Authors: Eve LaPlante
In the ensuing lengthy debate, Hutchinson’s question was not answered. Cotton, however, invited his “brother” Shepard to “give God glory and speak.” The Reverend Shepard recalled visiting Hutchinson three times during her incarceration. The first time, he questioned her about “some speeches she used in the court.” The second time, he said, “I came not to entrap her. But, seeing the fluentness of her tongue and her willingness to open herself and to divulge her opinions and to sow her seed in us that are but strangers to her,” he recorded her words. He explained, “I account her a very dangerous woman, to sow her corrupt opinions to the infection of many.” At his third visit, “I told her I came to reduce her from her errors and to bear witness against them. Therefore, I do marvel that she will say we bring it into public before I dealt with her in private.”
“I did
not
hold diverse of these things I am accused of,” Hutchinson said, “but did only ask a question.”
Shepard warned, “The vilest errors that ever were brought into the church were brought by way of questions!”
“Brother, we consent with you,” Cotton assured him. “Therefore, sister Hutchinson, it will be most satisfactory to the congregation for you to answer to the things as they are objected against you in order.”
“I desire they may be read,” she said, and so Cotton now read the list that Leverett had already read. At least an hour passed. A lengthy discussion of mortalism followed. After Cotton read this error—“The souls of all men by nature are mortal and die like beasts”—he corrected it by saying, “The spirit ascends upwards, so [as in] Ecclesiastes 12:7,” which reads, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” He added, “The soul of man is immortal.”
“Every man consists of soul and body,” she replied, almost as though they were alone in his parlor, discussing Scripture, as they often had. “Now, ‘Adam dies not, except his soul and body die.’ And in Hebrews 4 the word [spirit] is lively in operation, and divides between soul and spirit: so then the spirit that God gives man, returned to God indeed, but the soul dies, and that is the spirit Ecclesiastes speaks of, and not of the soul. Luke 19:10.” For each chapter and verse citation, Hutchinson and Cotton both knew the exact scriptural words. Some in the meetinghouse were not so skilled, and many did not follow their meaning. John Winthrop himself had admitted in his journal less than a year before that these doctrinal errors were so murky as to be understood by hardly anyone: “No man could tell (except some few, who knew the bottom of the matter) where any difference was” between the theological arguments.
Cotton said to Hutchinson, “If you hold that Adam’s soul and body dies and was not redeemed or restored by Christ Jesus, it will overthrow our redemption,” adding, “1 Corinthians 6, end of the chapter.”
“I acknowledge I am redeemed from my vain conversation and other redemptions,” she replied, “but it is nowhere said that he came to redeem the seed of Adam—”
The Reverend Wilson interrupted their dialogue. “I desire that you would seriously consider of 1 Corinthians 6, at the end, ‘the spirit of God needs no redemption.’”
“I speak not of God’s spirit now,” Hutchinson said. “My main scruple [concern] is how a thing that is immortally miserable, [the corporeal body], can be immortally happy,” or eternally saved.
“He that makes miserable can make us happy,” the inscrutable Cotton replied.
“I desire to hear God speak this and not man,” Hutchinson retorted. “Show me where there is any Scripture to prove it that speaks so!”
Ten minutes into their dialogue, Hutchinson queried Cotton in a familiar manner. “Do you think man’s natural life is gone into heaven, and that we shall go into heaven with our natural life?” She was suggesting that the physical body is not resurrected—a natural corollary to the Reformed belief, accepted by all present, that the Lord’s Supper is not the actual body of Christ but its spiritual presence.
“Sister, do not shut your eyes against the truth,” Cotton said reprovingly. “All these places [in Scripture] prove that the soul is immortal.”
“The spirit is immortal, indeed, but prove that the soul is,” she challenged him. “For that place in Matthew which you bring of, ‘casting the soul into hell’ is meant of the spirit.”
“These are principles of our Christian faith,” he answered ominously, “and
not
[to be] denied.”
Hutchinson was trying to find words for concepts that cannot be clearly defined. As she knew from her study of Scripture, these matters could not finally be fixed or classified. What is the nature of the soul? How does God choose those whom he elects? How do they know they are saved? For her, unlike for her judges, truth was fluctuating. In reading Scripture, she could approach God’s meaning more closely than before but never attain complete comprehension of his word. But to the ministers, who wished to fix the truth as defined by God and Jesus Christ, her shifts and alterations were both maddening and suspect. The literary scholar Lad Tobin attributes this difference to gender: “Because the [male] elders saw God in the Law and in the Word, their root metaphors focused on maintaining the covenant and on the idea of the commonwealth as a family; because Hutchinson saw God in the spirit and in inspiration, her root metaphors focused on an individual’s intimate relationship with Christ, the indwelling spirit. In Hutchinson’s language,” Tobin added, “we see (and the elders heard) a consistent emphasis on intimacy, inspiration, and moments of light.” Moreover, she questioned whether anyone can “interpret with absolute certainty individual passages of Scripture.” Unlike her judges, she suggested that words do not have set meanings, that there is a gap between speaker and listener, and that human understanding always “falls short of absolute truth.”
“The sum of her opinion,” John Cotton concluded in the meetinghouse of Boston, “is that the souls of men by creation are no other or
better than the souls of beasts, which die and are mortal, but are made immortal by the redemption of Christ Jesus, to which hath been answered that the soul
is
immortal by creation, and the souls of the wicked [are] cast into Hell forever, and the souls of the godly are kept in a blameless frame unto immortal glory.”
Sensing Cotton’s impatience, Leverett asked if the Boston congregation was prepared to vote on this error. Anne’s son-in-law Thomas Savage stood up to request more time for the parties to come to agreement regarding this error. He and many present recalled that Governor Winthrop had invoked the church’s unanimity rule eighteen months before to forestall the appointment of John Wheelwright as the second teacher of this church. This rule, which was not applied uniformly, stated that the church not act without the consent of every member. Seeing that the whole “church is not accused of this opinion, but one party,” Savage asked that “the church may have time first to consider of it.” Savage, a twenty-nine-year-old merchant, had been born in Somerset, England, sailed from London to Boston in the spring of 1635, been admitted to this church the following January, made a freeman that April, and married Anne’s daughter Faith in 1637.
The Reverend Wilson tried to counter Savage by raising the ancient Israelites’ response to blasphemy: “They did rend their garments and tear the hair of their heads in sign of loathing! And if
we
deny the resurrection of the body, then let us turn epicures: Let us eat and drink and do anything, for tomorrow we shall die.” Referring to the prophet Elijah’s defeat of Queen Jezebel, Wilson cried, “And when all the priests of Baal pleaded for Baal, and Elijah
proved
the Lord to be God, if anyone had a scruple and was not satisfied but [believed] Baal was still God, should one man’s scruple hinder all the rest of the congregation [from crying] out that the Lord is God! The Lord is God! And the Lord
only
is the Lord!”
Governor Winthrop joined his longtime ally. “The whole congregation but one brother”—Thomas Savage—“is sufficiently satisfied with what hath been already spoken to this point to be sufficient. Therefore, let us proceed to the next.”
The Reverend Cotton looked at Hutchinson’s son-in-law Savage and said, “We are
not
to hear what natural affection will say. For we are to forsake father and mother, wife and children for Christ Jesus.
1 Corinthians 5:12.” He questioned the Hutchinsons’ catechism: “I am sorry to hear
any
of our brethren to be so brought up that they should not hear of the immortality of the soul.”
The Reverend Wilson raised the controversy over the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. “I look at this opinion to be dangerous and damnable,” he cried, flushing, “and no less than Sadduceeism and atheism, and therefore to be detested!”
“If error be the thing you intend,” Hutchinson replied, “then I desire to know
what
is the error for which I was banished [in November], for I am sure
this
is not [the error], for then there was no such expression from me on this.” Indeed, no one had raised any of these doctrinal issues, such as the resurrection of the body and soul or the indwelling of the Spirit, at her November trial.
An unidentified supporter of Wilson’s called for a show of hands. Most of the saints of Boston, according to the transcript, “did express themselves satisfied with what hath been spoken and by lifting up of their hands did show their dislike of it and did condemn it as an error.”
“This question of the immortality of the soul is an ancient heresy,” remarked John Davenport, the English minister who was staying with Cotton while awaiting the best time to travel southwest to a fledgling settlement that he would call New Haven. “They that speak for the mortality of the soul speak most for
licentiousness
and sinful liberty. Therefore, I think there should be no scruple” about “casting out” offenders and heathens from the church.
During the hours of testimony, Hutchinson made some concessions to her inquisitors. At one point when Davenport tried to clarify something for her, she said gratefully, “I thank the Lord I have light. And I see more light a great deal by Mr. Davenport’s opening of it.”
At other times, she resisted their pressure to change her views. Davenport tried to get her to concede that “the coming of Christ to the soul in Thessalonians is
not
meant to be Christ’s coming in union” with us. She replied, “I do not acknowledge it to be an error, but a mistake. I do acknowledge my expression to be erroneous, but my judgment was not erroneous, for I held before as
you
did but could not express it so.” She listed her references: “John 12, 1 Corinthians 4:3, 1 Corinthians 15:37–44, on having two bodies, and 1 Corinthians 4:16.”
Cotton said, “You
say
you do not know whether Jesus Christ be united to our fleshly bodies. There lies the scruple and the absurdity of it! Therefore, remember, both soul and body are united to Christ.”
Occasionally she returned to her familiar role as his student, as when she asked him, “I desire you to speak to that place in 1 Corinthians 15:37–44 for I do question whether the same bodies that die shall rise again.”
Davenport seemed to encourage her, asking after he explained something, “Therefore, are you clear in that place?”
“No, not yet,” she replied.
At one point, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley entered the fray. Bulkeley, now fifty-five years old, had come to Boston a year after Anne, had founded Concord, where he preached, and, with Thomas Hooker, had run the Cambridge Synod, which established orthodox colonial doctrine. “I desire to know of Mistress Hutchinson whether you hold that foul, gross, filthy, and abominable opinion, held by Familists, of the
community of women,
” meaning a community in which women have power over men. This was the same fear that Winthrop had expressed prior to the court trial, that Hutchinson would “establish a community of women,” with their “abominable wickedness.”
It is not clear that the ministers actually believed Hutchinson was a Familist or a believer in free love. These terms were useful against her, so Winthrop and the orthodox ministers portrayed her this way. In a letter to Cotton in 1634, Shepard had referred to her obliquely: “Familists do not care for word of ordinances but only the spirit’s motion. They will profess that there they meet with the [Holy] Spirit and their superlative raptures.” Shepard added, “Jezebel, Revelation 2, who hath her depths, calls herself a prophetess, ’tis her glory to interpret scripture….” In response, Cotton had denied knowledge of any Familism in his flock, a denial that Shepard seemed to accept.
Now, in response to the Reverend Bulkeley’s charge of Familism, Anne Hutchinson said hotly, “I hold it not!” Of course she was not a Familist. To address this accusation and that of subscribing to the indwelling of the spirit, she said, “I do
not
believe that Christ Jesus is united to our bodies.”
“God forbid,” Wilson gasped, as if even to state the heresy in denying it was an offense.
The Reverend Davenport ignored her denial and echoed the Reverend Bulkeley’s concern. “If the resurrection be past, then marriage is past, and then if there be any union between man and woman it is not by marriage but in a way of community,” or what is now called free love.
Repelled by the suggestion that she questioned the sacred vow of marriage, Hutchinson said, “If any such practice or conclusion be drawn from it, then I must leave it, for I abhor that practice.”
“The Familists do not desire to evade that question, for they practice the thing,” Winthrop offered. “And they bring this very place [in Scripture] to prove their community of women and to justify their abominable wickedness. It is a
dangerous
error.”
Leverett pleaded on her behalf. “But our sister doth not deny the resurrection of the body.”
“No,” she sighed. But most everyone in the room acted as though Leverett had not spoken, or if he had his words were not true. In this church trial, unlike the civil trial the previous November, Anne had little success in undercutting the many misrepresentations of her beliefs and attacks on her character. Moreover, she was already convicted as a heretic and banished, so she had less stature. In addition, the ministers whom she had criticized were anxious to shore up their egos by attacking her. They bullied her at times. The Reverend Peter asked her, “Do you think the very bodies of Moses, Elijah, and Enoch were taken up into the heavens, or no?”