When we to want to find out more, who do we ask? Who do we trust? What authority will we accept?
In 1634, Anne Hutchinson set sail from England to America with her husband and ten children. The family settled in Boston. She turned her attentions to the sick and needy in town and eventually began work as a midwife. During labor she tended to pregnant women’s needs and offered them spiritual support as well. The Massachusetts Bay Colony had been founded not too many years earlier to be a great Puritan “city on a hill” – an example to the world of Christian piety and righteousness. John Winthrop was the governor. He, like many other Puritans, believed in very strict piety. He felt that God would judge people as a community and not as individuals – in Boston, all were to be their brother’s keeper. He believed that salvation was something that we are to struggle with our whole lives long or, to quote Philippians 2:12, we are, “to work out [our] salvation with fear and trembling.” This struggle, he thought, helped to push us to seek God and to stay together as a community. In a colony that faced terrible hardships, rough winters, starvation, illness – sticking together was a matter of life and death. Part of being a city on a hill meant that everyone needed to subscribe to this theology. Being good Puritans meant that God would be happy and the colony would flourish.
But there was Anne Hutchinson, attending births and making her own spiritual suggestions. She started holding weekly meetings at her home apart from the regular services. She would comment on the sermons and lessons that the pastor had made and elaborate with her own interpretations. Originally these meetings were just for women, but they became so popular and so well talked about that she had to start another meeting entirely for interested men – this was about 60 people a week all coming to hear Anne. And what did Anne say? She said that she had been touched by God. She said that God had given her assurance that she was saved and that it was possible to have a personal connection, a personal relationship with God. She talked about grace and intuition – about being able to read the Bible for yourself and to be led by the Spirit to new understanding. She said, “He who has God’s grace in his heart cannot go astray.” For her, real authority came from the Spirit to the individual. It could not be dictated by one person to another.
This was not the prescribed way of doing things in the colony. This was not the strict piety and fear and trembling that John Winthrop sought to cultivate. His question was basically the same one that the chief priests and elders asked Jesus, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” Just as Winthrop had feared, Anne’s alternate theology was spreading some unrest and disagreement in the colony. People were debating and challenging one another. Pastors were writing sermons publicly accusing pastors on different sides of the debate. Winthrop took many measures to try to contain the controversy, even instituting a day of fasting for all in the colony. In November of 1637, Anne Hutchinson was tried with slandering ministers, sedition, disturbing the peace, and holding illegal meetings in her home. John Winthrop presided at her trial. Ultimately she was found guilty and banished from the colony. Though she was defeated on that day, her legacy of religious freedom lives on in the founding and in the very fabric of our country.1
[1] https://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/view/