A Blast From The Past

John Winthrop 

A fellow parishioner invited me to have dinner with him a week back.  I knew he was chair of the Economics Department at a major university and, as a historian, I had some questions I wanted to discuss with him about a project that I am working on concerning banking in 14^th century Siena and the creation of government debt.   My host however had invited two friends of his to dinner as well—all three had grown up in Cuba and came to the United States as boys.  They had been high-school friends and had each gone on to a career in academia.  One was a professor of Philosophy at a large Catholic University, the other a professor of Sociology at a University in Florida.  The conversation was intense—I told my friend later that I felt like I was sitting for my comprehensive exams all over again.  But the question that I brought to the table was: What are the roots of the divisions and polarization  that we are experiencing in contemporary America?

Professor X, (the economist) believes that the tension in our society is resultant on the sense of powerlessness that people experience as they find themselves slowly sliding down the economic ladder rather than, as had their parents, climbing up into greater prosperity.   As one person recently put it to me, “I have never made so much money and had so little.”  As parents are anxious not only for their own personal security but for the economic welfare of their children and grandchildren, there is a sense that economically at least, our glory days are behind us and our country is “going to hell.”  

Professor Y (the sociologist) gave the opinion that carried the conversation.  He believes that the increased ferocity of the “culture wars” is related to the collapse of such foundational institutions such as the family, the Church, the public school system, and the neighborhood—to name only a few. We really didn’t explore the economic issue sufficiently and hopefully we will in a future conversation because I think the increased economic disparity of our society should not be underestimated, but the sociological issue has perhaps more implications germane to the mission of the Church as it represents the collapse of community. 

When the Puritans coming to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony were still aboard ship in 1630, their leader, John Winthrop, addressed them with the following sermon.  It is still something, perhaps today with the fracturing of our society, even more something, to consider. 

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck and to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly; to love mercy; to walk humbly with our God. For this end we must be knit together in this work a one man: we must entertain each other in brotherly affection; we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities; we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality; we must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together; always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body, so shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.  The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with.  We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, 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, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we shall be made a story and a byword through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going. And to shut up this discourse with that exhortation of Modes that faithful servant of the Lord in his last farewell to Israel (Deut. 30): Beloved there is now set before us life and good, death and evil in that we are commanded this day to love our God and to love one another to walk in his ways and to keep his commandments and his ordinance and his laws and the Articles of our Covenant with him that we may live and be multiplied and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it.  But if our hearts shall turn away so that we will not obey but shall be seduced and worship other gods, our pleasures, and profits, and serve them it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it. 

Therefore let us choose life

That we and our seed

May live by obeying his

Voice and cleaving to him

For he is our life and

Our prosperity

 Actually, when you read Winthrop’s sermon you can see the connection between the economic issues and the collapse of our cultural foundations.  We have lost the vision that we are mutually invested in one another and abandoned the principles of community for an individualism that permits the few to rise to towering heights of power and wealth while leaving the many to sense that their future is slipping through their hands. 

More than ever we need the voice of the Church to give the call to turn back to our commitment to a society in which all are mutually inter-dependent.  The economic philosophy of Pope John Paul II called for this sort of solidarity in which the interdependence of all was the foundation for society’s economy.  Only when we realize and take ownership of the idea that God intends for his gifts to be shared out among all his children in ways that provide for the welfare of each can we begin to build that sort of a world to which John Paul and John Winthrop and the Fathers of the Church and the Hebrew Prophets have called us—or rather made us aware that God is calling us. 

Some Background About Baptists

  

First Baptist Church of
Providence, the oldest
Baptist Congregation
in the United States

Some readers weren’t overly happy with my pointing out that four of the dunces on the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus who expressed their outrage that Pope Francis recognized Palestinian Statehood were Baptists.  It makes Baptists look stupid was the gist of their complaint.  As long as we are at it, let me point out that the four are also Republicans. 

I don’t mean to imply that all Baptists or all Republicans are stupid.  Far from it.  True, I have no respect for anyone of any party or religion who drinks the ideological Kool-Aid and liberal Democrats and Katholik Krazies can do that as blindly and blithely as conservative whacko-Jesus Tea-partiers.  I have only contempt for those of any party or religion who serve up the toxic potion—they know better—and I would put our four Congressional horses’ asses of the Apocalypse in this category.  I can’t pray “Father, Forgive them for they know not what they do” as they very well know how they are manipulating the truth for the most unsavory of political ends.  But how does this relate to their being Baptists?

Let’s look at Baptist history and perhaps we can discover the flaw that skews our friends both intellectually and morally.

In our series on the history of Anglicanism we saw that the Baptists developed out of the radical congregationalism of non-Conformist groups that broke with historic Established Church in England during the period of the Commonwealth/English Civil War. 

A Church of England priest, John Smyth, had gone to serve an English congregation in Amsterdam as early as 1609 because he had come to believe that the privileged position under English Law of the Established Church was contrary to the scriptures.  Smyth also believed that one must first believe and then be baptized—that the practice of infant baptism was contrary to the Scriptures.  In the Netherlands Smyth had become familiar with Mennonites, a sect who came out of the Anabaptist tradition.  The Mennonites had been founded by Menno Simmons, a Dutch Catholic priest who, in the 1530’s had broken with the Catholic Church over several practices, including infant baptism, which he considered contrary to scripture.  Smyth would eventually himself become a Mennonite as did many of his followers.  Some of his followers under Thomas Helwys returned to England and established a congregation at Spitalfields in today’s East End of London.  Helwys, like Smyth, rejected the idea of an Established Church and believed that the King (that is to say, the Government) had no right over the conscience of his subjects and that all should be free to worship God as he pleased.  This led to his imprisonment in Newgate prison where he died in 1616. 

Meanwhile, Roger Williams who had apprenticed in Law under the great English jurist, Sir Edward Coke, but who had been ordained in the Church of England left England in 1631 for Boston in the great Puritan migration fleeing the High Churchmanship of Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.  Williams had moved from a position of Puritanism within the Church of England to a more radical Congregationalist Puritanism, but one that was a bit extreme even for the Boston Puritans.  Williams insisted that the civil authorities must have no power to punish religious dissent.  His principles were: separation from the Established Church, freedom of conscience, and separation of Church and State.  The Puritans at Boston, while not anxious to be part of the Established Church of England, were not about to reject the use of civil power to enforce conformity to their own particular brand of religion, nor were they about to let each person worship as they might please.  When Williams’ opinions rendered him unacceptable to Puritan authorities in Boston, he moved to Salem and later to Plymouth where the Church employed him, but eventually the more traditional Puritans managed to have him summoned before the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to answer for his separatist views.  He was accused of spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions” and before he could be apprehended he fled to Raynham Massachusetts where he was sheltered for the winter by the Native Americans, and from there in the spring he and a band of followers settled in what is now Providence, Rhode Island.  Within two years of his settling in Rhode Island, Williams became convinced of the importance of believer’s baptism and had himself rebaptized by Ezekiel Holliman before the end of 1638.  Williams and his followers constituted the first Baptist congregation in the United States and the congregation survives today as the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island.  Williams did not long a Baptist; he was troubled by the lack of an apostolic continuity and came to believe that Christians must await the Divine appointment of new apostles who would restore the Church.  The Baptist congregation which he established, however, did and does survive as I just noted. 

English Baptists tended to reject the Calvinist doctrine of double pre-destination by which some have been destined from before time for salvation and others for eternal damnation.  With his strict Puritan roots, however, Williams was a staunch Calvinist.  Baptists who believe in double pre-destination are Particular Baptists; those who hold to Free Will are General Baptists.  Perhaps it would be clearer to explain that Particular Baptists hold that Christ died for each person who has been pre-destined by that atonement for salvation.  Salvation is thus particular.  General Baptists believe that Christ died for the atonement of the sins of all people and that while all are not necessarily saved, grace is available to all.   Salvation is thus general. 

Rhode Island was established on the principle of Religious Freedom and there was even a Jewish congregation founded before the end of the seventeenth century.  While there was no overt persecution of Catholics, they were never welcomed in Rhode Island and at the time of the American Revolution there is no record of a single Catholic living in the State which is very strange given that they were found in every other State of the New Republic, even Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia—all of which had strong laws against them. 

Baptists have a very strange intellectual history.  While both Smyth in England and Williams in America were products of the Oxbridge system and competent scholars, and while the Providence Church was associated with the establishment of Brown University, the predominance of Baptists—along with Methodists and Presbyterians—in the Second Great Awakening drastically changed the character of American Baptists. 

The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival, principally on the American Frontier, in the last years of the 18^th century and the first three decades of the 19^th.  The insufficient numbers of trained clergy to meet the spiritual hungers of the rapidly expanding frontier led to a predominance of lay preaching which replaced a biblical literalism for the more intellectually sound biblical theology of classic Protestant thought.  Indeed, the revival marks the triumph of raw religious emotionalism over intellectual integrity in a way that would only appall Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and the other Reformation Fathers.  The Bible came to mean whatever the preacher wanted it to mean, regardless of the eighteen hundred years of Christian prayer, reflection, and study that had gone before.  This fell right in line with the radical individualism that had blighted Protestantism since Luther’s profound conviction that Christ had died “for me” overshadowed the classic doctrine that Christ had “died for humankind.”  This emphasis on individual belief and individual salvation continues to undermine sound ecclesiology in modern America where even we Catholics tend to exalt individual opinion over adherence to a common creed. 

Contemporary Baptists range from the theologically sophisticated like Harvey Cox, Amy Butler, the late Warren T. Carr, Robert Bernard or Dale Wood Peterson to the self-anointed mad men at the other end of the spectrum such as the late Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka.  Unfortunately, the anti-intellectual approach of Biblical fundamentalism that totally ignores the biblical scholarship of the last two centuries tends to predominate among Baptists giving a rather dunce-like cast to their reputation.  Preachers like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and the late Gerry Falwell have not helped improve the reputation. 

Franklin Graham’s father, The Reverend Doctor Billy Graham, was no bright light of Christian academia, but much like such Catholic figures such as Mother Theresa or Dorothy Day he exercised such a strong example of an applied Christian Faith that he has had an unparalleled moral influence on American life, a stronger influence than any theologian.  Other contemporary “evangelists” have often proved to be at best entrepreneurs, and too often just plain charlatans but Billy Graham is a true American icon.  Unfortunately his son and others have done much to dismantle the Empire of Christian credibility that Billy Graham built by his decades of walking the walk as well as talking the talk.   

A common Texas expression “A Baptist Bar,” for a bar concealed behind panels in a wall when fellow churchies come to visit, has come to typify “evangelical morality” which is seen to emphasize a public righteousness that conceals private iniquity.   Frankly in this 21^st century all Christians of any and all denominations need to clean up our act where we flaunt virtues that are no more than a phony veneer that make us appear more upright than we truly are.  Whether it is the sex scandals in our (and others’) church, the inordinate salaries and lifestyles of some preachers , the fiscal fleecing of the flocks entrusted to our care, or the just general dishonesty that is an universal after-effect of original sin, we need to do some repairs on our own houses before we start throwing stones at the unchurched.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church C

Old Ship Meeting House in Hingham

MA, an example of Puritan worship

space.

Robert Browne (c1555-1633) had studied at Cambridge where he fell under Puritan influence.  He served as a Lecturer at Saint Mary’s Church, Islington—at the time a wealthy suburb of London and today right smack in the middle of London.  A Lecturer was a lay preacher—a man with sufficient theological education to preach but not ordained.  Lecturers were very popular among the Puritan segment of the Church of England which stressed preaching, while the Episcopal faction generally preferred to limit preaching to those in Holy Orders and so tie it closer to formal worship.  It should be pointed out that the clergy of the Church of England, even before the Reformation, were all University men, educated at either Oxford or Cambridge.  Cambridge had always been the more theologically radical and what one might today call “low Church.”   Browne returned to Cambridge after several years at Saint Mary’s Islington and was encouraged to take Holy Orders, but shortly after ordination gave up hope that the Church of England could be reformed from within.  He attempted to set up a separatist congregation at Norwich—that is an independent congregation not under the bishop but ruled by its own members—and was arrested for doing so.  Powerful family connections won him his freedom but not tolerance of his ambitions for a separate Church. He and his followers moved to Middleburg in the Netherlands where they could form an independent congregation.  Browne and others like him believed that the Churches of the New Testament were such independent congregations, each having their own pastor and each being self-governing.  Browne was reacting against two things: the authority of the State over the Church and its policies (remember, the Church of England was a State Church and thus governed by Parliament) and an established hierarchy in which bishops had authority over a number of congregations, thus usurping the authority of the congregation’s local pastor.  Browne’s understanding of primitive Church governance was a bit naively romantic, but at the same time was closer to the post-Apostolic Church of the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries than the diocesan authority structures of either contemporary Catholicism of Anglicanism. 

In any event, Browne soon gave up on his separatist notions and returned to the Church of England which he served as headmaster of several schools and rector of Achurch in Northamptonshire.  (Achurch is the name of the parish.)  He died within the Anglican Communion though he had founded the separatist movement.  

Richard Clyfton was an Anglican priest of the Puritan faction appointed to the Church of All Saints, Babworth.  Despite his holding a benefice in the Church of England, he followed Browne and became a Separatist.  Among the members of his congregation which met at Scrooby Manor was William Bradford who was one of the leaders of the Pilgrim emigration to Massachusetts Bay. 

While the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth were Separatists and rejected the authority of the Church of England—both its bishops and its supervision by Parliament—the majority of settlers in Massachusetts Bay Colony were Puritans who in the 1620’s and 30’s still considered themselves members of the Church of England.  However as under James, and even more under his son, Charles I, (reigned from 1625 until his execution in 1649), the Church of England moved increasingly away from the Calvinist/Puritan ideals towards a recovery of its Catholic liturgical heritage and Arminian doctrine; consequently the co-existence of the Puritan faction and the Episcopal faction in the same Church of England became more and more strained.  In the New England colonies there were no bishops and no royal officials who could insist on worship conforming to the Book of Common Prayer.  Ministers and Congregations were free to do more or less as they wished, while back in England non-conformity was dealt with with an increasing severity.  It was only a matter of time until the tension between the two factions would set off an explosion that would shatter the Church of England.  And it would do more than that, it would bring down the monarchy. 

I think this is a particularly important period for us to look at.  Increasingly since the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church, at least in the English speaking world (and too a lesser extent in France and Germany) has also seen a division between two distinct visions of Church.  This is not totally new, at least here in the United States where the recusant tradition of the old Maryland Catholics gave a markedly different Catholicism than the immigrant tradition brought over from France during the French Revolution and later from the German, Italian, and Eastern European Catholics who settled here in the 19^th century.  The different Episcopal styles of Ambrose Maréchal and John England in the early 19^th century or the conflicts between Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Corrigan in the late 19^th century witness to two distinct—and to some extent incompatible—ecclesiologies in American Catholicism.  Today we see the Church of Cardinals Burke and Archbishop Cordileone and Bishop Finn and its very different style than the Church of Cardinal O’Malley and Archbishop Cupich.   Like the Church of England in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries we can live together in the same broad communion, but how far will this last without breaking?  Certainly Burke or O’Malley or Cordileone or Finn or Cupich will never break bonds with Peter in Rome and thus with one another, but there is a rising tension among priests and peoples that might easily snap the cords, each accusing those of the other side of betraying the tradition.  As a historian I think that not only is schism a possibility but that it is all but inevitable unless we are willing to allow for a pluriformity of Catholicisms in which legitimate differences of discipline and even doctrine are respected.  A rigid uniformity, on the other hand, will be very detrimental to the future of the Church.