Although these debates on individual interpretation, revelation, the canon, and typology, took place in Europe, they did not pass New England unnoticed. Colonists in Massachusetts Bay traveled to and from England, read works shipped from Europe, and followed English
ecclesiastical politics carefully. In all of these ways, the debates reached American libraries and
colleges. In his seminal work, The Hunting of Leviathan, historian Samuel Mintz discusses the
conservative writers who brought rationalism into mainstream biblical exegesis. Mintz focuses primarily on Hobbes’s critics, as these authors, Mintz suggests, were drawn into a snare. Because
Hobbes critiqued the Bible in Leviathan, his rationalism did not come across as harmlessly
theoretical (43). Instead, Hobbes applied the philosophy of rationalism to both politics and Bible studies, provoking clergy, professors, and lawyers, all of whom had a “vested interest” in the institutions Hobbes appeared to undermine (53). The effect of Hobbes’s work, Mintz explains eloquently, was that it drew defenders of the status quo into the philosophical debate about rationalism, in turn bringing the language of rationalism into the English church: “Hobbes’ impact was subtle: he provoked intense hostility, but he also obliged his critics to employ his own method of rational argument. Their absorption of his method while they resisted his ideas is an extremely interesting feature of seventeenth-century rationalism” (viii). Hobbes focused on the Hebrew Bible rather than the Gospels, but his method inevitably impacted study of the New
25 Mason Lowance observes that although Mather often used his uncle’s book, he nevertheless demonstrated the influence of his own time period by adjusting some ideas to meet contemporary
challenges. While Samuel felt comfortable with traditional typology, Cotton occasionally used allegory to try to capture “every available epistemological means for the accommodation of spiritual truth” (Lowance 30). For example, wishing to illustrate the soul’s need for Christ, Lowance relates, Cotton identified the Flood as a type of baptism, with Noah’s Ark a type of Christ (Lowance 36).
Testament. Similarly, Anthony Collins, responding to Whiston about the lack of concordance between Old Testament prophecies and New Testament fulfillments, simultaneously undermined the authority of both books. His ideas, like Hobbes’s, spread thanks to conservative reactions.
Collins’s Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) received
thirty-five printed responses (Ruderman 61).
Rationalism also entered the Church of England through the Latitudinarians. The most prominent were Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), the master of Trinity College; Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699), the bishop of Worcester; and John Tillotson (1630-1694), the archbishop of Canterbury (Reedy 12). Replying to Hobbes’s implication that reason and revelation serve different aims, Latitudinarians argued that faith could come from reason (Reedy 31). For example, John Tillotson’s sermons indicate the extent to which he believed reason was
compatible with Christianity. In Sermon 28, “Objections against the true RELIGION Answer’d,” (c. 1680), he remarks that God commands nothing unreasonable (Fiering, “Enlightenment,” 340). Tillotson explains that despite humanity’s degeneracy, “the Law written in God’s Word is not contrary to the Law written upon our Hearts. . . . Our Judgment still dictates the very same things which the Law of God doth enjoin” (Tillotson 330). The universe itself provided rational
evidence of God’s existence, Latitudinarians noted (Reedy 33). Consequently, ethics could be learned from natural inclincation (Holifield 59). Latitudinarians also agreed that external evidence was unnecessary for faith because reason itself was participating in the divine mind (Reedy 47).
Tillotson had the most direct influence on Mather’s colonial peers. A study of library lists by Norman Fiering indicates that Tillotson’s sermons were among the most read in the American colonies during the first half of the eighteenth century (“Enlightenment,” 309). Ben Franklin’s
“Silence Dogood” joked in 1722 that students attended Harvard just to learn how to plagiarize Tillotson (Fiering, “Enlightenment,” 312). Mather would have been an observant witness of this
pedagogical shift. Fiering suggests that the appointment of John Leverett26 to Harvard’s
presidency in 1707 marked the school’s acceptance of Tillotson’s scholarship (“Enlightenment,”
309). Mather himself had his eye on Harvard because it was his alma mater and because his
father, Increase Mather, was its longtime president. Increase clung to traditional Puritan pedagogy even as more liberal tutors, like Leverett, tried to introduce Latitudinarian ideas. A political maneuver in 1700 forced Increase to decide between living in Cambridge and resigning his post as president of Harvard; he chose the latter (Silverman 178). Cotton himself hoped to become its president eventually, and when Leverett died in 1724, Mather anticipated an appointment (385). To his disappointment, the college chose a much younger and less experienced man to preside over Harvard (385).
Perhaps most shockingly for Mather, in 1722, the rector of Yale and three tutors declared that they had converted to the Church of England and went to England to be ordained as
Episcopal ministers (Clap 31). The rector was subsequently relieved of his duties at Yale (Clap 32). Mather himself had been instrumental in establishing Yale, as he had convinced Elihu Yale, a native Bostonian who had become a merchant in London, to donate £800, resulting in the school changing its name in 1718 to honor him (Silverman 299).
New England had seen major theological rifts before, but not in its seminaries, and not away from Calvinism, but rather in further refinement of it. Stephen Foster has shown that this transition during Mather’s lifetime illustrates not the end of Puritanism in America, but another
26 Although Mather obviously had some openness to Tillotson, Kenneth Silverman suggests that Mather considered Leverett an “enemy” (Silverman 224). In 1710, when Mather tried to sue a detractor for libel, Leverett intervened unsuccessfully to try to squash the lawsuit (224). Even when Leverett died, Mather remained bitter, writing to the Overseers of the college to suggest that they investigate his administration (384). They did, but they upheld it (384).
stage of it. In The Long Argument (1991), Foster explains that Puritanism was a movement rather than a set of ideas. He criticizes the earlier historiography of Perry Miller and Sacvan
Bercovitch, who yielded to “the inevitable temptation” to “single out as definitive some one characteristic or another of a much broader movement and to tie the fate of a protean
phenomenon to purely temporary arrangements” (4). To truly understand the Puritans, one must take a “longer view that fuses the American and English histories of the Puritans and thereby locates enduring commitments and points of accord in decade after decade of reverses, internal divisions, and lamentations of decline” (4). While Foster admits that there is “a real and
continuing historical entity out there,” the Puritans failed to self-define or self-organize (5). He therefore defines the Puritan movement as “a loose and incomplete alliance of progressive Protestants, lay and clerical, aristocratic and humble, who were never quite sure whether they
were the vanguard or the remnant” (5).In a sense, Mather’s transition to a more moderate
reading of the Bible exemplifies the Puritans’ traditional inclination towards response.
Mather and his neighbors had access to European works because of Boston’s position as a port city. Boston was no London or Amsterdam, but it nevertheless had a literate population with interest in the latest ideas. By 1710, Boston not only had five presses, but nineteen bookshops (Cohen 4). Mather also could have accessed European works by borrowing from other ministers. Fiering notes that in 1717, Boston minister Ebenezer Pemberton’s library included Isaac Barrow, John Tillotson, Rene Descartes, Henry More, and John Norris, writers that interested Mather (Fiering 330). Mather himself owned around 4000 books by the time he
died (Murdock 22).27 Some he received as gifts, including forty books from the library of
Charles Chauncey, given to Mather by Chauncey’s widow (Silverman 172). There were also
27 See the impressively researched bibliography and provenance of the Mather libraries: Julius Herbert Tuttle, The Libraries of the Mathers. The Davis Press, 1910. Tuttle observes that the administration of Cotton Mather’s estate – and therefore of his library – is “surrounded with some mystery” (30).
specialists who could be consulted by letter or sometimes face-to-face. The first American Hebrew grammar book was produced by Judah Monis (1683-1764), a Jewish immigrant who arrived in Boston from Italy in 1720 (Hertzberg 109). After converting to Christianity in 1722, Monis taught Hebrew at Harvard (Kohut 218). Mather noted in his diary in 1724 that he wanted to consult Monis about some passages in the Old Testament (Hertzberg 109).
Historian Daniel Cohen observes that the book trade in New England was nevertheless limited compared to England and the Continent. He explains that ministers “dominated” local
print and had the power to somewhat censor circulating works (ix).28 Although David Hall has
suggested that profane works circulated in New England, Cohen notes that printed material produced in New England was mostly religious (Cohen 57). Mather’s father authored one of the
first American responses to deism with A Discourse Proving that the Christian Religion is the
Only True Religion (1702) (Holifield 70). Therefore, even if deist works did not circulate in New England, orthodox responses did.
Initially, Mather resisted the rationalism movement. The founding of the Brattle Street Church in Boston in 1698 caused what historian Michael Winship calls “a nasty little pamphlet
war” involving the Mathers (Winship, Seers, 78). The Brattle Street Church did not require a
public spiritual conversion narrative for admission to membership. A person therefore did not need to have the validity of his or her faith tried before the congregation in order to receive
communion as was done at the other churches in Boston (Lovelace, Pietism, 21). Similarly, at
this church, any Christian – not just a member – could have his or her children baptized (21). For Mather, as for many other Puritans, conversion narratives had cultural significance. Mather himself claimed that the requirement of a narrative for church membership, to keep churches
28Using the North American Imprints Program, Hugh Amory was able to produce a table indicating the
pure, began in the 1630s (Morgan 94). Thomas Shepherd and Michael Wigglesworth, ministers in neighboring Cambridge, even kept records of conversion stories, collecting around fifty narratives, much to the joy of modern historians (Morgan 91).
However, shortly after resolving his differences with the Brattle Street Church, Mather optimistically decided to employ rationalism in defense of orthodoxy. Imitating Tillotson,
Mather wrote Reasonable Religion (1700), a defense of Christianity’s reasonableness and the
credibility of miracles (Winship, Seers, 79). Winship explains that “in following the Anglicans,
Mather shifted the weight of persuasion from dogmatic certainty and private illumination to a moral, probabilistic certainty arrived at from weighing matters of public documentation” (79). He stopped short of full Latitudinarianism, of course. His Reasonable Religion still takes for granted that total depravity weakened the faculties and that only grace can restore the ability to reason properly (80).
In “Biblia Americana,” Mather weaves together radical and conservative readings of the Bible. Michael Lee notes that orthodox exegetes, who had begun to adopt critics’ methods to respond to challenges, were unable to come up with concrete support: “The Anglicans who defended the Bible by use of historical evidence argued that the evidence could lead to high probability but not absolute certainty” (Lee 33). Lee suggests that “Mather never picked up this nuance” (Lee 33). However, it may have been awareness of this trend that caused Mather to maintain traditional methods of exegesis in some cases while endorsing radical readings in others. He wished to demonstrate the wealth of information available in the Bible and illustrate how vastly skeptics undervalued its authority. Mather’s belief in the Bible’s credibility never changed, and his embrace of numerous hermeneutical methods reflects the broadening of his
description of evidence at the same time as other commentators’ perception of evidence was shrinking.