Analysis Of Anne Hutchinson's Argument Of Elect

Anne Hutchinson was raised on the ideas of the typical Puritan theology. This theology believed that God originally established a covenant with Adam specifying that firm obedience of God’s law would result in salvation. After the fall, humanity sank into sin until God formed a second covenant with Abraham. Because post-Lapserian man could not abide by a covenant of works, God established a covenant of grace whereby certain individuals were preordained as the spiritually elect, but were concealed as such from the secular world. The inability to determine one’s spiritual status empirically; the “invisibility” of the elect; largely cultivated the self-deprecating, anxiety-ridden nature of Puritan discourse in New England. The leaders of Massachusetts …show more content…
The grace of Christ was most perfect in those who unwittingly performed good deeds; conscious works proved nothing of one’s spiritual status. From the view of her theological opponents, such a contention implied that man’s unaltered sinfulness should be no cause for distress and was equal to religious anarchy. The so-called antinomians rejected the notion of a federal covenant which, in a landscape still spiritually unsullied, significantly frustrated the Puritan notion of social order and community. By describing the elect as an invisibly connected community united by spirit rather than geography, the antinomians only increased Puritan fears of religious and epistemic …show more content…
She taught them that every person could ask and receive an answer from God if they would listen. If Anne would continue to express her thoughts amongst other women all women would become a challenge to all male supremacy. The Government of Massachusetts was forbidding letting this happen to their