Bulkeley, Hooker, and the Synod That Answered Anne Hutchinson

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In April 1637, the ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony named Peter Bulkeley one of two moderators for a synod they meant to settle a controversy that had split the colony for more than a year. The other moderator was Thomas Hooker, by then the best known minister in New England. The synod they led convened at Newtown, later Cambridge, on 30 August 1637, and spent weeks working through a long list of doctrinal errors the ministers traced to the preaching of Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright: an emphasis on free grace and on direct, personal revelation from the Holy Spirit that the assembled clergy read as loosening the place of visible, disciplined conduct in a believer's assurance of salvation. The synod condemned the errors it catalogued. It did not itself try Hutchinson, who was examined and convicted before the General Court that November and, after her own congregation heard her case in March 1638, excommunicated and banished from the colony. But its findings supplied the doctrinal ground the later proceedings stood on. Bulkeley's own century read his part in this as the ordinary business of a minister defending the colony's covenant orthodoxy against error. Later historians have not all agreed, and the Antinomian Controversy is remembered today as much for the questions it raises about religious dissent and civil authority as for the theology it was fought over.