Daily Inspiration Quote by Anne Hutchinson

Hutchinson is doing courtroom judo: she concedes just enough to sound orthodox, then flips the charge back onto her accusers. The sentence pivots on a razor-edged distinction between preaching a covenant of works and living under one. That separation is not academic hair-splitting; it is a moral indictment. In Puritan New England, the “covenant of works” signaled a dangerous drift toward earning salvation by behavior, while the “covenant of grace” anchored the colony’s self-image as a community of the elect. By claiming ministers can rightly preach works (even the apostles did) without being spiritually trapped by works, Hutchinson positions herself as the true guardian of Reformed doctrine. The sting is in “another business”: it’s colloquial, almost dismissive, a phrase that shrinks the ministers’ authority to something embarrassingly pedestrian.

The context is the Antinomian Controversy, where Hutchinson’s home meetings and theological precision threatened a social order built on clerical mediation and communal discipline. Her opponents wanted a clean binary: either she was undermining morality or attacking the ministry. Hutchinson refuses the binary. She implies that men like John Cotton may articulate grace, but others reveal, through their anxiety about “signs” and “preparation,” that they inhabit the very legalism they denounce. The subtext is political as much as spiritual: if ministers are “under” works, their power rests on surveillance and performance, not revelation. Hutchinson’s language turns doctrine into a diagnostic tool, exposing a leadership class whose legitimacy depends on confusing outward obedience with inward assurance.