IMPLICIT MODELS FOR A LOCAL CONGREGATION
IN OUR HISTORY AND TRADITION
prepared for Prairie Group, 1988
Kendyl Gibbons
Antecedents
The idea of covenant as the foundational structure for the religious enterprise may be retroactively discovered in the Jewish scriptures account of the events at Mount Sinai, and the Christian gospel description of the Last Supper. But in institutional terms, the idea of congregational polity founded upon covenant goes back to Robert Browne's uneasy synthesis of the Reformed theology of Luther and Zwingli with the Anabaptist view of the voluntary and self-disciplined nature of church government. Luther defended infant baptism by arguing that the children of believers were included in the covenant of grace freely bestowed by God. In this view, the giving of the covenant is a strictly one-sided divine act, to which the believer appropriately responds by participating in sacraments, the "seals of the covenant," but which the believer has no real power to accept or refuse. The Anabaptists argued that it was precisely the ability to choose as a free agent to enter into covenant with God and with fellow believers that defined a Christian. Adult baptism was that "true covenant sign," a personal pledge of dedication to the Lord's service, to the avoidance of evil and the doing of good, and to mutual loyalty with the brotherhood of fellow believers banded together in the struggle against many adversaries.
In the book describing the organization of his dissenting church in Norwich, England in 1580-81, Browne says:
"The Kingdom of God was not to be begun by whole parishes, but rather of the worthiest, were they never so few." 1
and he describes the basis of the church as follows:
"First, therefore, they gave their consent to join themselves to the Lord, in one covenant and fellowship together, and to keep and seek agreement under his laws and government, and therefore to utterly flee and avoid suchlike disorders and wickedness as was mentioned before. Further they agreed of those which should teach them, and watch for the salvation oftheir souls, whom they allowed and did choose as able and meet for that charge.... Likewise, an order was agreed on for their meetings together for their exercises therein.... Again it was agreed that any might protest, appeal, complain, exhort, dispute, reprove, etc. as he had occasion, but yet in due order..." 2
Browne's writings and ministry were influential in the Separatist movement, particularly among the English churches in exile in the Netherlands, where Browne led his followers in 1581. These churches lived in the continuing tension between their rejection of the orthodox church authorities and their unwillingness to accept the whole Anabaptist system. John Robinson, pastor of the separatist congregation originating in Scrooby, England, which migrated to the Netherlands and later to America, wrote in 1624:
"...that as the infants of Abraham, and of the Israelites his posterity, were taken into the church-covenant, or covenant of life unto salvation...with their parents, and circumcised; so are the infants of the faithful now, and to receive accordingly the seal of Baptism." 3
The church, argued the proto-Baptists, exemplified by John Murton, is gathered through the act of baptism. The proto-Congregationalists insisted that the church was gathered by covenant in Christian conduct and separation from the world. This emphasis upon conduct as opposed to doctrine is of course an ongoing theme of the free church.
As early as 1610, Robinson had defined the church as:
"a company consisting though but of two or three separated from the world...and gathered into the name of Christ by a covenant made to walk in all the ways of God known unto them." 4
And it was already a firm conviction the "the ways of God" were not yet fully known. Robinson admonished those of his congregation departing for America to receive:
"whatsoever light or truth shall be made known to them from His written word;" 5
for the early leaders of the movement,
"though they were precious shining lights in their times, yet God hath not revealed his whole will to them." 6
Thus it seems natural that in the extremity of their precarious legal position, being forced to land in a place where they believedtheir English charter had no force, the Mayflower pilgrims should turn to the covenant principle in order to form a kind of ad hoc "civil body politic." As Charles W. Eliot says in his dedication address for the Pilgrim monument in Provincetown,
"...it was an act which the whole experience of their church in England and in Holland, and the essence of the doctrines taught by their pastors and elders naturally though unexpectedly led up to. They had been trained to disregard all authority which they had not themselves instituted or accepted, and they had also become accustomed to cooperative action for the common good. Indeed, the whole doctrine and method of cooperative goodwill cannot be better stated today than it was stated by Robinson and Bradford in 1618 in one of their five reasons for the proposed emigration from Holland to America: 'We are knit together in a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves straightly tied to care of each other's good and of the whole by everyone, and so mutually." 7
But no matter how "straightly tied" they might be "to care of each other's good," both the Pilgrims and the Puritans who followed them understood themselves as good Calvinists, subject to all the suspense and terrors of the question of election, until subjective Christian experience should manifest the fruits of possessing the Grace of God. Yet John Cotton and others of the first generation are tediously concerned to show that infants of believers are in some sense partakers of the covenant with God, for "all the creatures of God must stoop unto the people of God when He is in covenant with them." 8
Seeking to create their "city on a hill" and to avoid the cold formality of the English state church, they could not escape the powerful paradox of covenant which would make the Unitarian controversy ultimately inevitable. In order to maintain a pure church under Calvinist theology, they had to insist that only visible believers could be a part of it. Yet that covenant was inextricably linked with the covenant upon which was founded the social order -- the holy commonwealth -- and in order to maintain this, it was necessary to understand all members of the community, regardless of age, sin or theology, as covenant participants, or else to banish them, like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. As Peter deJong observes:
"The leaders virtually raised to a normative level the Christian experience of those who had undergone persecution for the sake of their faith. It was not long before this standard became unattainable for the generation which had not tasted the bitterness of religious persecution, and hence had not been strengthen in their convictions by such fiery trials. When they grew up and married, a grave problem faced the churches. Their children could not be baptized, because they had not entered in voluntary church covenant. And they could not enter that church covenant for themselves, because they could not attain to the high level of spiritual experience which the church authorities demanded." 9
In the face of this dilemma, some asserting that all descendants of those who participated by profession of regenerate faith in the church covenant were eligible to receive baptism, and others claiming that non-members could not claim the privilege of baptism for their children, the Massachusetts General Court called for a synod on the subject. At stake was not only the eligibility of non-members' children for baptism, but the whole balance between Calvinist orthodoxy, which might be ready to embrace Presbyterian church government in order to protect the integrity of doctrine, and Separatist polity, which might be willing to accept Anabaptist theology to protect the independence of the individual congregation. Furthermore, the political and ecclesiastical implications of limited church membership and baptism were first, the reduction of the numbers eligible to vote, and second, the prospective paganization of the colonies as they became populated with unbaptized children, and, inevitably, unbaptized adults.
Ultimately, in 1648, the synod approved the Westminster symbols as a description of appropriate Christian doctrine, though this was not understood to inhibit the individual congregation from drafting its own statement of faith, and issued a seventeen chapter platform of church discipline. The Cambridge platform, as it came to be known, affirmed that the church was constituted by "visible saints only" through the "visible covenant, agreement or consent whereby they give themselves unto the Lord." Of the baptized but unregenerate children of members it affirmed:
"They are in covenant with God, and have the seal thereof upon them, viz. Baptism; and so if not regenerated, yet are in a more hopeful way of attaining regenerating grace, and all the spiritual blessings both of the covenant and the seal; they are also under Church-watch, and consequently subject to the reprehensions, and monitors, and censures thereof, for their healing and amendment, as need shall require." 10
Here is a hint of the way in which the liberal party will ultimately invert the understanding of covenant, so that "healing and amendment" become its function rather than its precondition.
Rather than have parents enter the church covenant in hypocrisy by professing a regeneration which they had not actually experienced, or, the equally unpalatable alternative, allow their children to growup unbaptized, the Congregational churches put into practice gradually a "half-way covenant," which admitted the descendants of the pioneers to baptism and subjection to the civil authority, but not to the Lord's Supper or to the franchise. Not without some opposition, but inexorably driven by social need, the half-way covenant became first the practice and then the theory of the New England churches.
As the baptized but unregenerate adults were accepted into the congregations, they began to be required to affirm their "historical faith," which is to say, their intellectual assent to the principles of Christianity, and their "interest in the covenant," which meant obedience to ecclesiastical authority, proper use of the means of grace, and a persistent seeking after the fruit of conversion in their experience. Forms and ceremonies of "owning the covenant" were drawn up by individual pastors or congregations, for instance in Salem and Boston's Old North Church. 11
Yet neither the ministers nor the members could force the will of God, who alone determined the vivid experience of regeneration and conversion, and many half-way members became quite content to have it so. As New England prospered economically and politically, the ministers exhorted in vain. The earnest and prayerful seeking of salvation dropped lower and lower in the priorities of the average citizen. And as the interest of the population in religious matters declined, the ideal of the pure church receded, and the clergy found themselves preaching morality rather than religious experience to increasingly prosperous and luxurious congregations.
A reform movement in the early 1680s proposed the solemn renewing of the covenant in churches, wherein the members were to pledge themselves to the reformation of their own hearts and minds, the education of their families, and the purification of themselves from "the sins of the times." In 1700, the Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northhampton began to include the Lord's Supper as a means of grace, in addition to prayer, regular public worship, and moral living. These were practices designated to place the unregenerate believer in a more favorable situation for the reception of the experience of regeneration, and thus it was the believer's obligation to exercise them. Notice the vocabulary shift, where at one time the unregenerate person had been in a "sinful" condition, Stoddard now describes this as being in a "natural" condition. (Incidently, Stoddard also held that it was the laying on of hands at the ordination service, rather than election by the people, which created a minister, so he was only in some degree a friend of our tradition.)
Although Stoddard's theological arguments were less orthodox and less logical than Increase Mather's indignant refutations, his sensitivity to the institutional need of the churches was high; his theories were widely adopted, and half-way members came to receive both sacraments, and thus, in effect, all the privileges of the church. The concept that performance of religious duties might lead to or promote the inward spiritual experience of regeneration is butone small step removed from the Arminianism that lurked always in the background.
Into this setting Jonathan Edwards propounded his eloquent, earnest and disturbing speculations as to man's absolute dependency on God, and the need for a genuine experience of redemption. Their effect was twofold. Theologically, Ernest Bates describes it this way:
"He moved back and forth between the two poles of the individual and the universal, and in neglecting the intermediate stages of social activity, he facilitated the withdrawal of religion into the limited field of individual conduct to concern itself above all with the subjective conscience." 12
Sociologically, Edwards may be said to be the progenitor of the intense community experiences termed revivals which swept New England and other colonies in the 1730s and 40s. Both in theory and in practice, Edwards's thinking seemed to undermine the covenant as it had been previously understood. This despite his own attempt to defend it, at least as a historical motif, in The History of the Work of Redemption.