God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
Within the Church, these commandments of God are most embarrassing. If few today preach through the Ten Commandments, almost no one preaches these commandments given by God in the Garden of Eden, before the Fall. The closest pastors and their people get to acknowledging their existence is the occasional lame reference to “human beings” having a duty to be “creation keepers.”
This is a reprehensible equivocation of God’s commands to be “fruitful,” “multiply,” “fill” the earth, “subdue” the earth, and “rule” over all creation.
What’s missing is obvious: man alone was created by God in His Own Image and Likeness. Man is not one among many animals. That’s Scientism’s Evolutionism, and Christians have always recognized that lie’s usefulness to men intent on embracing their inner ape as they slide back down to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Redwoods are not persons. They should not have standing in any court of law, nor should cats and dogs be pushed in baby strollers.
Every Christian knows animals were given us by God to rule; and more explicitly, to kill and eat. Yes, our dear brothers and sisters in Christ only avoid meat because of health reasons. But we can be hopeful their health reasons don’t preclude a simple reproduction of this command of God, Who said to Noah:
Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant. (Genesis 9:3)
To the Christian, Western societies’ present consensus concerning the relationship between man and nature—that wilderness devoid of man is the supreme good—is directly contrary to the Order of Creation God established. It is commonly said and believed by unbelievers that nature is innocent, and thus the goal almost universally agreed upon by unbelievers is that man’s evil influence upon nature should, as much as possible, be removed. Even down to European movements calling for depopulating the earth.
Actually, this doesn’t make sense when we consider that the Enlightenment brought upon the Western world the universal denial of the Fall of man and consequent corruption of Original Sin. If all the great minds agree Adam did not Fall and Original Sin is that horrid and wicked doctrine Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson agreed it was, why is Nature good and Man bad?
My library has a 1962 volume by George Huntston Williams titled, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity & the Paradise Theme. It’s not available in any e-text format, but here is a lecture which was a precursor to the book and available online. Presented in 1959 (and therefore in the public domain),1 it is the Presidential Address given by Williams to the American Society of Church History on Dec. 29, 1958 in Washington, D.C. A few years after giving this lecture, Williams incorporated the text as Part IV of Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought published three years later, in 1962.
Found on JSTOR, this lecture had many of the problems which attend JSTOR texts, but I spent some time correcting and formating the work. Why make it available here?
A professor at Harvard Divinity School, Williams was Unitarian, and thus quite naturally a dissenter from all orthodoxies, political and religious. He is best known for his history of anabaptists and other fringe movements at the time of the Reformation titled The Radical Reformation.
The text of Williams’s address is reproduced here because of the help it provides us in coming to terms and growing in our understanding of the present infatuation of the Western world with Nature’s wilderness, and the parallel denigration and humiliation of Man, God’s crown of all Creation.
We must view this wicked time through the text of God’s Words; through what Scripture reveals about the sins we in the Western world have given ourselves to these past fifty years. Most abominable among them are our wholesale slaughter of our little ones, but right behind this sin is our drowning ourselves in sodomy and lesbianism.
Why are we doing this?
Here is the explanation of God’s Word:
Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed unto the ages. Amen.
For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions… (Romans 1:24-26)
When we worship Nature—wilderness, plants, and animals—rather than the Creator God Who made them for us, turning away from Him to worship what He made, He Himself turns us over to the lusts of our hearts. To impurity. To the dishonoring of our bodies. To lies.
Nature worship bears hideous fruit, physically and morally. God has ordained it so.
We and our children have not chosen LGBTQism, but God has smeared it all over us. It is His decision, not ours. His choice, not ours. And the fact that we glory in it is also his judgment on us.
He has given us over to shamelessness.
William’s speech/article also provides much wisdom pertaining to the current millenarianism which is at the foundation of the recent Christian Nationalism resurgence. Readers will note we have been here before, and that shocking recognition might be helpful in avoiding and condemning the errors being repeated today.
So now, I do hope you will take the time to read this helpful talk. I’ve put in bold those parts I found particularly interesting or helpful. Other emphases are original.
Finally, I regret to inform readers I hadn’t the inclination to keep and hyperlink the footnotes. Those who wish may find them at the JSTOR link below to the original article in Church History.
****************************
The Wilderness and Paradise in the History of the Church
George Huntston Williams
Church History Vol. 28, No. 1 (Mar., 1959), pp. 3-24 (22 pages)
Published By: Cambridge University Press
THE WILDERNESS AND PARADISE IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH*
By GEORGE HUNTSTON WILLIAMS, Harvard Divinity School
*Under this title are comprehended four lectures, of which selected passages were read as the Presidential Address during the meetings of the American Society of Church History on Dec. 29, 1958 in Washington, D.C. The whole is to be published separately by Harpers;
Part IV follows the Introduction below.
INTRODUCTION
In his now classic “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” read before the American Historical Association in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner quoted from A New Guide for Emigrants to the West (second edition; Boston, 1837), written by the pioneer Baptist missionary and founder of seminaries, John Mason Peck, who died just a century ago. Peck had distinguished three types of Westerners: the pioneers, the settlers, and “the men of capital and enterprise.” Turner found this typology useful and adapted it in his succession of studies that have helped to shape our understanding of American history.
William Warren Sweet applied Turner’s frontier concept as a basic category in the interpretation of Christianity in America in a series of studies of religion on the frontier, a specialized aspect of which he presented a quarter of a century ago in his Presidential Address before the American Society of Church History. Sweet, too, mentioned Peck, in passing; for the founder of Rock Spring Seminary (1827), which was a forerunner of Shurtleff College in Alton, Illinois, was an important figure in the history of the Baptists and a representative builder of the Middle West.
In the present address on the significance of the wilderness concept in church history it is appropriate to allude once again, by way of introduction, to John Mason Peck. A certain Presbyterian minister, who had come recently into Illinois, later recalled the following incident. Making his way over the lonely prairies, interspersed here and there with patches of timber, he was arrested by the sound of an axe, and upon observing a woodman nearby, called to him with the question, “What are you doing here, stranger?”
“I am building a theological seminary,” was the reply.
“What, in these barrens?”
“Yes,” resounded the woodman, “I am planting the seed.” The planter in the wilderness was John M. Peck.
A seminary is a seed-bed or garden for the nurture of the clergy.
There are three millennia of biblical and ecclesiastical history behind the impulse to plant a seminary in the barrens, a garden in the wilderness, a paradise in the desert. It is indeed so basic a concept in Christian history that the wilderness motif might be said to exceed in significance the frontier as a category in the interpretation of not only American history but of church history in general; for like the frontier, the wilderness is not only geographical but psychological. It can be a state of mind as well as a state of nature. It can betoken alternatively either a state of bewilderment or a place of protective refuge and disciplined contemplation, as well as literally the wilds.
When the emigrants from the eastern seaboard of America moved into the West, they passed through a real wilderness haunted by wolves and savages, but the millennial tutelage of Scripture had charged that wilderness with epic significance and theological meaning. The wilderness had become, in fact, a complex symbol of significance both for the corporate and the mystical expressions of the Christian life.
The precariousness of the garden (Eden, Paradise, the Vineyard of the Lord) that can during a moral shift or deficiency in the changing seasons of the spirit be blasted by the breath of God and turned into a desert and at the same time the miraculous convertability of the wilderness into a refuge and a realm of purification has made of the paradise-wilderness motif a powerful religio-psychological motivation and scriptural resource in the never-ending to-and-fro of Christian history; in many reforming or restitutional movements; in many heretical, sectarian, and monastic formations; and in many mystical, educational, and missionary formulations and impulses.
The wilderness state or bewilderment is, for example, almost a technical theological term in certain traditions. It is one of the most useful images supplied by Scripture to designate the recurrent fact that even in the life of the redeemed there are periods or phases of partial failure, depression, uncertainty, and even defection. The children of Israel had been saved from bondage to this world, slavery in Egypt, by their miraculous passage through the Red Sea; they wandered in a wilderness for forty years before reaching the Promised Land; and many of them died murmuring against God and Moses and the new Commandments. Even Jesus after his baptism in the waters of Jordan faced a comparable period of forty days in the wilderness, tempted by Satan. It is expressly recorded that the very Spirit which had appeared as a dove at his baptism led him into that wilderness. Throughout the history of Christianity the parallel of the forty years and the forty days after the redemptive event of symbolic or exemplary baptism in the Red Sea and the Jordan River has been held up for typological contemplation as to the meaning of our temptations or aimless wanderings, our drynesses and murmurings, that seem to be the chronic blemishes of the Christian life.
The quest for the wilderness as a place of refuge prepared for the true Church persecuted by the world—the quest again for that wilderness which may through spiritual and moral subjugation even more than physical conquest, tilling, and seeding become a garden or Eden of the Lord—this is a basic impulse in the history of many branches and institutions of Christianity.
The account which follows is not, of course, a retracing of the pilgrimage of God’s people through history or even the idea of pilgrimage and wandering, except indirectly. It is not an account of successive interpretations of the Fall from the Garden, although it will touch upon this. Nor is it a pursuit of a specialized aspect of millennialism, although the eschatological mood is prominent. It is rather a sketch of successive, representative types of interpretation of the desert and the garden as expressions both of the grace and the wrath of God, of his protective and his punitive providence.
Although allegorization and typology, tendentious misappropriation and outright misconception of the original meaning of the wilderness in Scriptures are part of the account, the most interesting feature is the fact that successive Christian transcripts and permutations of the garden and wilderness texts have, with impressive frequency and inner cunning, despite all their variety and imprecision, faithfully reproduced the fascinatingly ambivalent character of the desert motif in the Old Testament itself.
Of almost equal interest is the fact that the wilderness texts of the Bible have become variously combined in the long course of Christian history, until at length certain conflations have become, as it were, stable compounds in the building up of increasingly complex exegetical syntheses with their own peculiar affinities, motion, and vitality more or less independent of the scriptural matrix from which they were derived.
Since the Bible was looked upon as a unit, I have, instead of considering the New Testament material as part of the early Christian elaboration of the Hebraic themes, brought the principal motifs of both the Old and the New Testament together in one movement. The symphony with its four movements, its motifs and variations on a theme, has indeed suggested the basic structure of the following composition as an artistic whole. For it is the main movements of the whole of the history of God’s people that I hope to evoke in tracing the two motifs of wilderness and garden through i) the Bible, ii) the ancient and the medieval Church, iii) the Reformation and modern times, and in iv) American Christianity, with the underlying expectation that we shall the better be able to understand ourselves as a Church with its schisms and dissensions and also our Christian or would-be Christian lives with all their darkness and temptations.
When Baptist missionary John Mason Peck prepared the foreword of his Guide to the West, he quoted Isaiah 66:8. In exhilarated confidence that a new nation was indeed being “born at once.” Another prophecy from the same book, Isaiah 51:3, may be appropriately taken as the motto of the following composition because of its perennial influence in the history of the Church:
For the Lord will comfort you; he will comfort all her waste places, And make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord….
With this haunting prophecy, we turn to the biblical world of Isaiah and to his forerunners and successors, in the interpretation of the wilderness and the garden.*
*A synopsis of the series as a whole is here inserted. The footnotes are numbered consecutively through the series. Ed
WILDERNESS AND DESERT; GARDEN AND PARADISE IN THE BIBLE
The Desert, the Deeps, and Death in the Old Testament
The Essenes: A Coherent Wilderness Theology of Wandering, Warfare, and Water
The Wilderness Theology of a Fourth Exodus as Recorded in the New Testament
WILDERNESS AND PARADISE IN THE BAPTISMAL THEOLOGY OF THE CHURCH OF THE MARTYRS, IN MONASTICISM, AND MYSTICISM
Early Baptismal Theology
The Flight to the Desert: The Provisional Paradise of the Monks
The Wilderness in Mystical Theology and in the Formation of Heretical Conventicles in the Middle Ages
III. FLEEING TO AND PLANTING IN THE WILDERNESS IN THE REFORMATION PERIOD AND MODERN TIMES
THE ENCLOSED GARDEN IN THE WILDERNESS OF THE NEW WORLD
In retrospect the epic gathering of a mighty Christian nation made up of peoples fleeing in successive generations from the bondage of the Old World across the Atlantic Ocean to a land of promise and of liberty has been seen as a providential repetition, in majestic, continental proportions, of the exodus of God’s ancient elect from bondage to Egypt. To be an American has been for successive immigrant generations to know a new birth of freedom. In fact, first citizenship papers have been for countless yearning thousands the outward sign of an invisible change of allegiance, a sense of belonging within the covenant of a new people of destiny. This sense of being a new people who had sloughed off the accents and the attributes of the Old World was perpetuated within these families unto the second and even the third generation. But if America has been for them the community of rebirth, the old world churches brought over with them represented the community, so to speak, of birth, their native land. In them, they found weekly solace from their being buffeted about in a new world whose ways and words, though fascinating, were not immediately understood; and during the Sunday sermon or mass their homesick hearts were drawn not only upwards to the Jerusalem above, but also backwards and across to the villages and hills of their homeland whence came also their inner strength. The immigrant church, to speak collectively, was the conservative, ethnico-cultural community of birth. No broad interpretation of American culture and American denominationalism can be complete without a full documentation of this epic reversal of, or at least continuous strain upon, the respective roles of church and commonwealth in the unfolding of American society.
But the interpretation of the crossing of the Atlantic and the trek of the pioneers from the eastern seaboard settlements into the opening west, in terms of the biblical exodus, has in point of fact been largely a retrospective reflection. It was not the wilderness of Sinai that our earliest forefathers had mostly in mind, but rather much more commonly the eschatologically oriented wilderness of Revelation 12:[1-]6 and the mystically saturated imagery of the wilderness in Canticles and in the allied texts in the pre-exilic prophets.
Thus the fourth section of our survey is entitled the Garden Enclosed, in the Wilderness. The heading would in fact adequately serve to cover an account of the divergent developments of the Garden motif, both in Latin American and in the Anglo-Germanic element within what has emerged as the United States of America.
I am, however, unprepared to pursue the former development, but it is surely noteworthy at the outset of any such presentation that the Catholic Christopher Columbus reported to his sovereigns that he had almost certainly discovered the terrestrial Paradise, while the Calvin- ist John Cotton of Boston, expounding Canticles, thought of the new plantations of the Lord coming up out of the wilderness of the New World, as a Garden Enclosed, “a Paradise, as if this were the garden of Eden.”
We cannot tarry with Columbus except to note that he knew from Genesis 2:8 that the Lord God had planted a garden eastward in Eden and basing his further calculations on Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, he was prepared to find the Terrestrial Paradise at the first point of the Far East where the sun rose on the day of creation near the stem-prominence of the supposedly pear-shaped earth. To his royal patrons he wrote:]
I have already described my ideas concerning this hemisphere form, and I have no doubt, that if I could pass below the equinoctial line … I should find the earthly paradise, whither no one can go but by God’s permission; but this land which your Highnesses have now sent me to explore, is very extensive, and I think there are many other countries in the south, of which the world has never had any knowledge. I do not suppose that the earthly paradise is in the form of a rugged mountain, as the descriptions of it have made it appear, but that it is on the summit of the spot, which I have described. … I think also, that the water I have described may proceed from it, though it be far off, and that stopping at the place which I have just left, it forms this lake. There are great indications of this being the terrestrial paradise, for its site coincides with the opinion of the holy and wise theologians whom I have mentioned ….
With this glimpse into the mood of the explorer of milder climes we return to the sterner mood of the Bay Colony, where the wilderness theme appears in almost every imprint from the colonial period.
Choice Grain in the Wilderness of New England
John Eliot of Roxbury, Apostle to the Indians, will at once make us familiar with the northern mood. In his refutation of the charge in England that the Puritans were new fangled, he puns: The “Novangles are not New Fangles but No Fangles (in respect to worship);” and he goes on to say that they have come purposely into the barren wilderness in just their present location on the Bay, neither further north where furs are plentiful, nor to the south where the warm sun makes both for gold and tobacco:
Assuredly [he goes on] the better part of our plantations did undertake the enterprise with a suffering minde . . . to go into a wilderness where nothing appeareth but hard labour, wants, and wilderness-temptations (stumble not countrymen, at the repetition of that word, wilderness-temptations), of which it is written that they are trying times and places,
Yankee frugality is not only a consequence of the climate but a biblical interpretation of the proper dress and deportment of the elect in the wilderness state.
The work from which we have quoted appears in a larger publication on the Indians as Judah scattered westward. The title-page quotes Canticles 8:8 on the little sister without breasts in application to the admittedly still immature spiritual state of the bewildered descendants of Judah; but Eliot was confident that their speech, which he had mastered the better to proclaim the Gospel among them, was akin Hebrew, which he knew well and thought of not only as the Ursprache and the divine language but also as the universal tongue of the future of mankind.
Thomas Shepard in nearby Cambridge was likewise concerned for the evangelization of the Indians, and the sympathizing editor in England introduced Shepard’s The Clear Sunshine of the Gospell, Breaking forth upon the Indians in New England (London, 1648) with these words:
. . . there can be no reason given why God should fence us, and suffer other places to lye wast, that we [white Englishmen] should bee his Garden, and other places a Wilderness, that he should feed us with the bread of Heaven, and suffer others to starve.
He then uses Paul’s argument (Romans 11:14) about the conversion of the Gentiles with a new twist:
Let these poor Indians stand up incentives to us, as the Apostle set up the Gentiles a provocation to the Iews: who knows but God gave life to New England to quicken [the] Old. . .?
Another Puritan, Roger Williams, likewise conspicuously concerned for the Indians, was the American counterpart of the English Seeker John Jackson, already quoted.
In his A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643) Williams offered not only a dictionary of Indian words and phrases but also valuable observations on life in the wilderness and reflections on its theological meaning. The orderly “Mould or forme of Government” among the aborigines and their relatively high sexual and family morality despite their nakedness prompted him to place a poem on their lips:
We weare no Cloaths, have many Gods,
And yet our sinnes are lesse:
You are Barbarians, Pagans wild,
Your Land’s the Wilderness.
Observing the fruitfulness of the American wilderness, Williams turns to rebuke his fellow-European:
The Wildernesse remembers this [God’s command], The wild and howling land Answers the toyling labour of, The wildest Indians hand. But man [in Christian Europe] forgets his Maker, who, Framed him in Righteousnesse. A paradise in Paradise, now worse Then Indian wildernesse.
No pantheist but a mystical Calvinist with a deep sense of God’s sovereignty as creator of the universe, Williams read the book of the wilderness with its emblems much as he read Scripture typologically, as though it were a vast palimpsest unrolled before him. On one level of legibility he perceives: “As the same Sun shines on the Wildernesse that doth on a Garden so the same faithfull and all sufficient God, can comfort, feede and safely guide even through a desolate howling Wilderness.” Or again: “How sweetly doe all the severall sorts of Heavens Birds, in all Coasts of the World, preach unto Men the prayse of their Makers Wisedome, Power, and Goodness, who feedes them and their young ones Summer and Winter… ?” But on the more obscure level he discerned the lineaments of the fallen world: “The Wildernesse is a cleere resemblance of the world, where greedie and furious men persecute and devoure the harmlesse and innocent as the wilde beasts pursue and devoure the Hinds and Roes.” Thus the ambiguity of the desert in the Old Testament reasserts itself in Williams’ understanding of the wilderness of the New World.
Driven from Congregational Salem into a Providentially prepared wilderness, Williams turned quickly from a three-months experiment with believers’ baptism in Providence into a mature Seekerism, despairing of the rival pretensions of mutually exclusive sects. He interpreted Revelation 6:19 [sic], from which the “white horsemen” of the earlier chapters (understood of the apostles of Christ) are absent, as indicative of the “routing of the Church and Ministry of Christ Jesus, put to flight, and returned into the Wildernesse of desolation.”125 He was convinced that
there were no churches since those founded by the apostles and evangelists, nor could there be any, nor any pastors ordained, nor seals administered but by such, and that the Church was to want these all the time she continued in the Wilderness.
Unlike the Quakers, Williams recognized both a “nurturing” and a “generating” ministry. The latter he knew was possible only when the ministers were truly sent, in other words, apostles; and he beheld no apostles at work in his world; but unlike George Fox he looked for the coming of truly apostolic men. In the meantime against Fox he contended that
… there is a time of the coming out of the Babylonian Apostacy & Wilderness: there is a time of many Flocks pretending to be Christs and saying [
Against the godly commonwealth of the Bay Colony, Williams averred that the Puritans there “make the [enclosed] garden and the wilderness (as often I have intimated)—I say, the garden and the wilderness, the church and the world all one.” He continues:
The unknowing zeale of Constantine and other Emperours, did more hurt to Christ Jesus his Crowne and Kingdome, then the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes. In the persecutions of the later, Christians were sweet and fragrant, like spice pounded and beaten in morters: But tho good Emperours, persecuting some erroneous persons, Arrius, &c. an advancing the professours of some Truths of Christ (for there was no small number of Truths lost in those times) and maintaining by the materiall Sword
Sir Henry Vane, governor of Massachusetts Bay and leader of the Long Parliament, sympathetic with Antinomians and Seekers in Old and New England, completely interiorized the Kingdom of God as a state of conscience; but like Williams he understood the wilderness as a real place outside the mind where the eschatological combat is to be fought out “between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent”:
The Kingdom of God is within you and is the dominion of God in the conscience and spirit of the mind …. This Kingdom of Christ is capable of subsisting and being managed inwardly in the minds of His people, in hidden state concealed from the world …. Those that are in this Kingdom, and in whom the power of it is, are fitted to fly with the Church into the wilderness, and to continue in such a solitary, dispersed, desolate condition till God call them out of it. They have wells and springs opened to them in the wilderness, whence they draw the waters of salvation, without being in bondage to the life of sense.
The principal opponent of Williams was one with whom Antinomians and Seekers knew they had much in common, John Cotton. It is here the place to return to him and to other, more typical New England Puritans who, unlike Eliot, Shepard, and Williams, were not much interested in the evangelization of the Indians in the wilderness. But in the conception of the garden and the wilderness Williams and Cotton will be seen, as in the following quotation from Cotton, to be virtually interchangeable:
. . . under the Christian Emperors, Constantine and the rest opened the doors of the Church so wide, that all the garden of God was become a wilderness by an inundation of carnall people, Christian in name, but Pagans in heart, that were let in; and then that which was once a garden enclosed, was now made a wildernesse. …
In his Exposition of Canticles, as already indicated, Cotton dealt extensively with the church of the wilderness (3:6, 8:5 ff.), though without express reference to the American situation:
. . . All the world is a wildernesse, or at least a wilde field; onely, the Church is Gods garden or orchard, in these three respects, First, as the garden of Paradise was the habitation of Adam in the estate of innocence, so is the Church of all those who are renewed into innocency.
At home in the medieval monastic-sectarian tradition, Cotton rejoiced in the wilderness state as conducive to greater spiritual perspicuity. In introducing the work of a fellow New Englander on their Congregational Way to those of the Reformed Churches in Britain and on the Continent, Cotton wrote confidently:
Let no one despise this as the inelegant production of exiled and abandoned brethren, as long as it can be said of them, as Jehoshaphat
The book which Cotton thus introduced was The Answer to [the Dutch divine] Apollonius by the Ipswich pastor John Norton, designated for the task. In this work another feature of the New England wilderness theme was programmatically expressed, over against the Anglican right and the Anabaptist left. At issue with the Baptists, though otherwise Calvinistic, was believers’ baptism. Norton used the practice of the wilderness church of old Israel as a precedent for that of the New, and contended that the offspring of covenanted parents were already by virtue of their birth members of Christ’s Church. The uncircumcised Israelites were called “the congregation (ekklesia) in the wilderness” (Acts 7:38). Hence, “the church may be deprived of baptism for a time and yet remain a [true] church.”
Against the de jure dizino episcopalian right Norton was, of course, adamant, but he deplored the bitter disagreements on polity among those who could broadly regard themselves as Reformed, and went so far as to hold that the
discord of brothers about the polity of the Gospel holds Christ away from his dominion, keeps the woman [the true Church] in the wilderness, and the [Anglican-Papal] harlot on the throne.
The provisional, though protective character of the wilderness State based upon Revelation is clearly reflected in a speech on the wharf, in England, preserved by Edward Johnson, which may well have been his own on departing:
I am now prest for the service of our Lord Christ, to rebuild the most glorious Edifice of Mount Sion in a Wilderness
And William Stoughton (1631-1701) in an election sermon in Boston in 1668-69 stamped a phrase which has remained indelible in the memory of his descendants to this day: “God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into the wilderness.”
By the end of the colonial and the beginning of the provincial history of Massachusetts, Cotton Mather, still filled with hope for the holy experiment and yet depressed by the vagaries which even the Puritans were not spared, reflected in his extensive writing ambiguity of the meaning of the desert and wilderness in the Old Testament and the New. In one mood he holds that the North American wilderness was ordained by providence as a refuge and protection of the Reformed Church. In the other he thinks of the wilderness as the empire of Antichrist, filled with frightful hazards and the demonic minions of Satan.
In the latter frame of mind, in The Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, 1693), a discourse based on Revelation 12:12, he wrote:
The first Planters of these Colonies were a Chosen Generation of men, who were first so Pure, as to disrelish many things which they thought wanted Reformation elsewhere; and yet withal so peaceable, that they Embraced a Voluntary Exile in a Squalid, horrid, American Desart, rather than to Live in Contentions with their Brethren. . . .
Witchcraft in Salem was clearly the outcropping of the demonic. Here we find very much alive the Old Testament feeling for the desert as the haunt of death and the demonic. Being interested in the sciences of his day, Mather charged Satan and his devils with holding up the invention of much wholesome scientific aids and comforts, as spectacles, the printing press, and the telescope. In the American Wilderness he felt surrounded by devils and also the red savages who were in the service of the French-Catholic Antichrist.
The Wilderness thro’ which we are passing to the Promised Land [he continues] is all over fill’d with Fiery flying serpents …. All our way to Heaven, lies by the Dens of Lions, and the Mounts of Leopards
In The Devil Discovered (Boston, 1693), he noted that it was precisely “when he was alone in the Wilderness” that the Devil “fell upon our Lord.” And more fully in Magnalia Christi Americana or The Ecclesiastical History of New England (London, 1702), he said:
It is written concerning our Lord Jesus Christ that he was led into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil; and the people of the Jesus Christ, led into the wilderness of New England, have not only met with continual temptation of the devil there; the wilderness having always had serpents in it; but also they have had in almost every new lustre of years, a new assault of extraordinary temptation upon them; a more than common hour and power of darkness
But besides the demon-infested howling desert, Cotton Mather shared and significantly propagated the idea that in the wilderness of North America, James I had as the unwitting instrument of Providence given in letters patent “all that part of America, lying . . . from forty degrees . . . to the forty-eighth degree . . . throughout all firm lands from sea to sea” as “the spot of earth, which the God of heaven spied out for the seat of such evangelical, and ecclesiastical and very remarkable transactions, as require to be made an history; here ’twas that our blessed Jesus intended a resting place, must I say? or only a hiding place for those reformed Churches, which have given him a little accomplishment of his eternal Father’s promise unto him; to be, we hope, yet further accomplished, of having the utmost of the earth for his possession?” Mather had at this point already declared his intention of writing the history to date “of a New-English Israel” and now goes on to be eschatologically specific, however modestly, namely, “an history of some feeble attempts made in American hemisphere to anticipate the state of the New-Jerusalem far as the unavoidable vanity of human affairs and influence of Satan upon them would allow . . .”
Perhaps the most sober and authentically scriptural balance in interpreting the negative and positive sense of the desert was struck by John Higginson in his “Attestation” printed as a foreword to Magnalia, wherein he presents the ten reasons why his colleague Cotton Mather had undertaken the Magnalia; and four of the reasons admirably summarize the theological meaning the wilderness held New Englanders as they looked back on their heroic period:
Sixthly, That the present generation may remember the way wherein the Lord hath led his people in this wilderness, for so many years past unto this day; [according to Higginson and Mather awaited further reformation preparatory to the final building up of Zion.]
Jonathan Edwards was likewise bent upon reformation, but like his contemporary, John Wesley, he largely interiorized and individualized the meaning of wilderness, and for him the promised land was heaven and not a realizable godly commonwealth. The revival which he preached was the ordained means of coming out of the wilderness of the world. In his sermon, “The True Christian’s Life, A Journey Towards Heaven,”’43 Edwards appropriately used Hebrews (11:13 f.) which, as has been indicated, anciently represented the stages of the exodus as the rungs of a ladder:
The land that we have to travel through is a wilderness; there are many mountains, rockes, and rough places that we must go over in the way; and there is a necessity that we should lay out our strength ….
With the Treaty of Quebec in 1763 and the subsequent generous concessions made to the Catholics by the British in the north, the fear of Catholicism was suddenly intensified.. [sic]
But as the break with Britain approached, some of the language used of Rome was transferred to the Anglican Tories. Escape from bondage to Pharaoh became a stock allusion in the sermons preached annually before the uniformed militia on Lexington green in commemoration of the decisive action of April 19, 1776. In 1777 [sic; the sermon was actually preached on January 17, 1776]] the Patriot preacher Samuel Sherwood (1730-1783) delivered on a public occasion his The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness: An Address on the Times, in which he enlarged on the persecuted Waldenses and their Protestant successors and of three colleges in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, in his The Little Stone and the Great Image averred that the wilderness of Revelation 12:6 was America, providing sanctuary for the Huguenots from France, the Scots, the English Independents, and other godly Reformed refugees from the scarlet woman and the red dragon. And in the same year the music press of Oliver Ditson sang the anti-Anglican Republican lines:
Oh, we are weary pilgrims; to this wilderness we bring
At this point our account blends into many standard treatments of the Christian factors in the rise of American nationality and of the secularization of the doctrine of election as “manifest destiny.” But there are two specialized permutations of the wilderness theme that can be mentioned before returning to the seed-plot in the wilderness, with which our story began. I refer to the Mormon trek and the haunting sense of the wilderness in a strikingly large number of Negro spirituals.
Isaiah and Canticles in the Desert of Joseph Smith before the Mormon Exodus to Utah
The trek of the Mormons from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois under severe persecution to Utah at once suggests the epic of Exodus and is obviously the closest American parallel to the flight of the Boers to escape British control. Surprisingly, however, the language of Exodus is not at all prominent in the extant documents. This can be only partly explained by the fact that Joseph Smith’s own Book of Mormon and his Commandments had been interposed between the Bible and the daily experience of the Mormons on the frontier. In any event it is in the works of Smith himself that the wilderness motif in Mormonism can be best examined at its source.
Mormon Restorationism stresses the recovery of not only the apostolic church but also the Aaronic (lower) and the Melchizedek (higher) priesthoods. This took place in two stages in 1829, a year before the printing of The Book of Mormon. Smith declared that he went into the woods along the Susquehanna River near the New York-Pennsylvania boundary to pray and inquire of the Lord respecting baptism for the remission of sins. John the Baptist descended in a cloud from heaven ordaining him and his associate Oliver Cowdery to the Aaronic priesthood with the power to baptize. Accordingly, on May 15 Joseph and Oliver immersed each other in turn “by being buried in the liquid grave.” The power of ordination, however, was still understood to be wanting. The restoration of the Melchizedek priesthood was authorized by a second oracle:
A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county, declaring the three witnesses to bear record of the book. The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light. The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broome county, on the Susquehanna river, declaring themselves as possessing the keys of the kingdom, and of the dispensation of the fullness of times.
With the baptismal and apostolic powers of the two priesthoods restored Smith and his collaborator proceeded to organize their strictly immersionist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, April 6, 1830. A new Israel had begun to gather in the wilderness, moving westward under the compulsion of both persecution and a phantom promise.
In his Commandment at the dedication of the Temple in Kirtland, Ohio, March 27, 1836, he declared:
[Remember all thy Church] that thy Church may [rise up and] come forth out of the Wilderness
The allusion to the army terrible with banners in combination with other scriptural passages suggests John Bunyan’s House in the Forest of Lebanon.
In the Book of Mormon it is written:
For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the Garden of the Lord.
The wilderness tabernacle suggested the Mormon term for their local meetings (- parishes), namely, “stakes,” in dependence on Isaiah 33:20 and 54:2: “Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out, hold not back, lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes.” Zion was thus an overarching concept. an invisible canopy above a people gathering from all sides. Yet Zion could be thought of as quite localized in Jackson County, Missouri, for example, which had been spied out and identified by Joseph Smith and his men as its eventual location.
Driven to Utah, interpreters of the trek looked back upon their experience as providential. Commenting on Zion in the wilderness in Section 97 of Smith’s Doctrines and Covenants, the commentators appealed to Revelation 12:6 in accounting for the way in which the Mormon Church had escaped, among other disasters, the scourge of the Civil War by going into the Rocky Mountain wilderness prepared by God.
Turning from the Mormons to the Negroes, we take up another peculiarly American permutation of the wilderness theme.
Yo Wanna Fin’ Jesus, Go in de Wilderness
As in the Bible and most of the traditions (with the almost unique exception of Wesley), so in the Negro spirituals the wilderness has both a positive and a negative sense. On the negative side are those spirituals of Methodist lineage like “Ain’t I glad I got out of the wilderness,” “Done foun’ my lost sheep … Go to de wilderness, seek an’ fin’,” and “In his name we come out ‘d’ wilderness,” wherein the experience of spiritual and moral struggle is portrayed. But by far the more distinctive meaning (even when the associated tune is derived from a Methodist hymn with the negative sense of the term) is that which has as its background the slave assemblies in the forest. The aboriginal secret meetings brought over from Africa and stealthily perpetuated were gradually given an increasingly Christian reinforcement and coloration by what the slaves overheard in sermon and hymn about the Bride (Canticles) or the Woman in the Wilderness (Revelation). Their early morning “valley” or “wilderness” assemblies were sometimes magnanimously countenanced by the white masters during a revival, but were more often furtively attended while the masters were sleeping. There was usually a tub of water allegedly to drown the sound, actually carrying over a forgotten African jungle appurtenance, possibly also interpreted as the pool of water in the wilderness in so many of the desert passages in the Bible. In the following spiritual the imagery of the Bride, the Woman, and the Devil of the Jordanian temptation scene seem to be intertwined. In other words the positive and negative senses of the wilderness experience are combined:
Ef ye want to see Jesus, Go in de wilderness, . . Leanin’ on de Lord.
The quest for Jesus in the wilderness for secret solace and revival and fellowship appears frequently: “Jesus a waitin’ to meet you in de wilderness,” “I seek my Lord in de wilderness for I am goin’ home,” etc.
Because the wilderness meeting was at once the Bride, the Woman, and, by extension, Mary the Mother of Jesus, the slaves of St. Helena Island had a tradition that the much-sought Jesus was actually born in the secret meetings in the woods, and they tiptoed in the early morning in order not to disturb the Babe of Bethlehem.
In some spirituals Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the Woman of the Wilderness are combined as “Weeping Mary,” symbol of the Negro Christians, their church of the wilderness outside the white man’s church. In one spiritual she rocks her child all night in “a weary lan'” Another spiritual addresses the more or less secret Negro Christian fellowship:
Run, Mary, Run, Mary, run, Oh, run, Mary, run, I know de oder worl’ ‘m not like dis. Fire in de east, an’ fire in de west, I know de oder worl’ ‘m not like dis, Bound to burn de wilderness, I know de oder worl’ ‘m not like dis. Jordan’s riber is a riber to cross, I know de oder worl’ ‘m not like dis, Stretch your rod an’ come across, I know de oder worl’ ‘m not like dis.
The allusion here to the burning of the wilderness is not entirely clear from purely scriptural sources. It reappears in “What Yo’ Gwine to do When Yo’ Lamp Burn Down?” and fire “burn down de wilderness.”
From wilderness assembly and its big city equivalent “the praise house” several negro denominational movements have sprung.
From wilderness assembly and its big city equivalent “the praise house” several negro denominational movements have sprung. From the haunting spirituals of the slaves and the oracles and commandments of the seer of Palmyra, New York, we turn back to that major cultural expression of our theme, the building of the seminary in the wilderness with which our long survey began.
The Seminary in the Wilderness
Back at the beginning of Dartmouth, Eleazer Wheelock had appealed to the wilderness motif in choosing for the college seal Vox Clantantis in Deserto [a voice crying in the wilderness]. The eschatological conviction that a seminary, as the seed bed of proclaimers of the gospel, was the God-ordained means of building up the waste places of Zion (the collective term for the churches of the Congregational Way) was everywhere stressed.
Dr. Wheelock, like the earlier John Eliot of Roxbury, had been convinced that God manifested his displeasure against New Englanders for their failure to bring the gospel to the Indians. Hence his great interest in founding a missionary school for them. In moving north from his first work in Lebanon to Hanover on the Connecticut River, Wheelock “derived support from the example of the prophet Elisha”
A poem written in his lifetime by a pupil of Wheelock alluded to the college as the garden of the Lord, a provisional paradise in the desert:
Thus we behold, in pathless forests sprung,
In the founding and interpreting of Dartmouth the missionary motif and the recovery of the apple of paradise through the study of the golden apples of the classical tradition are here all brought together in the seminary in the wilderness. In 1811, Wheelock’s biographers could write of him and his missionary school, now a leading college:
How would the good Doctor, like aged Simon, with the infant Redeemer in his arms, have rejoiced to see our day, when the tongue of the dumb sings for joy, and the wilderness blossoms as the rose. Perhaps God designed him as the morning star, to be the harbinger of this resplendent light.
The rock smitten by the hand of faith watered the camp, and sustained the church of God in her travels through the wilderness.
The wilderness motif, as interpreted by all New Englanders, was at once the experience of punitive testing (Exodus) and the providentially prepared environment in which the true but hidden church (Revelation 12) could gather strength for a world mission to the pagans near and far. Thus the establishment of a seminary, a seed-plot of preachers and missionaries, in the wilderness or desert after a “long drought,” sustained by copious “showers of grace,” the revivals, was a mark of “the grand era of missions” at home and abroad, setting off the present from “all former ages.” President Timothy Dwight of Yale, for example, preaching in 1812, spoke of all the colleges in the New World as seminaries for the training of evangelical preachers, defining their evangel as the whole design of both the Old and the New Testaments, and he pictured the revival as a shower upon the desert:
The Gospel is the rain and sunshine of heaven upon the moral world. Wherever its beams are shed, and its showers fall, the wilderness blossoms as the rose, and the desert as the garden of God: while the world beside is an Arabian waste, where no fountains flow, and no verdure springs, and where life itself fades, languishes and expires.
Into “the wilderness of Zion,” he declared, preachers were coming like angels from heaven, preaching another gospel-Unitarians, Universalists, Methodists, Freewill Baptists, all thinly veiled behind his characterizations, while all about were multitudes who did not even pretend to any other conviction than French infidelity. It was the clear implication of his sermon that every man preparing to “enter the desk” would have to be adequately fitted intellectually and morally to challenge the angels of both heresy and infidelity. Hence the urgent need, expressed also by Lyman Beecher in A Plea for the West (1835), for many more liberal arts colleges and seminaries. Approaching the close of his sermon Dwight reminded his largely clerical congregation:
Every Minister is here constituted by Christ the shepherd of his flock, “to watch as one that must give an account”; to feed them with the bread of life; and
EPILOGUE
We need not carry the theme further. Connecticut-born John Mason Peck with whom we began in the barrens of Illinois, in 1827, chopping in the wilderness to build Rock Spring Seminary, was filled with the same convictions as his forerunners, Increase Mather of Harvard, Eleazar Wheelock of Dartmouth and Timothy Dwight of Yale.
To conclude, we may paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner: Up almost to our own day, many major and minor movements in Christian history have been in a substantial degree the history of the interpretation of the biblical and post-biblical meanings of wilderness and paradise in the experience of God’s ongoing Israel.
One might, to be sure, ask at this point whether the biblical theology of the desert and the accumulative interpretations thereof actually induced the movements or whether, to explain their inner experience, the mystics simply resorted to the imaginative language of scripture; and whether to justify mass migrations and sectarian secessions, their leaders did not simply appeal to plausible scriptural sanctions.
The motives of the children of Adam, even when they are Christians, perhaps especially when they are Christians, are mixed; but I would not have recounted this long story, were I not convinced that theological ideas move history and that behind these movements, even when occasionally destructive or futile, we must seek to descry the Lord of hosts who may be either punishing or protecting us, as also the biblical prophets themselves perceived when they observed how the desert can through faith and the showers of the spirit blossom as the rose, and conversely, how even the enclosed gardens with their shrine and sanctuary can be blasted by the wrath of God.
The Christian, and perhaps especially in our time the Christian scholar,166 lives in an enclosed garden, a kind of provisional paradise sustained by the grace mediated through the academic fellowship of memory and hope. Disciplined by his professional obligation and opportunity to come face to face with the many before him in the vast communio sanctorum of the centuries, he should feel strengthened to join his more activist Christian colleagues with renewing devotion, in the never ending task of holding back the moral and spiritual wilderness on the frontier of which man precariously maintains his hold upon the life that God created and called good.
Just a couple of weeks ago, a poetry group I've been going to read the 17th century wilderness poem below. It's hard to know what to make of it. It's by a Scottish High Church Episcopalian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Drummond_of_Hawthornden . The poem sounds like it's about John the Baptist being crazy and useless in the wilderness (the Puritans, for Drummond?), but anybody who read it would think of John's success and how many people went to the wilderness to listen to him and repent, so maybe the message is that persistence obtains success.
It makes me think of this wilderness of an Internet we're posting in.
Saint John Baptist
William Drummond (1585-1649)
The last and greatest Herald of Heaven’s King
Girt with rough skins, hies to the deserts wild,
Among that savage brood the woods forth bring,
Which he more harmless found than man, and mild.
His food was locusts, and what there doth spring,
With honey that from virgin hives distill’d;
Parch’d body, hollow eyes, some uncouth thing
Made him appear, long since from earth exiled.
There burst he forth: All ye whose hopes rely
On God, with me amidst these deserts mourn,
Repent, repent, and from old errors turn!
— Who listen’d to his voice, obey’d his cry?
Only the echoes, which he made relent,
Rung from their flinty caves, Repent! Repent!