Invisible Saints and the Risk of Knowing: Reading Baird Tipson on Judging with Charity

Setting the Scene: Charity and Church Membership

The tension between faith and visibility—between divine election and human recognition—has haunted the church since its earliest days. It is not a purely theological problem. It is a pastoral one. Who belongs? Who may partake in the sacraments? Who should be called a saint—not merely in hope, but in practice?

In seventeenth-century New England, this question took on institutional urgency. The colonies were an ecclesial experiment: communities attempting to build visible churches made up of visible saints. Ministers required would-be members to publicly articulate their faith, often offering a narrative of conversion and a demonstration of sincere piety. To Continental eyes, this process appeared novel, even presumptuous. It was one thing to shepherd souls. It was quite another to require a detailed account of their regeneration.

New England ministers defended the practice with a theological claim: that they were acting iudicio caritatis—with a “judgment of charity.” They were not claiming to know who was truly elect, but rather admitting those whose lives and professions gave sufficient outward evidence of grace. Their judgments, they insisted, were provisional, hopeful, charitable.

Tipson begins Invisible Saints by examining this claim closely. His concern is not to attack it, but to probe it—historically, theologically, and pastorally. He observes that while many scholars have accepted this “judgment of charity” at face value, few have examined how it was actually applied. Did the theory hold up in practice? Or did the structures of New England religion reveal a quiet contradiction between charity and control?

At this point, a modern reader might be tempted to wave the whole discussion aside. Isn't this just theological nit-picking? Shouldn’t we simply go with the flow, trust people’s sincerity, and focus on helping people follow Jesus?

It’s an understandable reaction. Many contemporary Christians have grown weary of hair-splitting doctrine and the kind of gatekeeping that seems to have little to do with grace. And yet, this reaction often underestimates the seriousness of the questions at hand. Questions like: How do we receive one another in the name of Christ? What is the church, and what kind of belonging does it offer? When someone says, “I believe,” what are we being asked to hear—and to trust?

To frame these issues as merely technical is, in a way, to avoid their difficulty. While it is true that churches must resist graceless legalism, it is equally true that communities—especially communities of faith—require form. They must decide what it means to welcome, to instruct, to discipline, and to share life together. To go with the flow may sound freeing, but it rarely prepares us to deal well with real questions of spiritual growth, theological difference, moral failure, or pastoral care.

The New England pastors knew this. Their concern was not to make church entry difficult for its own sake, but to ensure the church remained meaningfully distinct. They believed that what the church is shapes what the church offers. And while their solutions may raise difficult questions, their questions are not irrelevant.

They are perennial.

Luther, Calvin, Zanchi: Saints by Sight or by Faith?

The New England ministers did not invent the idea of judging with charity. They inherited it. Long before them, theologians wrestled with how the visible church could rightly receive people into its fellowship without presuming to speak for God. The heart, after all, remains hidden.

Augustine offered one of the earliest articulations of this tension. In On Christian Doctrine, he wrote, “Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build on the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all.” For Augustine, charity was not a soft virtue but a theological compass. It governed how Christians ought to read, relate, and receive one another—particularly in the absence of perfect knowledge. Ministers, unable to see the soul, were to extend the ordinances of the church to all with impartial care, leaving the judgment of election to God (De Doctrina Christiana, 1.36.40).

Luther drew a similar line when he responded to Erasmus. He distinguished between two modes of judgment: the canon fidei, or rule of faith, and the canon caritatis, or rule of charity. The former deals with what can be known with conviction—those whom God has revealed as saints. But the latter is how Christians are to judge one another here and now: with charity, assuming the best in the absence of divine disclosure. “Charity,” Luther wrote, “always thinks the best of everyone, and is not suspicious but believes and assumes all good of its neighbours… she calls every baptised person a saint” (The Bondage of the Will, 10.104).

Calvin echoed this in the Institutes. He granted that the elect could not be known “with the certainty of faith,” but still insisted that believers ought to be received into the church “by a certain judgment of charity” (Institutes, 4.1.8). This was no vague sentiment—it involved concrete criteria: confession of faith, visible holiness of life, and participation in the sacraments. These, though not infallible, were sufficient for the church to act.

Zanchi sharpened the distinction further. In a 1561 dispute, he argued that a person could have assurance of their own salvation—because God reveals it inwardly—but could not possess that same certainty about others. What they could do, and must do, was observe outward signs: moral conduct, participation in the sacraments, a confession of faith. These were not proofs, but they gave shape to a hopeful assumption. “One could not look within one’s neighbour’s heart,” Tipson summarises, “but one could observe the external effects of possible grace.”¹

All of these voices—Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Zanchi—contribute to a theological posture that values humility over presumption. They did not collapse the distance between appearance and reality, between visible membership and inward regeneration. But neither did they demand evidence of spiritual certainty before offering welcome. They extended the church’s embrace not with cynicism, nor with naïveté, but with a settled conviction: that charity is not blind optimism, but a proper response to our creaturely limits.

It’s worth remembering that they weren’t seeking to evade theological depth. They were trying to make theological depth bear fruit in church life. And for all our modern discomfort with church boundaries, we still face the same problem. People want to know they belong. Churches want to honour the gospel. The judgment of charity remains a necessary tool—so long as we remember what it was designed to do.

New England’s Quiet Contradiction

The ministers of New England inherited the theological scaffolding of the judgment of charity, but they built something far more elaborate atop it. In theory, they maintained the humility of Augustine, the hopefulness of Luther, the pastoral prudence of Calvin. But in practice, the demands of a visible church of visible saints produced something more exacting—and, as Tipson argues, more conflicted.

The tension was subtle. Public profession of faith was not new. But in New England, that profession was often required to take a particular form. A narrative. An expression of conversion. A display not just of knowledge or practice, but of inward transformation. Ministers expected candidates for church membership to testify—both to the congregation and to the minister—how God had brought them to saving faith. Not merely that they believed, but how they had come to believe.

At face value, this was a pastoral instinct: to hear what God had done in someone’s life. But it also marked a shift. Charity, in its classical sense, required no inner sign—only the absence of obvious contradiction. But New England churches asked for more. They asked for a kind of spiritual transparency that, as Tipson puts it, “combined the traditional judgment of charity with a demand for some inner sign of grace.”

Cotton Mather gives voice to this in language that is both cautious and exacting. Candidates were to be judged “not only by external profession … but in some measure of sincerity and truth.” Churches were duty-bound, he argued, “not to receive such into their fellowship as they see to want such qualities, yea, or see not some ground to conceive that they have them.” Mather insisted this was to be done with “charitable discretion.” But to critics, such discretion sounded suspiciously like intrusion.

What began as a hopeful assumption had morphed into a process of spiritual discernment—part encouragement, part examination. Thomas Hooker added to the criteria the need for “expression.” But as Tipson astutely notes, once “expression” becomes a requirement, silence itself becomes suspect. If someone cannot or does not speak of inward grace, are they therefore without it? The New England divines answered that question with greater confidence than many of their Reformed forebears might have found comfortable.

The result, Tipson suggests, was a theological dissonance. The ministers claimed the mantle of charity while constructing a framework that leaned heavily on introspection and articulation. Critics were not wrong to see in this a risk: that the churches of New England had begun to traffic in knowledge too close to what belongs only to God.

But if this is a contradiction, it is a revealing one. It shows the weight of responsibility these pastors felt. They wanted churches full of true believers—not out of suspicion, but out of hope. They believed that a pure church would be a powerful witness. And they lived with a form of social cohesion that made church membership far more consequential than it often is today.

Still, the tension remains. How much must someone say to be received? What kind of story must they tell? What if their experience doesn’t follow the usual pattern?

Tipson’s point is not that the Puritans were graceless. It’s that they were caught—caught between theology and structure, between hope and control, between love for the church and the unknowability of the soul. And perhaps so are we.

What This Asks of Us Today

There’s something sobering about tracing theological contradictions not in systems, but in people—faithful, thoughtful, spiritually serious people. Tipson’s critique isn’t mean-spirited. It’s careful. And his question—what happens when the judgment of charity is quietly replaced with a demand for proof?—feels as relevant now as it was in seventeenth-century New England.

We live in different conditions, of course. Most churches today don’t require conversion narratives for membership. Many no longer assume theological consensus as a given. In some cases, it’s the boundaries that are in dispute; in others, it’s whether boundaries are even appropriate. But the deeper questions remain. How do we receive one another? What kind of evidence—if any—do we require? And what happens when our desire for faithfulness drifts into a need for certainty?

Such questions of others may give rise to questioning our own experience. How does the evidence of my life conform to the manifestations of a new life in the Spirit? When I say one thing and do another, might others be guilty of duplicity also? Does grace extend itself in absence of testimony or alms?

The danger isn’t just that we might exclude someone unfairly. It’s that we forget what the judgment of charity was meant to protect: not a lax ecclesiology, but a reverent one. A recognition that we are not God. That we do not see hearts. That the church must operate in the space between God's revealed word and his hidden will—with caution, with faith, and with love.

That love has structure. Communities need form. Discipline, sacraments, teaching—all require some kind of order. But that ordering must be inhabited with humility. The pastors of New England carried real burdens. They knew the cost of spiritual hypocrisy. They wanted churches that mattered. Their instincts, in many ways, were good. And still, the contradictions showed.

Which is why their story should give us pause—not to condemn them, but to listen. The temptation to demand more than God requires, or to presume more than God reveals, is not a Puritan problem. It’s a human one. And it shows up wherever churches are trying to be faithful.

The judgment of charity is not a perfect tool—but perhaps it was never meant to be. It is a gesture of theological restraint. A discipline of trust. It reminds us that the church is made up of sinners—some visible, some hidden, some assured, some doubting. We live by grace, not by inspection. This judgment asks us to welcome with openness, to guard with care, and to remember that even our clearest convictions must be tempered by the God who sees further than we can.

Conclusion

Reading Invisible Saints is less an exposure of historical failure than an invitation to theological honesty. Tipson reminds us that even our best traditions can carry tensions, and that faithfulness to Christ’s church requires both clarity and compassion. If the Puritans wrestled with how to judge charitably, we should not be surprised to find ourselves doing the same. Their questions are still our own.

Baird Tipson, “Invisible Saints: The Judgment of Charity in the Early New England Churches,” Church History 44, no. 4 (Dec. 1975): 460–471.