10/09/2023 – The amazing story of renowned Purtitan missionary to the American Indians, John Elliot (1604-1690)
This is from “A Puritan Theology” – Doctrine for Life” by Joel R. Beeke & Mark Jones, an excerpt from Chapter #48: “The City on a Hill”: The American Puritans’ Optimistic View of the End Times, covering page # 784 through page # 786.
Let’s get started:
“The renowned Puritan missionary to the American Indians, John Elliot (1604-1690), strove to plant Christ’s monarchy among his Christianized Indians as a model for God’s rule amount the nations. James Houston call’s Eliot’s vision ‘the single most ambitions utopian project within the large Puritan utopia of New England … No other Puritans, Old or New World, worked so long or with such concentration on a single utopian project, and no other Puritan utopias remained so committed to connecting utopian writing and practice.
Like most Puritans, Eliot believed strongly that the last times were near. Since the gospel shall be heard by all the earth before Christ’s second coming, the Indians must be evangelized immediately. Eliot spend three years studying the Algonquian language and then began preaching to the natives in their own language in 1646.
Eliot was not alone among the New England ministers in this conviction. Citing Brightman, Thomas Shepherd (1605-1649) wrote in 1648 that he expected Turkish power to soon collapse, the Jews to be converted, and ‘these Western Indians {to} soon some in’ to embrace the gospel. Convictions like these led the following year to the founding of the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which was established to support the work of Eliot and other evangelists to the Indians. Over the next twenty years, Eliot wrote or sponsored a great many works that became known as the Eliot Indian Tracts, which were published in London as aids in fundraising.
Eliot bean to set up towns of ‘praying Indians.’ Natick was the first ‘praying town’ (1651). God blessed his work with numerous conversions, which in turn enflamed his eschatological hope for the Indian converts. By 1652, Eliot was already writing in one of his many tracts, Tears of Repentence, that Christ’s kingdom was ‘rising up in the Western Parts of the World, which, according to James Maclear, encouraged Cromwell to promote the reign of Christ everywhere. In his zeal to evangelize the Indians, Eliot added two rather extreme convictions to his thinking, as Maclear notes: ‘First, he added a new dimension to speculation about he Indians’ place in eschatology by his conviction that they were Hebrews, retrograde descendants of the biblical patriarchs and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Second, he believed that his own humble Indian flock at Natick was destined to take the first step toward the millennium.
Despite these views, Eliot had set up nineteen praying towns by 1674, with an estimated population of 3,600 Indians approximately 1,100 had been converted. In each town, the natives made a solemn covenant to give themselves and their children ‘ to God to be His people’ as the basis of the new civil government. Eliot organized the new government following Jethro’s advice to Moses in Exodus 18: he appointed rulers over hundreds, fifty, and ten in each town to keep la to the Massachusetts General Court. For the most part, the natives were expected to adopt the Puritan lifestyle along with the Christian faith.
After organizing the civil government, Eliot started establishing churches with the Congregationalist forms of government. After overcoming numerous difficulties in a fifteen-year period, the first native church was officially established in 1660 at Natick. The establishment of other churches in praying towns soon followed.
In the meantime, Eliot had been working hard since 1653 on translating the Bible into the Native American language. One of most difficult tasks was inventing a vocabulary as well as grammar to express the relationships of time and space that were missing from the native language. With the help of English supporters, Eliot established a printing press in Cambridge. In 1861, Marmaduke Johnson printed the first New Testament in the Massachusetts language. The Old Testament with metrical psalms followed in 1663, making it the first complete Bible printed on the American continent. The Alonnquian Bible is considered by many to be Eliot’s greatest accomplishment, but for Eliot, that Bible was only an aid to the conversion of the Native Americns before Christ would return.
Eliot translated more works into Massachusetts, ranging from classics of Puritan piety to primers and one-page catechisms. By this time, Eliot had some coworkers. They kept the society’s printing press busy until King Phillip’s War. They also founded schools in the native towns. To help in the schools, Eliot published The Indian Grammar Begun (1666), The Indian Primer (1669)m and The Logic Primer (1672). A building was even put up for an “Indian college” at Harvard, although few natives enrolled due to a scarcity of teachers and students.
The souls of natives so dominated Eliot’s thinking that he did not fear for his own life. When once challenged by a Native American sagamore with a knife, Eliot said, ‘I am about the work of the great God, and He is with me, so that I fear not all the sachems of the country. I’ll go on, and do you touch me if you dare.
Eliot’s work prospered until the onset of King Philip’s War in 1675. Fearing for their lives, numerous native converts moved to an island in the Boston harbor. Many died there. That pattern was repeated in other towns, where praying Indians were destroyed by either warring tribesmen or angry colonists. Unfortunately, the praying Indians were considered enemies of both the English and the native Indians; only Eliot and a few others stood by them during the war. A dreadful genocide wiped out the praying towns and the vast majority of Indians living in them.
After the war, the surviving Native Americans returned to Natick, Eliot attempted to start over, rebuilding Natick and their other towns despite the distrust of the English. It seemed at first that Eliot’s experiment in the New World might still be successful, but that effort never recovered its millennial promise. By the nineteenth century, not one convert remained who could read the Bible in the Massachusetts language.
Eliot is a classic example of how a renowned, godly man, who lived and died well (his last word were, ‘Welcome joy!), could be carried to some extreme eschatological views. Despite these views, however, God used his mightily for the conversion of hundreds of Indians.”
Soli Deo Gloria!