scholarly journals Continuing Revelation and Institutionalization: Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charismatic Leadership in Antebellum America

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 233-253
Author(s):  
Claudia Jetter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Continuing Revelation

Nineteenth-century North American religious history is filled with divinely inspired people who received and recorded new revelations. This article presents Joseph Smith Jr and Ralph Waldo Emerson as charismatic prophets who promoted the idea of continuing revelation. Drawing on Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority, it will contrast their forms of new sacred writing with one another to show how both had experienced encounters with the divine. The second part will then explore how different conceptualizations of revelation led to opposing concepts of religious authority, with consequences for the possibility of institution-building processes. While Smith would reify revelation in hierarchy, Emerson eventually promoted extreme spiritual individualization by rejecting the idea of an exclusive institution as the centre of revelatory authority.

Abandoned Quarries

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early National ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Period

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.

The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-819 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
New Divinity

The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the modern American Protestant missionary spirit to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his self-appointed heirs, those Congregational ministers who came to be called New Divinity men. Edwards proposed a theology of cosmic redemption and supplied the exemplary missionary model in Life of Brainerd (1749), his most popular and most frequently reprinted work. Samuel Hopkins then furnished a theological rationale for missions by revising Edwards' aesthetic concept of “disinterested benevolence” into a practical one of self-denial for the greater glory of God's kingdom and the betterment of humankind.

The Distinctiveness of American Denominationalism: A Case Study of the 1846 Evangelical Alliance

1976 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest R. Sandeen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
European History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Characteristic Shape ◽  
American Protestantism

The Chicago school in American religious historiography, especially its two most distinguished representatives, W. W. Sweet and Sidney E. Mead, has emphasized the growth of religious liberty as a crucial factor in accounting for the characteristic shape of American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. The effect of this interpretative hypothesis has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of American religious history while focusing attention so intensely upon American phenomena that evidence from European history which might have served to qualify that hypothesis has not yet received adequate attention.

Adventists Discover the Seventh-Day Sabbath: How to Deal with the ‘Jewish Problem’

1992 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 373-378
Author(s):  
Keith A. Francis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Seventh Day Adventist ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Protestant Denomination

In 1831 William Miller, a farmer from Low Hampton, New York, began to preach that the Second Advent would occur ‘about the year 1843’. From this rather inauspicious beginning the number of people who agreed with Miller’s prediction grew, so that by 1844 they probably numbered more than 50,000 according to some estimates. This phenomenon would be of little historical interest—except, perhaps, to historians studying nineteenth-century American religious history—had it not been for the fact that one legacy of Millerism is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which has over six million members world-wide and can claim, for example, one of the largest educational systems run by a Protestant denomination.

Bunyan and America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel D.S. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Key Features

This chapter surveys the reception and appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684) in American religious history and literary culture, arguing that, through a series of politically, theologically, and artistically motivated realignments, American adaptations of John Bunyan’s classic shaped key features of American Protestantism and of a distinctively American literary tradition. In the eighteenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress was evoked to reconceive ‘progress’ along lines more commercial and technological than spiritual. In the nineteenth century, modernized spin-offs became important touchstones in the hotly contested debates over theological liberalism and conservatism. In the increasingly secular twentieth century, it was often either ‘emptied of religion’ and recast as ‘road literature’, or appropriated dialectically as a means for coming to terms with the perceived absurdity of the human condition. In sum, to quote Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress tells us a good bit about the American story’.

Introduction

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Wacker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

From the early nineteenth century through the middle twentieth century, foreign and domestic missionaries ranked among the most conspicuous figures of American religious history. In many quarters they still do. “Don't apologize,” one academic quipped at a conference in India. “All Americans are missionaries.”

Priesthood Ordination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
Power And Authority

Early Mormons used the Book of Mormon as the basis for their ecclesiology and understanding of the open heaven. Church leaders edited, harmonized, and published Joseph Smith’s revelation texts, expanding understandings of ecclesiastical priesthood office. Joseph Smith then revealed the Nauvoo Temple liturgy, with its cosmology that equated heaven, kinship, and priesthood. This cosmological priesthood was materialized through sealings at the temple altar and was the context for expansive teachings incorporating women into priesthood. This cosmology was also the basis for polygamy, temple adoption, and restrictions on the participation of black men and women in the church. This framework gave way at the end of the nineteenth century to a new priesthood cosmology introduced by Joseph F. Smith based on male ecclesiastical office. As church leaders expanded the meaning of priesthood to comprise the entire power and authority of God, they struggled to integrate women into church cosmology.

Prologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
Military Planning ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future War

This introduction explains that looming, a nineteenth-century term for a superior mirage, shows us how visions of the future war affected antebellum America. First, some spark, an event or object, captured people’s attention. Second, a unique atmosphere elevated and enlarged that spark, making it loom greater than reality. Before the Civil War was fought or remembered, it was imagined by thousands of Americans who peered at the horizon through an apocalyptic atmosphere. Third, observers focused on it and reported what appeared to be beyond the horizon. Popular forecasts rose from leaders but also women, slaves, immigrants, and common soldiers. These imaginings shaped politics, military planning, and the economy. The prologue identifies the two prevailing temporalities of antebellum America, anticipations and expectations, and calls for more historical attention to the diverse temporalities of past people.

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