Tethering a Beast: Law and Liberty in Puritan Theology

Freedom and order: how shall they be balanced? This is the central problem of political science. It may take several forms. How do we balance the demands of law and the need of liberty? the freedom of the individual and the need for order and cohesion in society? How do we uphold the power of the magistrate to enforce the law and at the same time protect the citizens from the abuse of that power?

Every theory and form of government is an answer to that central problem. The American answer goes back to the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, who struggled with it both in theory and in practice. The answer they gave to the problem of law and liberty, freedom and order, was a unique one. It grew out of their theology and theological world view, and they applied it in their society in very practical ways.

The struggle between what Oscar Handlin has called the “demands of authority and the permissiveness of freedom” began early in Massachusetts Bay. John Winthrop reminded the emigrants on board the Arbella even before they got to America that the interests of the colony would have to be paramount:

The work we have in hand is by mutual consent with a special overruling Providence, with a more than ordinary mandate from the churches of Christ to seek out a place to live and associate under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. In such cases as this the care of the public must hold sway over all private interests. To this not only conscience but mere civil policy binds us, for it is a true rule that private estates cannot exist to the detriment of the public [“A Mode of Christian Charity,” The Annals of America, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968, I 113].

The charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company provided for a governor and assistants to be elected by the company “freemen,” or stockholders; but when the Puritans got to America, they began to modify this system of government. First they granted freemanship not just to shareholders in the company but also to all men who were members of some church within the colony. Next, they allowed the freemen to have representatives, or deputies, who could confer with the governor and his assistants on matters of taxation. They also allowed these deputies (rather than the assistants) to elect the governor and deputy governor.

Then in 1634 the deputies demanded legislative power, basing their claim on the wording rather than the meaning of the original charter. The dispute between the deputies and the assistants over legislative power went back to a kind of running debate between John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley over what we might call “substantive justice.” Winthrop believed that in its early years a colony should be ruled with leniency and liberality. Justice should be done, but governors should be more informal and discretionary than formal and inflexible, as Dudley insisted.

But the deputies feared Winthrop’s concept of discretionary power, not because he misused it but because it could be misused. Their experiences in England had taught them that. They were now demanding a full body of legislation drawn up by themselves as a protection against a discretionary government that could become arbitrary. To protect their liberties, they wanted a rule of law rather than a rule of man or men.

The result was a change in the government. The freemen would elect deputies to represent them in a legislative body. This body would serve along with the governor and the assistants, who functioned as judges or magistrates. The magistrates were given a veto over the deputies as a check and balance to the deputies’ democratic tendencies. In 1641 a document called the “Body of Liberties” was completed; this gave the people, in the words of Nathaniel Ward, who drew it up, “their proper and lawful liberties.”

But then in 1645 the long-running disagreement flared up again. A disputed election in the town of Hingham came before the magistrates for settlement. Winthrop, then deputy governor but acting as a magistrate (judge), ordered the faction led by the Reverend Peter Hobart to appear at court. When they refused, he committed them for contempt. The Hobart faction then petitioned the deputies to consider Winthrop’s charges against them and their charge that the magistrates had acted without authority in imprisoning them. The case eventually was heard by the magistrates.

Winthrop was acquitted of the charges brought against him by the Hobart faction. After the case was settled, he asked permission to address the court, and his speech on that occasion has been called the classic expression of Puritan political theory. Of authority, he said:

It is yourselves who have called us to this office, and being called by you, we have our authority from God, in way of an ordinance, such as hath the image of God eminently stamped upon it, the contempt and violation whereof hath been vindicated with examples of divine vengeance.

The authority of the magistrate is from God, even though it is the people who decide who the magistrates shall be. Therefore contempt or violation of that authority is a very serious matter, both for the rulers and for the ruled. The ruled are always to remember that the magistrates are “men subject to like passions as you are” and therefore, “when you see infirmities in us, you should reflect upon your own, and that would make you bear the more with us.” The magistrate is responsible to uphold his covenant with his people. As long as he is faithful to that covenant and is of a good, not an evil, will, the people are to bear with him even in his error.

On the matter of liberty, Winthrop called attention to “a great mistake in the country”:

[There is] a two-fold liberty, natural (I mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures.… It is liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority. The exercise and maintaining this liberty makes men grow more evil and in time to be worse than brute beasts.… This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it.

The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the political covenants and constitutions among men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.… This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority, it is the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.…

Even so, Brethren, it will be between you and your magistrates. If you stand for your natural corrupt liberties and will to do what is good in your own eyes you will not endure the least weight of authority, but will murmur and oppose, and be always striving to shake off that yoke; but if you will be satisfied to enjoy the civil and lawful liberties such as Christ allows you, then will you quietly and cheerfully submit unto that authority which is set over you, in all administration of it, for your good [quoted in C. Gregg Singer, A Theological Interpretation of American History, Presbyterian and Reformed, p. 17; paragraphing added].

Here Winthrop makes it clear that human beings must choose between the two kinds of freedom, “natural” and “moral.” Natural freedom, as Winthrop explains it, is an autonomous freedom that rejects any limitation or restraint or authority outside itself. It is a freedom similar to that enjoyed by any of the “beasts and other creatures,” grounded in nature, natural law and rights, and free to do evil as well as good.

Moral freedom, by contrast, is a freedom within limits and under authority. It is a liberty to do “that only which is good, just, and honest” and cannot exist apart from authority. Such liberty is a gift of God given in his covenant with his people. In short, moral freedom is liberty under law whereas natural freedom is a liberty from law.

The significance of Winthrop’s speech lay not only in what he said but also in its relation to the background situation. The deputies, in opposition to the magistrates, had demanded a written, formal law. They had even tried a magistrate under that law. Now Winthrop was warning them of a danger in the other direction. If the answer to the problem of authority in the colony was not an unlimited and discretionary or arbitrary power in the magistrate (as the deputies had argued against Winthrop), neither was the answer an autonomous or unlimited view of liberty (as Winthrop was cautioning the deputies). The truly free society must avoid both extremes in order to preserve its liberty.

But how could this be done? How could the colony make sure that moral liberty would be chosen over autonomous liberty? John Winthrop reminded the court that those who insisted upon their “natural corrupt liberties” would not maintain civil liberty because they would “murmur, and oppose, and be always striving to shake off” the “least weight of authority.” Liberty would be sacrificed along wth order. It was in tackling this problem that the Puritans gave their unique answer to the problem of freedom and order.

The Puritans believed there were several dangers to their freedom. The first was man’s desire for autonomy. Man was a sinner and in rebellion toward God and wanted to put himself above God:

Now by sin we justle the law out of its place, and the Lord out of his Glorious Sovereignty, pluck the Crown from his head, and the Scepter out of his hand, and we say and profess by our practice, there is not authority and power there to govern, nor wisdom to guide, nor good to content me, but I will be swayed by my own will and led by mine own deluded reason and satisfied with my own lusts. This is the guise of every graceless heart in the commission of sin [Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson, editors, The Puritans, Harper & Row, 1963 (rev. ed.), I, 294].

A similar danger was that man seeks a visible unity. John Cotton preached against this in his sermons on Revelation 13, in which he taught that the beasts of that chapter were, according to R. J. Rushdoony, “a visible world state and a visible world church.” Says Rushdoony:

The New England Way, as Cotton so clearly stated it, was anti-universalist.… No institution or order … could … claim to embody within itself the unity and plurality of life. Such catholicity and universality was transcendental and reserved to the triune God alone [This Independent Republic, Craig, 1964, p. 100].

A third danger to freedom was the increase and misuse of power. Cotton was one of the most outspoken on this point, demanding “that all power that is on earth be limited.” Man, as a creature of God (and a fallen one at that), is subject to limitation, including limited power and limited liberty. Sinful men, however, would attempt to destroy those limits. “If you tether a beast at night,” he said, “he knows the length of his tether before morning.”

The Puritans’ answer to the problem of freedom and order grew naturally out of their ideas on liberty and the nature of man coupled with their concept of the covenant under God. To the Puritan, every part of life involved a covenant or some kind of covenant activity. There were three basic covenants, the personal covenant of grace, the civil or social covenant, and the church covenant. Of these, the personal covenant of grace was the most important since it was the covenant by means of which man was saved and made a covenant-keeper rather than a covenant-breaker. It was basic to all the other covenants, which included family, calling, ministry, magistracy, church, state, school, or anything else. The Holy Commonwealth was just that: a union of limited, separate powers, or spheres of covenant activity, united under the triune God to his glory.

Later writers, especially Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), Herman Dooyeweerd, Rousas Rushdoony, and Francis Schaeffer, have used the term “law spheres” to describe the Puritan solution. The spheres are both independent and interdependent. Each has its own laws and prerogatives and limitations, but no sphere is sovereign: each is only one aspect of the whole creation. Church and state, for instance, both contribute to the preservation of the Holy Comonwealth, but neither was to trespass on the other, though each had an obligation to rule its spheres according to the Word of God.

The spheres were not only to have limits to their power but were to check and balance one another. Cotton in his exposition of Revelation 13 urged that “every man … be studious of the bounds which the Lord hath set.…” If the boundaries are properly drawn, Cotton continued, giving neither too much power nor too little, they need not be imposing: though they are but banks of sand, they will contain the sea if they are in the right place.

In this way, by instituting a pluralistic principle in his society, the Puritan could have both freedom and order. The law spheres found their resolution and reconciliation in the triune God. Man could experience the spheres as unity but he could not unite them. There is no sovereign sphere, no autonomous man, no final authority on earth. Only God is sovereign and only his Law-Word is absolute.

The Puritan solution to the problem of freedom and order has left its mark on the United States. The concept of fundamental and higher law resulted in American Constitutionalism; the restriction of ultimate sovereignty to God and the diffusion and limitation of power is mirrored in the separation of powers and checks and balances of the Constitution, as well as in the whole concept of American federalism.

In the Puritan view, law and liberty were not in contradiction, and human government was neither unlimited nor absolute. By dividing and separating the powers of government and by limiting the spheres of authority and placing them in opposition to one another, the Puritans minimized the effects or error and the chances of usurpation by sinful men. At the same time they provided a way for united action and harmonious cooperation among men of good will. Not only did they find a way to tether the beast; they also grounded it in the triune God, who gave the parts their proportion and perfection. We know by its fruits that their political application of Christian truth was a sound one.

ALL THESE BREADS

all these breads—

matzo, rye,

tortillas, soft indian disks,

unbleached wheat—

broken, torn, snapped, crumbs

floating down from soft loaves

or popping up from the sheets

of perforated matzo—

these many grains

grown in red soils, black loam,

grey or yellow clay,

roots of wheat and oats

and barley and rye

probing dirt & rain,

the slender, parallel-veind leaves

arching in sun or lying

straightend in a strong wind—

crusht, ground, rolld, sifted

at last becoming

all these breads—

one diverse loaf passing

from hand to hand,

dying into each mouth,

sprouting a new

& shining grain

EUGENE WARREN

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