Was Mary Rowlandson the true Puritan she was portrayed to be?

Mary Rowlandson was captured by the Indians from her home in Lancaster, Massachusetts, during King Philip's War of 1675.  She was held for 11 weeks and 5 days before being ransomed.  She wrote a narrative about her captivity and "restoration."  This narrative became one of the most representative documents by which white New Englanders remembered King Philip's War.  After being trapped in the wilderness as a prisoner of war, and surviving.  Mary Rowlandson saw herself as spiritually renewed and redeemed.  While many of the events of her account are probably true, her narrative is still somewhat mythical and shaped, both consciously and unconsciously, to fit her religious and cultural ideals (http://www.bookrags.com/printfriendly/?p=gale&u=rowlandson-mary-aaw-01). 

There appear to be two different perspectives in Rowlandson's narrative.  This could be a result of Rowlandson suffering from a mental disorder known as survivor syndrome.  She tries to reconcile her feeling of guilt over having survived the Indian attack on Lancaster and her captivity with her obligation to paint her experience in the hues of providential affliction.  Rowlandson recounts the events of her captivity in a vigorous and homely style, combining close observation with simple, direct expression.  When she pauses to consider the significance of a particular detail, her style becomes more elevated as she employs biblical quotations and metaphors to convey her meaning (http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/captive.htm).

Throughout most of the text, Rowlandson is cast as the Christian woman lost in the unknown wilderness among a savage people and unsure of her surroundings.  Rowlandson recounts multiple experiences of sitting in her captors' wigwams at different times during her captivity and completely forgetting where she is before jumping up and running outside.  At another point in the text, Rowlandson states, "My son being now about a mile from me....away I went; but quickly lost myself travelling over Hills and through Swamps, and could not find my way to him."  Although she is lost in the woods, she was able to find her way back to her master's wigwam.  Despite these incidences of being lost in the wilderness, Rowlandson seems to know her geographic location throughout the course of her captivity.  She knows of the time of day and place when she is in the Indian town called Wenimesset, Northward of Quabaug.  Other examples of this, Rowlandson is aware of an "English town thirty miles away," and being aware she was "two miles from the Connecticut river" during another "Remove".  Rowlandson also seems capable of keeping track of the days of the week.  At several points throughout the narrative, she makes note of her captors' activities on the Sabbath.  It would seem likely that a person held hostage in a completely alien environment for nearly three months would lose track of the days of the week.  Rowlandson did not appear to suffer from this.  Instead of being presented as a poor soul who has lost her way, these assertions of place and time cast her in a resourceful light by showing us a woman capable of orienting herself spatially and temporally (http://www.bookrags.com/printfriendly/?p=gale&u=rowlandson-mary-aaw-01).

Throughout the narrative there are evidences of God's providence for His chosen.  His chosen need only wait patiently and suffer nobly to receive deliverance.  Yet Rowlandson barters her services for food and money and actively navigates through her captors' society.  This is a woman that is self-reliant and capable of surviving hardships in her own right.  For instance, Mary makes a shirt for King Philip's son and is paid one shilling.  She makes a shirt for another Indian and harasses that Indian until he makes payment of a knife.  Mary is taking control of her life and her ability to survive (http://enh241.wetpaint.com/page/Mary+Rowlandson).

Rowlandson's tone is colored by hindsight.  She tells the story of her captivity having been freed and knowing how the story ends.  Though she is often filled with despair, her overall tone remains hopeful.  She presents her story as a lesson to others.  Because of Rowlandson's intimiate relationship with her Indian captors, her book is interesting for its treatment of cultural contact.  In the use of autobiography, typology, and the jeremiad, Rowlandson's book helps us to understand the Puritan mind (http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/canam/rowlands.htm) (http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/rowlands.htm).

Mary Rowlandson remained a Puritan woman in her narrative.  Mary was a woman to be reckoned with before her captivity began.  She was a minister's wife but did not attend Sunday service regularly.  She admitted to smoking tobacco in excess and enjoying the pleasure of it.  During her captivity, she remained aware of her surroundings and the limits placed upon her by her captors.  Mary was able to survive because of her mental and physical strength.  Above all Mary Rowlandson was able to adapt through her own abilities and through the Grace of God.  She was a Puritan woman with a strong pioneering spirit. 

Thomas Paine blog

Was Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, the beginnings of what Scientology is today?

Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England on January 29, 1737.  His father was Quaker and his mother was Anglican.  In 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin in London.  Franklin helped Paine emigrate to Philadelphia.  His career turned to journalism and Paine became a revolutionary propagandist.  He published Common Sense in 1776.  He produced The Crisis (1776-1783), which helped inspire the American Revolutionary Army.  Paine later returned to Europe to purse other ventures instead of continuing to help the Revolutionary cause.  In 1791-1792, he wrote The Rights of Man in response to criticism of the French Revolution.  This work caused Paine to be labeled an outlaw in England for his anti-monarchist views.  To avoid being arrested, he fled to France to join the National Convention [http://www.ushistory.org/PAINE/].

In 1793, Paine was imprisoned in France for not endorsing the execution of Louis XVI.  It was during this imprisonment, he wrote and distributed the first part of what was to become his most famous work at the time, The Age of Reason.  A deist manifesto to the core, Paine acknowledged his debt to Newton and declared that nature was the only form of divine revelation [http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/paine.html].

While reading this excerpt from The Age of Reason, Paine's writings appear similar to the beliefs of present day Scientologists.

          It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human inventions; it is only the
          application of them that is human.  Every science has for its basis a system of principles
          as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed (646).

          In fine, it is the soul of science.  It is an eternal truth; it contains the mathematical
          demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses are unknown (647).

          It is the structure of the universe that has taught this knowledge to man.  That structure
          is an ever- existing exhibition of every principle upon which every part of mathematical
          science is founded.  The offspring of this science is mechanics; for mechanics is no other
          than the principles of science applied practically (647, 648).

          The Almighty lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the
          universe, has invited man to study and to imitation.  It is as if He had said......
          "I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens
          visible, to teach him science and the arts.  He can now provide for his own comfort, and
           learn from my munificence to all, to be kind to each other" (648).

          I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church,
          nor by any church that I know of.  My own mind is my own church.  All national
          institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other
          than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power
          and profit (643).

Scientology considers the belief in a Supreme Being as something personal and offers no specific dogma.  The nature of the Supreme Being is revealed personally through each individual as he/she becomes more conscious and spiritually aware.  All humans are immortal spiritual beings capable of realizing a nearly godlike state through Scientology practice.  The path to salvation, or enlightenment, includes achieving states of increasingly greater mental awareness.  The Church of Scientology considers itself a religion because of its focus on the soul and spiritual awareness.  L. Ron Hubbard was the founder of Scientology.  His personal research concluded that a human is made up of three parts:  the body, the mind, and the soul.  Each individual has the capacity to reach a higher plain through intense study of oneself through the use of the sciences [Scientology.org/What_Is_Scientology] [www.religioustolerance.org/scientol.htm].

"These are the times that try men's souls."  This simple quotation from Thomas Paine's The Crisis not only described the beginning of the American Revolution, but also the life of Paine himself.  Throughout most of his life, his writings inspired passion, but also brought him great criticism.  But his radical views on religion would destroy his success [http://www.ushistory.org/PAINE/].

Franklin, W., Gura, P.F., Krupat, A. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol A.  W.W.  Norton & Company, Inc.  New York, NY, 2007.

Disclaimer:  The author of this blog is a Christian.  This blog is not intended as advertisement for Scientology
                   as a religion.

Jonathan Edwards was a great influence on the Great Awakening. Why was he voted out of the pulpit in Northampton?

Jonathan Edwards was a prominent leader of the east-coast revivals of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening.  The Great Awakening defined Christianity in the New World as distinctive from its European forms and allowed it to adapt to a democratic society.  Edwards was known as one of the greatest and most profound American evangelical theologians.  Edwards explicated the fundamentals of Reformed Calvinism according to reason and common sense, relying minimally on arguments from the Bible.  Edwards has been described as the first and greatest homegrown American philosopher [http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jonathan_Edwards].

Edwards was raised in a theological environment.  His father was Timothy Edwards, a minister, and his grandfather was Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, Massachusetts.  Jonathan Edwards had been an eager seeker after salvation and was not fully satisfied with his own "conversion".  He took greater joy in the beauties of nature, and delighted in the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon.  Edwards sought the soul of a true Christian, a holiness that was a sweet, serene, and calm nature.  Balancing these mystic joys and perceptions of Christian community was the stern tone of his Resolutions.  Edwards reflects the core Calvinist spirituality, that the more we appreciate the glory of God, the more we perceive the depravity and evil of the human rejection of Him [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/edwards/].

On February 5, 1727 he was ordained minister at Northampton, Massachusetts and assistant to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard.  Stoddard launched innovations in order to bring the people of the frontier to church, including opening communion to all who would come.  In this way, he utilized the Communion Table as a converting ordinance and not as a reward or sealing of salvation.  Stoddard departed from the traditional Puritan dry discourses to reach the emotions of his congregation.  As his successor, Edwards would develop this method of preaching and provide theological underpinnings for it in his work on the religious affections.  Edwards rejected his grandfather's opening of the Communion Table, an act that would undermine his position with the congregation decades later [http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jonathan_Edwards].

Solomon Stoddard died in 1729, leaving Edwards the difficult task of the sole ministerial charge of one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony.  In 1733, a religious revival began in Northampton and reached such intensity in the winter of 1734 and the following spring as to threaten the business of the town.  In six months, nearly 300 were admitted to the church.  The revival gave Edwards an opportunity for studying the process of conversion in all its phases and varieties.  This revival in Northampton was followed in 1739-1740 by the Great Awakening, distinctively under the leadership of Edwards (Tracy).

Edwards' ideas were compatible with scientific developments in his age.  He was fascinated by the discoveries of Isaac Newton and other scientists of his time.  While he was worried about the excessive faith in reason and materialism of some of his contemporaries, he saw the laws of science as derived from God.  For him there was no conflict between the spiritual and material worlds.  Edwards became very well known as a revivalist preacher who subscribed to an experiential interpretation of Reformed theology that emphasized the sovereignty of God, the depravity of humankind, the reality of hell, and the necessity of "New Birth" conversion.  The intellectual framework for revivalism he constructed in many of his works pioneered a new psychology and philosophy of affections, later invoked by William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902 [http://edwards.yale.edu/research/about-edwards/biography].

In 1748, a crisis developed in his relations with his congregation.  Edwards' preaching became unpopular.  For four years, no candidate was presented for admission to the church.  Edwards was not allowed to discuss his views in the pulpit.  Edwards was concerned with the "open admission" policies instituted by Stoddard that allowed many hypocrites and unbelievers into church membership.  Edwards insisted on a public profession of saving faith based on the candidate's religious experiences as a qualification not only for Holy Communion but also for church membership.  The ecclesiastical council voted that the pastoral relation be dissolved.  The church members, by a vote of more than 200 to 23, ratified the action of the council, and finally a town meeting voted that Edwards should not be allowed to occupy the Northampton pulpit.  His dismissal is seen as a turning point in colonial American history because it marked the clear and final rejection of the old "New England Way" constructed by the Purtitan settlers of New England.  There were social and political forces at work in the town as a reflection of larger economic, social and ideological forces then reshaping American culture.  Ironically, the colonial theologian who best anticipated the intellectual shape of modern America also was its first victim.  Edwards' struggle with these forces is recorded in the many manuscript sermons that were to follow [http://edwards.yale.edu/research/about-edwards/biography] [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/edwards/].

Edwards' views on the freedom of the will, virtue, God's purpose of creation and, most importantly, the religious affections, have garnered the attention of evangelical thinkers to this day.  The Great Awakening laid the spiritual foundation for the American revolution.  Edwards respected his congregation's right to self-governance, viewing their vote to oust him as "God in his providence, now calling me to part with you."  He justified the strong claim of God and religion upon the individual in a democratic society.  Edwards based his theology on personal spiritual experience, reason, observation and the common meaning of words, not scripture.  Edwards set the parameter for American religious thought then and today [http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jonathan_Edwards].

Edwards' theology has a timeless appeal that makes it fascinating today as philosophy, but his importance to his own era lay in his ability to reach the hearts of his congregation.  The tragedy of Jonathan Edwards was that he was so clearly a product of the changing patterns of authority and community life in eighteenth-century New England.  He was more like a revolutionary than a Patriarch, but he thought of himself as a Patriarch.  Self-conscious as he was, introspective as he could be in moments of both triumph and failure, he could not reinvent himself.  His ideas were potentially far in advance of the time, but he kept all his best insights chained to the service of an antiquated social ideal that few other men shared by 1750.  But perhaps, like all good fathers, Edwards gave his "children" the inner resources to rebel when it came time for them to be men (Tracy).

Tracy, P.T.  Jonathan Edwards, Pastor.  Hill and Wang, New York, 1979.  (p. 194).