Timon Cline wrote recently that “theonomists” didn’t run Puritan New England.¹ He is correct, in his major thesis, that the claim that “Puritanism and the natural law tradition are antithetical” is “wildly ahistorical.” Mr. Cline demonstrates that Puritans repeatedly extolled natural law. Besides the Puritan sources Mr. Cline mustered, Increase Mather articulated their view succinctly: “the [natural] Works of God have a voice in them, as well as his Word.”² So, insofar as theonomy is a rejection of natural law, Mr. Cline is right to conclude that Puritanism was decidedly non-theonomic.

However, Mr Cline, in his justifiable attempt to dissociate Puritanism from (that definition of) theonomy, appears to over-reach by seeking to over-turn the claim that the New England colonies (save Rhode Island) were “Bible Commonwealths” – that is, Protestant theocracies. Citing Joe Boot, Greg Bahnsen (1948-1995) “and others” as peddlers of this “common false narrative,” he claims that “better historians,” like George Haskins (1915-1991) put that idea “to bed.” But Haskins was a legal scholar, a professor of law, and not primarily a historian. As for reputable historians who specialized in New England Puritanism, Perry Miller (1905 –1963) championed the idea that Massachusetts was a “Bible Commonwealth.” To attribute the “Bible Commonwealth” label to Boot and Bahnsen, rather than Miller, is odd. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the New England Puritans and yet I did not know that referring to the original Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “Bible Commonwealth” was questionable. I casually referred to it as such in a 2020 article published by The Gospel Coalition.³ Demonstrating that that label is appropriate is the purpose of this article.

The City Upon a Hill

John Winthrop (1587/88 –1649), the first governor of Massachusetts, told the settlers while crossing the Atlantic that they were going to plant a “City upon a Hill.” ⁴ The entire world was to be awed by the model of Christian charity they were going to build. Winthrop told them, “The eyes of all people are upon us.” That this was not a mere rallying slogan but a genuine expression of the founders’ self-identity is demonstrated by his description of the guilt of Robert Keayne (1595 –1656). Keayne had not, by his price gouging, just trespassed Winthrop’s vision of a revolutionary Christian community but had brought disrepute on “a church and commonwealth now in their infancy and under the curious observation of all churches and civil states in the world.”⁵ Massachusetts was under “curious observation” precisely because it wasn’t just another commercial colony or a duplication of old England. It was something new: a “Bible Commonwealth,” a Protestant Christendom.

Indeed, the debate between historians of Perry Miller’s generation was not whether Christian principles primarily motivated the planting of New England, but which Christian principles in particular: the repristination crusade of Puritanism specifically to reform the Church of England or the a broader evangelistic impulse that would eventually give rise to the “great century of missions.”⁶ Theodore D. Bozeman and Robert Middlekauf insist that the chief end of New England was, as Samuel Danforth (1626-1674) put it in his famous May 11, 1670 election sermon, “A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness,” the “liberty to walk in the faith of the gospel.”⁷ John White (1575 –1648), a Puritan Anglican pastor writing to recruit colonists for Massachusetts at the very inception of the colony, demonstrated that they were indeed moving forward toward an evangelical goal. He emphasized that the purpose of planting New England was “the furthering of the gospel.”⁸ The original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony demonstrates that. It shows a Native American echoing the Macedonian call (from Acts 16:9), pleading with Puritans to “Come over and help us.”

Finally, Bozeman’s dissection of motives for the Great Migration — positing the Puritan quest for “liberty of the ordinances” against exemplary mission to England which is, in turn, contrasted to mission to the Indians, and those motives contrasted with economic ones — smacks of the modern scholar’s penchant for fine distinctions rather than the more varied aspirations of early seventeenth century religious folk.⁹ Indeed, the very ideational nature of Puritanism, with its inherent holism, precluded such divisions.¹⁰ Could not the founders of Massachusetts Bay have seen all of this as a piece: fleeing to America as an opportunity to escape Laudian liturgical tyranny and thus setting up “pure” churches, which, through the “beauty of holiness” would attract the native Americans to the gospel, discipline all members, white and red, in true Christian living, inspiring all to work hard in vocations, which would produce prosperity for most, shared with all, which would produce a society so attractive to England and the rest of Europe that the nations would stream to Zion?¹¹

Perry Miller, in his path-breaking “Errand Into the Wilderness,” had it right: “Massachusetts Bay was not merely an organization of immigrants seeking advantage and opportunity. It had a positive sense of mission.”¹² This sense of mission pervaded the first three generations.¹³ But, as Miller observes, New Englanders not only had the “errand” but also the wilderness with the opportunities that distance from London provided.

Distance from England allowed the Puritans to start de novo with a pure experiment based on their congregational Puritan principles. That required, regrettably, the persecution of dissenters, notably Baptists (whom they typically labeled “Anabaptists.”) Their Puritan brothers back in the homeland, surrounded by a relatively diverse religious climate in which Puritan Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists (whom Matthew Bingham calls “baptistic congregationalists”), found that hard to fathom.¹⁴ Only fifteen years after Winthrop disembarked from the Arbella, his former Puritan comrades back in England, leaders who could easily have joined Winthrop, John Cotton and Richard Mather, wrote an open criticism of the young colony’s intolerance toward “Anabaptists.” To the leading lights of the “City upon a Hill” both the unique mission and the necessities and opportunities of their experiment clearly justified their stringency. Puritan America was more oppressive than Commonwealth England (1649-1660) precisely because it was more Puritan; their New England colonies were Bible commonwealths.

The wilderness gave the Puritans an opportunity to start over. Far from Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1861-1932) “wilderness thesis” of democracy growing spontaneously out of the forest, for the founders of the Bay colony the wilderness gave them the “free air” to live out their universal mission to its fullest. The first generation of New England Puritans believed that those who did not agree with their established Congregationalism, like the Baptists, had “free liberty to keep away from us.”¹⁵ We might say today, “Puritan New England: Love it or Leave It!” New England, after all, was the Puritans’ experiment. They can be excused some sense of ownership. Their insistence on conformity was the Puritans application of the European policy of cuius regio, eius religio.¹⁶ Their established Congregationalism was unique.

The second generation testified to the thoroughly Puritan aspirations that brought the founders to New England. Edward Johnson (1599-1672), in the first published history of New England, the 1654 Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England, noted that New England was the training ground “to muster up the first of [God’s] forces in.”¹⁷ He wrote that the Puritans on the “western end of the world” had constructed “the porch of the glorious building” to be soon completed in England.¹⁸ “These poor New England people,” he wrote, “the Lord has sent . . . to preach in this wilderness and to proclaim to all nations, the near approach of the wonderful works that ever the sons of men saw.”¹⁹ Likewise, the pious merchant, John Hull, described New England as “a wine-cellar for Christ to refresh his spouse in.” He believed that it was the example and writings of those refreshed in this wine-cellar that awoke “the whole nation” “to think of a general reformation,” making them “willing to enter into a war.” Hull believed the New England Jerusalem lit the fire that set off the English Civil War.²⁰

Increase Mather, the de facto spiritual and civil leader of the second generation, declared,

It was a great and high undertaking of our fathers when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean that so they might follow the Lord into his land. A parallel instance not to be given except that our father Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees or that of his seed from the land of Egypt.²¹

It was in respect to some worldly accommodation that other Plantations were erected, but Religion and not the World was that which our fathers came hither for . . . . Pure Worship and Ordinances without the mixture of human inventions was that which the first fathers of this colony designed in their coming hither. We are the children of the good old non-conformists. ²²

The great pioneering missionary, John Eliot explained that his reason for coming to New England was “to enjoy the holy worship of God, not according to the fantasies of men but according to the Word of God, without … human additions and novelties.”²³  In the third generation, Samuel Wigglesworth wrote, “A pure and undefiled religion was the great thing our ancestors had in their view when they cast their eye towards this wilderness for a habitation.”²⁴

To fulfill these yearnings, English Puritans founded three – maybe four – colonies: Massachusetts Bay (1630), Connecticut (1636, eventually annexing Saybrook) and New Haven (1638). Though it’s debatable, I believe Plymouth – the separatists’ forerunning colony – should be numbered among them. Indeed, American Puritanism can be called “The 1620 Project.”²⁵ The American strand founded in 1620 and then in earnest in 1630, the Puritan “City Upon a Hill,” is the 1620 project still locked in a struggle with the consumeristic 1619 project.

Congregational Theocracies

This brings us back to Mr. Cline’s essay. As for the major point he seeks to make – that Puritans were not theonomists who held that “Scripture alone [is] a competent and exhaustive legal code” – he is convincing. He has mustered an overwhelming and irrefutable number of Puritan sources to prove that. However, he overstepped when he concluded the Puritans “did not inhabit a Bible commonwealth.” That is, not only does he insist that they were not theonomic – ruled exclusively by biblical law – he implies that they were not even theocratic – ruled by the church. In this over-reach, he is mistaken. As the above Puritan sources show, their goals were consciously Christian, both in the Puritan quest to purify the church and in evangelizing the world. To admit that they were driven by that goal, which I believe the evidence above requires, while somehow failing to organize their society for that purpose is to accuse them of inconsistency, if not incompetence.

If the theonomists fail to understand that for the New England Puritans natural law was God’s “other book,” Cline and others even more intent on secularizing the “City Upon a Hill” fail to understand how the New England Puritans’ ecclesiastical polity shaped their civil polity. New England Puritans arrived before the Westminster Assembly (1643–52) decided in favor of presbyterianism. Prior to Westminster, Puritans were diverse in their polity, with some tolerant of episcopacy and others leaning toward presbyterianism or congregationalism. Those who crossed the “rude waves” of the Atlantic slipped into congregationalism with ease. This was pregnant with political implications.

First, congregationalism is faced with the task of identifying who qualifies for church membership. Who among those who attend the church’s meetings are members and who are not? Since neither a bishop nor a session of elders can be called upon to make this decision, congregationalism requires some kind of objective criteria. The Congregational churches, as developed in exile, mostly in the Netherlands, required potential members to subscribe to the church’s doctrine and live morally.²⁶ The “pilgrims” of the Plymouth colony followed this pattern, requiring doctrinal subscription and moral living for church membership. Soon after John Cotton arrived (1633), a revival ensued among the new colonists. The result was that for entry into church membership these Puritans added a public testimony of experienced conversion. Richard Mather explained that prospective members were asked first to “speake concerning the Gift and Grace of Justifying Faith in their soules, and the manner of Gods dealing with them in working it in their hearts,” then, “Secondly, we heare them speake what they do believe concerning the Doctrine of Faith.”²⁷ This practice of expecting prospective members to be able to express an experience of God’s regenerative work further emphasized the commitment of the Puritan church to be an assembly of visible saints. “For the first time in Christendom,” claims Sydney Ahlstrom, “a state church with vigorous conceptions of enforced uniformity in belief and practice was requiring an internal, experiential test of church membership.”²⁸ By 1700, Richard’s son, Increase Mather (1639- 1723), was still defending the practice of examining applicants to church membership.

It has been proved that church members ought to be believers, saints, regenerate persons. And therefore the Church should put the persons who desire admission into their holy communion to declare and show whether it be thus with them, whether they have truly repented of their sins, and whether they truly believe on Christ.²⁹

Second, in congregational polity these “visible saints” constitute the church and by vote make the major decisions for the church, including the selection of pastors. Congregationalism minimalizes clericalism and teaches democracy. The model of polity in the church is easily transferred to the body politic. In New England, while the civil rulers were God’s viceregents on earth, the pastors were a “speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy.”³⁰ Eventually the democracy is prone to break its silence. The “visible saints” lead Massachusetts Bay by having the exclusive right to vote. In the first generation, the franchise was restricted to men who had been admitted as church members. Hence, congregational polity controlled the electorate and through the electorate controlled the state. Thus, it was a congregational theocracy.

This overturns the claims of Baptists today, our main inheritors of congregationalism, that their polity is inherently antithetical to theocracy, to creating a theopolis on earth. The claim of many of our contemporary Baptists is that since their polity is democratic, that it promotes democracy (and implicitly religious diversity) in society at large; thus implying that more hierarchical polities, like episcopacy and presbyerianism, tend toward encouraging authoritarianism in the societies where they are dominant. The reality that Puritan New England was both congregational and a “Bible commonwealth” disproves that claim. Thus, the now frequent claim (usually by Baptists like me) that congregational polity (i.e. church democracy) leads to societal democracy and is antithetical to theocracy is disproven. The Puritans were simultaneously congregational and theocratic.

Finally, a theocracy is defined as a form of government in which God is recognized as the supreme civil ruler. Theonomy achieves this end by simply imposing Biblical civil laws, originally applied to ancient Israel, to contemporary society. Thus, theonomy is a sub-set of theocracy; not all Christian theocrats are theonomists. Others insist that in order for a system to be a true theocracy, the clergy must be involved in, if not dominate, the government. Even if we grant that definition, which is not necessary, to claim that Massachusetts Bay was not theocratic because the pastors – the only type of clergy within congregationalism – could not hold political office, fails to understand the theology or dynamics of congregationalism. Congregationalism pushes the soteriological principle of “the priesthood of all believers” into ecclesiology so that, while a church may have a “speaking aristocracy,” all the members are priests.³¹ In Puritan New England, these priests ruled the commonwealth, in the same way, today, the electorate rules the United States. The pastors may advise the theological priesthood, through their preaching and teaching, but ultimately church members had the final say.

Conclusion

Timon Cline has provided us with a fine demonstration of how the Puritans saw natural law, often in the form of English common law, incorporated with biblical law in the Puritan colonies. In so doing, he has refuted the claim that Puritans were theonomists imposing exclusive, simplistic biblical law. Yet, in so doing, the learnèd, insightful, and winsome Mr. Cline, went too far when he rejected the widespread view, espoused by esteemed, specialist historians, that the Puritan colonies were theocratic “Bible commonwealths.” They were, in fact, congregational theocracies.

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1. Timon Cline, “That One Time Theonomists Didn’t Run Puritan New England,” London Lyceum, July 8, 2022, https://www.thelondonlyceum.com/that-one-time-theonomists-didnt-run-puritan-new-england/. ↩︎
2. Increase Mather, The Latter Sign Discoursed of. Boston, 1682; according to Stout, The New England Soul, 102.  “One of the classic assumptions of the Puritan mind was that the will of God was to be discerned in nature as well as in revelation.” (Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 5.) ↩︎
3. “When Puritan Theology Helped Develop Immunology,” The Gospel Coalition, April 30, 2020, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/puritan-immunology/. ↩︎
4. John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity (1630). ↩︎
5. Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England,” 1630-1649, I, 315-318; according to Alden T. Vaughan, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620-1730, 174. ↩︎
6. On how New England Puritanism gave rise to Protestant missions, see John Carpenter, “New England Puritans: The Grandparents of Modern Protestant Missions,” Missiology 30:4 (October 2002), 519-532, narrated and illustrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqF4lJdENzI&ab_channel=CovenantCaswell. ↩︎
7. Danforth, “New England’s Errand into the Wilderness” (Cambridge, MA: Printed by S. G. and M. J., 1671), 9-10. ↩︎
8. The Planters Plea (London: William Jones, 1630), 399. ↩︎
9. T. Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 97-98. ↩︎
10. For a discussion of these terms see John B. Carpenter, “A New Definition of Puritanism, A Cross-Disciplinary Approach,” The Evangelical Journal, (Vol. 36, 1, Spring 2019), 17. https://covenantcaswell.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/A-New-Definition-of-Puritanism.pdf. ↩︎
11. Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence suggests just such a multidimensional original motivation to the Great Migration. In it, Johnson describes how the Puritan founders were key players in Christ’s ultimate overthrow of the Anti-Christ (Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards [Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1976], 189). ↩︎
12. Miller, “Errand Into the Wilderness,” Religion in American History: A Reader (Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, editors, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31. ↩︎
13. On continuity in the first three generations in New England see John Carpenter, “New England’s Puritan Century,” Fides et Historia, Vol. 35, 1 (Winter 2003), 41-58. ↩︎
14. Matthew C. Bingham, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4, 18, 23. ↩︎
15. Nathaniel Ward, The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (1647). ↩︎
16. “Whose realm, their religion,” meaning that the religion of the ruler determined the religion of those ruled. ↩︎
17. E. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England (1654) (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1974), 1. ↩︎
18. Richard Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 249. ↩︎
19. E. Johnson, 34. ↩︎
20. “Dairies of John Hull” (1857) (Puritan Personal Writings: Diaries, Sacvan Bercovitch, editor; New York: AMS Press, 1982), 168. ↩︎
21. Increase Mather for the 1679 Boston Synod, The Necessity of Reformation (1679), i. ↩︎
22. original emphasis, Increase Mather, An Earnest Exhortation to the Inhabitants of New England (Boston: John Foster, 1676), 21. ↩︎
23. According to Richard Cogley, “John Eliot’s Puritan Ministry,” Fides Et Historia 31:2, 1999b: 2. ↩︎
24. Samuel Wigglesworth, An Essay for Reviving Religion: A Sermon delivered at Boston (Boston: S. Kneeland, May 30, 1733), 34. ↩︎
25. “The 1620 Project: Puritanism and the Ideological Founding of America,” Touchstone Magazine, May/June, 2021. ↩︎
26. Stanley Grenz, Isaac Backus — Puritan and Baptist: His Place in History, His Thought, and Their Implications for Modern Baptist Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1983), 24. ↩︎
27. Richard Mather, Church-Government and Church-Covenant Discussed (London: R. O. and G. D., 1643), 23. ↩︎
28. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 146. ↩︎
29. Increase Mather, The Order of the Gospel (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1700), 19. ↩︎
30. Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse In Eighteenth Century Connecticut, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 1. ↩︎
31. Matt Capps, “We the Priesthood of All Believers!,” (March 26, 2013), https://matthewzcapps.com/2013/03/26/we-the-priesthood-of-all-believers/. ↩︎