Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy on Trial: A Review Essay

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Louise A. Breen. Trangressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 292 pp. Sargent Bush, Jr., ed. The Correspondence of John Cotton. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 548 pp. Michael P. Winship. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 322 pp. In the midst of an entangled “crisis” that appeared to threaten the very being of newly founded Massachusetts, one close observer of the situation in 1636 and 1637 felt that little of substance separated the warring parties: “few could see where the difference was; and indeed it seemed so small, as (if men's affections had not been formerly lienated, when the differences were […] stated as fundamental) they might easily have come to reconciliation.” Other contemporaries painted the crisis in starker colors, invoking, as John Wheelwright did in a fast-day sermon of January 1637, the combat between the forces of Christ and the followers of the Anti-Christ and summoning the “children of God” to “prepare for a spirituall combate” against their enemies.The Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Richard S. Dunn et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) 216 ; David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968) 158–59. By and large, modern historians have sided with Wheelwright in emphasizing the seriousness of the “Antinomian controversy,” as the crisis is conventionally termed. Its modern interpreters disagree, however, on what was at issue and on the relationship of the controversy to the underlying dynamics of the Puritan movement. Two new books by young historians add to this debate in important ways, and a third volume, a scrupulously edited collection of the letters of the Reverend John Cotton, advances our understanding of a minister whose sermons to his Boston congregation helped precipitate the crisis.