Preachin' & meddlin'

My intellectual deployment to 17th century New England has been extended. I'm taking a May term course on religious and cultural life in colonial America, and the first book we have to read is Harry Stout's The New England Soul.

Curious thing about those Puritan preachers: they stuck to salvation during their Sunday sermons, but used weekday, fast day and other occasional sermons to comment on politics and culture.

The division of labor wasn't due to any wall of separation they'd raised between Church and State, or politics and religion. They were Puritans, after all. Theocrats. The State was but the coercive arm of the Congregational religion.

No, the concerns were doctrinal: election and covenant. Eternal salvation was a matter of God's covenant of grace, which God initiated without regard to human merit. But God, the Puritans believed, also made other, federal covenants with the people, and disobedience could trigger covenant sanctions (Indian wars, smallpox, etc.) But in order to avoid any confusion between the two types of covenants, they talked about temporal rewards and punishments outside of Sunday, and reserved Sunday for conversion.

I can't help but wonder if I'd stuck to salvation on Sunday and did religious cultural criticism on Wednesdays if I might have avoided a sticky wicket or two in my ministry.

In fact, I'm sure of it. I have a colleague and good friend who served a church as an associate pastor. This congregation had a sort of unwritten rule that the Sunday sermon was to be relatively apolitical, but the weeknight program could be a no-holds-barred examination of any and all issues, no matter how controversial. But the congregation called a new pastor who, fancying himself a prophet, preached highly politicized sermons. The problem wasn't his politics, or that he thought about political issues theologically. It was that he'd violated a congregational taboo by mixing them in the wrong location.

The Old Testament ceremonial laws may have expired with the coming of Christ, but the concern they were trying to address, namely, the problem of things being out of place, abides. And yet, this is not quite the same as the Puritan concern to distinguish between conditional and unconditional covenants.

Thoughts?

Comments

[Michael Westmoreland-White]

Of course, this assumes a radical split between "the gospel" and political topics that I find very suspect.