Some critics believe this is where the love of the Puritan stopped—they merely accepted the people in their own families and their own churches, and only when such people complied with their strict rules of right behavior and belief. But I imagine Hutchinson—who had tended to the wounds of her enemies in the midst of war—would have laughed at this accusation. How absurd is it to think the love of God is confined! No. The love that Christians must show to one another in worshiping together, caring for each other, and not creating divisions or separating comes from God himself, who is infinite and extends his love to all human beings in particular ways. Thus, just as believers are to love those in the church because they are God’s people, so must they love those outside the church because they are God’s creation.
“But what about sin?” you ask. Well, Hutchinson would reply that sin does influence how we love unbelievers—but it also influences how we love all people. As she wrote to Barbara in her theological treatise, even though God’s people must hate sin, including that of unbelievers, they must also love unbelievers as human beings created by God and even potentially repentant, hoping for and working toward their conversion. In fact, believers must not only hate sin in unbelievers but also sin in their families and their own hearts even more than they hate sin in others! In Hutchinson’s words, loving God makes the Christian to hate all things that are contrary to his holiness, even in themselves and their most beloved relations. “Do not I hate” says David, “the workers of iniquity? I hate them with a perfect hatred” [Pss. 5:5; 139:21–22]. Yet saints hate them thus only as workers of iniquity; as men and creatures of God they love them so as to desire and endeavor their conversion, but they hate their sins, and those most that prevail in their own hearts and the hearts of those that are dearest to them.
By admitting to the presence of indwelling sin in the hearts of loved ones and oneself, Hutchinson calls her readers to replace a reactive and clouded hatred of sin with a righteous and clear-sighted hatred. This means the Christian home must not be a place of pretend holiness, where real evil in the household is swept under the rug and sinners on the street are mocked or demonized beyond recognition, but a place of daily repentance and forgiveness that seeks to be fair in its evaluation of good and bad, no matter where—or in whom—it is found.
It is not surprising to find Hutchinson saying that the Christian’s love for all people comes from God since she said the same about loving fellow believers. Yet, after making this point, Hutchinson shockingly reverses her regular sequence to say that sometimes believers are not thankful to God enough for the common graces he gives because of their lack of love for all people, and thus they should love them more in order to be more thankful to God. In other words, she not only made a qualitative connection between love of God and human beings by saying you cannot love God without loving people, but also a quantitative connection by saying the more you love people (in a healthy way) the more you will love God! Now do you see why I think Hutchinson would laugh at the accusation that the Puritans only loved their own?
And this isn’t even all of it. When Hutchinson made this point, she used a metaphor often reserved as an image for the church, namely, the body, saying believers should view themselves as intimately connected to all people in their humanity and be more thankful for the fact that this whole body receives good gifts from God rather than just certain parts of the body. Her train of thought is best seen when taken all together in her own words. She told [her daughter] Barbara:
Common benefits [we receive from God] are commonly slighted or not taken notice of. While the whole world shares with us the glorious and admirable benefit of light, we seldom consider what cause of thanksgiving we have for that mercy, and so for the air, fire, water, summer, winter, and the like. And this is for want of humanity and love to mankind, for did we consider ourselves to be one body with them, we would be more thankful to God for imparting his benefit to all then if it were only particularly extended to ourselves, wherefore David stirs up his soul to praise God for his goodness to the children of men. This makes him in a holy ecstasy to admire the bounty of God to mankind when he says, “Lord what is man that you are mindful of him” [Ps. 8:4]. . . . The common benefits, which God of his unspeakable mercy and goodness extends to all the children of men, [are] so worthy of admiration.
Thus, instead of excluding those on the outside of their spiritual family, believers are supposed to embrace them as family in another way—still calling them to and hoping for their repentance, but not withholding basic courtesy, comradery, and affection.
Hutchinson continued on, saying God not only blesses humanity with the elements and seasons, but also with his entire universe and the vast array of “glorious creatures” who have “such various and excellent virtues.” Hutchinson wanted to pay attention to, appreciate, and sanctify the created world around her, every aspect of human existence and every human being, because God’s love is so great that it reaches every little bit of life and overflows in its abundance. Thus, she concluded this section of her book by bringing all of the wonder together to exclaim how intentional, universal, and extraordinary God’s blessings to all people are by giving “particularly to every man and woman in the world” so that even those who “lie under the heaviest outward pressure have infinite cause of thanks.”
When Hutchinson had lost so much, including her husband, her house, her political cause, her social reputation, and her financial stability, she did not give up on life and stop trying. Neither did she become jealous of those around her who still had family, wealth, and respect, or embittered against a world that had imprisoned her husband, crushed her dreams of a good life, and imposed unreasonable restrictions on her just because she was a woman. Rather, she sat down to literally count her blessings—found not only in her own life but also in the lives of those around her, to whom she was connected in her very existence—and then gifted this treatise, the best of herself, to her daughter and the church.
Content taken from 5 Puritan Women by Jenny-lyn de Klerk, ©2023. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
