John Cotton Reconsidered: Law and Grace in Two Worlds

Abstract

Scholarly accounts of John Cotton's pre-migration divinity focus upon its legalism. Cotton's Old-World voice speaks with the law-mindedness of the ‘precisianist’ and the ‘experimental predestinarian’. Cotton, moreover, is said to have made a ‘radical change’ when, in Massachusetts, he renounced the law's ‘power’. Legalist therein becomes solifidian. Such a view fails to account for the very particular nature of Cotton's Old-World evocations of the moral law. Cotton was a diffident legalist in old Boston. A flirtation with the covenant of works momentarily roused the power of the moral law, but this was atypical of Cotton's English divinity. It was in Massachusetts that Cotton made bold pastoral use of the law's power. And, with this, he coupled a theological revision that cut through the roots of Old-World piety: placing unusual stress on the passivity of faith, he rejected the ‘evidentiary’ value of the Puritan holy walk.