Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (25 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 134
Behind this view lay a rich conception of the Supper as a source of profound emotional satisfaction. Increase felt an ecstasy at the Lord's Table that he believed all gracious men should experience when they receive the sacrament. For, though Increase always denied to the Supper the power to convert sinners, he attributed more emotional power to it than most Puritan intellectuals did. To be sure, he employed the conventional terms in describing it: the Supper was a "seal" of the covenant of grace, a sign of our salvation through Christ, a commemoration of His sacrifice. But he invested these terms with an intense piety. A man who hoped to take the Supper should realize, he once wrote, that the Supper was more than a mere form, a commemorative device. One who took it had the obligation to come to the Table in a loving frame of mind, and prepared to experience a greater emotion than he knew. Indeed, soul-ravishing joys should seize him. The heart of these joys was Christian love, love of Christ for His gift of Himself to men, love of Christ's ordinances, and the love of one's brethren in the particular church. Bread and wine, the "outward elements" of the sacrament, helped induce these notions in the soul. Increase Mather always emphasized that men needed the tangible to help them comprehend the intangible.
57
Mather, however, was not content to point to the connections of inner and outer in the sacrament; he insisted that the full beauty and power of the Supper would affect men only if its every aspect were grasped. Thus he made explicit the spiritual significance of each sacramental action. The smallest physical movement spoke of a divine loveliness. The "taking" of the bread and wine signified the incarnation of Christ in human nature; the "blessing" of the bread and the cup signified the sacred use of Christ for men; the "breaking'' of the bread, the "bruising" to death of Christ on the cross; the "giving'' of the elements to men, the "giving" by God of Christ for man; the "receiving," the reception of Christ as our Savior; the eating and drinking of the elements, our feeding in faith upon a crucified Christ.
58
Other Christian groups have given themselves fully to the beauty of the Eucharist. Still there is in Increase Mather's theory more than the usual plan for participation in a right frame of mind. Since observing him as he gives the Supper to his church is no longer possible, we should not suggest that the ex-
 
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perience carried great physical gratifications for him; nor can we say with absolute certainty that he expected communicants to feel sensual pleasures at the Table. He wrote after all only of the ravishment of the soul, not the body. Certainly he experiencedand desperately wanted others to experienceemotional satisfactions. But he may have felt more than satisfaction as he gave and received Communion. He concentrated not just on the thing symbolized, not just on the elements of the sacraments, but on the symbol itself, and the visible events which happened to itreceiving, breaking, eatingto a degree that hints that he experienced sensual pleasures at the Table of the Lord.
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The Supper could nourish; it could enable men to grow in grace. Thus, to Mather, it followed that only the qualified should come. A man could be transformed through a series of religious experiences, and then he could come to the Table with grace. A natural man lacked grace and he could not grow in something he did not have.
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Although Stoddard seems to have shared a delight as great as Mather's when he took the Supper and though his advocacy of open Communion rested in part on the belief that the sacrament should give comfort, he did not claim that it would produce bliss in communicants because he recognized that the participation of many would be unacceptable to the Lord. He encouraged all members to take it, hoping thereby to induce conversion, an experience that might be pure ecstasy. Thus Stoddard's sacramental theory reduced the importance of the sacrament in worship as it increased it in conversion.
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In reducing sacramental practice to the level of ordinary worship, Stoddard argued that though the participation of an unregenerate man in Communion was not "acceptable" to God, it was clearly "lawful."
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A natural man might after all be regenerated by the Supper. Increase had replied that if the Supper were a converting ordinance it ought to be given to the profane. Why confine it to Church members? Stoddard never really answered this question except to repeat that the sacraments were designed for administration to those in the Church. Some division between the Church and the world had to be maintained. But as far as Increase could see, Stoddard threatened to close the gap almost completely.
63
The controversy between the two ended as such disputes did
 
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between Puritans, with each man more than ever convinced of the strength of his own position and the weakness of his antagonist's. But at the close, through the struggle in the pulpit and the presses, the arguments of each had been strangely transformed. What began in disagreement over sacramental practices finished as conflict over the meaning of New England.
Throughout, Stoddard had rested his case on a very simple proposition: good men could not be separated from bad men by the Church. That fact helped define the character of the Church in the world. The Church would contain saints and hypocrites, but far from considering such a mixture a liability, it ought to seize its opportunity to use all the ordinances, sacraments as well as sermons, to convert its members to the faith. In New England the Church occupied a particularly favored place: the entire nation comprised the Church, because the entire nation, saints and sinners alike, enjoyed a special covenant with God. This far had Stoddard's understanding and appreciation of externality brought him. In fact, Stoddard extended the theory of the national covenantthe covenant God made with a people regardless of the certainty that any people would contain men damned eternallyfar beyond its conventional limits. The national covenant promised temporal prosperity to a people who lived up to its conditions, though it could not convey salvation to anyone. But as originally conceived, the nation was not presumed to coincide with the Church, a more restricted agency because of its purity.
64
Stoddard, however, argued in the course of his dispute with Increase Mather that the "Public Covenant" between God and a people constituted the Church. As Stoddard read history, God made the first national covenant with the Jews in Israel and thereby created a national Church. In this polity the Israelites organized themselves into separate synagogues for convenience, but they relegated these smaller institutions into a subordinate position under the Church that was the nation. In fashioning this ecclesiastical polity the Israelites apparently simply followed the light of nature. At any rate, Stoddard found justification for this arrangement in nature which taught that man was "fitted for Society" so that he might worship with his fellows. According to nature's laws men ought to worship not only in "lesser societies"particular churchesbut in ''Kingdoms and Countrys'' as well. Nature also instructed men in the line of au-
 
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thority: "the whole hath Power over the parts" provided a principle that must be applied to Church organization. And therefore Stoddard proposed a system whereby the nation as a Church supervised the worship and discipline of subordinate churches. He admitted that no such national Church was mentioned in the New Testament. The reason was not that "National Churches are not according to the mind of God," Stoddard explained, but that no Christian nations existed in the days of the gospels. Now Christian nations abounded, and national churches represented the wishes of the Lord speaking in nature and through the history of Israel.
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Although Stoddard conceived of the nation as the Church, he never suggested in the seventeenth century that everyone in the nation should receive the sacraments. The Church, he advised, should continue to exclude the vicious and profane from its sacraments. But as he pondered the uses of externality and the impossibility of detecting saints in a world of sinners, he gradually altered his conception of the benefits of the Supper. The Lord's Supper, he maintained in the 1680's, could help regenerate menit was a converting ordinance as well as one which nourished the gracious. Hence it should be given to carnal men, who professed faith in Christ and lived acceptable lives. Yes, he replied to Increase Mather, Communion was the seal of the covenant. No, he said, when Communion was given to carnal men it did not seal a "blank" because these men were in covenant with God despite the absence of grace, an external covenant whose condition was a morally sincere profession of belief and obedience to the law. The Supper given to such communicants might carry them to the faith that saved.
66
By the early years of the eighteenth century, Stoddard had come to place a new value on the sacrament. Not only might the Supper produce faith, it might also ensure outward prosperity to the Church. God had made a "publick covenant" with the nation because it was a Christian nation; this external covenant deserved to be sealed in the same manner as the internalthrough the Lord's Supper. Therefore, unregenerate men should claim the sacrament not just in hope of salvation, but as a "right" they possessed as part of the "body corporate," and as a guarantee of the blessings of ''outward prosperity." By this astonishing extension of theory, Stoddard lifted the sacrament from the realm
 
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of private experience and placed it among the terms of public obedience to the national covenant. And in doing so, he unwittingly co-opted religion to secular purposes, an action Increase Mather both feared and despised.
67
Stoddard's pronouncements contained nothing about the final meaning of New England. Presumably he believed that its character was important, but he was disturbingly content to think of New England in the terms of the national covenant alone. That covenant included sinners as well as saints and, as Increase Mather came to see, sinners could do little for the Lord.
68
The more that Stoddard asserted that the Church in New England included the entire nation, sinners as well as saints, the more Increase felt disposed to insist that the Church must remain the haven of the pure. The struggle with Stoddard persuaded him that New England's only hope of avoiding rejection by God lay in the Church. The Church held hope only so long as it held fast to its purity. If it were pure, it could stand for the entire land. Though it contained only a fragment of New England's people, it nourished the people most precious to God. In a sense Stoddard was right, Mather conceded, the Church was New England, but not the national Church, not the Church of the impure, but the Church composed of visible saints.
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This New England, the New England of the Church and not of the public covenant, was a type, Mather believed, in the sense that Israel had been a type. If New England was a type, what was the antitype? The answer was one his father would have shrunk from announcing though he may have considered it: New England was "a Type and emblem of new-Jerusalem," the Kingdom of God that would flourish in the millennium.
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The Church of the pure, the visible saints, could stand for the entire land. Though they were only a fragment of the people, they could redeem the whole. And the truly godly among them, the New England of the type, could serve saints everywhere. When these saints received the Lord's Supper, they anticipated the saints in Heaven sitting at the side of Christ, judging the world on its final day. Hence the desperate need to preserve the beauty and the purity of the sacrament; anything less would rob New England of its glory at the end of history.
 
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8
The Invisible World
While the controversy with Stoddard was brewing, but before it reached a boil, Increase Mather was thinking about another matter that affected his ideas about the Church in New England: nature and an arena beyond nature, the invisible world. In fact Mather always pursued his scientific studies in the frame of mind that inspired not only his ecclesiology but all his scholarship. His preoccupations, which were those of his generation of New English divines, remained centered on God's designsespecially as they involved New England. It is true that in Mather's lifetime such concerns lost much of their urgency for him as he turned his attention to the problems of converting the elect, but even then his sense of wonder at the mystery in the world and his love of the power behind it, which had been reinforced by his scientific studies, continued as strong as ever.
Increase approached scientific study with the traditional Puritan assumptions about nature as an extension of God's wisdom and power. His friend Samuel Willard once said that "When God wrought the works of Creation, he had a Design in every Creature."
1
The detection of that design was recommended to all sorts of men, who were told that it was their duty just as poring over
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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