The Witch of Bristol | Installation Postponed
Pastor's Notes for January 9, 2025
The Witch of Bristol
Last week, I paid a visit to Bristol Hospital. While waiting in the lobby, I looked at the oil portrait of Fuller Forbes Barnes, the first Chairman of the Board of Bristol Hospital.
Wondering who Mr. Barnes was, I did a quick search, and soon found myself reading Ten Generations of the Barnes Family in Bristol, Connecticut, a privately-published family history, scanned and available online.
The book was written by Fuller Forbes Barnes himself, and begins confidently:
Many races have made valuable contributions to English civilization. In making this acknowledgment, we should not minimize the invaluable Nordic contribution. The stamina and daring qualities of a race which, guided only by sun and stars, pioneered over the Atlantic, is the basic explanation for England’s greatness. It is the key to the boundless energy and unshakeable determination characteristic of many Americans of English descent. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that the Barnes name goes back to the Norse “Bjorne,” meaning, a warrior.
But the family history turns dark a few pages later.
I was startled, though not surprised, to read that Mary Barnes, the wife of Thomas Barnes, was found guilty of witchcraft and hanged in 1662.
The bereft husband even had to pay court fees of 21 shillings.
Those of us who came of age reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (which was more about McCarthyism than the Salem Witch Trials) tend to explain the colonial witch craze as the result of mass hysteria that masked a thinly veiled religious hypocrisy.
Another explanation is rye bread.
But Barnes, the family historian, is more sympathetic to his ancestors and the clergy of New England. He writes:
Perhaps the darkest side of colonial church life was the universal belief in witchcraft. However, the colonial clergy have been unduly censored for their part in the witchcraft trials recorded in our early history. In justice to them, we should remember that everyone at that time believed in witchcraft or the power of Satan over certain individuals. The most learned secular scholars were as fully convinced regarding the truth of witchcraft as were any of the colonial clergy.
Let’s pause there.
Having been called back to New England to fill one of her historic pulpits, I have been reading Perry Miller’s The New England Mind as a kind of total-immersion project.
Perry writes:
…we must remember that the Puritan looked upon discoverable truth as already discovered, set down in black and white, once and for all by the supreme wisdom. There was nothing essential to be learned outside of revelation.1
It is easy to see why this mind did not survive the coming scientific revolution and the explosion of knowledge that came with it.
Indeed, the faithful have been trying to pick up the pieces ever since.
Fuller Barnes concludes this sad episode in his family’s history with these words, offered as a kind of exoneration:
In fairness to our forefathers, it should be said that if they overemphasized the power of Satan, we today have let the pendulum swing too far in the other extreme.
“…too far in the other extreme….”
What was Barnes getting at? That is what I would like to know. Is he holding out the possibility that his distant relative might have been a witch? That Satan has real power?
If so, then why? What were witches doing in this learned, well-catechized Christian colony? After all, this was not apostate Israel under Ahab and Jezebel. This was New England under the Mathers in which Mary Barnes was “convicted of entertaining familiarity with Satan.”
The Puritans believed in witches because they believed the Old Testament was true. More than anyone else, they ought to have been vigilant to prevent this devilish infiltration. So, it’s fair to ask, what oversight, what omission on their part led to witchcraft taking root in their new Eden?
Perhaps the answer was environmental, and not just the sclerotic spore from rotten rye, but what Nathaniel Hawthorne called the “deep dusk” and “unseen multitude” that enveloped and tormented Young Goodman Brown.
Perhaps the answer lies in Puritan theology itself.
The soul of Puritan theology is the hidden God, who is not fully revealed even in His own revelation. The Bible is His declared will; behind it always lies His secret will.2
But the Puritans inhabited a new world, only recently hidden, and the old world was fast giving up her secrets to men like Isaac Newton.
Perry describes this moment of shrinking secrets and expanding revelation as “the one fissure in the impregnable walls of systematic theology… the portal through which ran the highway of intellectual development.”3
Yet, having passed through that portal, ten generations later, Fuller Barnes warns us that we’ve gone too far. He wrote those words in 1946.
What would he say today, faced with the prospect of an insurgent pagan America?
Installation Postponed
My installation as pastor of First Church Woodbury has been postponed. The Litchfield South Association asked to meet me first, since they customarily would conduct the installation. The Council and I thought it prudent to have that meeting before proceeding.
To be the subject of further discussion and discernment, personally, with them, and with our congregation, is whether or not I should pursue ministerial standing with the Association and, through them, the United Church of Christ (UCC).
Currently, I am a licensed ordained minister in the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference (CCCC). The CCCC, along with the UCC, and The National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, are the three main congregationalist denominations in the United States. Founded in 1947, the CCCC is the oldest and most conservative.
Connecticut’s congregationalist associations (of which Litchfield South is one) pre-date all three denominations by hundreds of years, and are, by and large, organized by county.
While in close cooperation and direct affiliation with the UCC, the Litchfield South Association is a distinct entity, with considerable discretion to associate “under such provisions as it deems wise, admit, or continue to fellowship with, any Congregational Christian local church which is not part of the United Church of Christ.”4
Litchfield South, along with her sister associations, dates from 1708, when the colonial legislature adopted the 15 Articles, the Heads of Agreement, and the Savoy Declaration of Faith as The Saybrook Platform.
The 15 Articles created a bulwark of associations to protect Connecticut’s churches from incipient Unitarianism on the one hand and prelatical episcopacy on the other. The Heads of Agreement enshrined home rule in each congregation. Holding everything together was a common confession of the Protestant Reformed faith: the Savoy Declaration.
The postponement of my installation does not nullify or alter the terms of my call to First Church in any way. Per the bylaws I am, and remain, the Ordained Minister.
Perry Miller, The New England Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 20.
Miller, 21.
Miller, 21.
Constitution, United Church of Christ, Article V, para. 16, lines 111-112.