"But now having seen him which is invisible I fear not what man can do unto me"
About this Quote
A woman on trial turns the courtroom inside out: the only authority that matters, Anne Hutchinson suggests, is the one her judges cannot subpoena. “Having seen him which is invisible” is a daring paradox, a line that weaponizes Puritan logic against Puritan power. If God is truly sovereign and unknowable, then an inner certainty of His presence outranks every visible institution claiming to speak for Him. The sentence isn’t mystical fluff; it’s a legal strategy. Hutchinson is testifying to a jurisdiction higher than Massachusetts Bay.
The subtext is confrontation disguised as piety. She doesn’t call the ministers corrupt, doesn’t denounce the magistrates as tyrants. She simply exits their frame. By declaring that she fears not “what man can do,” she shrinks the court to its proper size: capable of punishment, incapable of final judgment. It’s a rhetorical move that makes coercion look petty. If the state can only touch the body, and the soul is already answered for, then threats lose their teeth.
Context sharpens the blade. Hutchinson’s “antinomian” controversy was never only theology; it was about who gets to interpret grace, who gets to teach, who gets to speak with authority in public. A female religious dissenter claiming direct access to divine truth was intolerable precisely because it bypassed the colony’s control mechanisms: credentialed clergy, sanctioned sermons, orderly hierarchy.
The line endures because it names an old American tension before America exists: conscience versus compliance, private conviction versus public discipline. Hutchinson doesn’t beg to be spared. She makes fear itself look like a failure of faith.
The subtext is confrontation disguised as piety. She doesn’t call the ministers corrupt, doesn’t denounce the magistrates as tyrants. She simply exits their frame. By declaring that she fears not “what man can do,” she shrinks the court to its proper size: capable of punishment, incapable of final judgment. It’s a rhetorical move that makes coercion look petty. If the state can only touch the body, and the soul is already answered for, then threats lose their teeth.
Context sharpens the blade. Hutchinson’s “antinomian” controversy was never only theology; it was about who gets to interpret grace, who gets to teach, who gets to speak with authority in public. A female religious dissenter claiming direct access to divine truth was intolerable precisely because it bypassed the colony’s control mechanisms: credentialed clergy, sanctioned sermons, orderly hierarchy.
The line endures because it names an old American tension before America exists: conscience versus compliance, private conviction versus public discipline. Hutchinson doesn’t beg to be spared. She makes fear itself look like a failure of faith.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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