Possession and Selflessness Theme Analysis

In his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop sketches a rough utopian communism based on love and mutual dependence, one free from private property, devoid of personal investment, and abundant in public charity. To achieve this communism would require a selflessness most readers likely find impossible. In order to convince his original audience as they enter a trying new life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop, a firm Puritan, models his arguments on Protestant conceptions of the self. These Protestant conceptions assume that humans are nothing without God and that everything on Earth is on loan from him. From these considerations, Winthrop argues that charitable selflessness—much like God’s charity in bestowing gifts and plenty—is the godliest life.

Winthrop admits that it is a very natural human impulse to claim ownership, count oneself special, and feel worthy of one’s lot in life. At the beginning of his sermon, Winthrop makes it clear that certain unavoidable factors position people to feel greater than others. One person has money, for instance, while another is poor; one has talents while another does not. These are basic facts of life. He goes on to describe man’s selfish instinct: “every man is borne with this principle in him, to love and seek himself onely.” This selfishness, suggests Winthrop, is a widespread, innate, and natural feeling. He spends several pages addressing commonly held desires to “lay upp”—that is, to stockpile—one’s earnings for one’s own use. Again, in devoting so much space to selfish urges, he acknowledges their frequency.

All the while, Winthrop has been carefully sketching his view of material existence as a temporary loan from God, a view that will soon help him refute the instinct toward selfishness. Winthrop describes all material wealth as a “guift” (gift). This is a very telling word choice, as a gift is something given voluntarily, not at all something earned or deserved. He might well have used the word “earning” or “prize”—words that can reasonably retain the Protestant value of hard work. Instead, he uses the word “gift” in order to express God’s temporary attitude toward the material world and toward excessive wealth especially. He states that “God still reserves the propperty of these guifts to himself,” quoting several lines of scripture from Ezekiel and Proverbs in defense of this view. Winthrop suggests that men (or people more generally—Winthrop’s male-centric perspective is a product of his time and place) ought not to “say that that which he possessed was his owne.” His language here goes even further than the gift metaphor, since a gift, once accepted, might be said to belong to the recipient. Instead, people have no right to claim such belongings; in suggesting this total lack of ownership, Winthrop asks his audience to think of the entire material world as a loan.

Even though Winthrop acknowledges that the human impulse towards selfishness is common and perhaps even expected, he demands that humans overcome it. To do this, he draws on his account of God’s temporary attitude toward the material world. Continuing the rhetoric of ownership and possession, Winthrop turns to the topic of lending, emphasizing that the Massachusetts Bay colonists ought to lend to each other whenever possible. What’s more, one’s duty to lend is even greater if “there be a danger of looseing it,” if reimbursement is unlikely, since this indicates the desperation of the borrower. With references to Christ’s sermon on the mount—thus positioning himself alongside Jesus’ irrefutable word—the metaphor here, of lending and community, suggests that the colonists ought to view personal wealth the way God does, as temporary, dispensable, and useful insofar as it can help others. Winthrop makes further comparisons to the possession-less ethos of “the primitive churche.” This reference to the “primitive” is not derogatory; instead it draws on the popular Protestant conception that the very first followers of Christ had the purest understanding of his teachings, untainted by the Catholic Church’s later reforms. He also cites the Waldenses, a group of early church reformers, in urging that “the care of the publique must oversway all private respects.” Scripture, continues Winthrop, not only advocates selflessness; it punishes the opposite. As the Book of Corinthians states, “He that soweth spareingly shall reape spareingly.” This argument demands a renunciation of the private self as distinct from the rest of humanity.

Winthrop deepens his argument for selflessness by suggesting that all humans—deriving from the same ancestors in Adam and Eve, and before that originating in the same godly act of creation—are most logically viewed as one collective body. It follows, then, that the pain of one person ought to be felt by all. As he closes his sermon, Winthrop urges his listeners to let go of their human impulses towards selfishness, ownership, and possession, for if their colonial project is to work—and if they are to live as God commands—“we must be knit together in this worke as one man.”