Every immigrant who has left homeland, home, and position for the sake of a conviction understands something of what John Cotton experienced at age 47: a respected pastor in England, forced to cross the Atlantic to keep preaching the gospel as his conscience demanded.
Born in Derby, England, in 1585, Cotton entered Cambridge in 1598, at just 13 years old. He studied at Trinity College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1603, and then at Emmanuel College, the most Puritan of the university’s colleges, where he became a fellow and taught Hebrew, theology, and rhetoric. In all, he remained at Cambridge for 14 years.
In 1612 he took the pulpit of St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, Lincolnshire, where he ministered for 21 years.
Over these years, Cotton drew ever closer to Puritanism, abandoning Anglican rites he considered without biblical basis. In 1630 he preached the farewell sermon to John Winthrop’s fleet, based on 2 Samuel 7:10, comparing the colony to the land God had promised Israel.
Prosecuted in 1632 for his nonconformist stance, he emigrated in 1633 to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America, fleeing the persecution the Church of England was waging against Puritans. There he became teacher of the First Church of Boston, a post he held until his death, and soon came to be recognized as the colony’s most influential theologian.
Cotton systematized congregational autonomy in works such as The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644) and The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England (1645), arguing that each local congregation, not an ecclesiastical hierarchy, holds the authority of the keys entrusted by Christ. The first work even convinced the theologian John Owen to leave Presbyterianism and embrace congregationalism.
His story also has documented shadows: Cotton took part in the dispute that led to the banishment of Roger Williams over disagreements about religious liberty, even writing in defense of that expulsion. During the Antinomian Controversy, he initially supported Anne Hutchinson, his former parishioner in England, but later turned against her under pressure from fellow pastors and magistrates, and it was he himself who pronounced her excommunication in 1638, contributing directly to her trial and expulsion from the colony.
In 1646 he published the catechism Milk for Babes, an introduction to the faith in question-and-answer form that would become the first children’s book printed in the American colonies, used for generations in the Christian education of children in New England. His daughter Mary would marry the pastor Increase Mather, and the couple’s son, Cotton Mather, would inherit this calling of teaching the faith to new generations.
Cotton’s life reminds us that convictions come at a cost, and that even the most influential theologians err in dealing with those who think differently. His pursuit of faithful, well-taught churches still challenges those who today build Christian communities in distant lands.
