The Puritans and Emerson Argue: An Imaginary Theological Debate of Epic Proportions

Emerson:   Hello, my fellow citizens of this beautiful world. I have come from the future.  Do not be alarmed, it was a very natural journey, which has occurred mostly in my soul and mind.   I simply took the new invention of the train, which is quite similar to a horse-drawn carriage, on a journey back to your colony, the birthplace of the American journey.  

John Winthrop: Citizens, we have a madman in our midst who blasphemizes in the church of the LORD.  Let us cast him out to the wilderness with Anne Hutchinson!

Emerson: No, gentle sir, cast me in chains if you will, but I come not to disdain the name of the LORD.   I myself feel a deep connection with God, in the very recesses of nature from which I come to you.

John Winthrop:  What sayeth you?   You profess to speak with God.  What unholy ideas have entered your head in this place from whence you come?   Go back into your forests and natural lands if you will, there is no God there but a God of wrath, who surely will not listen to your paltry cries.

Emerson:  It is there that you err, kind sir.   "As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy when it is all poetry; or, all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols..And as this is the first language, so it is the last"(16). If there is anywhere that the Lord will hear me, it is amongst his creation, away from the distractions of material goods, with the language that he created first, before he created even man.
 John Winthrop: Surely you cannot profess that you are to speak to the Lord by laying in the grass or calling like a bird.   God's word is in the Bible.  It is there that he speaks to us, directly, and without any need for calling upon mountains or questioning what is being said.   Nature is itself the true distraction: a place of idleness and sin, wild and full of danger.  It is the very enemy of religion, which, along with Jesus Christ is the savior of our souls!

Emerson: Alas, "All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an increasing reference to spiritual nature...therefore is nature always the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment"(21).  Is it not true that the Lord, in his Genesis 1 created the earth first, and spoke it into being with the language of nature?   Did the Lord not charge you to take care of his animals and set you to live first in a garden amongst the plants and trees?  Indeed, "The aspect of nature is devout...the happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship"(30).  In your centralized village, you have no sense of the wonder of God or your own spirituality in relation to it.  Go out and transcend these wooden shacks to the glory of the divine! 


John Winthrop:  No! Fool!  We are content and righteous to live here, away from the sin of England, in our village which is not isolated from God, but rather designed to keep us on his straight and narrow path!  We will live this way for years to come and none of your blasphemy can alter what we know to be right.  Off to Connecticut with you!  Be Gone!

Emerson: No need to fear me, sir, it is you who are blinded to the true light.  There!  I hear a whistle in the distance.  My train arrives.   Goodbye, and good luck.