Establishing Orthodoxy

Abstract

Abstract The primary task facing Massachusetts’s ministerial intellectuals in the decade following the Antinomian controversy was to preserve the fruits of their victory by firmly establishing their interpretation of Puritan doctrine as the official orthodoxy. Three obstacles stood in their path, two of which had emerged only after the suppression of Antinomian dissent. The defeat of Anne Hutchinson had sorely undermined the charismatic authority of her mentor, John Cotton, within the ministerial community. Indeed, the whole affair had raised suspicions and doubts about the safety of charismatic authority. In the years directly following the Antinomian controversy, a new informal leadership structure emerged among the clergy in Boston and its neighboring towns (Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, Watertown, and Cambridge), a structure I have called the “big six pulpits.” The Antinomian controversy had also revealed significant disagreements among the ministerial intellectuals on questions of theology and church polity. While such differences had been smoothed over for the time being by the various compromises struck at the Synod of 1637, there could be no doubt that new issues would arise in the future from which debates and controversies could ensue. To ensure that such controversies would never assume the crisis proportions of the Antinomian fiasco, the orthodox regime created an educational system, with Harvard College at its apex, that would foster cultural cohesion among the thinking class through a common, hegemonic core curriculum. Finally, of course, the Bay divines faced various dissidents among the laity and clergy who threatened to undermine the system of cultural domination. All three obstacles had to be cleared before the Massachusetts thinking class could compile the canonical document of the New England Way, the Cambridge Platform.