elisha, stationed at a defensive fort on the frontier,

are full of admonitions to seek after God instead of worldly things. In one such letter,

in January 1749, Joseph pleaded passionately with his brother over “that head in

which you and I and every Mortal Creature with an immortal Spirit, is infinitely

concerned.” He continued,

True Religion, my Dear Brother, and thorough Religion, is the pleasantest of

everything this side [of] heaven. It is the most reasonable of all things. Our

happiness so consists in it that without it we can’t be happy. It is a fountain of

continual peace and sweetness to the reasonable mind and every deviation

therefrom is a wandering from happiness.134

In another letter, a year and a half later, he told Elisha that his greatest concern is for

“the spiritual health of your soul,” and proceeded to commend to him “the high ways

132 “His contemporaries believed him to be a great man; friend and foe alike attributed to him wisdom, leadership, and a fine sense of justice. In 1776, he could have had any honor within the gift of Massachusetts and men hoped that he would go to the Continental Congress” Brown, 191–92. 133 Brown, 15. 134 Joseph Hawley to Elisha Hawley, January 16, 1749, in Hawley Papers, microfilm, Forbes Library, Northampton, Massachusetts. (N.B. All Hawley letters cited henceforth are from the Hawley Papers, on microfilm in the Forbes, unless otherwise noted.)

89

of God or true religion which is no other than a reconciliation and Consent of heart

with and to the ways of Salvation as to the procurement of it by Jesus Christ.”135

It can barely be ignored that Joseph’s language bears striking resemblance to

the distinctive pastoral and theological language of Jonathan Edwards. In fact, it was

Edwards who regularly bid his parishioners get to the heart of the Christian religion,

to the “true religion.” In Religious Affections (1742), his magnum opus on the inner

spiritual workings of conversion, Edwards bases his argument on one core doctrine:

“True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”136 This he unpacks by linking

the Christian’s joy to the glory of God, a “Christian hedonism” that calls the believer

to find his greatest joy and the greatest glorification of the divine in the same place.137

Edwards puts it another way elsewhere: “God is the highest good of the reasonable

creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper happiness; and is the only happiness

with which our souls can be satisfied.”138 This is at the heart of what Joseph Hawley

is saying when he tells his brother that no one can be “happy” outside of “true

religion.” It is all highly Edwardsean, even if not in the end theologically

135 Joseph Hawley to Elisha Hawley, June 15, 1750. 136 Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in Works 137 “Christian hedonism” is a term modern theologian John Piper has coined to describe and encapsulate this Edwardsean doctrine. See Piper, God’s Passion for His Glory (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1998), and Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2011). 138 Edwards, “The True Christian’s Life: A Journey towards Heaven,” in The Works of President Edwards (New York: Leavitt, 1843), 578.

90

harmonious.139 Young Joseph even admits as much in one letter: “I believe you have

heard Mr. Edwards urge [similar things], with great reason in preaching.”140

COUSINS IN CONFLICT

At the same time that he quoted his older cousin Jonathan in his letters to Elisha,

Joseph Hawley also reported on the controversy brewing in Northampton. It is telling

indeed that as early as January 1749, at the relative beginning of the controversy, he

was imagining that the congregation’s inquiry into Edwards’s views on communion

qualifications would end in dismissal. He wrote that he and the town were anxious to

know if “finally there must be a council to determine whether Mr. Edwards be

dismissed [of] his pastoral office.”141 Again, in August of that same year, he told his

brother confidently, “I believe the event will be a separation between [Edwards] and

the people.”142

This brotherly correspondence overlapped with Joseph’s entrance into the

dismissal proceedings. In November 1749 he agreed to become a member of the

influential precinct committee.143 A committee of five was subsequently called

together after Edwards began to resent the (civil) precinct committee’s meddling with

religious affairs; Hawley was among these influential five. This process happened again

in April when Hawley was appointed to yet another council of five to make a different

set of decisions. After this Hawley found himself, by the end of the month of April,

139 Hawley is said to have been a devout Arminian at this time; then, under the care of Jonathan Edwards’s successor to the Northampton pulpit, he seems to have returned to his earlier Calvinism. Brown, 41. 140 Joseph Hawley to Elisha Hawley, June 15, 1750. 141 Joseph Hawley to Elisha Hawley, January 16, 1749. 142 Joseph Hawley to Elisha Hawley, August 11, 1749. 143 Trumbull, 207.

91

among the few main advocates of the cause of dismissal in the preparations for the

final ecclesiastical council in June. At that council it was Joseph Hawley who read the

church’s harshly worded statement of accusation against his cousin.144 By the end of

the proceedings that cousin was out of a job and Hawley was one step closer to the

status of river god.

Minkema argues that Hawley was insignificant in the dismissal, and yet

Edwards himself wrote privately, after his Hawley’s biographer roundly declares that

the twenty-three-year-old’s decision to involved himself was “a matter of loyalty to

conscience and an act of intellectual honesty,” since Hawley was an Arminian and

thus disagreed with his Calvinist cousin on key doctrines. As we will soon see, this is

at most only a half-truth.

In reality, doctrine was not so much the point as was power, position, and

revenge. As Kevin Sweeney has shown, the wholesale backlash of Northampton

oligarchs against Edwards in the late 1740s and culminating in 1750 with his

dismissal was fostered by “a jealousy of power undoubtedly nurtured by living for years

with Stoddards and their kin.” This was brought on by the destabilizing death in

1748 of patriarch and Edwards protector John Stoddard, his uncle.145 This was the

case particularly for the Pomeroys, old Deacon Ebenezer (once an influential

magistrate) and young Major Seth.146 It also happens to have been the main

motivation of Joseph Hawley.

144 See Trumbull, 206ff. 145 Sweeney, 433–34. 146 Ibid., 435–36.

92

His underlying motivations can be detected both before and after the dismissal

in 1750. As I have already pointed out, it was generally believed that Jonathan

Edwards had some hand in precipitating the depression and subsequent suicide of

Joseph Hawley II, young Joseph’s father, fifteen years before. More immediately

relevant is a Hawley family controversy in 1747. In that year, a young, unmarried

woman in Northampton named Martha Root claimed that Elisha Hawley, the

brother to whom Joseph wrote so many letters, was the father of her illegitimate child.

Outside church channels Elisha Hawley settled financially with the Roots and the

matter seemed settled. But it was not settled for Edwards, who reacted in a manner

not unlike his brashness in dealing with the youth in the bad books affair. He believed

Elisha Hawley should be compelled to marry Martha Root since in their sexual

relationship they had already become “one flesh.”

It seems that a church hearing, undocumented, found Hawley at fault—that

is, guilty of seducing Martha Root—and he, with the help of his brother Joseph, just

beginning to practice law, appealed in 1749 to a council of regional churchmen to

hear the matter. Edwards expected that this council would uphold his judgment, but

it did not, and Elisha Hawley—and Martha Root—was free from the unwanted

marriage after all. This circumvention of his authority at the hands of the Hawley

boys, Patricia Tracy writes, made them “traitors” in Edwards’s sight. “They had been

[Edwards’s] disciples of a sort, and they were his own cousins; but they were not

ashamed to display just how limited, by the late 1740s, was the pastor’s authority.”147

147 Tracy, 164–66.

93

The Hawleys, and especially crafty Joseph, were already resentful opponents of

Edwards and his powerful position.

Yet perhaps the most interesting and revealing twist in the relationship of

these cousins, Joseph and Jonathan, was yet to come. Within several years after the

events of 1750, Joseph Hawley had a change of heart, or perhaps matured to some

degree, and reached out to his exiled cousin in Stockbridge, asking for a frank

assessment of his behavior in the dismissal controversy. Edwards replied frankly that

he believed himself “greatly injured” by the church, especially at the hands of the

ringleaders of the opposition, and that Hawley was “greatly guilty in the sight of God,

in the part [he] acted in the affair; becoming, especially [towards the latter] part of it,

very much their leader in it.” In other words, Edwards was pained by the controversy

in general, but offended especially at Hawley’s leadership—on account, the older

cousin complained sharply, of his “youth, and considering your relation to me.”148

Jonathan Edwards clearly was affected by treachery of his cousin.149

In response, Hawley wrote to Edwards that he recognized that “there was a

great deal of censoriousness and most uncharitable conjecture and a great deal of

unchristian heat and many … bitter speeches both in private conversation and in

publick meetings.” He confessed that his speech was, as his cousin had charged,

148 Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Hawley, November 18, 1754, in Works 16: 646–54. 149 Although Edwards had been of this opinion immediately after the dismissal. He wrote to John Erskine, “The people, in managing this affair on their side, have made chief use of a young gentleman of liberal education and notable abilities and a fluent speaker, of about seven or eight and twenty years of age, my grandfather Stoddard's grandson, being my mother's sister's son [Joseph Hawley, Jr.], a man of lax principles in religion, falling in in some essential things with Arminians, and is very open and bold in it. He was improved as one of the agents for the church, and was their chief spokesman before the council. He very strenuously urged before the council the necessity of an immediate separation.” Jonathan Edwards to John Erskine, July 5, 1750, in Works 16: 347ff.

94

“immodest, immoderate and irreverent.”150 This repentant exchange seemed to patch

up the relationship between the cousins, for Edwards began to use Hawley as a

personal mail carrier to Boston sometime afterward.151

It was five years later, in 1760, that Hawley once and for all apologized in the

form of a thorough and, for the historian, very interesting confession, published in a

Boston newspaper. In it he writes at great lengths about his faults, sometimes perhaps

exaggerating his culpability to the exclusion of the others of the anti-Edwards camp.

He rehearses many of his confessions to his cousin in the private exchange of 1754 to

1755, albeit in more emotionally intense language. He admits, for example, to voicing

“groundless and slanderous” accusations; he says his persecution of Edwards was in

effect the further persecution of Christ, that his words were akin to those of the

Pharisees; he seeks forgiveness of God, of the Edwards family, of Christians

everywhere and at all times. Yet he goes further, which is crucial. He avers that his

behavior was grievous “because I was not only under the common obligations of each

individual of the society to him, as a most able, diligent and faithful pastor; but I had

also received many instances of his tenderness, goodness and generosity, to me as a

young kinsman.” He declares that his motivations in his conduct flowed from and were

“founded on jealous and uncharitable mistakes,” that he was influenced “by vast pride,

self-sufficiency, ambition, and vanity.”152

150 Joseph Hawley to Jonathan Edwards, January 1, 1755. 151 As evident in an undated fragment in which Edwards charges Hawley with carrying a latter to Thomas Prince “as soon as ever you get to Boston.” Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Hawley, after January 1, 1755, Works 16: 660. 152 Printed in S. E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards, 421–27. Emphasis added.

95

In effect, then, Joseph Hawley confessed that the dismissal of his cousin, the

eminent Rev. Jonathan Edwards, was not caused mainly by doctrinal differences,

socioeconomics, or the collapse of Puritan covenant society. Rather, Hawley undertook

the cause of dismissal out of jealousy, pride, and ambition. In the end Joseph Hawley

acted not as a kneejerk, automatic response to historical trends, or out of religious

conviction,153 but out of the selfish desires of the aspiring river god.

153 Sweeney rightly joins with Tracy and Foster in the opinion that Arminianism had nothing to do with the dismissal. Sweeney, 439, n. 46.

96

EPILOGUE

One scholar has written, “Historians have rightly sensed that the communion

controversy was the formal rather than material cause of dismissal.”154 This study has

borne out that fact. In the end, doctrine and the controversy that attended Edwards’s

change in attitude toward Stoddardeanism were not causes of Northampton’s

rejection of their famous minister. Yet it is also simplistic, and incorrect, to point to

social, political, religious, and economic factors as causes of the dismissal. What really

caused Edwards’s coup were Edwards and the people of his congregation, especially

the “leading men.” This, like all human history, is a history of relationship: God and

man in a covenant of Christ’s blood, church and minister in a covenant of protection

and trust, and relatives, cousins, in an unseen but very real covenant of consanguinity.

Relationship is a crucial and elemental given of human history.

Yet historians have not chosen to write the story of Edwards and his cousin

Hawley as the main historical narrative. I believe this is because of the modern state

of history as a discipline. Patricia Tracy’s work is pioneering and necessary in its focus

on Northampton society and Edwards’s participation in—and, in some sense,

leadership of—that society. But where she fails is in taking the understanding of

Edwards’s milieu and using it as an explanation of human action, as though society acts

upon persons, rather than the other way round. Ludwig von Mises, an economist and

historian who wrote mainly in the early twentieth century, offers this criticism of such

irresponsible analysis: “In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to

154 McDermott, 166–67.

97

individuals and individual events, [some] authors resorted to a chimerical

construction, the group mind or social mind.”155 Mises gives an excellent corrective in

response (something he calls methodological individualism),

Only individuals think and act. Each individual’s thinking and acting is

influenced by his fellows’ thinking and acting. These influences are variegated.

The individual American’s thoughts and conduct cannot be interpreted if one

assigns him to a single group. He is not only an American but a member of a

definite religious group or an agnostic or an atheist; he has a job, he belongs to

a political party, he is affected by traditions inherited from his ancestors and

conveyed to him by his upbringing, by the family, the school, the

neighborhood, by the ideas prevailing in his town, state, and country. It is an

enormous simplification to speak of the American mind.156

I do not quote at length from Mises to bore or even to commence a

philosophical discussion where a historical one ought to be. Yet the unavoidable

reality is that all history is written with an underlying concept of what history is and

what it ought to describe—in other words, all history has, at bottom, a philosophy of

history guiding it, conscious or not. This philosophy has an attached methodology

attached to it, and that methodology opens to the historian only certain doors. When

she searches, the social historian finds a social history. The intellectual historian finds

an intellectual history. This is precisely what has happened in relation to Edwards

scholarship and especially to the question of why he was dismissed.

155 Mises, 188. 156 Ibid., 191.

98

I have tried to act as a sort of “relational” historian in this thesis. Such a

subfield as “relational” history does not exist, but perhaps it should. For the answer to

the question of why Jonathan Edwards was fired in 1750 involves primarily Edwards’s

relationship to his extended family and his relationship as pastor to his flock (or, in

careful Misesian terms, to the individuals known collectively as his flock).

So there arises a significant lesson for historians to be drawn from this episode

in local history and from the historiography that has surrounded it and sought to

address it. It is instructive that in the end Jonathan Edwards was ousted, as it turns

out, not as a victim of events and trends—economic changes, a shifting social order, a

religion in flux. Edwards was not felled by the growth of capitalistic commerce in

New England or by the decline of the covenant society of seventeenth-century

Puritanism. His downfall was interpersonal and relational first and foremost.

This is not to say that doctrine was unimportant. The subtle yet pernicious

Marxist conviction that religion is a mere ideological superstructure, insignificant in

itself, that disguises deeper, darker socioeconomic realities is shown to be untrue in

this case. Rather, the historian must remember that the presence of external factors

and forces does not mean that one ought to conclude immediately that these, much

more so than some prevailing mentality or ideology, are the primary causes.

The challenge for the historian is to balance the large and small, the long-term

and short-term, which I have endeavored to do. I have shown that the events of 1749

and 1750 in Northampton came to pass as a result both of long-term impersonal

forces and short-term personal and interpersonal forces. It is inappropriately

deterministic to show that the greatest American theologian of his time (or perhaps all

99

time) was fired merely because ministerial authority was increasingly under attack by

restive colonists in the pursuit of a sort of homegrown democracy. Such an argument

ignores the everyday motivations and relationships of the individuals involved. Yet it is

equally inappropriate to ignore the trends that informed and shaped, quite out of any

individual’s control, the set of choices available to human actors in the given time and

place.

Good history need not be biography. But it should not avoid biography simply

out of fear that the story of individuals and their relationships with one another is not

sufficiently true, interesting, or relevant as a historical narrative. The human story is

not to be ignored or explained away, but rather contextualized carefully. In that vein,

I hope that I have shown that in this case Jonathan Edwards was dismissed because of

a jealous cousin and many mistakes in his pastoral relationship to individuals in the

church community, and that neither of these causes can rightly be understood

disembodied from the context of the official institutional dismissal proceedings or the

broad shifts in covenant society.

100

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University.

Allen, Alexander V. G. Jonathan Edwards. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890.

Andrews, Charles M. The Colonial Period of American History: England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.

Bement, W. “Stoddardeanism.” New Englander and Yale Review 4 (1846).

Boyer, Paul S., and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Brand, David C. Profile of the Last Puritan: Jonathan Edwards, Self-Love, and the Dawn of the Beatific. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991.

Breen, T. H. The Character of the Good Ruler. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

Bremer, Francis J. Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Brown, E. Francis. Joseph Hawley: Colonial Radical. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931).

Bushman, Richard L. From Puritan to Yankee. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Carroll, Peter N. Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

Chamberlain, Ava. “Bad Books and Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts.” The New England Quarterly 75 (2002): 179–203.

Coffman, Ralph J. Solomon Stoddard. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Cohen, Charles Lloyd. God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Cooper, James F. Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

101

Crawford, Michael J. Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition and Its British Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Davidson, Edward H. Jonathan Edwards: The Narrative of a Puritan Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Davis, Thomas D. and Virginia L., eds. Edward Taylor vs. Solomon Stoddard: The Nature of the Lord’s Supper. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

Dwight, Sereno Edwards. The Life of President Edwards. New York: G., C. & H. Carvill, 1830.

Edwards, Jonathan. Images or Shadows of Divine Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

Elliott, Emory. Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Fiering, Norman. Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Foster, Mary C. "Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1729–1754: A Covenant Society in Transition." Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1967.

Goodwin, Gerald J. “The Myth of ‘Arminian-Calvinism’ in Eighteenth-Century New England.” New England Quarterly 41 (1968): 213-237.

Gouge, William. Commentary on Hebrews. London: 1655.

Goulding, James A. The Controversy Between Solomon Stoddard and the Mathers: Western Versus Eastern Massachusetts Congregationalism. Claremont, Calif.: 1971.

Gura, Philip F. “Preparing the Way for Stoddard: Eleazar Mather’s Serious Exhortation to Northampton.” The New England Quarterly 57 (1984): 240–249.

Hiner, N. R. “Preparing for the Harvest: The Concept of New Birth and the Theory of Religious Education on the Eve of the First Awakening.” Fides et Historia 9 (1976): 8–25.

Holifield, E. Brooks, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Johnson, Parker H. “Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Personal Narrative’ and the Northampton Controversy.” Cithara 26 (1987): 31–47.

102

Kidd, Thomas S. God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Knight, Janice. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Lee, Sang Hyun, ed. The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Lesser, M. X. Reading Jonathan Edwards: An Annotated Bibliography in Three Parts, 1729–2005. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

Lucas, Paul Robert. Valley of Discord: Church and Society Along the Connecticut River, 1636-1725. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1976.

Marsden, George D. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

McClymond, Michael J. Encounters with God. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

McDermott, G. R. One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1956.

Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981.

Miller, Perry, ed. The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953.

Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson, ed. The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, vol. 2. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Miller, Perry. Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

103

Minkema, Kenneth P. “Old Age and Religion in the Writings and Life of Jonathan Edwards.” Church History 70 (2001): 674–704.

Moody, Josh. Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment: Knowing the Presence of God. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005.

Nobles, Gregory. “The Rise of Merchants in Rural Market Towns: A Case Study of Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts.” Journal of Social History 24 (1990): 5–23.

Nichols, Stephen J. Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought. Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2001.

Nye, Russell B., and Norman S. Grabo. American Thought and Writing, vol. 1, The Colonial Period. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

Pettit, Norman. The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.

Piper, John, and Justin Taylor, eds. A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004.

Piper, John. God’s Passion for His Glory. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1998.

Rightmire, R. D. “The Sacramental Theology of Jonathan Edwards in the Context of Controversy.” Fides et Historia 21 (1989): 50–60.

Scheick, William J. Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980.

Stoddard, Solomon. An Appeal to the Learned. Boston: Printed by B. Green, for Samuel Phillips at the brick shop, 1709.

Stoddard, Solomon. The safety of appearing at the day of judgement, in the righteousness of Christ: opened and applied. Boston: Printed by Samuel Green, for Samuel Phillips, 1687.

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

Stuart, Robert Lee. “‘Mr. Stoddard’s Way’: Church and Sacraments in Northampton.” American Quarterly 24 (1972).

Sweeney, Kevin M. “River Gods and Related Minor Deities: The Williams Family and the Connecticut River Valley, 1637–1790.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986.

104

Tracy, Patricia J. Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.

Tracy, Patricia J. “The Pastorate of Jonathan Edwards.” The Massachusetts Review 20 (1979): 437–451.

Trumbull, James Russell. History of Northampton, Massachusetts: From Its Settlement in 1654. Salem, Mass.: Higginson Book Co., 1989.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1921.

Von Rohr, John. The Shaping of American Congregationalism, 1620-1957. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1992.

Walker, George Leon. Some Aspects of the Religious Life of New England. New York: Silver, Burdett and Co., 1897.

Walker, Williston. The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969.

Walsh, James P. “Stoddard’s Open Communion: A Reexamination.” The New England Quarterly 43 (1970).

Weber, Donald. “The Figure of Jonathan Edwards.” American Quarterly 35 (1983): 556–564.

Woodhouse, A. S. P. Puritanism and Liberty. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974.

Williams, William. The Death of a Prophet Lamented and Improved, in a Sermon Preach’d at Northampton, Feb. 13. 1729. Boston: Printed by B. Green, for D. Henchman in Cornhill, J. Phillips and T. Hancock, near the town dock, 1729.

Zakai, Avihu. Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: the Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Ziff, Larzer. Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World. New York: Viking Press, 1973.

Ziff, Larzer. “The Social Bond of Church Covenant.” American Quarterly 10 (1958): 454–462.