The Synod That Followed: Bulkeley, Hooker, and Civil Authority in the Antinomian Controversy

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

The Massachusetts Bay Colony that Peter Bulkeley helped found had no separation between civil and religious authority in the modern sense: a minister's theological judgment could decide who was permitted to stay. That was the stake in 1637, when the colony's ministers appointed Bulkeley and Thomas Hooker to moderate a synod meant to settle the controversy stirred by Anne Hutchinson's preaching, her claim to direct revelation from the Holy Spirit and her charge that most of the colony's ministers preached a covenant of works rather than the covenant of grace she held John Cotton alone rightly taught. The synod, meeting at Newtown from the end of August 1637, worked through a long list of doctrinal errors it attributed to Hutchinson and her followers and condemned them. It did not itself try her. That happened separately, before the General Court that November and before her own congregation the following March, proceedings that ended in her excommunication and banishment from the colony. But the synod's findings gave the later proceedings their doctrinal footing, and the whole episode is remembered today less for the theology in dispute than for what it shows about a colony where doctrinal dissent and civil standing were never really separate questions, a history often read alongside the case for keeping them apart that later American constitutional practice made.