‘To Promote Religion and Learning and Piety’: The Failure of Queens College, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Revisited

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-156
Author(s):  
Carl I. Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Regional Society ◽  
Educational Project ◽  
Lay Persons ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Queens College ◽  
Ongoing Support ◽  
Ubiquitous Presence

This chapter details how, in the early 1760s, Hampshire magnates promoted a bold new educational project to found a college in Hampshire County. However, it was the clergy of northern Hampshire County who took the first formal steps to secure a college even though their initial efforts and ongoing support have been overshadowed in subsequent accounts by Israel Williams' ubiquitous presence. The ambition to establish a western counterpart to Harvard probably had been germinating for some time in the Williams family, and the leader in this new clerical enterprise was evidently the Rev. Jonathan Ashley of Deerfield, who certainly belonged to the Williams connection. These Hampshire clergy, particularly the leaders such as Ashley, were conservative, Stoddardian ‘Old Light’ Calvinists who, like Israel Williams and other lay persons, had supported the ouster of Jonathan Edwards from his Northampton pulpit in 1750 and who, in Kevin Sweeney's words, ‘found Harvard too liberal and Yale too susceptible to the New Divinity’. Queens College was conceived as the institutional expression of this distinctive and highly-conservative regional society within the Bay Province.

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 centre of Christianity—the doctrine of the cross’: Andrew Fuller as a Reformed Theologian

2019 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
Ian Hugh Clary
Keyword(s):  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Common View ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
The Cross

Studies of Andrew Fuller on the atonement typically focus on the question of whether or not he was influenced by the New Divinity of the followers of Jonathan Edwards in America. With the recent scholarly interest focusing on hypothetical universalism as a common view of the atonement amongst the Reformed Orthodox, evaluations of Reformed theologians like Fuller are appropriate. This article examines whether or not Fuller’s view of the atonement fits within the diverse views of the Reformed on this subject in light of growing understanding of the movement’s diversity. It concludes that though Fuller made some changes in his language between editions of The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, his theology of the atonement is within the bounds of Reformed Orthodoxy on the atonement as expressed at the Synod of Dordt.

Reforming Church and Nation

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-85
Author(s):  
Larry Abbott Golemon
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Theological Education ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Theological Schools ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Narrative Interpretation ◽  
Princeton Theological Seminary

This chapter explores Protestant theological schools that educated pastors as reformers of church and the nation after religious disestablishment. This education built upon the liberal arts of the colleges, which taught the basic textual interpretation, rhetoric, and oratory. Rev. Timothy Dwight led the way in fashioning a new liberal arts in the college, which served as the foundation for advanced theological education. At Yale, he integrated the belles-lettres of European literature and rhetoric into the predominant American framework of Scottish Common Sense Realism. He also coupled these pedagogies with the voluntarist theology of Jonathan Edwards and the New Divinity, which bolstered Christian volunteerism and mission. With Dwight’s help, New England Congregationalists developed a graduate theological at Andover with a faculty in Scripture, theology, and homiletics (practical theology) who taught in the interdisciplinary, rhetorical framework of the liberal arts. Dr. Ebenezer Porter raised a generation of princes of the pulpit and college professors of rhetoric and oratory, and he wrote the first widely used manuals in elocution. Moses Stuart in Bible advanced German critical studies of Scripture for future pastoral work and for scholars in the field. The greatest alternative to Andover was the historic Calvinism of Princeton Theological Seminary, as interpreted through the empiricism of Scottish Common Sense. President Archibald Alexander, historian Samuel Miller, theologian Charles Hodge, and later homiletics professor James Wadell Alexander emphasized the text-critical and narrative interpretation of Scripture, and the emphasis on classic rhetoric and oratory in homiletics culminated the curriculum.

The Women of the ABCFM Oregon Mission and the Conflicted Language of Calvinism

1995 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve McCoy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
Free Grace

Among the books Oregon missionaries Elkanah and Mary Walker kept in their mission home at Tshimakain was a Bible in which was written a quotation attributed to Martin Luther: “Men are never more unfit for the sacrament, than when they think themselves most fit—and never more fit and prepared for duty than when most humbld ‘sic’ and ashamed in a sense of their own unfitness.” Fitness founded in unfitness, ability based on inability, and autonomy grounded in dependence were qualities that the Walker' sponsor, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), encouraged in its emissaries. The country's first foreign missionary program was established in 1810 by a small group of New Divinity ministers. Dominating the rural pulpits in New England and New York during the Second Great Awakening, New Divinity preachers aimed to legitimate their conception of revival and conversion by appealing to the earlier revival theology of Jonathan Edwards. In the process, they insisted that predestination and free grace did not violate human free will and moral responsibility. Based on these convictions antebellum ABCFM missionaries, including the Oregon group, learned to assess their own spiritual condition and calling. However, the internal conflicts prompted by New Divinity understandings of the conversion experience alternatively produced debilitating and vitalizing effects that continued to trouble these women and men throughout their missionary careers. In effect, the vocation of the missionaries of the Whitman-Spalding mission proceeded from an uncommonly heroic effort to achieve a salvation that could not be guaranteed by their own theology. Moreover, contemporary clashing views regarding the nature and social role of women became intertwined with this disabling discourse. This, in turn, limited the Oregon women's conception of themselves and their capacities as missionaries.

Jonathan Edwards Jr.’s Relish for True Religion: The Advance of the New England Theology in the Sermon on the Mount

2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-92
Author(s):  
John S. Banks
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Sermon On The Mount ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Civil War Era

Jonathan Edwards Jr. is often portrayed as a spiritless preacher who drove away his congregation with metaphysical preaching. This narrative, produced by the early liberalism of the pre-civil war era, has stuck to Edwards Jr. for nearly two hundred years. Accordingly, this narrative typically describes Edwards Jr. and his fellow New Divinity pastor-theologians as distorting the Edwardsean legacy. This essay begins to amend the inherited narrative by showing that between the younger and elder Edwards there can be no line of demarcation. In particular, the younger shares his father’s relish that true religion would flourish in his own congregation through the Holy Spirit’s influences. Since the Sermon on the Mount has been the traditional territory of theological liberalism, this research examines Edwards Jr.’s forty-six manuscripts from the Sermon on the Mount which demonstrate a strong reliance upon Religious Affections.

Jonathan Edwards and the Protestant Scholastics

2018 ◽  
pp. 28-68
Author(s):  
Adriaan C. Neele
Keyword(s):  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

Edwards’s theological and philosophical reflections can be found in his treatises, miscellanies, sermons, forms of Scripture commentary, notebooks, and other writings. Given that he lived in the late orthodox period of the post-Reformation era, it is natural to raise the question to what degree there was continuity and discontinuity between his theological and philosophical thought and that of his predecessors. This is all the more important because some of Edwards’s doctrinal formulations found their way into New England’s “New Divinity.” The answer to this question, then, will be formulated, in part, against the background of Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706), a representative of Protestant scholasticism, who wrote during high orthodoxy. It is hoped that this will also satisfy some in Edwards scholarship who ask who Mastricht is. He is an appropriate subject for comparison considering the praise the preacher of Northampton bestowed upon the German-Dutch theologian, philosopher, and Hebraist.

Radical Orthodoxy: William Goodell and the Abolition of American Slavery

2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 592-624
Author(s):  
Steve Gowler
Keyword(s):  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Radical Orthodoxy ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
The Impact

This essay examines the impact of New Divinity theology on the thought of abolitionist William Goodell. Over a 50-year career of ceaseless writing and speaking, he maintained that the central ideas of Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards Jr., what he called “radical orthodoxy,” comprised the moral foundation of immediate abolitionism.

Stowe and Her Foremothers: The Newport Female Society in The Minister's Wooing

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Laura Henigman
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Romance Plot

The publication of The Minister's Wooing in 1859 marked a turn in Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictional output. Having published two antislavery novels earlier in the decade, the first of which, of course, made her an international celebrity, she turned to what we think of now as the next phase of her writing career, a series of nostalgic, partly autobiographical novels about historic New England, following Minister's Wooing with The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1978), and Poganuc People (1878).Set in 18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, The Minister's Wooing is built around the historical character of Samuel Hopkins, one of the generation of New Divinity theologians, who, having studied under Jonathan Edwards, attempted to carry on his legacy. Stowe's Hopkins is historically accurate to the extent that he is identified in the book with one of the theological teachings for which he was known, “disinterested benevolence,” which meant for him that a true Christian duty was to accede to one's own damnation for the glory of God; he is also, as was the historical Hopkins, an antislavery activist, prodding his Newport congregants who are slave owners or are profiting by the slave trade to exercise that disinterested benevolence in a socially conscious way and withdraw from the sinful practice, even though it may cost them dearly. What Stowe adds is the romance plot alluded to in the title: Hopkins falls in love with the daughter of his landlady, Mary Scudder; she loves a young sailor, James Marvyn, who has been her companion since youth but who is, it seems, unre-generate.

Effective Clinical Interviewing

1978 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 265-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline T. Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Family Members ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Speech Language Pathologist ◽  
Lay Persons ◽  
Clinical Interviewing ◽  
Client Management

Speech, language, and hearing professionals rely on many individuals to provide information about a client. Management programs, in part, are devised, modified, and evaluated according to responses obtained from the client, family members, educators, and other professional and lay persons who have contact with the client. The speech-language pathologist has the responsibility of obtaining pertinent, complete, unbiased information about clients. This article provides an overview of the essential elements of an interview.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document