Thomas Hooker's Case Against the Eighty-Two Errors

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

When the synod convened at Newtown in August 1637 to examine what its own findings numbered as eighty-two erroneous opinions circulating in the Massachusetts Bay churches, Thomas Hooker shared the moderator's chair with Peter Bulkeley, but the two men came to the controversy from different pastoral traditions. Hooker had spent two decades as one of English Puritanism's most influential teachers of the graduated stages of conviction, humiliation and preparation by which a soul was drawn toward saving grace, a method his students carried to New England ahead of him. The opinions the synod condemned, several tracing to lay meetings Anne Hutchinson led in her Boston home, held that the Holy Spirit's indwelling could be known immediately and that a soul justified by free grace owed nothing to any prior process of sanctified behavior, a position its critics labeled antinomian, against the law. For a minister whose whole practice rested on discerning the marks of preparation in a hearer's spiritual state, the claim that grace arrived with no discernible process was not an abstract doctrinal quarrel; it undercut the pastoral method Hooker had spent his career teaching. The synod's condemned list became the doctrinal basis on which the Massachusetts General Court banished Hutchinson that November and her own church excommunicated her the following March, though she was not personally examined at the August synod itself. Hooker returned to Hartford afterward to a colony whose 1639 constitutional settlement he is remembered for shaping barely a year later, a sequence that places the same man at the center of New England's sharpest doctrinal crisis and its most cited constitutional moment within eighteen months of each other.