Too Much Spirituality?

Last updated on: October 30, 2019 at 12:01 am by Scot McKnight

Too Much Spirituality? 2019-10-28T06:47:24-05:00 Scot McKnight

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By Ruth Tucker, drawing from her book The Parade of Faith

Can a Christian be too spiritual? Puritan preacher Cotton Mather (1663-1728) is a fascinating case study on that issue—as well as many others. Did he place too much emphasis on spirituality and spiritualizing daily life? It was his practice to meditate on every mundane activity of the day. Washing before bedtime, for example, reminded him of the washing of regeneration; rising from bed in the morning reminded him of the Resurrection; feeding chickens, of God’s provisions. Indeed, he turned this kind of spiritualizing into an art form. Every event in life, no matter how inconsequential, was ripe for a spiritual analogy.

I remember a pastor of our little country church who would stop by our farm to visit. Virtually everything he said related to spiritual matters. My mother avoided him like the plague. When she saw his car drive in the yard, she would shoo me outside to talk with him and put him off for another day. She would have done that with Mather as well. In fact, he was not a popular individual around town. He had a one-track mind: the spiritual well-being of the soul. But isn’t that a good quality—and a biblical injunction?

His form of spirituality also took a turn toward self-analysis and self-condemnation. As one of the most prodigious diarists of the era, his personal struggles are recorded for posterity. In the 1690s, we find him reflecting on the “manifold filthiness of my heart and life, and the horrible aggravations of that filthiness.” When his uncle, the minister of the Plymouth congregation was driven from his pulpit for “fornication,” he was very fearful that God’s judgment might also light on him for similar sins. At fifty-seven, he was still lamenting his “former pollutions.”

Cotton Mather, for my money, is the most interesting of the New England Puritan founding fathers. The son of Increase Mather and grandson of Richard, he brought up the rear of the Mather dynasty. Also, the grandson of John Cotton. No question, he had big shoes to fill. The expectations were high, and as such he was learning Latin and Greek as a toddler and soon thereafter trained in the spiritual disciplines: prayer, fasting, and daily Bible reading. Twice a year his mother read the entire Bible to the children. He enrolled at Harvard at twelve, graduated at fifteen.

His first job was at Old North Church, assistant pastor to his father who was also president of Harvard. Then in his late twenties he stepped out of dad’s shadow and became a critical player in the 1692 Salem witchcraft frenzy. Now in addition to his own filthiness and pollutions, he was fighting Satan’s agents in the form of witches. Indeed, “An Army of Devills is horribly broke in upon the place,” turning the Bay colony into a “devil’s den.” Not only witches but “grievous wolves” in the form of Quakers. This was at a time when native guerillas and French artillery, as well as deadly disease, house fires and bitter winters claimed the lives of large numbers of pious Puritans. They had enough to worry about. It was a time when this brilliant young preacher could have used his influence to calm the colony of its witch and Quaker fears. He did not.

His father’s reaction was measured: “I would rather judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch.” Son Cotton, however, almost seemed to revel in his role as the leading expert on witchcraft. Although he advised “exquisite caution,” he turned around and endorsed a “speedy and vigorous prosecution.”

So, during that short New England summer, two dogs, six men, and fourteen women were executed as witches. Less well known is that some two hundred terrified individuals were accused and charged with secondary involvement, including a little five-year-old girl. What had seemed like an almost circus atmosphere that summer quickly turned into an angry autumn dirge leading to remorse, apologies, and finger-pointing—a wagon load of the blame placed squarely Mather. Historians have disputed his role ever since, though few would deny his credulity and his fanning the flames. In his Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), he quoted testimony of the court trials and sought to present himself as little more than an observer.

Some years before the Salem frenzy, Mather had married Abigail, a “Lovely consort,” who bore nine children before she succumbed. “I have never yet seen such a black day in all my pilgrimage,” he lamented in his diary. “Hardly had the bell tolled for Abigail, however, when the widowed minister became the most eligible bachelor in town,” I write in Parade of Faith. “Marrying a minister was upward mobility in Puritan social circles.” So it was that Prudence Prynne, a young floozy, stepped up to the plate and declared her love for him barely two months after Abigail’s death.

She wrote him a letter, requesting an interview—a bold move. “Her reputation has been under some Disadvantage,” Mather confided in his diary. “She has gott a bad Name among the Generality of the People.” But he couldn’t resist her. He welcomed her visits, while neighbors peeked from behind wood piles. Though smitten, he sacrificed for Jesus. “I sett myself to make unto the Lord Jesus Christ, a Sacrifice of a Person, who, for many charming Accomplishments, has not many equals in the English America,” he plaintively wrote. “I struck my Knife into the Heart of my Sacrifice by a Letter to her mother.”

But Prudence was not so easily dissuaded. In fact, she spread the word that Mather had reneged on a promise—a most serious offense among Puritans. In fact, she and her mother brought their case to his father. But before the matter could be settled, Prudence learned that Mather was courting Elizabeth, a young widow. Prudence, he wrote, threatened “that she will be a Thorn in my Side, and contrive all possible Wayes to vex me, affront me, disgrace me, in my Attempting a Return to the married state with another Gentlewoman.” He married Elizabeth eight months after Abigail’s death.

Elizabeth gave birth to six more Mather children, though only two survived infancy. After she died in 1713, he was determined to remain single, praying for “purity in the widowhood.” Soon, however, lamenting his single state, he married the much younger Lydia George, widowed six months earlier. Convinced she was the love of his life, he quickly found her to be unstable, sometimes leaving home for long periods of time. (Her side of the story might be interesting.) Only six of his fifteen children survived to adulthood, two of whom outlived him.

How do we assess Mather, particularly on spiritual matters and his relationship with God. Impossible. But he was in many ways an open book: his analogies, his confessions of personal sins, his take on the “Devill,” and his take on God. Indeed, when his daughter Nanny was severely burned from falling into the fire, instead of confessing his own neglect, he wrote: “Alas, for my sins the just God throws my child into the fire.” On another occasion daughter Nibby was left home alone and would have burned to death if there hadn’t been “a person then accidentally passing by the window.” Again, he does now see his own neglect as part of the equation. And if God were in the business of throwing people into a fire, why not Mather himself?

After a brief illness Mather died at sixty-five, having outlived his father by five years and having served at Old North church for more than four decades. A brilliant scholar, he knew eight languages, including the very difficult Algonquin tongue. He left behind a mixed reputation as well as some four hundred published papers and books in such diverse fields as science, history, biography, poetry, fiction, family relationships, theology, sermons, diaries and devotional material. He kept up to date on the latest discoveries in science and medicine, often illustrating his sermons with such examples. Indeed, he was widely heralded for his brilliance and was elected to the prestigious Royal Society of London, a great honor for a backwoods colonist.

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