The Covenant & the Charter - Visible Saints

American Political History · Apr 30, 2021 · 25m

In 1634, a woman arrived in Boston who had been reading theology since childhood — trained on her father’s heresy trial transcript, devoted to a preacher who made people feel grace rather than merely describe it. Her name was Anne Hutchinson, and she had a question the Bay Colony could not answer: if God’s grace was truly free and truly direct, what exactly were the ministers and magistrates there for?

What followed was one of the most remarkable legal confrontations of the seventeenth century. A two-day trial in a Cambridge meetinghouse. Forty judges on a raised platform. Anne Hutchinson…