Moderator's Memos

Jonathan Edwards: Puritan First and Last

This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of the Puritans: their history and their ideas about God. 

The colonial world that became the United States had no more impressive figure than Jonathan Edwards. His dark vision of a justly wrathful God loving His chosen few and rightly damning most humans was the traditional church view, unsoftened by the idea’s early covenanted and communal boundaries. Edwards emphasized the religious ecstasy of those who found

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This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of the Puritans: their history and their ideas about God. 

Jonathan Edwards’ Puritan Revival

A student of mine, after reading Edwards’ sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), told the class, “This guy’s really good at scaring the hell out of people.” Edwards was, for a while. Yet this sermon little reflects traditional Puritan pulpit oratory, nor that of Edwards.
 
Given over a century after the religious settling

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This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of the Puritans: their history and their ideas about God. 

John Wise’s Democratic Political Theory

When early Puritan minister and theologian John Cotton was asked to comment on democracy, he brushed it off, “If all rule, who will be ruled?” Yet the Massachusetts church system that Cotton labeled Congregationalism let individual churches be ruled, personally and theologically, by their members. They could hire and depose ministers, theoretically determine doctrine, and early question

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This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of the Puritans: their history and their ideas about God.

Shifting Eternal Truths

Churches often pretend to offer eternal truths; believers tend to think they find them in their faiths. Yet dogmas have to float within the changing currents of their times, often a bit more slowly in churches than elsewhere.

Puritans remained strong defenders of core Christian doctrines, with salvation coming from intense rational-emotive seeking within autonomous Congregational judgement. The core

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This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of one of our denominational ancestors, the Puritans: their history and their ideas about God.

Witches and the Mathers

The Revs. Increase and Cotton Mather, father and son, were the influential late 17th clergy keeping witchcraft vital in New England and supporting the Salem Village executions of 1692. They led in the Puritans’ changing world, and believed witchery would help restore an intense piety that they felt drifting away. Son and grandson

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