A Model of Christian Charity

Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” focuses on two major arguments. First, the act of charity is both a social and spiritual institution designed by God and central to the working of Christian society. Second, the colonial project is an opportunity to create an ideal Christian society founded upon these principles, or face the consequences of displeasing God. These two arguments frame both the positive and negative assertions of the text. For instance, Winthrop’s exhortations of charity are foundational to his hope for a new, better world than what is available in England. Furthermore, his understanding of love and goodwill as the core teaching of Christ is a positive interpretation of religious doctrine. However, Winthrop’s arguments on the special role of pious Christians in this new society inform the text’s more negative implications, such as its seeming exclusion of other creeds from Christian charity and the American exceptionalism that is often associated with the text (for more on this latter aspect, see Themes). Before examining the developments of these arguments, it is necessary to understand their roots in the sermon’s immediate political background.

In 1534, King Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy, breaking England from the religious control of the Roman Catholic Church and making himself the highest religious authority in the Church of England. This made England a sovereign nation, and ensured that all English taxes formerly paid to Rome now went to the king. In the late 16th century, a growing sect of Protestants arose, expressing dissatisfaction with many of the Roman Catholic vestiges which remained a part of the Church of England. This group wished to “purify” the Church toward Protestant ideals, and believed the religious government should more strictly enforce laws emphasizing religious virtue. Though not a true religious sect, this group came to be known as the Puritans, and it is to this group that the lawyer John Winthrop belonged.

When Charles I became ruler of England in 1625, he dissolved the English Parliament, took control of the nation’s fiscal policy, and began taxing citizens to fund his own whims. Puritans objected to this corruption, as well as to Charles’s marriage to a Catholic and continued leniency toward Roman Catholic practices in the Anglican Church. In response, Charles arrested many Puritans. As rebellion against Charles would be rebellion against the Church, which would displease God, Winthrop saw no way to piously correct for this rampant moral and political corruption. Among many other Puritans, and indeed other social groups looking for a more hospitable home in the New World, Winthrop made the difficult decision to depart from England and be part of the founding of a new society in the Americas (for more on this decision, see Author Bio).

Overseas travel from England to the New World was long and arduous, with many dying or becoming deathly ill along the way. Once landed, conditions were to remain difficult—with few supplies, no infrastructure, and frequent risk of attack or starvation. Overall, colonists were stuck between two unsatisfying realities: an Old World which they saw as spiritually and/or economically uninhabitable, and the incredibly risky enterprise of settlement in the New World.

Understanding Winthrop’s sermon against this backdrop explains its radical emphasis on charity in terms more functional than its immediately apparent religious ideals. Winthrop understood that to face the threats of the New World, cooperation between settlers would be crucial. Christian charity offered a powerful tool for the social institutionalization of such cooperation, and was an ideal Winthrop also certainly believed in, as a devout Puritan. Therefore, Winthrop begins his sermon emphasizing the divinely ordained nature of charity, and its function as a basic demand of God which structures social realities such as wealth and class disparity. God “hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind” to ensure that “every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knitt more nearly together in the Bonds of brotherly affection” (34). These lines emphasize the communal place of all classes in the future community of the colony—though notably do not abolish or declaim wealth differentiations—and invites all settlers to understand themselves as participants in a communal divine project. At the same time, it institutes charity as a demand higher than any individual will, as it is directly designed by God.

Charity as such becomes a dually economic and religious reality in the text. Winthrop expresses this marriage of economic function and religious ideal well in the next section, in which he works to strike a balance between the demands of mercy and the demands of justice. For instance, in laying out specific rules by which a new, charitable economy of the settlement should operate, Winthrop urges individuals to forgive debts whenever they can, calling on their mercy, unless the charitable transaction is under a lawful contract, respecting the role codes of justice have for structuring relations. Later, this interplay between the demands of God and the demands of public policy will become crucial to how Winthrop intends to govern the colony, under a government “both ciuill and ecclesiasticall. […] by which, not only conscience, but meare civill pollicy, dothe binde us” (46). This emphasis on the union between ecclesiastical and civil leadership foreshadows Winthrop’s future government style, in which he placed primary importance on piety. More fundamentally, it illustrates that at the same time charity is a divinely ordained ideal, it is also a necessity for the colony’s survival.

The laws of mercy and justice which Winthrop outlines correspond to different stages in man’s religious development—the law of “nature” corresponds to the time of Adam, and the law of the Gospel corresponds to the time of Christ. In this interpretation of history Winthrop situates Christianity as the pinnacle expression of God’s plan of charity, given to humanity “in the estate of regeneracy”: to regenerate them toward a system of society such as God intended, a system lost in Adam’s fall. This would be an especially welcoming idea to Puritans who felt disenfranchised in their beliefs within English society, positioning the colonial project as an opportunity to correct for the mistakes of the Old World and build a society such as God intended. Again, this has the benefit of authorizing Winthrop’s economic plan for survival through divine authority.

The correspondence of Christianity to the highest expression of charity implicitly excludes other creeds from the ideal society of New England. Though all Winthrop’s fellow colonists were Christian, we cannot be sure such exclusion was his intention, though his Puritan beliefs certainly suggests all other religions would have been reprehensible to him. Winthrop never mentions Puritanism or Protestantism as the specific faith-systems that will govern his New England colony. Instead, he opens this opportunity to all Christians. This open invitation aligns with the fact that though Winthrop wished all his colonists to be pious, the task ahead required many types of skilled labor which naturally diversified the colony’s ranks. Arguably, Winthrop’s choice not to specifically mention Protestant or Puritan ideals was an attempt to bring non-Puritan settlers around to the religious aspirations Winthrop had for the colony, cementing their subscription to the economic reality he outlined and thereby ensuring the colony’s survival.

After outlining some practical frameworks by which charity will find its expression in their coming colonial society, Winthrop transitions to discussing the origin of this charity in the love God places in the souls of all people. This discussion of the value of love is perhaps the most typically theological portion of the text, drawing complex metaphors of the ligament’s role in the body to the social glue of love and charity, and outward to the symbolism of Christ’s sacrifice of his own body, his “embodiment” of the ideal of love, and his equation with the entirety of Christendom as “members of the same body” (44). These sections work to emphasize the fundamental importance of charity to Christian identity, further authorizing it as an economic system applicable to the Christian settlement of New England.

Across his metaphor of the body, Winthrop emphasizes the special role charity has within Christian society. This is an extension of his argument about the law of the Gospel. Further, he also extends his idea of the colonial project as an opportunity to create an ideal Christian society under God. Just as humanity received the law of the Gospel in the “estate of regeneracy,” the spirit of Love and its expression in charity acts “like the Spirit upon the drie bones” (42). Expressing charity to the highest level, Winthrop suggests, will not only secure the economic success of the colony, but ensure one’s own place in the kingdom of Christ. This will also be a particularly salient point to Winthrop’s more god-fearing listeners, offering some salvation from the tribulations of colonization in the afterlife.

Winthrop constantly references Christian and Jewish religious history. He particularly emphasizes events in the histories of these faiths which correspond to the demands currently on his congregation. For instance, “There is a time when a christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles times. There is a time allsoe when christians (though they give not all yet) must give beyond their abillity, as they of Macedonia, Cor. 2, 6.” (36). Constant reference to Christian history urges Winthrop’s readers to see their project as part of a divinely ordained trajectory that is in the event of unfolding. Notably, the concept of predestination was an important line of thought within Protestantism, especially to thinkers such as John Calvin, who taught that God predetermined the salvation or damnation of every individual. Winthrop’s connection of the colonial project to deeper currents in Christian history would have been particularly salient to his Puritan listeners, supporting his argument that the expression of charity in the colonial undertaking would be central to each settler’s individual salvation.

Winthrop’s understanding of colonization as part of a Christian history appears most succinctly in his closing comparison of the Americas to a new promise land where “The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his oune people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our wayes” (47). Winthrop urges his readers to see the similarities between their struggle and that of God’s chosen people in the time of Moses. These similarities do indeed abound: The Israelites, like the Puritans, escaped political oppression, undertook a period of wandering, and eventually founded a new society. Like the Israelites, the settlers under Winthrop are entering a covenant with God: “We are entered into Covenant with Him for this worke” (46). This pact between God and Man has quite high stakes. As Winthrop notes, “if wee shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends wee have propounded. […] the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us” (46). Like God destroyed countless civilizations throughout history, his power extends over the fate of the coming settlement. Here we see the true marriage of Winthrop’s demand for charity and hope for the success of his colony in his own mind: Though the onus of success is on the settlers, and lies in the practice of charity, the ultimate survival of the colony rests in the power of God. Therefore, everyone must struggle toward the individual ideal which God demands of them, and thereby save their new society, both economically and spiritually.