Search Results

Calvin’s ecclesiology is a site of creative theological construction, drawing together the insights of the gathered church of the radical Reformation and the Catholic notion of the church as a sacrament of grace. Calvin’s pastoral practice acknowledged the peccability of the church while energetically pursuing visible holiness. He argued for particular reforms but also believed that the building up of the church is God’s work: the church for Calvin is at once a community of gift and a community of argument. Edwards inherited the theological tensions and the dynamism of Calvin’s ecclesiology, and his own pastorate provided ample opportunities for ecclesial reflection. This chapter compares Calvin’s arguments against requiring ministerial celibacy with Edwards’s arguments in support of revivals, making clear that both saw the central pastoral task not as the maintenance of a historic tradition but as the prayerful, communal discernment of the present form of ecclesial faithfulness.

Although Brainerd's published journals had proven to be popular reading, the publication of his private writings as The Life of David Brainerd by Jonathan Edwards provided a fresh burst of interest in Brainerd's life. However, Edwards published the diaries as one means of dealing with a specific problem among the members of his church—their waning commitment to God. Although Edwards intended the Life of Brainerd to be an example, it proved to be one of the reasons his congregation chose to dismiss him in 1751.

Mark Twain grappled seriously with theologians from the Calvinist tradition. While many of his comments seem dismissive (and funny), it is clear that Calvinism charged his writing with what one might call an insistent humorousness of purpose. Reflecting on free will, election, and predestination, Twain read especially Jonathan Edwards; not just as one of whom to make fun but as one with whom he had much in common. Edwards provided more than just a whipping boy for Twain’s philosophical comedy—they shared a theological vocabulary, metaphysical assumptions, and a view of God as sovereign. Their disagreements were substantial, but Mark Twain and the Calvinists were partners in the same enterprise. Thus, one can argue that Twain’s growth as a writer came, not, as some have argued, only insofar as he could distance himself from his Calvinist upbringing and influences, but rather as he fully engaged and wrestled with that tradition.

Widely considered America's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, more than any other American, asserted that love dominated and defined heaven—the love among the three members of the Trinity, the love between God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit and individual saints, and the saints' love of one another. His portrait of heaven, like those of George Whitefield and other leaders of the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, focused on the saints' praise of God, intimate relationship with Christ, growth (especially in knowledge), and social harmony. Edwards also emphasized heavenly rewards and argued that to avoid the suffering of hell and enjoy the glories of heaven, people must be born again. As Calvinists, First Great Awakening revivalists believed that God predestined people to salvation, but they also exhorted people to pursue holiness.

A Calvinist spirituality of desire, celebrating the beauty of God in creation, reached a new height in Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century. A theologian of beauty par excellence, he perceived the shared desire of the Holy Trinity as continually overflowing in its effort to replicate its glory in the wonders of the world and the beauty of the human soul. Influenced by Lockian epistemology and the fervor of the revival, he emphasized a sensory knowledge of God. This was experienced in a new “spiritual sense” that allowed believers to relish the aesthetic grandeur of a world alive with beauty. For Edwards, aesthetics were inseparably related to ethics, as he went on to emphasize how “delighting” in beauty also necessitates the “bestowing” of beauty on others.

Chapter 2 builds on chapter 1 by examining the continuities of thought between Jonathan Edwards and the previous generation of Puritan divines surrounding the concept of conversion and his theological departure from the high preparationism represented by Thomas Shepard. Through an analysis of his major concepts such as the affections, the “sense of the heart,” “actual” ideas, and “attention of the mind in thinking” in works such as Religious Affections, “The Mind,” and his “Miscellanies,” this chapter presents Edwards as an important transitional figure between Calvinist theology and Emerson’s transcendentalism, specifically in the ways he conceptualized the roles of consciousness, perception, the will, and habit in the conversion process. Focusing on his adoption of objective idealism and Locke’s theory of epistemology, it argues that by making consciousness a creative force bringing God’s universe into being, Edwards was able to characterize conversion as an affective, yet orderly, process taking place at the horizons of consciousness, a space of indeterminacy, where abstract and concrete truths, certainty and uncertainty, and perception and objects perceived are in constant flux, generating new beliefs about the world and self. In this way, conversion is responsible for the continual process of creating original relations to the universe.

Although the renowned Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards scarcely fits the conventional image of a nature writer, his work embodies a theology of Creation that has important implications for environmental ethics. As such, his ethical philosophy anticipates--in several surprising but instructive ways—the twentieth-century “land ethic” set forth by Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac. Edwards’s notion of “benevolence to Being in general,” as articulated in The Nature of True Virtue, is a theocentric ideal that resists the anthropocentric assumption that nature exists solely to fulfill human needs and desires. Edwards’s vision of Creation as an all-encompassing and sacred beauty thus anticipates the modern sense of “ecology” that likewise affirms the interactive unity of all living and nonliving things.

At first glance, American Universalism seems to have been one of the clearest manifestations of the rational spirit of the revolutionary era, and with its bold assertion of salvation for all, the Universalist movement was shocking even in an atmosphere charged with challenges to orthodox Calvinist doctrines. In the nineteenth century, Universalists became even more closely identified with rationalistic dissent. Drawing upon eighteenth-century evangelical Calvinism on the one hand and Enlightenment liberalism on the other, Universalism emerged as an attempt to nourish piety through rational conviction. Reason, Universalists argued, dictated that a benevolent God would redeem all of creation; the doctrine of universal salvation was God’s way of influencing human affections and turning naturally self-centred human beings to the love of God and the greater creation. This chapter traces the early development of the movement and the notable figures involved.

By 1750, a transition was beginning to take place in American Christianity. Americans began to replace traditional theology with public intellectual ideologies like republicanism and commonsense moral reasoning – views that had traditionally been seen as heterodox. This occurred in large parts because the traditional Puritan framework cracked and fragmented during the heated events of the colonial Great Awakening.

Theologians dominated the public square in Colonial America. Colonial American theology in many ways maintained continuity with Old World understandings of the world and the church. Colonial theologians emphasized the importance of historic confessions and creeds and viewed hierarchical social structure as God‐given.

This chapter surveys Erskine's sympathy for America, viewed by him as a burgeoning godly territory for the growth of evangelicalism. In the wake of the revivals in America and Britain in the 1730s and 1740s, he had established correspondences with several Americans, mostly other ministers, and eventually becoming a key propagator of the theology of Jonathan Edwards. Demonstrating his support for America, Erskine penned three apparently radical pamphlets in which he depicted Britain as unfairly treating her colonies. Once war broke out, and because he had already been corresponding for years with a number of American ministers connected with the transatlantic revival, Erskine remained sympathetic to the colonists' grievances against Britain.

This chapter explores the breadth of Erskine's role as a disseminator through the literature that he sent to America, Britain, and Europe. Erskine posted books to his correspondents for a variety of reasons. Sometimes he received specific requests for material on a particular subject, as was often the case with Jonathan Edwards, or he might send the latest theological publications by authors with heterodox views to capable evangelical theologians like Joseph Bellamy with the intent that they write polemics as a response to these writings. Regardless of whether Erskine was working towards publishing the posthumous manuscripts of Jonathan Edwards, forwarding books to his friends, or filling the bare shelves of fledgling institutions such as the College of New Jersey, Yale, and Dickinson College, his goal was to enlighten his recipients to current works in print in order to strengthen evangelicalism.

Jonathan Edwards was deeply involved in education, as a tutor at Yale College, with catechists in his congregation at Northampton, with Indian children at Stockbridge, and as president of the College of New Jersey. He also took aspiring ministerial candidates into his home, teaching them theology. From this central pedagogical impulse, Edwards’s own students, most famously Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy, used a “mentor’s” model for rusticating ministerial students and building “schools of the prophets” of a home-grown variety. New Divinity men and women became teachers, professors, and presidents of educational institutions, training new missionaries in particular. With the mainstreaming of the New England Theology, however, divisions arose within the movement over the true meaning and inheritors of Edwards’s legacy; feuds broke out among institutions, including breakaway schools such as the East Windsor Seminary. After the movement dissolved, some educators carried the torch of Edwardsianism into the twentieth century.

By 1790, American Christians also embraced the “new moral philosophy,” a way of understanding their faith through “commonsense moral reasoning.” Because they came to believe that God had created humans with a capacity for moral reasoning, American Christians largely gave up the traditional, hierarchical arbiters of truth found in the established churches of Europe and took into their own hands the determination of religious truth and control of the churches.

Along with the Introduction, this postscript is a bookend. It argues that the chapters in this volume have shown that the New England Theology is a source of important theological development in nineteenth-century American theology and that it had a significant international impact as well. The ideas of Edwards, the taproot of the movement, were transmitted, changed, and adapted in important respects by successive generations of adherents. Nevertheless the New England theologians influenced and shaped a century of Christian thought in North America and left an important legacy that is of continuing significance for theologians, historians, and scholars of religion and philosophy.

Although there are numerous difficulties in identifying Edwards's theological legacy, the first distinct group of followers to emerge was referred to as the New Divinity. From the outset, there was significant opposition to Edwardsean theology from Arminians and from liberalizing Congregationalists (or Old Lights). Appropriating and adapting Edwards's theology proved to be problematic not only because of the complexity of ideas, but also because of a lack of access to his materials. Ultimately the New Divinity authors moved beyond Edwards by heightening human responsibility, rejecting imputation, and removing the distinction between moral inability and natural ability. Despite these changes, these Edwardseans venerated Edwards and believed that his legacy should endure. Edwardsean teaching underlay much of nineteenth-century evangelical expansion in missions, antislavery (abolitionism), education, and social reform.

Whitefield was particularly excited to visit New England because of its connection with the puritan past. While New England retained some features of pilgrim culture it had a fractious religious landscape and many local clergymen believed that piety was slipping. Some members of the clergy welcomed Whitefield because of his popularity. Others, including Charles Chauncy, (rightfully) believed that his visit would cause further fissures. The visit in fact led to a contentious debate over the relationship between clergy and their congregation and particularly whether evangelicalism would further erode the authority of the orthodox erudite (typically Congregational) clergy.