On my rough estimate I talked about Fuller’s founding vision in at least two hundred speeches over the two decades.
One of my duties during my twenty-year presidency of Fuller Theological Seminary was to articulate a vision of what the school stood for in the world of theological education. But in reading this important book I thought about my own journey as an institutional leader. It would be easy, and in many ways right, to criticize these historians and political leaders for their selective understanding of American history and the place of Winthrop’s sermon within it. Reagan was the first president to credit Winthrop with a formative vision of America’s future-and he was followed in this by all of his successors until Donald Trump. Kennedy was the first American president to make use of it, although he “localized” its relevance by applying it primarily to Boston’s history. Soon after the new scholarly attention to Winthrop by Miller and others, “city on a hill” references began to show up in the rhetorical tool kits of American presidents. And even more basic: Miller had to decide to use one particular document-the Winthrop sermon-to locate the origin of a vision of a flourishing American nation. Not only did he decide to focus on New England rather than Virginia in constructing his narrative, but he even had to look to Boston rather than Plymouth in looking for the formative vision. Like other historians discussed by Van Engen, Miller had to make some choices in order to feature Winthrop’s sermon in his narrative about the “meaning” of America. What Winthrop’s Puritan vision provided, he argued, was a strong sense of national purpose, along with a narrative that gave the American nation a prominent place in the global human community, as well as inspiring a vibrant bond of civic kinship. He argued, for example, that the role of Jamestown in Virginia in influencing the self-understanding of the United States did not have enough “coherence” to contribute to the vison of a flourishing America. In taking this approach Miller was not only ignoring the actual biblical content of Winthrop’s sermon, but he was effectively setting aside other historical factors as formative in shaping the sense of America’s calling. Perry’s use of the sermon was one of the significant acts of historical revisionism that later enabled figures such as Reagan to invoke Winthrop’s sermon as they did. He contended that “without some understanding of Puritanism. Miller himself was an avowed atheist, but he admired what he saw as the fundamental intent of Winthrop’s “city on a hill” motif. Both nations, he argued, were on the way to establishing a state with a unique mission. The title of Miller’s best-known book, Errand into the Wilderness, published in 1956, signals the parallel Miller drew between American beginnings and ancient Israel’s wilderness pilgrimage. He insisted that the sermon is crucial for understanding the origins of the American nation. The influential Yale historian Perry Miller figures prominently in the shift in how the sermon was understood. But it did not come to be used as a “founding” document of the American nation as such until after World War II. In the nineteenth century it began to be referenced for its regional significance in the history of New England. For that reason, as Van Engen points out, it was pretty much ignored for a couple of centuries-showing up only in the occasional sermon anthology. And as such it did not even stand out among the hundreds of other seventeenth-century sermons about Christian faithfulness. In his new book, City on a Hill, Abram Van Engen demonstrates convincingly that the practice of featuring Winthrop’s sermon in accounts of America’s origins is misguided. Winthrop was simply using Jesus’s words to his followers in Matthew 5:14–16 to encourage his Puritan congregation to be the kind of God-fearing community that the Lord calls the church to be in all times and places. For another, Winthrop’s sermon had nothing to do with the vision of a nation that would have a special role in God’s providential plan for the world. He was a Puritan leader who had come to Massachusetts directly from England he had no affiliation with the Pilgrim band of separatists who had left the Netherlands to settle in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. For one thing, Winthrop was not a Pilgrim. Reagan was engaging in more than a little historical revisionism. In that sermon, Reagan said, Winthrop, “an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man,” had used the Bible’s “city on a hill” image “to describe the America he imagined.” To support his urgings, he cited a sermon preached by the Puritan leader John Winthrop in 1630. When President Ronald Reagan delivered his “Farewell Address to the Nation” in 1989, he called on his fellow citizens to be true to the purposes for which America was founded.