Posted on 11/24/2008 8:47:44 PM PST by Alex Murphy
The Calvinists who settled Massachusetts Bay in the 17th century -- Puritans and Pilgrims alike -- lived in what we moderns might call a perpetual state of creative tension. Their worldview was founded on a belief in themselves as a community covenanted with God and bound together in a common calling; yet each member of the community had to find his own salvation alone, in prayer and reflection, while awaiting the divine gift of justifying faith. Calvinist theology told these settlers that God had predestined only a select number to find such faith. Yet they also believed in the freedom of the human will to choose between good and evil. It was a paradox that, in John Calvin's view, would liberate the faithful from the "wheel of works" preached by contemporaneous Catholicism -- the need to merit salvation by doing good on Earth. For others, the paradox opened a window to antinomianism, the profoundly destabilizing belief that for the elect all things are permitted.
Our modern reading of these long-ago Calvinists reflects such contradictions. Although we ordinarily think of the Puritans as fleeing to the New World to secure the freedom to worship as they pleased, we also know that they took it as their God-given obligation to punish those who publicly disagreed with them on religious matters. The last Quaker was hanged on Boston Common in 1661, in contrast to the mother country, where the restoration of Charles II had brought a modicum of religious toleration.
The Bay Colony looms large in collective memory as a commonwealth steeped in religion, a place where the civil franchise was limited to adult men who had experienced a saving work of God in their own souls. Yet it was the most secular government of its day, with its powers firmly and exclusively
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The Separatists, by all accounts prized God’s Word and went directly to the Logos — and got a lot of Rhema in the process. In so doing, they were truly some of American culture’s first great heroes.
That is what they cared about. They read about the feasts that were instituted by God for the Israelites and thought it was an appropriate idea to hold a festival thanking God for the harvest.
I have heard this idiot on NPR. “Sarah Vowell”
She is a complete fool
But of course the entire photo op is made out to be "A Man beat me"
These people are freaks
Do not use potty language - or references to potty language - on the Religion Forum.
I beg your pardon I didn’t realize this was on the religion forum. and you will forgive me as I am an old sub sailor with a mouth.
My main concern here is the subversion of Judeo Christian values for PC dirge.
And these academics make use of the Holidays to push it
Good night all.
Sorry Cherokee Pentecostals
She’s an idiot. As Perry Miller said, if America has a distinctive intellectual tradition it is that of the Puritans, and New Englanders carried that worldview
west as far as —I say- the Great Basin. And I guess half the Union army was made up of their descendents. Abe Lincoln’s family started out in Massachusetts and ended up via Virginia in Kentucky and Indiana. Eventually, it even reached the South, which “got religion” during the war.
They were arch enemies. The stiff necked, holier than thou Puritans of Bay Colony - the ones that wore black and white and considered singing a sin and were intent on converting the Indians, or else - would fit right in with today's liberal.
The Plymouth Colony folk loved to sing and play games and dyed their clothes in reds, yellows, oranges, greens, blues, browns, etc, and they were friends with the Indians and didn't try convert them -
The Plymouth Pilgrims were NOT Calvinists. They would fit in with today's conservatives.
I remember the story of a English settler who came to the Bay Colony and drew the wrath of the civil and religious authorities by erecting a May Pole and engaging in other English folk traditions. I cannot remember his name but he called his little settlement Merrymount and it was in present day Quincy, I believe.
yep. That would be Thomas Morton. The 'town' was first called "Mare Mount" for hill by the sea. But after Morton planted himself there, he renamed it Merrie Mount, with the May Pole celebration. "Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes.."
He and his merry band of scoundrels were drunkards and rabble rousers = drinking from morning on. They 'trucked' with the Indians, trading guns and liquor, both forbidden by proclamations of the King.
Morton scoffed at such proclamations and continued his fun and games = that were a great danger to the stability of the fledgling colonies.
Morton was actually well educated and from a prominent family, but developed his drinking, rabble rousing habits early on. He had married, for money, a wealthy, much older, widow and upon queries being made by her children of his handling her monies, he made himself scarce by coming across the pond.
His lifelong addiction to the bottle resulted in a tumultuous and often scurrilous lifestyle.
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