On Visible Saints

This was a really tough book for me to get through, and I think it’s largely due to the topic of the book rather than any failing on behalf of the writer. I expected this to be a history of the Puritan church in New England, which it partially is, but it’s more a historical theology based around one question: How does the church construct membership in a congregation?

Dating back to the Puritan church’s earliest stirrings in England, Puritans were consumed by anger with the blatant disregard that clergy in the Church of England had for their sense of holiness. In the first chapter, there is a wall of shame of sorts, where Morgan directly quotes the criticisms that many Puritans had of individual clergymembers. Complaints included that individual clergymen were “carders,” “dicers,” that they were convicted of “whoredom,” that one priest could not “produce an account of his faith” in either English or Latin, etc. In response, Puritans turned to St. Augustine’s ideas of the “visible” and “invisible” church.

The “invisible” church is effectively a who’s-who of God’s elect. This includes every single person who will go to Heaven. However, because it is impossible for mortals to know who has already been chosen by God, all churches will include members in the congregation who will not go to Heaven. As a result, every congregation is imperfect. In the traditional model of the Roman Church and, subsequently, the Church of England, church membership is defined by residence. All people belong to a parish and, as a result, a place in the church, regardless of whether an individual believes in God or not, whether people keep the laws of God or not, etc. The Puritans found the traditional Roman model to be too lax. Their goal, then, was to shrink the “visible” church to be more in line with the “invisible” church. While Puritans did understand that it was impossible to directly line up who should be included in the visible church with the elect, it was believed that religious testimony, actions, and behaviors could give a better insight into who may be elect, significantly narrowing down church membership to only the most godly.

The dilemma that Puritans then faced is that they inadvertently divorced themselves from the world and became obsessed with purity (hence, “Puritan,” I guess). While they claimed to understand that they could not achieve perfection in their churches, they continued to attempt perfection and, by the eighteenth century, this would cause the entire edifice to collapse in New England.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that church membership was such an important topic for Puritans, their descendant churches are today called “congregationalist,” for instance, but Morgan gives us a clear-eyed account of this theological dispute and the dilemma it produced. At the end of the day, questions about who is accepted within a church are really important.