Abstract
Roughly two years after Metacom’s War, John Eliot published a Lord’s Supper preparativo titled, The Harmony of the Gospels, in the Holy History of the Humiliation and Sufferings of Jesus Christ from his Incarnation to his Death and Burial (1678). The book’s 130 pages provide a copious survey of various sufferings undergone by Jesus which Eliot parsed out of his reading of Scripture. Eliot posed several parallels between the experiences of Jesus, on one hand, and those of genuine Christians on the other. One of these parallels is the experience of poverty and what Eliot repeatedly called an “obscure low condition” that obtains from poverty. Considering Eliot’s long experience in cross-cultural ministry in a tenuous colonial context, this is one of the most striking features of the book. I believe it resonates with the Native Christian experience more than the white colonial Christian experience. Time and again Eliot makes an authorial movement from Gospel narrative and biblical commentary to contemporary application for Christian readers. I suggest that Eliot intended to voice comfort at times in The Harmony specifically to Native Christians by assuring them their experience of marginalization and suffering did not negate their status as a part of God’s people. What Eliot wrote about the low condition of being “a worm” reflects convictions likely forged in the fires of cross-cultural ministry in colonial context. Eliot’s multifaceted and expectant vision for the praying towns was a casualty of Metcom’s War. He seems to have changed his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 1:26–29. The theological motif of Zechariah’s temple rebuilding mission was replaced by the suffering Messiah’s rejection as the prominent biblical type informing Eliot’s expectations for the development of Native Christianity. In this carefully nuanced pastoral theology of poverty is also a prophetic critique of injustice toward the poor and marginalized.
Keywords
Introduction
Between the summers of 1675 and 1676, the colonists of New England fought a 14-month long war against a coalition of Native Americans led by Wampanoag sachem Metacom, or “King Philip.” Most of the seaboard Christian Natives at the time, who called themselves “praying Indians,” pursued neutrality in the conflict. Many actually offered to help serve the colonists as scouts. But the praying Indians were caught in a middle ground, as it were, distrusted and attacked by both Metacom’s forces and white settlers. Some praying Indians were interned over the winter on an island in Boston harbor, supposedly for their own safe keeping (Pulsipher, 2005: 135–59). 1 The calamity of Metacom’s War meant the destruction of 12 colonial towns and 10 of the 14 Native Christian settlements, called “praying towns.” Most copies of the Algonquin Bible were either lost or destroyed. Approximately 5,000 total Native Americans and 2,500 colonists lost their lives. Among the Native fatalities were half of the total praying Indian population.
Roughly two years after Metacom’s War had ended, Rev. John Eliot published a book titled, The Harmony of the Gospels, in the Holy History of the Humiliation and Sufferings of Jesus Christ from his Incarnation to his Death and Burial (1678). The book was primarily and explicitly intended as a Lord’s Supper preparativo, a popular Puritan genre in the 1670s (Holifield, 1974: 73–74). 2 The book’s 130 pages provide a copious survey of various sufferings undergone by Jesus which Eliot parsed out of his reading of Scripture. The sufferings range, temporally, from Christ’s nine months in Mary’s womb to his soul’s three-day disembodiment while his pre-resurrection corpse lay in the tomb. The book is sometimes noted by scholars as an Eliot publication but has largely eluded the attention of historians of Puritanism, the emerging United States, and colonial missions. 3 Though it’s traditionally not considered a part of Eliot’s “Indian library,” books having to do with his cross-cultural ministry, I believe it reflects much about his experience and aims as the Apostle to the Indians.
Eliot (1604–1690) had served the Roxbury Congregationalist church for 43 years by the start of Metacom’s War. He began regularly itinerating among the Algonquin in 1646. The septuagenarian Eliot and others who attended to the needs of Christian Indians during the conflict faced public intimidation and were victims of at least one attempt on their lives by other colonists. 4 Eliot was perhaps the most vocal and active proponent for the just treatment of praying Indians during Metacom’s War. 5 He was the leading critic of the colony’s selling of Indians into slavery (Lepore, 1998: 9n22, 153). 6 Margaret Newell rightly notes that Eliot was “no Bartolome de las Casas” in that he never published an extended treatise arguing for the rights of Indians. Yet she also notes that Eliot and leaders of the Native Christian community themselves “begged” the Massachusetts General Court to address the problem of indiscriminate kidnapping of Indians by colonists (Newell, 2009: 41, 48). 7
The ambivalent reception of Eliot’s case by colonial magistrates, as well as the animosity of colonists during the war toward Eliot and other colonial friends of Native Christians raises the question of how marginal was the position from which Eliot labored as a missionary (especially in the years after the monarchy was restored in England in 1660, the Puritan reign coming to an end there and then). Even before Metacom’s War, Eliot’s mission seems to have always lacked the popular support of colonists. 8 Intercultural tensions had gradually mounted as the population ratio increased rapidly in favor of the colonists. A picture of Eliot in ambiguous relationship with the larger colonial project and other settlers is indeed consistent with recent scholarship on the history of Christian missions in the context of imperial expansion. 9
Eliot’s expectant missionary theology of the praying towns
Eliot proposed to Governor John Winthrop, Jr. in a July 24, 1675 letter, one month into Metacom’s War, that doing justice toward Natives regarding land disputes may “open [their] hearts” to God (Morrison, 1995: 167). 10 Eliot believed just dealings by colonial governments with Natives in general would be a means of grace, a thing that God might use to gain the interest of some Natives in the Christian faith. However, the widespread colonial desire for more land, even that land legally set aside for praying Indians, was fueling hostility and conflict. 11
Eliot had spent thirty years promoting the praying town project. 12 These towns were each a part of legally preserved spaces between 3,000 to 6,000 acres large, respectively (Gookin, 2000 [1674]: 32). They were meant to remedy the negative impact that settler culture was having on the Native way of life, such as the spoiling of traditional fishing spots by English style saw mills and the trampling of corn by unfenced English owned cattle. In praying towns, certain Native traditions could be preserved while certain English practices could be appropriated on Native terms. Eliot intended praying towns to include a mode of instruction in “letters” and “trades” that would equip residents for productive participation in a changing economic context ever more difficult to elude. 13
Praying towns were also meant to facilitate a ministry of teaching among the Indians by both itinerant ministers and resident Native leaders. They were meant to facilitate a set of corporate spiritual practices, what I call “Congregationalist piety” in my dissertation, of which the Lord’s Supper was the apex. They were communitarian spaces for the eventual establishment of Native ruled congregations.
Praying towns were also, in part, an attempt to mitigate the threat to personal welfare and disruption of social relationships brought upon a person or family by their Christian conversion. Hostility from Native traditionalists, both real and potential, was another practical impetus to the formation of praying towns. 14 Somewhat conversely, praying towns were also meant, ideally, to train converts for evangelistic encounters with relatives. 15 Some missionary forays were even ventured from a few praying towns, and curious enquirers were always welcome, at least in theory, to visit and observe praying Indian practices in praying towns. 16
In 1648, two years into his cross-cultural ministry and three years before the founding of Natick, the first praying town, Eliot believed God would eventually enlarge the work that he assumed to be in embryonic form. He thought God would do so in response to the prayers of individuals and congregations for such. He expected God to provide the additional means necessary to enlarge the work, especially more preachers or “Labourers,” both New English and Native (Winslow, 1649: 159). Eliot expected God to do this by “shining upon the day of our small things in his due season” (Whitefield, 1651: 206). God is wiser than all, and “the Lord’s time is best,” he wrote around 1650 (Whitefield, 1651: 187). The other praying towns were eventually established, though only few saw the formation of a church in their midst.
As late as 1669 Eliot wrote to Richard Baxter, “The work is chargable and full of difficulty and hardship, and few or almost none have an heart to set upon it. Pray for the day of small things” (Powicke, 1931: 55). 17 Eliot had also referred to a “day of small things” or “small beginnings” twice in The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, published twenty years earlier (1649). His frequent use of these phrases was in allusion to the two biblical texts on the title page of the first so-called Eliot tract, New England First Fruits (1643). Those two texts are Job 8:6–7 (“If thou were pure and upright, surely now he will awake for thee:—And though thy beginning be small, thy latter end shall greatly encrease”) and Zechariah 4:10 (“Who hath despised the Day of small things”). Zechariah 4:10 was also printed on the title page of the second tract, The Day-Breaking (1647), edited by Thomas Shepard.
Zechariah’s prophecy concerned the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem after the Israelites returned from exile in Babylon. 18 In that prophecy, Yahweh encouraged king Zerubbabel and the people of Israel to not be discouraged by a sight of the temple ruins and the extent of rebuilding that remained to be done. They were to take up the task of temple construction with God’s supernatural help. Specifically, they were to expect that their work would be accomplished, from foundation to capstone, not ultimately “by [their] might nor by [their] power,” but by the Spirit of God at work among them and through them. In fact, Eliot noted that, “God delighteth in small beginnings, that his great name may be magnified” (an allusion to Zechariah 4:6–10). The largeness of an accomplishment after the seeming human or natural impossibility of it provided occasion for God to be praised upon the completion of it with apparent divine assistance.
Eliot’s long-time associate in cross-cultural ministry, Daniel Gookin, concluded a brief description of the 14 praying towns in 1674 by referring to them as “some small beginnings that God hath wrought.” He continued, “and [Oh,] what foundations, through grace, are laid for the future good, and increasing their numbers” (2000 [1674]: 56). Gookin concluded that book with an appeal to readers for prayer that God, among other things, would “frustrate the design and stratagems of Satan and wicked men who endeavor to disturb and destroy the day of small things begun among this people” (2000 [1674]: 83–84). He also wrote in Historical Collections, “It is our duty by faith and prayer to wait God’s time, to give a blessing on the means” (2000 [1674]: 60). Gookin said in an introductory epistle to the treatise, “I shall humbly desire all such; not to despise the day of small things, but to turn their doubtings into prayers, which will be more for God’s honour and our comfort” (2000 [1674]: 3).
Such a multifaceted and forward looking expectant vision for the praying towns was a casualty of Metcom’s War. A careful reading of Eliot’s 1678 Gospel harmony in light of earlier publications and his ministry experience, noting a changed rendering of 1 Corinthians 1:26–29 in particular, suggests a new theological framework emerged for Eliot’s understanding of the Native Christian experience.
Eliot’s Gospel harmony two years after praying towns destroyed
In The Harmony Eliot posed various parallels between the “holy doings and sufferings” of Jesus, on one hand, and the experience of genuine Christian believers on the other. Eliot framed the suffering of Christian people as something “sanctified” by the holy or sinless sufferings of Christ himself. Suffering in the Christian life is now medicinal for the soul, a “physick” as he called it for their growth in holiness. This is a common Reformed and Puritan perspective on suffering, of course. Eliot did not, though, theologically justify or excuse any prejudice, neglect, hostility, envy, or unjust violence. On the contrary, his book includes a clear though implicit prophetic rebuke of injustice toward the poor and powerless. In Eliot’s book, readers were warned that God’s judgment and wrath would fall on persons full of pride and rage.
For example, Eliot drew a maxim from Peter’s armed defense of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: “All men should be aware of rash drawing out of the Sword, it is a dangerous thing, and not to be done without great counsel and deliberation” (1678: 73). 19 In The Harmony’s section on “the “sufferings of Jesus Christ under Pontius Pilate,” Eliot made the following conclusion: “we see that no human policy can quench the rage of the wicked against innocent Jesus Christ, and his innocent servants” (1678: 95–96). 20 Twin themes running through The Harmony are the irrationality of mob rage, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the providential turning of all events by God, even tragic ones, for God’s good purposes. 21
Eliot framed Pilate’s washing of his hands as both atypical for a Roman juror while paradigmatic for unbelieving, unreliable authorities in general. Christians ought not be surprised when unbelieving rulers fail to do justice for Christians though it is in their power to do so. Eliot warned that because Pilate so surprisingly failed to release the innocent Jesus, “Jesus Christ and his poor Servants may see what we are to expect from the hands of Man.” 22 Again, Eliot makes an authorial movement from Gospel narrative and biblical commentary to contemporary application for Christian readers.
One of the parallels between Christ and the Christian that Eliot develops is the experience of poverty and what Eliot repeatedly called an “obscure low condition” that obtains from material poverty. He treated these separately as two different kinds of suffering, though related and similar phenomena. 23 Considering Eliot’s long experience in cross-cultural ministry in the midst of a tenuous colonial context, I find what he said regarding poverty and an “obscure low condition” to be one of the most striking features of the book. From Eliot’s perspective, would it not have resonated more with the embattled Native Christian experience than the privileged white colonial Christian experience? By the late 1670s, Native Americans in general were despised by most colonists, even churchgoers who had begun to equate settler culture with Christianity and Native identity with heathendom. 24 The comfort that Eliot voiced at times to his readers by assuring them that their experience of marginalization and suffering did not negate their identity or status as a genuine part of God’s people suggests to me his intended readership included Native American Christians. 25 Regardless of his intended audience(s) or the explicit object of his reflections, Eliot’s theology of poverty is one of the earliest such offerings from the New World.
The book is comprised of 15 brief chapters. At the end of its seven-page-long sixth chapter titled, “The History of the holy life of Jesus Christ in the time of his child-hood,” Eliot noted, . . . all [Christ’s] glory was vailed from the worlds eye, by a poor, obscure low condition. Here might be great instruction both to children and parents, to all Believers, yea, and to all the enemies and dispisers of Jesus Christ: But I will pass on in attending to the History of his holy life and bitter Sufferings. (1678: 25)
In other words, Eliot says, “Here might be great instruction for the contemporary Christian reader, and for the despiser of Christian faith . . . but I will forgo that to keep pushing forward in my History of Christ’s life.” This is a device he uses throughout the book to signal implications or applications, but implications or applications he wished to remain unstated explicitly. It’s his way of saying, “Let the reader understand.”
I suspect the “great instruction” and lesson that Eliot passed over here was that Christian Natives in an “obscure low condition,” especially after Metacom’s War, had some kind of glory unnoticed by most colonists, especially those who considered themselves Christians but were not truly so per Eliot’s judgement. The idea of a person’s “glory,” honor, or true identity in relation to God being “veiled,” as Eliot put it, from the sight and recognition of others because of the glorious person’s material poverty or marginalized position in society is a theme Eliot returns to time and again in this book. Eliot’s “Indian tracts” of the 1640s and 1650s were attempts to prove to potential donors in England that God was at work among Native Americans, and he had famously failed in October 1652 to help Native candidates for church membership and baptism convincingly present their conversion narratives to a white audience in Massachusetts. 26 Might Eliot have responded to the cultural and psychological crisis that Metacom’s War was for Native Christians by signaling in this book that their experience of neglect and hostility at the hands of those with more social resources, power, and even ecclesial prestige paralleled the experience of God’s holy Son?
Eliot on poverty in The Harmony
Eliot opened these four pages in The Harmony on Jesus’s poverty with Matthew 8:20 and then Luke 2:7. “[T]he Foxes have holes, and the Fowls of the Air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay is head . . . she brought forth her first born Son, and wrapped him in swaddling Clouts, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the Inn.” Eliot commented, “He was the Son of a Carpenter . . . yet had not the means or opportunity to raise any worldly estate, nor to build for himself an house, nor any shelter where to lay his head” (1678: 35). 27
Eliot claimed that Jesus’s suffering of poverty “was a thousand times, yea, above all comparison, more bitter then our poverty is” (1678: 39).
28
In this sense it was unique. The reason for this “more bitter” experience of suffering on Jesus’s part is the primary theological rationale for all the suffering experienced by Jesus. Eliot wrote, . . . for his poverty had the sting of the curse in it, it was an effect of the wrath of God. And by his suffering thereof, unto the full satisfaction of divine justice: he took the sting of the curse out of our sufferings, and out of our poverty, and made them to be only medicinal to us. Our poverty and all our sufferings are upon many accounts sweet and easy, yea Jesus Commands us to rejoyce, and to be exceeding glad under them. The believing Jews took joyfully the spoyling of their goods, Heb. 10.34.—But Jesus Christ his sufferings were all bitter, as respecting his humane nature, as being our Mediator and Surety. (1678: 39)
Jesus underwent poverty, even “deep poverty,” said Eliot, for the “satisfaction of the vindictive justice of God for the sin of man, all sinless punishment which sin had deserved, and justly brought upon man, this Jesus Christ suffered, of which punishment poverty is a chief part” (1678: 38). 29
So, poverty is a result of sin, said Eliot, if not the direct result of one’s own sin, then the collateral damage of someone else’s sin. Sin in general deserves the punishment of poverty, and poverty is a punishment on persons for their sin whether their sin directly produced the poverty or not. But it is no sin to be poor, Eliot posited. He deduced this from observing that the sinless Jesus was poor.
The bulk of Eliot’s thinking on poverty and an obscure low condition in this section of the book is laid out in two sections. The first explains “seven afflictions of poverty” and the second explains various components of what I am calling Eliot’s “worm theology.”
The seven afflictions of poverty
In Eliot’s description of the first affliction of poverty he emphasized that poverty “cutteth us off” and “depriveth us” of much human “dominion over the Creatures of God.” Eliot emphasized the loss of “those creatures of God over which we are to have dominion in this low world, for our comfort and use” (1678: 36). He put it this way: Adam was made Lord over Gods Creatures, in this low world he had dominion over them, but sin hath stripped us in a great measure of our dominion. God will permit us to have a little, a few of his creatures to rule over and employ. Through some dominion . . . of the creatures God doth allow to every one, even to the poorest Lazarus, viz. the Earth to tread and ly upon, the Air to breath in, and some food to live upon, though this is a grant of free mercy, for sin hath deserved we should be stripped of all good.
A bit later on this page, Eliot lamented, God made man Lord over the works of his hand, gave him wisdome to use and improve them to the glory and service of God, and for his own honour and comfort. but sin hath stripped us of this our dominion; we have forfeited and lost all, see a bereaved condition described, Psal. 89.38, to 46 . . . alas, how poor hath sin left man! Adam suffered the greatest loss & downfall that ever man suffered! poor Adam! he lost the Lordship of the whole world, both from his own possession, and his Childrens after him. Only God did of his meer bounty and goodness restore unto him a little under the government of Christ, so much as might serve his turn in a poor manner, to pass through the pilgrimage of man in this world. (1678: 36)
In the paragraph between these two parallel ones cited above Eliot claimed there are certain vices that “attend” poverty though he did not name them. He said that poverty tempts and exposes the poor to certain sins, but “Jesus Christ touched none of them.” Conversely, “[t]here be also many virtues that attend and shine in poverty, these virtues did Jesus shine in” (1678: 36). Again, those particular virtues were left unstated; but from a reading of The Harmony and the rest of Eliot’s published corpus I would venture he meant something like the faithful, joyful worship of God and the glad doing of good to others in obedience to God despite having limited resources, the struggle to live, and the temptation to discouragement and envy arising from poverty.
Eliot made no simplistic correlation between wealth and godliness. The devil is bringing wealth into the hands of wicked persons for the promotion of demonic designs: By this fall of Adam, and loss of his dominion, the Devil hath got it in a great measure by the permission of our Lord, Into his hand, and all his study and care, is to bring all dominion, riches, and worldly honour into the hands of the wicked and ungodly world; who will be real and vigorous promoters of his affairs and Kingdome. (1678: 36)
Eliot made clear that Jesus took the shame out of poverty for genuine Christians who are concerned about promoting his kingdom rather than the devil’s.
The second affliction of poverty is that the poor person has little food, clothing, shelter, and no beast to ride upon “or to bear burthens for him.” Because Jesus was such a man, “only believers had faith to behold him that was behind this Curtain of poverty” (1678: 36–37). The third affliction of poverty is that the poor are taken for granted. What they do have to offer society is not regarded: “the poor are neglected, disregarded, yea, though they be wise, beneficent, and do eminent good works, poverty so darkens them, that they are forgotten and not regarded, Eccl. 9.14,15,16 . . . the poor man’s wisdome is despised, and his words not heard” (1678: 37). 30 Again, Jesus is the grand exemplar of this. Though he “was employed in the great work of our Salvation,” said Eliot, there has been no one more neglected than Christ (citing Isaiah 53:3 and 1 Samuel 18:23). 31
The fourth affliction of poverty is that “if the poor do never so little anger, vex, or stand in the light of the proud, carnal world, they [the proud and carnal] will despise and curse them Joh.7.48,49.” Eliot cited and quoted three verses from the book of Proverbs (14:20; 19:4; 19:7). The first is “Prov. 14.20. the poor is hated even of his own neighbor, but the rich hath many friends” (1678: 37). 32 Eliot concluded this fourth affliction of poverty with another verse from John’s Gospel, adding it as a christological illustration and fulfillment of these proverbs: “Thus it was with Jesus Christ, Joh, 7.5. for neither did his brethren believe in him” (1678: 37). 33 Might the Christian Native reader of, or listener to, The Harmony here have been reminded of the hostility of unconverted relatives as well as that of supposedly Christian New English neighbors not accepting of praying Indians and their place in the church or larger colonial project?
The fifth affliction of poverty follows the third and fourth afflictions in logical progression. Not only are the poor ignored—except when they are irritating obstacles to the designs of others—but, because they are poor, others “think that God despiseth them, as they themselves do.” Again, Eliot moved fluidly from Gospel narrative to stating general maxims: Thus they dealt by Jesus Christ, Isai. 53.4. we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted, Jer. 5.4. poor and foolish, poverty renders a man destitute, forlorn & despicable, poverty layeth a man by like a broken potsheard good for nothing, Prov. 10.15. the destruction of the poor is his poverty. (1678: 37)
34
Note that Eliot said poverty renders a people “despicable” to those who perceive them as other, as “good for nothing,” who even render them cursed by God. 35 These despisers of the marginalized minority rationalize a theological justification for their posture of neglect and acts of injustice.
The sixth affliction of poverty is that the poor are “tread upon” by “every one” else. These tread upon poor include both the fatherless and the “righteous” person sold into slavery. Eliot wrote, . . . every one will be bold to afflict, wrong, tread upon the poor man, Psal. 10.2,8,6,14. the wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor, his eyes are fiercely set against the poor, he catcheth the poor when he draweth him into his net, men are bold to injure the poor, because they know they are not able to revenge themselves, and they think no body else will, they think not of God that he hath taken the protection of the poor, and that he will behold their mischief, and spight, Psal. 10.14. thou hast seen it, for thou beholdest mischief and spight to requite it, with thy hand, the poor committeth himself to thee, thou are the helper of the Fatherless, Am. 2.6, Thus saith the Lord, for three Transgressions of Israel and for four I will not turn away the punishment thereof, because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes, thus they dealt with Jesus Christ, and mostly hath the Lord visited the Jews for such injuries done unto our Lord Jesus. (1678: 37–38)
By appropriating this verse from Amos, Eliot clearly condemned selling “the righteous for silver” in this book published three years after his letter to the commonwealth magistrates protesting the sale of Indians into foreign slavery. God sees wrongdoing and will punish it, warned Eliot in The Harmony. This seems the most explicit reflection of Eliot’s concern for Native Christians evident in the book.
The important place in what I call Eliot’s “Congregationalist piety” of doing notable good deeds for others and improving one’s own generation is evident in his explanation of the seventh and final affliction of poverty that he enumerated.
36
He wrote, The seventh affliction of poverty is, that it draws a vail or Curtain over all humane excellencies, it taketh away the matter and means whereby he may excell in the world among men, he cannot do any great and honourable works in his Generation, he hath not wherewith to do them, as rich men have . . . What ever other virtues or wisdom he hath, if he want [i.e. lack] wealth, he is disabled, darkened, and laid aside from a capacity of doing any great service among his people. (1678: 38)
37
According to Eliot, the ideal situation for a Christian community was the ability to do “great and honourable works” in their day, works with great and broad social impact remaining for the benefit of future generations as well. Future generations would then build upon what they inherited. But poverty deprives a people from doing so.
Eliot’s worm theology and the normative Christian experience
Eliot said it pleased Jesus Christ to “lay himself” in the condition of poverty, humble obscurity, and even that of being “a worm.” Eliot began the second section of this ninth chapter with Psalm 22:6, “I am a worm and no man, despised of the people.” He elaborated by adding, “a no body, a nothing, a poor despicable thing.” Eliot made a christological connection between this text and Philippians 2:6–7: He who was God humbled himself by his Incarnation, lower then Angels, though he had been born the greatest of men on Earth, yet he humbled himself to become a man, Phil. 2 6,7. he emptied himself to become a man, and laid himself among the lowermost rank and sort of men, which is Rhetorically expressed by a worm, what is lower then a worm among living creatures, such was Jesus Christ in the flesh, a no body among men, the lowest of no body, therefore the Text saith a worm & no man, one of no account.
38
Eliot was quick to point out that, “this Text sheweth of what esteem and account Jesus Christ was in the worlds eye only.” In contrast, Eliot noted that God (citing and quoting Matthew 12:18 and 3:17), angels (citing and quoting Luke 2:10–11), and “the Scriptures” (citing and quoting Isaiah 9:6–7) all recognized the lowly Jesus for the glorious person he actually was. In addition, the true people of God in Jesus’s day, whom Eliot called “the Church,” were able to recognize him and his glory rather than blindly and wrongly despise him (1678: 40). 39
On the third and final full page treating this topic Eliot explicitly drew the parallel between Jesus’s condition as a “worm” and the status of Christians as such. It was part of his five-point answer to the question he rhetorically posed of why Jesus would take upon himself such a low condition. Eliot noted that Christ “sanctified” such a state, “[s]eeing that it was the purpose of God to carry the Church in this world through such a low condition, 1 Cor. 1.26,27,28.” Eliot explicitly noted here that most (my emphasis) of “God’s Elect” will indeed experience a low condition “for the Text saith.” Eliot clearly deemed poverty to be the normative experience for the majority of genuine Christians. Before citing and quoting 1 Corinthians 1:26–29 as the chosen text to prove this, he claimed, “it is Gods designe and purpose, that the state of his Church and Saints in this world should be poor, the most part of them, and therefore he hath prepared poverty for them by taking the curse out of it” (1678: 38–39). 40 Christians who suffer this affliction can rest, though, in the “most tender care [of Jesus] over all his poor worms.”
Eliot then asked, “In what respects was Jesus like a worm?” Before a brief seven-part answer in prose, Eliot presented the seven respects in a two-column list or simple chart. It is the only such chart in the book. The chart is offset from the previous and following paragraphs by double-line spacing. Curled brackets, also unusual for the book, point leftward and draw attention to the chart. In these ways, the section is highlighted beyond all parts of the book. It seems what Eliot says about this condition of being like a worm reflect certain convictions likely forged in the fires of cross-cultural ministry in colonial context.
Eliot wrote, “a worm is. . . 1. Despicable, 2. Useless, 3. None feareth it, 4. None cares to defend it, 5. Every one is bold to tread on it, 6. They will be easily induced to destroy it, and 7. None fears revenge for destroying it” (1678: 41). Eliot took a little less than a full page to explain these seven aspects of Jesus’s worm-likeness and make comment upon each of them.
The first aspect is that Jesus’s glory was veiled, he was considered “despicable,” and such a “cloud of obscurity” was “no small part of his humiliation.” Eliot’s proof texts are these: “Psal. 22.5. despised of the people, Psal. 119.141. I am small and despised, Eccles. 4.16 the poor mans wisdome is despised, Isai, 53.5, despised, rejected of men.” Yet “God did dearly accept him.” Eliot’s commentary on the second aspect could have applied to the colonial situation. When “the world” is “exceeding populous,” he said, the “poor worms” (note his use of the plural) are considered to be a burden rather than of any use “to their Generation.” Though these poor worms actually be godly and wise inhabitants of that space, he said, “Joh. 7.49, the poor people are cursed.” The third point reiterates that “men of war” do not fear worms and consider them to be nothing: “None is afraid of a worm, it cannot hurt us.”
The fourth part says no one cares to defend poor worms who are considered useless. Those who do dare defend them face “quipping” for speaking a “good word” on behalf of a worm. Eliot was no stranger to that. Cotton Mather’s biography of Eliot, which appeared just a year after Eliot’s death in 1690, noted that “some furious English People that clamoured for the Extirpation of the Praying Indians . . . vented a very wicked Rage at our holy Eliot, because of his concernment for the Indians” (1694: 47). In Mather’s transcription of Eliot’s 1671 letter to John Owen regarding the Sabbath, Eliot noted “virulent Revilings, and false accusations” by “professed Adversaries.” Eliot claimed, “I suppose there is scarce any one alive in the World, who hath more Reproaches cast upon him than I have” (in Mather, 1694: 29).
The fifth part of Eliot’s description of a worm says, “Any one is bold to tread upon a worm to hurt and injure it.” Though at times “the people” sought to stone Jesus or cast him off a cliff, “God preserved him from them.” The sixth parts claims, “Every one is easily influenced & perswaded to destroy a worm” even though they might have sung hosannas over it just days earlier. A crowd can quickly turn from adulation to calling for a crucifixion. Eliot may have had in mind, behind this sixth point, the early transatlantic popularity of the mission to the seaboard tribes, a mission extolled in support raising pamphlets distributed in Old England. What was once celebrated, albeit for various reasons and with mixed motives during the rule of the Puritan Parliament in the Interregnum period (between the respective reigns of Charles I and Charles II), was now largely dismissed locally (on the periphery) and no longer a priority across the pond at the metropole (Breen, 2001). 41
Finally, in describing the seventh aspect Eliot asserts, “They fear no body to take vengeance for wrong done to a worm, so were the Jews fearless of any vengeance to be inflicted upon them for the wrong and injury done unto Jesus Christ.” Yet for that “wrong” and “injury,” adds, Eliot, “never was blood more sharply revenged, and a curse more severely executed.” In Eliot’s Puritan theology, God’s covenant with Israel served as a template for divine dealings with contemporary nations. God’s “rod” of discipline always loomed overhead for a people and/or their ruler who did not maintain an adequate amount of righteousness. 42
Conclusion
It seems that Eliot’s expectations for Native Christian communities abruptly changed from what he had hoped for at the beginning of his ministry among the Algonquin three decades earlier. Just three years before the conflict (1672), Eliot wrote in his Logick Primer for Native readers that 1 Corinthians 1:26–29 meant that “some believers are poor in this world” (1672: D4f). Now, after Metacom’s War, Eliot wanted sympathetic readers of his Lord’s Supper preparativo to hear him voice the idea that poverty was the normative Christian experience in their day, and used that same text for proof. The theological motif of Zechariah’s temple rebuilding mission was replaced by the suffering Messiah’s rejection as the prominent biblical type informing Eliot’s expectations for the development of Native Christianity. This is a significant aspect of his carefully nuanced postwar pastoral theology of poverty in which one finds a perhaps too subtle and muted prophetic critique of injustice toward the poor and marginalized.
Over the years, Eliot modeled a missionary theology and practice that was both pastoral and prophetic. He was a Christian catalyst and coach as an outsider among Native Americans. He was, conversely, a mediator and advocate for the marginalized among a “sending” population with whom he increasingly found it difficult to relate because of his association with the missionized other. The late Paul Hiebert’s framing of the missionary as mediator provides a helpful lens for retrieving the “double audience” aspect of much of Eliot’s actions in ministry as well as in certain works of his published corpus. 43
As Eliot’s own cultural situation and social location changed, he adapted his approach to cross-cultural ministry. An elderly Eliot invested the final decade and a half of his life after Metacom’s War into quietly seeing the Algonquin Bible and translations of Puritan devotional classics published again (after being previously published in the 1660s) for appropriation by Native readers, especially an emerging cadre of bi-cultural Native pastors (Andrews, 2013: 58). 44 Rather than a failure of mission, this was a timely, though accidental, shift in focus and loosening of the missionary reigns. Tragically, though, a population dispossessed and on the demise by way of more European immigration and the emergence of the US republic was not poised for widespread Christian revival. This is in contrast with the forced moratoria of missions that followed some nationalistic movements in latter twentieth century Africa where the church unleashed, though often poor, would flourish through indigenous agency like never before.
Perhaps Christian evangelists and apologists laboring from, within, and among Native communities in the twenty-first century USA that are disenchanted with the white church might find in The Harmony a theology of lament, critique, consolation, and promise. Proponents of community development and wealth creation the world over might find in Eliot’s theology of poverty after Metacom’s War both theological rationale for their projects as well as theological qualifiers and biblical comfort when they encounter challenges, obstacles, and failure(s). In addition, Eliot’s transformed perspective and expectation demonstrates both the contextual nature and contextualizing imperative of our theological constructions. Our readings of Scripture are invariably influenced by our experiences and yet should be applied to situations before us. They are contextual and correctable, and intercultural encounters especially bring the potentiality and actualization of that reality to the fore.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
