Puritan people wanted to establish a city of god in the wilderness. People like Anne Hutchinson, an antinominalist, and Roger Williams – founder of Rhode Island – were banished by puritans because they wanted to separate the church and the state or did not follow the rules of the Puritan leaders. Because of the first amendment, no one is forced to practice a religion. Everyone has different opinion about god and what they believe in; they have their own way of showing. John Winthrop (the first governor of Massachusetts Bay), Anne Bradstreet (first noteworthy American poet), and Jonathan Edwards (last American Puritan defender of New England Calvinism) have their own way of showing what they believe in and how they see God.
Winthrop thought that the power should be kept “in the hands of those whose Christian calling is to govern and that their number should remain as small as possible.”
It is expected that we have only discussed men writings except Anne Bradstreet because of the era.
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In the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards talks about how God is the one who is holding Israelites up from falling down. He believes that if a person was to fell, it would be because God wanted him or her to may be because of their wickedness. Moreover, Bradstreet would agree with him that “time brings down what is both strong and tall” (78). According to Edwards, God is ‘sovereign” and no one is above Him (171). Every wicked man “contrives well for himself, and that his schemes won’t fail,” but God knows it well and does not let them escape from the Hell (173). Although they had everything planned out, the unexpected can barge in anytime in any form: God’s wrath in a form of the person’s own destruction or death. The wickedness inside a man is what making them lean towards Hell. If “spider’s web… [cannot] stop a falling rock,” then god cannot stop someone from going into Hell because of the wickedness of the person weighs more than the stopper (Edwards