Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH COLONIAL LITERATURE
described in Institutes as “the eternal decree of God, by which He hath determined
in Himself what He would have to become of every individual of mankind . . . .
eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others.” Whatever
one’s predestined fate was, one could do nothing to change it. Nonetheless, the
Puritans held that one should always behave piously regardless of one’s destined
outcome and emphasized the weaning of aections from the things of this world.
Puritans were instructed to develop an attitude of indierence toward material
things—to “wean” themselves of their natural attraction to the worldly—as well as
to personal relationships, including one’s own family. This was not to encourage
hard-heartedness but rather to make spiritual things the main priority of one’s
life because the things of this world will not last; only the life of the spirit was
permanent for the Puritans.
Given their beliefs in the total fallibility of mankind, Puritans looked outside of
themselves for guidance in following God’s will. The rst source of guidance was
the Bible, which the Puritans took to be the most direct expression of God’s will.
The Puritans, like other scholars of the Bible before them, believed in a typological
relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Stories of the
Old Testament were types or, as Hebrews 10:1 puts it, “a shadow of good things
to come,” that foreshadowed the antitypes or “the very image of the good things”
in the New Testament. For example, Jonah’s release from the whale in the Old
Testament would be considered a type to the antitype of Jesus’ resurrection in the
New Testament. However, the Puritans did not conne typological interpretation
to the Bible alone. Typology assumes that all of human history and experience is
part of a larger pattern of meanings that communicate God’s will, so any event—as
big as smallpox decimating the native populations in greater numbers than the
colonial populations or as small as a snake failing to ingest a mouse as recorded
in John Winthrop’s journal—could be considered part of that pattern and signs of
God’s approbation or disapprobation.
Despite vigorous policing of their theological borders against antinomians
(who argued that salvation through faith meant that one needn’t follow the laws of
a church); Quakers who disagreed with the beliefs of total depravity and salvation
for only a limited number; and others who criticized Puritan practices, the Puritans’
power eventually faded along with the membership of the denomination by the
end of the seventeenth century. Initially, the bar for membership in the church
was quite high. Believing that only the elect, or those who are destined to be saved,
should be members of the church and thereby be able to choose leaders for both
the church and the state, prospective members were required to testify of their
conversion experience and be interrogated by the other members of the church.
It was a rigorous experience that more and more people decided to forego, and
eventually, church members in the colonies were outnumbered by non-church
members. To increase their ranks and hold on to political power, Puritan churches
adopted the Half-Way Covenant in 1662. Under this covenant, the children of
church members could become members without testifying to their conversion.
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