Theology Today - Vol 33, No. 2 - July 1976 - BOOK REVIEW - The Puritan Origins of the American Self & Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England

200 - The Puritan Origins of the American Self & Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England

The Puritan Origins of the American Self
By Sacvan Bercovitch
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1975. 250 pp, $15.00.

Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England
By Emory Elliott
Princeton, Princeton University Press,1975. 240 pp. $10.00.

For several generations, scholarly writing on English and American Puritans has included numerous important contributions by students of literature. Foremost examples in recent decades are William Haller and Perry Miller, who published major studies that continue to be basic works. Each had begun with more strictly literary interests (John

202 - The Puritan Origins of the American Self & Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England

Milton in the case of the one, American culture and its origins in the case of the other), was drawn to investigate the religious background or context of his subject, and came to devote major energies to exploration of the Puritan movement in its English or colonial phases. Two newly published studies skillfully continue this tradition.

The Puritan Origins of the American Self is at once exceedingly narrow in focus and extraordinarily wide in range. Cotton Mather's "life" of John Winthrop in his Magnalia Christi Americana-"Nehemius Americanus"-is the beginning point and continuing referent for a study that reaches with daring ease from the Bible and Augustine to Emerson and Whitman and offers frequent comparisons and contrasts with both classical and European authors. Of course Mather's studied and self-conscious execution of his own projects not only warrants but finally requires this approach. His own writing is shaped on these traditions and directly embodies an extraordinary range of reference and allusion.

At the center of Bercovitch's study is a thesis that the unique American sense of self in relationship to society derives from contradictions in Reformed Protestantism, the intellectual tradition of colonial America. In this framework the early Puritan materials that include such a strong stress on the community are transformed so that they are re-expressed with a characteristic emphasis on the development of self as the outcome of American destiny.

Justice cannot be done in these few sentences to the richness of Bercovitch's materials or to the stimulating subtlety of his argument. Possibly the point to be emphasized is the challenge he presents to understand theological materials from the Puritan tradition in a less rationalistic and less creedalistic manner than is frequently done. In other studies Bercovitcb has reviewed more technical aspects of the ways in which Puritans used the biblical and classical materials, especially through typological interpretation. This study broadens that approach so effectively that it certainly offers an agenda for the next several decades of scholarly work on colonial religious materials.

Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England is conceived in a rather different fashion. Most succinctly, it is a study of the changing characteristics of the published sermons from New England in the course of the transition that took place in colonial society between roughly 1660 and 1700. This was the period in which the last of the first and founding generation, which went out pronouncing doom upon the community, relinquished its hold on power and reluctantly gave over leadership to a new generation that undertook to develop a more positive estimate of the society. Elliott finds rather pronounced periods reflected in the sermons that expressed the changing responses to broader social developments. Through the preaching here reviewed, the younger generation is interpreted as achieving collective self-understanding over against the oppressive legacy from the founders. Thus, the sermons are viewed as a special type of literature properly understood in relationship to the episodes in colonial social history.

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In this project Elliott turns to advantage several recent kinds of studies. In the past decade colonial history has been examined at the local level in such a way as to make clear both the kinds of society represented in different New England towns and the specific changes taking place in the course of these years. Furthermore, theoretical interest in relationships between generations (both more narrowly and more broadly construed) provides Elliott with important insights. Thus, social history in its current modalities provides a setting for interpretation of the sermon literature from a new perspective. In turn the literature becomes useful evidence with respect to the social context. In principle Elliott's approach has promise as a means of studying pulpit literature in other eras which have been "opened up" in similar ways.

These two studies differ markedly in conception, approach, and style of execution, and each deserves far more extensive analysis and assessment than is possible in this brief review. Both do remind readers, if they require it, of the continuing importance of literary studies for work with theological and religious materials. Both books are basic contributions that continue, although in different ways, the important tradition of serious interest in Puritanism on the part of literary scholars.

John F. Wilson
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey