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This chapter briefly outlines the Taylor family history, including Nathaniel William Taylor's puritan roots in New England. Although Nathaniel William Taylor's grandfather and family patriarch, Nathanael Taylor, was a prominent Old Calvinist, Nathaniel William Taylor's religious horizons were expanded under the tutelage of Azel Backus, the prominent New Divinity preacher and successor to Joseph Bellamy's pulpit in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Backus molded the young Taylor's mind – as well as his piety and his preaching style – after the Edwardsians.

Between 1790 and 1840, Reformed theology reached the summit of its broad influence in American culture. With New England's Congregationalists in the lead, and then joined by mid‐state and southern Presbyterians, the Reformed theologians engaged in the most serious religious and public debates of the years. These debates led to the production of a great surge of theological literature, most of which was significantly influenced by the new conditions of American public life. The rise of Unitarianism during this period presented a special challenge to more traditional Calvinist theologians.

In his conclusion, Sweeney moves beyond the usual story of Edwardsian decline to a summary of Taylor's own substantial legacy to post‐Edwardsian America. He notes that in New England, Taylor's theology managed to split Connecticut's General Association, but his opening up of the Edwardsian culture changed the face of New England Theology. As America moved westward, Taylor's dilation of New England's traditional regional orthodoxies paved the way for the spread of its churches and their theology on the frontier. For Taylor, as for his American successors, the proof of one's theology lay in preaching and virtuous living.

Yale’s Nathaniel William Taylor was the most controversial Edwardsian theologian of his era. He scandalized the country with his recontextualization of Edwards’s views of original sin, freedom of will, and regeneration. His New Haven Theology split the ranks of Connecticut Congregationalists, inciting strong reaction from conservatives led by Taylor’s rival, Bennet Tyler. It also yielded a schism in the Presbyterian Church. This chapter explains and assesses the nature of the controversy sparked by Taylor’s teaching, focusing closely on the debate between Taylorites and Tylerites (who founded a Pastoral Union, a Christian periodical, and a seminary in opposition to Taylor and Yale Divinity School). Revising older views of this dispute, which saw Taylor as a symbol of the decline of Edwardsian theology in America, the chapter interprets Taylor and the contest over Edwards as a sign of the vitality of Edwardsian divinity to the time of the Civil War.

Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.