New England Puritans: The Grandparents of Modern Protestant Missions
How the Puritans started the Modern Missions Movement
This academic article was originally published in Missiology, 30:4 (October 2002), 519-532.
Protestant mission history, from the Reformation to the “Great Century,” is often told as an overwhelmingly European affair. The American contributions to setting of the missionary explosion of the nineteenth century are, if not ignored, often minimized. Stephen Neill’s respected A History of Christian Missions dedicates less than a page to American missionaries John Eliot and David Brainerd combined (Neill: 1986, 192.) But, as we shall see, these two products of New England Puritanism, along with the last great Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, were instrumental in setting the stage for the Great Century.
The Puritans began their errand into the wilderness of America for ostensibly missionary reasons.[1] Beyond the high-flown rhetoric of John Winthrop’s call for a City upon a Hill, they had an immediate goal to reach the “savages” for their brand of Christianity. The more immediate mission to the indigenous people of New England had not only the goal of bringing the gospel and civilization to them but the long range target of demonstrating God’s blessing upon the Puritan experiment. While results of this immediate mission were disappointing, the forces they set in motion in the wilderness of New England eventually changed the world—especially the world of missions.
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Through trial and error, the New England Puritans blazed trials for Protestant missions that shaped the way missions would later be done in “the Great Century.” Perhaps naively, the Puritans believed that the indigenous folk of New England would be so attracted to their way of life that they would flock to their churches to hear the gospel. This is mission as a “city upon a hill.” Richard Cogley calls this “affective missions” (Cogley, 1999a: 5.) King Charles I described it best in the Massachusetts Bay Company charter: “that the people from England may be so religiously, peaceably, and civilly governed, as their good life and orderly conversation may win and incite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith” (Warneck, 1906: 47.)[2]
Are we to take these statements of mission seriously?[3] Richard Cogley has uncovered several pieces of evidence to believe that the Puritan founders of New England saw missions as one of the primary motives for planting the “City Upon a Hill”: (1) John Winthrop put Indian evangelism at the top reason on several lists on why to go to New England; (2) Puritan leaders personally drafted the missionary purpose statement; (3) they designed the seal with its explicit missionary meaning; (4) they composed the governor’s pledge to “to draw . . . the natives of this country . . . to the knowledge of the true God;” and (5) John Cotton’s farewell sermon to initial “Great Migration” fleet exhorted them to “win . . . [the Indians] to the love of Christ” and remember that God may have “reared up this whole plantation for such an end” (Cogley, 1999a: 2.)[4] John White, writing to justify and recruit for Massachusetts, emphasized the opportunities for native evangelism heavily; for example, he ruled out Virginia as a destination for the Puritans because the Virginians had so alienated the natives there that they would not be receptive to the gospel (White, 1630: 389.)
Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony with native saying “Come over and help us,” from Acts 16:9.
Certainly there were “strangers” among the founders of New England who did not share any missionary concern (as even the founders’ admitted). Nevertheless, it is the founders to whom we should look for defining the colonies’ purpose, not the occasional opportunists. That the founders assumed an evangelistic mission to the Native Americans to be part of the broader purpose of New England is well illustrated by “the Apostle to the Indians” himself. Seven years after he began his missionary work, John Eliot explained his reason for coming to America was “to enjoy the holy worship of God, not according to the fantasies of man, but according to the Word of God, without . . . human additions and novelties.”[5] That the man who did the most for Puritan missions would echo nearly the same words which some use to narrow the Puritan purpose to exclude missions, demonstrates the breadth of their purpose for planting the “City upon a Hill.” There is no doubt about Eliot’s commitment to missions and yet he described his reason for coming to America just as Samuel Danforth (1666-1727) did in “Errand Into the Wilderness.” When Puritans described their reason for migrating as the enjoyment of God’s ordinances “without human additions and novelties,” outreach to the “Indians” was part of it.
"We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." — John Winthrop
Why, then, did the New England Puritans take so long to evangelize the native Americans and why did they send out so few missionaries?[6] The “City upon a Hill” model of missions by example, Cogley’s “affective,” proved to be very ineffective. Like most Protestants, the Puritans had not developed the church structures to carry out mission. “In the beginning [of New England] conversion of the native population was a goal for the entire community: everyone was to be a missionary at least by example” (Salisbury, 1975: 255.) Merchants were especially encouraged to take the Gospel along with the commodities they traded with the natives (Kellaway, 1961: 12.) Little seems to have come of this. Though they were Congregationalists, they were not Quakers; they held to the need of leadership by highly educated, ordained clergy. Though they had the highest percentage of clergy to populace in the European world, they were handicapped by their assumption that a true minister must have a church. John Robinson, the leading pastor in the Netherlands of the separatist Puritans who planted the Plymouth colony, had taught that the minister’s office is “confined within the circle of a particular congregation” (Robinson, 1644: 12.) The Cambridge Platform (1648) stated, “Church officers are officers to one church, even that particular, over which the Holy Ghost hath made them overseers.” Eventually, John Eliot’s contemporary, Richard Baxter would appeal for “unfixed ministers” to meet the missionary need (Rooy, 1965: 320.) The forbidding language barrier—numerous difficult dialects each spoken by a relatively small number of people—also stood in the way.[7] It is easy to look back and assume that Protestants should have intuitively known how to organize missions structures and go about the work; but in reality the lessons we take for granted today had to be hard won and the New England Puritans were among those who learned those hard lessons.
Massachusetts had a higher number of Indian converts than any of the other English colonies
Those who criticize the ineffectiveness of the mission, probably do not appreciate the extra-ordinarily difficult task that cross-cultural missions can be. In my missionary experience, a John Eliot with fourteen “praying towns” and several planted churches (meeting Puritan membership standards) is a phenomenal success; even David Brainerd’s few score of converts, which many consider a failure, would today be looked at as a remarkable achievement for a missionary. In fact, Massachusetts had a higher number of Indian converts than any of the other English colonies where even less had been achieved (Pettit, 1985: 27.)[8] Perhaps nothing shows the sincerity of their missionary goals than their self-criticism, despite their relative success. Samuel Wigglesworth, in the election sermon of 1733, scolded New Englanders for not laboring enough for the “conversion of the miserable natives . . . . If we can content our selves with doing so little for God, and the eternal happiness of our fellow creatures, what a . . . symptom is it of the weakness of those principles which we fondly boast of!” (Wigglesworth, 1733: 25.)
A Puritan Contribution: the Unity of Humanity
It was far from self-evident to Western Europeans, as they began the era of colonization, that all men were created equal. Indeed, some doubted whether native peoples in the Americas were made in the image of God at all, questioning, in that pre-biology period, whether theologically the “Indians” were of the same spiritual species as themselves. This cultural backdrop should be kept in mind as we see what Puritanism contributed to modern missions. While it is easy to relegate Puritan missions to the by-gone age of “Christendom,” in reality the Puritans treated the native peoples with according to the golden rule: as they would expect to be treated. Paul Hiebert has described the implication of globalization for Christian missions in a way that remarkably fits Puritan missions practice. First, the Puritans assumed from the onset the humanity of the Native Americans and thus demonstrated a belief in “the unity of the human race which runs deeper than the surface differences of culture, language, race and gender” (Hiebert, 1993: 72.) In missions practice this means going “beyond contextualization to inculturation” (Hiebert, 1993: 75.) Of course, the Puritans could be criticized for never getting to contextualization, for never being open to reciprocity, and thus being simply imperialistic. Such criticism fails to understand Puritans on their own terms. It is an ironic (if not hypocritical) to simply dismiss all attempts at holistic mission, missions including social transformation, as an imperialistic imposition of Western values.[9] Such an approach assumes that our current values of cherishing all cultures are normative just as much as the Puritans assumed their cultural values were normative. But more to our point, such an approach, in its haste to criticize “imperialistic” missions, misses important achievements along the way. Here, the achievement was the implicit belief that the native folk were equally human. Robert Cushman specifically called the Native Americans “the sons of Adam in that new world” and hence appealed for “knowledge and salvation” be furthered among them (Cushman, 1991: 6.)
The Puritans were treating the native people just as they expected to be treated themselves.
The incorporation of the indigenous people under Puritan theocratic legislation, especially the “conclusions and orders” of 1646, was a significant element of the mission. It demonstrated Puritan belief that the “Indians” were full human beings.[10] The Puritans were treating the native people just as they expected to be treated themselves. Both English and Algonquian were included indiscriminately in the prohibitions against blasphemy, heresy, swearing, criticism of the clergy, powwowing, and violating the Sabbath (D. Morrison, 1995: 66.) In the Puritan context it would have been a statement against the humanity of the natives to have excluded them from the legislation.
John Eliot: “Apostle to the Indians”
Further, the Puritans assumed that the native folk were just as capable of cultivation, under the right guidance, as they saw themselves capable of. (Whether one sees Puritan civilization as superior is irrelevant here for the question is whether Puritans saw the “Indians” as equal human beings or something else.) Eliot, in a 1654 letter to Jonathan Hamer, wrote about the “Indians,” “there is in them a great measure of natural ingenuity, only it is drowned out in their wild and rude manner of living; but by culture, order, government, and religion they begin to be furbished up”(Cogley, 1999a: 247.) When Natick established its own legal code it copied much from the English and even added special prohibitions, such as against biting lice!, tailored to change Algonquian customs. The Praying Indians adopted the Puritans’ conviction that family and faithfulness in a calling were the primary means of social control (D. Morrison, 1995: 73.) Puritan missionaries, especially John Eliot, taught native Americans to train their children in the Puritan way, with the goal of breaking their self-will (Greven, 1977, 265.) The law that perhaps aims most directly at changing native customs, both sexual and economic, required every young man, if not another man’s servant, to set up a wigwam and plant for himself. He was not permitted to live, as in former times, floating from wigwam to wigwam (Rooy, 1965: 185.) This is just how we would expect Puritans to treat Indians if they considered them equal human beings because this kind of thoroughgoing economic and cultural criticism is what they practiced on themselves. Eliot, for example, castigated the emerging English trend of men wearing wigs. In a 1653 letter he described men’s wigs as “a commission to pollute . . . [the body] with the like lusts.” Twenty years later he pointed to men’s wigs as the possible source of “all other lusts which [have] so incorrigibly broken in upon our youth”(Cogley, 1999b: 11.) Eliot was, hence, not simply an imperialist but a Puritan social reformer.
Puritan ministers concluded that their experience with the “Indians,” “those most natural of men,” validated their doctrine of original sin.
Augustinian spectacles made uncultivated, unregenerate human nature appear repulsive. Indeed, it made uncultivated nature itself seem abhorrent. A venerable Puritan minister and son of New England, William Hubbard (1621-1704) preached, “It was order that gave beauty to that goodly fabric of the world which before was but a confused chaos, without form and void (Hubbard, 1676: 247.)” The same “nature” that the nineteenth century romantics would pine for—with its Henry David Thoreau’s retreating to Walden Pond or Paul Gauguin painting the glories of the natives of Tahiti—the seventeenth and eighteenth century Puritans saw as something demented and dangerous, depraved and destructive. For the Puritans, it was a “howling wilderness.” Puritan ministers concluded that their experience with the “Indians,” “those most natural of men,” validated their doctrine of original sin. David Brainerd reported that the natives were open to the proposition that all people are born sinners. Their experience with their own children, Brainerd and other Calvinists noted, was just more testimony to the truth of Puritanism’s Augustinian foundation (Heimert, 1966: 22.)
Before we conclude that this “holistic mission” was merely an excuse for oppressing and denigrating the native people, we need to be aware that some key Puritan leaders were aware of the anomie gripping the tribes in close contact with them and were concerned about it. Cotton Mather noted that the “Indians” who remained after the decimating plagues that struck just before the Pilgrims arrived “were smitten into awful and humble regards of the English. . .” (C. Mather, 1702: 51.) Puritan missionaries were aware of the state we now call anomie and sought, with genuine “disinterested benevolence,” to solve it. In the late eighteenth century, Samuel Hopkins, one of the founders of the New Divinity movement which saw itself as the rightful heirs of Puritanism, heartily advocated missions to the native people. He wrote that Puritan missions “will tend to make them the people, and prevent their viewing themselves as underlings, despised by the English, etc., which would be of very ill consequences, and even frustrate the whole design” (Conforti, 1981: 54.)[11] If his inculturalist mission could overcome native anomie, Hopkins believed, several Indian “Bible Commonwealths” could spread throughout Indian territories. In other words, full ecclesiastical-political Puritanism could be reborn among the indigenous people (Conforti, 1981: 54.)
Of special importance to the Puritans was transforming the natives’ economic values (White, 1630: 387.) This too demonstrates their belief in the full humanity of the “Indians.” The Puritans, from William Perkin’s On Vocation onward, saw working faithfully in a vocation as an essential part of the Christian life. They expected a cultivated work ethic from each other and, applying the same standards to their new neighbors, they expected it from them too. The Puritans objected to the Algonquian subsistence economy (Cogley, 1999a: 242.) Richard Mather, wrote, “if there be any work of grace amongst [the remnants,] it would surely bring forth, and be accompanied with the reformation of their disordered lives, as in other things, so in their neglect of labor, and their living in idleness and pleasure” (D. Morrison, 1995: 81.)[12] When John Eliot reported “the glorious progress of the gospel among the Indians,” he described the newly developed industriousness of one elderly convert as proof of genuine regeneration (Eliot, 1649: 6.) Over a generation later, Cotton Mather taught the “Indians” that the eighth commandment calls them to “be honest in increasing and preserving our estates . . . . The eighth commandment will condemn you if you live in idleness” (C. Mather, 1700: 9-10.) A few decades later the missionary John Sergeant showed that he still held Puritan convictions. In a published letter to Benjamin Colman, Sergeant developed a master plan for transforming the “Indian children” “into the condition of a civil, industrious and polished people.” Key to this transformation was a rigorous plan to raise a group of native children under two masters who would regiment their lives around learning and labor “that as little time as possible may be lost to idleness” (Sergeant, 1743: 3-4.) Thus transforming the economic life was a prominent part of Puritan missiology just as it was a prominent part of their view of sanctification (Kellaway, 1961: 8.) To dismiss these concerns as patronizing colonialism misses the fact that for the Puritans not to hold the “Indians” to these standards would have been, from their perspective, a denial of the equal humanity (and hence equal responsibility before God) of the Native Americans.
The Praying Towns: Holistic Mission at Work
John Eliot and other Puritans interested in missions began groping toward understanding the need of the missionary organization. From early on Eliot and other interested Puritan leaders sought English support of their mission to the Algonquians. In 1649, the Long Parliament, after much delay, founded the New England Company that helped fund Eliot’s work and continued encouraging native missions until the Revolution. Eliot soon became a figure exemplifying the global expansion of Puritanism. In the long run, Eliot contributed to Protestant missions, besides a model of hard work and devotion, a set of techniques that, mission leaders later came to believe, might work better overseas (Hutchison, 1987: 28.) Among these techniques was the transcribing of native languages at which Eliot excelled. When William Carey wrote his Enquiry, though English speaking Protestants still had much to learn about missions, the lessons gained from John Eliot were not lost.
The Puritan mission was trying to separate the Praying Indians from their ethnic relatives in order to attach them to the world-wide Reformed community. Crucial to achieving this, for Eliot, were the “Praying Towns.” Those who choose to reside in them would be inculturated through the ministry of the church and submission to Biblically based civil codes. Striving to inculcate civilization with Christianity, Eliot, “with astonishing energy,” organized the “Praying Indians” into fourteen towns where they would divest themselves of their native culture to become “Red Puritans” (Hutchison, 1987: 27.)[13] Eliot wrote,
A place must be found . . . somewhat remote from the English, where they must have the word constantly taught, and government constantly exercised, means of good subsistence provided, encouragements for the industrious, means of good structuring them in letters, trades, and labors, as building, fishing, flax and hemp dressing, planting orchards, etc. (Eliot, 1649: 8.)
Eliot’s appeal here shows that we cannot simply sweep all Puritan missions under the rug of imperialism. If he had only wanted to deprive the native people of their culture, he would have wanted to keep them close and integrated with the English settlers. Instead, fearing the poor witness of the carnal colonials, he wanted to keep them separate. Some may point to the conscious application of the Puritan work ethic as proof of naked imperialism. But it must be remembered that Eliot’s vision for “Praying Towns” is exactly the same vision for society that the Puritans went to New England to achieve for themselves; having chosen the same for themselves, they sought to raise up a native society on the same foundations. For them to have done any less would have been, from the Puritan perspective, a denial of the natives’ equal humanity.
“The goal of evangelism is not individual salvation, or even the planting of churches, but the irrupting reign of Christ on earth and the glory of God” — Paul Hiebert
This Puritan view of mission, for so long out of fashion, is much closer to the new “global” view articulated by Paul Hiebert than it was to the dualistic view of missions, in which evangelism is divorced from social transformation. It was also much closer to the practice of seminal missionaries like William Carey who, besides evangelism, were concerned about raising agricultural productivity and ending social injustices even if those injustices, like Seti, were long established cultural practices. “The goal of evangelism is not individual salvation, or even the planting of churches, but the irrupting reign of Christ on earth and the glory of God” (Hiebert, 1993: 73.) Key to this social transformation were the “Praying Towns.”
The Puritans had a theocratic essence to their missions theology. They were holistic in mission in that they believed that every part of every culture must be transformed to be like the heavenly kingdom. For example, Thomas Shepard assumed that “civility” (that it, English culture) was important to inculcate, either along with or before evangelism (Shepard, 1647: 15.) Thus when they encountered “Indian” practices that were at variance with any part of what they considered the living law of God, those practices would have to be changed. Going deeper than mere doctrines, John Eliot sought to inculcate the Western mind in the Algonquians. He wrote The Logick Primer (an interlinear of both Algonquian and English) to teach the “Indians” the basics of the European cognitive style. The expressed purpose, though, was not to learn Western philosophy but “whereby you may open the word of God, the Bible. Lord Jesus help us!” (Eliot, 1672: 57.) Puritan historian Sidney Rooy notes, “The gospel, as the Puritans understood it, was a way of life, not simply a few doctrines to be accepted” (Rooy, 1965: 220.) No appeal to preservation of native cultures could deter this drive to hold all things together under the rule of Christ. They instinctively strove to create a global community under Christ. The post-modern belief that all cultures are of equal and intrinsic value and must be preserved under the banner of “diversity” was not a Puritan value.
Though the Puritans may appear to be cultural imperialists by some modern standards, Eliot’s work gave the natives the first tools to preserve their culture.
“Their pervasive, fundamental assumption,” according to historians Henry W. Bowden and James P. Ronda, “was that native Americans must either adopt European standards of living or suffer gradual attrition because there were no other practical alternatives” (Bowden and Ronda, 1980: 3.) The Puritan missionaries did not segregate cultural uplift as a secondary goal of mission. In John Eliot’s words, it was ‘absolutely necessary to carry on civility with religion’” (Bosch, 1991: 260.) While modern critics like to blame them for destroying native American culture, we must ask whether in the real world the preservation of “Indian” society was possible. If John Eliot had not reached out to the Massachusetts, English immigrants of far lesser religious sincerity would have continued to come and would have continued to encroach on tribal lands. Indeed, they would have done so more ruthlessly and the “Indians” would have had less protection than they already had. Though the Puritans may appear to be cultural imperialists by some modern standards, Eliot’s work gave the natives the first tools to preserve their culture. The first Bible printed in America was Eliot’s “Indian Bible.” He printed catechisms and other works in their language (Small, 1880: xxvii). In the real world, Eliot and the other Puritan missionaries were the best chance the indigenous folk had of continuing as a society—radically changed perhaps but still living together and speaking their own tongue.
In the summer of 1650 Eliot founded the first “Praying Town,” Natick. Eventually, he would found 14 of them and have as many as 1,100 native folk who choose to live in them. Because Puritan standards of church membership were so exacting, even white Puritan churches were having problems keeping membership levels up. Thus, it is not surprising that it took a while for the first recognized, independent church to be founded in Natick. That the natives were able to found such churches on the exacting standards of New England Puritanism’s first generation is the surprising event.[14] “Red Puritans” were a fact. James Axtell figures that at its peak Natick had between 190 to 220 (over 40% of the town’s population) as baptized church members by Eliot’s Puritan standards (Axtell, 1997: 351.)
John Eliot’s intentions, as well as those of the Puritan establishment, are demonstrated in the case of Town of Dedham v. the Indians of Natick. The neighboring towns fell into a boundary dispute. Eliot interceded strongly on behalf of the Natick Praying Indians. Besides answering the colonists’ of Dedham case point by point, Eliot also reminded the jurors that the “City upon a Hill” had a responsibility to the native peoples. The magistrates, at least in this period and for this case, also showed a bias for the natives. During three trials in 1662 at Suffolk County, the juries found for the farmers of Dedham, despite Eliot’s appeals. Three times the same occurred: a jury found for the English town and the magistrates threw the verdict out. Judges eventually gave the land to Natick (D. Morrison, 1995: 141-147.) Nearly a century later, Jonathan Edwards would likewise be an advocate for the Stockbridge Housatonics (Pettit, 1985: 16.)
Jonathan Edwards: The Puritans’ Bridge to the Great Century
John Eliot, through his writings and reputation, created a legacy as the “Apostle to the Indians.” Jonathan Edwards was the catalyst for the Great Awakening and the ministry of David Brainerd (1718-47) for effecting the coming Great Century. He was a missionary in his own right in Stockbridge and his followers, the New Divinity, cultivated zeal for missions. His own sharpened evangelical Calvinism was also decisive in lighting the fuse that eventually set William Carey heading to India. Edwards’ theology and the example of David Brainerd became two major factors in the ignition of Anglo-American missions that began with Carey.[15]
David Brainerd, supported by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge to be a missionary to the “Indians,” is more important for how he was immortalized than in what he actually achieved. Jonathan Edwards particularly admired Brainerd for carrying out in his practice what he believed in his heart (Pettit, 1985: 14.). Edwards was hosting him when he died. One of Brainerd’s last deeds was to give Edwards his diary, telling him to do with it as he thought best.[16] Edwards edited and published it and made it into an inspirational classic that inspired not only local “Indian” missions but John Wesley and the Methodists and a Calvinist Baptist cobbler in England. Through Wesley, Edwards’ biography of Brainerd became an evangelical classic in England before becoming popular in America through John Style’s abridged, popularized edition (Conforti, 1985: 191.) William “Carey . . . considered the Life [of David Brainerd] to be a sacred text” (Pettit, 1985: 3.) Thomas Coke (1747-1814), a founder of Methodist missions around the world, and Henry Martyn (1781-1812), an Anglican missionary to India, were two other leaders of the nineteenth century missionary movement who were inspired and shaped by Edwards’ Life of Brainerd (Pettit, 1985: 4.)[17] The work was so influential that by the mid-nineteenth century, Joseph Tracy, in his landmark The Great Awakening, felt compelled to warn zealous missionaries from emulating Edwards’ portrayal of Brainerd too closely, lest they follow him to an early grave (Conforti, 1985: 197.) Charles L. Chaney believes that the biography of Brainerd was the work that provided a model for a truly Protestant missionary (Chaney, 1976: 71-74.) This monumental work in the history of Protestant missions is the product of New England Puritanism, the fruit of a self-conscious Puritan revival in America.
Edwards, created a following that carried on the missionary impulse. Besides David Brainerd, New Divinity theologians helped found Andover Theological Seminary (1808), the theological seedbed of America’s initial foreign missionaries (Conforti, 1981: 157.) “In the field of foreign missions,” notes historian Douglas Sweeney, “the boys of Andover could not be beaten” (Sweeney, 1995: 302.) Another product of the revival, Williams College was home of the Haystack Prayer meeting in 1806 which gave birth to America’s foreign missions movement. Jonathan Edwards’ grandson, Timothy Dwight, made Yale into a missions training center well into the nineteenth century.
“Then many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and . . . excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Tartary, and other now most barbarous countries” — Jonathan Edwards
Besides cross-cultural missions to their neighbors, awakened Puritans had grand visions of crossing to other continents. Samuel Hopkins, one of Edwards’ most devoted followers, after moving to Newport, Rhode Island, mixed his drive for cross-cultural evangelism with his concern for African slaves. He planned and worked for an African mission led by freed slaves for 30 years. Much like his vision for Indian Bible Commonwealths, Hopkins envisioned a mission for the Christianizing of Africa. He recruited two African slaves, members of Hopkins’ church, helped arrange their emancipation, and sent them to Princeton to train for the mission. The Revolutionary War intervened, however, distracting supporters and resulting in the death of one of the prospective missionaries as a sailor fighting for America. Finally, well after Hopkins’ 1803 death, thirty freed slaves sailed from Rhode Island to Africa in 1826. This was all the fruit of Jonathan Edwards Puritan vision: “then many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and . . . excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Tartary, and other now most barbarous countries”(Miller, 1949: 327.) Though little was achieved in Hopkins’ lifetime, this Puritan conceived vision of using “means for the conversion of the heathen” in other continents was born well before William Carey wrote his famous tract.
Jonathan Edwards’ ability to make the sovereignty of God a basis for evangelism had a major impact in sparking the era of modern missions. The Puritan mind combined their convictions about the unity of humanity with their convictions the sovereignty of God. This mixture helped to spark the “Great Century.” In 1784, the Scot John Erskine sent some of Edwards’ writings to a group of English Particular Baptists. The Particular Baptists at that time were struggling with a theology critics today label “ultra-high Calvinism” or simply “hyper-Calvinism.”[18] The pervasive idea was that since the non-elect could not receive grace even if they heard the gospel, they could not be held morally responsible for not responding to the message and, therefore, the Church had no obligation to proclaim the message to them. John Ryland, Jr., pastor at College Lane, Northampton, England, got Erskine’s package. He carefully read Edwards’ Freedom of the Will. In it, Edwards had argued that there was a distinction between natural and moral ability. Since all people have a natural ability to repent and believe, they are responsible for their own refusal to do so. Two other books by Edwards had an enormous impact on the missionary awakening in Britain later in the eighteenth century and in the early national period in the US. Freedom of the Will, although addressing Arminianism, challenged the deterministic turn English Calvinism had taken by the late eighteenth century. Barricading themselves against the assaults of the Enlightenment, belief in human depravity had become more hardened. Edwards did not necessarily seek to soften Puritanism’s Augustinian pessimism toward human nature. He wanted simultaneously to reinforce that theological conviction while reconciling it, again, to a willingness to use means to “convert the heathen.”
“Calvinism and evangelism not only could but should be reconciled.”
Ryland introduced Edwards’ ideas to Robert Hall (1764-1831) and Hall introduced them to Andrew Fuller, both leading Particular Baptist pastors. Fuller, pastor at Kettering, England, developed the conviction, on the basis of Edwardsian theology, that “Calvinism and evangelism not only could but should be reconciled” (Naylor, 1992: 210-212.) Thus Edwards’ careful harmonization of an over-riding divine sovereignty with human co-operation appealed immensely to these young, moderate Calvinist pastors (Stanley, 1992: 4.) The next year, 1785, he wrote, under Edwards’ influence, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. This book prepared the ground for Baptist missions, because it enabled Particular Baptists to reconnect insistence on human responsibility to the center of their theology of salvation (Stanley, 1992: 5-6.) Fuller not only based his work on Edwards’ Freedom of the Will but claimed the support of the sixteenth century Puritans (Naylor, 1992: 199.) One of his frequent hearers, by the way, was a young cobbler, William Carey.
Another Edwards book, A Humble Attempt, created enormous energy stimulating missions interest which in turn spawned organizations and support networks in the early United States (Chaney, 1976: 68.)[19] The book “developed the logical, aesthetic, and typographical consistency of missions, revivals, and the Concert of Prayer” (Heimert, 1966: 83.) This work had a profound impact on Ryland, Fuller, and their pastor friend John Sutcliff. His support for the Scottish initiated “Concerts of Prayer” and his very Calvinistic belief that divine sovereignty necessitates—not negates—the use of “means” motivated prayer and work (Rooy, 1965: 321.)
“A treatise written by a New England Congregationalist in support of Scottish Presbyterians reprinted by English Baptists who were inspired by it to launch a world missionary movement—the wind bloweth where it listeth!” — Timothy George
Ryland, Fuller, and Sutcliff’s young disciple, the not yet ordained pastor William Carey (1761-1834), not only soaked up the Edwardsian theology coming from New England but read the lives of Eliot and Brainerd. These two Puritans, along with the Apostle Paul, became “his canonized heroes,” his “enkindlers”(Carey, 1924: 51, 71, 141.) In 1788 he met a wealthy member of Cannon Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Thomas Potts, who had remained interested in missions since being exposed to the “Indians” as a young man in New Orleans. Potts, along with the Particular Baptists pastors, urged Carey to publish something on missions (Stanley, 1992: 8-9.) “A treatise written by a New England Congregationalist in support of Scottish Presbyterians reprinted by English Baptists who were inspired by it to launch a world missionary movement—the wind bloweth where it listeth!” (George, 1991: 53.) Thus Edwards, the last great Puritan, became the link between the original New England Puritanism and the “the Great Century” of missions.[20]
When William Carey wrote his ground breaking An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen (1792), he was being carried along by the momentum of Jonathan Edwards and, through him, of New England Puritanism. He seemed aware of this Puritan heritage. In his Enquiry he listed both John Eliot and David Brainerd as models. The only book, besides the Bible, mentioned in the Enquiry is Edwards’ book on prayer. To the degree, then, that William Carey is the “father of modern missions,” New England Puritanism is its grandfather.
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022).
[1] See the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, showing a Native American calling out, a la the Macedonian call, “Come over and help us.” “Massachusetts Bay was not just an organization of immigrants seeking advantage and opportunity. It had a positive sense of mission.” (Miller, 1998: 31).
[2] This mission statement was probably written by one of the Puritan colonists.
[3] See my discussion of Theodore D. Bozeman’s thesis that such declarations do not contain the missionary meaning we ascribe to them (Carpenter, 1999: 104-107.)
[4] However, Cogley believes that these reflect the colony’s “public motive,” “a regnant convention in the history of colonization” (1999, 2.) I do not believe that Puritans, because of their aversion to empty rituals, would have so many hypocritical commitments to mission they did not believe in.
[5] According to Richard Cogley, “John Eliot’s Puritan Ministry,” Fides et Historia, 31, 2.
[6] “No more than twelve Congregational ministers became actively engaged in Indian missions during the seventeenth century” (Hutchison, 1987: 28.)
[7] John White, recruiting for the colony in 1630, refuted the objection that “winning the heathen to the knowledge of God . . . is a mere fantasy.” He admitted that so far the Pilgrims had not succeeded in mission but chalked it up to the language barrier. He noted that so far the English have only understood enough of the native’s language to trade with them. “But how shall a man express unto them the things merely spiritual, which have no affinity with sense, unless we were thoroughly acquainted with their language, and they with ours?” (1630: 403).
[8] “Compared with Spanish and French missionaries in similar situations, Puritan clergymen were never as energetic or self-sacrificing.” (Bowden and Ronda, 1980: 25).
[9] In From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, Ruth A. Tucker dismisses Eliot’s “Praying Towns” as an inability to distinguish between Christianity and Western culture (1983: 87.)
[10] “The Puritans did not view the natives as a race apart.” (Bremer, 1976: 200).
[11] Samuel Hopkins to Gideon Hawley, June 7, 1762 according to Joseph Conforti.
[12] John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance: Or, a Further Narrative of the Progress of the Gospel Amongst the Indians in New-England,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 3rd Ser, 4, Cambridge, MA, 1834, 197-260; according to D. Morrison (1995).
[13] The term “Red Puritans” is from Henry W. Bowden, and James P. Ronda, editors of John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues: A Study in Cultural Interaction (1980), 37.
[14] Eliot records nine pages worth of doctrinal questions put to the Christian natives at Natick. One sample: “Q: Seeing but one man Adam sinned, how come all to die? A: Adam deserved for us all that we should die.” (Eliot, 1655: 11-19).
[15] “If the two major forces behind nineteenth century Anglo-American missions could be isolated, a convincing case could be constructed for their being the theology of Jonathan Edwards and the example of David Brainerd.” (DeJong, 1970: 137).
[16] Hutchison writes that he was later considered the most inspiring of the Puritan missionaries (Hutchison, 29). This is only because of Brainerd’s journal which Jonathan Edwards edited.
[17] “Others of this era who testified to the importance of Brainerd [– in fact, Edwards –] were Samuel Marsden, missionary to Australia and New Zealand, Robert Morrison, Scottish missionary to China, Samuel John Mills, American missionary to India, and Christian Frederick Schwartz, German missionary to India.” (Pettit, 1985: 4).
[18] Peter Naylor refers to the anti-evangelism, anti-missions theology of mid-eighteenth century English Calvinists as “the cold hand of an ultra-high Calvinism. . . .” (Naylor, 1992: 210). “Hyper-Calvinism” is the more usual term.
[19] Full title: A Humble Attempt to promote an explicit agreement and visible union of God’s people through the world, in extraordinary prayer, for the revival of religion, and the advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on earth, pursuant to scripture-promises and prophesies concerning the last time.
[20] “Jonathan Edwards was . . . one of the chief links between the Great Awakening in America and the missionary awakening in Britain” (Rooy, 1965: 293.)