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Reconsiderations: an Exchange Reconsiderations: An Exchange DID JOHN DAVENPORT’S CHURCH REQUIRE CONVERSION NARRATIVES FOR CHURCH ADMISSION?: A CHALLENGE michael p. winship EING admitted into a New England church was no easy matter B in the seventeenth century. Prospective members were expected to show that they were “sound in the faith,” as John Cotton put it, by making their doctrinal knowledge evident. More daunting, they were also expected to show that they knew faith not only intellectually but savingly, what the minister John Norton called “experimental faith,” through an account of their conversion. The 1648 Cambridge Platform called this conversion account a “relation,” or “a personal and publick confession and declaring of God’s manner of working upon the soul.” Besides being codified in the Cambridge Platform, relations were presented as normative in accounts of New England church practices by Norton, Thomas Lechford, and John Cotton.1 Normative was not the same as mandatory, of course; congrega- tional churches could not collectively compel individual churches. “A relation of the work of conversion . hath been ordinarily used in most of our churches,” wrote Jonathan Mitchel in 1664 (Mitchel may have been thinking of the Presbyterian leaning churches of Newbury and Hingham as the exceptions, along with Thomas Hooker’s Hart- ford church and perhaps a few more obscure ones). Three decades later, Increase Mather remembered only Hooker’s as being an earlier Congregationalist church that did not use relations.2 1John Cotton, A Copy of a Letter (London, 1641), p. 5; John Norton, Respon- sio ad totam quaestionum syllogen a` clarissimo viro domino Guilielmo Apollonio (London, 1648), p. 13; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1853), 2:226; Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing: or, News from New England (Boston, 1867), pp. 18–25. 2Mather, Magnalia, 2:28, 103. Plymouth colony churches may have been slow to adopt relations and may have never been as stringent about them as the other orthodox The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVII, no. 1 (March 2014). C 2014 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00347. 132 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00347 by guest on 25 September 2021 RECONSIDERATIONS 133 In his much-needed 2012 biography of the important puritan min- ister John Davenport, Francis Bremer argues that Davenport’s New Haven church was also an exception to the general practice. Accord- ing to Bremer, Davenport believed that “true understanding and the ability to make godly choices” were sufficient signs of “saving grace.” Therefore, Bremer states, “evidence of godly behavior and a true pro- fession of faith” were the sole requirements for joining Davenport’s church. What was not required, Bremer says repeatedly, was a rela- tion, “a personal account of how [prospective members] had experi- enced God’s grace and been born again.”3 Bremer’s novel claim opens up intriguing interpretive possibilities. Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and John Cotton were the three most prominent ministers to immi- grate to Massachusetts. Hooker heretofore has been the only promi- nent New England minister known to have rejected conversion narra- tives. Not coincidently, he chose to found the colony of Connecticut rather than remain in Massachusetts. By Bremer’s reading, disap- proval of relations might have helped spur the founding of the other orthodox puritan colony, Davenport’s New Haven, as well. The re- jection of relations by two of New England’s three most prominent ministers emphasizes just how outside the puritan mainstream the practice was. The importance of Bremer’s claim has already been recognized.4 But is that claim correct? Or can the stream of scholarly conventional wisdom continue to flow placidly in its wonted course? If Bremer’s claim is correct, it is counter-intuitive. Bremer does not provide any contemporary comment on Davenport’s alleged deviation from the norm, whereas Thomas Hooker’s was noted by both Cotton Mather and his father Increase.5 There is no record of Davenport intervening on the topic of relations when the Cambridge Platform was being written, as he did about other topics. A prominent element colonies. See George D. Langdon, Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620– 1691 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 129–31, and Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 264–65. 3Francis Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 188, 186, 185, 259. Further page references will be cited in the text. 4Walter Woodward, review of Bremer’s Building a New Jerusalem, New England Quarterly 86 (June 2013): 325. 5Mather, Magnalia, 1:349, 2:68. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00347 by guest on 25 September 2021 134 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in the New Haven church’s contemporary reputation, unremarked by Bremer, was the strictness of its admission standards. Davenport was “the strictest man for . admitting of members in New England,” Robert Child wrote in 1648. Cotton Mather referred to “a more than ordinary exactness in admitting members. ...Ihadalmostsaid severely strict.” William Hubbard called Davenport’s church “careful” while acknowledging that opponents would find it “overly strict.”6 Relations were acknowledged as the strictest and most severe part of the Congregational church admission process, and so it is difficult to see how Davenport’s church would have gotten its reputation in their absence. Moreover, as Bremer notes, in the only glimpse we have of the New Haven church’s admission standards in practice, relations are prominent. The process of selecting the visible saints who would found the church began, according to a contemporary manuscript, when neighbors “gave their accounts one to another of God’s gracious work on them” (p. 182). In light of New England norms, the silence of the archives, and the reputation of Davenport’s church, it might seem reasonable to infer later admission practices from the way the church was founded. Bremer, however, dismisses any such inference. He claims that these early meetings were “informal” (p. 190). Thereafter, he says, “there is no evidence that such accounts had to be delivered to the congre- gation for an individual to obtain membership” (p. 191). Lack of evidence that relations were the norm (if that is so) is, of course, not positive evidence that they were not. Bremer’s positive case is inferential and rests on two foundations. The first foundation is an argument about Davenport’s “understanding of the process of salvation” (p. 185). Bremer suggests that the turbulent up-and-down spirituality of many puritans, eloquently captured in the conversion accounts in the existing relations, might have been alien to him. No Davenport spiritual diary survives, although that is true of many ministers, nor does a detailed account of a conversion experience, although Cotton Mather’s biography of Davenport can be read to suggest that he was converted while barely a teenager.7 6Robert Child to Samuel Hartlib, in The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662) Held in Sheffield Univer- sity Library; Prepared by Members of the Hartlib Papers Project, ed.J.Crawford et al. (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Publications, 1995), 39/2/5A-6B; Mather, Magnalia, 1:328; William Hubbard, A General History of New England: From the Discovery to MDCLXXX (1848), p. 320. 7Mather, Magnalia, 1:322. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00347 by guest on 25 September 2021 RECONSIDERATIONS 135 Bremer reinforces this foundation of his argument by stating that Davenport “never addressed himself in print to the stages of conver- sion” and displayed “inattention to issues of the saint’s preparation [for salvation]” (p. 185). That claim needs to be qualified. Only one, not very long set of sermons on practical divinity by Davenport was pub- lished. This set provides a slender base from which to make a broad generalization about his inattention in print, or lack thereof, to prepa- ration. On the other hand, Davenport coauthored a warm preface to another minister’s treatise that did focus on preparation. Davenport discusses the stages of conversion briefly in the published doctrinal profession of faith he gave while being admitted to the New Haven church. Those stages follow the normative puritan model. Conversion is a process that includes preparation. The convert is first prepared for conversion by realizing his complete, helpless, damnable corruption, “awakened and humbled by the Law . judging himself worthy to be destroyed for his sins, and . utterly destitute of all help or hope of himself.” After this awakening, if the would-be convert is among the elect, the Holy Spirit will reveal Christ in his true salvific nature.8 In short, Bremer’s foundational argument about Davenport’s un- derstanding of the process of salvation hardly seems strong enough to bear the weight of the claim about admission expectations he erects on it. To bolster it, Bremer repeatedly draws parallels between Davenport’s and John Cotton’s understanding of conversion. But Cot- ton expected relations, which would appear to undercut the intrinsic relevance of Bremer’s argument.9 8John Davenport, The Profession of the Faith of That Reverend and Worthy Divine Mr. J. D. (London, 1642), p. 6; John Preston, The Saints Qualification (London, 1633), “To the Christian Reader.” 9There is a tendency among New England historians to take Thomas Hooker as the yardstick by which to measure a minister’s commitment to preparation, but Hooker was recognized at the time as an extremist. See my Making Heretics: Militant Protes- tantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp.
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