Tuesday, November 26, 2024

It is the 26th of November 2024. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. I'm your guest host, Sam Leanza Ortiz.

As far as educational institutions go in American history, none reaches the acclaim and prestige of Harvard, the first university founded in what would become the United States. Today, we remember its first president, Henry Dunster, a minister in colonial New England who sought to craft a “school of the prophets.”

Born sometime in November 1609 in Lancashire, England, Henry’s first recorded moment was his baptism, which took place on the 26^th of the same year. As we’ll learn in his story, the fact that I’ve chosen this day to tell his story, rather than say, his death or his installation at Harvard, is an irony, but hey, the calendar landed here; what can I say?

Dunster’s early years have few details until his college years at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he received both a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Arts degree. These qualifications brought him back home to Lancashire to teach at a grammar school and minister at a church.

By 1640, with civil war on the horizon in England, it was time to skip town. Dunster set sail for Massachusetts Bay and, by August of that year, was chosen to head the fledgling college in a new Cambridge, now known as Harvard College.

Harvard went through a few phases before Dunster arrived, first at Newtowne, then at its now home in Cambridge, which briefly also served as the name for the school. But, acting as little more than a grammar school, with its one professor teaching in a house, it needed cash. Enter the Puritan John Harvard, who bequeathed his library and an endowment that allowed it to thrive.

Dunster, hailing from the original Cambridge, understood what needed to be done. He arranged for a building to be constructed, brought in professors, raised money, and obtained the charter for the university, which remains to this day the institution’s governing document.

 

Everything was going well for Henry in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the center of New England Puritanism. He played a crucial role in Puritanism’s hold over the region by crafting an institution that formed the vast majority of the colony’s ministers. During his tenure, Harvard even extended this learning to the region’s native tribes, though that experiment was short-lived.

Then, everything changed. Dunster’s time at Harvard came to a screeching halt in 1654 when he was fired from his post for publicly committing to the doctrine of believer’s baptism.

While practitioners of infant baptism and believer’s baptism can come together, even institutionally in some cases, in our day, this was not the case in seventeenth-century New England, where theological differences could land you in deep trouble.

Shortly before Dunster came to America, two of Puritanism’s most famous dissidents were banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony – Anne Hutchinson for her controversial actions and views and Roger Williams for his Baptist views.

Dunster had some advantages over these two that could have helped him – he was a male leading an important institution who generally approved of the Puritan relationship between church and state. And indeed, for a time, this status did help him as he grew more vocal in his approval of baptism by immersion over the course of the1640s.   

One biographer suspects Dunster changed his views about infant baptism in 1651 following an incident in which one Baptist was flogged, and several were imprisoned. Their commitment to this view left an impression.

The proverbial rubber eventually met the road for Dunster, and in 1653, he withheld his fourth child from baptism. Looking at the incidents that came before him, Dunster surely understood what the colony would do to him, but he committed to his view. He defended believer’s baptism in sermons, to a council of church elders, and finally, the General Court of Massachusetts.

His position at Harvard increased the seriousness with which the case was treated – how could the leader of the region’s training ground for ministers deviate from a core teaching? Sensing what was coming, Dunster submitted his resignation in 1654, which Harvard quietly accepted.

This was not the end, however, for he was brought to trial at the County Court for disturbing the peace and subsequently sentenced to a public admonishment with a bond over his head.

In the midst of Dunster’s controversy, the Massachusetts General Court was undergoing its own baptism crisis with the proposal of the “Halfway Covenant,” which allowed baptized parents without conversion experiences to have their own children baptized – presenting issues of who belonged in God’s visible church, who could receive communion, vote on church issues, etc.

This covenant was proposed in 1657 and accepted in 1662, and it served as the governing principle for church membership for the majority of New England’s churches for the remainder of the century until the preachers of the Great Awakening reestablished the importance of the conversion experience.

As for Henry Dunster, he avoided exile to Rhode Island, instead removing himself from the Boston intelligentsia for the freer ways of the Plymouth colony. He would spend the remainder of his days preaching at an independent church in Scituate until his death in 1659. Undergoing an infant baptism on this day in 1609, a mode of baptism he would come to reject, he was forty-nine years old.

 

The last word for today comes from the daily lectionary, from Psalm 76:

God is renowned in Judah;

    in Israel his name is great.

2 His tent is in Salem,

    his dwelling place in Zion.

3 There he broke the flashing arrows,

    the shields and the swords, the weapons of war.

4 You are radiant with light,

    more majestic than mountains rich with game.

5 The valiant lie plundered,

    they sleep their last sleep;

not one of the warriors

    can lift his hands.

6 At your rebuke, God of Jacob,

    both horse and chariot lie still.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 26^th of November 2024 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

This show has been produced by Christopher Gillespie.

This show has been written and read by Sam Leanza Ortiz, whose favorite Harvard grads include Elle Woods, Dr. Frasier Crane, and NFL Quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.