Harvard Theological Review 2009-01

T HR Harvard Theological Review 102:1 JANUARY 2009 ISSN 0017-8160 HTR Harvard Theological Review 102:1 ISSUED QUART...

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T HR Harvard Theological Review

102:1

JANUARY 2009 ISSN 0017-8160

HTR

Harvard Theological Review 102:1 ISSUED QUARTERLY BY THE FACULTY OF DIVINITY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

The Harvard Theological Review is partially funded by the foundation established under the will of Mildred Everett, daughter of Charles Carroll Everett, Bussey Professor of Theology in Harvard University (1869–1900) and Dean of the Faculty of Divinity (1878–1900). The scope of the Review embraces history and philosophy of religious thought in all traditions and periods—including the areas of Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Christianity, Jewish studies, theology, ethics, archaeology, and comparative religious studies. It seeks to publish compelling original research that contributes to the development of scholarly understanding and interpretation. EDITOR

François Bovon EDITORIAL BOARD

David D. Hall, Jon D. Levenson, Kevin Madigan, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R S

Members of the Faculty of Divinity MANAGING EDITOR

Margaret Studier E D I T O R I A L A S S I S TA N T S

Cavan Concannon, Brian Doak, Aryay Bennett Finkelstein, Jonathan Kaplan, Piotr Malsyz, John Robichaux, Bryan L. Wagoner P R O D U C T I O N S TA F F

Anne Browder, Eve Feinstein, Rebecca Hancock, Richard Jude Thompson, John Whitley

Manuscripts and communications on editorial matters should be addressed to the Managing Editor, Harvard Theological Review, Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138. “Instructions to Contributors” may be found in HTR 80:2 (April 1987) 243 – 60; an updated style sheet is available upon request ([email protected]). For subscriptions (US): Subscription Coordinator, Cambridge University Press, 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473; tel: 800-872-7423 or 845-353-7500; fax: 845-353-4141. Email: [email protected]. Annual subscription rates for Volume 102, 2009: Individuals, print only: US $55 in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico; £36 in UK, elsewhere. Institutions, print only: US $160 in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico; £95 in UK, elsewhere. Institutions, electronic only: US $146 in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico; £87 + VAT UK, elsewhere. Institutions, print and electronic: US $175 in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico; £105 in UK, elsewhere. Prices include surface postage and are payable in advance or on receipt of invoice; only personal check or credit card accepted for individual subscriptions (corporate check also accepted for institutional subscriptions). Website: journals.cambridge.org. For subscriptions outside the US: Journals Marketing Department, Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 1BR, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1223 326-070; fax: +44 (0) 1223 315052. Email: [email protected]. VAT registration no: GB 214 1416 14. Payment in pounds sterling. Back issues of vols. 1 (1908) through 93 (2000) are available from the Periodicals Service Company, 11 Main St., Germantown, NY 12526; tel: (518) 537–4700, fax: (518) 537–5899. For more recent issues, contact the journal’s customer services at Cambridge University Press, 100 Brook Hill Drive, W. Nyack, NY 10994-2113; tel: 800-872-7423. The foreign language and transliteration fonts used in this journal are available from Linguist’s Software Inc., PO Box 580, Edmonds, WA 98020-0580 USA; tel: (425) 775–1130. Website: www.linguistsoftware.com. 7\SHVHWLQWKH+DUYDUG7KHRORJLFDO5HYLHZ2IÀFHV+DUYDUG'LYLQLW\6FKRRO&DPEULGJH0DVVDFKXVHWWV 3XEOLVKHGE\&DPEULGJH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV1HZ[DRKEVS.PSZKSbXSYDUISYDOEM INRIVKLbOEMXSQ[ZXIVSbYNTIVTEDWER QEZGEMVERHMZWXSQSROEMHMM"ORSYZQIRSbE?GVM QIVMWQSYD]YGLDbOEMTRIYZQEXSbE.VQ[DRXI OEMQYIP[DROEMOVMXMOSbINRUYQLZWI[ROEM INRRSM[DROEVHMZEb 4:13OEMSYNOI?WXMROXMZW MbENJERLbINR[ZTMSR EYNXSYDTEZRXEHIKYQREOEMXIXVEGLPMWQIZRE XSMDbSNJUEPQSMDbEYNXSYDTVSbSaRL.QMDRS.PSZKSb Hook words 4:14–6:12 Section4 4:14–5:10 Chiastic subsection 4:14µ)GSRXIbSY@RENVGMIVIZEQIZKER HMIPLPYUSZXEXSYbSYNVERSYZb©-LWSYDR XSRYM.SRXSYDUISYDOVEX[DQIRXLDb S.QSPSKMZEb 4:15SYNKEVI?GSQIRENVGMIVIZE QLHYREZQIRSRWYQTEULDWEMXEMDb ENWUIRIMZEMbL.Q[DRTITIMVEWQIZRSR HIOEXETEZRXEOEU©S.QSMSZXLXEG[VMb E.QEVXMZEb 4:16TVSWIVG[ZQIUESY@RQIXE TEVVLWMZEbX[DUVSZR[XLDb GEZVMXSbM_REPEZF[QIRI?PISbOEM GEZVMRIY_V[QIRIMNbIY?OEMVSR FSLZUIMER 5:14EDbKEVENVGMIVIYbIN\ ENRUV[ZT[RPEQFERSZQIRSbY.TIV ENRUV[ZT[ROEUMZWXEXEMXETVSbXSR UISZRM_RETVSWJIZVLH[DVEZXIOEM UYWMZEbY.TIVE.QEVXM[DR 5:2QIXVMSTEUIMDRHYREZQIRSbXSMDb ENKRSSYDW MROEMTPER[QIZRSMbINTIM OEMEYNXSbTIVMZOIMXEMENWUIZRIMER 5:3OEMHM©EYNXLRSNJIMZPIMOEU[b TIVMXSYDPESYDSY_X[bOEMTIVMEYNXSYD TVSWJIZVIMRTIVME.QEVXM[DR

4:7; 4:12 heart

A: Heb 4:12 the word B: Heb 4:12 soul and spirit B´: Heb 4:12 desires and thoughts A´: Heb 4:13 the word

4:12; 6:5 word of God

A: Heb 4:14 high priest B: Heb 4:15–16 suffer with C: Heb 5:1–4 high priest taken from men does not take honor on his own C´: Heb 5:5–6 Christ did not glorify himself as high priest B´: Heb 5:7–8 suffered A´: Heb 5:9–10 high priest

GABRIELLA GELARDINI

Hook words 5:4OEMSYNGI.EYX[DXMbPEQFEZRIM XLRXMQLRENPPEOEPSYZQIRSbY.TS XSYDUISYDOEU[ZWTIVOEM©%EV[ZR 5:53Y_X[bOEMS.'VMWXSbSYNG I.EYXSRINHSZ\EWIRKIRLULDREM ENVGMIVIZEENPP©S.PEPLZWEbTVSb EYNXSZRYM.SZbQSYIM@WYZINK[ WLZQIVSRKIKIZRRLOEZWI 5:6OEU[bOEMINRI.XIZV[PIZKIMWY M.IVIYbIMNbXSREMN[DREOEXEXLRXEZ\MR 1IPGMWIZHIO 5:7SabINRXEMDbL.QIZVEMbXLDb WEVOSbEYNXSYDHILZWIMbXIOEM M.OIXLVMZEbTVSbXSRHYREZQIRSR W[Z^IMREYNXSRINOUEREZXSYQIXE OVEYKLDbMNWGYVEDbOEMHEOVYZ[R TVSWIRIZKOEbOEMIMNWEOSYWUIMb ENTSXLDbIYNPEFIMZEb 5:8OEMZTIV[ARYM.SZbI?QEUIRENJ©[`R I?TEUIRXLRY.TEOSLZR 5:9OEMXIPIM[UIMbINKIZRIXSTEDW MR XSMDbY.TEOSYZSYWMREYNX[DEM?XMSb W[XLVMZEbEMN[RMZSY 5:10TVSWEKSVIYUIMbY.TSXSYD UISYDENVGMIVIYbOEXEXLRXEZ\MR 1IPGMWIZHIO

5:11–6:12 Chiastic subsection 5:114IVMSY`TSPYbL.QMDRS.PSZKSbOEM HYWIVQLZRIYXSbPIZKIMRINTIMR[UVSM KIKSZREXIXEMDbENOSEMDb 5:12OEMKEVSNJIMZPSRXIbIM@REMHMHEZWOEPSM HMEXSRGVSZRSRTEZPMRGVIMZERI?GIXIXSYD HMHEZWOIMRY.QEDbXMREXEWXSMGIMDEXLDbENVGLDb X[DRPSKMZ[RXSYDUISYDOEMKIKSZREXIGVIMZER I?GSRXIbKEZPEOXSb[OEM]SYNWXIVIEDb XVSJLDb 5:13TEDbKEVS.QIXIZG[RKEZPEOXSbE?TIMVSb PSZKSYHMOEMSWYZRLbRLZTMSbKEZVINWXMR

4:12; 6:5 word of God

69

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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

5:14XIPIMZ[RHIZINWXMRL.WXIVIEXVSJLZX[DR HMEXLRI_\MRXEEMNWULXLZVMEKIKYQREWQIZRE INGSZRX[RTVSbHMEZOVMWMROEPSYDXIOEM OEOSYD 6:1(MSENJIZRXIbXSRXLDbENVGLDbXSYD'VMWXSYD PSZKSRINTMXLRXIPIMSZXLXEJIV[ZQIUEQL TEZPMRUIQIZPMSROEXEFEPPSZQIRSMQIXERSMZEb ENTSRIOV[DRI?VK[ROEMTMZWXI[bINTMUISZR 6:2FETXMWQ[DRHMHEGLDbINTMUIZWI[ZbXIGIMV[DR ENREWXEZWI[ZbXIRIOV[DROEMOVMZQEXSb EMN[RMZSY 6:3OEMXSYDXSTSMLZWSQIRINEZRTIVINTMXVIZTL S.UISZb 6:4©%HYZREXSRKEVXSYbE_TE\J[XMWUIZRXEb KIYWEQIZRSYbXIXLDbH[VIEDbXLDb A: Heb 5:11 sluggish INTSYVERMZSYOEMQIXSZGSYbKIRLUIZRXEb B: Heb 5:12–14 beginning TRIYZQEXSbE.KMZSY C: Heb 6:1–3 works 6:5OEMOEPSRKIYWEQIZRSYbUISYDV.LDQE D: Heb 6:4–6 tasted once HYREZQIMbXIQIZPPSRXSbEMN[DRSb D´: Heb 6:7–8 drank often 6:6OEMTEVETIWSZRXEbTEZPMRENREOEMRMZ^IMR C´: Heb 6:9–10 work B´ Heb 6:11 end IMNbQIXEZRSMERENREWXEYVSYDRXEbI.EYXSMDbXSR A´ Heb 6:12 sluggish YM.SRXSYDUISYDOEMTEVEHIMKQEXMZ^SRXEb 6:7KLDKEVL.TMSYDWEXSRINT©EYNXLDbINVGSZQIRSR TSPPEZOMbY.IXSROEMXMZOXSYWEFSXEZRLR IY?UIXSRINOIMZRSMbHM©SYbOEMKI[VKIMDXEM QIXEPEQFEZRIMIYNPSKMZEbENTSXSYDUISYD 6:8INOJIZVSYWEHIENOEZRUEbOEMXVMFSZPSYb ENHSZOMQSbOEMOEXEZVEbINKKYZbL`bXSXIZPSbIMNb OEYDW MR 6:94ITIMZWQIUEHITIVMY.Q[DRENKETLXSMZXE OVIMZWWSREOEMINGSZQIREW[XLVMZEbIMNOEM SY_X[bPEPSYDQIR 6:10 SYN KEV E?HMOSb S. UISb INTMPEUIZWUEM XSYD I?VKSY Y.Q[DR OEM XLDb ENKEZTLb L`b INRIHIMZ\EWUI IMNbXSS?RSQEEYNXSYDHMEOSRLZWERXIbXSMDbE.KMZSMb OEMHMEOSRSYDRXIb 6:11INTMUYQSYDQIRHII_OEWXSRY.Q[DRXLREYNXLR INRHIMZORYWUEMWTSYHLRTVSbXLRTPLVSJSVMZER XLDbINPTMZHSbE?GVMXIZPSYb 6:12M_REQLR[UVSMKIZRLWUIQMQLXEMHIX[DRHME TMZWXI[b OEM QEOVSUYQMZEb OPLVSRSQSYZRX[R XEbINTEKKIPMZEb

GABRIELLA GELARDINI

71

Hook words 6:12; 6:15 perseverance, persevering 6:13–20 Chiastic transitional element5 6:138[DKEV©%FVEEQINTEKKIMPEZQIRSbS.UISZb INTIMOEX©SYNHIRSbIM@GIRQIMZ^SRSbSNQSZWEM [?QSWIROEU©I.EYXSY¸ 6:14PIZK[RIMNQLRIYNPSK[DRIYNPSKLZW[WIOEM TPLUYZR[RTPLUYR[DWI 6:15OEMSY_X[bQEOVSUYQLZWEbINTIZXYGIRXLDb A: Heb 6:13 God B: Heb 6:13 promised Abraham INTEKKIPMZEb C: Heb 6:13 swore 6:16E?RUV[TSMKEVOEXEXSYDQIMZ^SRSb C´: Heb 6:16 swear SNQRYZSYWMROEMTEZWLbEYNXSMDbENRXMPSKMZEb B´: Heb 6:17 heirs of promise TIZVEbIMNbFIFEMZ[WMRS.S_VOSb A´: Heb 6:18–20 God 6:17INR[`TIVMWWSZXIVSRFSYPSZQIRSbS.UISb INTMHIMD\EMXSMDbOPLVSRSZQSMbXLDbINTEKKIPMZEb XSENQIXEZUIXSRXLDbFSYPLDbEYNXSYDINQIWMZXIYWIR S_VO[ 6:18M_REHMEHYZSTVEKQEZX[RENQIXEUIZX[R INRSM`bENHYZREXSR]IYZWEWUEM[XSR]UISZR MNWGYVERTEVEZOPLWMRI?G[QIRSM.OEXEJYKSZRXIb OVEXLDWEMXLDbTVSOIMQIZRLbINPTMZHSb 6:19LaR[.bE?KOYVERI?GSQIRXLDb]YGLDb ENWJEPLDXIOEMFIFEMZEROEMIMNWIVGSQIZRLR IMNbXSINW[ZXIVSRXSYDOEXETIXEZWQEXSb 6:20S_TSYTVSZHVSQSbY.TIVL.Q[DRIMNWLDPUIR ©-LWSYDbOEXEXLRXEZ\MR1IPGMWIZHIO ENVGMIVIYbKIRSZQIRSbIMNbXSREMN[DRE 6:20; 7:1 Melchizedek

Notes to the Readings 1. Lexeme occurring only in the transitional elements Heb 3:1–6 and 12:1–3: witness, witnesses (Heb 3:5; 12:1). 2. Lexemes occurring only in the sections Heb 3:7–4:11 and 11:4–40: Egypt (Heb 3:16; 11:26, 27), disobedient/disobedience (Heb 3:18; 4:6, 11; 11:31), David (Heb 4:7; 11:32), saw (Heb 3:9; 11:5, 13, 23), wilderness (Heb 3:8, 17; 11:38), foundation (Heb 4:3; 11:11), left (Heb 4:1; 11:27), people of God (Heb 4:9; 11:25), fall (Heb 3:17; 4:11; 11:30), wander (Heb 3:10; 11:38), come short (Heb 4:1; 11:37), be afraid (Heb 4:1; 11:23, 27). 3. Lexemes occurring only in the transitional elements Heb 4:12–13 and 11:1–3: invisible/visible (Heb 4:13; 11:3), word of God (Heb 4:12; 11:3). 4. Lexemes occurring only in the sections Heb 4:14–6:12 and 10:24–39: love (Heb 6:10; 10:24), judgment (Heb 6:2; 10:27), Son of God (Heb 4:14; 6:6; 10:29), enlightened (Heb 6:4; 10:32), need (Heb 5:12; 10:36).

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5. Lexeme occurring only in the transitional elements Heb 6:13–20 and 10:19– 23: curtain (Heb 6:19; 10:20). Main Theological Emphasis and Interpretation The Center in Section C: The logic of a concentric structure necessarily unfolds from its center. Unlike Vanhoye, I locate the center not in Heb 9:11, with Christ’s high priesthood,63 but instead in Heb 8:7–13 (9:10), which contains God’s promise of a covenant renewal as expressed in the longest quotation of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament from Jer 31:31–34. Contrary to the opinions of Neeley (Heb 10:19–13:21), Guthrie (Heb 12:18–24), and Westfall (Heb 12:1–28), moreover, the center proposed here does not lie either in Hebrews 12, which issues the invitation to approach the heavenly sanctuary.64 From a pragmatic point of view, we could consider locating the center in Hebrews 12—indeed plausible—and commend the latter three scholars for their analyses. Yet from a logical, structural point of view, the center must lie in Hebrews 8 in which God and not the Son promises a new covenant. This proposal in turn disqualifies a center in Hebrews 9. Rhetorically speaking, this center forms the logical and necessary precondition for the appointment of the Son as mediator and for the invitation to the addressees to approach God’s throne in the aftermath of the high priest’s atoning endeavor. Hence, rather than judging either the one or the other proposed center as flawed, we can—based on the insights from the “linguistic turn”—distinguish the center in Hebrews 12 as the pragmatic and therefore paraenetic one, yet the center in Hebrews 8 as the logical, structural, and therefore theological center. This approach not only allows an interpretative comparison of sister paragraphs but also generates the hermeneutical key that allows us to place all the parts of the book into a logical and coherent whole: Main Section C: This central section speaks of a new covenant inaugurated by God and mediated by Christ. Hence, God, the central persona and considered more important than the Son, initiates the covenant renewal. We can confirm this when analyzing the semantic inventory related to God, which appears slightly higher than that related to the Son. Commentators frequently neglect this fact. Along with the new covenant, this section describes the new—actually old and original (see Exod 25:40 in Heb 8:5)—celestial cult institution. Beautifully reflected in the mountain-like-shaped climactic structure, the passage relates the new covenant to the celestial mount Zion. Relation of Main Section C with B: Chiasm serves not merely an ornamental function, but rather, its power lies in the potential to unify what seems incompatible.65 63

Vanhoye, La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux, 237, 269. Neeley, “A Discourse Analysis of Hebrews,” 41, 51; Guthrie, The Structure of Hebrews, 143; Westfall, A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews, 301. 65 Rodolphe Gasché, “Über chiastische Umkehrbarkeit (1987),” in Die paradoxe Methapher (ed. Anslem Haverkamp; Edition Suhrkamp 1940: Aesthetica; Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998) 437–55. 64

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In this chiastic sense, the relation of B—covenant breaking—with C—covenant renewal—appears logical. Both of the long quotations related to the Hebrew Bible express well-established polar concepts in early Jewish texts, liturgy, and culture.66 Relation of Main Section B with A: I did not immediately perceive the relation of B with A, and only extensive intertextual search made clear to me that KadeshBarnea finally ends the renewed Sinai covenant on account of the people’s sin. This one final sin in a series of ten (Num 14:22; cf. also Pss 78; 106), appears most similar to the idolatry with the golden calf committed at Sinai in Exodus 32–34. This context makes plain that the existence of angels occurs as the natural consequence of God’s absence (Exod 33:2–3). Haggadic literature from the first century on widely reflects not only the danger that angels of revenge present for the people but also Moses’ saving role. This narrative structure interlocks Hebrews with the narrative matrix of the Hebrew Bible, it further confers Moses’ office upon Jesus, and vice-versa relates the intended listener to the fathers of the Hebrew Bible. Relation of Main Section A with B´: The understanding of section A leads smoothly over to B´. The faithful fathers and mothers (in past and present) become entitled as “witnesses.” This legal term makes clear that their mentioning before God by Moses in the golden calf pericope (Exod 32:13–14) helps to save the lives of the sinful people. Likewise, the protecting and even salvific function of the faithful fathers in the interests of the sinful people appears also as a well established motive in Hellenistic-Jewish, protorabbinic, and rabbinic literature, beginning with the writings of Philo (see, for instance, Praem. 166). Relation of Main Section B´ with A´: In the latter section (= A´), we see the sons invited to the celestial cult and ethically and legally equipped for an existence under a renewed covenant. I have argued elsewhere that the location of the cult in heaven does not serve supersessionist needs, but rather, liturgical (for instance, the fast day of Tisha be-Av) and/or historical reasons (for instance, the destruction of the second temple in the year 70 C.E., which implies God’s absence on earth and consolidates the broken covenant) might have necessitated this rhetorical strategy.67 In making up for the earthly loss, the author invites his addressees to the one remaining legitimate temple, according to Exod 25:40, which is quoted in Heb 8:5, the celestial and original one to which God withdraws from earth in times of broken covenants. He takes them there step-by-step and relativizes possible apprehensions while empowering them at the same time mentally and spiritually to transcend their experiences of a disheartening present.

Gelardini, “Verhärtet eure Herzen nicht,” 123–90. Gabriella Gelardini, “Hebrews, an Ancient Synagogue Homily for Tisha be-Av: Its Function, its Basis, its Theological Interpretation,” in Hebrews: Contemporary Methods, New Insights (ed. eadem.; BINS 75; Leiden: Brill, 2005) 107–27. 66 67

The Rapture of the Christ: The “PreAscension Ascension” of Jesus in the Theology of Faustus Socinus (1539–1604) Alan W. Gomes Talbot School of Theology

In this essay I examine a rather quirky and possibly novel teaching of Faustus Socinus (1539–1604): what George H. Williams calls a “pre-Ascension ascension” (hereafter PAA) of Christ into heaven. Faustus claimed that this bodily ascent into heaven took place before Christ’s final visible ascension to heaven some time between his baptism and the commencement of his earthly teaching ministry. The theory states in brief that Christ, “after he was born a human, and before he began to discharge the office entrusted to him by God, his own Father, . . . was in heaven, and abode there for some time.” Christ took this heavenly sojourn “that he might hear from God himself and . . . see in his very presence what he was soon to proclaim and reveal to the world in God’s own name.”1 In another place Socinus states that Jesus, “after his birth from the virgin, and before he announced the gospel, was

1 “Ipsum Christum, postquam natus est homo, & antequam munus sibi à Deo Patre suo demandatum obire inciperet, in coelo, divino consilio atque opera fuisse, & aliquandiu ibi commoratum esse, ut illa ab ipso Deo audiret, & praesens apud ipsum, ut ipsa scriptura loquitur, videret, quae mundo mox annunciaturus & patefacturus ipsius Dei nomine erat” (Christ himself, after he was born a human, and before he began to discharge the office entrusted to him by God, his own Father, was in heaven by divine counsel and work. He abode there for some time, that he might hear from God himself and, as the Scripture itself states, see in his very presence what he was soon to proclaim and reveal to the world in God’s own name). Faustus Socinus, Christianae religionis brevissima institutio, per interrogationes & responsiones, quam catechismum vulgo vocant [hereafter Institutio] (vol. 1 of Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum quos Unitarios vocant [BFP] 1, 2; Amsterdam: 1668) 1.675. (Note that the first two volumes of the BFP comprise the Opera omnia of Socinus.) Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Latin are mine. The Latin text has accent marks and ampersands (&) because it comes from a 1668 printing of Socinus’s Opera Omnia.

HTR 102:1 (2009) 75–99

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raptured into heaven (in caelum raptus fuerit). There he learned from God himself what he was to reveal to the human race.”2 Possible Sources of Influence How did Socinus come by this unusual theory? The possible sources and influences on Socinus, beyond the biblical arguments that he sets forth, remain obscure. Williams speculates, without drawing any definitive conclusions, that Italian Neoplatonist thought, influenced by the Arab philosopher Avicenna, would have influenced Socinus. The idea of a mystical celestial ascent, applied to the Prophet Muhammad in Avicenna, came from Neoplatonist Christians, who adapted it to Enoch, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and Paul. For example, Williams cites Marsilio Ficino of Florence (d. 1499), who “opened his Commentarius in Epistolas D. Pauli with a proemium on Paul’s ascent to the third heaven for ‘the arcane mysteries’ in the tradition of Plotinus.”3 Although we have no evidence of any direct influence of this on Socinus, Williams says that “the important fact is that this kind of thinking was abroad, whether in approval or disapproval, in Italian circles in which Socinus had once moved.”4 Williams does note that the “ascent” in all of these other instances indicates a purely mystical and not a spatial one. Furthermore, the Neoplatonic literature does not apply any of these mystical ascents to Jesus. Williams concludes that “the originality of Socinus lay in reappropriating this tradition and centering 2 “Similiter, quòd Filius hominis in caelo fuerit antequàm eo conspicuè ascenderit, revera & propriè ad hominem illum Iesum Nazarenum referri & potest, & debet. Nam quòd revera homo ille, postquam natus est ex virgine, & antequam Evangelium annunciaret, in caelum raptus fuerit, ibique ab ipso Deo ea didicerit, quae humano generi patefacienda per ipsum erant, adeò est verisimile, ut aliter fieri non potuisse videatur” (Similarly, concerning the fact that the Son of Man was in heaven before his visible ascension to it: this can and ought to be referred, truly and properly, to the man Jesus of Nazareth. For that man truly, after his birth from the virgin, and before he announced the Gospel, was raptured into heaven. There he learned from God himself what he was to reveal to the human race. This has so much the appearance of truth that it seems it could not have happened otherwise). Faustus Socinus, Tractatus de Deo, Christo, & Spiritu Sancto, 1.813. He sets forth the same theory in his De Unigeniti Filii Dei existentia, inter Erasmum Iohannis, & Faustum Socinum Senensem disputatio (hereafter Adv. Erasmum Iohannis) 2.511: “Propterea enim fuit Christus homo ille in caelo [ut ego quidem nihil dubito] priusquam à mortuis resurgeret, ut rerum caelestium uberrima cognitione imbueretur, eaque certa & constantissima, quam deinde, quatenus liceret atque opus esset, cum hominibus communicaret, & cuius vi praedicandi Evangelii munus quam rectissime obiret, & alia admodum ardua, quae illi exequenda erant, fideliter omnino atque intrepide exequeretur” (Therefore, Christ was that man in heaven—as I indeed have no doubt—before he rose from the dead, that he might be instructed in the abundant, certain, and firm knowledge of heavenly matters. Later, in so far as it was permitted and necessary, he would communicate [these truths] to people. In the power of this knowledge he would rightly discharge the office of preaching the Gospel, fearlessly and faithfully accomplishing all the exceedingly difficult tasks that he was to perform). 3 George H. Williams, “The Christological Issues between Francis Dávid and Faustus Socinus during the Disputation on the Invocation of Christ, 1578–1579,” in Antitrinitarianism in the Second Half of the 16th Century (ed. Róbert Dán and Antal Pirnát; Studia Humanitatis 5; Leiden: Brill, 1982) 317. 4 Ibid.

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it in Jesus and (in four passages in John) also in understanding the pre-Ascension ascension as no less spatial than the final Ascension and the ultimate descent at the Second Advent.”5 Williams’s interesting observations notwithstanding, it perhaps moves beyond the evidence to speak of Socinus as “reappropriating this tradition and centering it in Jesus” given the marked discontinuities between Socinus’s version of the ascent and these earlier accounts, together with the lack of any direct evidence that Socinus made reference to these. The biblical texts that Socinus cites, coupled with his fecund mind, may adequately account for it, and at all events constitute the only sources of influence about which no one disputes. Beyond Socinus’s use of texts that he believes teach a PAA directly, together with indirect biblical parallels that suggest it, Socinus himself does not betray enough information to settle the question of antecedents. While we cannot be certain, he might have derived it simply from his own reflections on the biblical text and in light of other systemic considerations. Faustus did make certain statements that come close to claiming originality for the doctrine, although he expresses himself ambiguously. In what is perhaps his first work to mention the PAA, his Brevissima institutio,6 Socinus grants that the PAA, although it provides an excellent accounting for some otherwise difficult texts, is nevertheless novel and “unheard of by most of us.”7 This statement comports with the idea that Faustus originated the teaching but falls short of proving it. Likewise, the “Arian”8 Erasmus Johannis attacks Socinus’s interpretation on the grounds that it is “novel” (novam) and “departs from the simplicity of Scripture” (à simplicitate scripturae alienam).9 Socinus grants the former while denying the latter. He replies, “scarcely surprised” (haud sane mirror), that Johannis considers this interpretation novel (Quod haec interpretatio tibi sit nova), although he does marvel that Johannis could charge this interpretation with departing from Scripture’s simplicity; Faustus cannot imagine a more literal and straightforward reading of the text. Here again, Socinus acknowledges the teaching’s novelty but falls short of claiming authorship for it.10 5

Ibid. The dating of this work is uncertain; see below. 7 “Jam tuae sententiae . . . quantumvis novae & majoribus nostris fortasse inauditae, libenter acquiesco. Video enim hac ratione complura sacra testimonia admodum alioqui explicatu difficilia planissima reddi” (I now freely agree with your opinion . . . however novel and perhaps unheard of by most of us. For I see that in this way many sacred testimonies that are otherwise exceedingly difficult to explain are made crystal clear) (Socinus, Institutio, 1.675). 8 See the discussion of “Arianism” below. 9 “Fateor, mihi hanc interpretationem esse novam, & à simplicitate scripturae alienam” (I confess that his interpretation is novel to me and departs from the simplicity of Scripture). Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis, 2.511. 10 “Quod haec interpretatio tibi sit nova, haud sane mirror. Sed, quod illa à simplicitate Scripturae aliena tibi videatur, equidem satis mirari non possum; cum potius nulla alia interpretatio excogitari queat, quae tam Scripturae simplicitatem sequi quam haec facit, cuiquam merito videri possit; immo 6

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The Prominence of the PAA in the Writings of Socinus Whatever the doctrine’s provenance, Williams notes that the PAA constitutes “a major topos” in the writings of Socinus.11 The teaching appears not only in Socinus’s own exegetical, catechetical, and polemical writings, but makes its way (through Valentin Schmalz) into the slightly later Racovian Catechism12 and thence into the works of some important later Socinians, such as Christopher Ostorodt, Johann L. Wolzogen, and Jonas Schlichting. Other Socinians, such as the prominent theologian Johann Crell, however, did not find the teaching compelling and treated it either with ambivalence or outright rejection.13 Williams notes that Socinus does not mention the PAA until after his disputations with the “nonadorant” Unitarian Francis Dávid of Transylvania in 1578–1579.14 This observation leads Williams to opine that this doctrine did not yet form a part of Faustus’s Christological inventory, because Socinus could have used this doctrine to great effect against Dávid.15 In terms of the extant writings, Williams first finds the PAA teaching in Socinus’s undated Christianiae religionis brevissima institutio, which, he believes, Socinus wrote early in his career. Socinus composed the work in Italian and then translated it into Latin, but it appeared published posthumously cum haec interpretatio nihil aliud sit, quam ab ipsa Scripturae simplicitate nihil prorsus discedere, sed verba omnia ut proprie sonant accipere” (I am scarcely surprised that this interpretation is novel to you. But I am utterly surprised that it strikes you as departing from the simplicity of Scripture. On the contrary, anyone can see that there is no other interpretation imaginable that follows the simplicity of Scripture more than this one. Indeed, this interpretation does not depart from Scripture’s simplicity in the slightest but takes all of the words at face value). Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511. According to Williams, “Socinus acknowledges in 1595 that it [the doctrine of a PAA] is new, suggesting that he had come to clarity about it on his own.” In support, Williams footnotes the aforementioned exchange between Socinus and Johannis, although, as seen above, all that Socinus admits here for certain is that the teaching was not widely known, leaving open the question of the teaching’s authorship. See George H. Williams, The Polish Brethren (2 vols.; Missoula, Mont.: Scholars, 1980) 1:85. We should also note that the disputation itself took place in 1584, although it was not published until 1595. See Christof Sand, Bibliotheca Antitrinitariorum (composed around 1670; published Amsterdam [posthumously], 1684) 72; and also Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.492. Toulmin wrongly gives a publication date of 1598; see Joshua Toulmin, Memoirs of the Life, Character, and Sentiments, and Writings of Faustus Socinus (London: J. Brown, 1777) 334. 11 Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:88. 12 “Section V: Of the Prophetic Office of Christ,” in The Racovian Catechism, with Notes and Illustrations, Translated from the Latin: To Which Is Prefixed a Sketch of the History of Unitarianism in Poland and the Adjacent Countries (trans. Thomas Rees; London: Paternoster Row, 1818; repr. Lexington: American Theological Library Association, 1962) 170–72. 13 Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:86. 14 Dávid was a Unitarian who argued that because Christ was not God he should not be invoked in prayer nor receive religious adoration, which should be given only to God. Those who espoused this position were called “nonadorants.” Socinus debated with Dávid at length. Williams provides a fine background and discussion of this debate (Williams, “Christological Issues”). Socinus furnishes the details of the debate in his De Iesu Christi invocatione disputatio, quam Faustus Socinus Senensis, per scripta habuit cum Francisco Davidis anno 1578, & 1579, paulo ante ipsius Francisci obitum, 2.709–766. 15 Williams, “Christological Issues,” 319.

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in Rakow in 1611.16 As for works that we can date with some confidence, we find Socinus floating the theory somewhere around 1580 in his response to the Lithuanian Calvinist Andrew Wolan17 and also in his response to some lectures on the Trinity given at the College of Posnania in 1583–1584.18 The specific documents of Socinus that establish the PAA, then, I list as follows: 1) Disputatio adversus Andream Volanum (written 1580);19 2) Tractatus de Deo, Christo, & Spiritu Sancto (written 1583–1584);20 3) De unigeniti Filii Dei existentia, inter Erasmum Iohannis, & Faustum Socinum Senensem disputatio (conducted 1584);21 4) Responsio ad libellum Vuieki . . . de divinitate Filii Dei, & Spiritus Sancti (written 1593);22 5) Explicatio variorum locorum Scripturae Sacrae (date of composition uncertain);23 and 6) Christianae religionis brevissima institutio (original date of composition uncertain and unfinished due to the author’s death in 1604).24

■ The Systemic Function of the PAA in Socinus’s System We must observe just what the doctrine of a PAA “buys” Socinus in terms of its function in his overall theological system. Socinus espoused a humanitarian/dynamic monarchian Christology along the lines of Paul of Samosata. Indeed, the detractors of Socinus and of his followers sometimes called them “neo-Samosateans” (novi Samosatenici).25 This appellation fit more accurately than the catchall epithet “Arian,” a capacious term often hurled without nuance at those who denied the deity of Christ. We need to distinguish the

16 Williams, Polish Brethren, 2:416 n. 28. Williams cites Christof Sand, Bibliotheca Antitrinitariorum, 67, who gives no date for the work, noting only that Socinus composed it in Italian and afterward translated it into Latin. 17 Williams, “Christological Issues,” 314, citing Listy, says that Socinus composed this treatise before 20 June 1580. However, in his earlier Polish Brethren, 1:85, he offered a date of 1583 for this work. 18 Toulmin, Memoirs of the Life, 330, 332. 19 BFP 2.371–422 (published Raków, 1588). 20 BFP 1.811–814. Note that through a printer’s error this material is duplicated verbatim in BFP 1.281–285, following the Summa religionis Christianae. 21 BFP 2.489–528 (published Raków, 1595). Toulmin (334–35), and Williams (“Christological Issues,” 315–16) discuss the circumstances surrounding this debate. 22 BFP 2.529–624 (published Raków, 1595). 23 BFP 1.139–156 (published Raków, 1618). See the discussion in Williams, “Christological Issues,” 314, where he describes this collection as “evidently assembled over a number of years and published posthumously.” See especially his discussion of the background of the Explicatio variorum S. Scripturae locorum (hereafter Explicatio locorum) 318. 24 BFP 1.651–676. See Sand, 77; Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:85. 25 E.g., Faustus Socinus, Assertiones theologicae de trino & uno Deo, adversus novos Samosatenicos, 2.423.

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Christology of Faustus from that of the “Arians” of his day with whom he exchanged polemical blows.26 Socinus affirmed the full humanity of Christ but denied that he possessed a divine nature in any sense of the word (Arian or orthodox) and accordingly rejected the notion that Christ existed before his birth through Mary. He did, however, grant Christ a virginal conception, wrought by God as a divine testimony and imprimatur of his messiahship from the beginning.27 Compared to Socinus’s humanitarian view, one could argue that the Arians had a “higher” Christology—in some sense a “Christology from above,” although not in an orthodox understanding of that term. Their Christology comes “from above” in the sense that they held to Christ’s preexistence as a divine spirit being, albeit one subordinate to the Father, who then came down to earth, took flesh, and became human in the virgin birth. While the Trinitarians regarded the Arian Christology as no more orthodox than Socinus’s, one could argue that it was “higher” in that the Arians, like the orthodox, admitted to a “divine” element in Jesus (although not full deity in the orthodox Nicene sense) and also to his preexistence. A PAA would allow Socinus to account for (or to evade, as his orthodox critics would charge) certain biblical texts that might otherwise run afoul of his dynamic monarchian/humanitarian Christology—specifically, those cited both by the Arians and by the orthodox in proof of Christ’s preexistence. One class of such passages speaks of the Son of Man “coming down from heaven” (e.g., John 3:13), “where he was before” (John 6:62) in his divine preincarnate existence. Both the orthodox and the Arians ascribed this “descent” to his coming to earth from his heavenly abode 26 According to Socinus, the “Arians” whom he opposed held that Christ was a created divine being who existed as the son of God even before his earthly birth. Specifically, Christ existed as a divine spirit creature, possessing a created, immaterial nature that was “divine,” not human. In the incarnation this created divine son took on human body or flesh through the virgin birth. What Socinus finds especially problematic is that this view, on his reckoning, destroys Christ’s true humanity. Socinus relates that the Arians were explicit in regarding only Christ’s body as truly human, not his immaterial nature or soul. See Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis, 2.489. 27 “Quodsi nihilominus aliquis dicat: quare Deus ita et non aliter [i.e., than through the virgin birth] concipi eum et nasci voluerit, causae inquirendae sunt. Earum praecipue et fortassis haec una est, quod non semper fuisset Dei Filius nec ab ipsa conceptione et nativitate filius dici potuisset, si ex Iosepho natus fuisse, sed oportuisset eum exspectare ea, propter quae postea Dei filius dictus fuit; quod in Iesu Christo servatore totius mundi fuisset valde absurdum. Hinc est, quod angelus dicebat Mariae: id quod ex te nascetur vocabitur Dei filius.” (But if nevertheless someone should ask why God did not wish him to be conceived and born in another way [than through the virgin birth], the reasons ought to be sought. Chief among the reasons, and possibly the one reason, is that if he had been born of Joseph he would not always have been the Son of God, nor could he have been called the Son from his very conception and birth. Rather it would have been necessary for him to await those things on account of which he was afterwards called the Son of God. But that would have been exceedingly absurd in the case of Jesus Christ, the savior of the whole world. It is for this reason that the angel said to Mary, “What will be born of you will be called the Son of God.”) Faustus Socinus, Epitome colloquii Racoviae habiti anno 1601 (ed. Lech Szczucki and Janusz Tazbir; Biblioteka Pisarzy Reformacyjnych 5; Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1966) lines 553–560.

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in order to become a human being. Socinus extricates himself from this difficulty by taking the “descent from heaven” as occurring during Christ’s earthly sojourn. But if Christ descended from heaven, he first had to find his way up there somehow, and so Socinus postulates a literal, bodily rapture before the commencement of his earthly ministry. In short, one could write off Socinus’s theory of a PAA as simply an ad hoc concoction cobbled together to evade some pesky passages that stand in the way of his Samosatean Christology. While such an accounting for the theory may well have some truth—for Socinus’s interpretation of these texts does circumvent the difficulties they otherwise might pose for his humanitarian Christology—it does not go far enough in giving due weight to the theory’s critical role in light of Socinus’s larger doctrinal concerns. One could make the case that the PAA of Christ spreads out much more extensive systemic tentacles beyond the mere convenience of allowing Socinus to escape from an exegetical jam. As we shall see, Socinus himself suggested a non-PAA option for interpreting these problem texts—an option on which he could have rested his case if he had so chosen. Yet, he bypasses this option in favor of a literal, spatial rapture. Socinus actually goes so far as to say that he regards the doctrine of a PAA as “necessary” (necessarium).28 To see the significance of the PAA in Socinus’s theological system, one must first identify the center of his system (if in fact one exists) and then examine several of the “spokes” (particular doctrines in his system) that connect to that center. After doing so we can see how the PAA fits into it. The Center of Socinus’s System As I have argued in another place,29 the “center” of Socinus’s system is the attainment of eternal life (immortality), which one achieves through keeping the commandments of God as revealed by Christ.30 The “spokes” that connect to this 28

“Unde perspicuum est, graviter errare, si quisquam est, qui existimet, haud verisimile esse, vel non adeo necessarium fuisse, Christum hominem ante mortem in caelum ascendisse, ibique aliquandiu commoratum esse, ut verba ipsa indicant, in quibus Christus in caelo fuisse significatur; cum potius nihil aut verisimilius, aut magis necessarium esse potuerit ante ipsam Evangelii praedicationem” (From this it becomes clear how gravely someone errs, who thinks that it scarcely appears true, or thinks it unnecessary, that the man Christ ascended into heaven before his death and abode there for some time. The words themselves indicate this, in which Christ is shown to have been in heaven. On the contrary, nothing could appear more true or be more necessary before the very preaching of the Gospel). Socinus, Adv. Iohannis, 2.511. 29 Alan W. Gomes, “Some Observations on the Theological Method of Faustus Socinus (1539– 1604),” Westminster Theological Journal 70 (2008) 49–71. 30 For example, the first two sentences of this Summa contain in microcosm the center of gravity for Socinus’s theological system: “Religio Christiana, est doctrina caelestis, docens veram viam perveniendi ad vitam aeternam. Haec autem via, nihil est aliud, quam obedire Deo, iuxta ea, quae ille nobis praecepit, per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum (Hebr. 5:9)” (The Christian religion is the heavenly doctrine, teaching the true way of attaining eternal life. Moreover, this way is nothing other than to obey God, according to those things which he commands us through our Lord Jesus

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center—specific doctrines relevant to the PAA—include Christ’s prophetic office, the absolute necessity of divine revelation, and his nature as human simpliciter. This accounting stands in contrast to other proposed “centers” for his system, including the oft-repeated conventional wisdom that the system of Socinus represents a species of rationalism, whether pure or hybrid.31 In my view Socinus’s system has a moral center, and Socinus examines the necessity and importance of any given doctrine in terms of how it conduces to obedience to God’s commandments. Such obedience in turn conduces toward the attainment of eternal life. Thus, the doctrine of the reward of immortality, attained through obeying the divine precepts, provides the center from which we may sweep the circle of his system.32 Therefore a person must know about these precepts, since his or her eternal felicity hangs on their observance. Contrary to the rationalistic approach attributed to him, Socinus denied that one could even know the existence of God apart from divine revelation much less the specific precepts that one must observe to attain eternal life. As he makes plain in his De sacrae scripturae auctoritate,33 Socinus eschews any natural knowledge of God whatever; human beings utterly depend upon a direct revelation from God.34 This includes the rejection of a properly innate, inborn knowledge as well as a natural theology drawn discursively from observing the created order. Therefore reason, Socinus tells us, cannot be the principium on which a knowledge of the Christian faith rests, for reason “is much too fallible in a matter which depends upon divine revelation, such as the Christian faith.”35 Thus, Christ). Faustus Socinus, Summa Religionis Christianae, 1.281. One could adduce numerous quotes making this same point. 31 For a sample of some works, old and new, postulating a rationalistic bent in the theology of Faustus, be it pure rationalism or a hybrid of rationalism and supernaturalism, see Maurice A. Cauney, “Socinians,” An Encyclopedia of Religions (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921); Martin I. Klauber and Glenn S. Sunshine, “Jean-Alphonse Turrettini on Biblical Accommodation: Calvinist or Socinian?” Calvin Theological Journal 25 (1990) 13; Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology (trans. Gene J. Lund; St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1968) 322; Herbert J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951) 12; Philip Schaff and Johann A. Herzog, “Socinus (Faustus) and the Socinians,” in A Religious Encyclopedia or Dictionary of Biblical, Historical, Doctrinal, and Practical Theology (ed. Philip Schaff; New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1891); William M. Clow, “Socinianism,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (ed. James Hastings; 13 vols.; New York: Scribner’s, 1917); and Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma (ed. and trans. Neil Buchanan; 7 vols.; New York: Russell and Russell, 1958) 7:139. 32 I am indebted to Clow (“Socinianism”) for this metaphor (i.e., “sweeping the circle of his system”), although Clow himself was referring to the significance of the death and resurrection of Christ for Socinus, not to the center that I have given above. While Socinus certainly gives prominence to the death and resurrection of Christ, I disagree with Clow that these provide the Archimedean point from which he is able to leverage the rest of his system. 33 Faustus Socinus, De sacrae scripturae auctoritate libellus Fausti Socini Senensis (hereafter De auctoritate) 1.265–280. 34 Socinus, De auctoritate, 1.273. He makes the same point in his Praelectiones theologicae, 1.538. 35 “Quod enim ad rationes attinet, haec nimis fallax via est in re, quae ex divina patefactione pendeat, qualis est Christiana religio” (Moreover, concerning [the use of] reasons [for overthrowing a

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one needs a prophetic word from God to know what precepts to keep in order to attain eternal life. Christ as prophet fulfills this critical role. Christ mediates to us the divine precepts and brings them down from heaven to us.36 As Socinus stated in his famous De Jesu Christo Servatore, Christ is our Savior because he has announced to us the way of eternal salvation,37 which we obtain by imitating him.38 For Socinus, and also for the later Socinianism, the prophetic office of Christ comprises almost all of his salvific work. When one inspects the later Socinian Racovian Catechism—a document not written by Faustus but one on which his fingerprints appear at every turn39—the amount of space devoted to the prophetic office of Christ, as opposed to the kingly and priestly, is eye-opening but hardly surprising. Although the catechism ostensibly employs the threefold office as an organizing principle when treating the work of Christ, it presents a massive discussion about the prophetic office, little about the kingly, and almost nothing of the priestly.40 One would expect this,

NT doctrine]: This way is much too fallible in a matter which depends upon Divine revelation, such as the Christian religion) (De auctoritate, 1.267). In context, Socinus is considering specifically the hypothetical possibility of using “reasons” to overturn some doctrine of the New Testament. This Socinus rejects as an utter impossibility given the fallibility of reason in matters of faith. 36 Socinus paraphrases Christ in John 3:9–13 in his Explicatio locorum (1.146a): “Indeed, for that reason am I sent that I may teach you celestial things. Neither before was there anyone who ascended into heaven where celestial things are first acquired, besides me, I say, who when I was there whence I descended, that this which I learned there, I should undertake the office of teaching among you. . . . Therefore it is necessary for him who wishes to know heavenly things, without which a sure hope of eternal life is not possible to be conceived, to come to me [Jesus] and to have total faith in me. Not otherwise did Moses go out into a desert and set up a bronze serpent on a high place [for healing]” (Williams, “Christological Issues,” 318; translation his). 37 “Ego verò censeo, & orthodoxam sententiam esse arbitror, Iesum Christum ideo servatorem nostrum esse, quia salutis aeternae viam nobis annuntiaverit, confirmaverit, & in sua ipsius persona, cum vitae exemplo, tum ex mortuis resurgendo, manifestè ostenderit, vitamque aeternam nobis ei fidem habentibus ipse daturus fit” (But I regard and judge the orthodox position to be that Jesus Christ is our savior because he announced to us the way of eternal salvation, he confirmed it, and he clearly demonstrated it personally—both by the example of his life and by rising from the dead. And he himself will grant eternal life to us who have faith in him.) (Faustus Socinus, De Jesu Christo Servatore [hereafter De Servatore] 2.121). 38 “Demonstratur, . . . nos Christum imitari posse, hancque esse aeternae salutis viam: ob idque Christum iurè Servatorem nostrum appellari” (It is demonstrated . . . that we can imitate Christ, and that this is the way of eternal salvation. Therefore Christ is rightly called our Savior.) (Socinus, De Servatore, 2.128). 39 Valentin Schmalz (a close associate of Socinus) and Johannes Volkel completed the Racovian Catechism. However, the Institutio of Socinus (1.651–676) is in some sense the rough draft of it and certainly provided a good bit of the thought material that found its way into the catechism. For a good discussion of the production of the Catechism see Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (2 vols.; Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1945) 1:409. 40 Although the Socinians wrote a great deal about Christ’s work on the cross, they devoted almost all of it to undermining the orthodox doctrine of satisfaction. Their positive statements about the priestly work are much fewer and often vague by comparison, especially when placed alongside the sharp dialectic that one finds in their assault on the penal theory.

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since the Socinian Jesus, preeminently a prophet, functions as the purveyor of the saving truths. The Role of the PAA in Socinus’s System Now, if one connects the necessity of divine revelation with Socinus’s humanitarian Christology, the propriety of a PAA becomes evident. Christ, fully but merely human, must have the divine truths that constitute the saving gospel revealed to him supernaturally. Since Jesus does not have a divine nature, he has only a human mode of knowledge open to him, and so God must reveal the divine arcana to him just he would to any other prophet. But why would God reveal these truths to Christ through a spatial rapture into heaven and not in a more conventional way as with other prophets? Socinus argues for such an exotic mode of revelation to Christ as utterly appropriate if not necessary given Christ’s preeminence over all the spokespersons from God, who came before and after. Socinus will argue from the lesser to the greater. If Moses under the old dispensation and the Apostle Paul under the new had revelation given to them in a direct audience with God, how much more ought Christ to have received the saving precepts in a similar but an even greater way? Thus, considering the various systemic threads that the PAA draws together in Socinus’s thought, the doctrine appears less contrived than at first blush. Consequently, I cannot agree with McGiffert, who places the doctrine of a PAA among those that lie “outside of Socinus’s controlling principles.”41 McGiffert includes the PAA in a collection of Socinian teachings that have either a supernatural cast (such as the virgin birth and his literal ascension after his resurrection) or stand in tension with what McGiffert sees as the logic of their humanitarian Christology (such as the teaching that Christ should receive worship). But none of these doctrines fall outside of Faustus’s “controlling principles,” once we properly identify and understand these principles.42 Whatever one may say about the move toward rationalism in the later Socinianism, Socinus himself was a confirmed supernaturalist, and the supernatural aspects of a PAA would not have fazed him.43 The PAA comports well with Socinus’s theology as a whole and with his Christology in particular. 41

Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant (New York: Scribner, 1924) 117. Surely one might well ask how these “controlling principles” came to lose so much control that Socinus so very often departs from them! 43 Later Socinianism does show the impact of seventeenth-century Cartesianism. Interestingly, as Wilbur recounts (History, 1:530), the Socinian Johann Ludwig von Wolzogen worries that if reason replaces Scripture the inevitable result will be a falling away from the true faith. For this reason Wolzogen opposed the onslaught of Cartesian rationalism. Wolzogen’s protest not withstanding, later Socinians and Remonstrants alike were to imbibe significant aspects of Cartesian thought, and by the time Andreas Wiszowaty came on the scene, the Socinian movement had moved significantly toward genuine rationalism. Spinoza and Descartes particularly influenced Wiszowaty. He outlines his program in his important Religio rationalis seu de rationis judicio, in controversiis etiam theologicis, ac religiosis, adhibendo, tractatus (Amsterdam,1685). In this work he states unequivocally that 42

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■ Theological and Exegetical Arguments in Support of the Pre-Ascension Ascension of Christ Socinus used exegetical arguments, which revolved around a few key biblical texts, to establish and to defend his theory of a PAA. The texts that Socinus draws upon for direct support for the PAA come from John’s gospel, specifically 3:13, 31–32; 6:38, 62; and 8:28b.44 He also cites other passages both from the Hebrew Bible, such as Moses’ ascent on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19 and 24) as a type of Christ, and from the New Testament, such as Paul’s rapture to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:1–5), to provide indirect support for the propriety of the PAA. Biblical Texts Construed as Directly Teaching the PAA Of the aforementioned Johannine texts, Socinus singles out for special consideration John 3:13 and 6:62, which express quite similar ideas but which contain some important differences as well. The texts read as follows: John 3:13: “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven.”45

sound reason is the touchstone of truth and anything taught in Scripture that offends reason must be rejected. Wilbur (History, 1:572) says that Wiszowaty was the first Socinian to enunciate this view unambiguously. Note, however, that by Wiszowaty’s time, rationalism was gaining ground among those who were not Socinians in any official sense, and by the turn of the century it became the dominant intellectual pattern in many circles; it came to affect even the orthodox communions. Note, for example, Stapfer and Wyttenbach, who were “orthodox” theologians attempting to incorporate the rationalist philosophy of Wolff. Hadorn describes Stapfer, who wrote in the mid-eighteenth century, as advocating an “orthodox rationalism of the mild Reformed type.” See Wilhelm Hadorn, “Stapfer,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (ed. Lefferts A. Loetscher; 15 vols.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1949–1950). On the rise of rationalism in late-seventeenthand eighteenth-century Reformed theology see Richard A. Muller, Prolegomena to Theology (vol. 2 of Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics; 4 vols.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1987) 38–39; Michael Heyd, Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Jean-Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva (The Hague: Njhoff, 1982); John W. Beardslee, “Theological Development at Geneva under Francis and Jean-Alphonse Turretin (1648–1737)” (Ph.D. diss.; Yale University, 1956); and Ernst Bizer, “Die reformierte Orthodoxie und der Cartesianismus,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 55 (1958) 306–72. Concerning the rise of “natural religion” in later Socinianism, in contradistinction to the view of Faustus, see Zbigniew Ogonowski, “Faustus Socinus,” in Shapers of the Religious Traditions in Germany, Switzerland, and Poland, 1560–1600 (ed. Jill Raitt; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981) 206–7. See also Delio Cantimori, Eretici Italiani del Cinquecento (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1967) 359–62. 44 Williams (Polish Brethren, 2:416 n. 28) for some reason also includes John 3:6 in this list, although I suspect this to be a typographical error since John 3:6 does not appear to be relevant, nor did I observe Socinus discussing it in the context of the PAA. 45 The Alexandrian text type supports a shorter reading of this verse, which does not contain the words “who is in heaven” (S. [?RINRX[D SYNVER[D). The Byzantine and Western text types available in Socinus’s day, however, strongly attest to the longer reading. The longer reading is also in the Vulgate. Socinus, working from both the Greek text of Erasmus (based upon a Byzantine text type) and the Latin Vulgate, of course accepted the text as he found it, as did his opponents.

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John 6:62: “What if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where he was before?”

Socinus states that in order to untangle a proper understanding of these texts one must ascertain what in them to take literally versus what one should understand figuratively or as a “trope.” Socinus urges that either these texts contain a figure of speech (tropus) or they do not.46 Now, if one wishes to take the passages as containing a trope, the question becomes where ought one to locate the figure. Profound implications for one’s Christology depend upon which elements (if any) one takes as figurative. Socinus does not believe that the Christologies of his “adversaries,” whether Trinitarian or Arian, stand up to a careful exegesis of these texts because of their error in taking as figurative parts of the text that one must understand literally. THE TRINITARIAN INTERPRETATION OF THESE TEXTS Faustus declares that the orthodox (Trinitarian) exegesis requires some kind of trope in these texts, even though it takes other parts of these same texts literally. In John 3:13 the orthodox take as literal the parts of the verse that refer to Christ’s descent from heaven and also to his present tense dwelling there. They say that his literal descent (i.e., in becoming a human being through the virgin) proves his divine preexistence, while the force of the present tense in describing him as “in heaven” shows that Christ, subsisting in two natures, remained in heaven according to his divine nature even as he informed his disciples of this fact while on earth. As for John 6:62, the orthodox take as literal the Son of Man’s future ascent to heaven as well as his heavenly preexistence, “where he was before.” Now, on an orthodox reckoning, Christ’s preexistence in heaven, his descent from there, and his present tense heavenly dwelling, must refer to his divine and not to his human nature. Yet, in both texts Christ ascribes these activities to the Son of Man, a clear reference to his humanity. Consequently, Socinus observes, the orthodox take the expression “Son of Man” as figurative, not literal. In doing so the orthodox “take refuge” in what Socinus sarcastically calls “that holy anchor of the Trinitarians” (ad sacram illam Trinitariorum anchoram),47 namely a christological doctrine known as the “communication of attributes” (communicatio idiomatum). According to this doctrine, one can, through a figure of speech, predicate a divine activity to Christ (such as being in heaven) under one of his human titles (e.g., “Son of Man”) as well as predicate a human activity to him (such as suffering crucifixion) under one of his divine titles (e.g., “the Lord of Glory,” 1 Cor 2:8). This communicatio idiomatum becomes possible because all of these activities and titles have reference

46 47

Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146; Adv. Volanum 2.380; Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511. Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis, 2.511.

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to the same concrete individual (or suppositum), to whom the orthodox predicate these actions and names.48 Socinus attacks the use of the communicatio idiomatum to explain these particular texts. For one thing, he believes that one cannot use these texts to prove Christ’s preexistence and divinity, since such proof relies on the doctrine of the communication of attributes (denied by the Unitarians and others), while the doctrine of the communicatio, in turn, relies on these same texts to establish it. The orthodox assume his divine preexistence in these texts in order to prove that they incorporate a communicatio idiomatum and then seek to demonstrate his preexistence from these same texts by employing the communicatio idiomatum in their explanation. Thus, they argue in a circle.49 Furthermore, Socinus states that, at most, his opponent could use a figure of speech (such as that which the communicatio idiomatum entails) for explaining his position and perhaps even for deflecting certain criticisms of it. But this differs from proving one’s position through the use of such a figure. As Socinus states, “the explanation of words through figures of speech certainly has the power to provide a response or to ward off [criticism], but it is useless for proving the point.”50 Socinus believes that “the communicatio idiomatum is clearly a fiction” (commentitia plane est ista idiomatum communicatio). Socinus presents as an 48 For a brief but helpful description of the communicatio idiomatum see Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1985) 72–74. To be perfectly accurate, the form of the communicatio idiomatum described above is more fully called the communicatio idiomatum in concreto, since the predication of the attributes is on the level of the person, i.e., to the concrete suppositum. This is in contrast to a communicatio idiomatum in abstracto, in which the attributes of one nature are predicated to the other nature—the natures being “abstractions,” as distinguished from the concrete suppositum who bears those natures. We should observe that Socinus was hardly the first antitrinitarian to take the cudgels against this theory. Servetus, among others, rejected it as a scholastic quibble throughout his De Trinitatis erroribus libri septem (1531) as well as in his slightly later Dialogorum de Trinitate libri duo (1532). Earl Morse Wilbur has made these writings of Servetus available in an accessible English translation. See Michael Servetus, The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity: On the Errors of the Trinity (Seven Books); Dialogues on the Trinity (two books); On the Righteousness of Christ’s Kingdom (four chapters) (ed. James H. Ropes and Kirsopp Lake; trans. Earl Morse Wilbur; Harvard Theological Studies 16; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932; repr., New York: Kraus, 1969) 9, 15, 16, 18, 59, 118. So, while Socinus may not break any particular new ground in his arguments to undermine the theory, he does expend considerable energy in neutralizing it, as he must if his literal PAA theory is to stand. 49 See Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511. See also his Responsio ad libellum Iacobi Vuieki Iesuitae, Polonice editum, de divinitate filii Dei, & Spiritus Sancti [hereafter Ad libellum Vuieki ] 2.610, where he states, “Sed, ut hoc illis concede possit, oporteret saltem de ista coniunctione personali Dei, & hominis, seu divinae, & humanae naturae in Christo, aperte constare: quod illud ipsum est repisa, quod ex hoc loco probare volunt” (But, in order to grant this [the communication of attributes] to them, it is necessary at least to establish clearly that personal conjunction of God and humanity, or of the divine and human nature in Christ. But that is the very thing that they wish to prove from this passage). 50 “Quo fit, ut verborum explicatio per sermonis figures ad respondendum quidem, atque excipiendum valere possit, sed nihil omnino ad probandum” (Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380).

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analogy the case of the soul and the body, entities characterized by different sets of attributes and activities. One cannot predicate concerning the body that which characterizes the soul alone, nor can one predicate of the soul the unique characteristics of the body. For instance, one does not say that the soul “stands” or “procreates” just because the body does, nor does one say that the body thinks or philosophizes just because the soul does.51 Similarly, one cannot say that the human nature resided in heaven because the divine nature did so. In the above argument Socinus has tacitly shifted his attack to the doctrine in abstracto, in which the characteristics of one nature literally apply to the other nature (and therefore do not involve any trope). He did this rather than attack the form of the doctrine in concreto, the figurative form, which his opponent had invoked in explaining these texts and which was the form on which Socinus had based his criticism to that point.52 In his later work (1593) against the Jesuit Wujek (Vuiekus), Socinus nuanced his polemic and ruled out either form of the communicatio in relation to this passage. Socinus’s argument there, although a bit sketchy, merits attention. Wujek has attempted to establish the divine attribute of immensity (immensitas) as applying to Christ based on John 3:13. Wujek infers a divine (and therefore immense) nature in Christ from this text as follows. On the one hand, Christ states that he is in heaven (present tense). On the other hand, he makes it clear that his body was not in heaven at that time because he said that he will ascend to heaven (future tense). Now, if he had not yet ascended into heaven bodily but at the same time said that he was there, then, Wujek reasons, he must have been there according to some other nature, namely, his deity. Since deity entails immensity, “filling both heaven and earth simultaneously,” then one can predicate immensity of Christ.53 In response, Socinus points out, as before, that Wujek relies on the trope of the communication of attributes in as much as Christ refers to himself as the “Son of Man” in this text. Socinus then, also as before, repels the possibility of 51 “Quemadmodum enim non dicitur anima stare aut federe, quia corpus stet aut fedeat; sic neque corpus cogitare aut philosophari dicitur, quia anima cogitet aut philosophetur” (For just as the soul is not said to stand or to procreate because the body stands or procreates, likewise neither is the body said to think or philosophize because the soul thinks or philosophizes) (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). Socinus argues similarly in his Ad libellum Vuieki 2.610. 52 For the distinction between the various forms of the communicatio idiomatum, again see Muller, Dictionary, 72–74. 53 “Si Christus in caelo erat, quando haec loquebatur in terra, igitur simul in coelo & in terra erat: non autem corpore tunc erat in coelo, cum se diceret ascensurum in coelum, igitur alia in Christo natura erat, praeter humanam illam, quae cernebatur oculis mortalium, videlicet divina, quae immense est, & coelum simul, ac terram replet” (If Christ was in heaven when he was making these statements on earth, he was therefore in heaven and on earth simultaneously. Moreover, he was not in heaven bodily at that time, since he said that he was going to ascend to heaven. Therefore, there was some other nature in Christ beyond his human nature, which was discerned by mortal eyes, i.e., the divine nature, which is immense and fills heaven and earth simultaneously) (Socinus, Ad libellum Vuieki 2.610).

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a communicatio idiomatum in abstracto54 by repeating unchanged his earlier argument that the characteristics of one nature cannot apply to the other. He cites the same example of the impossibility of applying the properties of the soul to the body and vice versa. But unlike before, Socinus now extends the argument to rule out as well the inference of a communicatio idiomatum in concreto through this passage. Socinus does grant that one can predicate properties of either the body or of the soul to the person (suppositum), and so accepts the communicatio idiomatum in concreto as not absurd per se (as is a communicatio in abstracto). But Socinus argues that one cannot use John 3:13 to establish such a thing about Christ. Socinus seizes on Wujek’s claim that in this text Christ indicated his future bodily ascension, at which point—but not before—his body would be in heaven. Socinus marvels at this inference and wonders what in this text Wujek used as evidence for a future ascension. One could derive this idea only from the phrase, “no one has ascended/ is ascending to heaven” (nemo ascendit in coelum). Such an interpretation could work if one took the verb ascendit (in the Vulgate) as present tense. In that case the present tense ( “is ascending”) could and would refer figuratively (figurate) to a future event in this context. (It could not refer to something happening before Nicodemus’s eyes.) But when comparing the Vulgate with the underlying Greek text, one must construe ascendit (ENREFIZFLOIR “has gone up”) as a perfect and not as a present indicative. Thus, these words do not indicate a future ascension for Christ but in fact demonstrate a past one. What options, then, does Wujek have left? He could abandon a literal interpretation altogether and take the ascent, descent, and existence in heaven as metaphorical, allegorical, or otherwise figurative. (The next section discusses how such a figurative interpretation might look.) Alternatively, he could throw in his lot with Socinus and admit “that Christ truly, after he was born a human but before he spoke these words, [literally] ascended into heaven.” Regardless of which alternative Wujek should choose, “Christ’s words [in this passage] are altogether useless for proving his immensity.” To summarize, then, Wujek could not prove his point by an appeal to the communicatio idiomatum in abstracto, even if he wanted to, because that doctrine turns out to be false per se. On the other hand, he cannot prove his point here by an appeal to the communicatio idiomatum in concreto because the grammar of the text will not allow it.55 54 Note that in the actual text of Socinus on which I base my summary of his argument he always refers simply to the communicatio idiomatum and does not specify the further description in abstracto or in concreto. I have employed these added details in my own discussion to make clear the logic of his argument. I have provided the verbatim and complete passage in Socinus here under consideration in the following note. 55 The above summary is what I take to be the logic of Socinus’s argument and entails a number of amplifications from the rather terse and telegraphic way in which he sets forth the discussion. The actual passage in question, on which the above interpretation is based, runs as follows: Sed

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A NON-TRINITARIAN BUT FIGURATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THESE TEXTS Although Socinus will cast his lot with a purely literal interpretation of these texts, he does offer a non-Trinitarian alternative for those who wish to see some aspect of these texts as figurative. The Trinitarians against whom he has argued chose to situate the trope in the words “Son of Man” and to take as literal the heavenly adversarii figuratum sermonem in ipso nomine filii hominis esse contendunt; de quo per idiomatum communicationem dici volunt id, quod Dei cum eo in eadem persona coniuncti est proprium. Sed, ut hoc illis concede possit, oporteret saltem de ista coniunctione personali Dei, & hominis, seu divinae, & humanae naturae in Christo, aperte constare: quod illud ipsum est repisa, quod ex hoc loco probare volunt. Praeterea, quemadmodum in homine, qui ex animo, & corpore constat, quae propria corporis sunt, animae tribui separatim non possunt, nec contra; sic, si Christus, ut adversarii volunt, constat ex Deo & homine, sive ex divina, & humana natura, non possunt quae sunt Dei seu divinae naturae propria, separatim homini seu humanae naturae tribui: nec contra. Nec idiomatum communicatio aliud praetera efficere potest quam ut quae unius tantum sunt naturae, ipsi supposito tribuantur; quemadmodum, quae propria sunt animae tantum, aut corporis tantum, ipsi homini merito tribui possunt. Sed quid est, quod adversarii dicunt, Christum non potuisse dicere, quod tunc corpore esset in coelo, cum, se diceret ascensurum in coelum? Nam quomodo, obsecro, probant, Christum tunc dixisse, se ascensurum in coelum: Dicent (neque enim video, unde id alioqui colligere audeant) ex illis verbis, Nemo ascendit in coelum. Atqui verbum ascendit, ut ex Graeco patet, non est praesentis temporis, ut figurate ad futurum tempus accommodari aut possit, aut etiam debeat, sed praeteriti; adeo ut necesse sit (nisi Ubiquitarii esse velimus) fateri, vel totum Christi sermonem figuratum esse, & istum ascensum & descensum atque existentiam in coelo metaphorice & allegorice accipi debere, vel Christum revera, postquam homo natus fuit, antequam verba ista diceret, ascendisse in coelum: ex quo etiam merito dicere potuerit, se hominem ibi fuisse (iam enim dictum est pro qui est, iure posse reponi qui erat) & sic nihil prorsus ad Christi immensitatem probandam haec ipsius verba pertinere possunt. (But the adversaries contend that the figure is in the expression “Son of Man.” They speak of it in this way through the communication of attributes, because it is the property of God conjoined with him in the same person. But, in order to grant this to them, it is necessary at least to establish clearly that personal conjunction of God and humanity [hominis], or of the divine and human nature in Christ. But that is the very thing that they wish to prove from this passage. Besides, just as in the case of a human being, who consists of soul and body, the properties of the body cannot be attributed separately to the soul, nor vice versa. Thus, if Christ [as the adversaries wish] consists of both God and humanity [homine], or of a divine and a human nature, the properties of God or of the divine nature cannot be attributed separately to the human nature, nor vice versa. Nor can the communication of attributes bring about anything else than that the properties [lit., “things”] that belong only to one nature should be attributed to the suppositum, just as the characteristics [lit., “things”] that are properties of the soul alone, or of the body alone, can rightly be attributed to the human being. But what is this that the adversaries declare: that Christ could not say, at that time, that his body was in heaven, since he said that he was going to ascend to heaven? For how, I ask, can they prove that at that time Christ said he was going to ascend into heaven? They will say it based on the following words [for I fail to see from where else they would otherwise dare infer it]: ‘No one is ascending [ascendit] into heaven.’ But the word ascendit, as the Greek makes plain, is not present tense, which, understood figuratively, would allow for or even demand a reference to the future. Rather, it is past tense. Thus, unless we wish to be Ubiquitarians, it is necessary to admit either that the entire saying of Christ is figurative—and that the ascent, descent, and existence in heaven ought to be taken metaphorically and allegorically—or that Christ truly, after he was born a human but before he spoke these words, ascended into heaven. In line with this Christ rightly would have been able to say that he was there as a human [for as was already stated, the words ‘who is’ can rightly be replaced with ‘who was’]. Thus, Christ’s words are altogether useless for proving his immensity) (Socinus, Ad libellum Vuieki, 2.610).

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descent, ascent, and present-tense abiding. Socinus reverses the orthodox conclusion and suggests an interpretation that takes the expression “Son of Man” as literal and the parts that speak of a heavenly descent, ascent, and present-tense abiding in heaven as figurative.56 Socinus says that one can make a case for taking these verses figuratively from the preceding verse in John 3:12, which speaks of the knowledge and understanding of heavenly things. On this reckoning, Socinus says that “to ascend into heaven” would mean nothing other than to investigate the truth of heavenly matters, while “to descend from heaven” would mean to go forth to teach those same heavenly truths to others. “To be in heaven,” stated in the present tense, would mean to apprehend rightly (probe tenere) these same heavenly truths with such clarity and immediacy that one could describe them as present in one’s consciousness (tanquam praesentes inspicere atque intueri).57 Thus, Socinus concludes that however much Christ may have abided on earth, one could nevertheless say that he had abided in heaven at the same time. Against Wolan, Socinus suggests a similar interpretation for John 6:62. Why could not one understand Christ to have ascended already “in heaven” (i.e., before his postresurrection ascension took place) in the sense of constantly residing “in heaven” in thought and mind? He certainly did hold in his mind all the most divine and heavenly arcana (omnia coelestia, id est arcana quaeque divinissima) to such an extent that he saw them as if present to him. The above interpretation does not require one to affirm anything or to take anything for granted (pro concesso sumitur) except the plain truth. By contrast, the orthodox opinion requires assumptions (such as the communicatio idiomatum) that not only raised doubt in their own day but have caused bitter contests historically.58 56 “Si agnoscendus est [i.e., a trope], nihil impedit, quominus iste ascensus in coelum, & iste descensus de coelo, & denique istud, Esse in coelo, figurate accipiatur, non minus quam adversarii velint, nomen illud Filius hominis figurate accipi debere & inde duas in Christo naturas colligi”(If [a trope] should be acknowledged, nothing stands in the way of taking as figurative the ascent into heaven, the descent from heaven, and [the words] “is in heaven,” any more than for the adversaries, who wish the name “Son of Man” to be taken figuratively, and from which [figurative understanding] they infer the two natures in Christ) (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). 57 Ibid. Socinus makes this same point in Tractatus de Deo (1.813), in which he says that if one takes the present tense figuratively, the reference is to “the penetration (as it were) into the knowledge of divine things” (“penetrationem [ut ita loquar] ad rerum divinarum cognitionem sint interpretati”). He again advances the same line of argument in Ad libellum Vuieki (2.610). 58 “Non videmus inquam, cur non potius haec interpretatio amplectenda sit, in qua nihil vel dicitur, vel pro concesso sumitur, quod verissimum esse non constet, quam ista vestra, in quo coniunctio illa duarum naturam in Christo aut pro iam posita habetur, aut expresse affirmatur; de qua & olim, & hodie non modo dubitatum, sed etiam tam acriter pugnatum est” (We fail to see, I say, why this interpretation ought not rather be embraced, in which nothing is either stated or taken for granted that is not [already] well known to be absolutely true. In your interpretation [on the other hand] that conjunction of the two natures in Christ is either already taken as a given or expressly affirmed—about which, in times past as well as today, it was not only in doubt, but was even so bitterly contested) (Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380).

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The figurative interpretation suggested by Socinus appears compatible with the teaching office of Christ as the Son of Man qua man and does not require anyone to invoke such a contested and tendentious doctrine as the communicatio idiomatum. In reading Socinus’s praise for this interpretive option, one may think at first blush that he favors it. Williams apparently thought Socinus might have favored it originally, albeit tentatively, and said that in Socinus’s treatment of the verse in the Explicatio (cited above), he regarded this option as “the literal [sic]59 and proper sense of the verse.” Williams tries to reconcile Socinus’s praise here for the figurative interpretation over against his ultimate advocacy of a literal PAA by describing Socinus as “still wavering between an ecstatic and experiential over against a spacial or physical transport.” Williams suggests that such wavering provides an argument for an early date for this particular entry in the Explicatio.60 Socinus oscillates between a figurative and a literal interpretation in the Explicatio in an uncharacteristic and puzzling way. Consider what follows in the Explicatio on the heels of this effusive endorsement of the figurative model: If nevertheless someone wishes to be so obstinate (ita pertinax) that he is unwilling to concede in these matters any figure of speech, however elegant and free of difficulty—and therefore most appropriate, if not necessary, to this passage (as this [figurative] sort of interpretation certainly is)—the only alternative is that we say that the Son of Man, or that man, truly and properly had already both descended from heaven and was in heaven.61

Yet Socinus straightway places himself among the “obstinate” by professing his unbridled enthusiasm for just such a literalistic approach to the text. He declares that he “not only freely grants but even plainly contends” (non modo libenter concedimus, sed etiam plane contendimus) the truth of the purely literal interpretation “without a doubt” (nec ullo modo dubitandum esse).62 But then, Socinus further muddies the matter when he doubles back to the figurative option and states that one can in no way take literally the early part of the verse, in which “no one has ascended to heaven,” granting that Elijah and most probably Enoch had already literally 59 I presume Williams means “literal” in the sense of “true” or “actual,” since Socinus’s whole point is that this option involves a trope, in contrast to the literal approach he suggests in his discussion immediately following. 60 Williams, “Christological Issues,” 319. As Williams points out, the Explicatio comprised explanations of various difficult biblical texts; Socinus wrote these explanations at different times throughout his career. 61 “Quod si tamen quispiam ita pertinax esse velit, ut nullum tropum, quamvis elegantissimum, eumque facillimum, ac praeterea ipsi loco accommodatissimum, seu potius necessarium, quails profecto iste est, in rebus istis admittere velit, nihil aliud restat, nisi ut filium hominis, sive hominem illum, & vere & proprie, iam tum & de coelo descendisse, & in coelo fuisse dicimus” (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). 62 “Quod nos sane, non modo libenter concedimus, sed etiam plane contendimus, nec ullo modo dubitandum esse dicimus” (ibid.).

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ascended there. On this basis Socinus concludes that the “entire passage should be taken figuratively” (totum locum figurate accipiendum esse).63 While the flow of the discussion in the Explicatio admits to no easy explanation, Williams’s interpretation—that Socinus wrote this entry early in the Explicatio when vacillating between the two options—seems to me not correct. The point here is not whether Socinus wrote this entry in the Explicatio early (he certainly could have) but whether the apparent “vascillating” that one sees in this passage can be construed as evidence for that. Upon examining Socinus’s later writings that treat these texts, we see a striking similarity in the structure of his argument insofar as he also praises the figurative option only to reject it. Thus, one should not see this particular characteristic of the Explicatio as an anomaly, since we find it in nearly all of his other treatments of the topic including those written well after one could have any doubt but that he had made the PAA his definite, settled opinion.64 Consider his dispute with Erasmus Johannis, written in 1584: If you wish, I say, to understand the [true] sense, I think you ought to consider that the words of Christ must either be taken with some trope or without any trope. Now, if they are to be taken with some trope, who would not see how aptly Christ could say, speaking as a human being, that he was in heaven before he ascended to it bodily with his disciples looking on. For his mind was always dwelling in heaven, so that he harbored all heavenly thoughts, considering these as if always present to him. This is clearly so in a unique way, above and beyond the experience of all other godly persons. But if, as it indeed appears to me, the words of Christ are to be taken without any trope, then it is necessary to confess that he, as a human, or certainly after he was human, was in heaven before that ascension that was observed by the Apostles. I strongly [vehementer] commend that opinion, and freely follow and embrace this interpretation of Christ’s words.65

63

Ibid. And so for the treatises already cited in which support for the figurative interpretation appears: Ad Volanum (1580), Tractatus de Deo (1583–1584), Adv. Erasmum Iohannis (1584), and Ad libellum Vuieki (1595). What makes the discussion in the Explicatio more difficult to interpret, however, is that after seeming to drop the figurative interpretation in favor of the literal one, which he “freely contends, without a doubt” to be true, he concludes the discussion with an argument that appears to favor taking the entire passage as a trope. It is this latter feature that distinguishes the argument in the Explicatio from the way in which he structures it elsewhere. 65 “Si velis, inquam, hoc scire, considerandum tibi esse arbitror, Christi verba aut cum aliquo, aut cum nullo topo accipienda esse. Si cum aliquo; nemo non videt, quam apte Christus, ut homo, in caelo fuisse dici possit, antequam, videntibus discipulis, cum suo corpore eo ascenderit; cum perpetuo in caelo mente sua versaretur, calestiaque omnia ita cognita haberet, ut ea tanquam praesentia semper inspiceret: idque ratione quadam plane singulari, & praeter ac supra omnem aliorum divinorum hominum sortem. Sin autem, ut mihi quidem videtur, nullo cum tropo sunt Christi verba accipienda; necesse est fateri, ipsum, ut hominem, aut certe, postquam fuit homo, fuisse in caelo ante ascensionem illam suam Apostolis conspicuam. Quam sententiam ego vehementer probo, hancque verborum Christi interpretationem libentissime sequor atque amplector” (Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511 [emphasis mine]). 64

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Now, why would Socinus offer a figurative interpretation and praise it so highly only to drop it in favor of something else? Other antitrinitarians, such as Servetus, had already suggested something close to this figurative understanding of the text, and Socinus may have not wished to discredit this manner of handling the issue.66 Further, many of his fellow antitrinitarians might not have agreed with this new interpretation of his, whether due to its novelty or for some other reason. If this was his worry, then his disquiet had foundation: some of the later Socinian theologians (e.g., Crell) did in fact abandon this teaching as untenable. Therefore, Socinus, in cogently stating and praising a figurative understanding of these texts, may have wished to leave his cobelligerents with an alternate refutation of the orthodox exegesis, even if they proved unwilling to embrace the one that he favored. Second, Socinus might have offered this figurative possibility for the sake of completeness (i.e., to canvas all the possible options) and for systemic (and, dare I say, scholastic) tidiness. Socinus might have thought that logically speaking, whether or not one wishes to see a trope in the text, one cannot sustain the orthodox view. INTERPRETING THE TEXT WITHOUT A TROPE: A LITERAL RAPTURE His sometimes circuitous mode of presentation notwithstanding, Socinus embraced a literal PAA as the best explanation for these texts. But one sticky issue yet remains for Socinus and, on its face, appears to present a formidable if not fatal objection to the theory. What can Socinus do about the present tense in the expression “the Son of Man who is in heaven”? How can that comport with a literal approach to this text? To grant that Christ was in heaven when he made that statement—as the present tense would indicate—would grant him some kind of divine status, would it not? The significance of the present tense does not escape the orthodox, who forcefully press this point against him. Socinus suggests an alternate translation for the verse. He claims that one can take the Greek participle ¢n ([?R), rendered in the Vulgate as “is” (est), as a “past imperfect” (praeteritum imperfectum), “was” (erat), “so that it reads not ‘who is’ but ‘who was in heaven.’”67 Socinus cites Beza and Erasmus as authorities favoring this rendering of the text. Not only grammatically possible, this reading has the benefit of bringing John 3:13 into line with the statement in John 6:62, which says that the son “was in heaven before” (erat prius; L@RXS TVSZXIVSR), not that he “is now” (nunc est) in heaven.68 Indeed, one should not overlook the fact that John 6:62 poses a significant challenge to the orthodox view, because the statement “where he was before” (ubi prius erat) most naturally suggests that he no longer remains For example, Servetus had already suggested taking as figurative the “ascent” mentioned in both Johannine texts. See Servetus, Two Treatises, 26–27; 71–73. 67 “Ut legatur non qui est, set qui erat in caelo” (Socinus, Institutio, 1.674). Socinus makes this identical point in his Explicatio locorum (1.146) and in his Ad libellum Vuieki (2.610). 68 Socinus, Institutio 1.675. 66

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there.69 By rendering est as erat, Socinus is convinced that his view can reconcile both texts on solid grammatical grounds in a way that the orthodox interpretation cannot. Socinus believes that the theory of a PAA provides an accounting of these verses strong both for defense and offense. Socinus says that whatever these texts say about the descent of Christ from heaven, his going forth from the Father, and his antecedent dwelling in the same place as his later visible ascent into heaven, has no force against his view, however much the orthodox urge these passages against him. Indeed, his opponents, who accuse him of departing far from the letter of Scripture, instead stand rightly accused by Socinus of doing that very thing in this case! They attribute to some imagined nature or essence what the Scriptures attribute either to the Son of Man or simply to the “suppositum” (in orthodox parlance) Jesus Christ.70 In contrast, Socinus argues that one need not resort to such figurative interpretations here. Rather, one ought to accept Christ’s words in this passage in their literal significance and at face value, since to do so is consistent with his humanity. Observe that Christ, in this context, stresses his humanity by his reference to himself as the “Son of Man.”71 Aside from modifying the translation to read “who was in heaven,” based on the grammatical propriety cited earlier, one can take the rest of this text according to its plain sense.72 69 “Potius interrogandum est, quomodo Christus illa verba, ubi erat prius, de seipso secundum illam divinam naturam, quam isti sunt commenti, dicere potuerit, ut quidem iidem isti volunt. Ea enim indicant eum, de quo dicta sunt, tunc temporis ibi, id est, in coelo, non fuisse, & consequenter, si istorum interpretatio admittatur, Christum cum haec dixit, secundum suam divinam naturam non fuisse in coelo. Quod ex ipsorummet sententia absurdissimum est” (It rather ought to be asked how Christ would have been able to utter the words “where he was before” about himself with reference to his divine nature, which they have falsely contrived [for him], as indeed these same individuals would have it. For these words indicate that he, about whom they were spoken, was not there, i.e., in heaven, at that time. Consequently, if their interpretation is allowed, the words indicate that Christ, when said these things, was not in heaven according to his divine nature. But in terms of their own view, this conclusion is utterly absurd) (Socinus, Institutio 1.675). 70 “Ex quo fit, ut quidquid de decensu Christi de coelo, de exitu ipsius à patre, de antecedente eiusdem visibilem ascensum in coelum, ipsius ibidem commoratione, in Sacris Literis legitur, quod tantopere contra nos adversarii urgere solent, id nihil plane sit. Immo efficitur, ut adversarii nostri, qui nos, tanquam interpretationibus nostris à Litera ipsa longe recedentes, accusare solebant, à nobis merito, hoc eodem nomine, accusentur; quippe, qui, quod scriptura, vel illi filio hominis, vel simpliciter, supposito illi, ut vocant, quod Iesus Christus est, aperte tribuit, divinae cuidam à se somniatae naturae, sive essentiae tribuere non vereantur” (From which it is the case that whatever one reads in Holy Scripture about the descent of Christ from heaven, or about his going forth from the Father, or about his abiding in heaven preceding his visible ascent there—which things our adversaries are so often accustomed to urging against us—plainly accomplishes nothing [to harm our position]. On the contrary: it turns out that our adversaries, who are used to accusing us of departing far from the literal meaning of Scripture [à Litera ipsa longe], are rightly charged by us of that very thing. Indeed, these are the ones who do not fear to attribute to some divine nature or essence [that they have dreamed up] what Scripture clearly attributes either to the Son of Man, or simply to the “suppositum” [as they say], which is Jesus Christ) (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). 71 Socinus, Institutio, 1.674–675. 72 Ibid., 1.675.

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If these passages teach a PAA, in which Christ receives instruction in the heavenly arcana, then this fact not only removes them from the orthodox arsenal of proof texts for Christ’s deity but makes them proofs against it. If Christ always was true God and existed always from the substance of the Father, God would have no need to rapture him into heaven whether to contemplate the heavenly arcana or for any other reason.73 Socinus argues that if the person of Christ has an indivisible conjunction of the divine nature with his human nature, this conjunction per se would prove sufficient to enrich his humanity with perfect knowledge of divine things.74 In leveling this criticism, Socinus again shifts to the literal form of the communicatio in abstracto from the form of the doctrine in concreto, which involves a mere verbal predication. Biblical Texts Construed as Indirectly Teaching the PAA Besides the texts in John that he construes as speaking of a PAA, Socinus finds indirect parallels in support. He draws upon the case of Moses and his ascent up Mount Sinai (Exodus 19 and 24) and that of Paul the Apostle regarding his rapture into the third heaven (2 Cor 12:1–5). MOSES’ ASCENT AS A TYPE OF CHRIST’S RAPTURE In his Brevissima institutio, Socinus puts forth what he considers a telling argument in support of the PAA.75 He argues for the PAA of Christ based on the well established notion of Moses as a type of Christ. But his application of it to the PAA appears unique. Williams summarizes this line of argument as follows: As Moses ascended into the clouds of Mount Sinai (“an antitype [sic] of heaven”) to receive the Law, so Jesus during the comparable forty days in the wilderness was lifted even higher to receive in the bosom of his Father the secret saving Gospel he was called to exemplify on his descent and to proclaim.76

Socinus cites verses out of Exodus 19 and 24 to show that Moses (a type of Christ) went up into the presence of God on Mt. Sinai (a type of heaven) on multiple 73 “Nam, si Christus, antequam homo natus est, non solum fuit, sed etiam verus Deus semper ex patris substantia extitit, quid opus erat, eum postea in coelum rapi, sive ut Dei arcana contemplaretur, sive quamcumque aliam ob causam?” (For if Christ, before he was born a man, not only existed but even always existed as true God from the substance of the Father, what need was there for him to be raptured into heaven afterward, whether to contemplate the arcana of God, or for any other reason?) (Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380). 74 Ibid. 75 Williams (“Christological Issues,” 315–16) states that Socinus cited both the case of Moses and of Paul in his De unigeniti filii Dei existentia, i.e., his dispute with Erasmus Johannis. However, I did not observe any reference to Moses in this work, although he does cite the case of Paul in Argument Seven of the dispute (Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.510–511). 76 Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:85.

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occasions. There Moses received instructions on all the procedures of the divine worship and the guidelines for manufactured artifacts (both as to their form and their material) related to that worship.77 On two separate occasions, he ascended to receive the ten commandments written on stone tablets by the finger of God (i.e., once when originally given and subsequently to replace the tablets that Moses shattered when he cast them to the ground in the face of the Israelites’ idolatry). Socinus states that just as Moses constitutes a type of Christ, even so Sinai provides a type of heaven.78 Hence he concludes that Christ ascended into heaven “and that perhaps more than once” (idque fortasse non semel, ascenderit).79 PAUL’S RAPTURE INTO HEAVEN AS AN ARGUMENT FOR CHRIST’S PAA Socinus cites the case of Paul’s rapture into the third heaven (2 Cor 12:1–5) as support for Christ’s own PAA. Likely the first place Socinus sets forth this argument is in his debate with Lithuanian Calvinist theologian Andrew Wolan.80 Socinus then repeats this argument four years later in his dispute with the Arian Erasmus Johannis. Here the argument rests not on any typical likeness between Paul and Jesus, but rather Socinus argues from the lesser to the greater. If Paul “was raptured in the third heaven before his death” (ad tertium usque coelum raptus fuit), we should expect his teacher and Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, to have arrived there some time before his death. In particular, we would expect him to have abode there before the commencement of his earthly service/office (munus).81 That something granted to Paul would not also have gone to Christ in no way rings true (nec ullo modo sit verisimile).82 Socinus also uses the case of Paul to refute the inference that Christ possessed a quasi divine, created substance—a conclusion that some draw from the faulty notion that Christ was in heaven before his earthly birth. Here Socinus has in mind specifically the Arians, who asserted a heavenly existence before Christ became human. Such an inference could stand only if one reasons that Christ, as a human being, could not have existed as a human in heaven at some time before he uttered the statement. By invoking the case of Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, he shows this 77 “Manufacta opera omnia, quae ad ipsum divinam cultum pertinerent, cuius materiae cuiusve formae esse deberent, ipsi Mosi à Deo praescriberetur” (God prescribed to Moses himself all the manufactured artifacts pertaining to the divine worship, both as to their form and material) (Socinus, Institutio 1.675). 78 “Nam ut Mosis Christum, sic montis Sinai coelum antitypum esse, apertissimum est” (For it is quite clear that just as Christ is the antitype of Moses, even so heaven is the antitype of Mount Sinai) (Socinus, Institutio 1.675). 79 Socinus, Institutio 1.675. 80 Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380. See also the discussion in Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:85. 81 Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146. 82 Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511. Williams discusses this passage (“Christological Issues,” 315).

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reasoning faulty. When Christ says that the Son of Man was in heaven, we have every reason to believe that he was in fact present there as a human being, just as Paul later would be. Socinus says that even if one granted that Christ possessed some nonhuman, quasi divine, created substance (i.e., in an Arian sense), this would neither prove that he preexisted in heaven according to that substance (i.e., before the virgin birth), nor less would it disprove his PAA theory. Certainly, for the sake of argument, he could have possessed both a human and a nonhuman substance while on earth, i.e., after his birth, and then been raptured into heaven according to that nonhuman substance. One might argue that something analogous to this occurred with Paul, who remained unsure whether God raptured him into heaven with or without his body. Thus, Socinus sees no necessity to conclude that Christ’s abiding in heaven could have occurred only before his earthly birth.83

■ Conclusion The doctrine of a pre-Ascension ascension of Christ constitutes an oddity in the history of doctrine. Yet the doctrine has significant cogency within the context of Socinus’s own system. While the doctrine does provide Socinus with a way of removing potential obstacles to his dynamic monarchian Christology, its roots penetrate more deeply than that. Given that Socinus had another viable interpretive option at his disposal, he did not advocate a literal PAA out of desperation. Rather, he believed that this interpretation best explained the text and tied together a number of doctrines about which he had become certain: his humanitarian Christology, the absolute need for divine revelation for a knowledge of God and salvation, and Christ’s prophetic office. I find nothing ipso facto unorthodox about affirming a PAA for Christ. Socinus himself believed it incompatible per se and argued that the conjunction of Christ’s divinity with his humanity would impart more to his store of knowledge than any pre-Ascension rapture would or could, which would render the latter superfluous.84 The premise that underlies this conclusion, however, is that an orthodox Christology does not allow for Christ to acquire knowledge or to grow as a human being. Although orthodox Christologists have construed the matter variously,85 one can speak of Christ’s authentic growth in knowledge as a human, as Luke 2:52 and numerous other texts indicate. An orthodox Christology can and indeed ought to affirm that Christ related to his Father as a human being relates to God, and that includes receiving instruction from God in modalities possible and appropriate to a human person. That some or even the bulk of this instruction might have happened in a divine audience with the Father, situated in heaven, appears neither impossible 83

Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.510. Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380. 85 An older but helpful book in this regard is Alexander B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1955). 84

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nor contrary to an orthodox Christology. Even granting the position’s theoretical compatibility with orthodoxy, I do not see any particular pressure on the orthodox to embrace such a quirky interpretation, which even the later Unitarians themselves abandoned as untenable. For the student of Socinus, the doctrine of a PAA may have the greatest value as a test case that illustrates the exegetical differences between Socinus and the orthodox. A theme that runs throughout this particular debate concerns what aspects of the text one ought to take literally versus what one should take figuratively. In much of their anti-Socinian polemic, the orthodox accused him of seeking refuge in figures of speech and metaphorical language to evade orthodox credenda. This he did in his handling of the redemption, ransom, and propitiation language, denuding it of its ability to establish penal satisfaction.86 Yet here Socinus turns the tables and does not lose the irony in this. Socinus now champions taking the words at their face value and in their most literal signification despite the oft-leveled charge that it is he who “departs far from the Letter” in his interpretations (tanquam interpretationibus nostris à Litera ipsa longe recedentes).87 Perhaps this difference—the way in which he distinguishes the literal from the figurative—underlies not only the debate on this issue but is, in the exegetical sphere at least, the exact point at which the Socinian and the orthodox systems diverge.

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For example, De Jesu Christo Servatore. “Immo efficitur, ut adversarii nostri, qui nos, tanquam interpretationibus nostris à Litera ipsa longe recedentes, accusare solebant, à nobis merito, hoc eodem nomine, accusentur; quippe, qui, quod scriptura, vel illi filio hominis, vel simpliciter, supposito illi, ut vocant, quod Iesus Christus est, aperte tribuit, divinae cuidam à se somniatae naturae, sive essentiae tribuere non vereantur” (On the contrary: it turns out that our adversaries, who are used to accusing us of departing far from the literal meaning of Scripture [à Litera ipsa longe], are rightly charged by us of that very thing. Indeed, these are the ones who do not fear to attribute to some divine nature or essence [that they have dreamed up] what Scripture clearly attributes either to the Son of Man, or simply to the “suppositum” [as they say], which is Jesus Christ) (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). 87

Native Americans, Conversion, and Christian Practice in Colonial New England, 1640–1730 Linford D. Fisher Indiana University, South Bend

Fortunately, the two travelers arrived before sunset. Earlier in the day, on 5 May 1674, John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had set out from Boston for Wamesit, the northernmost of the fourteen Indian “praying towns” within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the one most subjected to retaliatory attacks from raiding bands of Mohawks in the previous few years. Upon safe arrival, the Englishmen greeted their Pennacook friends and gathered as many as they could at the wigwam of Wannalancet, the head sachem of Wamesit, where Eliot, the aging missionary to the Indians, proceeded to talk about the meaning of the parable of the marriage of the king’s son in Matthew 22:1–4. Wannalancet, according to Gookin, was a “sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty”; he had from the beginning been “loving and friendly to the English,” and in return they had tried to encourage him to embrace Christianity. Although the English missionaries would have desired him to readily accept the gospel message they preached, Wannalancet voluntarily incorporated Christian practices slowly, over time, without necessarily repudiating his native culture and traditional religious practices.1 For four years Wannalancet “had been willing to hear the word of God preached”; when Eliot or other missionaries made their periodic visits to Wamesit, Wannalancet made sure he was there. Over time, Wannalancet adopted the English practices of keeping 1 Although it is easy to assume too quickly what missionaries in this period did and did not want from their Indian proselytes, the combination of Gookin’s commentary on Wannalancet (he “hath stood off” and “not yielded himself up personally”) and Wannalancet’s own interpretation of the Englishmen’s activity and desires (that they “for four years . . . [did] exhort, press, and persuade us to pray to God”) provides ample evidence, it seems to me, that the missionary timetable was different than the one Wannalancet chose.

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the Sabbath, learning to go to any available meeting or instruction, fellowshipping, and refraining from various activities proscribed by the town’s praying leaders. Despite all that, however, the English missionaries still complained that he “hath stood off” since he had “not yielded up himself personally.”2 On this particular visit, after the sermon, the meeting ended without incident, and everyone returned to their respective residences except the two Englishmen, who stayed overnight in Wamesit. The next day, however, in another, perhaps more informal, gathering, the Englishmen pressed Wannalancet to “give his answer concerning praying to God.” After some “serious deliberation and serious pause,” he stood up and made the following speech recorded by Daniel Gookin, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Massachusetts Colony: Sirs, you have been pleased for four years last past, in your abundant love, to apply yourselves particularly unto me and my people, to exhort, press, and persuade us to pray to God. I am very thankful to you for your pains. I must acknowledge I have, all my days, used to pass in an old canoe [alluding to his frequent custom to pass in a canoe upon the river] and now you exhort me to change and leave my old canoe, and embark in a new canoe, to which I have hitherto been unwilling; but now I yield up myself to your advice, and enter into a new canoe, and do engage to pray to God hereafter.3

This somewhat surprising turn of events was “well pleasing to all that were present,” both Indians and English. Eliot and Gookin followed up, encouraging Wannalancet and his people to “sanctify the sabbath, to hear the word, and use the means that God hath appointed, and encourage their hearts in the Lord their God.” For Wannalancet, at least, the practices that he found meaningful before his “conversion” continued to be so afterward; Gookin reported that Wannalancet “doth persevere, and is a constant and diligent hearer of God’s word, and sanctifieth the sabbath, though he doth travel to Wamesit meeting every sabbath, which is above two miles.”4 This little vignette invites us to consider the rich, overlapping worlds of Native spirituality and Christian practice, one in which the rituals, symbols, and beliefs of European Christianity were adopted by Indians over time, either voluntarily or in response to the overtures of English missionaries. In the end, Wannalancet apparently did embrace Christianity in a way that was satisfying to the AngloAmericans, but it happened in his own way, in his own time, and on his own terms. And when the time came for that crowning Puritan religious practice, the public confession, Wannalancet described the event with symbols familiar and meaningful to him and his lifeworld; he spoke of leaving his old canoe for a new one—a metaphor hardly English or biblical in origin. Ironically enough, the pre- and post-conversion descriptions of Wannalancet’s Christian practices by Daniel Gookin 2 Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (ed. Jeffrey H. Fiske; [n.p.]: Towtaid, 1970 [1674]) 75. 3 Ibid., 76. 4 Ibid., 74.

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sound strikingly similar: Wannalancet attended sermons and kept the Sabbath. The only added practice was the one mentioned by Wannalancet, to “engage to pray to God hereafter.” Such identification must have surely had significant social consequences, however, for Gookin noted that “sundry of his people deserted him, since he subjected himself to the gospel.”5 Scholars of early America have described the complex process normally referred to as the “colonization” of North America in a variety of ways, variously preferring to emphasize the one-sided nature of things (an “invasion”), the longterm co-created world of shared symbols and cooperation (a “middle ground”), or a variety of possible combinations of the two at various times.6 In most accounts of early New England, religion and missions play a fairly prominent role, with interpretations of that role ranging from nefarious to benign. Historians often—and, sometimes, rightly—fault the Puritans for their cultural insensitivity, political complicity, and financial impropriety. Indians—even those who did convert—are often faulted for not grasping the finer points of Christian theology or for persisting in their traditional practices. Ultimately, seventeenth-century missionary projects are deemed failures, in part because of the traumatic rupture to Indian–colonist relations caused by King Philip’s War (1675–1676), but also partially because of the perceived illegitimacy of the religious hybridization that resulted from the evangelization attempts.7 Historians often quote Eliot’s famously pessimistic 5

Ibid., 74. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 7 The major exception, of course, is Martha’s Vineyard, where the Mayhew family has often been seen as the most tolerant and successful of the English missionaries. As part of Plymouth Colony until Massachusetts annexed it in 1691, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard were under different colonial oversight and largely spared the devastation of King Philip’s War. David Silverman’s recent work is the best scholarship available for the Island Wampanoag during this time period. See especially David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). An older but excellent study is by James P. Ronda, “Generations of Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly 38 (1981). Regarding “failure,” the longer the time frame under consideration for the historian, the more emphatic the pronouncements of failure become; microhistories of specific missions towns might display success, but ultimately they feed into the grand narrative of mission failure. What follows is just a sampling of stances regarding missions failure: William Kellaway takes the sentiments of Josiah Cotton, the son of missionary John Cotton, Jr., to be representative of eighteenth-century missionaries, writing, “Like many of those who preached to the Indians, he believed that little or nothing was being achieved in spite of their exertions.” William Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649-1776: Missionary Society to the American Indians ([London]: Longmans, 1961). Francis Jennings believed the missions to the Indians were a failure numerically, based on Daniel Gookin’s estimate that out of 1,100 praying Indians, only 45 were baptized and 70 were in full communion. Jennings, The Invasion of America, 251. Jean Fittz Hankins’s dissertation is a large-scale investigation into the self-pronounced failure of the missionaries from four major eighteenth-century missions efforts in New England and New 6

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deathbed lament in 1690 that “There is a Cloud, a dark Cloud, upon the Work of the Gospel among the poor Indians”; less cited, however, is the more optimistic last half of his statement, which reads: “the Lord Revive and prosper that Work and grant it may live when I am dead.”8 However, to focus on the failure of either the missionaries or the Indians, especially using missionary standards, ignores an important line of investigation that reveals a world of religious practices that somewhat obviates the question of success or failure. In recent years some scholars of religion have advocated a “lived religion” approach to the history of religion in America, one that focuses on, in the words of David D. Hall, the “everyday thinking and doing of lay men and women,” in short, on “religion as practiced.”9 In this context, the idea of “practice” encompasses “the tensions, the ongoing struggle of definition, which are constituted within every religious tradition and that are always present in how people choose to act. Practice thus suggests that any synthesis is but provisional. Moreover, practice always bears the mark of both regulation and what, for want of a better word, we may term resistance.”10 Such a focus moves beyond questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy to discover the formation of meaning within the lifeworld of particular individuals in a particular community in a particular time and space using religious symbols and idioms from a variety of sources that hold meaning for them. Religion as “practice” assumes that religion is not fixed, either in a society or in an individual; it allows for the messy confluence of ideas and beliefs that constituted the religious lives of men and women throughout history. York: the New England Company, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts [SPG], the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and the Moravians. Jean Fittz Hankins, “Bringing the Good News: Protestant Missionaries to the Indians of New England and New York” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1993) 6. John Frederick Woolverton states of a SPG missionary to the Mohawk, William Andrews, “Like those before him and those who would come after him, Andrews, for all his courage and seriousness, failed.” John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984) 103. 8 “An Attestation by the United Ministers of Boston,” in Experience Mayhew, Indian Converts, or, Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a Considerable Number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, in New-England (London: 1727) xvii. Kristina Bross states that Eliot believed the “missions enterprise itself had been murdered” in King Philip’s War. Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004) 199. By many measures, however, neither the missionary program nor Indian churches suffered irreversible losses in King Philip’s War. William Kellaway has pointed out that the postKing Philip’s War Indian-language publications funded by the New England Company outnumbered those published prior to 1675. Kellaway, The New England Company, 147. Similarly, when Grindal Rawson and Samuel Danforth were sent to Indian communities around Massachusetts in 1698 to count the number of Indian churches and active participants, they reported that there were thirty congregations in Massachusetts, with thirty-seven Indian ministers or schoolmasters and seven or eight English ministers overseeing them. “Account of an Indian Visitation, A.D. 1698,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 10 (Boston: Munroe, Francis, and Parker, 1809) 129–34. 9 David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997) viii. 10 Ibid., xi.

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Religion as practice assumes a fluidity within that practice in response to various social and personal conditions, as Robert Orsi has argued: “People appropriate religious idioms as they need them, in response to particular circumstances. All religious ideas and impulses are of the moment, invented, taken, borrowed, and improvised at the intersections of life.”11 In the field of Native American history, several scholars have fruitfully applied this methodology to various geographic areas. Michael McNally, Rachel Wheeler, David Silverman, and Christopher Bilodeau have explored Christian ritual and practice among the Ojibwe, Mahican, Wampanoag, and Illinois Indians.12 Central to much of this scholarship is an exploration of the meaning of “conversion” in the American Indian context—even as theorizing about the nature and meaning of conversion has garnered much recent attention in many other fields of religious history.13 Too often, historians, working primarily within an Eurocentric framework, conceive of religion as fixed, knowable, and singular, and imagine religious conversion to be total and complete.14 In this model, as Michael McNally has described it, contact between the Europeans and the Native peoples becomes a “ ‘collision’ of two ostensibly well-bounded systems of belief: Protestant or Catholic ‘Christianity’ on the one hand and tribe-specific traditions on the other,” 11 Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (ed. David D. Hall; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997) 8. 12 Michael D. McNally, “The Practice of Native American Christianity,” Church History 69 (2000). See also David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005). Silverman, Faith and Boundaries. Rachel M. Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village,” Religion and American Culture 13 (2003) 27–67. Christopher Bilodeau, “‘They Honor Our Lord among Themselves in Their Own Way’: Colonial Christianity and the Illinois Indians,” American Indian Quarterly 25 (2001) 352–77. 13 See, for example, the two volumes edited by Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton on conversion throughout the history of Christianity. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003). Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003). Allan Greer’s essay in the second of these volumes addresses these questions in the Native American context, specifically among the Mohawks. See Allan Greer, “Conversion and Identity,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New. Other classic discussions of conversion among American Indians include: William S. Simmons, “Conversion from Indian to Puritan,” New England Quarterly 52 (1979) 197–218. James Axtell, “Were Indian Conversions Bona Fide?,” in After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). More recent discussions include Charles L. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians: A Theological and Cultural Perspective,” in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (ed. Francis Bremer; Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993). Keely McCarthy, “Conversion, Identity, and the Indian Missionary,” Early American Literature (2001). 14 Kenneth Morrison challenges the ethnocentrism of historians with regard to the concepts of “religion” and “conversion” in Kenneth M. Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian-French Religious Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

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where “Christianity’s gains were unequivocally the losses of traditional religions,” or the “persistence of traditional religions signaled a lack of inroads on the part of Christianity.”15 Instead, there is a growing recognition that the bipolar framing of the question of conversion itself might be misleading. If it is the case, as Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton have argued, that “complete religious conversion—prescribed change or pure transmission, if you prefer—was and is impossible to achieve,” then Native “converts” will always fail to live up to historical and theological scrutiny, at least as presently framed.16 Furthermore, to gaze into the past with such lenses ultimately obfuscates a much more interesting and complicated world that the Natives actually inhabited and experienced—one that involved a confrontation with the divine, to be sure, but also multiple identities, shifting allegiances, changing economic and spiritual factors, and a multiplicity of kinship ties—all of which Neal Salisbury has summed up in the term “ambiguity.” Salisbury contends that simplistic, Eurocentric words like “conversion” and “convert” are unhelpful when trying to understand the world of Indians and their very ambiguous, ongoing relationships to Christianity and their European neighbors, and therefore historians should drop the words completely.17 One possible replacement suggested by Kenneth Morrison is the more ambiguous phrase “religious change,” which avoids the totalizing, triumphalistic notions implicitly embedded in the word “conversion,” while recognizing changes over time that did occur—including the partial, selective adoption of European cultural and religious practices.18 A focus on religious practice can meaningfully broaden our understanding of Natives and their relationship to European ideas about religion, a relationship that might have included, but was not limited to, concepts such as religious “conversion.” The sources upon which we are forced to rely usually come from the missionaries or their exemplary Native converts—Christian Indians who seemingly repudiated particular elements of their traditional religious practice but who were not representative of a majority of Indians whose experience occupied a more middle, gray ground of practice and belief. Even when using these exemplary accounts, however, a fragmented, partial picture emerges from the texts that suggests a complex world of religious practice in which the Indians responded to their changing social, cultural, economic, and religious conditions in a variety of ways, drawing from both Native and Christian practices and taking on both Christian and Native identities. The end result, as the missionaries were sometimes loath to admit, was a bricolage of indigenous and Christian ideas and practices that was not an exact representation of the imagined static orthodoxy professed by AngloMcNally, “The Practice of Native American Christianity,” 836–37. “Introduction,” Mills and Grafton, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New, xi. 17 Neal Salisbury, “Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in Seventeenth-Century North America,” Ethnohistory 50 (2003) 247–59. 18 Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin, 161. 15 16

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Americans. Scholars have various words for this—“syncretism,” “hybridity,” “dimorphism”—but arguably these potentially pejorative words apply equally to European and Indian Christianity in this time period. To focus on practice is merely to recognize the diversity of belief, practice, and meaning-making among Indians and their Anglo-American counterparts, and to acknowledge the construction of an indigenous Christianity without making facile pronouncements of whether the result is good or bad.19 A practice-centered interpretation, then, redirects the focus away from normative measurement—away from quests to find out if the Indians were “bona fide” Christians or not, or whether the missionaries or their Indian “converts” had failed. To focus on practice also recognizes the range of responses that emerge from a close reading of the sources, which ultimately requires a redefinition of what “conversion” is—what it meant to Anglo-Americans and Indians, and how present-day conceptions of it might obscure seventeenth-century realities.20 In an attempt to draw out these parallel themes over a longer stretch of time, this essay draws upon the experiences of the very varied Indian communities in New England from the 1640s through the 1720s, without intending to ignore the very real differences between the various eras and geographies under consideration. The fact that the social and political contexts of Massachusett Indians prior to 1675 and Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1720s were so different actually strengthens the argument of this essay, since it gives evidence that, to a certain extent, some themes and experiences transcend the usual influences of contextual and temporal factors. This essay, then, is a synchronic exploration of the Christian practices of the Native Americans who did, in some fashion, choose to adopt certain forms, rituals, and beliefs of European Christianity—including all the ambiguity, mixed elements, surprising Native appropriation, and range of responses that their practice of Christianity entailed. These appropriations eventuated in the formation of a hybridized indigenous Indian Christianity that remained simultaneously Native

19 Jace Weaver calls the coexistence of Native and Christian practice “dimorphism,” and says it has long been a characteristic of Native religious practice. Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) vii–viii. Reference taken from Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village,” 48 n. 6. Lamin Sanneh is in favor of dropping words like “syncretism” and “hybridity” from the vocabulary of scholarship completely since they are terms of “otherness” intended to imply disapproval. Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003) 44. 20 Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen helpfully raised some of these questions about the nature of conversion in his study of Christian Indians at Natick. See Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646–1730,” The New England Quarterly 63 (1990).

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and Christian but tended to satisfy neither seventeenth-century colonists nor later generations of American historians.21

■ Praying as Practice Central to Indian Christian spirituality in the seventeenth century, regardless of geography, was the practice of praying. Although in the case of Wannalancet given above, “praying to God” was a practice added after his public confession, for many Indians “praying” was the first, not last, step of identification with European Christianity. Many Indians seemed to adopt praying as a preliminary practice after initial contact with the English missionaries, most likely because the English commanded the practice in even the earliest non-missionary phases of contact. Totherswamp, one of the first Massachusett Indians to attempt to provide a public narration of his conversion, implied that even before John Eliot and the others first preached to the Indians in 1646, praying to God was urged upon him by his English neighbors: “Before I prayed to God, the English, when I came into their houses, often said unto me, Pray to God; but . . . I did not. . . . Then you came unto us, and taught us, and said unto us, Pray unto God; and after that, my heart grew strong, and I was no more ashamed to pray, but I did take up praying to God.”22 In a meeting with many Indians in the wigwam of the Indian leader Waban on 28 October 1646, after the sermon and a prayer, an Indian relayed how, since the first time he heard the Englishmen talking about praying to God, he had tried to pray in his wigwam, but “that while he was praying, one of his fellow Indians interrupted him, and told him, that hee prayed in vaine, because Jesus Christ understood not 21 William Hart, in his analysis of the Mohawk’s response to the missionaries of the eighteenthcentury Anglican missions society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG; founded 1701), found that there was a range of responses to the missionaries’s overtures, from outright rejection to full acceptance and everything in between. William Bryan Hart, “ ‘For the Good of Our Souls’: Mohawk Authority, Accommodation, and Resistance to Protestant Evangelism, 1700–1780” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1998) 36. 22 John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” in The Eliot Tracts (ed. Michael Clark; Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003) 269. Waban similarly described pre-missionary encounters with the English—all of which somewhat complicates the notion that no missionary activity took place in the Massachusetts Bay before the efforts of Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot. Waban recounts that “When the English came hither, they said, when I came to the English houses, that I loved the Devil: then I was very angry, and my words were, You know the Devil: I do not know the Devil, and presently I would go out of the house. Sometime they spake meekly to me, and would say, God is in heaven, and he is a good God: yet I regarded not these words, but strongly I loved my sins: it was hard for me to believe what the English said: after many yeares, I sometime[s] believed a word, but I left not my sin. When I began to understand more, I began to doubt, but I desired not Conversion from sin. Afterward, when the English taught me, I would sit still, because they would give me good victuals; then I sometimes thought, certainly God is in heaven.” Only after this does Waban mention his conversation with “Mr Jackson,” which occurred in October 1646 when Eliot and the rest first preached to Waban and his fellow Indians. The other encounters undoubtedly happened prior to these official missionary outreaches—years, if not many years before. John Eliot, “A Further Account of the Progress of the Gospel,” in The Eliot Tracts.

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what Indians speake in prayer, he had bin used to heare English man pray and so could well enough understand them, but Indian language in prayer hee thought he was not acquainted with it, but was a stranger to it, and there for could not understand it.” His question was “whether Jesus Christ did understand, or God did understand Indian prayers.”23 Eliot assured the man that God does in fact understand Indian prayers since he made Indians and English alike. Even for those who persisted to the point of making a public confession, however, praying surfaced early in their confessions as a practice they adopted for a variety of reasons. John Speene, another Massachusett to make an early profession, testified that when he first prayed to God, he did so to maintain already established networks of kinship and friendship: “When I first prayed to God, I did not pray for my soul but only I did as my friends did, because I loved them; and though I prayed to God, yet I did not fear sin, nor was I troubled at it.”24 Similarly, Anthony, a Natick praying Indian, says in his conversion narrative that he decided to pray to God because of his love for his brothers, who were already praying: “If any Warrs were, I would go with my brothers; only I thought of my love to my brothers: and then that, if my brother make Warr, I would go with him, to kill men. Now he prayes, shall not I go with my brother? And my brothers love me, and they both pray to God, why should not I? They prayed morning and evening; and when they eat, and on Sabbath dayes, then I thought I would do so: but it was not for love of God, or fear of God, but because I loved my brothers.”25 In their conversion narrations, other Indians gave different reasons, such as conviction of sin or truth, or sometimes gave no reason at all for giving into the English injunctions that they pray to God. Either way, praying was one of the first Christian practices that many Indians incorporated into their already complex spiritual lifeworld for social and spiritual reasons. “Praying to God” was not merely a perfunctory point of identification, serving as some sort of initiatory rite allowing access into the larger praying community, however. Evidence abounds that the practice of prayer remained central to Native American Christian experience throughout the Massachusetts Bay and over the long span of Native Christian lives. When the wife of Momonequem, the first Indian preacher at Nashauohkamuk (Chilmark) on Martha’s Vineyard, fell ill, Momonequem “waited patiently on God” for three days “till they obtained a merciful Deliverance by Prayer.”26 Margaret Osooit, who Experience Mayhew memorialized in 1727 as a veritable Indian saint, “constantly prayed with her children” and “frequently went into secret places to call upon the Name of the Lord: at which devotion she was sometimes accidentally surprised, by her relations and neighbors.”27 Samuel Coomes, the son of Hiacoomes, the first Indian to fully 23 24 25 26 27

John Eliot, “The Day Breaking, If Not the Sun Rising,” in The Eliot Tracts, 85. Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 284. Eliot, “A Further Account of the Progress of the Gospel,” 365. Mayhew, Indian Converts, 12. Ibid., 278.

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commit to Christianity on Martha’s Vineyard, prayed “Morning and Evening in his Family as long as he lived.”28

■ Additional Practices: Collective and Individual Praying, however, was not the only Christian practice adopted by Indians. Two related but separate practices emerge around the Sabbath day exercises, which were undoubtedly the centerpiece of formal Native Christian practices, at least in terms of communal activity: attending sermons and observing the Sabbath (obeying strictures on various kinds of work). The day was seemingly full of events: the service “consisted of an opening prayer, scriptural reading and exegesis, the singing of psalms, the sermon, another psalm, and a final prayer. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper was often part of the morning service, along with catechism, while the conduct of church business, baptism, and ‘any act of publick discipline’ took place in the afternoon of the same day.”29 Even in Indian communities before and after King Philip’s War where there was not a formal, Anglo-sanctioned church, indigenous leadership in each praying town, supplemented by visits from itinerant English ministers and missionaries, ensured that each Sunday the majority of these communities had some sort of Sabbath celebration. Aside from these formal, communal practices, however, Indian Christianity was infused with a plethora of individual and family practices, including family prayers, catechisms, scripture-readings, and hymns. Margaret Osooit took great care with her children by “teaching them their catechisms, and also reading the Scriptures to them, and pressing them to the duties mentioned to them, and warning them against the sins therein forbidden.”30 Wunnanauhkomun, an Indian minister in Christiantown who passed away in 1676, “constantly read the Scriptures in his Family, and usually sang Part of a Psalm before Morning and Evening Prayer; and did very frequently and diligently instruct his Children and Household in the Things of God, and his Kingdom.”31 Samuel Coomes, in the later years of his life, “set up the worship of God in his House,” praying twice daily with his family. He also “read the Scriptures,” and “frequently sung Psalms in his House,” and was “careful to instruct his Children in their Catechisms, and bring them up in the Nurture and Admonition of the Lord.”32 The practice of reading the Bible and other devotional literature, for Indians who had acquired the skills to do so, seems to have become a meaningful Christian 28

Ibid., 92. Kathleen Joan Bragdon, “Native Christianity in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts: Ritual as Cultural Reaffirmation,” in New Dimensions in Ethnohistory: Papers of the Second Laurier Conference on Ethnohistory and Ethnology (ed. Barry Gough and Laird Christie; University of Western Ontario: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1983) 120. 30 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 278. 31 Ibid., 18. 32 Ibid., 92. 29

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practice for many literate Indians. Abigail Sekitchahkomun, who made a “publick Profesion of Religion while she was but a young Maid,” was taught to read while she was young, and “made a good use of the Advantage, reading abundantly in the Bible, and such other good Books as our Indians have among them.”33 Margaret Osooit, when contemplating her own shortcomings, “used to take her Bible, to which she was no stranger, and turn to and read such places in it as she apprehended to intimate what holiness was required to be in such as so drew nigh to God.” Similarly, Margaret “mightily delighted” in Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety “and would scarce pass a day without reading something in it.”34 Tantalizing evidence of intense Bible reading practices emerges from the extant copies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century copies of the so-called Eliot Bible, first translated by John Eliot into Massachusett in 1663. Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon have transcribed, translated, and published copies of the sometimes barely intelligible but numerous Indian-language marginalia that fill the blank spaces of the Indian Bibles. The marginal notes reveal not only a close reading of the biblical text and, variously, identification with and distance from it, but also signs of personalization and decades of use and interaction. Some of the pages contain the owner’s name, along with a date, where it was purchased, and sometimes, even for what price. The last page in Malachi in one Bible reads “In Boston the 17th of the 5th month, 1670,” while on a page in the book of Romans the owner wrote: “I Mantooekit this is my hand.” Across the title page of the New Testament in one Bible is written, “I Laben Hossuit own this bible, June 11, 1747. Solomon Pinnon sold it to me. It cost four pounds.”35 More than just personalization, however, the Bibles’ marginalia evidence a range of interaction with the text: identification, alienation, and, at some points, expressions of sorrow, and mini-sermons of warning. In a blank page following the metrical psalms, someone wrote: “There is much of this word of God, this bible, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the one who believes in him shall find eternal life.” In another Bible, the pages after the metrical psalms contain the words: “All this we believe in the name of Jesus Christ, who (is) our savior, whom you [possibly he] sent to me.” Among the pages of the book of Isaiah is written, “Josiah Ned meditates about savior.” The word “meditate,” in fact, appears in the margin beside passages in Amos, and several times in the gospel according to Mark—indicating the appropriation and use of another Christian practice with a long history.36 Ibid., 188. Ibid., 199. Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, first published in London in 1615, was the all-time Puritan bestseller on personal piety. It was the third work to be translated into the Massachusett language by Eliot, in 1665, after the Bible (trans. 1663) and Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted (trans. 1664). The New England Company wanted The Practice of Piety to be translated first, but Eliot preferred to work on the Baxter treatise. Kellaway, The New England Company, 135. 35 Ives Goddard and Kathleen Joan Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988) 380–83, 391, 414. 36 Ibid., 443, 449, 453, 465. 33 34

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Some of the marginalia contain warnings and messages to future readers. The book of Acts contains the marginal exhortation, “My brothers, remember love for God and all people, always.” In the margin of the book of Exodus we find: “Forever are happy all who believe, forever. I say it you say it I say it I say it you say it you say it This truly is so among all of us. It was the truth in former times.” Simon Papenau seems to have especially interacted with his Bible. In the book of Numbers he reminded himself, “This is your book, you Papenau. Read it with c[oncentr]atrion. Your God [will] bless you.” In the book of Nahum he pleaded with his friends: “I Simon Papen[au] say this to you, my f[ri]ends, all (of you) pray hard.” In an unfortunately incomplete marginal note Simon set out to distill the personal application of 1 Samuel: “1 Samuel say this to you Papenau: if you pray hard to your God . . . .”37 Other moments of painful, comparative Indian self-scrutiny surface, however. A mysterious note in 1 Samuel laments, “We are poor people. We are unable to do that.” Written notes in Numbers include, “Pitiful people (are) we. It is not good. Always falsehood among us all”; “I am forever a pitiful person in this world. I am not able clearly to read this book.” In 1 Kings we read, “I am not able to defend myself from the happenings in the world.” Over and over again “pitiful” recurs as the descriptor of choice. In Malachi: “I am a pitiful man”; in John: “I Isak Papenau am a pitiful person. It is so.”38 Such statements, however, are not entirely unlike the extreme yet routine expressions of contrition expected in the normal rhythm of Puritan spirituality, as evidenced in the conversion narratives of English men and women and in the Indian conversion narratives recorded by John Eliot and published by the New England Company in 1653. The fact that such sentiments were voluntarily recorded as marginal notes in personal Bibles by Indian Christians merely confirms the depth of internalization and appropriation of various Puritan and Protestant practices by some of the Native proselytes. Heartfelt abasement, awareness of sin, and appropriate contrition were learned behaviors, and ones that the Indians did not learn quickly, as Charles Cohen and Kristina Bross have argued. But biblical marginalia demonstrate that more abstract Christian practices such as spiritual journaling and scriptural cross-referencing were also adopted over time by literate Christian Indians.

■ Relations of Grace and Church Membership From the perspective of the Puritan missionaries and ministers and their sponsors in Old England, however, the most important religious practice for the Indians to perfect was the public narration of their conversion. Interestingly, Daniel Gookin reported in 1674 that in Natick it was not uncommon for Indians to incorporate a wide variety of Christian practices into their normal lives without making an official 37 38

Ibid., 417, 423, 437, 453. Ibid., 375, 423, 431, 437.

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profession of faith in Christ. Many of the Natick Indians, Gookin reported, “have subjected to the gospel, that are catechized, do attend publick worship, read the scriptures, pray in their family morning and evening; but being not yet come so far, as to be able or willing to profess their faith in Christ, and yield obedience and subjection unto him in his church, are not admitted to partake in the ordinances of God, proper and peculiar to the church of Christ; which is a garden enclosed, as the scripture saith.”39 As noted above, Wannalancet observed the Sabbath and attended sermons for four years before confessing Christ. Nishohkou, a Natick praying Indian, noted that he prayed to God “about three years” and attended services during that time but “understood nothing at all,” especially since he attended the services primarily to “look upon women.”40 Many examples undoubtedly exist of praying Indians who practiced Christianity devoutly without embracing the covenant community of visible saints through formal church membership; a few such examples survived the censorial selection of the missionaries in their publications. Samuel Coomes, who Experience Mayhew otherwise describes as an exemplary Christian, laments that “he was guilty of one Fault, which I must mention, and a Fault it is which I believe many other good Men are guilty of: he never asked an Admission to the Table of the Lord, tho none that knew him would have scrupled to admit him to it.” The only reason Mayhew gives is because Samuel “feared that he was not well qualified for the Enjoyment of so high a Privilege.” Margaret Osooit was one of many Indians who received instruction under the ministry of the Mayhews and the Indian Christian leaders on Martha’s Vineyard. As mentioned above, if her devotional practices are any indication, her life of faith was robust: she “constantly prayed with her children;” “frequently went into secret places to call upon the name of the Lord,” often picked up and read her Bible, “to which she was no stranger.” According to Experience Mayhew, “She was looked upon as a person so well qualified for communion with the church of Christ, that many wondered that she did not ask admission thereunto; and some discoursed with her about the matter, but she had such apprehensions concerning the holiness required of those who are admitted to fellowship with God in his ordinances, that she could not be persuaded that she was herself qualified for so high privilege.”41 This seemingly distanced (but not necessarily insincere) practice of Christianity as described by Gookin and Mayhew appears to be the norm, however, not the exception. According to the numbers provided by Gookin’s estimates for the colony of Massachusetts alone, in 1674 there were 1,100 Penacook/Pawtucket, Nipmuc, and Massachusett Indians associated with the fourteen praying towns in Massachusetts, including seven “older” towns in the eastern part of the state and seven “newer” towns in Nipmuc country. Of those fourteen towns, however, 39 40 41

Gookin, Historical Collections, 69. Eliot, “A Further Account of the Progress of the Gospel,” 361–63. Mayhew, Indian Converts, 278.

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there were only two established churches—in Natick and in Hassanamesitt. Of the 1,100 praying Indians, only between sixty-four and seventy-four were in communion, or members, of any church, and only forty-five are listed as having been baptized. At most, then, only 119 out of 1,100 praying Indians in Massachusetts saw the need to move their practice of Christianity beyond the realm of meaningmaking that made sense to them, despite the continual proddings of the English missionaries.42 It is significant to note, however, that Gookin’s numbers did not include the Wampanoag in Plymouth Colony, on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, whose praying Indian population in 1674 numbered close to 3,500, according to recent estimates by David Silverman.43 Although more churches had been established among the Wompanoag in 1674 than among Massachusett and Nipmuc, the evidence suggests that practices among the Wampanoag in this same time period differed only slightly from their mainland counterparts with regard to actual church membership. Interestingly enough, scholars of New England have long recognized that the same statistical phenomenon existed among the Puritans. From very early on, the Puritan church in New England was more closed than open, with church membership limited to those who could give testimony to their experience of faith. With the formalization of the practice of the public confession of one’s faith in 1636 as a major part of church membership, the bar was raised so high that many Anglo-Americans in New England society, like many praying Indians, contented themselves with the rituals of Protestantism, such as Bible reading, prayer, and church attendance, without taking the final, formal step of church membership. Although steps were taken later in the seventeenth century to broaden the possibility of membership for later generations in the form of the so-called Halfway Covenant in 1662, even by 1700 the number of full church members as a percentage of the total population was undoubtedly small.44 It should come as little surprise, then, that the same might be true in Indian circles. Gookin, Historical Collections, 87. Francis Jennings has a helpful chart that summarizes Gookin’s numbers. See Jennings, The Invasion of America, 251. In his introduction to the first published Indian conversion narratives, Eliot notes, “These Indians (the better and wiser sort of them) have for some years inquired after Church-Estate, Baptism, and the rest of the Ordinances of God, in the observation whereof they see the Godly English walk.” The implication is that only “the better and wiser” (i.e., only a few) of the Indians sought membership, and the rest did not. Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 268. 43 David Silverman has an even more expansive chart that includes Massachusett, Penacook/ Pawtucket, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag Christian Indian populations. See Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 80. 44 Robert Pope has studied in detail the effects of the Halfway Covenant in seventeenth-century New England churches and concluded that in general, it did not represent “declension” at all; the churches were not inundated with “halfway” members, and the process of acceptance in the Massachusetts Bay was slow and long. Furthermore, the fact that the churches experienced growth of full members in the 1680s seems surprising given the lowering of standards supposedly represented by the possibility of “halfway members” in the 1662 Halfway Covenant. Pope’s analysis, however, does not directly address the question of the proportion of church members to the total population of New England. 42

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■ Hybridity and Religious Negotiation among Indians and AngloAmericans Somewhat more surprising, however, is the degree to which the Native Americans shaped their Christian practices and doctrines, either in seeking to continue traditional religious and cultural practices alongside of the newly adopted Christian ones, or else in choosing to focus upon the Christian practices and themes that most resonated with traditional practices, teachings, and beliefs. Many of the conversion narratives and descriptions of the “Indian converts” by Eliot and Mayhew contain examples of the incorporation of various Christian practices alongside the simultaneous retention of Native ones. Nishohkou related that After wee pray’d to God about three years, my heart was not yet right, but I desired to run wilde, as also sundry others did. . . . And I went to Pawwauing among others, and these things I loved thoroughly, and they grew in my heart, and had nourishment there, especially lust. . . . When the Minister came to teach us, hee taught, and I came to meeting; but I came to look upon women, I understood not what he taught; sometimes I came, and understood nothing at all. . . . Then I desired my heart might be made strong by Church-covenant, Baptism, and the Lords Supper, which might be as a Fort to keep me from enemies, as a Fort keepeth us from outward enemies.”45

Of course in the context of the conversion narrative, the “old life” is contrasted with the “new life,” but what is supplied for us rather incidentally is how easily Christian practices like praying and church attendance coexisted with traditional ones (here interpreted as running “wilde”), such as “Pawwauing,” and healing remedies, and traditional, promiscuous sexual mores.46 The reliance on powwows (Native religious leaders) for medicinal relief was apparently not uncommon, even on Martha’s Vineyard, where Experience Mayhew, perhaps somewhat facetiously, reported in 1704 that of 180 families on the island, only two people were pagan.47 Matthew Mayhew obviously believed in the efficacy of the powwows, given that they did their arts by “Diabolick Skill,” and gave two examples of “bewitched” or “Tormented” individuals going to a “Powaw” and finding relief, and Matthew said he could give “many instances” beyond just these two.48 The first one involved an Indian, later called Simon, whose friends, since Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969). For a similar argument against the Halfway Covenant as an indicator of declension, see Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 45 Eliot, “A Further Account of the Progress of the Gospel,” 361–63. 46 For an excellent account of “popular” religious practices among the Wampanoag during this time period, see Douglas L. Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony, 1670–1770,” Religion and American Culture 15 (2005) 147–86. 47 Kellaway, The New England Company, 239. 48 Matthew Mayhew, A Brief Narrative of the Success Which the Gospel Hath Had, among the Indians, of Martha’s-Vineyard (and the Places Adjacent) in New-England. (Boston: 1694) 13–15.

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he had been for some time “greatly Tormented,” “advise[d] him to the Powaw’s, concluding him to be Bewitched; they being met, and dancing around a great Fire” with the bewitched Indian lying nearby. Some of his neighbors and friends, however, began to suspect that the powwow to whom they came for a cure was the one who bewitched their friend in the first place, so “they threaten[ed] him that as he had Bewitched, unless he would Cure the Sick man, they would burn him in that fire.” In the end, the sick man’s friends and neighbors picked up the powwow, “resolving at least to singe him; who no sooner felt the heat of the fire near him, but the Sick immediately recovered.”49 In the other instance Mayhew specifically names two English observers, Capt. Thomas Dagget, Esq., and Richard Sarson, Esq., both justices of the peace. Apparently they were on an island close to Martha’s Vineyard with a “Bewitched Woman” who “lay in great Extremity.” Since the powwows on that island were unable to cure the woman, the Englishmen “sent to Martha’s Vineyard, for more famoused Powaw’s.” While the Englishmen watched, these more famous powwows danced and used “certain Ceremonies usual in such cases, Praying to [their] god with such ardent desires and fervency.” In the end, the rituals were effective: the powwows chased the troubling spirit, “the Spirit of an Englishman drowned in the Adjacent Sound,” out of the woman and caught it in a deerskin, but they recommended that the woman leave the island since the powwow who bewitched her was still close by and, furthermore, the captured spirit was an “English Spirit,” and they “could not long confine it.”50 Although historians have normally understood European-Native missions in terms of “power encounters” or show-downs between the spiritual leaders of the Natives and those of the European Christians, at times powwows allowed and even encouraged Christian practice and allegiance. One unnamed “Powaw” on Martha’s Vineyard “could precisely inform such who desired his Assistance, from whence Goods Stolen from them were taken, and whither carried.” Strangely enough, this “Powaw” had a wife who “was accounted a Godly Woman, and lived in the practice and profession of the Christian Religion, not only by the approbation, but incouragement of her Husband; She constantly Prayed in the Family, and attended the Publick Worship on the Lords Day’s: he declared that he could not blame her, for that she Served a God that was above his; but that as to himself, his gods continued kindness, obliged him not to forsake his Service.”51 As many scholars of Native New England have pointed out, such continuities with Native traditions and practices even after the explicit adoption of Christian practices was possibly more common than the missionaries liked to admit to their sponsors in Old England.52 In addition to the covert practice of powwowing, James 49

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. 51 Ibid., 12–13. 52 David Silverman notes that “scholars of Christian Indians, particularly the so-called praying Indians of New England, have reached a consensus that the natives’ religious institutions, rituals, and 50

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Axtell asserts that “Native social values, dress, housing, work patterns, language, and religious rituals survived and even flourished in many ‘praying towns.’”53 Richard Cogley notes that in the praying towns, the Indians continued to live in wigwams and continued to fish and take part in traditional forms of recreation. Proselytes in most praying towns elected traditional sachems and Native leaders into positions of authority, thereby maintaining previous, familiar hierarchies of leadership, kinship, and spiritual oversight. Some elements of Native burial practices coexisted with Christian ones, too. On Martha’s Vineyard, according to David Silverman, although many Wampanoag abandoned some ritual practices like coloring their corpses red, coloring their own faces black, mangling their face and hair, and screeching; funerary objects such as kaolin pipes, metal pots, glass bottles, and shell beads continued to be interred with the deceased. Christian Indians still “avoided mentioning the names of the deceased” in order to not disturb their ghosts, and they “continued to point their graves westward toward Kiethtan’s House, a practice based on the idea that the soul exited the body through the skull and should begin its journey to the afterlife traveling in the proper direction.”54 Similarly, on the mainland, excavations of Indian cemeteries at the three praying towns of Natick, Punkapoag, and Hassanamesit, arguably “the three most Anglicized communities,” have shown that “material objects were sometimes interred with the bodies,” a traditional practice that “violated the Puritan prohibition of grave goods.” Richard Cogley concludes that although there is no evidence that leading Christian Indians were buried in this way, “they were surely aware that the practice continued in the settlements and, at the very least, condoned it.”55 Hints of continuity in social practices surface from time to time, too. David Silverman’s description of a mideighteenth-century Wampanoag church meeting renders the rituals and functions of the service in the Native community as indistinguishable from the role of other pre-Christian meetings of the past.56 Even as late as 1792 the traditional peace pipe was passed after the Christian church service in some congregations.57

other behaviors included Christian traditional elements, often in syncretic form.” What is missing from much of the scholarship, as Silverman notes, is a nuanced understanding of the process through which this occurred. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 143. 53 James Axtell, “Preachers, Priests, and Pagans: Catholic and Protestant Missions in Colonial North America,” in New Dimensions in Ethnohistory: Papers of the Second Laurier Conference on Ethnohistory and Ethnology (ed. Barry Gough and Laird Christie; University of Western Ontario: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1983) 70. 54 Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 166. Kiethtan was the “good” spirit, who balanced Cheepi, the “bad” spirit. 55 Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) 244. 56 David J. Silverman, “The Church in New England Indian Community Life: A View from the Islands and Cape Cod,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury; Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003) 264–65. 57 Bragdon, “Native Christianity in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts,” 123.

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It was, perhaps, the continuities between Native religion and culture and Christianity that allowed Native Christians to “convert” to any degree in the first place. As Charles Cohen, Richard Cogley, and David Silverman have argued, American Indians in the northeast demonstrated an admirable capacity for apprehending the fine points of Reformed theology, but on the whole they showed preference for some concepts and slight aversion to others. Original sin and the bodily resurrection never quite took root as much as the English missionaries had hoped, while concepts of doing good works, punishment for sin, and heaven all resonated with traditional beliefs already existing within Native religion and culture.58 It is interesting to note, however, that if the imaginative religious space between European Christianity and Native religious traditions was minimized by the Indians, the English ministers and missionaries themselves contributed to this process in small ways. English sermons to Natives, for example, seemed to resonate with already-existing ideas and mores within Indian culture and religion, such as the need for general good-will and morality. Gideon Hawley, an eighteenth-century missionary, once noted that when Jonathan Edwards, known by later generations of theologians for his abstruse treatises on God, original sin, and true virtue, preached to the Mahican Indians at Stockbridge he was a “plain and practical preacher: upon no occasion did he display any metaphysical knowledge in the pulpit.”59 58 Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission, 243. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 145–47. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians,” 250, 255. Kristina Bross and Charles Cohen both speak of the “learning” of Puritanism. Bross highlights the lapse in time between the first sermon to the Indians in 1646 and the first public conversion narrative in 1652, arguing that it took a while for the Indians to learn what exactly the genre of the conversion narrative was. Cohen points out that even after the Indians were familiarized with the genre of the conversion narrative, they still needed more time to perfect it, since many, if not all, of the conversion narrations first given by the Indians in 1652 were rejected as insufficient and the same candidates were brought forward again seven years later in 1659. Not all English men and women, let alone Indians, however, successfully mastered this particular practice. Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons, 89–90. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians,” 244, 250. See also Robert James Naeher, “Dialogue in the Wilderness: John Eliot and the Indian Exploration of Puritanism as a Source of Meaning, Comfort, and Ethnic Survival,” The New England Quarterly 62 (1989). 59 Kellaway, The New England Company, 274. Part of this was undoubtedly due to the fact that Edwards did not know enough of the Native languages to preach in the local dialect; he routinely preached in English and had an Indian serve as an interpreter. Rachel Wheeler has written at length about the degree to which missionary experience shaped Edwards, including much attention to writing more simplified sermons full of relevant metaphors about the love of Christ. Ironically, however, in comparing hundreds of sermons preached by Edwards at Stockbridge and Northampton, Wheeler does not see much de-emphasis of Calvinism. William Hart has also argued that plain and simple preaching was a racialized missionary strategy adopted by various agencies in the eighteenth century as ideas about the inherent dullness of Indians and blacks gained more currency, something Wheeler does not see evidenced in Edwards. Rachel M. Wheeler, “Living Upon Hope: Mahicans and Missionaries, 1730–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1999) 134–35. William Bryan Hart, “‘Christianity Made Easy to the Meanest Capacity’: S.P.G. Missionary Attitudes toward EighteenthCentury Mohawk Cognition” (paper presented at the Tenth Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Northampton, Mass., June 2004).

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In general, English sermons were on “family love and the importance of family worship” and the importance of “good behaviour on earth to ensure eternal life,” all with “continual reference to the brotherhood of Christians, using generalized Massachusett kinship terminology such as nemat (‘brother, friend’).”60 To highlight the continuity of Indian Christianity with traditional Native culture or the coexistence of traditional and Christian practice, however, is not to argue for the superficiality of the praying Indians or to rule out genuine belief or knowledgeable Christian Indians.61 It is an attempt to understand the complex process of conversion that is much more than simply replacing one set of beliefs with another, and one that involves the process of making the “new” religion of Christianity something meaningful and truly indigenous in the process. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the rituals of Christianity became for many Indians a source of meaning-making and comfort, even as they did for the English.62 If scholars insist on endlessly scrutinizing Indian conversions to see whether they were “bona fide,” to use a phrase popularized by James Axtell in this context, however, it is only reasonable that the same should be done for their English counterparts. A more helpful direction, however, might be to simply recognize the ambiguity and open-endedness of religious practice among both English and Native Christians. As David Hall has demonstrated in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, even the religious culture of the most biblically literate, pietistic of all of the American colonies was infused with a surprising amount of so-called “popular religion” and rather unorthodox belief and practice—by the laity and clergy alike, to a certain extent. The Puritans, no less than the Indians, relied upon extra-biblical explanations, home-cures, and rituals to make meaning in their universe. In short, at times they both used whatever worked. “Yet it may surprise some readers (as I myself was surprised),” Hall writes, “to discover how much ‘magic’ circulated in New England—the magic of ‘murder will out,’ prophetic dreams and visions, pins hammered into buildings, shape-shifting dogs, and much more besides. The religion of the colonists was infused with ancient attitudes and practices, some

60

Bragdon, “Native Christianity in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts,” 121. Charles Cohen, Richard Cogley, and David Silverman argue against notions of vacuous Indian understandings of Christianity or even Reformed doctrine; Keely McCarthy and Kristina Bross argue for the need to allow for genuine belief in decisions to convert—McCarthy resists especially Axtell’s political-motivation-for-conversion narrative. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians.” Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries. McCarthy, “Conversion, Identity, and the Indian Missionary.” Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons. 62 For a rich discussion of the use of ritual in Puritan religious life, see Charles E. HambrickStowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). See also David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) esp. ch. 4, “The Uses of Ritual,” and the last half of ch. 5, “The Mental World of Samuel Sewall.” 61

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indeed so old as to antedate the rise of Christianity.”63 One English colonist visited the unnamed powwow on Martha’s Vineyard known for his ability to divine the location of lost or stolen items (mentioned above) and requested his assistance in locating an item that was stolen, “having formerly been an eyewitness of his ability”; at first the powwow said he could not help the colonist “since himself served another God,” but later decided, “If you believe that my god will help you, I will try what I can do,” at which point the Englishman desisted from “further inquiry.”64 John Winthrop, the pious, orthodox first governor of Massachusetts, is on record as participating in the rather superstitious (but apparently efficacious) rituals associated with the popular belief that “murder will out” in two cases: to determine the guilt of a murderer in 1644 and the mother of an illegitimate baby in 1647. In both cases, when the accused either touched the deceased or was in his or her presence, fresh blood flowed from the body or through the veins of the corpse.65 Even many “orthodox” Puritans mixed superstition with Christian belief and just as a large percentage of English men and women found the practice of Christianity apart from the official entrance into church membership meaningful, so, too, Indians accepted many Christian practices without abandoning their traditional beliefs or joining official Christian churches.

■ Indian Leaders and Religious Regulation The presence of such mixed, unorthodox belief, however, did not always guarantee ongoing acceptance; historians of “popular religion” often speak of the “reform of popular culture” as magistrates and clergy cracked down on various elements of popular practice and piety outside the cope of official approbation.66 In New England, the situation among the Indians was not much different. The towns that Eliot and the Massachusetts Bay Colony set aside for Christian Indians were called “praying towns,” starting with Natick in 1660; Indians who lived in these towns were called “praying Indians.” Terms like “praying towns” and “praying Indians” connote a uniformity of belief and practice that was almost completely lacking in most cases, however. Affiliation with the praying towns required only a willingness to listen to the missionaries, and although pressure was undoubtedly placed on the Indians to conform to some English cultural and religious standards such as Sabbath observance, men cutting their hair, etc., in reality English were in no position to impose uniformity on the Indians, even those within the praying towns. Furthermore, the “imposition” narrative of European-Native contact history obscures another 63

Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 19. Mayhew, A Brief Narrative, 12. 65 Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 176. 66 See, for example, David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) ch. 4. See also Imogene Luxton, “The Reformation of Popular Culture,” in Church and Society in England (ed. Felicity Heal and Rosemary O’Day; London: Macmillan, 1977). Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (New York: Academic Press, 1979). 64

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important aspect—the willing appropriation of Christianity by the Natives, and, even more interestingly, the leadership given by the Native tribal leaders themselves. Although it is more comfortable to blame the missionaries for the supposed strict moral and social codes in the praying towns, in reality the leadership was largely in the hands of the Indians who themselves undertook various levels of moral reform (or lack thereof, sometimes to the missionaries’ chagrin). Missions among the Massachusett and Nipmuc Indians are often viewed as the sole enterprise of John Eliot, as if Eliot himself was omnipresent, capable of simultaneously and continuously exerting his presence in the fourteen scattered towns of the Christian Indians in Massachusetts. In fact, Eliot throughout his life remained the fulltime pastor of the church in Roxbury, and although he was absent from his home church for months at a time, his primary duties were arguably still in Roxbury. The main responsibility for the direction and leadership of the Christian Indian communities fell upon Native Christian leaders, who in many cases were traditional sachems who adopted the practices and beliefs of Christianity. Although the Native leaders no doubt in some cases provided more latitude than Eliot might have, in other cases they upheld similar standards, to the point that if “blame” is assigned for the imposition of Christianity upon Native religion, the Native Christian leaders themselves played a large role, much larger than is usually admitted. In some cases, in fact, Indian Christian leaders adopted Puritan standards, such as the requirement for conversion narratives for church membership, and then continued them well into the eighteenth century, even though by this time many Puritan congregations had adopted less rigorous tests for membership.67 Examples of Native leaders, many as reformers of their own people, abound. Wunnanauhkomun, an Indian minister on Martha’s Vineyard, “would neither drink to Excess himself, nor keep Company with such as did.”68 Indian ministers were not the only source of such sentiments, however. Abel Wauwompuhque, Sr., although he “was not a minister . . . he was a zealous Reprover of the Sins of the times in which he lived, especially the Sin of Drunkenness he did abhor, and earnestly testify’d against it. He could no endure Contention among the Brethren, but earnestly endeavoured to promote Peace and Unity among them”; he would call for peace at church meetings, and as a magistrate among his own people he “used to be a Terror to Evil Doers when he was in that Place of Trust, by inflicting deserved Punishments on them.”69 Similarly, James Nashcompait, also a layman, “feared God and eschewed Evil, and was a sharp Reprover of Sin in his Brethren and Neighbors, and would tell them plainly that they sinned against God when they did so.”70

67 68 69 70

Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 164. Mayhew, Indian Converts, 18. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 100.

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The point here is that in many cases the leadership for “European” type reform largely came from the Indian leaders and Indian Christians; their effectiveness, as well as that of the English ministers and missionaries, is of course another issue. Richard Cogley and others have pointed out that over time John Eliot had to learn to tolerate a certain degree of co-mingling of Indian and English culture in the praying towns. In a sense, Eliot was forced to do so, given the diversity of responses and various “levels” of practice contained within each praying town.

■ Generational Dimensions of Religious Practice The experience of Indians and English was not always an ongoing, first-contact, frontier situation, however. In most situations in New England, a small proportion of Natives did adopt various aspects of Christianity and its practices and, with the help of English missionaries and ministers, gathered churches and educational organizations that were largely run by Indians. Furthermore, at some point, Indian children were born into more or less Christian Indian households, or perhaps, more accurately, households that were simultaneously practicing and preserving elements of Christian culture and Indian culture. Samuel Coomes was sent by his father Hiacoomes at a young age to live with Thomas Mayhew, Sr., one of the main English missionaries on Martha’s Vineyard, where Samuel “was very well instructed. He could read well, both in Indian and in English, and well understood the Principles of the Christian Religion. He had no doubt also many good Instructions, and Counsels from his own Father, who listened and preached about two Miles from his Master’s House.”71 Abigail Sekitchahkomun “made a publick Profesion of Religion while she was but a young Maid”; she read the Bible and other books translated into the local Indian dialect and in general it was reported that “she ordered her Conversation as did become the Gospel.”72 Martha Coomes was a “Daughter of religious Parents” and was “solemnly devoted to God in her Infancy, and had a religious Education.”73 Before long, the religious experiences of second and third generation Natives immersed in the religious culture of seventeenth-century Puritanism mirrored at points the experiences of their English counterparts. Mary Coshomon, who died in Chilmark, in March 1721/22, was “a Daughter of pious Parents,” namely, the Deacon Jonathan Amos and his wife, who “taught her to read, and instructed her well in the Principles of the true Religion: and she, so far as I can learn, was of a sober conversation from her Youth up.”74 After she married, she encouraged her husband to “constantly uphold the Worship of God in his House”; after two years of marriage she experienced a deep desire to be a full member of the church, lest she be “excluded from [God’s] Presence in the World to come.” After a time of 71 72 73 74

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

91. 188. 187. 179.

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thoughts and “many Tears,” and “seeking earnestly to God to prepare her for the Privileges which she earnestly desired to enjoy,” one night after the church service she met with the Indian ministers and made a profession of faith and was “readily admitted to a Participation of all the Ordinances of the Gospel.”75 Examples of second and third generation Christian Indians illuminate even more the “ambiguity” outlined by Neal Salisbury in attempting to define Native identity, but they also confirm the degree to which Christianity “went Native”—how it was adapted and adopted by the Indians to the point that the rituals of the faith not only allowed them to deal with the present in a meaningful way but also allowed them to preserve the future of their own traditions and community. Indians occasionally even spoke of Christianity as a return to what their forefathers knew.76 The irony of the Native Christian church communities, as Daniel Mandell has pointed out, is that although they were arguably institutions designed by some of the missionaries and English sponsors to eradicate various aspects of Native religion and culture, in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth century they were vital to the preservation of that same Native culture, practice, and identity.77 On Martha’s Vineyard, especially, in the eighteenth century the Christian churches “played a multivalent and principal role in offshore Wampanoag community life, reinforcing the Indians’ village, tribal, and colonial ties, and providing an institutional framework in which to address issues often unrelated to religion,” leading David Silverman to conclude that if anything, the importance of the churches in Wampanoag country expanded over time.78

■ Conclusion The important point here is that the Christian practices and beliefs that were adopted, even by second and third generation Indian Christians, were done so alongside other, more traditional elements of Native culture and religion. Native Americans responded to English missionaries across a spectrum that included rejection, 75 Ibid., 180. There is an interesting gendered dimension here, too, one that parallels patterns in English society in the seventeenth century, where women were typically the ones who initiated church adherence, membership, and baptisms, primarily at particular moments of transition within the family, like childbirth, marriages, etc. See Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Early New England,” in Lived Religion in America (ed. David D. Hall; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 1997) 55–56. Laurel Ulrich has also argued that women joined churches earlier and at a younger age than men (including their husbands) in part because “church membership was one of the few public distinctions available to women.” Laurel Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (1st ed.; New York, N.Y.: Knopf (distributed by Random House), 1982) 216. 76 William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986) 67. Lamin Sanneh has noted a similar phenomenon among twentieth-century post-colonial African tribes, namely, that Christianity helped them become “renewed Africans.” Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity?, 43. 77 Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) 5, 49. 78 Silverman, “The Church in New England Indian Community Life,” 265–67.

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embracement, and a variety of positions in between. For some, like Wannalancet in the praying town of Wamesit, Christian practices and belief were incorporated slowly, over time, as Christianity, and even Puritanism, was learned gradually. For others, the process happened more quickly. A select few made a formal confession and joined the church; others continued to make meaning of their lives through avenues of Christian practice besides formal church membership, at times very intensely, as in the case of Margaret Osooit. For none of the Indians involved, however, was the process ever total or complete as the word “conversion” implies. If this is what is meant by the pronouncement of the “failure” of missions to the Indians, than perhaps the indictment is correct. But, in fact, if we take the testimony of the Indians who decided to make Christianity their own, the story is different. Indians, no matter how Christianized and Anglicized they became, rightfully still remained Indian, and the Christianity they fashioned contained as many traces of their indigenous culture as the Protestant version of Christianity did of the English culture brought to the New World by the Puritan missionaries.

Books Received Adelman, Janet. Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 224 pp. $35.00 hb. Ahearne-Kroll, Stephen P. The Psalms of Lament in Mark’s Passion: Jesus’ Davidic Suffering. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 142. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 239 pp. $95.00 hb. Anderson, Janice Capel and Stephen D. Moore, eds. Mark & Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies. 2d edition. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2008. 288 pp. $22.00 pb. Arbuckle, Gerald A. Laughing With God: Humor, Culture, and Transformation. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 208 pp. $34.95 pb. Assmann, Jan. Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism. George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. 196 pp. $26.95 pb. Bal, Mieke. Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 250 pp. $22.50 pb. Ball, Bryan W. The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestly. Cambridge, U.K.: James Clarke & Co., 2008. 235 pp. n.p. Bamforth, Nicholas C. and David A. J. Richards. Patriarchal Religion, Sexuality, and Gender: A Critique of New Natural Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 403 pp. $95.00 hb. Bash, Anthony. Forgiveness and Christian Ethics. New Studies in Christian Ethics 29. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 208 pp. $85.00 hb. Beattie, Tina. The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason & the War on Religion. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2007. 209 pp. $20.00 pb. Beecher, Norman. Reform of Christianity: The Emerging Church. Concord, Mass.: Concord Seven Doors, 2008. 100 pp. n.p. hb. Beeley, Christopher A. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. Oxford Studes in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 396 pp. n.p. hb. Benedetto, Robert, ed. The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History: Volume One, The Early, Medieval, and Reformation Eras. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 691 pp. n.p. hb. Bennett, Jana Marguerite. Water Is Thicker Than Blood: An Augustinian Theology of Marriage and Singleness. New York, Oxford University Press, 2008. $55.00 hb. Bergant, Dianne. Scripture: History and Interpretation. Engaging Theology: Catholic Perspectives. Edited by Tatha Wiley. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 174 pp. n.p. HTR 102:1 (2009) 125–34

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Berger, Alan L. and David Patterson, et al. Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey from the Rock. St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon, 2008. 317 pp. $19.95 pb. Bernardin, Cardinal Joseph L. The Seamless Garment: Writings on the Consistent Ethic of Life. Edited by Thomas A. Nairn. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 305 pp. $30.00 pb. Billings, J. Todd. Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ. Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology. Edited by Sarah Coakley and Richard Cross. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 218 pp. $100 hb. Bohak, Gideon. Ancient Jewish Magic: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 483 pp. $135.00 hb. Bonifacio, Gianattilio. Personaggi minori e discepoli in Marco 4–8. La funzione degli episodi dei personaggi minori nell’interazione con la storia dei protagonisti. Analecta Biblica 173. Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2008. 293 pp. n.p. pb. Bostom, Andrew, ed. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008. 768 pp. $39.95 hb. Bouteneff, Peter C. Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. 256 pp. $22.99 pb. Brady, Bernard V. Essential Catholic Social Thought. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 294 pp. n.p. pb. Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian Studies 124. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2008. 209 pp. n.p. pb. Brock, Sebastian, ed. and trans. The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life. Cistercian Studies 101. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1987. 381 pp. n.p. pb. Brown, David. God & Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 288 pp. $ 49.95 hb. Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 568 pp. $27.50 pb. Brown, Raymond E. Christ in the Gospels of the Liturgical Year. Edited by Ronald D. Witherup. Expanded ed. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 437 pp. $29.95 pb. Bulkeley, Kelly. Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 331 pp. $23.00 pb. Busch, Eberhard. Barth. Abingdon Pillars of Theology. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2008. 95 pp. n.p. Byrd, James P. Jonathan Edwards for Armchair Theologians. Illustrations by Ron Hill. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 195 pp. n.p. pb. Byrne, Brendan. A Costly Freedom: A Theological Reading of Mark’s Gospel. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 283 pp. $26.95 pb. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series17. 3d ed. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2008. 418 pp. n.p. hb. Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 489 pp. $35.00 hb. Cary, Phillip. Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 189 pp. $55.00 hb.

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Cary, Phillip. Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 344 pp. $74.00 hb. Ciccarelli, Michele. La Sofferenza di cristo nell’epistola agli ebrei. Associazione Biblica Italiana. Supplementi alla Rivista Biblica 49. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 2008. 370 pp. €35,00 pb. Colless, Brian E. The Wisdom of the Pearlers: An Anthology of Syriac Christian Mysticism. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2008. 240 pp. $34.95 pb. Collinge, William J., ed. Faith in Public Life. College Theology Society Annual Volume 53. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2007. 300 p. $30.00 pb. Collins, Raymond F. The Power of Images in Paul. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 307 pp. $49.95 pb. Comings, David E., M.D. Did Man Create God?: Is Your Spiritual Brain at Peace with Your Thinking Brain? Durate, Calif.: Hope Press, 2007, 2008. 694 pp. $25.99 hb. Congourdeau, Marie-Hélène. L’Embryon et son âme dans les sources grecques. Collège de France - CNRS Centre de Recherche D’Histoire et cvilisation de byzance. Monographies 26. Paris, France: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 2007. 349 pp. € 75.00 pb. Coppa, Frank J. Politics and the Papacy in the Modern World. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 278 pp. n.p. hb. Cornick, David. Letting God Be God: The Reformed Tradition. Traditions of Christian Spirituality Series. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 171 pp. $18.00 pb. Cortright, David. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 376 pp. $29.99 pb. Daube, David. The Deed & the Doer in the Bible: David Daube’s Gifford Lectures. Vol. 1. Edited & Compiled by Calum Carmichael. West Conshohocken, Pa.: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008. 304 pp. $34.95 pb. Davis, Stephen J. Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 371 pp. $130.00 hb. D’Elia, John A. A Place at the Table: George Edon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008. 271 pp. $45.00 hb. Delio, Ilia. Christ in Evolution. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 228 pp. $18.00 pb. Dell, Katharine. Opening the Old Testament. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 224 pp. $38.00 pb. De Vries, Hent, ed. Religion: Beyond a Concept. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. 1006 pp. n.p. pb. Dozeman, Thomas B. Holiness and Ministry: A Biblical Theology of Ordination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 158 pp. $65.00 hb. Driel, Edwin Chr. van. Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. $74.00 hb. Dupré, Louis. Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. 136 pp. $25.00 p.b. Evans, Roger Steven. Issues of New Testament Anti-Judaism: Son of Man, Deicide, and Divine Predetermination. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008. 96 pp. $20.00 pb.

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Faber, Roland. God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies. Trans. Douglas W. Stott. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 365 pp. n.p. pb. Farmer, Jared. On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 455 pp. $29.95 hb. Fee, Gordon D. Galatians. Pentecostal Commentary Series. Dorset, U.K.: Deo Publishing, 2008. 262 pp. n.p. pb. Finlan, Stephen. The Apostle Paul and the Pauline Tradition. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 229 pp. $29.95 pb. Fishbane, Michael. Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 246 pp. $30.00 hb. Frank, Daniel and Matt Goldish. Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent, and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2008. 496 pp. $49.95 hb. Fredriksen, Paula. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. New York: Doubleday, 2008. 457 pp. $32.50 hb. Gaillardetz, Richard R. Ecclesiology for a Global Church: A People Called and Sent. Theology in Global Perspective Series. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 312 pp. $30.00 pb. Garlington, William. The Baha’i Faith in America. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Repr., Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. 248 pp. $27.95 pb. Genuyt, François. L’épître aux Romains. L’instauration du sujet Lecture sémiotique. Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 2008. 222 pp. 22€ pb. Greene, Colin and Martin Robinson. Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination. Colorado Springs: Authentic, 2008. 278 pp. n.p. pb. Gregory, Eric. Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 384 pp. $45.00 hb. Goldfrank, David M, ed. and trans. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies Series 221. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian, 2008. 369 pp. $39.95 pb. González, Justo L., and Catherine Gunsalus González. Heretics for Armchair Theologians. Illustrations by Ron Hill. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 166 pp. n.p. pb. Harmon, Kathleen. The Mystery We Celebrate, the Song We Sing: A Theology of Liturgical Music. Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2008. 78 pp. $29.95 pb. Harrison, Peter. The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 300 pp. $95.00 hb. Hills, Julian V. Tradition and Composition in the Epistula Apostolorum. 2d printing with new preface and bibliography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Divinity School, 2008. 180 pp. $ 22.95 pb. Hogan, Linda, ed. Applied Ethics in a World Church: The Padua Conference. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 287 pp. $28.00 pb. Holman, Susan R., ed. Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. 320 pp. $32.95 pb. Hood, Ralph W., Jr., and W. Paul Williamson. Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2008. 301 pp. $24.95 pb.

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Horsley, Richard A., ed. In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 199 pp. n.p. pb. Horton, Michael S. People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 325 pp. n.p. pb. House, H. Wayne, Michael Behe, Eddie Colanter, Logan Paul Gage, Phillip Johnson, Casey Luskin, J. P. Moreland, and Jay W. Richards, eds. Intelligent Design 101: Leading Experts Explain the Key Issues. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 2008. 284 pp. $16.99 pb. Hsia, R. Po-Chia, ed. Reform and Expansion 1500–1660. Vol. 6 of The Cambridge History of Christianity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 749 pp. $195.00 hb. Isaac, Gordon L. Left Behind or Left Befuddled: The Subtle Dangers of Popularizing the End Times. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 168 pp. $16.95 pb. Izmirlieva, Valentina. All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 224 pp. $45.00 hb. Inboden, William. Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 356 pp. $80.00 hb. Jandora, John W. States without Citizens: Understanding the Islamic Crisis. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 112 pp. n.p. hb. Jenkins, Willis. Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 363 pp. $35.00 hb. Jensen, David H., ed. The Lord and Giver of Life: Perspectives on Constructive Pneumatology. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 189 pp. n.p. pb. Kaye, Bruce. An Introduction to World Anglicanism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 276 pp. $29.99 pb. Kearns, Cleo McNelly. The Virgin Mary, Monotheism, and Sacrifice. New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 356 pp. $85.00 hb. Kelly, Anthony J. The Resurrection Effect: Transforming Christian Life and Thought. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 205 pp. $30.00 pb. Kelly, Joseph F. The Birth of Jesus According to the Gospels. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 106 pp. $14.95 pb. Khan, Ruqayya Yasmine. Self and Secrecy in Early Islam. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 200 pp. $39.95 hb. Kim, Heerak Christian. Intricately Connected: Biblical Studies, Intertextuality, and Literary Genre. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008. 102 pp. $20.00 pb. Kim, Sebastian C. H., ed. Christian Theology in Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 296 pp. $35.99 pb. Kirkpatrick, Frank G. The Episcopal Church in Crisis: How Sex, the Bible, and Authority Are Dividing the Faithful. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 219 pp. n.p. hb. Kleinberg, Aviad. Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 340 pp. $29.95 h.b. Klink, Edward W., III. The Sheep of the Fold: The Audience and Origin of the Gospel of John. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 316 pp. $101.00 hb. Leuchter, Mark. The Polemics of Exile in Jeremiah 25–45. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 320 pp. $90.00 hb.

130


Levinson, Bernard M. Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 206 pp. $75.00 hb. Lewis, James R. and Olav Hammer, eds. The Invention of Sacred Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 306 pp. $95.00 hb. Lindberg, Carter. Love: A Brief History Through Western Christianity. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 195 pp $22.00 pb. Lindly, Susan Hill, and Eleanor J. Stebner, eds. The Westminster Handbook to Women in American Religious History. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 249 pp. n.p. pb. Lindqvist, Pekka. Sin at Sinai: Early Judaism Encounters Exodus 32. Studies in Rewritten Bible 2. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008. 391 pp. n.p. pb. Lovin, Robin W. Christian Realism and the New Realities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 231 pp. $29.99 pb. MacCammon, Linda M. Liberating the Bible: A Guide for the Curious and Perplexed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 269 pp. $24.00 pb. MacDonald, Margaret Y. Colossians and Ephesians. Sacra Pagina, edited by Daniel J. Harrington, S.J. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2000, 2008 (with updated bibliography). 394 pp. $34.95 pb. Malina, Bruce J. and John J. Pilch. Social-Science Commentary on the Book of Acts. 243 pp. $29.00 pb. Malinar, Angelika. The Bhagavadgita: Doctrines and Contexts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 296 pp. $95.00 hb. Markham, Ian S. Understanding Christian Doctrine. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. 232 pp. n.p. pb. Massa, Mark, S. J. and Catherine Osborne, eds. An American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 287 pp. $25.00 pb. May, Cedrick. Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760–1835. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2008. 157 pp. $36.95 hb. McIntosh, Mark A. Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. 252 pp. n.p. pb. Miller, David W. God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 222 pp. n.p. hb. Moore, Sebastian. The Contagion of Jesus: Doing Theology As If It Mattered. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2007. 208 pp. $20.00 pb. Morris, Bridget, ed. The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 2: Liber Caelestis, Books IV–V. Trans. Denis Searby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 339 pp. $65.00 hb. Moser, Paul K. The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 292 pp. $90.00 hb. Moser, Paul K., ed. Jesus and Philosophy: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 236 pp. $26.99 pb. Murphy O’Connor, Jerome. St. Paul’s Ephesus: Texts and Archaeology. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 289 pp. $29.95 pb. Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 497 pp. n.p. pb.

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Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. With a new introduction by Andrew J. Bacevich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 198 pp. $17.00 pb. Niebuhr, H. Richard. “The Responsibility of the Church for Society” and Other Essays by H. Richard Niebuhr. Edited and with an Introduction by Kristine A. Culp. Library of Theological Ethics. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 155 pp. n.p. pb. Newman, Richard S. Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 357 pp. n.p. hb. Nicoletti, Michele, Silvano Zucal, and Fabo Olivetti. Da Che Parte Dobbiamo Stare: Il personalism Di Paul Ludwig Landsberg. Rubbettino, Italy: Rubbettino Editore, 2007. 395 pp. n.p. Nicholas of Cusa’s Didactic Sermons: A Selection. Translated by Jasper Hopkins. Loveland, Colo.: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2008. 474 pp. $40.00 hb. Noll, Mark A. God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. 209 pp. $22.95 hb. Noll, Mark A. and James Turner. The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue. Edited by Thomas Albert Howard. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2008. 144 pp. $16.99 pb. Novetzke, Christian Lee. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 309 pp. $50.00 hb. O’Brien, Suzanne J. Crawford, ed. Religion and Healing in Native America: Pathways for Renewal. Religion, Health and Healing. Susan Starr Sered and Linda L. Barnes, Series Editors. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 222 pp. n.p. hb. O’Collins, Gerald, S.J. Jesus: A Portrait. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 246 pp. $25.00 pb. O’Collins, Gerald, S. J. Salvation for All: God’s Other People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 279 pp. $29.95 pb. O’Connor, David. God, Evil, and Design: An Introduction to the Philosophical Issues. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 226 pp. $25.00 pb. Olivetti, Fabio. Paul Ludwig Landsberg: Una filosofia della persna tra interiorità e impegno. Methexis 2. Serafini, Italy: Pisa University Press, 2008. 510 pp. n.p. Olyan, Saul M. Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 188 pp. $80.00 hb. O’Murchu, Diarmuid. Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 270 pp. n.p. pb. Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe E. Theology Brewed in an African Pot. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 162 pp. n.p. pb. Pace, Sharon. Daniel. Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary. Macon, Ga.: Smyth & Helwys, 2008. 383 pp. n.p. hb. Pearson, Lori. Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Divinity School, 2008. 252 pp. $ 28.00 pb. Peterson, Anna L. and Manuel A. Vásquez, eds. Latin American Religions: Histories and Documents in Context. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 324 pp. $25.00 pb. Pickering, W. S. F. Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity. 2d ed. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008. 284 pp. n.p. pb.

132


Plant, Stephen. Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction. Rev. and exp. ed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 108 pp. $18.00 pb. Pope, Stephen J., ed. Hope & Solidarity: Jon Sobrino’s Challenge to Christian Theology. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 282 pp. $26.00 pb. Porter, J. R. The Illustrated Guide to the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 2008. 288 pp. $24.95 pb. Ramachandra, Vinoth. Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2008. 296 pp. n.p. hb. Reed, David A. “In Jesus’ Name”: The History and Beliefs of Oneness Pentecostals. Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 31. Dorset, U.K.: Deo Publishing, 2008. 396 pp. n.p. pb. Rewritten Bible Reconsidered. Proceedings of the Conference in Karkku, Finland, August 24–26, 2006. Edited by Antti Laato & Jacques van Ruiten. Studies in Rewritten Bible 1. Edited by Antti Laato. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008. 287 pp. n.p. Riches, John.Galations: Through the Centuries. Blackwell Bible Commentaries. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. 336 pp. n.p. hb. Rios, Marlene Dobkin de, and Roger Rumrrill. A Hallucinogenic Tea, Laced with Controversy: Ayahuasca in the Amazon and the United States. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 162 pp. n.p. hb. Rist, John M. What Is Truth? From the Academy to the Vatican. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 361 pp. $34.99 pb. Robinson, Bishop Geoffrey. Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007, 2008. 307 pp. $24.95 pb. Rothchild, Jonathan, Matthew Myer Boulton, and Kevin Jung, eds. Doing Justice to Mercy. Studies in Religion and Culture, edited by Frank Burch Brown, Gary L. Ebersole, Edith Wyschogrod. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 280 pp. $49.50 hb. Rowland, Tracey. Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedit XVI. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 214 pp. $24.95 hb. Rynne, Terrence J. Gandhi & Jesus: The Saving Power of Nonviolence. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 2008. 228 pp. $20.00 pb. Safouan, Moustapha. Why are the Arabs Not Free?—The Politics of Writing. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 106 pp. $25.00 pb. Santmire, H. Paul. Ritualizing Nature: Renewing Christian Liturgy in a Time of Crisis. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. 311 pp. $24.00 pb. Schenck, Kenneth L. Cosmology and Eschatology in Hebrews: The Setting of the Sacrifice. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 220 pp. $95.00 hb. Scheck, Helene. Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2008. 238 pp. $70.00 hb. Schifferdecker, Kathryn. Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job. Harvard Theological Studies 61. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 217 pp. n.p. pb.

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Schliesser, Christine. Everyone Who Acts Responsibly Becomes Guilty: Bonhoeffer’s Concept of Accepting Guilt. Foreword by Jürgen Moltmann. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 217 pp. n.p. pb. Schneider, Tammi J. Mothers of Promise: Women in the Book of Genesis. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. 240 pp. $21.99 pb. Schroeder, Roger P. What Is the Mission of the Church? A Guide for Catholics. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 159 pp. n.p. pb. Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 229 pp. $19.95 pb. Settembrini, Marco. Sapienza e storia in DN 7–12. Analecta Biblica 169. Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2008. 259 pp. n.p. pb. Sharlet, Jeff. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. 454 pp. $25.95 hb. Sharpes, Donald. Outcasts and Heretics: Profiles in Independent Thought and Courage. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlfield Publishing Group, 2008. 366 pp. $34.95 pb. Slingerland, Edward. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 370 pp. $24.99 pb. Sloyan, Gerard S. Jesus. Engaging Theology: Catholic Perspectives. Edited by Tatha Wiley. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 194 pp. $19.95 pb. Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 196 pp. n.p. pb. Stackhouse, John G., Jr. Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008. 370 pp. $27.95 hb. Steinmetz, Devora. Punishment & Freedom: The Rabbinic Contruction of Criminal Law. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 240 pp. $55.00 hb. Stock, Brian. Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reader in Western Culture. The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lecture Series. Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2008. 167 pp. $45.00 hb. Strauss, Lauren B. and Michael Brenner, eds. Mediating Modernity: Challenges and Trends in the Jewish Encounter with the Modern World: Essays in Honor of Michael A. Meyer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. 380 pp. n.p. hb. Swedish, Margaret. Living Beyond the “End of the World”: A Spirituality of Hope. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 222 pp. $18.00 pb. Tan, Jonathan. Introducing Asian American Theologies. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 210 pp. $24.00 pb. Treier, Daniel J. Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. 224 pp. $17.99 pb. Urban, Martina. Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 238 pp. $32.00 hb. Van Engen, Charles E., Darrell Whiteman, and J. Dudley Woodberry. Paradigm Shifts in Christian Witness: Insights from Anthropology, Communication and Spiritual Power. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 166 p. $25.00 pb. Vecoli, Fabrizio. Il sole e il fango. Puro e impuro tra i padri del deserto. Centro Alti Studi in Scienze Religiose 3. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007. 183 pp. 28.50€ pb.

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Verkamp, Bernard J. Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. 239 pp. $65 hb. Vollmer, Ulrike. Seeing Film and Reading Feminist Theology: A Dialogue. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 297 pp. $69.95 hb. Walls, Andrew and Cathy Ross, eds. Mission in the 21st Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 219pp. $25.00 pb. Webber, Robert E. Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative. Grand Rapids. Mich.: Baker Books, 2008. 191 pp. $14.99 pb. Wedemeyer, Christian K, ed.. Aryadeva’s Lamp that Integrates the Practices: Caryamelapakapradipa: The Gradual Path of Vajrayana Buddhism according to the Esoteric Community Noble Tradition. Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences. Translated by Christian K. Wedemeyer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 856 pp. $55.00 hb. Wettach-Zeitz, Tania. Ethnopolitische Konflikte und interreligiöser Dialog: Die Effektivität interreligiöser Konflicktemediationsprojekte analysiert am Beispiel der World Conference on Religion and Peace-Initiative in Bosnien-Herzegowina. Theologie und Frieden 33. Stuttgart, Germany: Kohlhammer, 2008. 288 pp. €34.00 hb. Williamson, Arthur H. Apocalypse Then: Prophecy & the Making of the Modern World. Praeger Series on the Early Modern World, edited by Raymond B. Waddington. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 354 pp. n.p. hb. Witte, John, Jr. The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 388 pp. $29.99 pb. Witte, John, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander, eds. Christianity and Law: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 343 pp. $29.99 pb. Wood, Charles M. The Question of Providence. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 120 pp. n.p. pb. Worcester, Thomas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 361 pp. $29.99 pb. Yannaras, Christos. Person and Eros. Translated by Normal Russell. 4th ed. Brookline, Mass. Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007. 395 pp. $24.95 pb. Yong, Amos. Hospitality & the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighbor. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 172 pp. n.p.

Harvard Theological Review 102:1

JANUARY 2009

ARTICLES

The Second Passover, Pilgrimage, and the Centralized Cult

1

Simeon Chavel

The Job of Judaism and the Job of Kant

25

Alan Mittleman

From “Linguistic Turn” and Hebrews Scholarship to Anadiplosis Iterata: The Enigma of a Structure

51

Gabriella Gelardini

The Rapture of the Christ: The “Pre-Ascension Ascension” of Jesus in the Theology of Faustus Socinus (1539–1604)

75

Alan W. Gomes

Native Americans, Conversion, and Christian Practice in Colonial New England, 1640–1730

101

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125

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