The Puritan Religious Dilemma: The Ethical Dimensions of God's Sovereignty

Abstract

Much American writing reflects an almost obsessive concern for exploring the interrelationship betweeen ethical and religious values. This preoccupation first emerges in the writings of the early American Puritans. Their covenant theology, as expressed by John Winthrop, describes a divinely established universal moral order which makes experience and God rationally and ethically comprehensible. However, from 1650 onward, Puritan writings frequently portray a wilderness experience that is no longer explicable in terms of this moral order. To many, the encounter with the wilderness abrogated the close correlation between the ethical and religious which the covenant theology affirms. As a consequence, there emerges in Puritan theological writings a quest for a symbol of God that makes the ethical and religious congruent, if not identical, realms. This preoccupation, although expressed in the idioms of the 1600's and early 1700's, gives Puritan theology a distinctively modern tone, since in many ways it anticipates the religious concerns which Soren Kierkegaard expresses in his notion of the suspension of the ethical. Puritan quest in fact gives rise to a debate whether such a notion as God's teleological suspension of the ethical constitutes a valid religious explanation of human experience. essential outlines of this debate are initially formulated in such writings as the Puritan jeremiads, Urian Oakes' sermon The Sovereign Efficacy of Divine Providence, and Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Despite these Puritan origins, however, this debate does not terminate with the demise of Purtanism. Rather, it is continued in such later writings as J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Lettersfrom an American Farmer, Nathaniel William Taylor's sermon RICHARD FORRER is Assistant Professor of Religion at Texas Christian University and has published essays on the interrelationships between religion and literature, which include: Oedipus at Colonus: A Crisis in the Greek Notion of Deity, Comparative Drama 8 (Winter 1974-75); and Absalom, Absalom!: Story-Telling as a Mode of Self-Transcendence, to appear in the forthcoming Winter issue of Southern Literary Journal: