Stephen P. Broker
The reading from the John Demos seminar, "Everyday Life in Early America," that has been most useful to my thinking about Puritan beliefs on death and the afterlife is that of David E. Stannard's 1977 book,
The Puritan way of death: a study in religion, culture, and social change
.5 Stannard's chapter headings include "The World of the Puritan," Death and Childhood," "Death and Dying," "Death and Burial," and "Death and Decline." Each of these chapters addresses what Stannard refers to as "the problem of death" for the New England Puritan, which was to accommodate both
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"The idea of God's 'antecedent will,' desiring the salvation of all, and his 'consequent will,' extending it only to the elect." 6
According to Stannard, the Puritan worldview included the following beliefs:7
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1. The earth is positioned at the center of the Universe [a decidedly pre-Copernican belief].
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2. The world is infused with design and divine purpose.
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3. God is omniscient and omnipresent, and the course of every man's life is predestined.
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4. God is inscrutable.
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5. Death is inevitable, and it is God's punishment for the original sin of Adam.
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6. Children are born with and imbued with this original sin.
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7. Evil spirits and evil men occupy the earth. In fact, all suffer from "utter and unalterable depravity."
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8. Death is a reward, at least for the chosen few.
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9. Upon death, the soul is released from its earth-bound world.
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10. The millennium is at hand, whether one takes it to mean the apocalyptic Day of Judgment or the thousand-year reign of Jesus prior to the Day of Judgment.
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11. The most glorious purpose to which a Puritan can espouse is to work to "bring God's kingdom home."
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12. Some will receive eternal salvation as a gift bestowed by God, but most face eternal damnation. Hell is a place of "unspeakable terrors."
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13. It is impossible to know with confidence that you are among the saved. The best you can do is to examine your life constantly and maintain faith in your own goodness and God's own justness.
Stannard suggests that the Puritans had little tolerance for worldviews that differed from their own. He finds that the Puritans increasingly were psychologically, morally, and spiritually isolated from a developing secularization of society, a result partially attributable to the growth of cities and the expansion of commerce. Using this concept of a Puritan belief system, I now introduce the community study of burying grounds, gravestones, and vital records of the early Cape Cod settlements.