Читать книгу Jacob Green’s Revolution - S. Scott Rohrer - Страница 13

2

Pastor

Grand, it was not. Tucked away on nearly four acres along the Whippanong River, Hanover’s Presbyterian meetinghouse looked more like a failing country store than a hieratic shrine to the Lord. A dilapidated, oblong structure built of logs, the two-story church lacked the crowning grace of a cupola or spire. Worshipers wanting to sit in the gallery had to mount stairs from the outside (fig. 2). The pulpit consisted of a carpenter’s bench, the pews of crude benches. Constructed in 1718, the church was falling apart when Jacob Green arrived in late 1745, but congregation members had been unable to agree on the location for a replacement or how to pay for it. For Jacob, more discomforting than the meetinghouse’s sad state was the congregation’s history. The presbytery had dismissed Green’s two predecessors following, in Jacob’s typically understated words, “uneasiness” between the minister and his people.¹

As dolorous as all this was, Jacob’s prospects upon his arrival were not hopeless. Hanover represented the oldest and most settled township in the newly formed county of Morris, serving as the jumping-off point for the settlement of land west and north of the village. Moreover, its abundant natural resources held the promise of economic growth. The numerous rivers enticed settlers to the area and became home to forges and mills. Of greater significance to Jacob was Hanover’s stature as the center of Presbyterianism in northwestern New Jersey; his congregation was the mother church that sired numerous offspring in the years before the American Revolution, meaning that his appointment as Hanover’s interim pastor instantly made him the leader of Presbyterianism in the region.²

The timing of his arrival was also auspicious. The New York Synod, which oversaw Hanover, had held its first session on September 19, 1745. Led by Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr, and dominated by New Siders, the synod was seeking to spread its New England brand of Presbyterianism in New Jersey and elsewhere. Dickinson and Burr viewed Jacob as an important recruit in this missionary effort. The troubles of Green’s predecessor, John Nutman, presented them with the opportunity to place an ally in an important congregation in East Jersey. Jacob Green would serve as a foot soldier in the New Siders’ fight for evangelism and revivalism.³

Jacob was flattered by the attention. Still unsure about his suitability for the ministry, he needed the encouragement from Dickinson and Burr, whom he held in “great regard.” Dickinson and the young Jacob Green likely saw each other as kindred spirits; although both men supported the Great Awakening, Dickinson and Green rejected the excessive emotionalism and divisiveness that accompanied it. Dickinson, who came to Elizabeth Town in 1708, was a leading Presbyterian in the middle colonies and a moderate New Sider who sought a middle ground on the raging controversies of the day, including the dual threats of Arminianism and antinomianism.⁴

When Green arrived in Hanover, he likely found the place congenial: the township was populated by second- and third-generation Puritans-turned-Presbyterians from New England. Hanover resembled Stoneham in several ways. It was a growing agricultural community of small farms whose cultural life revolved around the meetinghouse and the family. Culturally, a New England spirit infused the place. Former Puritans from Long Island, Newark, and Elizabeth Town, whose families originally came from Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and elsewhere, founded the township and launched Presbyterian life in 1718 when they built the meetinghouse and began holding services. Green approvingly described these early settlers as stout Calvinists, and he strove to establish a rapport with their descendants throughout the fall of 1745. Before his formal ordination as Hanover’s pastor in November 1746, Green served a one-year probation that allowed each side to get to know the other. Because the congregation’s relationship with Green’s two predecessors—Nathaniel Hubbard, who served until 1730, and John Nutman, who lasted until 1745—had ended badly, this was no formality. Congregants listened to Green’s sermons, met with him in their houses, prayed with him in the evenings.⁵

The members obviously liked what they saw, despite the shortcomings that Jacob so candidly described about himself. During these first years in Hanover, Green remained shy and unsure of himself, even in private settings. “I could speak but poorly in publick,” he lamented, “and I was bashful, backward and unapt to speak in private.” One step he took to overcome his nervousness and make himself “useful” to the membership “was to give out questions in writing, and have a time appointed to meet the people and hear them answer the questions as they thought proper, and then to make my own observations upon them.” The sessions could be quite freewheeling, and Green used them to become acquainted with his congregants on a personal level.⁶

Jacob’s insecurities ran deeper than his personality—they extended to his religious views, which were in flux in the 1740s and 1750s and were easily swayed by the luminaries he encountered in New England and New Jersey. George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and other apostles of the Great Awakening helped turn Jacob into what he termed in his autobiography a “zealous Calvinist” during his Harvard years (although this was an exaggeration). But despite his enthusiasm for John Calvin and the Reformed spirit, and despite his Puritan upbringing in Massachusetts, he departed Cambridge troubled about his Calvinistic faith and the paradoxes it presented. Across a broad front in the fields of science and religion, rationalists and advocates of the Enlightenment were questioning the theological system that had dominated western Europe for three centuries, and their attacks on predestination resonated with Jacob while he was a student at Harvard. As he confessed in the May 1744 letter to Nathaniel Tucker, he was unsure about predestination and free will and how one solved the many paradoxes they presented. Still, in 1744, his New England upbringing held firm, and he thought of himself as a Calvinist, believing that God controlled all and that “unregenerate men have now no power to embrace the offers of the Gospil.”⁷

Such certainty did not survive his first encounters with Dickinson and Burr in Elizabeth Town in 1745. The two Presbyterian leaders easily brought him around to their views on Presbyterianism and on a looser church membership. Abandoning Congregationalism for Presbyterianism was not a difficult step for Green; the two faiths arose out of the same Reformed tradition and had much in common, including a commitment to Calvinism and to a biblical-based church. The reversal on membership, however, was a dramatic repudiation of Jacob’s Puritan beliefs, which rested on the notion that only the elect could be full church members and participate in the sacraments. Dickinson and Burr, Green succinctly noted in his autobiography, “induced me to embrace Stoddard’s sentiments, which before I had thought were not right.” The reference was to the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, the influential Solomon Stoddard, who as pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, pressed for looser standards in an effort to win more converts to Christ. Jacob’s bow to Stoddardean standards induced him to take an even more heretical stance: he began to accept “some notions that were Arminian, or that bordered upon Arminianism; especially as to the power of the creature, the freedom of the will, the origin of action.”⁸

Despite these vicissitudes—or more accurately because of them—Green never stopped studying after he left Harvard. He read widely and thought deeply in the late 1740s and 1750s, as he worked out the views that allowed him to soften Calvinism’s hard edges and pursue a purer church and society in the 1760s and later; this study also undergirded his political views of the 1770s. His most intense period of study took place over seven months, from November 1754 to May 1755. Several times a week he retreated to his study to write in two daybooks. The first daybook covered more than 160 pages and was a wide-ranging exploration of divinity and what Jacob termed “the coda of systems.” In tightly packed pages that combined standard English with a system of shorthand developed by James Weston in the mid-eighteenth century, Jacob ranged over the centuries, beginning with the ancient philosophers (figs. 3 and 4). His central concerns were basic but profound: does God exist? Is the Bible accurate? What is free will? That Jacob even asked such questions was evidence of the turmoil he continued to experience in the mid-1750s. As a graduate of Harvard, he was well aware of developments in Western thought since the seventeenth century and the arrival of the Enlightenment in America in the eighteenth. Theologians everywhere were grappling with the challenges to Christianity posed by science, which was lifting the veil on nature’s workings and, ultimately, raising questions about God himself. The questions were serious enough that the Christian faithful believed they had to reassert the primacy of God, demonstrate the accuracy of the Bible, and explain the relevance of the Trinity. Many, like Samuel Clarke and John Witherspoon, fought fire with fire—they used science itself to make their case for religion. Reason was their watchword as they combated the skepticism of Arians, Socians, deists, philosophers, and others.⁹

Jacob Green, as a result, was hardly alone as he studied his Bible and pondered the meaning of faith. He approached the review of religion in an enlightened manner—his exploration was reasoned, rational, systematic, measured. The views of men, he warned in one early entry in his daybook, tended to run to extremes. He would avoid that pitfall and, instead, coolly examine the various controversies of the different ages. Jacob’s perambulations began with the customs of the ancients, including the Druids, and the hostility that early Christians faced. His review then carried him on to Jewish history, the “absurdities” of Roman Catholicism, and the views of everyone from Peter Lombard to the Socians. In his rough jottings—many sentences were half thoughts and lacked punctuation—Jacob did not advance his own arguments. Instead, his purpose was to poke and to prod at conventional wisdom as he worked his way up to the arguments of modern times. He was fascinated by the seemingly irreconcilable—those who relied on reason to determine God’s existence versus those who turned to revelation. As he studied Christian history, Jacob kept returning to his core questions, stressing the importance of learning which parts of the Bible represented truth and which were inspired by God. He devoted “chapters” in his daybook to analyzing God’s powers—the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and God the Son, among many others. In attempting to answer such questions, Jacob examined the origins of the world, the authority of the scriptures, and the nature of sin and evil.¹⁰

As he laboriously analyzed this coda, Jacob devoted one day a week (usually Wednesdays) to a second daybook, covering nearly one hundred pages, that broke down the mechanics of good writing and sermonizing. Here again he drew on his Harvard education and his experiences in the Great Awakening, focusing on Cicero and on how a “discourse . . . [can] move a heart.” Jacob wrote these daybook entries as if he was delivering a lecture to a classroom of college undergraduates: he would lay out his thesis and proceed to construct a carefully reasoned argument in support of that thesis. An important task for Jacob was determining in his mind what constituted bad writing. Such writing, he decided, “is weak and languid; i.e. what faintly conveys the authors sentiments.” Bad writers, he continued, “say nothing to inform the understanding, convince the Judgment, or please the Imagination . . . there is something awanting; which lies in this, that the discourse is not filled to make [an] Impression.” In other words, bad writers are boring—they are “pedantic” or bombastic.¹¹

Good writing, by contrast, is “simple, natural, nervous, diffuse, sublime,” according to Jacob. Out of that list of attributes, “simple” and “natural” were the most important ones to him. He admiringly cited the writing in the Old Testament: “The thoughts are natural, & the choice of words is natural.” He also praised Demosthenes and Cicero, who managed to be eloquent and persuasive without giving the “appearance of art & study, or of affectation.” Effective writers, Jacob strongly felt, take care to “accommodate to the capacities of the hearers. This is a most important Rule of Eloquence.” The implications for the minister trying to win over souls to Jesus Christ were obvious. Sermons “ought to be plain & simple,” Jacob advised; regular English was much more effective than relying on “dead languages.” When delivering these sermons, the “Speaker ought generally, if not always to appear calm, composed, & without any emotion at all.”¹²

This was not surprising advice coming from someone who considered himself a poor public speaker. Yet in another sense it was surprising, considering how much Jacob admired Whitefield and Tennent. The powerful, emotional preaching of the leading awakeners had moved him profoundly, and he was recruited to Hanover to serve as an evangelical minister. Instead, Green’s views reflected his careful study of the ancients; the treatises of his contemporaries, especially Jonathan Edwards; and the rhetoric of the Enlightenment. Simple was best; calm reason was more persuasive than fervid outbursts. Jacob’s Harvard coursework taught him that a good sermon should be built around four parts—invention, the process by which the speaker determines the subject matter; arrangement, by which the speaker places his argument in proper order; style, the determination of the proper language to use; and delivery, by which the speaker decides what voice and body language to employ.¹³

Jacob’s writing and preaching style was far closer to Edwards than to the classic rhetoricians or to the Great Awakeners. Green rejected the two extremes in sermonizing—he found his “rationalist” peers too elitist, too learned, too argumentative, but he was not comfortable with the evangelical style of Whitefield and others that stressed emotion and the ability to deliver a sermon extemporaneously. Instead, Green found a kindred spirit in the famed minister from Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards sought a middle ground in preaching that merged sound thinking and emotion. Edwards wanted to win over the “head” by going through the “heart.” To achieve this task he relied on vivid natural imagery that appealed to the emotions. Edwards at times was almost mystical in his use of language, stressing the beauty of nature and the wondrous ways of God.¹⁴

Jacob’s search for the middle ground is evident in his daybooks. He evinced little patience for college-educated ministers, who he said were more interested in showing off their education than in imparting sound evangelical principles to his listeners. He stressed that the careful minister should avoid excessive emotionalism, but he went on to say that emotionalism has its place in good writing and sermonizing. “We must be careful to set on the proper considerations before the Mind in the natural order; i.e., we must put first the plainest, & then the more complex, views of things”—all with an eye toward awakening the emotions in hearers. To pull off this feat, Jacob stressed, “a speaker must feel the emotions in himself.” He likened the process to a “contagion”; when the speaker feels warm emotion, he can pass it along to his audience. But if the speaker feels a “coldness,” he will cut a “very sorry figure” and fail to move his listeners.¹⁵

The most important aspect of Green’s education during this period was his study of Jonathan Edwards. It was Edwards who quieted his mind on Calvinism and enabled him to solve the key riddle about predestination—why should anyone act morally? As Green put it in his autobiography, Edwards did the most to “bring me off from all the notions that bordered on Arminianism,” the idea that man could achieve salvation on his own, that he had the free will to change his own fate. This doctrine, derived from the teachings of Jacob Arminius in the sixteenth century, threatened all that Calvinism stood for. The attack was serious enough that Green was tormented by questions about man’s culpability in sin and his ability to reform his ways. The role of free will only baffled him further during these early years. In 1744, Green hesitantly decided “that I think a man may be a free agent without having any power to believe, for a man may act freely and chuse to do one thing without being able to do the contrary to it, so a sinner may act freely in chusing to go on in sin without being able to chuse holiness.”¹⁶

Looking for better answers, Green read Edwards’s writings intently, especially his renowned Freedom of the Will and his Inquiry Concerning Qualifications for the Sacraments. Edwards had several concerns in these tracts. With the Enlightenment and “rational” religion advancing methodically in the mid-eighteenth century, he wanted to counter the attacks on Calvinism, especially by answering those critics who said that John Calvin’s rigid theological system built on the doctrine of predestination undermined a person’s moral responsibility. Edwards carefully set out to reconcile free will (the notion that individuals are free to do as they please) with Calvinism (the idea that an omniscient God controls all). Edwards reconciled the seemingly irreconcilable by distinguishing between natural necessity and moral necessity. An all-powerful but loving God governs through the latter—in his greatness he grants individuals the power to choose within the limits that God has decreed. As one recent biographer of Edwards explained, God “created intelligent beings who were free to choose what they wanted in the most significant ways possible in a God-governed universe. Their choices were fully their own, and they were morally responsible for their choices.”¹⁷

Green was impressed with this line of argument, and he came to believe that Calvinism’s critics were the inconsistent ones. Green noted in his autobiography that most skeptics were “partly Calvinists, and partly Arminians.” An intellectual muddle, in other words: the skeptics “dare not look the Calvinistic principles through, follow them to their source, and receive them with all their consequences. . . . They believe the perfections of God, and that he foreknew all things,” yet they were unwilling to accept that God controlled all.¹⁸

Green fleshed out his Edwardsean insights in a series of sermons and tracts that he published in the 1760s, beginning with a published sermon in 1764 on baptism and culminating in 1770 with a short pamphlet that summarized his views. Like Edwards, Green rested his theories on one sturdy foundation: God is all-powerful, loving, and good. In staking his claim for God’s greatness, Green again acknowledged the conundrums that it created: if God is so powerful and good, why does he permit evil? If he is so loving, how can he be so cruel as to save some sinners but not others? And if God truly controls all, then are not humans powerless to achieve salvation? And are they not blameless for current or past sins?¹⁹

Unlike the confused explanation he gave in 1744, he answered these perplexing questions in the 1750s and later by constructing an Edwardsean defense, distinguishing between what he termed natural inability and spiritual inability. The difference between the two concepts was great, Jacob asserted. “Natural Inability, is the Want of Power or Faculty to do what Persons have a Will to do, what they choose and desire to do,” he explained. “A Man that has lost his Hands cannot do the Work that others do, tho’ he might wish and desire to. . . . The Man without Hands . . . [is] under a natural Inability.” By contrast, spiritual inability involved a conscious choice by the individual to do good—or ill. For the sinner, “the Motives to do good and avoid evil, have no considerable Weight with him. His wicked Disposition overcomes the Motives to good. . . . The Sinner is not blind and deaf like him that is without sight and hearing; the Sinner has Eyes to see, and ears to hear, and an understanding by which he may consider, but he has no Heart to read, hear or consider.”²⁰

Green well knew that skeptics would accept this as only a partial explanation, that they would counter with the observation “That Persons have not Power to alter their bad Will and Inclination; and that they cannot help being of such a bad Heart and Temper” (Green’s emphasis). To answer such objections, Green drew on Edwards’s concept of the will. “If any Person has a Will to love God or Holiness,” Green explained, “there is then Nothing in the Way, he does the Thing; he loves God and Holiness.” In other words, spiritual inability represented the “want of Will and Inclination.” In defining the will, Green and Edwards were tackling head-on the advances of liberalism and the Enlightenment. These “modern” values, espoused most powerfully by John Locke and René Descartes, placed a premium on individual rights by asserting that people have the freedom—the free will—to act as they choose. Individuals, in other words, were responsible for their own actions.

Edwards and Green agreed that free will involved a person’s ability to choose. But where they differed from Enlightenment apostles was in assigning the agent ultimately responsible for bestowing such an important right. For liberals, free will resided within individuals; for Edwards and Green, it resided with God. Both men reached this conclusion after traveling down the same path. It all began with an understanding of the supreme deity: he was sovereign, the creator of the universe and all within it. In his loving greatness, God decided to grant individuals the right to act. Edwards explained the presence of sin through his concepts of natural necessity (ingrained, naturalistic reactions to things such as physical pain) and moral necessity (habits of the heart where God gives one the choice of what to do), while Green called it natural inability and spiritual inability. For both men, God was the one who bestows choice, or free will, on individuals. Sinners, Jacob maintained, “are acquainted with their Duty. They know what is Right and what is Wrong; they know the dreadful Consequences of Sin, and the happy Effects of Holiness. Heaven and Hell are set before them.” Jacob added, though, that it was impossible for the unregenerate to achieve his or her own salvation; only God can bestow that: “’Tis impossible to choose a new Heart. . . . ’Tis contrary to the Nature of Things.”²¹

Having satisfied himself that free will can be reconciled with Calvin’s predestinarian teachings, and that individuals do have a choice to act morally or to sin, Green next worked out his views on the church’s role in this Calvinistic world. Who should belong to the church—only the elect (i.e., those who are saved)? Or should everyone, including the unsaved, be allowed to join and participate in the sacraments? The writings of Englishman Isaac Watts, the Calvinistic theologian and hymn writer, guided Green on this question of church purity. Green analyzed Watts’s Rational Foundation of a Christian Church, which was nearly four hundred pages and published in 1747, and praised it as “the most rational and scriptural, of any thing I have seen upon these subjects.” From Watts, Green worked out the role of reason in religion and the rationale for instituting a purer church with stringent admission standards. “Wherein soever Revelation gives us plain and certain Rules for conduct, Reason itself obliges us to submit and follow them,” Watts explained. “Where the rules of Duty are more obscure, we are to use our Reason to find them out, as far as we can, by comparing one Part of Revelation with another, and making just and reasonable Inferences.”²²

From there, Watts showed the importance of reason to church formation. “The Light of Reason teacheth, that there must be a mutual Consent, Compact, or Agreement, amongst such Persons as profess the same Religion, to walk according to the Directions and Dictates of it.” Perpetuating the church by admitting properly qualified members, he continued, was essential. On this issue, Watts cited both reason and the New Testament: common sense dictated that members with like views band together, and that these members “will think it proper to cast such Persons out of their Fellowship, that they may not infect the rest, nor dishonour their Religion.” But the New Testament also taught that the Christian church must take “take Care that they be kept pure, and free from Scandal, by separating themselves from evil Members, and by casting out those that depart from the Truth, or are guilty of gross Immoralities.”²³

Green agreed with Watts that only the elect can be full church members, and he decided by the early 1760s that he must fight for a purer church and, eventually, a purer society. He would, in other words, push to create a church where only the truly repentant could be full members, and he would work to cleanse society of some of its most pernicious shortcomings, including the holding of fellow human beings in bondage. Where to begin, though, in this audacious crusade to change the world? Green chose a logical place—his home church on Hanover Neck. He would institute a far stricter policy toward church membership and the partaking of the sacraments in Hanover. Green formally announced this shift in a sermon on baptism that he delivered to his congregation on November 4, 1764, but he began his effort several years earlier. Green then expounded on his views in two long tracts that he published in 1768 and 1770.²⁴

The baptism issue had been bedeviling Puritan New England since the days of the Great Migration in the 1630s. Who, exactly, was eligible for baptism? An adult who could show he was of the elect? An infant who was the offspring of full church members? Or could the children of the unregenerate be baptized, too? These seemingly mundane questions masked a far more serious one: how pure should the church be? In the heady early days of New England’s founding, Puritan radicals came down on the side of purity by baptizing only those children of parents who were communicant members. However, following the adoption of the “halfway covenant” in 1662 by a synod of clergy, the Puritan movement became more “liberal” on these questions. The halfway covenant permitted the offspring of partial members to be baptized, and the practice gradually took hold throughout New England under the prodding of Solomon Stoddard and other reformers. Soon, many Puritans were asking whether the same liberalizing tendencies should be applied to the other sacrament, communion. Stoddard, of course, answered yes. Those individuals who lived scandal-free and sought to become Christians should be permitted to partake in the Lord’s Supper, he argued. Stoddard saw the administering of the sacraments as a recruiting tool to bring more people to Christ.²⁵

Because of Dickinson’s influence, Green had followed the Stoddardean position during his first decade as a Presbyterian pastor. In the November 4 sermon, Green informed the congregation that he had changed his mind; he also explained at length the centrality of baptism to his vision of a purer church. The act, he told the congregants, “signifies the washing away [of] our native and contracted guilt and defilement,” and as such qualified baptism as a seal. Receiving baptism meant that its recipient was one of God’s “visible people”—he or she was of the elect, in other words, one of God’s chosen saints. Because of baptism’s great importance, not everyone automatically qualified for it.²⁶

In explaining why, Green returned to the Calvinistic conundrum about behavior and free will. God is all-powerful, yet we all have a choice; thus moral behavior falls into two categories—“natural and instituted duties.” The former, he said, involved basic acts of human decency, such as living honestly and ethically: “Every rational creature is bound to perform them, and sins less while he endeavours to perform them.” The latter was different. Instituted duties involved Christian duties mandated by God, and Green cited three examples—the gospel ministry, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. Not all individuals are cut out for the ministry, he said; they are called to it. “Nor may any draw near to God in the reception of the sacraments, (which are instituted duties) unless they are such persons as he declares qualified for them.” Adults have to qualify for baptism, Green stressed, and those “who openly continue in the sins of drunkenness, profane swearing, uncleanness, and the like scandalous vices” were disqualified.²⁷

But, according to Green, the standards were high for baptizing infants as well—their parents had to be in good standing with the church and be able to qualify for communion. Here, Green was raising the bar ever higher: it was not enough for an individual to have been baptized in childhood and to attend services as an adult; parents who wanted their children baptized must “renew the covenant . . . [and meet] the same qualifications, as if they were to be baptized themselves.” They must be full members, in other words. Green was thus rejecting the key Arminian premise that baptizing anyone was a way to draw more people to the church. What was the point, then, of baptizing babies? Green answered that the act signaled something important: it bestowed “God’s seal or mark” on children and demonstrated to them that God will be watching over them. It also signaled that these children would be under the care of the church and “watched over in a kind friendly manner.”²⁸

Green outlined the specific requirements that adult applicants must meet to qualify for baptism. The first was “a competent degree of christian knowledge; . . . God must be worshipped with understanding.” The second was that “they must be free from scandalous sins and offensive behaviour.” Moreover, applicants have to “be actually engaged in the positive and practical parts of religions. . . . They must manifest a relish for religion, and the company and conversation of godly people; a reverence for the holy name of God.”²⁹

In making his case for such rigorous standards, first succinctly in the 1764 sermon and then at length in his later tracts, Green fell back on his core Puritan beliefs and the arguments of Jonathan Edwards and Isaac Watts. The Puritans’ covenant of grace defined his understanding of what constituted a “proper profession” by seekers. The covenant represented “a command and a promise” between man and God, Green told his congregants. On man’s part, he is to “acknowledge his sin, the evil he has done, the miserable condition he has brot himself into.” For those who repent, God will then grant “eternal happiness” and “the enjoyment of God himself.” By embracing the covenant of grace, Green stressed, a seeker shows that “we prefer God and Christ to everything else; that we love his will, and take his word for our rule; that we hate sin, and watch against it. Now, persons that can say this, have true religion.”³⁰

In this way, covenantal theory underlay Green’s view of the sacraments and a pure church. It was impossible for God to “enter into covenant with unregenerate men,” he said. Both sides, he reiterated, made promises to each other. Breaking that promise rendered a seeker unfit—“dangerous” even—to partake in the sacraments. God “has appointed his faithful servants to profess their regard to him, & exhibit the evidence of their compliance with his holy Covenant . . . and to seal it in certain Sacraments: And that God on his part has appointed certain sacraments . . . to be signs themselves of the good that shall flow of them that comply with his covenant.” He warned that he could not permit someone to partake of one sacrament (baptism) but not the other (communion): “Such a person cannot act right in one Sacrament, while he is under so great Errors as to the other.” Thus Green concluded that the same demanding standards for baptism should be applied to communion—only the regenerate can come to the Lord’s Table.³¹

In making these arguments, Green rejected the halfway covenant and everything he once liked about Stoddard’s inclusiveness. Admitting the unregenerate, he explained, “gradually weakens & destroys chh. discipline.” It gives sway to the uncommitted and undermines the purity of the devout. Because of the dangers of admitting the unsaved, it was important for the church to maintain some separation from the world. “The door of the church is not to be opened to take in all the world,” he told his Hanover congregation. “The church and the world are distinct things according to scripture.” If the church let in sinners, it would “flatter” them and “let them build up self-righteousness.” It would also “tend to destroy the peculiar love, union, and communion that ought to be among chh. members.” And it would put the unregenerate in positions of power—they would have a say in the running of the congregation and the choosing of ministers and church officers. Most of all, letting the unregenerate in would lower the barrier between the church and the world, allowing the sins of the outside to infiltrate the church and pollute it. In advocating for a purer church, Green also wanted to head off the threat posed by the regenerate who stray from God’s ways. Stoddardeans and other rationalists cast a forgiving eye on these backsliders, but Green felt they must be dealt with sternly through excommunication, a harsh punishment that most congregations tried to avoid. “What’s so terrible in excommunication?” he wondered. He defended it as the best way “to shew them, & others, that they belong to Satan, & that these sins [if] continued will shut them out of heaven & leave them to go to hell with all the unregenerate.”³²

Green began to make concrete changes in Hanover as early as 1757. The most important one was to tighten the standards for baptism and for admittance to communion. From 1747 to 1756, during his Stoddardean phase, Jacob performed an average of eighteen baptisms a year, with a high of twenty-two in 1755 and a low of fourteen in 1748. In the 1760s, he did about seven baptisms a year—less than half of what he had done a decade earlier. To determine whether someone was worthy of admission to the sacraments, Green summoned the applicant to a meeting, where he questioned the person on his or her spiritual state. It was a task, of course, that Green took seriously. He likened the minister’s role to that of a “doorkeeper” who is “under solemn obligations to take care, that those they admit be duly qualified according to the rules of God’s word.” Yet Jacob leavened his tough stance with a touch of humility. “Gospel ministers,” he conceded, could “not pretend to discern the heart [of seekers], or determine who are internally gracious.” Instead, based on these interviews, Jacob admitted to the sacraments those persons “who make an understanding profession of faith, repentance, and new obedience, and whose behaviour and practice gives reason to think their profession is sincere.”³³

The tightening of standards created no fissures within the congregation. Quite the opposite. In his autobiography, Green observed that it was his Stoddardean “sentiments” of the 1740s allowing looser admission practices that were unpopular with most members. Implementing tougher standards did not result in any overt protests in Hanover or lead to Green’s ouster, noteworthy outcomes when contrasted with Edwards’s experience in Northampton. When he succeeded his grandfather as congregational pastor, Edwards continued Solomon Stoddard’s liberal (and popular) policies on admission to the church and the sacraments. But, like Green, Edwards was never comfortable with the looser standards, and after intense study he, too, concluded that such permissiveness was false and unbiblical. His decision to abandon the halfway covenant and end Stoddard’s standards caused an uproar in the church. The protests were so virulent that they contributed to Edwards’s dismissal as pastor in 1750.³⁴

Nothing like that occurred in Hanover. Instead, Green pressed on with the task of building a stronger Presbyterian faith. Presbyterianism was a growing force in Morris County in the prerevolutionary years, and the denomination’s strength radiated outward from Hanover. Up to the mid-1750s Hanover Township—a large territory that encompassed Whippany to the south and Dover to the north—had the only Presbyterian church in the area. As the old 1718 meetinghouse deteriorated and the Presbyterian population grew, the presbytery finally agreed in 1755 to build two more meetinghouses, one at Hanover Neck (Green’s home church) and one at Parsippany. Jacob also served as Parsippany’s minister until 1760, when the congregation got its own pastor. By 1775, the Presbyterians had nine congregations in Morris County, the vast majority in Hanover and Morris Townships. By comparison, six other faiths (Baptist, Quaker, Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, and German Reformed) had only one church in the county each. Thomas Bradbury Chandler’s Church of England had none.³⁵

Green’s contributions to Presbyterianism’s growth in Morris County were both intellectual (he worked out the Calvinistic doctrines that underlay the creation of a purer, stronger church in Hanover) and mundane (he began keeping records and introducing Presbyterian structures to the congregation). During these years, Green matured as a leader. Gone was the nervousness and indecisiveness from his first years on the job. He emerged from his theological studies convinced that he had to act, and his congregation was solidly behind him. It suffered from none of the New Light–Old Light splits that bedeviled other Presbyterian churches.

Ironically, this future champion of laymen’s rights shared the view of his New England compatriots that the minister was the undisputed leader of the congregation. In a Puritan world, the pastor was a highly respected person who was seen as a member of the local aristocracy. Green brought this mind-set with him to New Jersey, and he ruled the congregation for many years strongly, almost haughtily. When he tightened admission standards in the 1760s, he did so without getting the approval of the elders or the presbytery. Green interviewed candidates on his own and decided by himself whether someone should be admitted to the church or the sacraments. When Green concluded that the person was worthy of admission, he passed along his recommendation to the church.³⁶

Hanover, of course, was a Presbyterian church, and this meant that it placed limits on Green’s authority. When he arrived in 1745, Hanover already had deacons in place—but no elders. Green may have seen himself as the congregation’s undisputed leader, but he also well understood in these early years the strengths of the Presbyterian system. To lead effectively, the pastor needed allies among the laity. Without such support, Green could meet the same fate as his two predecessors. Jacob thus moved quickly to get elders in place. In June 1747, a few months after he was formally installed as Hanover’s pastor, five men were selected as elders. All were from leading families and possessed the stature and wealth to help Green lead; two (John Ball and Joseph Tuttle) were longtime deacons and thus the only officers when Jacob came to Hanover.³⁷

The Ball family was among the earliest arrivals to Hanover: Caleb migrated from Newark about 1710, bought land on Hanover Neck, and became a part owner of the forge known locally as the “Old Iron Works.” The Tuttles came later than the Balls but achieved greater prominence. Joseph Tuttle purchased land in Hanover in 1725 and added to it in 1734, when he bought 1,250 acres at Hanover Neck. As a wealthy landowner, Joseph became a county freeholder at Morris’s founding, and he worked with Green for years as deacon and elder. They were close enough that Green wrote the inscription on his gravestone when Tuttle died in 1789 at the ripe old age of ninety-one, with Green praising Tuttle’s leadership and “virtuous honor.” Joseph Kitchel came from a large landowning family in Hanover Neck, where the new meetinghouse was built, and the Kitchells held a variety of posts in the county. Joseph farmed part of a 1,075-acre tract that he and his brother John inherited from their father.³⁸

Besides relying on the help of the congregation’s elders and deacons, Green had two boards at his disposal—a parish board that assisted with the financial details of running a church, and a Presbyterian session of elders that handled discipline and “other matters of record,” according to its minutes. The parish board met periodically in the prewar years, but the session did not convene regularly until 1771, some six years after Jacob formally tightened admission standards to the church and the sacraments. For more than twenty years, in other words, Green pretty much acted alone in matters of church doctrine, although he likely consulted with the elders and had their support when he wanted to make changes.³⁹

The main concern of the parish board was replacing the decrepit meetinghouse. In 1754, the board selected a five-person committee, including elder Ephraim Price, Jr., to oversee the construction of an edifice just to the east of the 1718 meetinghouse on land donated by Henry Burnet. The committee was in charge of raising money, supervising construction, and handling a host of other mundane details, such as deciding what to do with salvageable parts from the 1718 meetinghouse (it voted to give Parsippany the pulpit, the seats from the gallery, and the windows and glass). Because money was so tight, building the replacement was no easy task. Construction dragged on for years, and the parish board struggled to complete the project.⁴⁰

In April 1758 it appointed a new four-person board to again try to raise enough money to finish the meetinghouse. Seven years later, the parish board gave the go-ahead to plaster the building. Two years later the church was still unfinished. Green was not pleased with the slow progress or with how the meetinghouse itself was shaping up. The money shortage meant that the congregation was relying on temporary seating and not pews; it also meant that the seating arrangements were haphazard. People sat wherever they wanted. In 1769, Green asked the board to reconfigure the church interior so that pews would replace the “common seats” in the west gallery and in an unfinished section. Jacob had several goals in mind when he made this proposal. Two were seemingly routine. The congregation would assign pews so that people would know where to sit, and it would charge rent, thus raising badly needed revenue for the church. But he also wanted to improve discipline and encourage piety within families: families would sit together in cordoned-off pews (thus promoting unity) and parents could better keep an eye on their children (thus promoting order). In taking this position Green was once again showing his traditional, even aristocratic mien. In New England and elsewhere, the renting of pews reinforced the traditional order of colonial society: the wealthy and the powerful sat in front, in the choicest seats; the less well-off sat in the back or the gallery. Church seating, as a result, reinforced society’s gradations, and it helped to maintain order. The elite led; followers followed. Jacob shared this view, and he saw pews as an important aid in building the kind of congregation he wanted. Green felt so strongly about the need for pews that he volunteered to pay for them himself—a startling offer since Green felt he was badly underpaid. The board accepted his offer, although it promised to reimburse him later.⁴¹

To aid his efforts to raise standards among members, Green donned the cloak of a teacher. It was a task he performed daily. Green preferred meeting with congregants in private meetings, where he posed questions to them “and [would] hear them answer . . . as they thought proper.” On other occasions Green encouraged members to submit questions to him, which he treated as an opportunity to deliver a lecture: “At these meetings I thought it proper to speak upon some things, and in a manner, that would not have been proper for the pulpit.” He also encouraged discussion among attendees. Green worked hard to establish a rapport with his membership. He made a point of visiting every single family early in his pastorship, devoting two days a week to this task: “When I came to the house, and the family was collected together, I first prayed with them; and then I began with the youngest, and so proceeded on till I came to the heads of the family—asking questions and discoursing, according to their several capacities.”⁴²

Prayer was an important part of these private meetings as well, and Green set aside at least one day a month for such sessions, “when my elders and I have, by turns, prayed and sung, &c. These days I have found useful in keeping up some sense of religion.” Green demanded a lot from his membership—and from himself. He understood that he led by example; as he put it, “I have been very sensible that my own personal religion was of great importance to myself, and to others.” He thus fasted at least once a month: “On these fasting days, I used to write my wants, or the things that I would, for each day, bear particularly on my mind before God.” He would then mediate on these wants and write out a series of resolutions.⁴³

One evangelical tool Green had little use for was the revival. This was somewhat surprising, given his support of the Great Awakening, his belief in evangelism, and his assertion in his 1770 tract that one way to end all the arguing over admission standards was to spark a revival of religion and create more qualified applicants for the church. Yet in the prewar years, Green led only three revivals: in 1756, 1764, and 1774, and most can be traced to personal causes. In 1756, Jacob’s first wife, Anna Strong, died, and to assuage his grief, Jacob threw himself into his work. “I was for a twelve-month after that event remarkably stirred up, quickened and engaged,” he explained. “I prayed and preached with an increased sense of divine things.” The impetus for the 1774 revival came from another unfortunate development: Green suffered an “apoplectic fit” (in the words of his son Ashbel) so serious that his family and congregation feared he would die. The crisis produced soul-searching within both Jacob and church members. Although seemingly close to death, Jacob retained “perfect possession of his intellectual faculties,” Ashbel said. He asked his eldest daughter to read from the gospel of John, which “produced in him a kind of holy rapture.” Meanwhile, when doctors warned that Jacob might not make it through the night, neighboring ministers and the Hanover congregation gathered to pray for his life. Their intercession, according to Ashbel, produced miraculous results: “The man who expected to be in eternity before morning—an expectation in which physicians as well as friends concurred—was in the morning, free from almost every threatening symptom of his disease.” A relieved Jacob turned the episode into a lesson on God’s goodness, and he pressed on with the revival. “In this sickness, I had remarkable views of divine things, and received uncommon tokens of favour from my people, who were then full of religion,” Jacob recalled.⁴⁴

But overall, this most serious of men was uncomfortable with the histrionics of the revival, and pressing outside obligations kept him from feeling the spirit. Instead, the sermon remained Green’s primary teaching tool and his preferred medium for bringing people to Christ. The sermon was the high point of the service, and it provided a forum for Green to inculcate religious and educational values to his parishioners. As his daybooks and sermon notes reveal, he put a tremendous amount of thought into the sermon. In a typical week, according to his diary, he delivered at least two of them—one on Sundays in Hanover, and one during the week at other Presbyterian churches in Morris County or at members’ houses. Often he gave a series of sermons on one theme that could last six weeks or more. Green wrote his weekly sermons on scraps of paper—some in Weston’s shorthand, others in partial sentences. These sermons were more than outlines, though. Throughout his forty-five-year career in the ministry, Jacob never possessed the confidence to speak extemporaneously as a George Whitefield would. Yet the meticulous preparation also reflected Jacob’s values. His approach was a hybrid between the latitudinarian and urbane sermons favored by many of his Harvard classmates such as Jonathan Mayhew, and the emotional and pietistic sermons of most Yale-trained pastors. His style, in other words, was closer to a Jonathan Edwards—studious, carefully prepared, well argued, but seeking to arouse an emotional response from the audience. Jacob carefully stated his thesis or argument based on the day’s biblical text (in fact, in his daybook, he stressed that the minister should select the text first and the discourse second), and he proceeded to defend it in clear, at times compelling prose, backing up his main points with everyday metaphors that his listeners could easily grasp.⁴⁵

Green was remarkably consistent in his message. He wanted to change people’s behavior and get them to reform their ways. For him, that was the key to bringing them into the invisible church. He had little use for millennial themes. Nor, unlike many evangelical preachers and itinerants (especially Methodists on the frontier), did he discuss his own trials: his struggles to achieve a rebirth and avoid backsliding remained private. Instead, out of the hundreds of sermons that he delivered in the prewar years, one theme predominated: the importance of moral responsibility and the need for sinners to recognize the imminent dangers. In 1768, in Morristown, Green took to the pulpit at the Presbyterian church there. He drew his inspiration from the gospel of John and John’s warnings about arrogance—“You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life,” with his main point coming from chapter 5, verse 40: “But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.” From that key line, Green delivered his sermon lesson, expounding on the threats from unregeneracy. “Unregenerate sinners,” he told his listeners, “are loath to believe that they are so bad, so wicked & blamable as they really are. They are willing to believe & at length do believe that they are not so very bad.” Jacob’s purpose in these sermons was to get people to understand the nature of sinning and the offensiveness of sinners’ behavior. “Light & happiness are to be obtained by coming to him or complying with the terms of salvation,” he told his listeners. In a line that reflected his views of an unregenerate’s spiritual inability, he added, “But sinners will not come, they are unwilling to comply.” They are, in other words, blind to the saving grace of Jesus Christ.⁴⁶

Green believed he was delivering an effective sermon if he acted as “an advocate for Virtue & Religion; to attain that improvement of Understanding, that purity of heart, dignity & even severity of Character.” And he could do that only if he spoke from the heart and with a deep knowledge of his subject. “The authority of the speaker does not arise from superior station; or power annexed to the office,” he noted in his daybook. “But it is of a more sacred kind, founded in superior wisdom & Virtue. An uncommon Eloquence gives a superiority over the Minds of Men: but wisdom seen & acknowledged gives a greater & stronger superiority than Eloquence can give.”⁴⁷

Week after week, he tried to get Presbyterians and other attendees to understand what was at stake. Hell awaited the unregenerate and “the fallen race of Adam.” Green constructed one such sermon around a passage from Mark 9:47–48: “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire.” From that text, Green delivered his stark warning. “Hell is a place with a real material Fire,” he explained. “Sinners will receive the greatest punishment they are capable of both in body & Soul.” The punishment was so severe that they faced something akin to torture—their bodies would “be kept alive in the midst of a burning fire.”⁴⁸

Heaven or hell? It was up to God. “You are in God’s hands,” Green declared in a 1769 sermon. He alone will determine when you die and whether you will receive a spiritual pardon. “Consider what poor brittle clay you are in the hand of an angry God. You are but as clay in the hand of him the potter who can make you the vessel of his wrath whenever he pleases. Your life . . . is in his hand.” God’s wrath, Green continued, “is very terrible; when he riseth up none can stand before him.”⁴⁹

Some of this language, especially references to an angry God, echoed Edwards’s teachings. Yet Green’s intent was more than to scare people. He also described the joys of heaven that awaited the elect. But upstanding Christian behavior was essential if someone was to demonstrate that she was among the saved. Many a sermon began by describing the dangers awaiting the sinner before segueing to the eternal rewards available to the repentant; the wrathful God was also a loving God. The 1769 sermon warning of God’s terrible vengeance concluded by urging people to open their hearts to him—“God is willing to be reconciled to you,” Green stated plainly. The Lord, he continued, “has endowed man with a rational & spiritual substances. . . . He has given us passion of love & hatred, hope & fear, joy & sorrow. . . . And all these things God has appointed to work to getting for our Good.” The happy conclusion: “God has told us if we are obedient all is glorious & perfection.”⁵⁰

Green’s weekly sermons thus softened Calvinism’s hard edges and appealed to the enlightened rationalist among his audience. Yes, God decided all, and, yes, hell awaited the unsaved, but there was much the good Christian could do to avoid such an awful fate. As Green explained in one sermon, “Mankind has Reason & Understanding & Understanding & Light . . . the Fall has not destroyed man’s Reason & Understanding . . . mankind are capable by these to know & discover the Faith respecting God & his Perfections as is clear from Roman 1:20–21”—a passage that emphasized “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen.”⁵¹

Subtle, Jacob Green’s views were not. The indecision of the late 1740s and early 1750s was gone, replaced by the 1760s by a clear, forceful expression of his religious beliefs.

The Loyalist Down the Road:

Thomas Bradbury Chandler, Anglican Convert

Unlike in the case of Jacob Green, there was little doubt that Thomas would attend college, and there was no need for him to wait on tables once he got there. He enrolled at Yale and, based on the Chandler pedigree, was ranked seventh in the incoming class of twenty-seven students. Like Jacob, Thomas was a natural student, becoming known at college for his piety and learning. Although Yale and Harvard had their peculiarities (Harvard was far more “liberal” and latitudinarian than was its Connecticut rival), Thomas’s course of study differed little from Jacob’s. Thomas studied the ancient languages, logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and all the other things a young gentleman needed to become a minister. He graduated from Yale in 1745, a year after Green left Cambridge.

He was nineteen.

Chandler thus knew at a far younger age than did Green that he wanted to be a minister, and he suffered from none of the insecurities that beset his Presbyterian counterpart. Chandler was raised a Congregationalist and hailed from a family with deep roots in the Puritan church. But Congregationalism was not a good fit for this fifth-generation Chandler. He studied theology under someone more congenial to his tastes and proclivities—Samuel Johnson, an Anglican and the future president of King’s College in New York City. Johnson and Chandler developed deep bonds of affection, with the former serving as Thomas’s mentor. (Thomas later wrote a reverential memoir of Johnson’s life.) Johnson, for his part, recognized how gifted Chandler was, praising him as “a truly valuable person, of good parts and competent learning . . . and of good morals and virtuous behavior.”

From Johnson, Thomas learned the ways of the king’s church. The Church of England was a state-established institution that had, following the reforms of King Henry VIII, become an arm of the government. The monarch was the church’s supreme earthly leader who appointed the bishops who ran the church. In Puritan New England, the state wanted each congregation to encourage people to turn to Jesus Christ. In England and its foreign domains, the state wanted its church to produce two things—good Christians and good citizens. It saw the two goals as complementary. Devout Christians attending church regularly would make for orderly, loyal subjects of the king. For the state, the church was to reinforce the government’s power, and the state was to reinforce the church’s power. Samuel Johnson was a good High Church Anglican who was wholeheartedly devoted to the Henrician legacy. He backed the state church and all that it stood for; in an age when Protestantism was expanding and roiled with factionalism, he was dismissive of dissenters, especially of the Puritan variety. Thomas recalled that his mentor had “an early dislike” of Congregationalism because it gave too much power to the people. Johnson found lay exhorters “ignorant” because they uttered “the most horrid expressions concerning God and religion.” He especially disliked Presbyterian Jonathan Dickinson, an early mentor of Jacob Green, because he was “a true zealot against the Church.”

Under Johnson’s guidance, Chandler converted to Anglicanism and was quickly identified as a rising star in the king’s American church. Within two years of leaving Yale, he watched the offers for his services pour in. In 1747, two churches asked him to serve as a catechist; instead, he accepted the advances of St. Peter’s Church in Westchester, New York. He did not remain there long. St. John’s Church in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, was so impressed with Chandler that it persuaded him to join it in December of that year, despite the fact that he remained too young to be ordained as a minister. Thus, as the winter days shortened and the afternoon shadows lengthened, Thomas Bradbury Chandler packed his bags and headed to East Jersey—dissenter country, bastion of Presbyterianism and Whig radicalism, and the home of that detested “zealot” Jonathan Dickinson and his protégé Jacob Green.⁵²