Darkness Falls on the Land of Light REVIEW
I will let the author of this book, Douglas Winiarski, summarize what his book is about.
Darkness Falls on the Land of Light examines the breakdown of New England Congregationalism and the rise of American evangelicalism during the eighteenth century. It is not a story of resurgent puritan piety but a tale of insurgent religious radicalism. The “New England Way”—the distinctive ecclesiastical system that shaped the Congregational tradition during the century following the puritan Great Migration of the 1630s—did not collapse under the weight of secularizing impulses, as Perry Miller and an earlier generation of social historians assumed. Nor was it plagued by the moribund formalism often denigrated by scholars of early evangelicalism.’ Instead, a vibrant Congregational establishment was buried under an avalanche of innovative and incendiary religious beliefs and practices during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Acrimonious theological debate and sectarian schism had roiled the New England colonies a century earlier; and the region had witnessed previous “stirs,” “harvests,” and “awakenings.” But the surging religious fervor that engulfed New England in the wake of George Whitefield’s 1740 preaching tour was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. It marked a dramatic break with the past. The primary agents inciting change were, not prominent ministers and theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, but unassuming men and women like Hannah and John Corey, whose burgeoning fascination with the drama of conversion and the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit drove them out of the churches of the Congregational standing order.
What does all that mean? It means that before American Christianity was challenged by rationalism, science, and secularism, it was challenged by emotionalism, mysticism, and a radically individualized spirituality. One might argue that only when the emotional and mystical forces of the Congregational Puritan churches left to form “wilder and crazier” churches, were the intellectuals in those formerly unified but argumentative churches able to really liberate themselves from any and all romanticism. Free from the constraints of the mystics, the Unitarians and transcendentalists and deists were given a freer hand in directing Churches further to the rationalist side. It may well be that Unitarianism was made possible by the departure of the – for lack of a better term – Pentecostals. Rather than struggle staying together in one church, the “liberals” and “conservatives” determined that it was just better to separate into two camps and hire their own ministers. Within a few decades, two church cultures (Old Lights and New Lights) became four and four became eight and eight became sixteen and so on and so on until “everyone’s hat was their church” as Thomas Paine expressed it.
Whitefield’s revivals, beginning in 1740, were a catalyst that provided the jolt that Congregational churches needed to manifest their divided approaches into divided institutions. Whatever allows a cell to break into two cells (one of them becoming a liver and the other a lung) is what George Whitfield’s revivals did in the American colonies. Whitefield was thus the midwife of many American denominations.
“The people called New Lights diverged from their puritan ancestors in two specific ways,” Winiarski writes,
“Their preoccupation with Whitefield’s definition of the new birth and their fascination with biblical impulses. These critical factors set many Whitefieldarians on a course to embrace increasingly radical beliefs and practices, including the bodily presence of the indwelling Holy Spirit, continued revelation, dramatic visionary phenomena, and a strident desire to break fellowship with their kin and neighbors and worship with like-minded men and women who claimed similar experiences.”
What does this mean? It means that Whitfield drew tens of thousands of people on the fringes of the mainline church’s life into membership but did so by assuring them that their individual ideas, their intuitions, their interpretations, their experiences, and their minds and emotions mattered more than the status-quo ministers had ever thought that they should matter. New souls came into the fellowship of the churches, yes, but on the condition that they would be given a status equal before God to college trained ministers – or higher. To the converts of the revivals, born again experience of the Holy Ghost was a better credential for leadership of a church than a degree from Harvard. Ministers who supported the phenomenal growth in membership were soon disenchanted when they realized what a horde of barbarians they were now expected to genuflect to.
English divines had maintained that the experience of regeneration unfolded through a series of stages that began with infant baptism and proceeded gradually through a process of human socialization over decades. The new Whitfieldians were insisting that the process of turning from sinner to saint could be and maybe should be almost instantaneous. It required only a good deal of psychological heat and fireworks. To the Whitefieldians, an elementary school education was fine. Maybe it was even an advantage. Passion was the thing. Not preparation. The author calls these opposing ideas “spiritist and preparationist models of conversion.” Clearly, the youth loved the change because it advantaged those with lots of feeling (the youth always have an excess of that) and disadvantaged those with education and experience (something the youth always lacked). Perhaps of most importance to the youth of 1740, Whitefield’s notions gave them weapons with which they could attack their elders and eventually defy them. “You read your sermons rather than channeling them,” you might hear a young person say to his or her minister, “So I don’t have to listen to them.”
Winiarski claims that the shift can be clearly seen in the applications for membership to these Congregational churches. Whitefield was like Elvis and the Beatles to those who had long insisted that classical music was music and everything else was just noise. Before Whitefield, an applicant needed only answer questions about his or her stance respective to the approved creed. After Whitfield, in the “New Light” churches, you needed a narrative of a born again experience. Ministers in the new churches narrowed down the scope of their sermons until in some of them, there was nothing left but presentations of the Gospel and a demand for tears and repentance – itinerant preachers would go from town to town, like the “Brother Love’s Salvation Show” in Neil Diamond’s song of that name, seeking converts. Once the convert was made, the Spirit could be depended on to tell said convert everything else they might need to know.
The sermons of the “new lights,” the author writes,
“represented a narrowing of traditional preaching themes. Whereas provincial clergymen spoke on a broad range of issues — redeeming time, improving providences and afflictions, upright moral behavior, preparation for salvation—the Whitefieldarians trained their sights on election and conversion …”
The dependence upon a salvation experience rather than an educational socialization process meant that the new church members were inclined to think that God was speaking to them via impulses and intermittent revelatory experiences and they saw these as having a greater weight than a well-reasoned academic argument based on knowledge of Hebrew and Greek sources (what the ministers had). Ministers had desired to gain devotees but instead had acquired a hoard of prophets. The pews were filling with “teenagers” who felt the Lord speaking to them, albeit through isolated verses of the Bible taken out of context but accompanied by intense feeling (surely, the feeling is what legitimated the interpretation, right?) Even Jonathan Edwards, an early fan of new light thinking began to reconsider and tried to back-peddle, when he saw that even the whack-jobs could claim revelatory authority for starting break-off churches. This new revival had opened Pandora’s box.
“The prominent Newark, New Jersey, clergyman, Aaron Burr, spoke for many of his colleagues when he ranked biblical impulses at the head of the catalog of revival errors that he sent to Joseph Bellamy during the spring of 1742. ‘Thro’ this door,’ he complained, ‘many errors have crept into the Church.’” It was only a matter of time before youthful prophets would begin testing the limits of orthodoxy by insisting on spiritual revelations nowhere near what the orthodox ministers could conceivable endorse. The first claims were to all the powers exhibited in the New Testament book of Acts where apostles did miracles, spoke in tongues, and communicated God’s will on ethical matters. In time, some “prophets” asserted authority over the flock, declared themselves free of all sin, advocated for “spiritual marriage” and, by the time of Joseph Smith, laid claim to experiences of receiving direct revelations via angels and new scriptures. The distance between Paul the apostle and what could happen to you in a field in Palmyra shrunk to nothing.
“As the millennial promise of the awakenings gave way to increasingly boisterous and disruptive revival meetings and as churches swelled with young converts who justified their experiences of the indwelling Holy Spirit on the basis of bodily distress, darting biblical texts, or visions of the Book of Life, most New England clergymen retreated from their initial assessments. An increasingly vocal chorus of ministerial opposers began condemning revival errors in scores of published sermons and pamphlets. Nearly 750 people from more than 125 towns across New England, including three royal governors,146 Congregational ministers, and dozens of notable merchants, magistrates, and militia officers, subscribed to Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England, Charles Chauncy’s ponderous antidote to the “Great disorders and irregularities” that the outspoken Boston revival opposer believed were flourishing everywhere. Connecticut enacted a law banning the practice of itinerant preaching. Ministerial associations passed denunciations.”
I find this all fascinating really. It is almost exactly what happened to the first apostles. Pentecost was a moment of pent-up revelatory zeal and an insurrection against the tectonic weight of centuries of tradition. Everything is in flux. The Spirit of God is speaking to everyone. In the book of Acts, when the new Christians are accused of being drunk, the Apostle Peter responded:
These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
“‘In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
The revivals of the 1740’s laid claim to these egalitarian impulses and ran wild with them and American spirituality has never entirely gone back (though not for lack of trying on the part of some ministers).
Jonathan Edwards gave a lecture to the students of Yale, Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, to try and bring a return to decorum. But it was too late. Elvis was in the building. With “holy boldness” the insurrectionists began demanding control of the pulpits and when denied them, the right to leave and form their own churches. Here is where this story starts to get particularly fascinating. “Around 1780,” says Winiarski, “the few remaining Separate churches embraced the phrase ‘Strict Congregational’ to differentiate themselves from the mainstream Congregational churches.” And this is when the church in Middletown Vermont (now Middletown Springs Community Church) was formed.
Under the influence of its Whitfieldian convert first minister, Ithimar Hibbard, it labeled itself, “The Strict Congregational Church of Middletown.” Many of the early congregants were drawn to the town and church from a separatist church in Norwich Connecticut (Newent) that is widely thought to have been one of the most “Pentecostal” and “apostolic” and “perfectionist” of the new light off-shoots. Middletown’s first church was set up to be a place where membership was conditioned upon your having a clear conversion story, preferably one with some sturm and drang. If you opposed the revivalists, you were not likely to be welcome here. A number of the church’s first congregants had left their church in Norwich when the minister, Benjamin Lord, had refused to demand conversion stories from new applicants. Middletown’s church would exercise the less tolerant approach. You could expect some “extreme vetting.”
What was fascinating to me was just how full of the dust and fog of dissention these new “Spirit-infused” churches were. Few of them survived as they were inevitably torn asunder by the centrifical force of personality and individualism and faction. People gathered in the same buildings but each might carry their creed under their own hat. And what had happened in the Newent church was simply transplanted to the Middletown church: At some point, some sort of line had to be drawn when some particular inspired congregant aspired to lead the church beyond the confines of apostolic permission. In Middletown, that challenge came in the form of Nathaniel Wood (known by his followers as “priest Wood”) and his faction of “serious Christian mystics.” [More on him later.]
The beliefs of the “Strict churches,” the author notes were captured in a manifesto, written by the breakaway church in Mansfield Connecticut. These “Mansfield Articles” served as an unofficial creed in the churches that defined themselves as “strict congregational.” The Newent Separates likely carried a copy with them on their migration to Bennington (where so many of the separatists migrated) during the early 1760. What follows is a lengthy set of passages from Darkness Falls on the Land of Light defining what the Strict Congregational Churches were all about.
Following an opening statement in which they affirmed basic Reformed theological doctrines, the Mansfield Separates struck out in a decidedly new direction, arguing that the Holy Spirit “can and doth make a particular Apllication” to the soul of every saint. True Christians, as Mansfield minister Thomas Marsh declared, “may know one another as certainly or clearly as a Man may know a Dog from a Sheep.” Subscribers to the Mansfield articles boldly asserted that “we are of that Number who were Elected of GOD to eternal Life,” and they further stated that all doubt of one’s future estate was sinful and “contrary to the Command of GOD.” In the minds of dissenters such as Abigail Cleaveland, a founding member of the Separate church in Canterbury, true “Christians” by definition were those who “had assurance.” They believed that “CHRIST died for me,” as her kinsman Elisha Paine emphatically proclaimed. The Separates’ rigorous adherence to Whitefield’s concept of conversion anchored a new set of restrictive church membership standards that barred covenant owners, doctrinal professors, and unconverted godly walkers. The “Doors of the Church,” according to the Mansfield articles, “should be carefully kept against such as cannot give a satisfying Evidence of the Work of GOD upon their Souls whereby they are united to CHRIST.” Only “true Believers (and none but such)” had the right to offer children for baptism or participate in the Lord’s Supper. Consistent with the Whitefieldarians’ repudiation of inclusive church admission practices, Strict Congregationalists reestablished the ideal of visible sainthood as the foundation of their purified churches. They sought what one Separate minister called an “almost invisible Church of Christ”: an earthly institution that mirrored the heavenly communion of saints as closely as the Holy Spirit allowed.’
The ritual arm of this latest incarnation of the New England way involved the restoration of oral church admission testimonies. Anyone refusing to recite their conversion experiences before the congregation, the Mansfield articles stated, would be “Looked upon as in open Contempt of the Gospel Commands.” The Canterbury Separates even extended the practice of delivering oral relations to communicants in other congregations who sought to transfer their membership. Each time the Separates organized a new church, the founding members—both men and women—”stood confidently and zealously declared” their “Experences how the Lord brought them out of darkness into his marvelus light.” These ritual acts of public speaking cemented the bonds of fellowship among the saints. Some relations functioned like awakening sermons. Minister Paul Parke noted that many candidates were “filled with the holy Ghost”— some to “Greate Rapture”—when they recited their conversions and were admitted into “Visable felloship” with the Separate church in Preston, Connecticut. According to Backus, Hephzibah Packard’s relation “Caused many Saints to glorify God in her.” When delivered with power, oral conversion narratives provided certain evidence of election, ensured the purity of Separate church membership, edified the assembled congregation, and, on rare occasions, propelled onlookers into raptures of their own.
[It is somewhat interesting that the new light conversion narratives contain a plethora of spelling errors]
As ardent Whitefieldarians, the Mansfield Separates believed that “GOD has yet more Light to reveal to his church, without contradiction to what is already revealed.” Letters that circulated among dissenting congregations opened with salutations wishing that the recipient would “Abound In the Gifts and Gracess of the Spirit of God.” Church records described how parents were spirit-centered worship practices began with separatist ministers. Adopting the preaching techniques established by James Davenport and other charismatic itinerants during the revival years, Separate pastors rarely read from prepared sermon notes. Instead, they waited for the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Backus appealed to God for suitable texts during intensive preparatory meditations. Answers in the form of biblical impulses often arrived at the last possible moment. “I was much Shut up,” he noted during the winter of 1749. When the afternoon meeting came, Backus struggled to discover a text from which to preach, until the “Lord gave me one and gave me glorious Liberty in preaching from it and there was a blessed moveing among the people.”
Among the most controversial features of the Mansfield articles was the provision that encouraged — and sometimes obligated — the Separates to exercise Spirit-given gifts of exhorting, prayer, or prophecy. “We believe that all the Gifts and Graces that are bestowed upon any of the Members are to be improved by them for the Good of the Whole,” the Mansfield Separates explained. Backus alluded to this practice in his account of a typical meeting during the summer of 1749. “I prayed,” he noted, “then one of the bretherin prayed and in his Prayer, the wind of the Spirit, began to breath upon us.” On his wedding day several years later, Backus invited one parishioner to “pray before and after” the exchange of vows. And, when the Titicut church met to elect deacons, “sundry both of Brothers and Sisters Came out in declarations of great things that they Saw.” A few claimed to have received revelations that God was calling certain members of the church to serve as church officers;
Others voiced their inspired opinions that they, themselves, had been called to preach. “These Separatists pretend to Act by Inspiration and immediate Suggestions,” groused Plymouth, Massachusetts, magistrate Josiah Cotton after watching Backus’s congregation later that year. During their worship exercises, he continued, “if One has anything revealed, let it be Man or Woman, The Speaker Stops and keeps Silence till the Revelation be deliver’d, and so there are Several Speakers at one and the Same Meeting.” In Cotton’s mind, it was no coincidence that Isaac “Bacchus” shared the same name with the Greek god of wine. He was confident that such spirit-intoxicating “Wild fire” would “run ‘em into all Confusion.”
In contrast to the established churches that had slowly relinquished their authority over most moral and ethical trespasses to the civil courts during the previous half century; dissenting congregations zealously interrogated offending saints for seemingly minor infractions. The Separates soon found themselves “going on in a Line of disipline” with a vigilance not known in New England since the age of the puritan founders. Offences ranged from intemperance, fornication, and evil speech to stealing, dancing, and gaming. The Mansfield articles also commanded the brethren to seek resolution to “Civil Differences” within the church rather than in the provincial courts. For the first time in decades, churches resumed the practice of monitoring the business dealings of their members. Neighborly watchfulness, however, easily devolved into pettiness and backbiting. John Hayward withdrew from communion in the Titicut church after Esther Fobes refused to return some sewing items she had borrowed from his wife. The taint of unresolved conflicts even followed people when they transferred their membership between Separate churches. Letters from their former congregations ensured confession for sins committed months earlier and miles away.
The decentralized ecclesiology and Spirit-filled worship practices of the Separate churches paved the way for bitter infighting and precipitated endless hearings and church councils. Records from the Separate church in Providence, Rhode Island, indicate that one in ten saints “broke covenant” and were excommunicated between 1746 and 1770. The Canterbury Separates admonished, censured, suspended, or expelled one-third of their members during Solomon Paine’s ten-year pastorate. During this same period, Paine also received thirty-two requests from twenty other churches asking him to assist in resolving ecclesiastical disputes. Interchurch councils became so frequent early in the 1750S that at least one Separate congregation was forced to postpone a disciplinary hearing to accommodate delegates from other churches called to negotiate disputes elsewhere on the same day. The rising number of councils rapidly outstripped ordinations. As the formation of Separate churches slackened, dissenters turned inward and grew increasingly fractious.
To one sarcastic Canterbury brother, it seemed as if the only way to avoid censure would be to sell his “soul to Devils” in exchange for a full pardon.
There were many questions that these churches had to resolve. Should pastors study and use notes or speak extemporaneously? Should children be baptized? Should towns support ministers with taxes? Should apostolic gifts be expected? Were lay teachers the equal of educated ministers? Should ministers be educated? Was it a sin to expect miracles or a sin to deny them? What were the limits of prophetic gifts, if any? Should pastors be appointed by denominational councils or were such decisions the prerogative of the Congregations themselves? Could a leader self-appoint? Deep under the surface of these other questions though was this: Was the final authority in the church the word as found in the Bible or was it in the Spirit of God that interpreted it through individuals?
For many of the strict churches, intensity of feeling was the determinant of accuracy of revelation.
Which brings us back to Nathaniel Wood in Middletown. Nathaniel was the first pastor Ithimar Hibbard’s father-in-law and Hibbard, as rambunctious as he was, may have been slightly worried to see the direction that the patriarch of his deceased wife’s family started to head upon coming to Middletown. Nathaniel wanted control of Ithimar’s church. And leaders in the church opposed it, worried about where Nathaniel was inclined to go with it. For just as the new lights were trying to wrestle away control from the stodginess of old light pastors, so also there were others on the frontier of rationality who wanted to go further. Nathaniel Wood could dowse and he claimed that this was a power bequeathed to him by God Almighty. [Ithimar Hibbard’s second wife by the way, was the daughter of Richard Haskins, another ancestor of mine].
By the 1790’s Nathaniel Wood had formed his own breakaway community from the “not-strict-enough” Congregational church in Middletown. According to town historian Barnes Frisbie, Nathaniel Wood had some significant influence over Oliver Cowdry (born in Wells, the next town South from Middletown) and eventually the origins of Mormonism. The leap from Nathaniel’s “St. John’s rod” to the golden plates was not a long one. Oliver Cowdry was, it appears, a dowser, and was the principle translator of the Book of Mormon. Oliver Cowdery's "gift," according to Joseph Smith, was not using peepstones to translate as Joseph used but "working with the sprout" (we assume he means dowsing). This gift was originally called the "gift of working with the rod," or the "rod of nature" but was later changed to “the gift of Aaron.”
Hibbard’s decedents would likewise carry out the predisposition of Wood’s followers and became proponents of Swedenborgiansm (another sect that accepted new revelations). The point is that the same ecclesiastical controversies that drew the Separates out of the standing order during the 1740s (challenges to authority) threatened to tear apart their newly formed communities when “brighter” new lights began to dabble not simply with new interpretations of old scriptures but with new scriptures altogether.
[Interestingly, Sylvanus Haynes, the pastor of the Baptist church in Middletown, would have been profoundly influenced by the library of Moses Gill and his wife Sarah Prentice (daughter of Thomas Prentice) who were also “new lighters.” The homeschooled Haynes was encouraged as a young man not to attend a seminary or college before going into the ministry and came to Middletown with his Bible and his brain alone to recommend him. He would later regret this decision and would obtain a degree from Middlebury College before heading to New York where he involved himself of the creation of a college for Baptist ministers (Hamilton Seminary, now Colgate)].
[Interestingly, Middletown missionary to Siam, Jesse Caswell, would later be “fired” from the ABCFM for his views on perfectionism. Jesse was the son of Beulah Haskins of the same Haskins family that Hibbard and Wood were connected to]
Question for Comment: Where do you stand on the fundamental question splitting these early Vermont churches? How open should a church be to challenges to its traditional understandings of God?
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