John Winthrop: “A Model of Christian Charity”

John Winthrop (born in 1587) was an English Puritan lawyer and one of the leading figures in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the second major settlement in New England following Plymouth Colony. Winthrop led the first large wave of colonists from England in 1630 and served as governor for 12 of the colony’s first 20 years. His writings and vision of the colony as a Puritan “city upon a hill” dominated New England colonial development, influencing the governments and religions of neighboring colonies.

Winthrop was born into a wealthy land-owning and merchant family. He trained in the law and became Lord of the Manor at Groton in Suffolk. He was not involved in founding the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628, but he became involved in 1629 when anti-Puritan King Charles I began a crackdown on Nonconformist religious thought. In October 1629, he was elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he led a group of colonists to the New World in April 1630, founding a number of communities on the shores of Massachusetts Bay and the Charles River.

Winthrop’s most famous writing was his sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which he wrote sometime during his sea passage to the New World in 1630.  Presented  below are a few of the most salient quotes from that sermon.

“God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.”

He lists three reasons for this condition:

1. His delight in the showing forth the variety and differences in his creatures. As it is in the natural world, so it is in human society.
2. That he might show the work of the Spirit so as to show his grace in the regenerate, as well as in the moderating of the wicked to prevent the rich from eating up the poor and the poor from rising up against the rich.
3. That every man have need of others and that they be knit together in brotherly love.

However specious his reasoning, this idea of the Great Chain of Being was commonplace in the 17^th century. He goes on to say, “There are two rules by which we walk towards one another: justice and mercy.”  The bulk of the sermon concerns itself with Christian love, which is “real, necessary, free, active strong, courageous and permanent.”  It is the basis for their community. The Puritans are embarked on a work “to seek out a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical.”  The care of the public must oversee all private respects.

“Whatsoever we did, or ought to have done, when we lived in England, the same we must do, and more also, where we go. That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must be brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with a pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens.”

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and cause Him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

What are we to make of this? First, it is important to note that Winthrop is laying down the principles under which the colony and the church (the two are the same) shall be governed. Those principles are based on Christian love as laid out in the Scriptures (1 Corinthians chapter 12; Ephesians 4:15-16; and 1 John 4:7, to name but a few).

Second, the phrase “city on a hill” comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:13) where he says, “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.” The church and colony which they are about to found in Massachusetts will stand as an example to the whole world; if the Puritans live up to their beliefs and values they will make a name for themselves, and if they fail they will make a different name for themselves.  For not only is America an experiment, so is their church an experiment. Remember they left England because they were being persecuted as dissenters from the Church of England. George Winthrop and the Puritans were not founding America, they were founding the Massachusetts Bay Company and its Puritan Church. The two were inseparable.

At its origin, American exceptionalism was built on the merger of church and state, and the principle that people could carve out a new world for themselves, built not on the principles of the Enlightenment (that would come later) but on Christian love.