Joyce Haworth
Troublemakers in Zion 2: Anne Hutchinson
Harper College Life-Long Learning program
Roger Williams, continued
Williams briefly joined the
Baptists (these were not quite the same type as our modern Baptists) but after
a few months deserted them, deciding that no true church was possible until
Christ reestablished the apostolic succession.
For some time he withdrew spiritually until he felt he could pray only
with his wife. Following this he made a
180-degree turn, fellowshipping with any who sought it. (Please note this issue of who he would pray
and fellowship with is separate from the issue of whom he welcomed to live in
his colony. All beliefs were welcome in
Rhode Island.) In 1643 events conspired such that Massachusetts thought they had
a good chance of getting control of Rhode Island. Williams then went to England and obtained a
royal charter for his colony.
Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson was probably the most famous
of those who got themselves thrown out of Massachusetts, though few good
popular histories have been written about her – probably because the issues
they were arguing about were based on obscure theological hair-splitting.
The story begins in 1634, when John Cotton
arrived in the colony and began preaching energetically about the grace of God,
to everyone’s happiness. Arriving with
him was the large Hutchinson family:
William, Anne and their surviving 11 children. They had been admirers of Cotton in England
and were there to join the Puritan experiment.
The Hutchinsons joined the church at Boston.
The following year the other two main players
in the conflict arrive: young Henry
Vane, whose aristocratic background made him something of a rock star in that
little community (he was made governor the following May), and John
Wheelwright, a relative of the Hutchinsons and another minister. Soon after her arrival, Anne Hutchinson began
having gatherings of women in her home to discuss Cotton’s sermons. This is not unlawful or even unusual. But it became a very large group, and men began
attending as well as women. Over time,
Anne began teaching them herself, offering her own spin on Cotton’s
teachings. She began to criticize the
colony ministers, saying all but Cotton and Wheelwright were under a “covenant
of works.”
Being under a “covenant of works” means that
you think your good deeds will get you to Heaven. This is the opposite of the mainline
Protestant teaching, the one that so much of the Reformation was about: that God saves people by his grace (his love
and favor that people do not deserve and can never earn). The issue that
everyone in Boston got so exercised about in 1636 and 1637 was, do good works
have any place in determining if a person is saved or not? Can you tell if a person is saved, if she is
a true Christian, by her good deeds? Most
Puritans said yes – the actions of one’s life are a reasonable indicator of the
state of one’s soul. The
Wheelwright-Hutchinson crowd said no – outward actions have no role or
indicator in salvation, and in fact you cannot tell if someone is saved or not
by any of their actions. To draw any
correlation between one’s good deeds and one’s spiritual state was preaching a
covenant of works, for you were implying (they said) that your good works saved
you. Salvation is spiritually
discerned. God speaks to your heart. He
also clues you in on whether the people around you are saved or not.
Hutchinson was strongly implying that few of
the ministers in Massachusetts Bay were actually saved, and that you had to be
super spiritual (like she was!) to discern exactly who was in and who was out.
This was troubling on several levels, the least not being that the Puritan
experiment in Massachusetts depended on being able to tell, with some
reasonable degree of accuracy, who was a child of God and who was not. Otherwise, how can we have a community of
Christians? In addition, Hutchinson was
putting herself and her favored few above the authorities of the colony, saying
they could tell who was in and who was out.
As the summer of 1636 went on, Hutchinson’s
gatherings attracted the enthusiastic support of the young governor, Henry
Vane. Other ministers decided to investigate what was going on in Boston. They feared that Wheelwright’s theology was
becoming rather like the Familists, which was a sect that said that true
believers were freed from obeying the moral law. Cotton, Wheelwright and
Hutchinson are all brought before a gathering of ministers. Hutchinson told the
ministers that none of them were preaching by the Spirit except Cotton and
Wheelwright. But they all pass muster,
for now.
But Boston was beginning to roil. The grace/works issue was dividing the
congregation, and the people in Boston were getting rowdy in church. They asked questions during the church
service -- which was fine; it was a
common practice at the time – but their questions were were pointedly critical
of all ministers besides Cotton and Wheelwright. Governor Vane joined in on this with
relish. Some Boston church members got
up and walked out if a minister other than Cotton preached.
In January 1637 a day of fasting in Boston
was called for, to repent seek God’s help out of all of the conflict and
trouble. On that day, Wheelwright
preached in the Boston church, and he said that the whole trouble was that Antichrist
was working among many ministers in Massachusetts, and believers must kill them
with the Word of God, or else ruin would ensue.
This did not help things. He was convicted of sedition in March. Henry Vane was voted out of office and he
stomped home to England.
The government decided to intervene in the
fall of 1637. Wheelwright, already
convicted, was banished. Cotton again
passed muster and thereafter toned his preaching down. Hutchinson, whose ministry was not public,
could not therefore be charged with sedition.
She was charged with “harboring” and “countenancing” troublemakers. In her two-day trial she defended herself in
a spirited way, besting the church fathers on their own theological
grounds. But when witnesses for her
defense waffled, she threw caution to the wind and said God had told her that
the ministry was corrupt and that Massachusetts would be destroyed if they
continued to persecute her. She was put
under house arrest, to be banished when the weather cleared in the spring. Before she left, she had an excommunication
trial in church, where she nearly recanted and apologized for all that she
said. But at the last minute, she
changed her mind and stuck to her guns.
Some 100 people left Massachusetts Bay as a
result of this “free-grace controversy.”
Of the four who were most involved, Hutchinson was made the scapegoat by
the town fathers. The whole thing was
billed as her fault, this conniving woman, holding meetings in her house and
teaching and stoking the fires of conflict.
The other three continued to be valuable to the colony, after a few
years: Cotton preached in Boston for
many decades; Wheelwright established a colony in New Hampshire and eventually
enjoyed an excellent relationship with Boston (he was eventually un-banished)
and Vane, back in England, was a booster for the American colonies. Hutchinson, unrepentant, moved to Rhode
Island and then New Amsterdam, where she was killed in an Indian War in 1643. So the entire embarrassing episode was billed
by the colony leaders as the fault of one woman, one clever, deceptive woman,
and once she was removed, peace was restored.
In our generation, she has been called a
feminist, a hero, and a defender of freedom of religion.
