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
