and composition methods to lived experience (and vice versa) further illustrates Puritan New England as a site of shared interpretive endeavors and common practice.
While the material-textual record clearly demonstrates practice—how sermon literature is received, recorded, disseminated, and applied—the theoretical premises beneath these practices remain difficult to explain satisfactorily. Understanding how the sermon was received, disseminated, and applied may simply be easier to explain than why sermons were preached in the first place. If redemption comes only through faith (sola fide) and through scripture (sola scriptura), then lengthy, repetitive, human explication might be redundant at best. If human reason is—along with the soul itself—fallen, then human language might produce only impaired explications of the divine Word. And so the knotty questions that lurk uncomfortably beneath every revelation of practice remain: What essentially is a sermon, and what kind of efficacy can its necessarily impaired, contingent language have in contrast to the coherent perfection of scripture?
The material conditions for sermon literature—from frequency and duration of preaching, to delivery conventions, to auditor practices, to the many variations of textual production by laity and clergy alike—are inextricably linked to textual meaning. Thanks in part to the obsessive self-scrutiny characteristic of Puritan piety, sermon literature leaves varied and instructive material traces, especially in the form of auditor notes and other fugitive, idiosyncratic textual records. Ultimately, the curious materiality of sermon literature reveals the theoretical and linguistic questions at stake. Put another way, the materiality of sermon literature returns us to central questions, not only about the pathology of the sermon (what made this tedious genre so popular?) but also to a set of questions to which the conscientious Puritan writer (or reader, or auditor) would not object. What did Puritans think language was? Specifically, what was the perceived relationship between human and divine language, and what did Puritans think they were doing when they composed a sermon (or heard, or read, or recorded one)? The questions are theoretical and linguistic, but the answers are drawn largely from the lived experience and material practices of sermon culture. Surely, the human endeavor of the minister alone does not constitute the soul-saving efficacy of the sermon. Theological principles, rhetorical dictates, stylistic practices, communal engagement, and the material circulation of preaching combine to determine meaning and relevance. The controlling logic of the sermon—along with its theological and linguistic premises—is created discursively across gathered communities and disseminated through the hybridity of print, oral, and manuscript practices.
In a common trope for pulpit eloquence, the minister is said to be merely a vessel. Two anecdotes about Thomas Hooker by Cotton Mather offer contrasting fantasies of the relationship between the divine Word and that human vessel. The first is typical of claims for the power of godly pulpit oratory generally:
A profane person, designing therein only an ungodly diversion and merriment, said unto his companions, “Come, let us go hear what that bawling Hooker will say to us;” and thereupon, with an intention to make sport, unto Chelmsford lecture they came. The man had not been long in the church, before the quick and powerful word of God, in the mouth of his faithful Hooker, pierced the soul of him; he came out with an awakened and a distressed soul, and by the further blessing of God upon Mr. Hooker’s ministry, he arrived unto a true conversion; for which cause he would not afterwards leave that blessed ministry, but went a thousand leagues to attend it and enjoy it.21
Variations on mundane Pauline conversions abound: Paul’s instantaneous, unambiguous conversion as narrated in Acts provides a model for the sudden and irresistible striking down of the sinful conscience, particularly when the impious, mischievous, or resistant soul is converted in the immediacy of the preached word. In one proverbial feature of the above anecdote, conversion creates further desire for good preaching as the newly converted soul is drawn to the minister, the style, and the doctrine that it once avoided and disdained. Such desire for preaching purportedly fueled not only much migration within England but increasingly to New England as well, especially as Archbishop Laud continued to silence nonconformist ministers. The anecdote also reveals a delicate balance that Mather must strike in his praise: Hooker’s preaching pierces the profane man’s soul, but more precisely, “the quick and powerful word of God, in the mouth of his faithful Hooker” does the real work of conversion. The profane man could be saved sola scriptura and sola fide, but he will likely not turn to the Bible, or consider it properly, or apply it correctly to his own precarious case, without provocation.
Technically speaking, the hard-line Calvinist position insisted that God’s grace alone could effectually save an individual. Nevertheless, it was also understood that individuals must seek “ordinary means” to salvation. Though not effectual in an absolute sense, such practices were considered necessary in the pursuit of faith.22 The ordinary means to redemption (regular attendance upon the preached word and the proper application of scripture explication) suggest an enabled partnership between the human activity of prophesying and the effectual truth of scripture. On the one hand, Protestantism fundamentally privileged the ordinary workings of salvation in the post-apostolic period, emphasizing preaching over the sacramental role of the minister, and English Puritan thought came to emphasize preached explication of scripture (sometimes, as critics such as Richard Hooker suggested, even over reading alone).23 New England ministers emphasized ordinary means as a spiritual-exegetical process with a penchant for sermon continua and prolonged explication of entire chapters and books. Sunday preaching tended to be pastoral in its goals, and Thursday lecture preaching focused more on theological concepts. Both kinds of preaching were part of ordinary means, and, ideally, the sense of explication as an ongoing process also made sermons applicable for auditors at any stage of spiritual development.24
The figures of spiritual “milk” and “meat” were often employed to distinguish between more elementary and more advanced spiritual lessons that might be gained from scriptural explication, such as Hugh Peters’s Milk for babes, and meat for men, or, Principles necessary, to bee known and learned of such as would know Christ here, or be known of him hereafter (London, 1630) and John Cotton’s much reprinted Spiritual milk for Boston babes in either England. Drawn out of the breasts of both testaments for their souls nourishment, but may be of like use to any children (Cambridge, Mass., 1656). Properly explicated, scripture could yield both easier and more difficult theological concepts, and depending on an individual’s spiritual-intellectual savvy, either “milk” or “meat” might be more appropriate and (to continue the seventeenth-century simile) spiritually nourishing. As one young notetaker puts the concept in what is probably a stock verse on the principle:
Noe age so young noe witt so small
which scriptur doth not fitt
Ther is milke for babes & yett witthall
Ther is meatt for stronger witt25
All auditors, however, no matter what stage of spiritual renewal, were necessarily dependent upon some accommodation for their naturally depraved intellect. In his study of the interaction between clergy and laity in their common pursuit of effectual salvation, Charles Lloyd Cohen privileges what he calls “original debility”—the broad implications of the premise of original sin, innate depravity, and postlapsarian limits to human understanding.26 Whereas Cohen emphasizes the psychological implications of the theological principle, the premise of debility lies beneath Puritan attitudes toward language and, by extension, scripture itself. Even a redeemed soul with enabled capacity to understand would continue to be impaired to some degree. Sermons and sermon literature seem always to acknowledge the limits of even the most enabled debility.
Moreover, the lived experience of conversion usually proves to be less dramatic than Mather’s preferred anecdotes suggest, even when attributed to a particularly powerful pulpit experience. As Patricia Caldwell points out, most of the “Cambridge confessions,” which constitute a majority of extant conversion narratives, significantly highlight disappointment
