John Norton on Church, State, Conscience, and Heresy

John Norton (1606-1663) tends to get lost in all the hullabaloo over John Cotton and the Mathers when it comes to the first generation of New England patriarchs. But in his own day he was arguably just as influential, at least at times. He was highly esteemed amongst his peers. That he was unanimously selected to pen the official defense of Congregational polity (Responsio ad Guliel, 1648) to be distributed across continental Europe (but especially The Netherlands)--he was generally considered the best Latinist and polemicist by his fellow provincials, and the book was the first Latin printing in the colony--evidences this fact.

Like so many of his compatriots, he was a Cambridge man. He was born at Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England (where he was ordained upon graduation), and after immigrating to New England in 1634/5, he was called to pastor in Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1638. (Ipswich was called home by several of the most interesting figures of early New England, including Nathaniel Ward, William Hubbard, and John Wise; the Ipswich Men deserve a focused comparative biography; their similarities are uncanny such that one begins to believe that what is now Essex breeds a particular type of man, at least in that century.) Norton has given us some of the earliest election sermon data (posthumously published as a three-sermon compendium) from the region (the focus of one of my recent projects), and his Orthodox Evangelist (1654), which circulated widely in his own day, is still worth perusing (and readily available in a good library). Norton was also a member of the synod that produced the Cambridge Platform (1648)--an apparently rather bibulous affair since the General Court rewarded the attendees with dozens of bottles of sherry (“sack”), gallons of beer, and what amounted to a barrel of wine for each clergyman-- and in 1652 succeeded John Cotton as co-minister (with John Wilson) at the First Church of Boston (the most important parish in the colony). In 1662 he was a diplomat to Charles II’s court, pleading the colonial case, and he died the next year, aged 56.

I.

Our focus here is Norton’s 1659 publication, The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies of the Present Generation, wherein he inveighed against the Quakers. That the object of Norton’s ire was Quakerism is neither here nor there, really, for this post--it simply supplies the occasion for the treatise. But it is worth dispelling contemporary inclinations about the controversy.

We think of Quakers today as being moralistic but docile pacifists; the kind of people you want as neighbors, like Mormons. (“Friends” is in the name, after all.) Perhaps, not the people you’d invite to a cocktail party, it must be said, but neither are they going to make you feel particularly guilty about going to one, even if they think they are more sanctified for abstaining. Plus, they’ve produced some good classical schools, from the looks of it, in my neck of the woods. All around good contributors to society, we’d be inclined to say.

But in the seventeenth century this was not the case, especially not from the Puritan perspective. Indeed, from George Fox (1624-1691) onward, the Quakers were a bit of a radical group, synonymous with subversive activity.

Norton talks about them being “incorrigible,” exuding insolence and “obtrud[ing] themselves upon us.” He is evidently frustrated in his treatise by their obstinance, their unwillingness to abide by Massachusetts law which prohibited their heretical proclamation. And this does not seem to be partisan exaggeration on Norton’s part. John Fiske, in his The Beginnings of New England (1892), wrote that it could not be doubted that

“the demeanour [sic] of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem to warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a natural consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those days all manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent.”

Their egalitarianism in church and state, utterly foreign to New England at the time, was abrasive to Norton and most everyone else. (The fragile state of a colony on the far side of the world at the time must also be factored in.)

“When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of earthy magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he walked up the street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and interrupt the sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once came into the Old South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand, and, holding them up before the astonished congregation, knocked them together and smashed them, with the remark, ‘Thus will the Lord break you all in pieces’; how Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the streets in the primitive costume of Eve before the fall, and called their conduct ‘testifying before the Lord’; we can hardly wonder that people should have been reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at Munster by the Anabaptists of the preceding century… Of all the sectaries of that age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive.”

Fiske recounts how the Quakers were not simply in New England to live peaceably, but to convert the populace, and they apparently weren’t shy about doing it. L:aws were eventually passed against them--it is little appreciated that Baptists, Quakers, and even covens of witches were allowed to live quietly in and about the colony for the first few decades; it was only once they infiltrated the center of society and proclaimed contrary doctrines that they became a real problem.

On one occasion, a Quaker, Mary Dyer, entered Boston with three companions specifically for the purpose of defying the law against them. They were summarily banished (and begged to stay away). They returned almost immediately in compounded defiance. Mrs. Dyer was sparred the gallows and returned to her family in Rhode Island. But her son and husband could not prevent her from returning a third time to Boston, even after Governor Endicott publicly begged Quakers to stay clear of the capital so that the law would not come against them. Mrs. Dyer ignored the plea. At the gallows (a second time) she was offered clemency if she would promise to honor her banishment. She refused and was hanged. The point is that, by seventeenth century standards at least, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay were not quite so cruel--and the Quakers not quite so stoic--as popular histories say.

II.

In any case, by the later decades of the century, the Quakers were still hanging around and making some headway in Boston, enough that Norton wrote forcefully against them (nearly 60 pages decrying them).

Most applicable to our own day, however, is what Norton has to say about church and state, conscience, and heresy generally.

First, Norton’s rather conventional (for the day) conception of the magistrate’s role vis a vis religion:

“As God hath armed the Magistrate with Civil power for the defence of Religion, so hath he animated him unto he regular and seasonable exercise thereof, by holding forth many excellent fruits, through the concurrence of divine benediction, concomitant and consequent unto his fidelity in this duty.”

These dutiful fruits included, inter alia, “The vindication of the… trueth [sic] of God from the dishonour done thereunto by Heresie [sic], & blasphemie… repairing of the honour of God.”

To understand why New England Puritans treated heresy the way they did this preliminary idea must first be grasped, viz., the duty of the magistrate to punish heresy--we will see why shortly--which was nothing less than a vindication of God’s honor.

Connected to this conception of the duty of the civil authority which, again, was conventional then, Norton anticipates the objection that God, his truth and church, does not need an earthly defender, and the accompanying supporting evidence for this objection that the early church survived without state support.

Norton provides what is (in my mind) a rather thorough but terse refutation of this objection which amounts to an exposition of the old maxim that God is a God of means:

“God can preserve his Truth immediately without any external meanes [sic] but his pleasure is ordinarily to doe it mediately. hence he surrounded the Arke according to divine Institution, with a double sence [sic], both Ecclesiastical and Civil. God can also save man immediately, from evils committed against the second Table, but he ordinarily effects it by the helpe [sic] of the magistrate. The injurie done unto the trueth [sic], hurteth man whose welfare depends upon the imbracing [sic] of it. It hurts not God, nor the Trueth in itself, but only in the estimation of man.”

Sure, Norton quips, God could do lots of things immediately (including even salvation), but he ordinarily operates through earthly means to accomplish his other worldly ends unto his glory. In this case too what is in focus is more the duty of the civil authority than anything else. The question is not what the church and her deposit of truth needs to survive. She is a perfect society dependent on nothing outside of herself for the accomplishment of her appointed ends. But Norton is considering questions of social order and the state’s duty to the church, not the other way around. As a God-ordained institution, the question is what role the state plays within providence. This distinction, or rather, orientation of the inquiry, is lost on so many today.

He continues:

“When there was no Christian Magistrate, God watched over the cause of Religion in an extraordinary man[n]er. The continuance of the gift of miracle, together with the then recent & fresh memory ther[e]of, conducing nor a little for that end. But extraordinance [sic] gifts ceasing, and the Christian Magistrate succeeding, God now expects the Civil power, in an ordinary way of Providence to be subservient thereunto. God can bring up his sons & daughters without making any use of Civil power: but it hath pleased him to appoint Kings to be nursing Fathers, and Queens to be nursing Mothers unto them. They are but ill nurses, who se[e]ing the danger of those committed to their trust, so much as in them lyeth, save not their nurse-lings form the poyson [sic] of the destroyer.”

Notice that Norton does not employ Two Kingdoms language here (as most New England Puritans, on my reading, did not). Rather he speaks of “powers” in the classic Gelasian sense (Duo Sunt)--the Cambridge Platform which he helped draft expresses the same sentiment (e.g., “Two Twinnes”). Also take note that Norton speaks of the civil power’s subordination to the spiritual power (church), a subject he also treats at some length in his reply to Apollonius mentioned above. This may surprise many Protestants, but as my friend Michael Lynch recently pointed out to me, John Davenant saw no problem with ecclesiastical officials also possessing civil authority so long as it was properly delegated to them. As with so many other doctrines, I think we are just no scratching the surface of the diversity of political thought in post-Reformation Protestant thought. My own theory is that Protestants did not substantially jettison fundamental medieval ideas in terms of social order (see e.g., my post from last year on John Cotton and integralism).

III.

Moving on, and with this view of the civil power in mind (i.e., it has a duty to punish heresy and protect its populace therefrom), we can examine Norton’s treatment of the dueling concepts of liberty of conscience and heresy.

On the question of conscience, Norton distinguishes between “Conscience, properly so called,” and “The errour of Conscience.”

Norton affirms, of course, along with the Westminster Confession that God alone is Lord of the conscience. In traditional fashion he designates the conscience “God’s vice-gerent in the soul,” but in the soul God is the “primary judge, conscience is a secondary & subordinate judge” insofar as the conscience is “the judgement of man’s self, answering unto the judgement of God concerning him.” As I’ve said before, the conscience is not some subjective tabula rasa. It has objective content informing it, viz., the law of God implanted in man in what William Ames called the “storehouse” (synderesis). Norton: “Conscience as operating, supposeth a principle enlightened, and erreth not concerning the notional & doctrinal part of the object. Conscience cannot ly [sic]".”

Imbedded in this claim is two things: 1) man, even fallen man, cannot desire a thing as evil in itself, rather he can be mistaken as to the good; 2) the conscience judges man based on the content of the storehouse (i.e., natural law), abhorring evil and promoting good. It cannot err. It can simply be ignored. Relatively then, “the errour of conscience” is not an error in conscience itself, but the ignorance of it “from the old man, and the Serpent.” Connecting himself to the exegetical tradition of Proverbs 20:27, Norton later refers to conscience as “a principle of light created & placed by God in the soul.”

Therefore, Norton distinguishes further between the liberty of conscience and its error. True liberty, classically conceived, is the freedom to do good, not evil (i.e., licentiousness). Appeal to conscience to condone or commit evil, then, is an error of conscience. Hence,

“liberty or the error of conscience is falsly [sic] called liberty of Conscience: being indeed opposite thereunto… walking contrary to Rule. It is a liberty to blaspheme, liberty to seduce others from the true God. A liberty to tell lies in the name of the Lord. It is indeed a liberty unto bondage.”

The conclusion to be drawn from Norton’s discourse here is that liberty conscience as such does not necessarily deserve protection as such… only ordered liberty of conscience.

Norton goes on to cede that the “coercive power of the Magistrate” only concerns the acts of outward man. He cannot delve into the inner working of the mind and soul. “Whilst a man keepth his heterdoxy to himself, he is doubtlesse [sic] out of the reach of the Magistrate in that respect.” This is what Norton calls “heresy alone” or quiet heresy. It is to be distinguished from “heresy Turbulent,” for “heresy, schisme, and sedition differ.” A quiet heretic can live a peaceable life in error. But when he attempts to propagate his heresy, to be dogmatic about it, to be “schismatick, or seditious,” then a problem for the Christian communion (church and state) arises. Norton has no desire (or means) to address the former. But the latter is rightly the province of coercive action for the sake of the peace and stability of the commonwealth. Once publicized, heresy becomes “pestilential,” and “here is a season, wherein it is the duty of the Civil-Magistrate [given what was outlined above] to put forth a Coercive power, as the matter shall require in the defence of Religion, Order, Church & common-wealth.” And at this juncture, appeals to liberty of conscientious exercise will not save the perpetrator, especially when he proves “incorigible,” resistant to correction (as the Quakers had).

Norton qualifies:

“We through grace abhorre [sic] prejudicing the liberty of Conscience in the least measure , and account such report of us to be slander. And through the same grace; We both dread, and beare [sic] witness against, liberty of heresy, liberty to Blaspheme the Blessed Trinity, the Person and Office of Christ, the holy-Scripture, the tabernacle of God, and those that dwell in heaven. Howsoever fallaciously transformed into, & misrepresented under the plausible vizard [i.e., mask] of liberty of conscience falsly so called.”

Norton said that error was to be contested against by persuasion where possible, but when error was publicly proclaimed, it was to be put down by civil power. The murderer kills bodies but the heretic kills souls, as the old saying went. In a Christian communion, propagated heresy not only threatened the peace and stability of the commonwealth but also the very souls of its members. “[E]ndeavours to seduce others thereunto” tended to “disturbing of Publick-order.”

This same rationale, in part and imperfectly, carried on into the American republic in prosecution of anti-Christian blasphemy (see e.g., People v. Ruggles (N.Y. 1811) and Updegraph v. Commonwealth (Pa. 1824)). Liberty of conscience was not a defense for those who would pull down the entire social order. As shown earlier, banishment was the preferred punishment for non-compliance (i.e., quiet heresy). There was plenty of land available at the time and Rhode Island seemed particularly welcoming to wilder dissenters. The Quakers Norton was dealing with, however, had not proven amenable to this response, insisting on infiltrating the Bay Colony against, what Norton would have interpreted as, the will of the majority of its inhabitant.

In this way, appeals to liberty of (erroneous) conscience were pitted against sovereignty and self-determination of a covenanted people. Do not these same ideas war amongst us today?