"A Model of Christian Charity" is a sermon that John Winthrop delivered somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on board the Arbella on its way to America. In this sermon, Winthrop described what he believed to be the revealed purpose of God in leading the passengers to America. In this sermon, he warned his fellow Puritans that the success or failure of their endeavors in America would depend on God's grace as well as their dedication to the ideal of creating selfless Christian community.
Although the Puritans believed in separation from the official English church practices, they did not believe in a separation between church and state. In "A Model of Christian Charity," Winthrop explains the reasoning behind the Puritans' unwillingness to accept the need for state and church separation. While Winthrop acknowledged that a natural separation exists between social classes, he believed that God created this separation for a reason, to bring the classes closer together through love of and need for each other. Mark Crilly (1999) writes that Winthrop developed the sermon in order to assert the privilege of property ownership. According to Crilly, part of Winthrop's speech suggests that a stratified social system is necessary in the new colonies as part of God's will (Crilly, 1999).
Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" also revealed the depth of knowledge that Puritans had about the Bible. Nearly every line of this sermon quoted or referenced passages from the Bible. Winthrop knew that his audience would be able to understand his references to the Bible indicating that his audience's detailed knowledge of the Bible would make it unnecessary to explain or amplify about specific references.
Winthrop's explanation that God determines that certain people will be poor and others will be wealthy is interesting because this belief implied that God took an active role in the lives of the Puritans, and that God determin...