A Chosen People
“AS A CITY UPON A HILL” was a line filled with ambiguity and anxiety. For a clearer measure of the pride that runs through “A Model of Christian Charity,” we must go back a dozen sentences earlier. “Thus stands the cause between God and us,” Winthrop had written there, as the Model moved from its opening themes to their application to the project at hand. God will expect more of us than before and more from us than from others; he will be all the more angry at our failings—all “in regard of the more near bond of marriage between him and us, wherein he hath taken us to be his after a most strict and peculiar manner.”
“Taken us to be his” was no casual expression. It radiated confidence. Unlike Winthrop’s onetime use of the “city upon a hill” motif, his sense of a people bound in a special relationship with God saturated the Model as it was to saturate New England preaching for a century and more to come. Like Saul on the eve of his destruction of the Amalekites, God has given us a “special commission,” Winthrop wrote. “We are entered into covenant with him for this work.” “We have taken out a commission,” which by bringing us safely across the ocean God will “seal” and “ratify” and to which he will hold us strictly to account.
To be as a city upon a hill was a condition from which there was no escape. To act on a commission from God, by contrast, was a choice: an act of the imagination weighted with self-importance. In claiming God’s “seal” on their work, the Model transfigured the New Englanders’ voyage from a flight to safety, as Winthrop had described it to his wife that spring, to an undertaking on God’s behalf. It was to conceive of that decision as fulfilling a covenant between themselves and their God. Holding the biblical parallels close to their hearts, it was to imagine themselves as stepping into the Old Testament part of God’s first chosen people. No other text from New England’s first decade ran the theme of pride as close to the limits of what a godly people could imagine. And yet here, too, the edge of anxiety could not be held out of sight.
Ideas of contract and covenant were commonplace in early modern England. The great trading companies were products of contract, the Massachusetts Bay Company among them. Winthrop’s legal work had immersed him in a culture of contract. English Puritans had sealed their churches by a mutual pledge among their members when they could do so without attracting the hostility of their bishops. They would apply the covenant model even more thoroughly in New England. They formed their churches by mutual covenants. They chose their ministers and other public authorities by consent, joining in a covenant with each other to serve and to obey.1 In constructing the project for New England, Winthrop wrote in the Model, the New Englanders had drawn up the “articles” of their own intentions and pledged to hold each other to those obligations. Ladders of infinitely graded authority and status ascending from peasant to king controlled the symbolic system of orthodox England. The Puritans, by contrast, were people of contract.
But in the social contracts that seventeenth-century Puritans made with each other, God was an essential partner. New England magistrates ruled by a three-part covenant, Winthrop would later write, between the colony’s freemen, the magistrates they elected, and the God whose laws they were pledged to serve. Similarly, in the covenant with which the emigrants had embarked on their project to New England, though the voyagers had drawn up their own terms, ultimately God was the empowering party. Obedience would be the rent that the emigrants would owe their divine “landlord,” as John Cotton put it.2 Joining mutually with one another, they had offered up to God the articles of their contract and received it back as their “sealed” commission.
Biblical history offered the New Englanders a wealth of examples. God’s contract with Adam lay at their root, along with Adam’s example of the wages of disobedience. But the stories that riveted early modern Puritan imaginations most strongly were the stories of the Israelites: the people whom God had chosen as his own, to bind in a covenant of law and obedience apart from all other people of the world. Their travails, their struggles to keep up their end of the bargain and never-ending failures to do so, their pride, their lamentations, their sense of chosenness and their fears of abandonment lay at the very heart of the Puritan leadership’s understanding of history and themselves.
The Puritans’ sense of living within the terms of their Bible’s Old Testament flowed in part from the high drama of its stories, broadcast now to every pious reader. But it was framed, even more, by a distinctive way of thinking about history and time. An idea of human history as in constant motion, propelled ceaselessly toward the new and unexpected, was not the world in which Winthrop’s contemporaries lived. They thought of historical time as a succession of already prefigured events, as a plot whose broad outlines had already been written in God’s mind and intentions. That was what Puritans meant by the “designs of providence.” In this reading of time and circumstances, every occurrence carried the marks of divine intention. A military victory or battlefield defeat, a stroke of good material fortune or a crippling loss, a plague or a recovery: however obscure their grounds might initially appear, all issued in one way or another from a larger cosmic purpose. Within this providentialist understanding of history, there were no accidents. Thus when a particularly profane sailor on the Arbella died or when Winthrop heard that a mouse had eaten through an Anglican prayer book but stopped gnawing when it reached the Gospels, he could be sure that God’s hand was at work.3
For those who worked within the circles of John Calvin’s massive influence on Reformation ways of thinking, as the English Puritans did, there was still more. The Bible, as they understood it, prefigured itself. The events of the Old Testament preenacted the events of the New; events of the present day had their prefigurements in both. To live within this sense of time, as Winthrop injected it into the Model, was to live within a nearly endless array of historical analogies.
The technical name for this way of relating the Old and New Testaments was “typology.” It offered Bible-learned Protestants a technique for mapping the authority of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures onto each other as “types” and “antitypes” of the same divine script and intention. Jesus’s forty days of purification in the wilderness was the antitype of the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the desert. Jonah’s emergence intact from the belly of a whale was the type of the resurrected Christ, rising from the tomb and the belly of the world to heaven.4 Typology was a way of joining the disparate books of the Bible into a single whole. When the same habits of analogical reasoning moved out into the secular world, its mappings of worldly events onto those events’ biblical foreshadowings were less exact. It would be more accurate to call this worldly application of typological reasoning a way of “thinking in biblical time.” But whatever we choose to call it, its impact on the experience of figures like Winthrop was foundational.
Every event for those who lived in biblical time had its scriptural analogue. Straining to parse out their right to occupy the land of New England’s native inhabitants, the designers of the Massachusetts Bay project could barely get started on the question without appealing to analogies between themselves and the position of Abraham among the Sodomites, Joshua’s incursion on the Canaanites’ land, or Jacob’s bargain with Laban.5 To fly from a place of persecution to one of safety and potential future service: Was that not analogous to Joseph’s flight from Judea or the flight of the “woman” in the book of Revelation into the wilderness?6 When the French Catholic royal governor of Acadia showed up unexpectedly and alarmingly in Boston in 1643 with his forty troops and accompanying friars, Winthrop’s journal shows a man desperately turning over the possible biblical analogues—Jehoshaphat’s entertainment of Ahazia, Josiah’s aid to the king of Babylon, Solomon’s presents to the queen of Sheba, and so on—to help discern the analogy that would show what the colony’s response should be.7
Within this context it was all but impossible to doubt that the chosen people of biblical Israel had their analogues somewhere in the modern world. The orthodox Christian interpretation held that all of Christendom was now the fulfillment of God’s election of ancient Israel. But in a world of rising nationalisms, it was hard for persons immersed in Bible-reading cultures to resist the idea that old Israel called out for a new Israel like itself. English nationalists were particularly possessed by the new Israel theme. Assertion that God had “tied himself to this whole nation” was “a commonplace of commonplaces,” the historian Michael McGiffert writes of early modern English literature. The late sixteenth-century English author and playwright John Lyly felt no blasphemy in praising God for taking special care of England “as of a new Israel, his chosen and peculiar people.” At the coronation of William and Mary, England’s new sovereigns were assured that “it may be affirmed without any arrogant preferring our own Nation to others, or any partiality for ourselves, in imagining that we are God’s favorite People; that within this last Age … we have had such a Series of Deliverances, as perhaps cannot be matched in History, since that of the Israelites coming out of Egypt.”8 The same analogies saturated the language of Dutch nationalism. Dutch Calvinist preachers thanked God that you “have dealt kindly with us, even as you have led the Children of Israel from their Babylonian prison.… You brought us dry-footed even as the people of yore, with Moses and with Joshua, were brought to their Promised Land.”9
Acts of colony making, too, found themselves wrapped in biblical analogies. After reading about the prospect of English settlement in Newfoundland, the Rev. Richard Eburne wrote with inspired delight in 1624, “I do thereby after a sort, as blessed Moses from Mount Nebo … view and behold with the eyes of my mind those goodly countries which there God doth offer to give unto us and to our seed.”10 An advocate for the colonization of the Georgia coast could not resist pointing out that it lay on the same latitude as “that promised Canaan, which was pointed out by God’s own choice, to bless the labors of a favorite people.”11 If the natives should resist, another colonization advocate advised, the English should do as the Israelites had done in Canaan and expel them, for “every example in the scripture is a precept.”12 Moses searching out for more favorable lands for settlement, like Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, were to those living in biblical time, transportable events—precedent and authorization for the Europeans who were now beginning to swarm into the new world.
All these were analogies and consciously held so. Press them too closely to literal truth, and one slid over the brink into blasphemy. For seventeenth-century Christian believers, there had been only one explicitly chosen people. Only the people of Moses had received their tablets of laws directly from God; only one nation had heard God’s voice in a burning bush or been led by a pillar of fire. All the other peoples who claimed a parallel place in providential history had to make do with similarities. The line between likeness and outright identity was thin but important.
Indeed, a few of Winthrop’s contemporaries denied the parallels with biblical Israel altogether. There were no new, chosen nations of God in the modern world, Roger Williams, for one, objected: “The pattern of the national church of Israel was a non-such, unimitable by any civil state” in any of the nations of the present day.13 The Plymouth colony’s organizer, Robert Cushman, made the same point: “Neither is there any land or possession now, like unto the possession which the Jews had in Canaan.… We are in all places strangers and Pilgrims, travelers, and sojourners … our home is no where, but in the heavens.”14
But most pressed their analogies with God’s first chosen people right up to the breaking point. That number included John Winthrop. In the Model he did not explicitly declare that the New England Puritans were “chosen” by God for their part. Nowhere did he claim direct succession to the place of the biblical Israelites. Seventy-two years later, the most learned of the Boston ministers, Cotton Mather, would style Winthrop as New England’s “Nehemiah,” rebuilder of Jerusalem’s temple.15 But Winthrop himself never styled his New England a new Jerusalem or a New World Canaan.
Winthrop did something else in the last pages of the Model: a claiming of the Bible’s words as his people’s own that was, in its own way, far more remarkable. In the first sections of the Model, Winthrop’s scriptural citations ranged widely through the Bible’s Old and New Testaments, with Paul’s injunctions to charity as their most frequent single source. But in the last pages on the “application” of these precepts to the project at hand, parallels with the chosen people of the Old Testament rushed into Winthrop’s mind and imagination. Saul’s failure to live up to the terms of the commission God had given him came to mind. So did God’s double-edged promise to Amos: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”16 If the New Englanders should keep the terms of their covenant, Winthrop wrote, “we shall find that the God of Israel is among us.” But if they failed, as the Bible’s chosen people had failed so often, God would make them know the price of disobedience: “We shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”
The words and structure of that line were virtually a literal appropriation from Deuteronomy. There an angry Moses had warned his people that if they should defy God’s commandments yet again they would be cursed in their lands and bodies; they would be assailed with inflammation, pestilence, and mildews; rain would fall on them as powder and dust; locusts would consume their trees and crops; “and thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all nations whither the Lord shall lead thee.”17
In the last three pages of the Model there is hardly a sentence that does not literally repeat or paraphrase, like this one, an Old Testament original. If Winthrop did not have all of these committed to memory, he surely had a Bible close at hand as he reached the Model’s climax. Its final peroration comes almost word for word from Deuteronomy’s record of Moses’s words to his people before they were finally to cross to their promised land beyond the banks of the River Jordan: “Behold, I have set before thee this day life and good, death and evil.”
Almost word for word, but not quite. Into the biblical text Winthrop added phrases and substitutions that possessed the text for the New England Puritans even before they came close to possessing their promised land. Moses had commanded his people to keep the laws and commandments. Reiterating the Model’s central theme, Winthrop added another injunction: “to love one another.” Moses had cautioned his people not to be seduced by other gods; Winthrop raised the stakes by warning his people not to be seduced either by other gods or by “our pleasures and profits.” If they fell grievously short, Moses had warned his people that they would “surely perish … in the land whither thou passeth over Jordan to possess it.” Winthrop warned they would “surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.”18
The Jordan River’s transmutation into the Atlantic Ocean, casual as it may seem now, was no minor slip of the tongue. It was as if a minor player in a theater company had stepped forward to declaim Henry V’s lines, editing them so that the alteration better fit his character. The Puritans believed in the sacredness of words. Above all they treasured the biblical word. They distrusted wordplay and they despised the flowery, metaphorical preaching of their non-Calvinist rivals. All this makes the conscious word-slippage in the Model all the more remarkable. Winthrop did not announce there that the Puritans were the heirs to the exclusive relationship with God that Moses’s people had held. Close as he was to come in later moments, he never made that claim explicitly. God might hold multiple commissions, after all, and dwell simultaneously with many peoples. In “A Model of Christian Charity” Winthrop did something else that was, in its own way, just as hubristic. Letting the distinction between the emigrants to New England and the children of Abraham all but dissolve, he appropriated the words of the Bible’s chosen people as the Puritans’ own. He borrowed their speech. He voiced the part.
In all these ways, pride saturated the Model’s closing section. But doubts and questions could not be left behind. For where, exactly, was the New Englanders’ new Israel? The question is rarely asked, as if the answer were self-evident: in America itself. But in the early years of the New England venture that was anything but clear.
“Be not unmindful of our Jerusalem at home,” John Cotton had preached to the departing Winthrop fleet.19 Cotton’s own heart, for the moment, was still in England, but the plea was not merely a personal one. The issue of England’s place among the chosen people went to the core of the first New England generation’s identity problem. They were leaving England, Thomas Hooker preached in defense of emigration, because God had given up on England: “God is going. His glory is departed from England.” But that God had first chosen England as his special people was inextricable from the theme that God’s patience was being exhausted. Hooker’s progressive verbs (“God is packing up his Gospel”), like Winthrop’s (God is “turning” the “bitter cup of tribulation” on us in England), spoke to a God who had still not rescinded England as his first choice among modern nations.20 In their formal statement of farewell to their English brethren, Winthrop and the project’s leaders professed themselves “a Church springing out of your own bowels,” a “weak colony from yourselves” like one of the small, distant churches Paul had planted. “Such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation, we have received in her [England’s] bosom, and sucked from her breasts.”21
It was safer to leave, of course, with assertions of common love than with a cleaner break. In other contexts, different terms would be more useful. Defending their invasion of Native Americans’ land, the New Englanders seized on analogies with Canaan. Had not Joshua fought his way into the promised land? Had not God decimated the Canaanites with a plague, precisely like the plague that was decimating the Native American population around them?22 Yet in still other contexts, the language of place shifted once more. New England Puritans dotted the land with settlements whose names looked back to those they left behind in England (Boston, Dorchester, Cambridge, Lynn, Weymouth), but they did not found any Canaans until the eighteenth century.
And other terms were much less prideful. “Our Macedonia,” Thomas Dudley called New England in 1630; worse, the emigrants were “almost as the Egyptians” given the terrible death rate of the colony’s first year.23 Often New England writers described their land as a “wilderness”—though rarely did they mean by “wilderness” the place of purification and atonement through which Moses had led his people. Theirs was a “wilderness, where there are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men,” Winthrop wrote at a low point in the colony’s fortunes.24 “A rude and unsubdued wilderness,” Richard Mather characterized Massachusetts.25 A place of “nothing but care and temptations.”26 In terms like these, the New England Puritans stressed not their central place in providential history but their distance from it. Writing in dismay at the prospect of a revocation of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter in 1646, the Massachusetts magistrates reminded the Commissioners for Foreign Plantations of the immense labor the New Englanders had expended in raising “these poor infant plantations” in “this remote part of the world.” They hoped their arguments would prevail even if they could only plead their case as “such poor rustics as a wilderness can breed up.”27
Every reference of this sort was a reference with a purpose. It was more strategic in petitioning the authorities at home for the New Englanders to present themselves as poor rustics than as founders of a new Israel. Winthrop came closest to equating the Massachusetts colony with God’s promised land when others disparaged or threatened to desert it. When the Puritan magnate Lord Saye and Sele undertook to divert English emigrants from New England to the rival venture in the West Indies in which Saye and Sele was deeply invested, Winthrop could barely contain his anger. “How evident it was,” he wrote Saye and Sele, “that God had chosen this country to plant his people in, and therefore how displeasing it would be to the Lord, and dangerous to himself, to hinder this work.”28 Saye and Sele wrote back in kind to warn Winthrop that he was verging on blasphemy by “misapply[ing] scriptures in this manner … by assuming … that there is the like call from God for your going to that part of America and fixing there, that there was for the Israelites going to the land of promise and fixing there” when good reason showed that there were better grounds for moving elsewhere. “I will grant you that God is with you, that you are glorious churches,” but what grounds in scripture was there to resist the conclusion that, now that they had been carried to safety in their wilderness and “sheltered by a gracious providence” until their strength and numbers increased, they should not now move to a place of better soil and less bitter coldness where they “might do more service” than in the remote place in which they now found themselves?29
Winthrop’s counterthrust of biblical references has not been preserved. But he took his revenge in his journal by noting that one of those who left Massachusetts for the West Indies had all his hay burned by his discontented servants and that Lord Saye and Sele and his company had ultimately lost more than 60,000 pounds on their investment when a Spanish fleet overran their colony.30 Another scoffer, Winthrop reported with satisfaction, lost both his freedom and his fortune when, deserting Massachusetts to return home to England, he was seized as a slave by Turkish sailors.31
The New Englanders were as like as any others to the new Israelites of their times; at the same time they were a “people poor and contemptible” in their remote and distant wilderness. Theirs was a central act in divine and human history; theirs was an act among many in a church that was “universal without respect of countries” or “places.”32 That God was with them, those who stayed in New England did not doubt. But where else might he be? Jerusalem was also at home in England, John Cotton had reminded them. The boundaries of the territory they imagined God to have claimed for his own people were in constantly unsettled motion.
All of these issues of geographical place and stability, in conscious play in the writings of the first New England generation, muddled the analogy with God’s chosen people that Winthrop’s echoes of Mosaic language seemed to make so plain. Still more, if place was less certain than we have been led to expect, so was the question of time and permanence. For if God chose a place and a people, could he unchoose them? Was the act of making a chosen people irrevocable?
This was not an abstract question for the New Englanders. And their answer this time was unequivocal. They were leaving England because, having been elected by God as his own, the land’s mounting sins were driving God to abandon it. In the scriptural type that was biblical Israel, God had scourged and plagued and scolded his people, but he never got around to cutting them off fully. If there was no ease in being a chosen people, in Old Testament history there was at least a stubborn fixity in it. For the chosen people living in the modern antitype of biblical Israel, by contrast, there was only conditionality. God stayed as long as his covenant was kept. Break it, and he would choose another, better people.
God could “cast off a People, and unchurch a Nation,” Connecticut’s founder Thomas Hooker preached. He could sue out “a bill of divorcement.” He could reduce his Jerusalems to rubble and leave his Protestant churches on the continent strewn with bodies of the dead. He could say, “Ye are not my people.”33 Somewhat less harrowingly, he could remove the candlesticks from those he had once chosen. This was what Concord’s minister Peter Bulkeley meant by his reference to a city upon a hill in 1646. Having pledged to be “a special people, an only people” so that there “were none like thee in all the earth,” neglect of the New Englanders’ covenant with God would bring all the more severe consequences. Take heed that God should not “remove thy candlestick out of the midst of thee,” Bulkeley wrote, that “being now as a City upon a hill, which many seek unto, thou be left like a Beacon on the top of a mountain, desolate and forsaken.”34
This acute sense of the conditionality of God’s promises ran as an abiding thread through Puritan preaching. God planted, John Cotton preached; but an angry and disappointed God could “root you out again.”35 Winthrop underscored the point in the Model: play falsely with God and “we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.” We shall “open the mouths of enemies,” their curses shall turn against us, and we will be “consumed out of the good land whither we are a going.”
None of this should be taken to dismiss the force of the chosen people theme in “A Model of Christian Charity.” Winthrop’s seizure of Moses’s lines for the New Englanders’ purposes has to go down among the striking acts of the English Reformation. His appropriation of the language of God’s chosen people, his repurposing of the scriptural text for the New Englanders’ own circumstances, his reading of God’s providential hand in every detail of their venture, his confidence that he could pierce the analogies between modern and biblical time: these were all audacious acts. Roger Williams quailed at the hubris he saw in them.
But in our certainty that we can read all the rest of the modern American nation in the closing section of the Model, we have not read it nearly as seriously as we should. To fold the history of biblical Israel into the history of New England was striking enough. But nothing in that act clarified exactly where the territory of a chosen people, now spread across an ocean, might lie. Nothing guaranteed its permanence. Nothing assured its future. Conditionality, not assurance, governed the modern life of a chosen people.
And Winthrop’s colony was not alone. There were chosen peoples and sacred projects, bigger and still more confident than New England of their place in God’s plan for history, all over the early modern Atlantic world.