I. Historiographical Reflections on a Contested Term

It is scarcely hyperbole to suggest that the story of early modern England is the story of England's national church. Politics, culture, and national identity—to say nothing of religion—were inextricably intertwined with the Church of England. And never were such truisms more applicable than during the period that was just beginning when Goodwin began to preach through Ephesians in 1641. During the English revolution, the twin fates of church and nation were so closely aligned that the effort to parse them has engendered decades of spirited debate, and fundamental interpretive questions continue to divide historiographical opinion.Footnote ⁴ One such disagreement concerns Thomas Goodwin's “great Question of these times,” namely: did mid-seventeenth-century Congregationalists oppose or affirm the English “national church?” Conflict over England's ecclesiastical future fueled the revolutionary fervor of the 1640s, and thus the relationship between the Congregational vision and the idea of a national church must be properly understood if we are to understand the period more generally.

And yet, not only are scholarly accounts divided as to whether or not Congregationalists opposed the national church, but one actually finds historians on both sides of the debate offering their answers with the sort of unalloyed confidence rarely encountered in the heavily qualified realm of modern historiographical discourse. Some scholars insist unequivocally that the Congregational Way represented “the antithesis of any form of comprehensive national Church,” while others maintain that “neither Independents nor Congregationalists rejected the idea of a national church” and, in fact, “sought to reform the Church of England as a national church.”Footnote ⁵ As this essay will demonstrate, such confusion stems from the underappreciated fact that Congregationalists used the term “national church” in a highly specific, technical sense. Many readers—including many early modernists—seem to have assumed that the idea of a “national church” implied a generic concern for overarching national ecclesiastical structures and support for magisterial enforcement of godliness. But this is decidedly not what mid-seventeenth-century Congregationalists meant when they invoked the term. Rather, as the present essay contends, when mid-seventeenth-century writers denied or affirmed the legitimacy of a “national church,” they were arguing about whether or not multiple congregations could be combined into a single entity and whether or not the resultant conglomeration could be rightly described as “the church.” In at least this key respect, then, debates over the early modern “national church” were far more nuanced and narrow than has often been assumed.

The present article clarifies the place of a “national church” within the larger ecclesiastical vision of Congregationalism by demonstrating how the phrase functioned as a crucial technical term within mid-seventeenth-century religious discourse. Goodwin identified the national church question as “the great Controversy of the times,” and an examination of print culture during the 1640s lends support to his claim. Analysis of published texts available on the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database reveals that the term “national church” was used only fifty-six times between 1630 and 1639. But between 1640 and 1649, the term appeared eight hundred fifty-five times, a 1,427% increase.Footnote ⁶ One might suggest that this leap in usage simply reflects the explosion of print culture more generally during the period and that perhaps the usage of any term would show a similar pattern.Footnote ⁷ To test this, I ran identical analyses using the control terms “church,” “England,” and “king.” Between 1630 and 1639 the term “church” appeared 102,212 times in the published literature available for full-text search on EEBO, while appearing 196,688 times between 1640 and 1649—a 92% increase. Likewise, the term “England” appeared 24,580 times between 1630 and 1639 and 116,200 times between 1640 and 1649—a 373% increase. My final control term, “king,” appeared 70,799 times between 1630 and 1639 and 180,899 times between 1640 and 1649—a 156% increase.

The usage of all four terms increased during the 1640s, a predictable result in the wake of censorship's effective collapse in 1641 and the consequent proliferation of printed material.Footnote ⁸ Nonetheless, the occurrences of the term “national church” surged upward at a dramatically higher rate than that of the control terms. This sudden growth of interest in the idea of a “national church” becomes even more striking when we observe just how seldom the term was used prior to the emergence of English Congregationalism during the 1640s. As we have noted, between 1640 and 1649, the term “national church” appears eight hundred fifty-five times in the searchable literature. Yet in the eight decades prior, stretching from the eve of England's troubles in 1639 back to Elizabeth's coronation in 1559, the term “national church” appears only one hundred ninety times. Thus, during the single decade of the 1640s, the term “national church” made 350% more appearances than in the previous eight decades combined. And though only a fraction of works available on EEBO admit a full-text search, the resultant smaller sample size should not, in theory, affect change-in-usage data expressed as a percentage of change over time. Thus, at a minimum, these figures suggest that during the 1640s, at least some English writers had taken an unprecedented interest in the term “national church” and the idea that it represented.Footnote ⁹

In light of the term's significance, it is notable that few, if any, scholars have dealt directly, primarily, and in depth with how it was understood and used during the English revolution. Avihu Zakai, for instance, is interested in the question of religious toleration, and, in that connection, is rightly concerned to refute an oversimplified historiographical narrative in which “Independency” is made synonymous with religious liberty.Footnote ¹⁰ Hunter Powell, meanwhile, is not directly interested in the concept of a “national church” per se, but he references it only insofar as it impinges upon his far narrower effort to understand the Westminster Assembly debates between Presbyterians and Congregationalists over the so-called ecclesiastical “keys” (Matthew 16:19, 18:17).Footnote ¹¹ Youngkwon Chung has considered how competing ecclesiological systems affected the piety of their adherents but does not examine the national church question.Footnote ¹² A group of scholars, which includes James Cooper, David Hall, Michael Winship, and Francis Bremer, has attended to the inner workings of ecclesiastical polity in New England, paying special attention to how Congregational principles empowered the laity and influenced concurrent discussions about the shape of American political life.Footnote ¹³ Jonathan Den Hartog's article on the Massachusetts Congregationalist-turned-Baptist Henry Dunster comes perhaps the closest to directly considering the relationship between Congregationalism and the idea of a national church, but even here that specific issue is complicated and obscured by the unique particulars of Den Hartog's chosen case study.Footnote ¹⁴

As a result of these oblique approaches to the concept of a “national church” in Congregational thought, the term is never adequately defined, and historians of the period are often left talking past one another. One might, of course, argue that such lapses, while regrettable, are not of great consequence once one steps outside the niche purview of so-called “denominational historians.”Footnote ¹⁵ To adopt such a stance, however, would be a mistake. It goes without saying that by excavating the context in which mid-seventeenth-century polemicists employed the term “national church,” we will better understand the nature of both Congregationalism and the alternative ecclesiastical platforms against which it was set. But there is good reason to believe that such an exercise will also pay dividends beyond the specialist domain of early modern ecclesiological debate. This is because after 1649, the reins of English ecclesiastical power fell decisively to a cadre of leading Congregational divines. Thus, the better we understand the Congregational vision as it was developed in theory on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1630s and 1640s, the better we will understand the Congregational vision as it was actually implemented in England during the 1650s. To that end, this article will treat the present confusion over whether Congregationalists did or did not desire a “national church.” In doing so, the article will also gesture toward how our reassessment of Congregational ecclesiology might clarify aspects of the Cromwellian religious settlement. I will argue that Congregationalists decisively rejected the very idea of a “national church” and that in their writings they employed the term only in a narrow, technical sense, a specific theological usage that has been largely overlooked by scholars. Moreover, I shall suggest that understanding the function of the term “national church” within Congregational discourse is crucial to properly interpreting the Cromwellian religious settlement.

II. The Idea of a “National Church” in Trans-Atlantic Congregational Discourse

As Thomas Goodwin was slowly working his way through Ephesians in 1641, a sermon he had preached several years earlier was receiving far-greater contemporary notoriety. That same year, the Baptist minister William Kiffen had brought to press A Glimpse of Sions Glory, an exposition of Revelation 19:6, which Goodwin had delivered while ministering to the Congregational church in Arnhem.Footnote ¹⁶ In an excited epistolary preface, Kiffen announced the recovery of the “great Truth” that the future of English Christianity belonged “not to a Hierarchy, neither to a Nationall Presbytery, but to a company of saints in a Congregationall way.”Footnote ¹⁷ Within the mid-seventeenth-century English Atlantic, this seemingly simple ecclesiological agenda and the ministers who promoted it were proving to be imposing agents of religious, cultural, and political change. The Congregational Way, in one form or another, displayed “an uncanny ability to appear at every revolutionary flashpoint,” undergirding the sociopolitical experiment in colonial New England and provoking contentious debate during the mid-1640s among commissioners at the Westminster Assembly.Footnote ¹⁸ Though rejected at the Assembly in favor of Presbyterianism, Congregational ideas resurfaced during the 1650s and provided the architectural framework for the church structure sought by Oliver Cromwell. At each of these pivotal moments, Congregationalists maneuvered for a church settlement amenable to their distinctive ecclesiological vision, a vision which, despite the contrary assertions of some modern scholars, categorically denied the legitimacy of what participants in the debate called “a national church.”

Among those who spoke on behalf of the Congregational Way during the 1630s and 1640s, few voices were more authoritative than that of John Cotton (1585–1652).Footnote ¹⁹ The Presbyterian polemicist, Robert Baillie, described Cotton as “the great Patron” of Congregationalism and “the great instrument” through which “it became lovely to many who never before had appeared in the least degree of affection toward it.”Footnote ²⁰ And while his presence was most obvious in colonial Massachusetts where he ministered from 1633 until his death, Cotton's intellectual influence was no less keenly felt among Congregationalist divines in England, most significantly among the quintet of Congregational commissioners who participated in the Westminster Assembly. As Francis Bremer has demonstrated, Cotton's relational ties with the so-called “Dissenting Brethren” can be traced to the 1610s and 1620s, a generative period during which many future Congregational leaders were introduced to one another through the scholarly, religious, and social networks in and around Cambridge University.Footnote ²¹ The friendships formed there were fostered over ensuing decades and allowed “Congregationalists to respond in a unified manner to the challenges of the 1640s and the opportunities of the 1650s.”Footnote ²² At least three of the Dissenting Brethren—Thomas Goodwin, Jeremiah Burroughs (bap. 1601?, d. 1646), and William Bridge (1600/1601–1671)—were known admirers of Cotton's preaching, travelling to hear him while he served as vicar of St, Botoloph's in Lincolnshire. And at a meeting in June of 1633, it was Cotton who persuaded Goodwin and Phillip Nye (bap. 1595, d. 1672) to embrace a more comprehensive approach to nonconformity.Footnote ²³

After departing for New England that same year, Cotton continued to shape a nascent English Congregationalism through his writings, an influence perhaps most directly attested by Goodwin and Nye's decision in 1644 to publish Cotton's Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, complete with a complementary preface authored by the two Dissenting Brethren. Though not agreeing with the New Englander on every particular, Goodwin and Nye could still maintain that “the substance” of his treatise aligned with that which they “did in the generall intimate and intend” in their own recent Apologeticall Narration.Footnote ²⁴ In turn, the newly published Keyes proved decisive in persuading a young John Owen (1616–1683) to abandon his Presbyterian conviction in favor of the Congregational Way, an event that Crawford Gribben has described as “one of the most important turning points” of Owen's life.Footnote ²⁵

In assessing the spread of Congregational ideas from New England to old, Nye and Goodwin's publication of Cotton's Keyes should not be considered in isolation. Rather, the book's movement across the ocean must be contextualized within an ongoing pattern of transatlantic textual transmission among Congregational practitioners. In her careful accounting of transatlantic print culture during the 1640s, Carla Gardina Pestana has identified one hundred twenty-five printed works examining New England's religious life, all published in London between 1641 and 1649. Of these, eighty-eight were written by current or former residents of New England, and many “went to press without the permission of their authors.”Footnote ²⁶ This lively movement of theological manuscripts from American scribes to English publishers proved decisive in introducing and explaining the Congregational vision to a curious English audience, an endeavor in which the Dissenting Brethren led the way. When the New England minister John Norton authored a Latin apology for Congregationalism in 1647, the manuscript was received in London, shepherded into print, and prefaced by Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and Sidrach Simpson (1600–1655).Footnote ²⁷ Likewise, after the manuscript of Thomas Hooker's magisterial Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline arrived in London in the spring of 1648 for posthumous publication, the “trust of viewing it at the presse” was “committed to [Goodwin's] care.”Footnote ²⁸

Indeed, the nexus of New England manuscripts and London publishing was so tightly wound that at least one significant manuscript written by John Cotton has long been incorrectly attributed to Thomas Goodwin, an error that has persisted into the present. The Hartlib Papers include an undated manuscript by John Cotton titled, The Doctrine of the Church Sett Downe by Way of Questions and Answeres. This manuscript is a significantly longer version of a work written by Cotton and published under a similar title in 1642—the published version runs to a mere six pages, while the manuscript contains eighty-eight. And although this condensed version of the work was printed three times (1642, 1643, and 1644), the full-version was never published under Cotton's name. Instead, the full version was first published as an inclusion in the posthumous Works of Thomas Goodwin (1697), where it was wrongly attributed to Goodwin rather than Cotton.Footnote ²⁹ Though much attention has been rightly paid to the more general growth of print culture within England during the 1640s, it was this great transatlantic textual migration that definitively shaped English Congregationalism during the period. The significance of this was not lost on Goodwin himself as he marveled at “Gods designe and pleasure” in “not onely having stirred up the spirit” of colonial Congregational ministers to write, but having also arranged that so many manuscripts were “now published” and “made publique, that have as long since been prepared, but detained . . . but now issuing forth as it were at once.”Footnote ³⁰

As this textual eruption was beginning in earnest in the summer of 1642, John Cotton, along with Thomas Hooker and John Davenport, received and declined invitations to participate directly in the Westminster Assembly.Footnote ³¹ The decision to remain at home, however, did nothing to dampen Cotton's impact on his Congregational counterparts in London, and the Massachusetts minister continued to influence events in England through a series of publications in which he explained the Congregational vision with unprecedented clarity. One such treatise, The Way of the Churches of Christ in New-England (1645), began by distilling the essence of Cotton's ecclesiology into a single, carefully wrought statement:

The passage captures what are arguably the two leading principles that gave Congregationalism its distinctive ecclesiological shape. First, those admitted into church membership were to be “visible saints”—that is, men and women assembled “by common and joynt consent” whose lives gave outward evidence of having experienced an inward spiritual transformation. Reversing the contemporary English norm in which individuals were assumed to be converted unless scandal or heterodoxy gave reason to doubt it, Congregationalists regarded individuals as unconverted until they were able to demonstrate saving grace. It is here that historians have often located Congregationalism's conceptual center. Geoffrey Nuttall described the term “visible saints” as “undoubtedly” containing Congregationalists’ “controlling idea” and as the decisive term that provided “the key to an understanding of what they were after.”Footnote ³³ Edmund Morgan likewise claimed the concept of visible sainthood as the idea with which his own study of Congregationalism was “wholly concerned.”Footnote ³⁴

Nuttall and Morgan were surely correct to emphasize this point. And yet, as important as it was to the logic of Congregationalism that church membership be limited to visible saints, this requirement would have been incomplete and ineffectual had it not been combined with the corollary requirement that the church into which saints were admitted be conceived only in terms of “one Congregation; which is commonly called a particular visible Church.”Footnote ³⁵ For Congregationalists, the individual congregation was taken to be the exclusive New Testament expression of the institutionalized or “visible” church. And this affirmation, in combination with the concept of visible sainthood so important to Nuttall and Morgan, upheld the Congregational vision. When William Bartlet (1609/1610–1682), a principal spokesperson for Congregationalism in England,Footnote ³⁶ sought to sketch A Model of the Primitive Congregational Way (1647), he identified these two same principles as containing “a Summary of the Congregationall way,” the “stresse of our businesse,” and the “ground-worke and basis, upon which the weight of the whole discourse (in this small Treatise) lyes.”Footnote ³⁷ These two principles of Congregationalism worked together and were conceptually inseparable. This was because a national or regional church in which membership was based upon, and essentially coterminous with, a geographic boundary could never hope to limit its membership to men and women who manifested evidence of conversion. Thus, in order to make good on their pledge to build churches in which all members were visible saints, Congregationalists had to limit the idea of the visible church to particular, voluntary congregations, and this, in turn, necessarily precluded the very possibility of a comprehensive, compulsory national church.

In articulating these positions, Congregationalists overturned longstanding assumptions about the foundational role of “national churches” within Christendom. The “national church” concept was so basic to the ecclesiastical self-understanding of early modern England that the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 could simply assume the term, rather than define or defend it. While discussing “the traditions of the church,” article thirty-four asserted that “Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man's authority, so that all things be done to edifying.”Footnote ³⁸ This language equated, in passing, a “particular” church with a “national Church,” implying that a comprehensive state church was the normative unit of ecclesiastical polity. Smaller ecclesiastical units—local parish churches, for example—were constituent parts of the larger national church, and this national church would, at least in theory, comprehend the entire populace. From the Reformation's beginning, “the founders of Protestantism held that the Church must be a comprehensive society, embracing and supervising both the elect and the reprobate, the zealous and the sluggish.”Footnote ³⁹ England's reformers were no different, and the comprehensive, compulsory, and theoretically uniform, national church lay at the center of English self-identity.Footnote ⁴⁰

Thus, by striking at this vital point, the Congregational Way was challenging not just the Church of England but the basic logic of Christendom itself. In doing so, the mid-seventeenth-century Congregationalists were following a line of thought first enunciated by the London minister Henry Jacob (1562/1563–1624), whose “church in Southwark (and exposition of congregationalism) amounted to a silent ecclesiastical revolution.”Footnote ⁴¹ As early as 1604, Jacob had denied the legitimacy of “any Nationall, or Provinciall, or Diocesan Church,” arguing instead that “Only a particular ordinarie Congregation is . . . properly and only a true visible Church of Christ.”Footnote ⁴² A similar position was articulated by the English exile William Ames (1576–1633), a theologian from whom John Cotton had thankfully “received light out of the Word.”Footnote ⁴³ In Ames's popular 1627 theological primer, translated into English as The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, he denied that the visible church could ever be constituted along “nationall, provinciall, or Dioecesan” lines. Instead, he insisted that the visible church be constituted “of one congregation, the members where of are combined among themselves, and doe ordinarily meete into one place to the publick exercise of religion.”Footnote ⁴⁴ And this assertion, though highlighted less frequently in the historiography, was perhaps even more critical to the Congregational project than the concept of visible sainthood, for it implicitly negated the very possibility of a comprehensive national church.

This was a more radical position than that held by the previous generation of dissenters. Rather than stressing the intrinsic inappropriateness of a national church per se, earlier English separatists had argued instead that the Church of England, by its policies and positions, was so thoroughly compromised as to have become a false church. Robert Browne (1550?–1633), for example, maintained that the failure to administer church discipline had left the Church of England with “no name, nor shewe of the church of Christ remaining.” In theory, this inadequacy might have been remedied, but in practice, Browne and his followers could wait no longer, calling for “reformation without tarying for anie.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Similar arguments were advanced by Browne's separatist contemporaries John Greenwood (c. 1560–1593) and Henry Barrow (c. 1550–1593), both of whom agreed that “the situation of the Church of England . . . was one of total apostasy.”Footnote ⁴⁶ But, though their condemnation of England's national church was unflinching, separatists like Browne, Greenwood, and Barrow did not clearly articulate the more provocative argument that no national church, however pure its doctrine and practice, could ever fit the biblical ideal.Footnote ⁴⁷

This more radical idea belonged to the seventeenth-century Congregationalists, a group whose rejection of the very idea of a national church proved far more disruptive to western Christendom than anything written by sixteenth-century separatists. To deny the legitimacy of a national church was to upend an assumption that had heretofore reigned unchallenged within the English church, and, indeed, within the magisterial reformation more generally: namely, that however the visible church might be best organized, that organization would encompass the entire nation as a single comprehensive and compulsory entity. To assert otherwise, as Congregationalists were increasingly doing, was to challenge the commonly held English notion that theirs was a Christian nation in the strongest sense, that is, that all of its citizens belonged to one single, comprehensive visible church, each congregation standing not as a discrete visible church, but simply as a local instantiation of a wider organic whole. Under such an arrangement, to be a member of the nation-state was to be a member of the national church, and to be born English was, effectively, to be born Christian. But a Congregational ecclesiology, by its own internal logic, upended this longstanding consensus. Without even needing to invoke the term “national church,” Congregationalists implicitly excluded its possibility each time they positively defined what they understood the visible, or institutionalized, church to be. According to Congregationalists, the only form of visible church acknowledged by the New Testament was the local gathering “consisting onely of so many as may and doe meet together ordinarily in one place, for the publique worship of God.”Footnote ⁴⁸

This understanding of what constituted “the church” contrasted sharply with the competing Presbyterian system in which one could speak of the visible church in multiple senses. “Our Presbyterian Brethren,” wrote Thomas Goodwin, “hold the Institution of Church-State, to fall upon the whole universal Church, as one great Body by Institution.” This single institution called “the church,” was then amenable to “the Division and Subdivision of the whole into several Subordinations of greater and lesser Bodies,” each of which could rightly be termed “the church.” Goodwin likened this Presbyterian conception of the visible church to a body of water in which “every part of [the] water hath the Nature of the whole, so every Integral Church, be it lesser or greater, National, Provincial, Congregational, &c. as they are all Churches.”Footnote ⁴⁹ As the Scottish Presbyterian George Gillespie described it, “the congregations in a nation” are “to be subject to a nationall Assembly” in which “many Churches are combined into one, in the very same manner, as many members are combined into one Church.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Gillespie could speak of local congregations as properly churches in and of themselves, while simultaneously referring to a national assembly as also properly “the church.” Another prominent Presbyterian and Westminster Assembly commissioner, Daniel Cawdrey, made a similar point in response to the Congregational claim that “you read [in the New Testament] of no Nationall Church . . . given . . . by Christ.” Cawdrey granted that the term “national church” was not to be found in the New Testament, but he observed in reply that the book of Acts could describe “the Church of Jerusalem” (for example, Acts 11:22) as comprising “many Congregations” while remaining “but one Church.” From this apostolic precedent, Cawdrey concluded that “if many Congregations may be called one Church in a City” he could “see no great reason” “why all the Congregations in a Nation, may not be called one National Church.”Footnote ⁵¹

For Congregationalists, however, the visible church was not scalable in this sense. As John Cotton insisted, “[t]he Apostle [Paul] never calls the Christians of a whole Nation one Church, but when there are many Congregations in a Nation or Country, then he terms them many Churches.” From such observations, Congregationalists like Cotton concluded that “National, Provincial, and Diocesan Churches are such that the Apostles never heard of in the New Testament” and “are therefore the Inventions of Mens Brains.”Footnote ⁵² Here, then, is the very idea with which Thomas Goodwin's “great Question of these times” was concerned in 1641: “whether yea or no, besides a particular Congregation that met together in one place . . . many Congregations, many Churches united in one may not be called one particular Church.” Goodwin identified “many Churches united in one” as “a Presbyterian Church” and in the Apologeticall Narration submitted to parliament in January 1643/4, Goodwin and his fellow Congregationalists would reject what they described as “a Presbyterial combination” of multiple churches.Footnote ⁵³ Thus if representatives of various churches assembled together into an association or synod to advise and assist one another, their collective action could not be properly predicated of “the church,” but rather only of “churches.”

This explains the striking but seldom-observed fact that Congregationalists doggedly policed their language so as to exclude all references to the English “church,” singular, referring instead only to the English “churches” plural. When a group of New England ministers exchanged ideas on ecclesiology with their old English counterparts in 1639, they conspicuously leveled their criticisms not against “the Church of England” but only “the English Parishes” and the “English Churches.” Elsewhere they explained that because in the New Testament “there is now no Nationall Church” it follows “that we reade so much in the New Testament of Churches, in the Plurall number.”Footnote ⁵⁴ When the five Congregational commissioners at the Westminster Assembly composed their Apologeticall Narration, they likewise avoided singular references to “the church,” preferring instead to talk about “the Churches of England” or “the parish Churches in England.”Footnote ⁵⁵ And though the Dissenting Brethren never explicitly drew attention to their unusual linguistic turn, it did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. The Presbyterian Alexander Forbes observed that “in this Apologie they constantly speak of the Churches of England in the plurall, never of the Church of England in the singular number.” This, Forbes explained, was because Congregationalists “cannot endure the name of a Nationall Church, not onely as Episcopal men absurdly understand it . . . but even as we rightly understand it to be meant of all the particular Congregations making one entire body, which is represented in a Nationall Synod.”Footnote ⁵⁶ When, in his celebrated 1644 treatise, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, John Cotton described the various processes through which an “Assembly of many churches” might cooperate in a synod, he was careful to use the plural form, rather than attributing collective action to a singular “church.”Footnote ⁵⁷ And in his 1645 treatise, The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England, Cotton likewise spoke consistently of churches in the plural, referring throughout the work not to “the Church of England (as they call it),” but rather to “the churches of England”: “wee doe not admit the Members of the Churches of England.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The consistent refusal to discuss “the Church” as a singular, overarching entity highlights one way in which Congregational authors could presuppose and advance their repudiation of a national church without needing to engage the question directly.

Several of these interrelated issues flow together in a published exchange between John Cotton and Samuel Rutherford, two leading representatives of Congregationalism and Presbyterianism respectively.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1644, Rutherford published The Due Right of Presbyteries, a massive defense of Presbyterian ecclesiology in the face of growing Congregational resistance. In the book, Rutherford critiqued the passage with which Cotton began his The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England, a passage in which Cotton asserted that “there be no national or provinciall Church under the New Testament, but only a parishonall Congregation meeting every Lords day, in one place for the worship of God.” Here was the foundational idea upon which Cotton's ecclesiological vision rested, the unifying principal and sine qua non of the Congregational Way. Rutherford recognized this and rejected it. For though he was quick to deny any support for a “National Church under the care of one Diocesan or National Prelate,” he insisted that this opposition to episcopacy did not imply support for the Congregational position that “there is no visible instituted Church now, but only a particular Congregation.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Rutherford argued instead that when many particular congregations were brought together, the resultant amalgamation could properly be described as “the church”—the “union of many Congregations in a visible government is enough to make all these united Churches one visible, ministerial and governing Church.”Footnote ⁶¹

To support his position, Rutherford located New Testament passages in which multiple congregations were addressed collectively as a singular “church.” For example, Rutherford contended that the seven churches addressed in the book of Revelation (Revelation 1:4) each “contained many Congregations under them,” and “yet doth Christ write to every one of the seven, as having one visible government.” From these and other New Testament examples, Rutherford concluded that “a Church national or provinciall of Cities, Provinces, and Kingdomes, having one common government . . . cannot be denyed.”Footnote ⁶² Having established the biblical basis for a national church in the New Testament era, Rutherford further nuanced his position by distinguishing between two types of “national church” found in scripture. The first type occurred “when a whole Nation” was “tied by Divine precept, to some publique acts of typicall worship, in one place.” The paradigmatic example of this was ancient Israel and “the Church of the Jewes.” This sort of “national church” was rejected by all involved in the debate—“thus farre our brethrens arguments doe well conclude, that the Jewish Church was Nationall in a peculiar manner proper to that Church onely.” But there was a second type of national church that Rutherford was willing to support. Under the New Testament administration, “a Nationall Church is taken in another sense”; namely “for a people to whom the Lord hath revealed his statutes and his testimonies.” This “Church is also made up of many Congregations and Synagogues, having one worship and government that doth morally concerne them all.”Footnote ⁶³ Such language was inimical to the Congregational project, for here again was the Presbyterian notion that the “church” could take on multiple forms, with varying ecclesiastical units combining and recombining into ever larger bodies, all of which might be appropriately described as “the church.”

As the Presbyterian polemical collective Smectymnuus noted in 1641, “the word Church is an Equivocall word, and hath as many severall acceptions as letters.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Divines on each side of the debate were thus forever distinguishing among many possible usages and nuances. John Cotton, for instance, could endorse a “national church” in the sense that “many thousands of pretious Saints” “live in a Nationall Church estate.” Yet, in the same treatise, Cotton sought vigorously “to distinguish our way from a Nationall Church-way.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Similar definitional gymnastics were on display when the Congregationalist Jeremiah Burroughes wrote:

Here Burroughes was defending himself against charges leveled by the notorious Presbyterian heresy hunter Thomas Edwards.Footnote ⁶⁷ Edwards had accused the Congregationalist of “preaching against Nationall Churches under the new Testament, and for the way of their particular Churches.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In reply, Burroughes claimed that in the specific instance, his rhetoric was directed only against that particular sense of the national church which, as we have seen, Samuel Rutherford also denied—that is, a national church wholly analogous to ancient Israel in which worshipers from across the nation were assembled in one location for “Nationall Worship.” This type of national church, Burroughes rightly insisted, was “no Independency to deny”—although Burroughes rather coyly refrained from elaborating on whether he denied the alternative sense of a “national church” that Presbyterians like Rutherford enthusiastically affirmed. But irrespective of Burroughes’ intentions, the exchange both demonstrates just how slippery the debate could be and underscores the need for scholars of the period to attend more carefully to the nuanced fashion in which key terms were deployed and contested.Footnote ⁶⁹

Indeed, many of the key terms used in mid-seventeenth-century ecclesiological debate were hotly contested, and untangling their usage is critical to understanding the period more broadly. When John Cotton attempted to explain why he refused to describe himself as an “Independent,” he stated that the label was unsatisfactory because it could potentially encompass too many positions with which he and his fellow Congregationalists disagreed. To illustrate the point, he observed that the term “Independent” was “compatible to a Nationall Church, as well as to a Congregationall.” He concluded that “if there must needs be some note of difference to decypher our estate, and to distinguish our way from a Nationall Church-way, I know none fitter, then to denominate theirs Classicall, and ours Congregationall.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This example is especially helpful, because the appropriateness of a national church was not, at this particular point, central to Cotton's discourse. Cotton only mentioned his rejection of a national church as a means to explain the separate point about why he refused to own the “Independent” label, a rhetorical strategy in which an idea clearly understood by his readers was invoked to explain an idea which clearly was not. Cotton's casual usage reveals an author who could comfortably assume familiarity among his readers with both the fact that Congregationalism was incompatible with a national church, and the centrality of this incompatibility within the wider Congregational vision. To this last point, Cotton invoked what he assumed would have been an obvious and gross conflict between “our way” and “a Nationall Church-way” in order to clarify the vehemence with which he rejected the term “Independent;” Cotton's point would only have been made if his readership had immediately perceived the absurdity of a label which could potentially encompass two positions as diametrically and self-evidently opposed as Congregationalism and “a Nationall Church-way.”

That Cotton could write in such a manner indicates that the fundamental tension between Congregationalism and a national church might have often functioned more as background than foreground. As Mark Noll has observed, intellectual history requires its practitioners to “identify the clusters of widely shared concepts, assumptions about states of affairs, and taken-for-granted convictions that within any given society function like languages.”Footnote ⁷¹ Such concepts are so basic to a given system of thought that they are often left unstated. For Congregationalists, the refusal to conceptualize multiple churches in aggregate as properly “the church” was logically prior to many of their more specific ecclesiological prescriptions. This pattern is at work in a treatise like John Cotton's Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven. The New England divine addressed a range of questions connected to church polity and all of his answers seemed to presuppose, rather than argue for, his abandonment of the strong national church ideal.Footnote ⁷² When Cotton considered, for example, whether or not “the Church hath power or libertie for proceeding to the utmost censure of their whole Presbytery,” the “Church” in view was the local, particular congregation, and the “whole Presbytery” in view was the body of elders serving that local, particular congregation. The way in which he discussed these interactions would have only made sense within a Congregational framework incompatible with a national church, as his entire discourse presupposed the negation of a Presbyterian system in which multiple churches could, in aggregate, be properly described as “the church.” If the only actions properly predicated of “the church” were those enacted by local congregations, then Cotton's descriptions of what “the church” could or could not do necessarily excluded the collective actions of a Presbyterian-style synod. Or, elsewhere, when Cotton explained the “seven waies” through “which communion is mutually exercised amongst” multiple churches, the churches in view were always local, particular churches, and these combinations of individual churches were never referred to as “the Church” in the singular. With respect to these specific examples and throughout the entirety of the treatise, the national church idea was not directly in view, but its repudiation nonetheless functioned as a controlling assumption.Footnote ⁷³

III. Further Historiographical Reflections: Clarifying Misconceptions

If Congregationalism was, in fact, inimical to the idea of a national church in some deeply rooted, underlying way, then we should not be surprised to find this tension often assumed rather than explicitly discussed. And this, in turn, may help to explain why the relationship between Congregationalism and the idea of a national church has generated division within the relevant scholarship. In his seminal study of The Congregational Way, Geoffrey Nuttall identifies the movement's basic “denial of a national church” as an argument “so revolutionary . . . that those who controverted it never really set about the task of trying to understand the idea of the Church which was its premise: they could not persuade themselves that anyone really had such an idea.”Footnote ⁷⁴ If, as Nuttall suggests, Congregationalism's contemporary opponents found themselves unable to fully appreciate the significance of what the Congregational Way actually entailed, it would seem that something similar has happened within segments of modern historiography. For when historians deny that seventeenth-century Congregationalists stood opposed to a national church, they seem to do so by considerably reducing the “revolutionary” and radical character of the Congregationalist argument.

When Avihu Zakai, for example, argues that “neither Independents nor Congregationalists rejected the idea of a national church,” the “national church” that he supposes Congregationalists to have supported was not a “national church” at all; at least, it would not have been recognized as such by the historical actors involved. Rather than appreciating the significance of the label “national church” as an early modern technical term with a quite specific set of meanings, Zakai assumes that the term simply stood in for any sort of generic national ecclesiastical oversight. More specifically, in asserting that Congregationalists sought “to reform the Church of England as a national church,” Zakai seems to mean only that Congregationalists denied neither the appropriateness of “a national synod” nor the magistrate's duty to enforce “religious unity and uniformity.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, Christopher Hill's argument that Congregationalists “still believed in a national church,” is based upon the fact that Congregational ministers were not opposed to a national system of tithes.Footnote ⁷⁶ No one familiar with Congregational writings would deny that these ministers supported synods, doctrinal uniformity enforced by the magistrate, and a system of ministerial maintenance. But it does not follow that Congregationalists thereby approved of a “national church” in the sense in which that term was most often used in mid-seventeenth-century religious discourse.

First, Congregationalists endorsed synods, national or otherwise, only insofar as the particular congregations involved entered into them voluntarily and as equal partners. As the New England Congregationalist Richard Mather explained in 1643, the “consociation of Churches into Classes and Synods we hold to be lawfull and in some cases necessary” so that individual churches might “seeke for counsell and advice from neighbour Churches.”Footnote ⁷⁷ When particular churches entered into such “consociation,” Mather continued, they did so “not as if the prime Churches were imperfect, and to make one Church by this union; but because they were intire Churches, and had the power of Churches, yet they needed support in exercising of it.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The key point, again, is that Mather and his contemporaries regarded particular congregations as the only legitimate church units recognized in the New Testament. Only particular congregations counted as true “visible churches,” or, as Mather put it, “there should not be Nationall Churches, but congregationall, and not one visible church, but many.”Footnote ⁷⁹ When multiple visible churches entered into associations or synods, they did not thereby constitute a “national church” but simply many churches joining together voluntarily for mutual benefit. John Cotton described “seven wiaes” by which “all the Churches enjoy mutuall brotherly communion amongst themselves.” But he also made clear that in doing so “no particular Church standeth in subjection to another particular Church;” for “one Church hath liberty to admonish another, though they be both of them of equall authority.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Cotton did grant that synods, once formed, had authority to “admonish an offending church” and the “power to decree and publish . . . ordinances” for the “general reformation” of the churches. But, crucially, whatever authority he granted to synods, Cotton always understood them to be ad hoc gatherings of churches, always voluntary, always occasional, and never constitutive of “the Church” proper.Footnote ⁸¹ The “Dissenting Brethren” at the Westminster Assembly wished to see a similar scheme extended to the national level, but this always involved multiple churches meeting together and in no way implied a “national church” in the strong, early modern sense. Indeed, Thomas Hooker made this contrast explicit when, in replying to Samuel Rutherford's assertion that Congregational approval of synods was tantamount to the approval of the very national church “which they otherwise deny,” the New England minister wrote that while “consociation is one thing,” the “constitution of a new species or kinde of a Church is another.”Footnote ⁸²

Second, when Zakai highlights that Congregationalists affirmed “the magistrate's coercive power concerning religion and belief” he is correct, but it does not follow that they thereby also affirmed a “national church” in a meaningful seventeenth-century sense. Zakai interprets the endorsement of magisterial control over religious questions as prima facie evidence of support for a national church. Because Congregationalists, like their Presbyterian counterparts, defended “the duty of the magistrate to uphold and maintain the true church,” Zakai concludes that “[t]hus, despite their differing concepts of church government, both the Independents and the Presbyterians sought religious unity and uniformity within the framework of a national church.”Footnote ⁸³ Zakai's premise that Congregationalists and Presbyterians often agreed with one another concerning religious toleration is undeniably true, and yet his conclusion that such agreement implied a shared endorsement of the English national church is not. This is because, as the preceding paragraphs have sought to demonstrate, the seventeenth-century disputants were using the term “national church” in a specific, technical sense, such that their rejection or embrace of the same did not necessarily impinge upon wider questions of magisterial toleration. To modern observers, the top-down imposition of doctrinal orthodoxy across an entire population may look precisely like the establishment of a “national church.” But this broad, modern usage is not consonant with the term's use by Congregational divines during the mid-seventeenth century, and the rather nebulous equation of the term “national church” with any overarching attempt to establish doctrinal uniformity cannot account for the oft-repeated Congregational insistence that a “Nationall political church-state” was “not instituted by Christ under the Gospell.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, when Congregational divines objected to the very idea of a national church, they were not arguing over toleration in any straightforward sense. Rather, they were taking up what Thomas Goodwin called “the great Question of these times,” namely, whether or not individual congregations could be combined into a single ecclesiastical body which could then rightly be called “the church.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The relationship between these issues is further complicated by the fact that questions of right-worship were not easily distinguished from wider social and ethical questions. Like almost everyone else in early modern England, Congregationalists clearly understood the civil magistrate to be responsible for enforcing a comprehensive national righteousness, and this public moral order included elements which modernity would later reclassify as purely religious concerns. Blasphemy, idolatry, and the failure to attend corporate worship, for example, were not seen as narrowly religious offences, but rather as violations of a universally binding moral law. This moral law was, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism put it, “summarily comprehended in the Ten Commandments,” meaning that so-called “first table” offences were still the proper concern of the civil magistrate.Footnote ⁸⁶ This explains why even the Baptist Christopher Blackwood, whom John Coffey identifies as sympathetic to “radical tolerationism,” advocated that the magistrate suppress Muslims, atheists, and polytheists, because those violations were “committed against the light of nature” and thus akin to “Blasphemy, Murder, Adultery, Falsewitnesse, Perjury, Theft,” and other crimes that “the Magistrate, whether heathen or Christian, is to be a terrour unto.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Unless we wish to argue that the Baptist Blackwood was thereby also in favor of a “national church,” we must conclude that one's position on toleration and the magistrate's duty to suppress a broadly defined immorality was conceptually distinct from one's assessment of the national church. Whatever their opinions on the toleration debate, Congregationalists’ beliefs in this area did not directly impinge upon their more foundational rejection of the national church idea.

The question of whether or not Congregationalists denied a “national church” hinges, then, upon how one understands the term. If it is taken to mean any sort of overarching ecclesiastical organization implemented on a national level, or any sort of magisterial enforcement of doctrine and practice, then surely Congregationalists were as happy as any of their contemporaries to support a “national church.” But while using the term “national church” to describe these activities might be eminently reasonable from a modern perspective, it was not the way that early modern English actors understood the term. When they denied or affirmed the legitimacy of a “national church,” they were arguing about whether or not multiple congregations could be combined into a single entity and whether or not the resultant conglomeration could be rightly described as “the church.” At its root, the Congregational objection to a “national church” was less about practice and more about theory, less about what churches did and more about what churches were. Desire for a “godly” nation ought not to be conflated with desire for a “national church.” To ignore this and to posit that Congregationalists supported a national church because they engaged in practices which would, by modern standards, seem to imply as much, distorts our understanding of the period and represents a failure, as Quentin Skinner put it, “to think as our ancestors thought and to see things their way.”Footnote ⁸⁸

IV. The Idea of a “National Church” in Cromwellian England

Commenting on John Cotton's prose style, the nineteenth-century historian and literary critic Moses Coit Tyler quipped that whatever “vast intellectual and moral force” the great Congregationalist may have possessed, it evidently “was a thing that could not be handed over to the printing-press.” Tyler described John Cotton's literary output as devoid of “remarkable merits in thought or style.” While reading Cotton, Tyler continued, “[o]ne wanders through these vast tracts and jungles of Puritanic discourse—exposition, exhortation, logic-chopping, theological hair-splitting—and is unrewarded by a single passage of eminent force or beauty.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The present essay may strike some readers as an exercise in the same “theological hair-splitting” that Tyler decried; here we have attempted to analyze how Cotton and his contemporaries understood a single term during roughly a single decade. One could, consequently, be forgiven for questioning such an inquiry's wider relevance and force. And had the set of ecclesiological distinctions and definitions with which we have engaged ourselves remained confined within the ministerial circles out of which they arose, such concerns would, perhaps, have been well-founded. But unlike many ecclesiological debates during the period, the national church question was not limited to the abstruse theological polemic of leading Congregational divines, and thus whatever sympathies one might harbor toward Tyler's aesthetic assessment of the genre, we need not worry that our expedition into the “jungles of Puritanic discourse” has been a fruitless one.

After 1649, Congregationalism's controlling assumption that the institutionalized, visible church be limited to local congregations became a controlling assumption of the Cromwellian regime. This insured that the very idea of a “national church,” as seventeenth-century actors understood it, was ruled out in principle. Yet because the significance of the phrase “national church” as a mid-seventeenth-century technical term has not been sufficiently appreciated, historians of the period often underplay the radicalism of the Congregational vision at this crucial point. A recent essay by Ann Hughes, for example, contends that one should not be “too hasty” to assume that Congregationalists “had little concern for a national Church[,]” because throughout the period they maintained a “commitment to some sort of non-compulsory official or national Church . . . combined with an elevated notion of the role of the civil magistrate.” Thus, Hughes argues, “mainstream Congregationalists had complex, perhaps even contradictory, relationships with the concept and practice of a national Church.” These comments and the broader portrait Hughes paints of “The Cromwellian Church” are helpful to an extent, but they are also misleading because they fail to account for how Congregationalists actually employed the term “national church” in their writing. Instead of adequately accounting for the way in which the phrase “national church” functioned as a technical term in mid-seventeenth-century ecclesiastical discourse, such assessments assume a far too vague and generic understanding of what might constitute a “national church” and then evaluate Congregationalists in light of this attenuated notion. Thus, a generic concern for some overarching national ecclesiastical structures and an ongoing role for magisterial enforcement of godliness are interpreted as evidence that Congregationalists supported a “national church”, even though the historical actors themselves would never have understood their own position as such. Such a reading and the persistent use of the label, “the Cromwellian Church,” throughout the essay minimizes the radicalism of the Congregational position by failing to attend carefully enough to what the term “national church” would have meant to those involved.Footnote ⁹⁰

Once we recalibrate our understanding of how the term “national church” functioned during the period, however, many of the ecclesiastical structures developed under Cromwell are clarified considerably. Though often overshadowed by the more notorious attempts at puritan social and moral reform,Footnote ⁹¹ Congregational ecclesiology shaped and determined the search for religious settlement during the 1650s. Individuals long-connected to the Congregational cause took control of England's ecclesiastical course and attempted to transmute the previous decade's transatlantic accumulation of words and ideas into actions, policies, and institutions.Footnote ⁹² Chief among this group were Thomas Goodwin and John Owen, “the two Atlases and Patriarchs of Independency.”Footnote ⁹³ After Goodwin's appointment as President of Magdalen College in January 1650 and Owen's as dean of Christ Church in March 1651, “[i]t was they, and the party they built in the university, who designed or promoted the principal ecclesiastical initiatives of the Interregnum.”Footnote ⁹⁴ When the Rump Parliament attempted to specify a doctrinal platform for the regime in March 1652, the outcome was a series of Humble Proposals drafted by Owen and Goodwin, along with Philip Nye and Sidrach Simpson.Footnote ⁹⁵ In December 1653, Henry Lawrence, who had once served as an elder alongside Thomas Goodwin in the Arnhem Congregational church, was made lord president of Cromwell's Council of State.Footnote ⁹⁶ The bodies of “triers” and “ejectors” appointed in 1654 to regulate the nation's ministers were dominated by Congregationalists, a group that included Owen, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, William Greenhill, and Joseph Caryl.Footnote ⁹⁷ Four years later, in the autumn of 1658, many of these same individuals assembled to draft A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practised in the Congregational Churches in England, a document which Tim Cooper suggests can be understood “as one more instalment in the almost continuous search for settlement that trekked through” the entirety of the decade.Footnote ⁹⁸

And though the religious settlement these ministers constructed during the 1650s may appear to modern observers like the very definition of a “national church,” those involved at the time would not have understood it as such. For as this article has labored to demonstrate, the term “national church” held a specific meaning within the lexicon and logic of mid-seventeenth-century Congregationalism, referring not in a general way to any top-down regulation of a nation's religious life but rather to the idea that all the particular congregations within a nation might be properly regarded as forming a single church—that is, “a new Church made up of many Churches.”Footnote ⁹⁹ By recognizing how the label “national church” functioned as a technical term within early modern ecclesiological discourse one can begin to understand the otherwise paradoxical phenomenon of supposedly “Independent” ministers retaining and participating in many of the preexisting parish structures after 1649,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ while simultaneously declaring repeatedly and unequivocally that under the New Testament “there be no national churches.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Having spent the better part of the 1640s critiquing the idea of a national church, Congregationalists were not about to authorize it once in power. Instead, they officially dismantled the national church in 1650, the Rump parliament repealing the Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity.Footnote ¹⁰² The Instrument of Government, adopted in 1653 as England's first written constitution, did not use the phrase “national church” nor even the single word “church.” Nor does the term “national church” appear anywhere in that later, more fulsome statement of Congregational doctrine, the Savoy Declaration (1658). Indeed, the Declaration's preface, likely authored by Thomas Goodwin and Phillip Nye, persistently refused to refer to the nation's congregations as constituting a “church” in the singular, preferring instead to follow the Dissenting Brethren's longstanding practice of referring only to the nation's “churches” in the plural.Footnote ¹⁰³ These deliberate omissions and conspicuous linguistic turns can be helpfully juxtaposed with parliament's commission to the Presbyterian-dominated Westminster Assembly in 1643. The Westminster divines were called to reform the Church of England as such, specifically charged with “the vindicating and clearing of the Doctrine of the Church of England from all false Calumnies and Aspersions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ By contrast, the Savoy Declaration explicitly denied even the possibility of an institutionalized national church, maintaining instead that “[b]esides these particular Churches [that is, local congregations], there is not instituted by Christ any Church more extensive.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Likewise, the Instrument made no provision for a national church, establishing only “[t]hat the Christian religion, as contained in the Scriptures, be held forth and recommended as the public profession of these nations.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Whatever the wonderfully vague phrase “public profession” might have entailed, it seems clear that this was something wholly other than that which parliamentary Presbyterians sought in 1643. The ecclesiastical structures established by the Instrument were deliberately limited and often ineffectual,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and efforts to specify the details of the “public profession of these nations” never gained statutory force.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Most importantly for our purposes, none of the religious initiatives established by Congregational divines during the 1650s amounted to what they would have understood as the establishment and endorsement of a “national church.” The Cromwellian “triers” and “ejectors,” for example, were appointed by the state and sought to regulate ministers serving in state-funded pulpits, but nothing within the scheme itself impinged upon the Congregational imperative that each specific congregation be considered a complete “church” in and of itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Triers and ejectors could remove someone from public ministry or bar him from initial entry, but they were not in the business of appointing ministers to specific congregations or otherwise interfering in the affairs of particular churches. Indeed, those drafting the March 1654 ordinance establishing the Triers went out of their way to specify that the mere approval of ministers as being fit for office was “not intended nor shall be construed to be any solemn or sacred setting apart of a person to any particular office in the ministry”—in keeping with established Congregational practice, the power and responsibility to make such particular appointments lay with individual congregations.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In 1643, the Dissenting Brethren had objected to a national church with its attendant “promiscuous receiving and mixture of good and bad” into church membership; under Cromwell, no such national church existed and local congregations were free to police their membership rolls as they saw fit.Footnote ¹¹¹ Officially, the individual congregation was regarded as the sole, visible expression of the church proper and any sense of national, normative religiosity was managed through magisterial rather than ecclesiastical oversight. Jeffrey Collins has described the Cromwellian church settlement as “the institutional culmination of an Erastian ideological impulse.” The present essay essentially supports that conclusion but nuances it by suggesting that insofar as the state was directing certain aspects of English life which appear “religious” to modern observers, this was done with the full support and blessing of the Congregational divines then pushing for precisely such an arrangement. The logic of Congregationalism demanded that the magistrate, or “nursing father,” make quasi-Erastian intervention and perform certain tasks which the Congregational Way had voluntarily extirpated from ecclesiastical remit.Footnote ¹¹² All of this helps to explain why Congregationalists could maintain such an affable posture toward their now-humbled Presbyterian colleagues after 1649. In that same year, John Owen dismissed their disagreements “about Church society” as “minute differences,”Footnote ¹¹³ and regional expressions of Presbyterianism such as the establishment of a London classis were allowed to proceed unhindered.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Localized, voluntary Presbyterian activities were unproblematic because the larger battle over a national church had already been won.

The Congregational victory was, of course, short-lived. Just as the Laudian bishop Jeremy Taylor could describe the events of the revolution as a “great Storm which hath dasht the Vessel of the Church to pieces,”Footnote ¹¹⁵ the events of the Restoration which followed proved equally traumatic to the Cromwellian religious establishment and its animating Congregational spirit.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Yet we must not allow the brevity of the Congregational ascendance to obscure its astonishing success. Born under persecution, developed in exile, and finally vaulted to political prominence by the creative destruction of revolution and civil war, the ascent of Congregationalism on two continents was swift and forceful. No less startling, however, was the basic rejection which undergird its fundamental axioms: namely, the categorical denial of the very idea of a national church. This denial has been obscured by conflicting scholarship, an historiographical confusion which, in turn, may reflect something of the underlying opacity of the source materials. But to recover a sense of how early modern Congregationalists used the term “national church” and why the Congregational vision demanded its rejection, is to reconstruct both something of the context out of which Congregationalism emerged and the essential nature of its inner logic. For it was only after identifying the local congregation, rather than a “national church,” as the exclusive New Testament manifestation of the institutionalized visible church that Congregationalists could then coherently conceptualize those more celebrated and well understood aspects of their ecclesiology.