Participation & Covenant in Puritan Theology

FROM THE BOOK

It was the genius of Perry Miller in his pioneering work: the New England Mind, to map out in detail the metaphysical and theological presuppositions of the British and American Puritan movement, and to demonstrate their large-scale social implications. In particular, he recognized that Puritanism was motivated by an integrative perspective according to which everything attained its unity, purpose and meaning only in relation to the Triune God. This was a profoundly theological vision of all of reality, which clearly impinged on everyday life, for it entailed the sanctification of all of life and the orientation of every vocation and discipline to God. At the heart of Puritan thought, therefore, was a fusion of contemplation and action which assumed a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between knowledge and practice.

The impact of this was profound and the Puritan Founding Fathers – still revered in America – did much to determine the later spiritual and political trajectory of the United States, including its dramatic collision with the British Crown. It is no exaggeration to say that the seeds of American Independence and even of the much-vaunted American Dream were sown in the Puritan era.

Significantly, Miller argued for an intimate link between this distinctive Puritan approach and the encyclopaedic and pedagogical movement of Ramism. Stemming from the work of the sixteenth-century Huguenot philosopher and educator Petrus Ramus, Ramism had spread rapidly in the Reformed world during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gaining a widespread following among Puritans and Further Reformers. It gained prominence in Puritan Colleges in Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin, the Scottish universities and above all at Harvard and early Yale, in a movement stretching – in the words of David Hill Scott – from Boston to the Baltic.

As Miller brilliantly demonstrated, the attraction of Ramism to Puritans was especially in its nature as a Platonic logic with its assumption of a direct map or isomorphism between the created world, the human mind, and the mind of God. In this, Miller pointed towards an important link between the Puritan vision of reality and the Platonism evident in medieval theologians such as Aquinas, Bonaventure and – I would want to add – Scotus. While Puritan theology is perhaps better known today for its engagement with scholastic Aristotelianism, Miller thus reveals its deep Platonic roots.

Yet always lurking behind what might appear to be Miller’s tidy, rational vision of Puritanism is the spectre of an arbitrary God. As the work develops, it becomes clear that he views Puritanism not just as a protest movement against established religion or as a vibrant intellectual tradition, but as an ongoing attempt to grapple with man in relation to an incomprehensible, sovereign God. In this sense, most notoriously, he explains the Puritan preoccupation with covenantal models of theology and society as a kind of unconscious attempt to domesticate God and re-establish a reliable and stable basis for divine-human relations. For Miller, Scripture and the covenants appear as lifelines to stop humans drowning in a sea of mystery. In the words of Baird Tipson, whose important work on Ramism and New England Puritanism follows closely in the footsteps of Miller, they quite simply marked the way of coming to terms with a “terrifying God.”In this book, I plan to revisit some of the key themes of Miller’s treatment of the Puritan theological and social vision. I will suggest that there is much to commend in them – especially his neglected account of the theological and metaphysical presuppositions of Puritanism. However, I will argue that while Miller is right to emphasize from the start what could be called the apophatic dimension of Puritanism, in the end he overplays his hand, missing the subtle balance of transcendence and immanence which runs through Puritan theology. This, I will suggest, was manifest in a delicately-poised metaphysics of participation and covenant which profoundly shaped the Puritan theological and social vision. This thesis draws on and builds on my recent book Ramism and the Reformation of Method: The Franciscan Legacy in Early Modernity, in which I seek to connect Ramism to a long Franciscan and Scotist tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages, but also on my own wider work, and that of many others, on Reformed scholasticism. While inspired by Miller’s connection of Ramism and Puritanism, it also looks well beyond the Ramist tradition to show how themes of participation and covenant were the beating heart of Puritanism.

– Introduction: Towards Re-Enchantment