Puritan concept of History

This essay argues that the Puritans were strikingly driven by an apocalyptic vision of history and life, and a sense of a divine ordering of everything. From this perspective, we will proceed.

For the Puritans, history was a product of divine necessity and decree. The Puritan conception of history was that historical events were universal, providential, apocalyptic, and periodized (Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and apocalypse in the Puritian migration to America 3). They conceived history as an apocalyptic event occurring outside of chronological time because God has so ordained it to be. Their adoption of an apocalyptic theology explains their worldview and understanding of the work of God in the cosmos, and the dynamics between ecclesiastical history and secular history, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man, the city of God and the city of man, the secular and the sacred.  History was by far thought as an operating event that could be read in two levels. The past, present and future times could be read theologically and mystically, dialectically and typologically. The Puritans looked back into the past to envision what will come to pass in the future, and saw themselves in the present as God’s primary agents in history. Further, they considered history and various dispensations of time in light of the biblical idea of covenant, between God and man. More particularly, they insisted they had a covenant with God, and were a new covenant community. “Wee are entered into Covenant with Him [God] …wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eyes of all people are uppon vs” (Modell of Christian Charity 159), John Winthrop declared.  In this respect, ecclesiastical history is a unique mode of historical thought.  They believed all history, secular and sacred, displays the working of God’s divine providence.

The Puritans posited an apocalyptic vision of life and interpreted history ideologically, in which they believed that they’ve entered a new sphere of sacred time and sacred space, and from this standpoint they accounted for their migration experience in America.[1] It is from this mode of thought also that, John Winthrop insisted that their community was “a Citty upon a Hill” (“A Model of Christian Charity” in The English Literature of America: 1500-1800, 157) entrusted with a divine commission.[2] As a new covenant community, the Puritans stressed their special relationship with God, believed their removal from England for the new world bore eschatological significance and fulfillment, had social and political meaning, and was good for the spreading and advancement of the Gospel, even for the salvation of the savages of the New world. In their popular discourse, they sustained that God had rejected the elect nation of England as he did in the past to the nation of Israel, and now had graciously chosen them as God’s new and elect people. The substantial proof is that God had kept his promise when he safeguarded them in their way/voyage to the new world and lead them to the American wilderness. In this way, they believed themselves as God’s agents, exceptional community with a far-reaching purpose. As Avihu Zakai argues, “In their de-sacralization of the Old World [England] and their sacralization of the New [the American wilderness], the Puritans produced thereby the first original American ideology of history” (Exile and Kingdom). In the subsequent paragraph, I reference three important concepts or ideologies underlying the puritan mind and guiding their philosophy of history.  The concept of typology, the predisposition of a divine providence, and the establishment of a social order, correspondingly, represent a holistically Puritan project and vision of life.

I.                   Providence

The Puritans emphasized that history was controlled and directed expressively by [God’s] special divine providence and order (Zakai 8). This premise is the highlight of influential works such as John Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity, William Braddord’s Plymouth Plantation, and Mary Rowlandon’s The Chosen People of God: Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative. Winthrop sustained that the Puritans were the chosen people of God and referred to God as “Our God” and to the Puritans as “his oune people.”  When the Indians attacked the Puritans in Lancaster, Rowlandon harked back to the biblical narrative of Joseph in Egypt to show that the Puritans were God’s chosen people by divine providence, “Shall there be evil in the city find the Lord faith not done it?…If any of thine be driven out to the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord thy God gather thee..”  The Puritans also believed that God had ordered the world and predestined deliberately whatsoever comes to pass including the outcomes of future events and also what will be decided by volitional agents. In this respect, one might infer that they embraced a meticulous, comprehensive view of [divine] providence and sovereignty. As Rumsey notes, “Luck, chance, fortune or fate did not exist in such a world” (Acts of God, 7). Further, the Puritans maintained a theocentric vision of life, of the world and humanity at large and yet emphasized human participatory role in cosmic events.  It is noteworthy for the Puritans, however, the Bible and the Book of nature correspondingly disclose God’s plan in history for humanity.

II.                Typology

The Puritans were masters of typological imagination.[3] Typology was a collective consciousness in their circle. As a concept, typology may be described as an interpretation of the Old Testament persons, figures, ceremonial rituals, events as types, signs and foreshadows which prefigure teleologically those in the New Testament. It could also be an exclusive reference to the person, and historical deeds and events of Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Davis, The Exegetical Traditions of Puritan Typology 15). The Puritans interpreted the drama of salvation history in both social-political and spiritual contexts and anticipated cosmic events to be fulfilled in dialectic terms. Consequently, their migration to the New world was a pilgrimage from Egypt to the Promised Land, from Babylon to the New Jerusalem, From England[4] to the American Wilderness. Derivatively one could affirm that the Puritans initiated a three-dimensional typology, appropriating the events in their lives antithetically: The Genesis type, Exodus type, and the New covenant type.  In this vein, they also envisioned a new national culture, a new nation, and  a new model of society (John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity” 152-159);  which have  not only defined or become the contemporary United States of America but celebrates America’s enduring ideals and its exceptionalism in the divine economy of the cosmic order.[5]  With this eschatological and millennial dimension of history, the Puritans conquered the new world and made it their own. 

III.             Social Order 

Accordingly the Puritan conception of the ideal state, as expressed in Winthrop’s Christian Charity, lies in the conviction that God is the sole determinator of universal moral laws that regulate society and maintain cosmic stability. It is in this respect they believe the world is ordered hierarchically in which it was said that some people have been predestined to be subordinate to others. They developed specific concepts of manhood and womanhood and highlighted complementary differences in role and function between man and woman, husband and wife, in the family and social orders, correspondingly. Society should not be construed in terms of egalitarian mode, rather in complementarian course. Hence, male domination and female subordination is advocated. The Puritans stressed the husband’s headship in marriage, the wife’s and children’s absolute submission or obedience (to the father) in the family.

As to the offices of the Government, the Puritans maintained a theocratic state and used governmental sites to enforce and promote religious conviction. Hence there was not a sharp difference between the office of the government and the ecclesiastical office, in the puritan mind. Self-government originated in town meetings and was subject to biblical guidance.  The state was Puritan, the towns and schools were puritans at large. The laws were puritan in origin and passed by Puritan ecclesiastical-civil authorities.  In earlier American colonies, only puritans were eligible to vote or hold public office. Accordingly, in the Puritan social order followed: first, the family, second, the church, and third, the civil society or common-wealth.  In the family, the husband is the supreme authority over his wife, parents over children, masters over slaves or servants.

IV. Conclusion

Because the Puritans saw themselves as having a special covenant with God as an exceptional community, based on the concept of divine providence, therefore we could well infer their primary audience was their own community, the covenant families of the Puritan circle. Outsiders were doubtfully anticipated as an extension of the Puritan society. On the other hand, one could have assumed perhaps a non-covenant individual such as the savage native Indians could join the community because of the Puritans’ claim to be “A City on the Hill” with the possibility to influence and invite others in the Puritan faith.  That was not the case, however. Puritan scholarship bears little witness of this phenomenon, that is, the effort to bring in or include the savage Indian into the chosen covenant community.  

In conclusion, The Puritans were the Exemplary of the doctrine of American exceptionalism which stresses that Americans are the exception of the mistakes of the past,  and that they [the Puritans] were starting a new world, initiating a new page in cosmic history and effecting a revolutionary humanism. It is safe to say, in part, that the discovery of “America” lies in the discovery of the Puritan Past.

BIBLIOGRAHPY

.

Davis, Thomas M. “The Exegetical Traditions of Puritan Typology,” Early American Literature

5 (1970): 11-50.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Typology,” in Sermons and Discourses: 1723-1729, WJE Online 14 (2009).

Ed. Kenneth P. Minkerma.   6 June 2009. http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4xMzozOjE6OC53amVv

Heimert, Alan, and Andrew Delbanco, eds. The Puritans in America: A Narrative

Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Jeylen, Myra, and Michael Warner, eds. The English Literatures of America: 1500-1800. New

York: Routledge, 1997.

Konkle, Lincoln. Thorton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition. Columbia: University of

Missouri Press, 2006.

Rumsey, Peter Lockwood. Acts of God and the People, 1620-1730. Ann Arbor: UMI Research

Press, 1986.

Zakai, Avihu. Exile and Kingdom: History and apocalypse in the Puritan migration to America.

New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

[2]  Heimert and Delbanco propose that “A Model of Christian Charity” can be read… as “restorationist” that is, as envisioning a social order in New England that would recapture the serenity of a recollected (or imagined) English past of well-defined place for all, and of clearly understood and easily fulfilled obligations within the social hierarchy” (The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology [ Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], 81) 

[3] For example, the Puritan Jonathan Edwards interpreted typology as the “shadow of beings” found in Scripture, nature, and human experience (“Typology,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1723-1729).

[4] William Bradford insists the first breaking out of the light of the Gospel occurred in “Our Honourable Nation of England, which was the first of nations whom the Lord adorned therewith…” (“Of Plymouth Plantation,” 177)

[5] Lincoln Konkle, in his excellent work, Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition, observes that Puritan themes of transgression, guilt, and repressed sexuality pervade nineteenth and twentieth-century American literary works, 2.