A Model of Christian Charity

Summary

A Model of Christian Charity is a lay sermon or discourse that John Winthrop composed in 1630 for the company of Puritan emigrants he was leading from England to Massachusetts Bay. The surviving heading says it was written in his passage across the Atlantic, and it has traditionally been pictured as preached aboard the flagship Arbella, though some historians think it was delivered before the fleet sailed or circulated in manuscript. It was printed only in 1838, from a copy not in Winthrop's hand. Winthrop begins with a proposition: God in his providence has ordered mankind so that some are rich and some poor, some in power and others in submission. He gives three reasons, chief among them that every man might need others and all be knit together in brotherly affection. He then distinguishes the two rules of justice and mercy and the two laws of nature and grace, and answers practical questions in catechism form about giving, lending, and forgiving debts, with special generosity required in times of common peril. The second part turns from the outward work of mercy to its inward source. Love, Winthrop says, quoting Colossians, is the bond of perfection, the ligament that knits the body of Christ together so that its members share each other's strength and weakness. He traces this love to regeneration in Christ, illustrates it with Jonathan and David, and argues that it always brings its own reward. The application names the persons (fellow members of Christ), the work (a new plantation under civil and church government), the end (to serve the Lord more fully), and the means (to practice what they had only professed in England). The company has entered into covenant with God, and he will expect strict performance. Winthrop urges them to follow Micah, to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly, to be knit together as one man, and to remember that they shall be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon them. He closes with Moses's charge in Deuteronomy 30 to choose life. Little noticed for two centuries, the city upon a hill passage was taken up by twentieth-century historians and presidents and became one of the most quoted texts in American political speech.

Top Lessons

• Inequality as an occasion for love

  Winthrop accepts differences of wealth and rank as part of God's ordering of the world, but he argues that their purpose is mutual need. The rich are stewards, the poor are brothers, and both are bound by the duties of mercy, so that difference becomes a reason for knitting together rather than for pride or envy.

• Love as the ligament of a community

  Winthrop's central image is the body, in which love is the sinew that joins the parts so that they share pleasure and pain. Rules of giving and lending can compel acts of mercy, he says, but only love produces a settled habit of mercy.

• Covenant and public witness

  The famous city upon a hill passage is a warning as much as a promise: because the eyes of all people are on the colony, its failure would make it a story and a byword through the world. Winthrop links the community's public reputation to its faithfulness in ordinary charity.

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