“Teach me thy way, O LORD; I will walk in thy truth” (Psalm 86:11a).
At age 12, God gave Henry Dunster “an attentive eare” for preaching. “The word was more sweet to me,” he recalled, “than anything in the world.” Enrolling at Cambridge University, he confessed to an “inordinate love of humane learning” and, on occasion, “dissolute living,” by which he “lost his [spiritual] comfort.” The convicting tongues of two preachers rescued him from further sinful indulgence. Upon graduation, he continued to struggle spiritually: “The more I did strive to keep the Law, the more vile I felt myself….I sought righteousness by the Law.” Finally, he wrote, “I cast my soule on (the) Lord’s grace & then I bid adue to al [self] righteousness.” In 1640, he sailed for the New World.
Soon after arriving in Boston, civil and church leaders asked Dunster, though only about thirty, to establish a college in nearby Cambridge, one aimed at producing an educated clergy. Already named Harvard after an English donor, it had no organization or leader. Accepting the challenge, Dunster moved to Cambridge and became the first president of the first college in America. He served as teacher, administrator, disciplinarian, and financial officer.
Under the authority of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the churches, the legal system, and now Harvard all functioned according to accepted Puritan theology. The college’s first seal contained three open Bibles, each stamped with one syllable of the Latin word for truth: Veritas.
Dunster served admirably. His pastor called him one “whom God hath much honored and blessed.” A Harvard historian spoke of his “eminent worth and accomplishments.” But 12 years into his presidency, trouble developed. Having believed in paedobaptism (that infants of believing parents should be baptized), Dunster, through further study, came to reject this entrenched Congregational orthodoxy. He concluded only those who understood the gospel and placed faith in Jesus should be baptized. He announced his new belief one Sunday at church, and like a bombshell, it reverberated far and wide.
February 2, 1654, a dozen theologians gave him the opportunity to state and defend his case for believer’s baptism. The meeting concluded with no one having changed his mind. His well articulated views, however, did have an impact. Jonathan Mitchell, Dunster’s 29-year-old pastor and former student, after hearing the college president explain his beliefs, wrote: “After I came from him, I had a strange experience; I found hurrying and pressing suggestions against Paedobaptism, and injected scruples and thoughts whether the other way might not be right, and infant-baptism an invention of men; and whether I might in good conscience baptise children and the like. And these thoughts…left a strange confusion and sickliness upon my spirit. Yet, methought, it was not hard to discern that they were from the EVIL ONE.”
Oh, the power of tradition!
Seeing the inevitable, Dunster resigned, but authorities offered him the opportunity to retain his position if he would keep silent on the point in question. This his conscience would not allow, and his dismissal soon followed. Driven from his job and eventually from his community, he wrote the court: “Our times are in God’s hands, with whom all sides hope, by grace in Christ, to find favor, which shall be my prayer for you, as for myself.”
About the Columnist: Paul V. Harrison has pastored Madison FWB Church in Madison, Alabama since 2015. Previously, he pastored Cross Timbers FWB church in Nashville, Tennessee, for 22 years. He was an adjunct professor at Welch College for 17 years, teaching church history and Greek. Paul is the creator of Classic Sermon Index, a subscription-based online index of over 66,000 sermons, with clients including Harvard, Baylor, and Vanderbilt, among others: classicsermonindex.com.
