For Sarah, who had always struggled with doubt, the evangelical emphasis on assurance was deeply appealing. Raised by parents who were steeped in the Puritan tradition, she seems to have absorbed Puritan understandings of conversion as gradual and often imperceptible: full assurance was possible, but rare. But a new generation of evangelicals, including young, dynamic leaders like Whitefield and Tennent, scoffed at this timidity. After arriving in Newport, they not only warned sinners that they must repent now but also told remarkable stories of people who had been converted so suddenly that they could identify the precise time and place of the change. Sarah envied them, and she seems to have embraced the evangelical movement as her own because she longed for their confidence. During the revivals she became convinced that if she could completely commit her life to God, she would finally be able to free herself from her worst doubts. If she could let herself believe that God loved her, then her moments of despair would be tempered by her confidence in God’s love. Like thousands of other evangelicals, she could become a “new creature,” a new self, in Christ.
Until the revivals, nothing about Sarah’s life had seemed certain. But after she became an evangelical, she could say—with assurance—that she knew what mattered. She knew that she had been born again.
The Quest for Certainty
We know almost nothing about Sarah’s life between 1735, the year of her first outbreak of rheumatoid arthritis (if that is indeed what it was), and 1737, when she became a full member of her church. Although she recorded God’s care for her during the dark months of her illness, she also admitted that she had “backslidden” as her health had improved. Scrupulously honest, she confessed that she had become “intimate . . . with those whose example was very bad” and had made “bold excuses to absent myself from the public worship,” but at some point she wished she had not been so frank. She scribbled over these words, as well as over seventeen other lines, which cannot be deciphered.3 If she had been on the brink of drifting away from Christianity, she did not want future readers to know it.
Sarah was obviously troubled by her long history of “backsliding.” Although she wanted her story to focus on her miraculous rebirth in Christ, she fretted over her inability to describe exactly when and how she had been born again. Looking back, she remembered feeling a strong sense of God’s presence on the night she had been stranded in the canoe, but she was not positive that she had experienced conversion then. “Some Christians have thought the change was then wrought,” she mused, but she was not sure whether she would have gone to heaven had she drowned that evening. She also thought she might have been born again on the night of her suicidal temptation, but she did not know whether she had experienced “true grace” or only a brief precursor to it. Despite her certainty that God had rescued her from hanging herself, she was not sure whether he had changed her heart. “I thought I trusted in God and used frequently in time of trials to go and pour out my complaints to him, thinking he was my only support,” she wrote. “But I durst not now be positive or really conclude that I knew what it was to put my trust in God, for my conduct after this seems so inconsistent with grace that I durst not say I had one spark, but rather think I was only under a common work of the spirit, though sometimes I think I had true grace though very weak.” In a frank admission of her confusion, she concluded, “God only knows how it was.” She also thought she might have been converted in the weeks after her marriage, when she “had a hope again at times that Christ was mine,” or during her son’s baptism, when she had dedicated both herself and her child to God.4 But each time she had fallen away from her faith. Certainty eluded her.
If Sarah had lived a hundred years earlier, she might have accepted her doubts as an inevitable part of her religious pilgrimage. Although the Protestant Reformation had been built around the conviction that converts could be sure of their salvation, ministers began toning down their rhetoric as radicals claimed to be certain that they had received new revelations from God. In 1535, for example, Anabaptists in Münster claimed that God had ordered them to practice polygamy and kill anyone who opposed them, and in 1637, Puritans in Boston had exiled Anne Hutchinson after she claimed to hear God speaking to her. (Some feared that she would turn Massachusetts Bay Colony into another bloody Münster.) In the decades after Hutchinson’s trial, Puritans urged people to search for convincing evidence of their salvation, but they also warned against the possibility of self-deception. According to the Westminster Confession, “infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it.” Although Puritans placed conversion at the center of the Christian life, they found that the path to assurance was often hedged with thorns. According to the Reverend William Perkins, conversion was rarely a sudden, unexpected change; it was rather a gradual transformation of the self that could take an entire lifetime to complete. Perkins listed ten stages that converts usually experienced before knowing they had been saved, from the first, small stirrings of grace (usually under preaching) to the final stages of repentance and obedience. Although he argued that “every Christian would experience a decisive moment in his life when he first became a child of God,” he also explained that conversion “is not wrought all at one instant, but in continuance of time, and that by certain measures or degrees.”5
But there was always a mystical strain within Puritanism that prized assurance, and beginning in the late seventeenth century, in response to political, social, intellectual, and economic changes, a small but influential group of ministers reclaimed the bold language of the Reformation. When Solomon Stoddard published A Treatise Concerning Conversion in 1719, he argued that “Men may have the knowledge of their own conversion.” Although the word may was crucial—he did not claim that all Christians would attain assurance—he believed that many would feel the spiritual change within themselves “by Intuition or seeing of grace in their own hearts.” Cotton Mather made the stronger assertion that when a convert was overpowered by the Holy Spirit, he would find it impossible to doubt either the reality of his own transformation or the truth of Christianity. “Christianity will strike such Rays of Light into his Mind, that he shall no more Question it, than he does, That the Sun Shines.” Mather imagined conversion as a heartfelt transformation that could be empirically experienced. “A Work of Grace,” he wrote, “brings a Man Experimentally to feel the Main Truths which the Christian Religion is composed of.”6
This emphasis on assurance was built on a new epistemology—a new way of thinking about human knowledge—that marked a break with the Puritan tradition. Although Puritans had always scrutinized their lives for signs of divine grace, they had also been skeptical about what they could genuinely know about themselves or God. In contrast, Stoddard and Mather admitted that self-deception was possible, but they placed far greater trust in the reliability of firsthand experience. Because of Mather’s alarm about the noxious spread of “Deistical Notions,” he published several tracts to prove that Christianity was true, and in each his closing flourish was an appeal to his personal, experiential knowledge of grace. “If my Saviour brings me to Live unto God,” he argued in one tract, “then he is Himself Alive,” and in another he explained, “A Work of Grace upon you will be a Witness within you to the Truth of Christianity.”7 As the historian Robert Middlekauff has commented, the danger of Mather’s approach was that it risked making religion subjective (it is true because I feel it to be true), but because of his anxiety about a creeping spirit of rationalism Mather did not think that he could defend Christianity simply by affirming the truth of the Bible. As Middlekauff explains, “Mather’s conception of religious experience was different from the founders’—it implied that when the ways of apprehending the truth provided by science, logic, and reason did not satisfy men, they must consult their own experience. The application of Scripture to the believer’s own condition—how he felt about it, how he experienced it—would persuade him
of its truth.”8
During the 1730s and 1740s, this “experimental religion,” as Mather called it, flowered into a distinctive kind of evangelical faith that particularly valued experience, assurance, and evidence. During the revivals ministers not only demanded that sinners repent now, before it was too late, but they urged them not to rest until they were sure of their salvation. When Gilbert Tennent arrived in Newport in the fall of 1741, he thundered out his condemnations of sin in such fierce language that many claimed to have been born again on the spot (and as we shall see, he terrified Sarah into thinking she was a hypocrite). Because the Synod of the Presbyterian Church had recently condemned him for encouraging “Convulsion-like-Fits” and preaching that “all true Converts are as certain of their gracious State, as a Person is of what he knows by his outward Senses,” he softened his language, but only a bit. Although denying that every convert would attain “a full Assurance of their good State,” he still portrayed doubting as the exception, not the norm. “All who are converted,” he insisted, “ordinarily have a lesser or greater Degree of comfortable Persuasion of their gracious State, either immediately upon their closure with Christ, or some Time afterwards, when Faith is in Exercise, either for a short or longer Duration.” (The key word for him was ordinarily.) Contrary to the Synod’s accusation, he had never taught that Christians should be able to pinpoint the exact moment of their conversion but rather that they should strive for “Evidences” of a new heart. “Surely, those that are rightly humbled by the Spirit of God, will not be satisfied ’til they obtain this,” he concluded.9
The Strict Congregationalists, or “Separates” as they were more popularly known, took this language of certainty to a greater extreme. Almost as soon as evangelicalism was born it splintered into factions, with the Separates emerging as the most radical wing of the movement in America. Influenced by the heart-centered preaching of the revivals, they argued that even uneducated men could preach if called by the Holy Spirit: God was no respecter of persons, and he often communicated directly with the faithful through voices or visions. The Separates also insisted that true Christians could be absolutely sure of their salvation. The Separate Church in Mansfield, Connecticut, argued that “all Doubting in a Believer is sinful, being contrary to the Commands of God and hurtful to the Soul, and an hindrance to the Performance of Duty,” and in nearby Canterbury, Separates claimed that “Assurance is of the Essence of Faith.” Unlike Tennent, who had grudgingly admitted that a certain degree of doubt was possible, Andrew Croswell preached that “there is no true Believer, but hath Assurance for some Space of Time, longer or shorter.” Even more controversially, some Separates asserted that true Christians could be sure not only of their own salvation but of other people’s as well. Despite their claim to infallibility (or perhaps because of it), they became quite popular. “If there is such a Person as a doubting humble Christian,” Ebenezer Frothingham testified, “I am sure you will find him in Hell.” The Separates had founded more than a hundred new churches before 1754, including a church in Newport.10
In some ways, this new emphasis on assurance was the natural outgrowth of latent tendencies within the Reformed tradition, but several external developments in the transatlantic world seem to have served as a catalyst. When the Toleration Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1689, extended the freedom of worship to all Protestants regardless of denominational affiliation, churches became more concerned about a lack of certainty than an excess of it. In New England, for example, ministers feared that the Puritan experiment would never survive unless converts could confidently proclaim the reality of their faith in an increasingly pluralistic culture. Although few towns were as religiously diverse as Newport, where Sarah could choose whether to worship among Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, or Anglicans, no single denomination in the colonies enjoyed the power to coerce membership.11
The desire for assurance seems to have been a reaction to the proliferation not simply of religious choices but of political, economic, and social choices as well. Although psychological explanations for historical developments are necessarily speculative, it is probably not coincidental that the evangelical movement coalesced at the same time as ordinary people gained greater opportunities for individual choice than they had ever had before, the result of market expansion, the breakdown of social hierarchies, and local political independence from England. Of course, some choices, like whom to vote for in local elections, were reserved for propertied men alone, but women could also make choices about what goods to buy, what religion to practice, and, increasingly, whom to marry. While many must have been intoxicated by this new freedom, others seem to have found it overwhelming. With so many choices, how could one be sure of making the right decision?12
Evangelicals also placed more emphasis on assurance in response to the challenges posed by the Enlightenment. Hoping to defend orthodox Christianity against the threat of “Arminianism,” they argued that true faith was a matter of firsthand experience, not abstract reason. According to Jonathan Edwards, converts gained a new spiritual “sense” that affected their perceptions of the world. As he recorded in his “Personal Narrative,” he felt that new, immediate sense when reading a biblical passage that particularly moved him: “There came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before.”13 In the popular language of the time, religious experience was “sensible”: it could be empirically felt. Like Hannah Heaton, who remembered her “sensible communion with God,” David Brainerd felt “sensible sweetness and joy,” and Sarah Osborn experienced a “sense” of God’s “excellence, glory and truth.”14
Ironically, evangelicals borrowed this language of sensation from the same Enlightenment thinkers whom they suspected of Arminianism and deism. Edwards’s understanding of a spiritual sense was influenced by the earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, who argued that all humans have an innate “moral sense” that helps them distinguish good from evil. Despite rejecting this positive view of human nature, Edwards agreed that knowledge comes from sense perception. When he and other evangelicals argued that Christianity was “sensible” and “experimental,” they linked their movement to powerful currents of Enlightenment thought that made them sound strikingly new and modern. If the mind should be described as “White Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas,” John Locke asked, then “How comes it to be furnished?” His answer was simple: “from Experience.”15 Echoing this language, evangelicals insisted that Christianity was based on the palpable experience of being born again.
It is likely that Sarah Osborn absorbed this experiential language from listening to her ministers, talking with like-minded Christians, and reading religious books. While there is no evidence that she ever read Locke, she did read the works of Edwards, Cotton Mather, and many other ministers who advocated an “experimental” religion. Since her church required converts to share their stories of conversion before being admitted to full membership, she also heard many lay Christians describing their religious “experiences.”
Today the word experience has become such a common part of our language that we may find it difficult to hear its revolutionary cadences. We tend to use it as a synonym for individual subjectivity, and we describe our experiences in the same way we do our “feelings”—as interior and private. Indeed, modern-day scholars of religion have expressed skepticism about studying “the experiential dimension of religion” because personal experience is “inaccessible to strictly objective modes of inquiry.”16 But in the eighteenth century, experience had a more scientific connotation, and Enlightenment thinkers believed that if they scrutinized human experience they could make new discoveries about the world. Intoxicated by scientific and technological advances, they insisted that empiricism would liberate people from blind devotion to the past. All ideas had to be subjected to the test of experiment and observation.
Evangelicals did not
want to be “liberated” from tradition, particularly not Christian tradition, but they, too, believed that firsthand experience could offer rational evidence about the universe. They confidently proclaimed that believers could feel and know whether they had been transformed by divine grace. In the words of David Brainerd, “I was spending some time in prayer and self-examination and the Lord by his grace so shined into my heart, that I felt his love and enjoyed full assurance of his favor for that time and my soul was unspeakably refreshed with divine and heavenly enjoyments. At this time especially as well as some others sundry passages of God’s Word opened to my soul with divine clearness, power and sweetness so that I knew and felt ’twas the Word of God and that ’twas exceeding precious.”17
Like scientists who adopted the Newtonian method in order to verify their findings, evangelicals often described their faith as experimental: it could be validated by concrete, measurable experience. Although they did not trust personal experience in the abstract—and in fact they assumed that most people viewed the world with eyes clouded by sin—they insisted that Christians gained new powers of perception during conversion. As Brainerd explained to Samuel Hopkins, “he believed it impossible for a person to be converted, and to be a real Christian, without feeling his heart, at some times at least, sensibly and greatly affected with the character of Christ.” Inspired by the Holy Spirit, Christians could see and understand things as they really were. According to Sarah Prince Gill, for example, she had been “experimentally convinced” of the justice of eternal punishment.18
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