Visible Saints by Edmund Morgan

Nothing is new under the sun

As one grows as a student of history, one learns several lessons over and over. One is to never get involved in a land war in Asia. Another is that nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Another is that it’s good to be the king. (Turns out, comedy and history are quite compatible.) One that I have been thinking about is a lesson imparted by the Teacher of Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun. I reflected on this truth as I was reading Edmund Morgan’s classic work on the early American Puritans’ ideas on conversion and church membership Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Cornell).

Morgan’s argument is simple. For a long time, it was assumed that Puritan ecclesiology was formed in Europe and brought, fully formed, to the new world. Morgan, however, shows that the Puritan theology of the church only flowered once the settlers arrived in New England. It was the American Puritan theologians that really distinguished the Puritan church from other Christian conceptions of the church.

Just what was the Puritan theology of the church? Since no Christian has the omniscience of God, and cannot see the inner workings of any spiritual life, the visible church would never be made up of only saints. The unregenerate would always find their way among the flock. It was the responsibility of the church, however—and this is the key difference in Puritan ecclesiology—to ferret out those who had not been saved by the grace of God. The church, therefore, was for the visible saints, those who, as far as the church, as the keeper of the keys of the kingdom, could tell, were actually Christians.

This, though, raised a particularly pressing question: How would one know who the unregenerate were? How could the church distinguish between those who wore the mask of a Christian without actually being born again and the visible saints, those who were made new by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? The flavor of Puritanism that made its way over to the colonies—even from the more radical Separatists*—held that, in order to be accepted into the church, one would need to assent to the orthodox doctrines of the church and live a life free from outward sin. The problem, however, was that this criteria did not actually answer their pressing question. After all, one could submit to the leadership of the church, assent to theological orthodoxy, and live a relatively holy life without ever encountering the saving grace of God. How, then, could the Puritans ensure that they only admitted visible saints to the church?

*Puritans sought to make the Anglican Church more pure; Separatists wished to separate from the church in their efforts to purify themselves.

This was the American addition to the Puritan theology of the church: Any potential member would have to prove to the church that he or she had actually encountered God’s grace and had been regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit.

How did they do so? In short, any prospective member needed the preaching of the gospel to kindle the fear of the Lord within him, which would bring about belief in what Jesus Christ had done for him, and the repentance and good works which follow any true salvation. This, however, was not enough. As Morgan put it, “This was the constant message of Puritan preachers: in order to be sure one must be unsure.” If anyone was too certain about his salvation, odds are, under this rubric, he did not actually fear the Lord, had not believed that he had contributed nothing to his salvation (that is, that it was all a work of God’s grace), and thus had not repented of his sin and changed his behavior. It was this insecurity, strangely, that revealed one’s security; it was only through the lack of assurance that one could be assured.

This was not the end of the story, however. As the generations went by, fewer and fewer people had such stark religious experiences that could account for one’s saving faith. As such, there were many adults who were baptized as children, but prevented from becoming members or from baptizing their own children*, meaning there were fewer baptized believers period. Thus, the number of members of Puritan churches began to decline precipitously. (That the right to vote in New England was restricted to male church members gave this issue an additional political salience.) This was the Puritan conundrum: How do you decide who is actually a Christian? How do you faithfully practice church discipline? How do you preach the gospel to those inside the church and outside the church? How do you know one’s spiritual status? These are perennial questions. There is truly nothing new under the sun.

*Oh no! he wrote sarcastically.

The Puritans resolved this issue with a literal halfway measure. The Halfway Covenant stipulated that those who had been baptized into the church as children could, even if they had not experienced saving faith, though they could not vote in church affairs or take communion, could undergo church discipline and, crucially, baptize their own children. Obviously, many were unhappy with such an arrangement. (Few are ever satisfied with compromises.) But this allowed the Puritan church to continue to strive toward becoming the pure church without its purity subsuming any actually living members.

How do we balance our desire to welcome in with the call to disciple and care for the flock of believers? How do we distinguish between those who simply made a snap decision with those who went through true conversions? How can we resolve controversies within the church in ways that enable the church to faithfully grow, steering between the poles of hyper-seeker-sensitive approaches of belonging without believing and the lone-wolf church that positions itself as the one pure bastion amid a sea of capitulators? Since nothing is new, the church of today has much to learn from the Puritan experience as well.