No Puritans yet walk among us. That religious movement has long since dissipated into the hoary annals of the past. Wordsmiths will occasionally attempt a resurrection with the usual purpose of disparagement. Practitioners of theological ressourcement, academics and churchmen, are more careful. They know that with the 1662 Act of Uniformity, Puritans either slowly receded into the mushy via media of the Church of England or helped seed the then-emerging nonconformist tradition of English Protestantism. The association of terms like “Puritan” with “nonconformist” might cause students of their popular usage, rather than history, to stand agog. They are elegantly reconciled in the person of William Pynchon.
William Pynchon was born in 1590 in Springfield, Essex, England. His family was prominent and respectable; he himself was a large landholder and served as a churchwarden in his local parish, a volunteer position that represented laypeople and stewarded church property. As a young man, he encountered the Puritan movement with which he became involved. The Anglican theologian J.I. Packer describes this religious reform and renewal movement well:
Puritanism was an evangelical holiness movement seeking to implement its vision of spiritual renewal, national and personal, in the church, the state, and the home; in education, evangelism, and economics; in individual discipleship and devotion, and in pastoral care and competence.
Such a comprehensive spiritual vision is difficult to realize with enemies as ubiquitous as the world, the flesh, and the devil (Eph. 2:2–3a). Many Puritans argued that the temptations of the world might be mitigated by abandoning the Old World of Europe for the New World of the Americas. Colonies established by those seeking spiritual renewal and holiness could prove transformative if blessed by divine providence.
William Pynchon himself participated in just such an experiment, founding with other settlers Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1630. Roxbury, absorbed by the city of Boston in 1868, retains a motto descriptive of both its geography and founding vision: Saxetum Dextris Deoque Confidens (“In this rocky borough, by God’s right, we are confident”). Yet Pynchon was not at all confident in the agricultural prospects of such a rocky landscape. He scouted the Connecticut River Valley in 1635, seeking a more fecund location for the establishment of a farm. The next year, along with a few other Puritan settlers, he established the Plantation of Agawam in that valley. It would grow to become the city of Springfield, Massachusetts.
Many Puritans argued that the temptations of the world might be mitigated by abandoning the Old World of Europe for the New World of the Americas.
Springfield was ideally suited for both agricultural production and trade. It was equidistant between the European settlements of Boston and Albany and close to populations of native peoples such as the Pocomtuc with whom Pynchon conducted a profitable fur trade. The Pequot War, fought between the Pequot and European settlers of several colonies between 1636 and 1638, threatened this trade. Pynchon found the behavior of the Connecticut colony toward native peoples so unconscionable and commercially ruinous that he disaffiliated Springfield from it and had it annexed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638.
The southwest border of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was commercially and politically dominated by the city of Springfield. William Pynchon made a fortune exporting beaver pelts by the thousands and establishing the first commercial meatpacking plant in the new world.
Politically, however, Pynchon resisted efforts by the colonial government of Massachusetts Bay to enforce a narrow orthodoxy curtailing religious liberty to a greater extent than did the English parliament, which had left open the question of the particulars of church government, for example.
While Pynchon established a commercial empire and wielded considerable political influence, his theological ambitions in the New World would meet with a markedly different fate.
In 1650, Pynchon published in England a slim theological book: The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption. It’s full title, abiding by the conventions of such books at the time, is considerably longer and spells out the scope of its argument:
The meritorious price of our redemption, iustification, &c. Cleering it from some common errors; and proving, Part I. 1. That Christ did not suffer for us those unutterable torments of Gods wrath, that commonly are called hell-torments, to redeem our soules from them. 2. That Christ did not bear our sins by Gods imputation, and therefore he did not bear the curse of the law for them. Part II. 3. That Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law (not by suffering the said curse for us, but) by a satisfactory price of attonement; viz. by paying or performing unto his father that invaluable precious thing of his mediatoriall obedience, wherof his mediatoriall sacrifice of attonement was the master-piece. 4. A sinners righteousnesse or justification is explained, and cleered from some common errors.
The argument in The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption is on the nature of the atonement, the saving work of Christ that reconciles the world to God. About the necessity, scope, nature, and meaning of this saving work there is no end of theological dispute between (and even within) the theological traditions, denominations, and sects of Christendom. Some 300 years after the publication of Pynchon’s work, C.S. Lewis, in his brief treatment in Mere Christianity of this doctrine and the perennial controversy that surrounds it, wryly observed, “The thing itself is infinitely more important than any explanations that theologians have produced.” Pynchon’s contemporaries were possessed of a considerably less generous spirit.
Pynchon was accused of heresy but escaped prosecution by returning to England in 1652.
The book’s claim that the price of our redemption was paid by the obedience of Christ rather than his suffering for us God’s wrath proved scandalous to much of the Puritan clergy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Only four copies of William Pynchon’s book survived the ensuing flames. The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption was the first book to bear the designation “Banned in Boston”—in fact, it was the first book banned in the New World. Pynchon was accused of heresy but escaped prosecution by returning to England in 1652. Before doing so, he was able to secure his family’s legacy in the New World by transferring his property held there to his son John. He lived the last decade of his life peaceably in the Old World in the light of his conscience.
Does this theological controversy make William Pynchon an antagonist to Puritanism rather than a Puritan himself? In their encyclopedic A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life, Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones observe that Puritanism was more diverse than the narrower bounds of Reformed orthodoxy. The unclassifiable Richard Baxter, the Arminian John Goodwin, possibly Arian John Milton, Baptist John Bunyan, and Antinomian John Eaton all bear the name “Puritan.” Pynchon’s case for the price of our redemption being the active obedience of Jesus Christ rather than his passive suffering for us God’s wrath was out of step with the Puritan movement, this is true, but the manner of his argumentation was in line with its distinctive character for, as Beeke and Jones explain:
The distinctive character of Puritanism was its quest for a life reformed by the Word of God. The Puritans were committed to search the scriptures, organize and analyze their findings, and then apply them to all areas of life.
Fun fact: William Pynchon is the earliest American ancestor of novelist Thomas Pynchon (V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Inherent Vice), a genealogical fact said to play some role in the latter’s fictional family histories.
