John Cotton on the Mutual Subjection of Church & State
John Cotton (1585-1652) is known to many but to less than he should be. Educated at Trinity and Emmanuel Colleges, Cambridge where he was heavily influenced by William Perkins (1558-1602)—Richard Sibbes (1577-1635) was a later influence. He was vicar of Saint Botolph’s Church, Boston, Lincolnshire before emigrating to the colonial Boston in 1633. (He had preached the send-off sermon for John Winthrop’s (1587-1649) fleet three years prior; he traversed the Atlantic at Winthrop’s invitation.) In short order, he became teacher of First Church, Boston in the Bay Colony. In that capacity, he is most remembered for his pamphlet warfare with Roger Williams (1603-1683) and his involvement in the so-called Antinomian Controversy (1637-1638).
Cotton is less remembered for his writings outside apart from those battles, much less his comments on the political. His Letter to Lord Say and Seal (1636) is a representative instantiation of how colonial Puritans conceived of church and state at the time (which was conventional), as is borne out by John Davenport’s (1597-1670) Discourse About Civil Government (1663) and John Norton’s (1606-1663) Answers to William Apollonius (1648), as well as the Cambridge Platform (1648) itself.
If anyone today reads anything by Cotton, I’ll wager it’s his Keyes of the Kingdom (1644), an exposition of his ecclesiology that was published in London by his friends Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680) and Philip Nye (1595-1672) as support for their Congregationalist persuasions at the Westminster Assembly. Therein, most readers probably miss some (albeit brief) commentary on civil government, or rather, the interaction between the two swords of ministerial and magisterial power.
Having delineated the source and place of the keys of the kingdom vis a vis the church, synodical power, and the rest, Cotton introduces a few corollaries, as he calls them (i.e., that which necessarily follows from the premises established in the preceding (lengthy) demonstration of a Congregationalist polity. (Perhaps, this will prove useful or compelling for modern Baptists who want to identify with early New England ecclesiology as to its structure in the way that the 9Marks crowd does—though they typically and improperly downplay the proper role of synods therein.) In truth, what Cotton says is, again, pretty conventional for the time.1
The ministerial power of the keys (in the church) is not derivative of the power of the temporal sword in “the performance of any spiritual administration.” That said, there is a sense in which the spiritual power “is subject to the power of the sword in matters which concern the civil peace.” Civil peace has to do with “civil matters,” the “things of this life.” Lives, safety, property, “liberties,” taxes, and etc. We might be tempted to limit “civil matters” to merely material conditions, but we would be wiser to resist until we see where Cotton goes.
All the stuff mentioned above doesn’t belong to the ministerial-spiritual power because, see Luke 12:13-14, John 18:36, and Matthew 17:27. Render unto Caesar, and all that—strangely, Cotton doesn’t actually cite Matthew 22:21 here.
Thus far, pretty predictable, even for evangelicals today. But to distance himself from our context and conform more to his own, Cotton extends the interest of “civil peace” beyond material conditions as we would understand them.
For the “concern of civil peace” includes “the establishment of pure religion, in doctrine, worship, and government [i.e., church government], according to the word of God: as also the reformation of all corruptions in any of these.” As many others did, Cotton invokes the “good kings of Judah” as an example. Details citations to 2 Chronicles follow. As I noted in my review of Stephen Wolfe’s chapter on the Christian prince at American Reformer (and elsewhere), Old Testament reformist kings were often employed in this way. Nearly as often, the good Roman emperors (Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian, etc.) were positioned as parallels.
“The establishment of pure religion, and the reformation of corruptions in religion, do much concern the civil peace. If religion be corrupted, there will be war in the gates, Judg. v. 8 and no peace to him that cometh in, or goeth out, 2 Chron. xv, 3, 5, 6. But where religion rejoiceth, the civil state flourisheth, Hag. ii, 15 to 19.”
Before anyone takes Cotton to be proffering a general, ecumenical, pluralistic flourish of "religion,” or even general Christianity, recall that he was writing from Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century. Establishment of “true religion” meant Protestantism and, more specifically, the purer polity and practice he ardently believed he and his compatriots had established in the American wilderness.
Reciprocity between church and state on this count was recognized. Of course, the church had a duty to and interest in establishment and “reformation of corruptions,” and, indeed, the New England clergy enjoyed significant influence over civil affairs as well—soft power, not formal office, mind you. But the church is limited to “spiritual weapons, ministry of the word, and church censures.”
Magistrates, on the other hand, tackle the same problem(s) by different means. Said means include “stirring up the churches and ministers thereof to go about it [reformation] in their spiritual way,” but is also exercised by “civil punishments upon the wilfull [sic] opposers, and disturbers of the same.” See Jehoshaphat’s sending of the Levites and punishment of idolaters, says Cotton. That was not a “duty or privilege” peculiar to the kings of Judah, but one also performed by pagan princes (see Ezra 7:23). Cotton’s eschatology also leads him to see Revelation 16:4-7 as supporting his position “where the rivers and fountains of water (that is, the priests and Jesuits, that convey the religion of the sea of Rome throughout the countries) are turned to blood, that is have blood given them to drink, by the civil magistrate.”
That the civil magistrate possesses a duty and power to “establish and reform religion” is obvious to Cotton. Yet, this doesn’t mean that the magistrate can compel people to attend the Lord’s Supper or become church members “before they be in some measure prepared of God for such fellowship.” The judgment of the church controls in this regard. Notice that Cotton is not so much, or at least not directly, concerned with a correspondence between church membership and citizenship. Indeed, Massachusetts Bay featured religious tests (church membership) for office/freemanship (i.e., the right to vote). He is simply shunning the idea that the magistrate could circumvent the church’s role in guarding the table and elements and her own numbers. More basically, we could reduce Cotton’s point to supposition that nothing done by the magistrate to reform religion could contradict the relevant standards for the same found in scripture.
Connected to these efforts of reform, the magistrate is within his rights to call upon the church for assistance insofar as he might declare a fast day for prayer and supplication regarding some pertinent civil issue, or he might call for the consultation of a synod. In both cases, “the churches are to yield him ready subjection herein in the Lord.” (See 1 Kings 22:5-7, advises Cotton.)
This subjection of the church to the magistrate in certain things implies a correspondent subjection in the other direction.
“[T]he magistrate (if Christian) is subject to the keys of the church, in matters which concern the peace of his conscience and the kingdom of heaven. Hence it is prophesied by Isaiah, that kings and queens, who are nursing fathers and mothers to the church shall bow down to the church, with their faces to the earth… that is, they shall walk in professed subjection to the ordinances of Christ in his church.”
Others have interpreted Isaiah to be saying a bit more than this, but he is certainly saying no less than what Cotton discerns.
In light of the whole of Cotton’s formulation, we find a mutual, distinct but overlapping, subjection, a coordination, between the two powers/swords, much as we find (as stated) in Cotton’s friends Davenport and Norton, but also in George Gillespie (1613-1648) and others. Hence, why I have referred to this model—not unjustifiably, I think, if anachronistically and provocatively—as integralist. But, again, all of this is exceedingly conventional—maybe even abnormally soft—within seventeenth-century Protestantism and should be pondered thoroughly by evangelicals today. If Cotton is wrong, why is he wrong? He does not conflate church and magistrate. He does not confuse their duties. But nor does he set up an artificial antagonism between the two powers ordained of God. Maybe this last part is what actually bothers evangelicals today who owe more for their political theology to post-war western liberalism than the tradition they confess on Sundays.
All quotes taken from John Cotton on the Churches of New England, Larzer Ziff, ed. (Cambridge: Belknap, 1968), 69-164.