Neither Democrats Nor Theocrats

A response to John Carpenter

At Theopolis, John Carpenter has responded to my London Lyceum piece which showed (sufficiently, I think) that New England Puritans weren’t theonomists. The symposium of which my contribution was a part was on theonomy. A common claim of Greg Bahnsen and more recently Joe Boot and their followers is that seventeenth-century Massachusetts and Connecticut were theonomic regimes. As I argued, theonomists are sloppy and self-serving with their historical claims and fail, in the case of New England, to move beyond apparent facial agreement and to consideration of the background influences that conditioned Puritan thought as well as the function of the colonies on the ground.

John is fine with my vindication of the Puritans from the theonomic label. Well, at least under the definition of theonomy I supply. (He can’t be too forceful or definitive in such a claim given the venue of his response.) And I really don’t understand what other definition can be used than what I’ve operated with here and here without eliminating all distinctiveness and coherent from the theonomic label, but I digress.

What irked John about my take on New England is that I insisted, following George Haskins, that its improper to refer to those colonies as “Bible Commonwealths” or theocracies (in the contemporary sense of the term). The fact is that 1) the Bible did not supply the legal code simpliciter, and 2) clergy were precluded from holding public office and therefore never ruled. That’s it.

First, John is apparently bothered, for finds incredible, that I cite Haskins on this point. Haskins was, indeed, a legal historian and is still cited regularly by Puritan scholars. His work is excellent—I really shouldn’t need an excuse other than that—as is his article on Plymouth. But the main reason I made sure to reference Haskins is because Bahnsen appeals to him in his appendix on John Cotton (which was partially the fodder for my article). This is interesting because Bahnsen thought Haskins agreed with him, but the exact opposite was the case.

Some excerpts from Haskins in Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts (1960):

“Although there is a biblical basis or justification for most of the criminal and for several noncriminal provisions, the evidence clearly controverts the statement of James Truslow Adams that the Cotton draft ‘was based entirely upon Bible texts.’” [citing Adams, The Founding of New England (1921)]

“The colonists’ reliance upon biblical precedent and authority, apparent in the pronouncements of their leaders and in the fabric of the legal system, has led some scholars to conclude that the law of early Massachusetts was essentially biblical, and even to characterize the colony as the ‘Bible Commonwealth.’ [referenced is Wertenbaker’s otherwise great book, The Puritan Oligarchy (1947)] Although such generalizations are not without foundation, their value is lessened by failure to examine them from the standpoint of the law as a whole and with reference both to the special conditions of settlement and to the social, political, and legal inheritance which the Puritans shared in common with other seventeenth-century Englishmen.”

[For shorter treatment of the “Bible Commonwealth” question from Haskins, see here.]

This latter quote is my point exactly. Not appreciated by others before (and after) Haskins is the legal background (function, character, and custom)—when considering theonomy, a legal question, it’s no surprise that a jurist is of more use to us, by the way. I detail this some in my article in question. So, yeah, I like Haskins. But I like Perry Miller too and am fully aware of his employment of the “Bible Commonwealth” label. (I also like Middlekauf and Bozeman.) Actually, I love Miller! But he didn’t get everything right, of course, as John would surely admit. This is one of those times. Haskins is the corrective.

John, like a good Baptist, simply wants to overemphasize discontinuity between the American Puritans and what came before. Even where “something new” could be found, this is a dangerous maneuver on the front end. That is, an assumption of departure rather than of congruence and continuity will skew one’s reading of the subject because it will inordinately sift out background conditions. In other words, that method fails to understand people as they understood themselves, a common problem in much of the triumphalist, whiggish history that has plagued Reformation studies generally.

Anyway, all John really accomplishes in a pretty long piece—though I, myself, am longwinded, so this is not per se an insult—is to show that the Puritans were chiefly driven by religious interests (i.e., the Christian gospel, as everyone knows), that their society was dedicated to said interests, that the Bible was instructive for them and highly valued by them. All this is obvious. What he doesn’t show is that they were guided by the Bible only—which he admits vis a vis affirming my comments on natural law and the Puritans—or that they were ruled by a clergy class. These two elements are the prerequisites for dubbing New England a Bible Commonwealth in any meaningful sense.

To quote John’s transition into his own rebuttal,

“As for the major point he seeks to make – that Puritans were not theonomists who held that “Scripture alone [is] a competent and exhaustive legal code” – he is convincing. He has mustered an overwhelming and irrefutable number of Puritan sources to prove that. However, he overstepped when he concluded the Puritans “did not inhabit a Bible commonwealth.” That is, not only does he insist that they were not theonomic – ruled exclusively by biblical law – he implies that they were not even theocratic – ruled by the church. In this over-reach, he is mistaken […] If the theonomists fail to understand that for the New England Puritans natural law was God’s “other book,” Cline and others even more intent on secularizing the “City Upon a Hill” fail to understand how the New England Puritans’ ecclesiastical polity shaped their civil polity.”

First, I’m not sure how I could be accused of a Puritan secularization project or of failing to appreciate how “ecclesiastical polity shaped their civil polity.” My entire thesis of Massachusetts Bay is that it was an integralist society (see, e.g., here, here, and here). I’ve written on the centrality of the sermon medium for civic life. And so on. Just a bizarre claim from John.

Second, and respectfully, John’s feeble attempt to get around this fact just does not cash out. His theory is that New England actually was a theocracy, a Bible Commonwealth, and myself and others are just too squeamish and too interested in secularizing the City on a Hill to admit it, because it was basically a democratic theocracy.

John’s equation: priesthood of believers + only “visible saints” could be church members + only church members could vote = rule by the freemen via voting and, therefore, rule by a class of popular priests a.k.a. democratic theocracy.

In John’s words:

“Congregationalism pushes the soteriological principle of “the priesthood of all believers” into ecclesiology so that, while a church may have a “speaking aristocracy,” all the members are priests. In Puritan New England, these priests ruled the commonwealth, in the same way, today, the electorate rules the United States. The pastors may advise the theological priesthood, through their preaching and teaching, but ultimately church members had the final say.”

This is kind of goofy stuff. It’s a nice dare I say, Baptistic, reading (importation) of Congregationalism but misunderstands the way things worked on the ground in the seventeenth-century. (Massachusetts Bay was not the Southern Baptist Convention, to put it mildly.)

First, off the analogy to the United States itself a misunderstanding of the way things work even now. The electorate does not “rule” the country. If you think that then you’re so far from being redpilled there may be no hope for you. But more fundamentally, John clearly thinks both Congregational New England and modern America are pure democracies. That’s the only situation wherein the claim to rule by the electorate makes any sense. Mere expansion of the franchise unto representation does not lodge the power in the people. Mere right of recall of representatives doesn’t do that either. The people may act as conduits for the distribution of authority in a republic, but they don’t rule. Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that the expansion of the franchise does not empower voters but rather dilutes power itself. Further, how does John explain the distaste for the model he describes amongst the New England patriarchs? Winthrop only begrudgingly accepted a franchise expansion in the mid-to-late 1630s. Cotton and Ward denounced democracy (as all good Aristotelians would). Willard rejected a levelling, libertine narrative of the colony’s founding.

Second, the Puritans did not think of pastors as mere advisors to the populist priesthood. Elders really did rule. Increase Mather makes clear in his discussion of both eldership, discipline, and synodical authority in various places that dissent was not really an option. Once the power was communicated to the rulers it was revocable only in extreme circumstances and even then, did not revert to the people as if they could ever rightly exercise or own it. In church and state, power is received by the rulers directly from God. This is basic. Regarding synods, the theory was that a church could only refuse to comply if they could demonstrate that a synodical measure or rule violated the word of God, otherwise communion with the dissenters would be broken. Presbyterians would agree. And this is arguably not dissimilar to the Roman theory of papal infallibility in Pastor aeternus from the First Vatican Council wherein even the pope speaking ex cathedra cannot contradict scripture. Synods in New England had greater power than is usually appreciated.

Lastly, if John’s theory is that wherever professing Christian church members dominate the electorate there is theocratic rule, then antebellum America (being 98% English Protestant) was effectively a theocracy too. This makes little sense and “theocracy” has been definitionally stretched beyond all sensible use.

None of this is because I’m squeamish. It’s that 1) real theocracy—and not just the seventeenth-century recognition of Christ’s preeminence over all—is improper and undesirable, and 2) that New England just wasn’t one. My own theory (normatively and historically) situates the visible church as the spiritual power above the civil, temporal power (in a particular sense that I’ve articulated at length elsewhere). I fully appreciate the formative centrality of the church in colonial New England. I’m not secularizing it. But Puritan political theory was robust and, in general, conventional for the time. It wasn’t a theocracy, but it was something even more foreign to modern readers: A well-ordered Christian polity that, like Geneva or Zurich, was attempting to recover the old Gelasian formula for church and state adjusted for particulars and contingencies of context. That is, a rehabilitation of the temporal power’s religious interest and role accompanied by a deference to the church for moral guidance, expressed often by an assurance that church discipline would be fully executed and supported civilly. The clergy, in turn, supported the magistrates and frequently served in a sort of unofficial advice and consent role on questions of policy and governance. But this isn’t theocracy, and John overestimates the role “the” people really played in anything. He likes that Wertenbaker calls New England a “Bible Commonwealth,” but does he also agree with Wertenbaker that New England was always an "oligarchy”?