Eucatastrophe Reader

"Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Death of a Hired Man by Robert Frost

https://www.bartleby.com/118/3.html.

There is a lot going on in this poem. Warren and Mary (husband and wife) are discussing what to do with Silas, the hired man who has returned and collapsed near the barn. Mary has invited him in and he now sits slumped near the stove while Mary attempts to persuade Warren to let him stay. Warren represents the demands of justice and the memory of past offences. Mary represents the desire for mercy and the reality of present need. Warren is all logic and Mary is all heart. The conversation involves a working out of an internal dialog within the poet who may be expressing two sides of his own nature (masculine and feminine?)

What it comes down to is two people looking at the same person but attending to different things about them. Warren recalls the following:

• Silas had been hired as a year-long farm hand in exchange for room and board for the year but then had taken off for higher wages right at the peak of the harvest season when everyone needs help. In other words, he had broken an agreement to his own advantage and left Warren in the lurch just when he needed him most.
• Silas had been told directly that if he left during the harvest for some other job, he should not think that he could come back when it was over. Silas had made his choice in full knowledge of the consequences. Warren has no interest in housing Silas all year so that he can go off just when he is needed and get paid.
• Silas was old and worn out and did not have a whole lot to offer a farm anymore anyway. In other words, he was no longer an attractive candidate for a job.
• Silas had family that could care for him (a local banker) that only lived a dozen or so miles away. If Silas needed assistance, that was the proper place for him to go for it.
• Silas had not taken advantage of his opportunities in life to better prepare for his waning years. His position of destitution was, in large part, a consequence of his own life decisions – his spending his money on tobacco rather than education or land, etc.

These are all part of what Mary might refer to as “the market things.” Her goal is “kindness” while his is “fairness.” It is a debate between the market and mercy and Frost tells us as much right from the outset.

Here is what Mary is attending to:

• Silas has returned in bad shape, huddled against the barn door. (Warren is skeptical)
• Silas had to be dragged into the house where Mary tried to revive him (to no avail).
• Silas had insisted that he had come back to do work not for a handout.
• Silas was not entirely coherent but kept insisting that he wanted to teach a former farm hand how to stack hay – how to farm. He wanted to pass on something that he was good at to a young person.
• Silas has the need of a dying person to know that he had done something in life worthy of his life – that he had been good at something and taught someone that thing.
• Silas is a man about to die and this is more important than the fact that Silas was a hired man who had not been reliable.

Warren’s message is a message of markets where one should get what they deserve and no more and no less. Mary’s message is a message of mercy where one should get help in their hour of need irrespective of what they have done to earn that help.

Lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice comes to mind:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Question for Comment: How can you see this conversation between Warren and Mary intruding into your own life?

"Like an old stone savage armed."

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side.  It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it
Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'  I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself.  I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

For a number of semesters, I used to use this poem as a way for students to introduce themselves to one another in my intercultural classes. “In what ways are you a wall builder and in what ways are you a wall dismantler?” I used to ask them. “When you look at the question of borders or boundaries in your personal life, family life, religious life, or national life, where do you see yourself strengthening boundaries and weakening them? Where are you like Frost and where are you like his neighbor?”

Twice, the poet states that there is some force in the universe that does not like boundaries and twice, his neighbor reiterates his family conviction that “good fences make good neighbors.” Frost participates in the reconstruction of the wall every year though he does not believe in it. Frost sees those places where “two can pass abreast” and should like to amplify the size of the gaps where he can and leave them to be widened by natural causes where he does not destroy them himself. He mischievously thinks about demolishing them in secret and then blaming the deed on elves. If hunters tear the wall apart in search of game for their dogs, that is fine with him.

To Frost, life lived by rules establish in bygone days for purposes no longer relevant is the epitome of living in darkness. Of being a “stone savage.” Boundaries between people that do not serve any legitimate purpose (either in walling in or walling out) are historical accidents. For him, the unseen force behind what is seen finds those humanly constructed boundaries a nuisance.

What I particular like in this poem is Frost's gentle mischievous subversiveness. He is a literal poetic “Frost heave” you might say suggesting a desire to undermine his own work of rebuilding the wall with his neighbor. He could tear the wall down in the night but he would prefer to convince his neighbor to let it happen naturally rather than assaulting his neighbor’s territorial instinct. “I wonder if I could put the notion in his head” he whispers. Clearly, this is what he is doing with this poem and surely he must know that his readers are the stone savage neighbor in the story.

“Is this boundary that I have inherited from my ancestors something I really honestly want to continue to maintain?” he wants us all to ask ourselves.

He does not argue that one should never have boundaries. He simply argues that one should never have boundaries that serve no legitimate purpose. If my apple trees are not going to eat your pine cones then, why wall them in or out?

If I were still teaching high school literature, I think I would read and reflect on this poem with my students and then ask them to write another poem from the vantage point of the neighbor.

Question for Comment: So how about you? What boundaries do you care a lot about and little about relative to your life’s “neighbors”?

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer REVIEW

“As the couple took in the hard news that the good man who was their son was now dead, so too many English took in the hard news that the dead man, who was a German, was good.”

The biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a story riven with moral complexities. Bonhoeffer was a key architect of the German confessing church during the Nazi era. His work resulted in the recruitment of pastors and theologians who rejected the Nazification of the German church under Hitler and insisted that there were not two churches in Germany (the state approved one and the Evangelical one) but only one church (that which took seriously a responsibility to put a spoke in the wheel of injustice as it ministered to the wounds of the victims of injustice).

Bonhoeffer’s complex moral system left him free to participate in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler and to deceive the Nazis in the process sof doing so. He worked for the preservation of the Confessing church while pretending to be working to infiltrate and betray the same. As a double agent, he pretended to be pretending to be an evangelical. His argument was that the true Christian does the will of god in the world and that the will of God is not always a slavish adoption of principles. “He could appreciate the value of something even if he rejected that something,” writes the author, “and he could appreciate the flaws in something even if he ultimately accepted that something.” He spoke of a need for instinctual clarity that went beyond the mere application of logic and dogma. Bonhoeffer believed in “thorough thinking” says Metaxas. He attempted to inspire people to an intellectual maturity rather than a slavish dependency and he objected to the use of manipulative oratory, preferring arguments to do their own arguing – in short, he was everything that Hitler was not. “The first service one owes to others in a community involves listening to them,” Bonhoeffer once insisted,

“Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them. God’s love for us is shown by the fact that God not only gives God’s Word but also lends us God’s ear.  . . . We do God’s work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them."

“Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.”

It is hard for me not to like Bonhoeffer and so I think I shall.

 Among Bonhoeffer’s various writings are to be found arguments that were influence millions. In his speech given at the ascension of the Nazi Party, he predicted the demise of the Fuhrer principle. In his book on the cost of discipleship, he insisted that following a person like Jesus had its benefits and costs and one could not have the one without the other. When asked if it would not be better and safer to join the Nazified church and work from within he said “If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.” “To renounce a full life in order to avoid pain is neither Christian nor human,” he added.

Next year, I am hoping to visit the monastery in Ettal Bavaria where Bonhoeffer began to work on his book on ethics and where he began meeting with the various conspirators who would eventually make several attempts on Hitler’s life.

When Hitler discovered the identities of the plotters that had almost killed him, he instructed his henchmen to destroy them all in his last inglorious act of vindictive spite only weeks before he took his own life. Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9, 1945, two weeks before the camp he was executed in was liberated.

He is one of the world’s weirdest martyrs having been executed for trying to kill a man for Jesus.

Question for Comment: Is it possible for a principle to become an idol?

The Great Awakening Documents on the Revival of Religion 1740-1745 REVIEW

This volume of primary sources, assembled and edited by Richard Bushman, captures the zeitgeist of this pivotal period in American history in approximately forty well-selected and contextualized separate documents. The viewpoints are representative of both ministers and congregants and run the gamut from the wildest of enthusiasts to the most implacable foes of the revivals that erupted in 1740. The documents shed light on the years just before the revivals began, the period in which they were almost universally applauded, the period when they were most vociferously opposed, and the period after they subsided and people began to reflect upon what had happened.

In the introduction, it is noted that Thomas Prince and his son (Thomas Jr.) attempted to collect narratives about the revivals from credible sources starting in 1743 (in the first Christian Magazine published in America, Christian History). The goal of the publication was to defend the revivals from those who were insisting that they were humanly contrived and basically destructive. For the most part, the magazine succeeded but it wound up having to use the narratives that were submitted selectively as many of them would have been documenting the very excesses of enthusiasm and emotionalism that Prince wanted to demonstrate were anomalous to the movement.

You have an excerpt from Samuel Willard trying to explain how dead the spiritual life of New England was getting previous to the revivals. You have Solomon Stoddard making a plea for “fervent preaching.” You have Gilbert Tennant trying to wake people up to their complacency. From here, chapter two proceeds to expose us the various admonitions of the itinerant ministers who began to “flood the market” with their fiery messages. We hear the communications of the great revivalist George Whitefield and some of those he inspired to mimic him. Eleazer Wheelock (Founder of Dartmouth) and James Davenport become known to us as well as the views of those who experienced the actual meetings they led. The selections about the expelling of James Davenport from Connecticut are particularly entertaining as that appears to be the turning point in the whole revivalist enterprise.

From here, we move to the chapter about the various ministerial opposition voices, starting with a plea from the Reverend Theophilus Pickering attempting to persuade his fellow ministers not to let Whitefield come back and use their pulpits. We also can read the official Acts of the Connecticut legislature passed to dampen the wildfire with prohibitions on itinerant ministers. Chapter three focuses on sources specific to understanding just what the conversion experiences were actually like. Ministers, opponents, and the revived themselves all sought to understand what the nature of the events they were witnessing were. Were they of divine origin or merely the results of manipulation (benevolent or malevolent)?

Moving into chapter four, we begin to see what people had to say about the splitting of churches over the substance and style of revivalists’ efforts. In Gilbert Tennant’s sermon “The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry,” we begin to see the groundwork being laid for the exodus of evangelicals from the standing order churches. Starting on page 101, there are a number of documents about the factionalism in the churches of Norwich, Connecticut that are of particular interest to me in my studies of Middletown, Vt (settled by many “evacuees” of the Norwich church “secessions.”) In these documents, we can read about the complaints that these early Vermonters had in regard to their former churches. The documents that served as early constitutions for the “strict” churches are presented in all their glory. In the final chapters on “Assessments” and “New Directions” the author presents us with some of the thoughts that people of the day had in the waning years of the revival as they looked back and looked forward. As always and ever, our perceptions of the past are the on-ramps we use to start driving into our futures.

This anthology does not take a position for or against revivals. It does not attempt to determine just what happened in those momentous years of the early 1740’s. It just gives us a window into all the different ways that humans at the time saw those events and incorporated them into the stories that they used to live their lives.

Question for Comment: How would you explain something like a revival? Are outside forces at work? Or are the causes all reducible to psychological forces and the working out of human emotion in groups?

A time when “multitudes were seriously, soberly, and solemnly out of their wits.”

Revivalism and Separatism in New England: 1740-1800 REVIEW

C.C. Goen’s account of the 60 year period after the arrival of George Whitefield to the American colonies (1740) details the fascinating story of the “fractalization” of American Christianity [I invented that word I think]. It would be a mistake to infer that the years between the landing of settlers in Roanoke, Va and the arrival Pilgrims at Plymouth, Ma on the one hand and the arrival of George Whitefield on the other was a period of total religious bliss and harmony but one could argue that there was a general consensus that each New England town should have basically one church (unless it was too large to accommodate one church). When dissent arose, dissenters were banished from the parish or the colony before they could divide the assembly. If the group of dissenters was large enough, it could pack up lock, stock, and barrel, and move to some other place (like Thomas Hooker who took his church to Connecticut).

With the Whitefield revivals however, local churches began to split much to the consternation of the established clergy who had hoped that the swelling numbers of converts would all be delighted to become members and attend the churches that had failed to ever inspire them before Whitefield came to town and lit them up with a different fire. The heat from that revivalist fire briefly warmed the “Old Light” ministers and then began figuratively burning their churches down.

The revival-warmed congregants wanted churches that reflected the values that had inspired them to finally convert. They wanted the right to hear itinerant ministers who brought more in the way of entertainment. They wanted ministers who expected and worked for dramatic conversions. They wanted some emotional extravagance (“excitements” the revivalist Charles Finney would call them a hundred years later). They wanted ministers open to lay preaching (exhorters). They wanted ministers who could determine sheep and goats and they wanted churches free of goats. They wanted to hear people’s confessions of born-again experience. They wanted holy lives lived by high standards of purity and piety. They wanted less erudition and more electricity in their worship experiences. They wanted ministers who had been “called” in the tradition of the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road. They cared less about ministers with high GPA’s at Harvard and Yale. They wanted to be free to get revelations of their own. They wanted ministers who were not in the ministry for the salary. And they definitely did not want to pay in taxes for what they were not getting in their established churches.

This book details the story of how they eventually got what they wanted and in many cases, got more of what they wanted than they actually wanted. For ultimately, some of them wound up escaping the dead formalism of their “status quo” parishes only to wind up in the white hot fires of contentious bickering and Puritanical judgmentalism. Once you have established the right of secession, they discovered, there is no going back. Once you make passion and zeal the mark of divine appointment, you head down a road that leads to a good deal of quackery. Eventually, someone’s passion is going to manifest itself in some sort of hallucination (as may have happened with James Davenport in Norwich, Ct.).

It would be difficult for me to provide a full and thorough review of this book because it contains so much that is interesting to me. I will contain myself to a few interesting notes relative to my studies of the early religious history of Middletown:

First, one should realize that much of the revival excitement in the 1740’s was the consequence of the Half-Way Covenant that allowed many people to be half members without ever converting. Many young people had thus grown up as Christians without ever being told what that meant. When they were told (by ministers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield) it terrified them to discover that they might not be Christians at all according to their minister’s understanding of the scriptures.

Secondly, I learned that the “Old Light” ministers attempted to use a tactic that had worked in the past to reign in the enthusiasm of the Separatists, namely civil coercion. Unfortunately, the demographic high tide was simply too much for their previously sufficient coercive sandbags. They experienced what Robert Bork would later say of the sixties, a “vertical invasion of barbarians.” In short, too many teenagers and adults acting like teenagers at once.

Third, I learned that there were a few key moments when the flood-tide went over the banks and refused to be contained. The revivals of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton and the surrounding region was one of them. The revivals of George Whitefield was a second (1740-). The Separation of the Church at Mansfield, Ct. (1745) was a third. The defection to the Baptists of Isaac Backus in Norwich was a fourth. The statement of Separatist belief by Ebenezer Frothingham (1750) was a fifth. The emigration of the entire Nuwent church to Bennington, Vt (1761) was a sixth. And the declaration of a new denomination (known as the Strict Congregationalist) in 1781 was a seventh. [All of these would have an impact on the founding of Middletown].   

[Note to self: Where are the covenant and records of the Nuwent church that were brought to Bennington in 1761 and how many people in that church wound up in Middletown? It is interesting that the “stricter” part of that church relocated to Poultney in 1780 with their pastor, Ithimar Hibbard who also itinerated in Middletown for 20 years before the arrival of Henry Bigelow from Yale]

Fourth, I learned that many of the early Strict Congregationalists societies dissolved. Sometimes they did so because they continued to fractalize (my word). Sometimes, they proceeded along a logical road to the Baptist denominations where they were simply able to be consistent. “Gone to the Baptists” is a frequent entry in their record books Goen writes. Sometimes, they returned to their more stable and ordered churches when market pressures brought those churches into conformity with separatist demands. This may have been made possible when the Unitarian and Universalist elements in those original churches split off to create churches of their own (leaving the original churches free to find middle ground.  

Fifth, I learned what I already knew from the records of the Strict churches of Middleton, Vt. Namely that “their [the Separatists] extreme concern that nothing be allowed to mar the purity of the fellowship in Christ led to a morbid preoccupation with the private life of each member.” I was particularly intrigued by the fact that the Caswell family of Middletown came from Mansfield, the Mecca of Separatist perfectionism. It makes sense that Jesse Caswell went further in that direction when he was allowed to by his removal from the culture as a missionary in Siam. It was also interesting to note that some proponents of perfectionism went so far as to declare that their original marital partners were not perfect for them and that they had an obligation to re-partner with the spouses God had wanted them to have from the beginning. Imagine.

Sixth, I learned that Joseph Spaulding, who gave Middletown Vermont its name, was from Middletown, Ct. a rare “one-church town” where THE Church was a Strict Congregational Church led by Ebenezer Frothingham, the author of the Strict Congregationalist’s most rational defense. (i.e. Spaulding would likely have been less of a wild-man than the Mansfielders but still a more demanding person than the town liberals). Interestingly, the Strict Congregational Church of Middletown Vermont was actually formed a few months after the denomination was created in 1781. On September 9 there was a meeting in Killingly Connecticut and the result of that meeting was the publishing of the Killingly Convention Sept 19, 1781. This Historical Narrative and Declaration marks the beginning of the Strict Congregational Convention of Connecticut. It makes total sense that the Congregational Church in Middletown aligned itself with that movement. I wonder if Joseph Spaulding was  a member of Frothingham’s church in Ct?

Seventh, I learned that Nathaniel Wood’s attempt to declare himself the pastor of that Strict Congregational Church in Middletown was not without precedent. The churches of Norwich and Stonington, Ct. were riven with contentious claimants to spiritual leadership. James Davenport was perhaps the most famous. But he was not alone. Matthew Smith, Separate pastor in Mansfield and later Stonington later recorded that the tectonic shifts in religious order at the time brought to the surface many people who thought that they were called to the ministry of local churches. He wrote:  

“The brethren, at a meeting, appointed for the purpose, having the impression that if it was the Lord’s will that they should have a minister, he would shew it to them, or reveal the man’s name, or the very man. Upon this, one of their number, in a vision or swoon, had a revelation that he himself was to be their minister: but the brethren, not having fellowship with him in that discovery, rejected his revelation; though he declared to me he knew it to be from heaven.”

Eighth, I learned that almost as soon as the new revivals began to stoke the fires of enthusiasm in people, the forces of reason and order began to close ranks against them. Ezra Stiles, for example, described the heyday of the ‘New Lights’ as a time when “multitudes were seriously, soberly, and solemnly out of their wits.”

Ninth, I learned that many Separates were decedents of the Mayflower Separates who were delighted to finally have an option to the Puritan Anglican established churches that had overwhelmed and tried to absorb them. This might explain why Jonathan Brewster, scion of the famous Pilgrim, William Brewster, was so protective of the Middletown Church for so many years after it was founded. I suspect that he may have found himself in a two front war against the enthusiast faction led by Nathaniel Woods and the Yale educated “old school” faction led by Henry Bigelow.

Tenth, I learned that the reason that Norwich was so contentious had to do with a number of factors. They had a rather old minister in Benjamin Lord. Perhaps more importantly, the region was so close to Rhode Island where so many dissenters had been driven in the previous hundred years. As the Rhode Island dissidents filtered into Eastern Connecticut, they inevitably brought with them their resentment of religious control and their fervent love of religious freedom. Ironically, when the dissenters packed up and moved to Vermont (or points West) this region became quite conservative.

Eleventh, I learned that the New Lights had their own preaching style. The author notes that James Davenport was the originator of the “Holy Whine” a hallmark of Separate preachers. One could actually “hear” the sound of a Separate itinerant preacher it is said. Someone referred to it as “the New Light tone.” Serious scholars were told not to “talk like a New Light.”

Twelfth, I learned that Sylvanus Haynes, though a Baptist, had been converted in the Baptist church in Leicester, Ma., a church that had been around for some time before the Whitefield revivals. Haynes would thus have been a Congregationalist growing up and would have been exposed to the New Light leaning works in the library of Thomas Prince but would have probably inherited the Congregationalist and Baptist distrust of emotionalism and over-enthusiasm. It is no surprise that he liked to preach with clear, organized, notes and that his sermons could be published because they would have been written (Many New Lights were suspicious of pastors who wrote out their sermons). I suspect that Ithimar Hibbard did not write his sermons and so I have never been able to find one.  

All in all, this was a book worth the time and expense to get and read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the early religious history of Vermont.

Question for Comment: How far back can you trace the ideas that "animate" your family of origin? 

Records of the Ira Baptist Church Benevolent Sewing Society

Records of the Ira Baptist Church Benevolent Sewing Society

Last week, I purchased a hand-written book of records of the Ira Baptist Church Benevolent Sewing Society. The organization was founded in May of 1847 and the record book contains annual sermons and reports, the constitution of the society, and minutes of meetings. It may be interesting to note that the famous Seneca Falls Convention that inaugurated the women’s suffrage movement was held in March of 1848. For reference, the largest the membership of the society ever got was 45 members. The smallest actual meeting seems to have been four in number and the largest, thirty. Men were invited to join but they did so rarely. Whether it was the benevolent ends or the sewing as a means to those ends that scared them away, I am unsure. What can be learned from the records is a good less than what one might like to learn. There is little in the way of narrative. The women, no doubt, discussed issues of family, faith, and folly in their monthly sewing meetings but they declined to record the human details in their minutes. Still one can surmise a few things.

First, these women were spiritual. The document opens with a sermon provided for the first annual meeting after founding by the Rev. Levi Smith (pastor from 1847 to 1852). His church would have met in the brick building across from the present church built the year Smith departed. The is sermon entitled “The Spirit of Primitive Christians delivered May 7, 1848 by Levi Smith" focuses on the philanthropic aspects of the early church and ranges from passages in the Gospels about the relief work of the disciples to passages in the book of Acts and the Epistles that speak of the social and economic contributions of the early Christians. Pastor Smith submits his sermon with the following signature:

 “Yours for the relief of human woe and the spread of the Gospel”  

The later portion of the sermon focuses on “the spirit of Dorcas” a woman from the community of believers in Joppa who is praised in the book of Acts. The text records that when she died “all the widows were weeping” and tells us of their showing Peter the clothing that Dorcas had made and generously bestowed on them. Not only was the Ira Baptist Church Benevolent Sewing Society meeting intentionally endorsed by the local church and rooted in Biblical Christianity, the monthly sewing meetings would always begin with some reading from a sacred source (each month a different member was asked to bring the reading) and a prayer. Typically, the meetings would conclude with the singing of some hymn or set of hymns.

The second conclusion that we can draw from this record is that these women were political (or starting to be). Rather than simply agreeing to meet, they form a corporation of sorts. The pages following the introductory sermon contain the society’s constitution. It outlines the purposes of the organization, the means to achieving those purposes, the officers who will direct it, the dues that will sustain it, and the means for amending the constitution should adaptation be required. The outline for the constitution is simple and the roles of the officers are not complicated but they reflect a desire on the part of these women to be taken seriously. They want it understood that they understand the mechanisms of power even if they are only for the first time, exercising it in some official capacity. When an officer cannot be present at a meeting, someone takes the minutes and signs them “Secretary Pro Tem.” You can tell these women are practicing for power someday whether they know it or not.  

Thirdly, we can conclude that these women intended their organization to serve a social good. While an opportunity to share time with one another and to abridge the essential loneliness of rural Vermont, there was a philanthropic purpose to be pursued in their gatherings (they called them “circles”). Over the course of years from 1847 to the last entry in June of 1872, the women of the society set to work to provide for a wide variety of social needs. They knitted and sewed socks, pillowcases, sheets, shirts, pants, quilts, and, when Abraham Lincoln was elected and the country started to disintegrate, a flag. They raised money for local needs, like carpets for the church or a fence for the graveyard or the local poor. They raised money for missions, foreign and domestic. They raised funds for religious literature or to support Sabbath schools. They sewed for or raised money for Union soldiers during the war. They did the same for the freedmen (freed slaves) after the war.  “To whichever quarter of the globe we turn our eyes,” one of the annual sermons reminds the society in 1851, “misery, want, wretchedness, ignorance, superstition and idolatry are staring us in the face.” “But we need not go out of our own towns and villages or even neighborhoods to find those who have actual claims upon our benevolence,” it adds. “Claims which we cannot throw off and be innocent.” “This work of benevolence,” the pastor continued “reaches on far down the track of time, widening and still widening in its course: and it will not cease to be felt through the boundless ages of eternity.”

Periodically, from year to year, the secretaries of the Benevolent Sewing Society would record a list of members and sometimes meeting attendees. There are some passages where you can tell that the secretary thought that some members should have come in spite of a storm that was claimed to be the reason for not coming. She wanted it recorded in the minutes that a few people did make it and so more could have. (See pgs. 59-60)It is not hard to imagine that some members paid dues and other members paid dues AND showed up to sew. Here is a list of members in 1865

Sarah Ross
Mary Collins
Mary Fish
Jane Curtis
Mary Curtis
Elvira Tower
Amylinn Johnson
Clara Lincoln
Celia Fish
[Felicia?] Fish
Sabria Rogers
Sarah Tower
Hannah Potter
Angeline Collins
Amanda Daniels
Mary Gilmore
Francis Wilkinson
Mr. Warren Mason
Mr. Warren Curtis

Here is a list of the names of the members in 1868.

Ashton
E. Tower
G. Fish
A. Daniels
A. Colins
B. Fish
C. Newton
A. Newton
C. Fish
G. Rogers
L. Paine
C. Woster
A. Gilmore
L. Bollard
A. Johnson
A. Marchel
C. Lincoln
A. Peck
L. Man
L. Hayward
L. Day
J. Tower
G. Peck
Mr, Ashton
Mr. J. Wever
E. Wever
Mr. E. Hayward
Mr. E. Rogers

I gather that the writer did not always spell the names correctly here. Other lists from the book could be used to augment those two. Some of the records are written out by Angeline Collins, Jane Wilkenson, L. A. Osgood, Julia Osgood, Mrs. Hazelton, P. A. Woodward, Mary Carpenter, Bella Fish, N. Clark, S.A. Ross, Martha Fish, Betsey Newton, and L.E. Fish, among others

Question for Comment: If you were to start up a benevolent society of your own and were going to gather together once a month to do some good in the world, what would you do with that time?

"Others he has thrown into the vapors and despair."

The Great Awakening REVIEW

It is always so fascinating to me to discover where an idea, now manifested in an institution or assortment of institutions, was actually born. Thomas Kidd’s book The Great Awakening takes the reader back to the point in American history (specifically, 1740) where the established American church metastasized into the ever multiplying denominational fractals we see today. There is a reason why a city like Grand Rapids, Michigan has hundreds of churches (maybe my friend Tom will count them for me?) The answer starts in the first chapter of this lively history of the revivals that erupted in the years between 1740 and 1743 (and beyond).  

“A close look at early American evangelicalism shows how oversimplified the ‘Old lights’ versus ‘New lights’ framework is,” Kidd writes as he introduces us to the idea of a unified church that could no longer contain its fringes.

“In this book I present evangelicalism as having fluid boundaries that changed over time. Instead of ‘Old lights’ and ‘New lights,’ we should think of the debates over this movement in terms of three points on a continuum. On one end were the anti-revivalists, who dismissed revivals as religious frenzy or enthusiasm. In the middle were the moderate evangelicals, who supported the revivals at their outset but became concerned about the chaotic, leveling extremes that the awakenings produced. Finally, on the other end, were the radical evangelicals, who eagerly embraced the spirit's movements, even if social conventions had to be sacrificed.”

Perhaps there were more than three points along that spectrum though? Obviously, Kidd concerns himself with the fractious evangelical movement alone but the template applies to a variety of other expressions of spirituality as well. At some point, people are too different to have their spiritual lives conformed to a one-size-fits-nobody church with a single minister (or synagogue with a single rabbi or mosque with a single imam). Even Catholicism, which markets itself as “the mother church” has many different orders and expressions. George Whitfield’s revival tour was the catalyst that made that already emerging diversity obvious in American Protestantism.

In the 1730’s a bubbling cauldron of differences in the Puritan churches of New England boiled over until it required the creation of new pots to put it all in. Each New England town (with a few exceptions) had been trying to maintain one single church headed by a single minister but with the arrival of George Whitfield, this model was put into serious jeopardy. “We should see Whitfield as a catalyst reacting with already existing materials to help initiate the great awakening,” Kidd writes,

“The tributaries feeding the creation of Anglo American evangelicalism hardly originated with Whitfield but perhaps he helped their confluence arrive earlier and more forcefully that it otherwise would have.”

Some of the tributaries that Kidd described might be alliterated as follows: pietism, puritanism, primitivism, and perfectionism. That is, he inspired a form of Christianity that was more personal, less “Catholic,” more apostolic, and less tolerant of gradualism in conversion and sanctification. Ministers were delighted with the droves of converts that Whitfield inspired but they soon realized that increased numbers came at a cost in unity. Itinerant preachers gave congregants exposure to options in a way similar to the way that cable TV replaced the model of having three networks (ABC - Catholic, NBC - Orthodox, CBS - Protestant). New converts were drawn by Whitfield’s message of individual empowerment and choice; not by the ministers’ message of the need for congregational subservience to unity and clerical dominion. Whitfield was the 18^th century’s version of “youtube” replacing corporate media.  

Whitfield intended to challenge the idea that God could only be heard by listening to a Harvard-trained consociation-approved minister on a Sunday morning (The Pravda church I will call it). But his message, once planted, grew into some pretty strange plants sometimes. The freedom that he preached in the style that it was preached went viral, perhaps beyond what he intended. Kidd explains why the New England clergy soon grew alarmed (including those who originally sponsored the revivals).

“One can appreciate, then, why many might have viewed radical evangelicals as a threat to a well ordered society. Radical evangelicals ordained untutored, and occasionally nonwhite, men as pastors. They sometimes allowed women and nonwhites to serve as deacons or even as elders. They lead crowds of the poor, children, and nonwhites singing through the streets. They permitted Native Americans, African-Americans, and women to exhort in mixed congregations, and they commended their words as worthy of white male attention. They endorsed the visionary, ecstatic experiences of the disenfranchised. They believed that individuals could have immediate assurance of salvation by the indwelling witness of the Spirit. They affirmed lay people's right to critique their pastors and founded new churches fully committed to radical revival.”

The church of the 1740’s was a study in contradictions. The Halfway Covenant of 1662 allowed people to have children baptized into churches even though they themselves were not attendees.[i] This system insured that the churches would be filled with substantial numbers of pseudo-members waiting for their conversion. When the revivalists came, they found a lot of “dry tinder” ready to be evangelized. For some time, ministers had been threatening physical punishments in the form of disease or Indian attacks or poor harvests. As physical security needs were increasingly met however, these threats became less effective and the complacent people who had been allowed to become members were incentivized to remain complacent. It is no wonder that some greater fear of suffering was needed as a motivator to commitment. This is why Jonathan Edwards’ sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was so powerful in its effects. Hell might not have been as real an immediate threat as an Indian attack but in the words of an effective public speaker, it could be made to *seem* more real.

Kidd notes that Edwards’ account of the revival in Northampton became a template for how to record revivals anywhere. “This was what any certifiable Holy Spirit inspired revival should look like,” Edwards seems to be implying. Kidd asserts that,

“The circulation of books like Edwards's a Faithful Narrative, and Whitfield’s journals and of Thomas Prince's magazine The Christian History was critical for generating excitement about the revivals and expectations that awakenings could happen in towns receiving those publications, too.”[ii]

I found it interesting that the fiery heart of the revivals could be found in central Connecticut.

“Adams, along with East Windsor’s Timothy Edwards, Norwich’s Benjamin Lord, Windham's Samuel Whiting, and Windsor’s Jonathan Marsh, formed the most activist contingent yet of evangelical ministers in New England. This group helped lead a series of revivals in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1710s and 1720s.”

Norwich was where so many of the early settlers to Middletown (Vt.) came from and it is clear to me that they brought the revival inspired conflicts with them when they came to Vermont. Thomas Prince would have been the source of the books that Sylvanus Haynes was incubated and educated with as a young man in Princeton, Ma (a town named for Thomas Prince, father of Sarah Prince the wife of Moses Gill).[iii]

In pursuing his theme, the author of The Great Awakening notes how outspoken some of the pro-revival ministers were in trying to limit the damage that the excesses of revivalism inflicted on their revival-loving unity. Those, like Edwards, who tried to hold a middle ground, had to fight both the rationalist and the mystical wings of the revived church. “Edwards had to work hard to disavow enthusiastic excesses,” Kidd writes,

“while at the same time not endorsing a naturalistic approach to revival. ... Edwards' Faithful Narrative would become the first, and most important, text of the new genre of revival narratives.”

“Most of the twenty-five revival narratives printed in North America from 1741 to 1745 (mostly printed in the new evangelical magazine the Christian History) followed Edwards' model fairly closely. Prominent features in these narratives, like Edwards', included the spiritual history and assessment of the town in question before the revival, a description of the beginning of effects of the revival, detailed accounts of individual convert's experiences, and a report on the continuing/declining state of the revival.”

Unfortunately, in spite of Whitfiled’s later attempts to mute the radicalism of his message, his early revivals had sown the field of American religion with the dandelions of an early transcendentalism and perhaps Mormonism and Universalism. Whitfield himself had described his own conversion experience as a soulful response to direct revelations.  “Here God was pleased to give me great fortastes of his love,” Whitfield had said in his conversion narrative,

“and filled me with much unspeakable raptures, particularly once in St. John's Church, that I was carried out beyond myself.”

The evangelists who followed in Whitfield’s wake were almost always amplifying this message of mysticism. “William Tennent Junior, for example,

“considered divisions normal and acceptable, so long as they affirmed orthodox doctrine, reprised visions seen in the Bible, or gave a person an early taste of heaven or hell. He himself had experienced all of these, and he certainly believed that his own visions could not count as common enthusiasm.”

Whitfield had closed the distance between his time and the apostolic age, allowing that believers could do almost anything apostles could do “but work miracles.” It was only a matter of time and enthusiasm before those were put back on the table of possibility as well. Within a hundred years, those possibilities included the ability to receive new written revelations. Stephen Bordly complained that Whitfield had,

“put some among us here on a wild goose chase, in quest of that degree of the spirit which perhaps they never will find. Others he has thrown into the vapors and despair and into a full persuasion that the good man, as he would have them believe, is miraculously inspired.”

The “fractalization” of the Puritan churches began innocently enough with the right of ministers to preach in communities other than their own. Eventually, this grew into a declared right for congregants to voluntarily attend church elsewhere (even in a barn or field) if they did not cozy up to their appointed minister’s teaching. Many congregants began to believe that the ideas that occurred to them accompanied by some warm and fuzzy feeling were to be regarded as more authoritative and direct than the ideas of their college-trained minister. The “New Light” revivalists “lead great stress upon impressions and impulses; particularly, upon any sense of scripture that was suddenly and strongly suggested to their minds.” Revelation democratized. Soon, the epidemic of itinerancy manifested itself in competition between ministerial opponents in the same locals. A church would split and the New Light minister would begin to run the new church, like Reverend Davenport, “in a separatist style, picking only certain holy friends to admit to communion.” Five of the sixteen Boston area churches showed signs of major revival in the months following Whitfield's fall tour,” Kidd explains, “These included Joseph Sewall’s and Thomas Prince’s Old South church.”

The foundations of later religious conflict in places like Middletown Vt. were being laid as early as 1741. Kidd writes:

“Up the Thames River from New London, at Norwich, the future Baptist leader Isaac Bacchus was converted during the summer of 1741 revivals, partly through Davenport’s preaching. In 1751 Backus recalled that it please the Lord to cause a very gentle awakening through the land especially in Norwich.”

Soon, the clerical empire began striking back and the practice of itinerancy without the permission of the local pastor was banned in Connecticut. The new law also outlawed all non-Connecticut itinerants altogether. The law was intended from the outset to give a legal cover for a unified response to ministers like Davenport. As Kidd puts it, he “was the first quarry caught under the policy.” When the Rev. Davenport was banished from the colony for preaching without permission, “the scene at the courthouse turned ugly.” “Pomroy and Davenport supposedly began calling for God to rain judgment on the court and the sheriff,” Kidd explains,

“which brought a rush of their followers beginning to sigh, groan, beat their breasts, cry out, and to be put into strange agitations of the body.”

This region of Connecticut began to develop a reputation for contention, radicalism, dissention, and the denunciation of settled ministers. Those out there to the “wacko side” of Whitfield began to insist that they had the power to know which ministers were Christians and which were not (a spiritual McCarthyism of sorts). Soon, ministers all along the spectrum began to declare ministers not at the same spot they were, “apostates” and “enthusiasts.” “Radical separates had begun establishing private meetings in 1741 and 42 across New England,” writes Kidd, “most notably in New London, New Haven, and Boston.”

  At some point, radicals went too far for some revival lovers to follow. Davenport insisted that the truly converted should shed all their worldly things and worldly clothes. He built a bonfire for his followers to throw their fashionable duds in and led the way by taking off his own britches and putting them in the fire. “A young woman thought all this crossed the line of propriety,” Kidd tells us, “and she snatched out his pants, and cried, ‘the calf you have made is too big’ and flung his plush britches into his face.”

From that point on, the positions began to solidify, with a minority moving away from the revivals altogether (Charles Chauncy), a minority following the radicals as far as they would go (Davenport), and a majority struggling to retain a position in the middle (Backus and Edwards).

Because so many of the early settlers of Middletown came from Norwich, Ct, I would like to highlight the story of that particular locale as it may shed light on Middletown’s first ministers and churches. Ithimar Hibbard, Henry Bigelow, Sylvanus Haynes, and Nathaniel Wood were all, in some ways products of the 1740 revivals. I suspect that Ithimar Hibbard was a “New Light” Separatist, that Henry Bigelow was a “middle grounder” (he was Yale graduated and trained by a minister by the name of Ichabod Lord Skinner who was a direct apprentice of Jonathan Edwards). Sylvanus Haynes can be connected in so many ways to the Baptist, Isaac Backus, and Nathaniel Wood seems almost certainly to have been influenced by the Davenport radicals in Norwich.

Nathaniel Woods was not crazy but Deacon Brewster (that scion of the Mayflower Brewsters) would take his separatism only so far. Here is a lengthy excerpt from the book that provides a context for Middletown spiritual divisions.

“In Norwich, Connecticut, disputes over the Saybrook platform also precipitated a church schism and launched the career of the most influential separate Baptist leader of the 18th century, Isaac Bacchus. Backus was converted in Norwich in 1741. The revivals continued in Norwich for two more years, and in June 1743 Norwich’s pastor, Benjamin Lord, wrote of ‘a great and glorious work of divine grace and a great reformation of religion’ transpiring in the area. Lord’s church saw ninety-one new full members added between 1741 and 1744, including the church’s first Native American and African American full members. Lord feared the excesses of lay exhorters, however, who seem to have sprung up in or visited Norwich and we're ‘so infatuated by a strange kind of Spirit as to think (many would think) there was much of the spirit of God’ in them.”

"In late 1744, the church began to squabble over the Saybrook platform, and its standards of full membership. It is not clear whether the separation preceded or followed a relaxing of membership standards, but it does seem that Lord wanted both to deemphasize personal conversion testimonies for full membership and to continue an informal compliance with the Saybrook standards through his involvement with the New London County ministerial Association. By summer 1745, thirteen members, including Isaac Backus, had withdrawn from the church. Lord summoned them to explain their absence, and in August 1745, Lord recorded some of their reasons.”

“Many expressed objections to Lord himself, saying that he denied the power of godliness and was not sufficiently supportive of the late revivals. Some complained that the church had lax membership standards, and that the church did not make conversion a term of communion. Others protested that the church body was committed to the congregational model of church government, but that Lord had swayed toward the Saybrook Presbyterian model. One mentioned that Lord was no friend of godly preaching and preachers and that he had banned Andrew Crosswell from preaching there. Mary Lathrup may have spoken for most Separates when she stated simply, ‘by covenant I am not held here any longer than I am edified.’ The Separates established a new congregation in the western part of Norwich. The church appears to have benefited both from the radical zeal and ongoing frustrations on the west side of town concerning the relatively distant location of Lord’s meeting house.”

“In any case, the church ordained one of the Separates, Jedidiah Hyde, as its first pastor in October 1747. Hyde and Backus frequently itinerated together during this period. Hyde testified that he separated from Lord’s church ‘because the gospel is not preached here.’”

Isaac Backus would go on to be a primary cause of the growth of the Baptist denomination in Vermont as the doctrine of adult baptism was the surest way to protect one’s church from the infiltration of the unwashed masses who could get through the unlatched gate of infant baptism. Sylvanus Haynes would be one of his indirect and possibly even direct converts (Haynes notes in his journal that he was compelled to accept the Baptist position by a pamphlet he read as a teenager – quite possibly one written by Backus in answer to the Reverend Lord). “Backus,” Kidd notes, “had no college education, but those who joined the church believed that his spiritual call to the ministry far outweighed his unfamiliarity with classical learning languages.” It was this disposition of the Baptist Churches not to send their ministers to seminary that caused Sylvanus and his best friend Abel Wood not forego further education.) “The Separates and Baptists were very close to another theologically,” Thomas Kidd adds, “but their split over baptism allowed no ultimate reconciliation.”

“Similarly, the Baptist church at Norwich, Connecticut (Backus's hometown) reported to Backus that ‘fifty or more have been converted there since December. Great and marvelous are Gods works sought out of all of that have pleasure in them.’ Bacchus and Norwich's Benjamin Lord developed a running argument in the 1760’s over Separate and Baptist principles. In 1764, Isaac Bacchus replied to Lord’s charges that the Baptist were apostate. Backus noted that churches like Lord’s had been declining in the early 1740s. Although the revivals re-energized the moderate evangelical churches for a time, their corrupt admission practices and hostility to popular manifestations of revival required honest Christians to separate. The liberty for Christians to improve their gifts, was allowed for a while, but soon the moderates joined with others that had called the work of God a ‘delusion of the devil’ and attacked the lay exhorters, among whom Bacchus became one of the most prominent. The moderates called the exhorters ‘disturbers,’ and deluded pretenders to an extraordinary call, and had some of them arrested and fined. 

“Lord predicted that the Separates pursuit of individual edification would produce declension and apostasy, but Backus concluded with delight that as of 1764, it seemed that only the Separate churches were flourishing. He saw the Separate Baptists as the authentic bearers of 1740’s style revivalism. . . . Backus, in particular, would soon become one of the revolutionary era's foremost advocates of liberty of conscience, the rights of religious dissenters, and abolishing religious establishments.”

IT should be abundantly clear from all this that the conflicts that erupted in Middletown in the 1780’s and 1790’s were not made in Middletown. They were imported there from Connecticut and the positions ranged all the way from Ethan Allen’s denial of any revelation at all to Nathaniel Woods claim that he was himself a priest, capable of receiving revelation direct.  

Question for Comment: As you go through life, where do you look for revelation and how much do you expect to get?  

[i] The halfway covenant of 1662 extended the right of baptism but not the Lord supper to many of the unregenerate.

[ii] Though it followed in the train of earlier New England awakenings, Northhampton's 1734-35 awakening has become the model revival of evangelicalism. Its Publicity dramatically heightened expectations in Britain and America for new awakenings, and it provided a framework for local pastors to use to promote revival in their own congregations.

[iii] Thomas Prince of the old South church thought that the earthquake was worth the damage caused, if accompanied by revival. After noting the path of the earthquake in the appendix to Earthquakes the Works of God 1727, he rejoiced that the terrible shaking had led to a wonderful reformation.

 

"I could lay blame"

Teacher Man REVIEW

After thirty years of teaching, Frank McCourt headed out the d%oor of his last school into retirement. Someone said to him “You should write a book.” He did.

“When I taught in New York City high schools for 30 years,” McCourt writes,

“No one but my students paid attention to me. In the world outside of the school I was invisible. Then I wrote a book about my childhood [Angela’s Ashes] and became mick of the moment. . . . I hoped it might sell a few hundred copies and that I might be invited to have discussions with book clubs. Instead it jumped onto the bestseller list and was translated to 30 languages and I was dazzled. The book was my second act.”

Referring to his poverty-stricken life in Limerick Ireland, McCourt begins his memoir of his teaching life by identifying all those he intends to blame and then subsequently forgive in the docket. “I could lay blame,” he writes,

“The miserable childhood doesn’t simply happen. It is brought about. There are dark forces. If I am to lay blame it is in the spirit of forgiveness. Therefore I forgive the following: Pope Pius the XII; the English in general and King George the VI in particular; Cardinal MacRory, who ruled Ireland when I was a child; the bishop of Limerick, who seem to think everything was a sin; and Eamonn DeValera, former prime minister and president of Ireland who directed teachers all over Ireland to beat the native tongue into us and the natural curiosity out of us.”

He goes on. He has a long list of grievances. But then he reserves a good deal of blame for himself from then on. If you have ever wondered how one should go about being honest about others in a memoir, this seems to be the way. Honesty fairly distributed with the heaping helpings reserved for one’s own ignorances, stupidities, and lack of integrity.  McCourt does not pass himself off as a saint anywhere.

He describes the life of a high school teacher in self-deprecating terms. “In the high school classroom,” he says,

“you are a drill sergeant, the rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap-dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, and mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookkeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw.”

His story was interesting but I confess, I think I would have preferred reading the memoir I wrote about teaching. I think it is because it had more to do with what I was teaching and learning and less to do with what I suffered.

Maybe I should write a book.

Question for Comment: Who was your most memorable high school teacher? Why?

Far from the Trree

Far from the Tree REVIEW

I can’t really do a better job describing this book/documentary than you will find HERE.  

But in short, consider all the different ways that a parent might find themselves raising a child who is unimaginably different than what they expected that a child of theirs would be. Imagine a child who is a prodigy or who has schizophrenia or who is autistic or was born with dwarfism, or who has Downs Syndrome or who is gay or trans or you name it. How does a parent figure out how to adjust to the work and privilege of parenting when “the apple is nowhere near the tree”?

Do you say to a child, “Look, I was prepared for you to be an individual within limits?” Do you say “Hey bud, in order for this all to work and for me to keep on loving you, you are going to need to be something a good deal different than you are?” Does a parent get to say to the universe “I signed up for the responsibility of caring for my child but not some alien being”?

Far From the Tree is the result of hundreds of interviews with families who tell their stories about adjusting to or accepting or appreciating abnormal children. It is compelling, riveting, and thought provoking and the sort of thing that would make for a great book or film discussion group.

Question for Comment: What adjustments did your parents have to make to love you as you are? What adjustments have you had to make to love your children as they are?

"GOD has yet more Light to reveal ..."

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?