Worlds of wonder, days of Judgment

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Worlds of wonder, days of Judgment

• Beliefs and Practices in 17th Century New England

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David D. Hall, Bartlett Research Professor,
Harvard Divinity School.
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Popular Religion

• Supernatural
• Sybolism of church and sacraments
• Ritual enclosing of sickness, death, and moral
  disobedience
• Self-perception of sinner
• Surveillance of a judging God

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Puritan Society on the Cusp

• Rejection of Catholicism and acceptance of the
  authority of ministers and magistrates.
• Common people continued to accept superstitions
  that did not directly conflict with Xianity
  indeed, they saw these phenomenon as evidence of
  God and Satan at work in the world.
• Its a world both shaped by the inductive
  practices of the Protestant Reformation and the
  slow but steady dissolution of traditional
  society.
• A few may not have practiced religion faithfully,
  but they gave no evidence of rejecting its
  claimsnote to Crowther, you silly atheist, you
  would have been alone!
• Religion for these folk was a loosely bound set
  of symbols and motifs that gave significance to
  the rites of passage and life crisis, that
  infused everyday life with the presence of the
  supernatural. (Hall, 18)

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Literacy

• Mixture of sacred and profane literatureBible
  and school books versus bawdy ballads.
• All, not just ministers and magistrates, had the
  right to read the Bible.
• To read or hear the Bible was to become directly
  into contact with the Holy Spirit. Scripture had
  no history, its pages knew no taint of time. Its
  message was as new, its power as immediate, as
  when Christ had preached in Galilee. (24)
• Through faith, people could understand the Bible,
  and it was completely true.
• Still, printed concordances, incorporating
  scripture into poetry and song, and lifting
  verses out of context meant that the Bible was
  mediated to fit the Puritan world view.
• Printers paradox The interplay of clergy,
  printers, and readers worked in complex ways to
  heighten clerical authority and to make it
  vulnerable to challenges from beneath. (31)

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World of Wonders

• Thaumaturgy people saw wonders in nature, in
  unexplained occurrences, in good fortune, and in
  tragedy.
• Mixing of meteorology, astrology, natural
  history, and apocalypticism.
• Biblical tales of mystery, popular folk tales of
  the supernatural, and experiential testimony of
  wonders combined to produce reinforcement of all
  manner of signs and wonders.
• Motif the godly, if they did Gods will, would
  survive all of the travail of this
  worldespecially the work of Satan and his
  minions.

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The New Testament

•  And these signs shall follow them that believe
  In my name shall they cast out devils they shall
  speak with new tongues They shall take up
  serpents and if they drink any deadly thing, it
  shall not hurt them they shall lay hands on the
  sick, and they shall recover. (Mark 1617-18)

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The Church as place and community

• Because of the unique rituals that occurred in
  the church building, puritans conceived that the
  church was wholly different than the world.
• Place of testimony to the ongoing, and often
  successful, battle with sin.
• Unworthy of salvation, deserving of damnation,
  but thanks be to God for the evidence of
  election.
• Meeting place of the ideal, the imagined faith,
  and ones own experience.
• These stolid farmers and their families
  interpreted the world in ways that softened the
  strict separation of the elect from the
  reprobate. Only when some crisis or life passage
  broke up the rhythm of their situationan
  earthquake, say, or marriage, or sudden deathdid
  the sermons of the ministers and the rhetoric of
  the chapbooks small, devotional materials
  become forcibly significant. (193)
• Puritans valued the sacred community of the
  church. They established requirements for
  membership, which included demonstrations of
  piety. At the same time, they yearned to keep
  kin within the foldhence, the half-way covenant,
  modifications of the meaning of baptism, and a
  lack of participation in the Eucharist. Cleary,
  over time, to be in the church was not to be
  apart from the world.
• And be not conformed to this world but be ye
  transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye
  may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and
  perfect, will of God. Romans 122.
• Although much evidence of impious and backslidden
  behavior remains, most bought into the concept of
  the Puritan faith, even if they chose not to live
  up to its ideals.

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Ritual

• Fast days and other rituals allowed the faithful
  to act out their sense of danger followed by the
  assurance of salvation always the purpose of
  ritual was to enact a reversal, as in turning
  sickness into health, providing passage out of
  danger, or making visible the hidden. Ritual was
  a formalized procedure, a patterned means of
  connecting the natural and social worlds to
  supernatural power. (168)
• In general, fast days and thanksgiving
  reaffirmed the myth that also sustained wonders
  and church covenants, that God protected people
  who obeyed moral rules of Christian community.
  (170)
• Confession of sin in ritual formed reaffirmed the
  notion that sin would be discovered.
• Death rituals, including the rhetoric of funeral
  sermons,. Eulogies, and epitaphs, reinforced
  basic beliefs about good, evil, God, judgment,
  the resurrection, etc.
• Ritual provided a check against disorder and
  chaos it also justified the social order.