of literal sense, plain style, and the self-authenticating revelation of the Word.
The complicated status of scripture is not a problem that begins with the Puritans. Perkins was simply continuing the objections raised by Tyndale and other early Reformers against what they saw as the corruption of the scriptural integrity by the human interference of fourfold exegesis. The hermeneutics of the fourfold method may have developed into full scholastic elaboration over centuries, but its roots were planted firmly in the writings of Origen, Augustine, and others who were revered by Protestant Reformers as “primitive” church fathers. Recognizing what Augustine called the “dark places” in scripture, Origen categorized and promoted figurative readings of problematic passages that had already been in use for generations. Determining whether the literal meaning of a particular passage was governed by common sense served as the primary litmus test for determining if figurative interpretation was warranted. For Jesus to point to a piece of bread and call it his body, for example, was absurd if taken literally, as were competing verses that placed Christ both on earth and in heaven. In such cases, a more flexible understanding of the letter of the scripture was required. Throughout the history of the Christian church, simple flexibility in textual reading has been insufficient to stave off violent controversy. The surface absurdity of bread as body, to use the same example, has produced not merely competing interpretations but competing claims for orthodoxy and charges of heresy, as well.
According to Mather, Hooker advised young ministers to undertake a long, systematic development of their exegetical prowess, recommending that “at their entrance on their ministry, they would with careful study preach over the whole body of divinity methodically, (even in the Amesian method,) which would acquaint them with all the more intelligible and agreeable texts of Scripture, and prepare them for a further acquaintance with the more difficult, and furnish them with abilities to preach on whole chapters, and all occasional subjects, which by the providence of God they might be directed unto.”50 Hooker’s suggestion that this initial preaching cycle might be “even in the Amesian method” (an exceptionally plain and very “use”-oriented style) indicates a gradation of levels of sophistication attainable in the Puritan pulpit. The “Amesian method” here seems to stand for the essential principles required in Puritan preaching but is also aimed at revealing “the more intelligible texts of Scripture.”51 The young minister, in Hooker’s scenario, is something like a journeyman, independent of his apprenticeship but not yet ready to be master. Hooker’s advice to the young minister essentially serves as a confession that literalness and absolute clarity presumed under sola scriptura are more complicated than it would first appear. If a less trained minister might be advised not to preach on “dark places,” how much darker might the same places be to an untrained reader of scripture? God—or, more specifically, the spirit of the Holy Ghost—might inspire any reader to perfect comprehension, but the ordinary means to correct reading seem to involve quite a bit of human learning.52
Perkins continues another long tradition by suggesting a specific syllabus of biblical reading by which the human reader might become enabled to understand more clearly the difficult places in scripture. He instructs the would-be minister to “proceede to the reading of the Scriptures in this order”: “Vsing a grammaticall, rhetoricall, and logicall analysis, and the helpe of the rest of the arts, reade firste the Epistle of Paul to the Rom. after that the Gospell of Iohn (as being indeed the keyes of the new Testament) and then the other books of the new Testam[en]t will be more easie when they are read. When all this is done, learne first the dogmaticall bookes of the old Testament, especiallie the Psalmes: then the Proheticall, especially Esay [Isaiah]: Lastly the historicall, but chieflie Genesis.”53 Moving roughly backward through the Protestant canon, the syllabus of essential readings suggests that the fullness of revelation requires the enlightened reader to read back and forth and not simply through scripture. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the Gospel of John work as more than lenses through which the Old Testament books can be read as precursors to New Testament revelations. According to Perkins, the “manner of perswading” is that the elect reader, affected by the presence of the Holy Spirit, discerns, approves, and believes “the voyce of Christ speaking in the scriptures” and is finally “(as it were) sealed with the seale of the Spirit.”54 Perkins qualifies the mysticism of the reading experience with his cautious parenthetical aside that the seal of the spirit intervenes “as it were,” deferring the question of what exactly happens when the human reader encounters scripture. The reader who encounters Psalms, Isaiah, and Genesis after Romans and John is, in some real way, different from the reader who takes the same five books in canonical (and purportedly chronological) order. Reading in such a scenario is experiential as much as it is intellectual, simultaneously an act of reception, interpretation, and arrangement. Reading and hearing scripture require deep intertextual engagement.
Perkins’s sense of how to open the literal sense of scripture and his sense of reading from Romans back into Genesis suggest a deep commitment to a kind of textual fluidity of revealed Word. Most concretely, this fluidity can be seen in the long sections of The Arte of Prophecying in which Perkins shows how disparate pieces of scripture can be understood in relation to one another. This process of “collation” is in part practical, allowing ministers to reconcile seemingly contradictory passages, to connect different historical (or “literal” moments), and, above all, to demonstrate the divine coherence of the biblical canon. As Gordis has pointed out, collation as a primary technique of sermon composition premised the self-interpretive capacity of scripture while, in practice, the method often pulled passages out of immediate context and made room for the ingress of human invention. Accordingly, “Collation tends to open exegesis outward, provoking disgressive discussions of the collated texts.”55 The traces of preached collation may be seen most readily in sermons (in print, full manuscript, and notes) in the form of concatenations of scriptural citations that punctuate prose blocks and margins. The deep intertextual logic of collation transcends sermon composition, however, revealing itself in all forms of sermon literature. Puritan writers (perhaps especially the lay writers) become adept at collating scriptural texts with biographical incident, contributing to the generic fluidity of sermon literature. We might call this a kind of lived collation. Nor are writers the only ones practicing acts of collation. In the very keeping of notebooks and circulation of manuscripts, auditors control and collate their sermon experience. Collation opens up not only textual but material means by which the controlling logic of the sermon disseminates across community, genre, and experience.
The archive is filled with curious examples of intertextual engagement through scriptural explication that complicate simple notions of authorship, readership, and the plain style, often in the form of notes, annotations, and other manuscript genres. The very idiosyncrasy of these material-textual artifacts can be particularly instructive, as divergent instances help us to plot out a kind of topography of possible variations of common practice. Unusual examples of lay notetaking, for example, help delineate typical auditing habits while simultaneously contesting the notion of normative practice. One example of a manuscript artifact that challenges the stability of authorship and genre in New England sermon literature can be seen in a curious handmade book by the otherwise unknown John Templestone. In the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society, his handmade book of folded paper bears a handwritten title page that proclaims himself as owner and creator (John Templestone) and a date (February 14th, 1687) that probably indicates either the inception or the completion of the volume.56 A hand-drawn border surrounds the text:
In fact, this title page is just one of several in the little book. (See figures 1–3.) The core of Templestone’s handmade volume is a manuscript copy of part of an execution sermon—originally preached by Joshua Moodey in March 1686 for the execution of James Morgan. On the pages before and after a handwritten copy of Moodey’s sermon excerpt is a careful transcription of notes on a sermon delivered by John Cotton Jr. in November 1687 on a text from Hebrews
