In defining the will, Green and Edwards were tackling head-on the advances of liberalism and the Enlightenment. These “modern” values, espoused most powerfully by John Locke and René Descartes, placed a premium on individual rights by asserting that people have the freedom—the free will—to act as they choose. Individuals, in other words, were responsible for their own actions.
Edwards and Green agreed that free will involved a person’s ability to choose. But where they differed from Enlightenment apostles was in assigning the agent ultimately responsible for bestowing such an important right. For liberals, free will resided within individuals; for Edwards and Green, it resided with God. Both men reached this conclusion after traveling down the same path. It all began with an understanding of the supreme deity: he was sovereign, the creator of the universe and all within it. In his loving greatness, God decided to grant individuals the right to act. Edwards explained the presence of sin through his concepts of natural necessity (ingrained, naturalistic reactions to things such as physical pain) and moral necessity (habits of the heart where God gives one the choice of what to do), while Green called it natural inability and spiritual inability. For both men, God was the one who bestows choice, or free will, on individuals. Sinners, Jacob maintained, “are acquainted with their Duty. They know what is Right and what is Wrong; they know the dreadful Consequences of Sin, and the happy Effects of Holiness. Heaven and Hell are set before them.” Jacob added, though, that it was impossible for the unregenerate to achieve his or her own salvation; only God can bestow that: “’Tis impossible to choose a new Heart. . . . ’Tis contrary to the Nature of Things.”21
Having satisfied himself that free will can be reconciled with Calvin’s predestinarian teachings, and that individuals do have a choice to act morally or to sin, Green next worked out his views on the church’s role in this Calvinistic world. Who should belong to the church—only the elect (i.e., those who are saved)? Or should everyone, including the unsaved, be allowed to join and participate in the sacraments? The writings of Englishman Isaac Watts, the Calvinistic theologian and hymn writer, guided Green on this question of church purity. Green analyzed Watts’s Rational Foundation of a Christian Church, which was nearly four hundred pages and published in 1747, and praised it as “the most rational and scriptural, of any thing I have seen upon these subjects.” From Watts, Green worked out the role of reason in religion and the rationale for instituting a purer church with stringent admission standards. “Wherein soever Revelation gives us plain and certain Rules for conduct, Reason itself obliges us to submit and follow them,” Watts explained. “Where the rules of Duty are more obscure, we are to use our Reason to find them out, as far as we can, by comparing one Part of Revelation with another, and making just and reasonable Inferences.”22
From there, Watts showed the importance of reason to church formation. “The Light of Reason teacheth, that there must be a mutual Consent, Compact, or Agreement, amongst such Persons as profess the same Religion, to walk according to the Directions and Dictates of it.” Perpetuating the church by admitting properly qualified members, he continued, was essential. On this issue, Watts cited both reason and the New Testament: common sense dictated that members with like views band together, and that these members “will think it proper to cast such Persons out of their Fellowship, that they may not infect the rest, nor dishonour their Religion.” But the New Testament also taught that the Christian church must take “take Care that they be kept pure, and free from Scandal, by separating themselves from evil Members, and by casting out those that depart from the Truth, or are guilty of gross Immoralities.”23
Green agreed with Watts that only the elect can be full church members, and he decided by the early 1760s that he must fight for a purer church and, eventually, a purer society. He would, in other words, push to create a church where only the truly repentant could be full members, and he would work to cleanse society of some of its most pernicious shortcomings, including the holding of fellow human beings in bondage. Where to begin, though, in this audacious crusade to change the world? Green chose a logical place—his home church on Hanover Neck. He would institute a far stricter policy toward church membership and the partaking of the sacraments in Hanover. Green formally announced this shift in a sermon on baptism that he delivered to his congregation on November 4, 1764, but he began his effort several years earlier. Green then expounded on his views in two long tracts that he published in 1768 and 1770.24
The baptism issue had been bedeviling Puritan New England since the days of the Great Migration in the 1630s. Who, exactly, was eligible for baptism? An adult who could show he was of the elect? An infant who was the offspring of full church members? Or could the children of the unregenerate be baptized, too? These seemingly mundane questions masked a far more serious one: how pure should the church be? In the heady early days of New England’s founding, Puritan radicals came down on the side of purity by baptizing only those children of parents who were communicant members. However, following the adoption of the “halfway covenant” in 1662 by a synod of clergy, the Puritan movement became more “liberal” on these questions. The halfway covenant permitted the offspring of partial members to be baptized, and the practice gradually took hold throughout New England under the prodding of Solomon Stoddard and other reformers. Soon, many Puritans were asking whether the same liberalizing tendencies should be applied to the other sacrament, communion. Stoddard, of course, answered yes. Those individuals who lived scandal-free and sought to become Christians should be permitted to partake in the Lord’s Supper, he argued. Stoddard saw the administering of the sacraments as a recruiting tool to bring more people to Christ.25
Because of Dickinson’s influence, Green had followed the Stoddardean position during his first decade as a Presbyterian pastor. In the November 4 sermon, Green informed the congregation that he had changed his mind; he also explained at length the centrality of baptism to his vision of a purer church. The act, he told the congregants, “signifies the washing away [of] our native and contracted guilt and defilement,” and as such qualified baptism as a seal. Receiving baptism meant that its recipient was one of God’s “visible people”—he or she was of the elect, in other words, one of God’s chosen saints. Because of baptism’s great importance, not everyone automatically qualified for it.26
In explaining why, Green returned to the Calvinistic conundrum about behavior and free will. God is all-powerful, yet we all have a choice; thus moral behavior falls into two categories—“natural and instituted duties.” The former, he said, involved basic acts of human decency, such as living honestly and ethically: “Every rational creature is bound to perform them, and sins less while he endeavours to perform them.” The latter was different. Instituted duties involved Christian duties mandated by God, and Green cited three examples—the gospel ministry, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. Not all individuals are cut out for the ministry, he said; they are called to it. “Nor may any draw near to God in the reception of the sacraments, (which are instituted duties) unless they are such persons as he declares qualified for them.” Adults have to qualify for baptism, Green stressed, and those “who openly continue in the sins of drunkenness, profane swearing, uncleanness, and the like scandalous vices” were disqualified.27
But, according to Green, the standards were high for baptizing infants as well—their parents had to be in good standing with the church and be able to qualify for communion. Here, Green was raising the bar ever higher: it was not enough for an individual to have been baptized in childhood and to attend services as an adult; parents who wanted their children baptized must “renew the covenant . . . [and meet] the same qualifications, as if they were to be baptized themselves.” They must be full members, in other words. Green was thus rejecting the key Arminian premise that baptizing anyone was a way to draw more people to the church. What was the point, then, of baptizing babies? Green answered that the act signaled something important: it bestowed “God’s seal or mark” on children and demonstrated to them that God will be watching over them. It also signaled that these children would be under the care of the church and “watched over in a kind friendly manner.”28
Green outlined the specific requirements that adult applicants must meet to qualify for baptism. The first was “a competent degree of christian knowledge; . . . God must be worshipped with understanding.” The second was that “they must be free from scandalous sins and offensive behaviour.”