The Bible and Scriptural Interpretation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Noll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry Ward Beecher ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Considerable Controversy ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
The Cross

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.

scholarly journals Insomnia and the late nineteenth-century insomniac: the case of Albert Kimball

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Beaumont
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sleep Problems ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual

This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the ‘insomniac’ as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term ‘insomnia’ itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about ‘neurasthenia’, as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the fin de siècle .

The Bible and Creationism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Trollinger ◽  
William Vance Trollinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Organic Evolution ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Young Earth Creationism ◽  
Conservative Protestants ◽  
Over Time

Biblical creationism emerged in the late nineteenth century among conservative Protestants who were unable to square a plain, commonsensical, “literal” reading of the Bible with Charles Darwin’s theory of organic evolution. As this chapter details, over time a variety of increasingly literal “creationisms” have emerged. For the first century after Origin of Species (1859), old Earth creationism—which accepted mainstream geology—held sway. But with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood—Noah’s flood explains the geological strata—young Earth creationism took center stage. Waiting in the wings, however, is a geocentric creationism that rejects mainstream biology, geology, and cosmology.

Mill Town Mortality: Consequences of Industrial Growth in Two Nineteenth-Century New England Towns

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan I. Hautaniemi ◽  
Alan C. Swedlund ◽  
Douglas L. Anderton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mortality Trends ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Connecticut Valley ◽  
Broad Objective ◽  
The Impact

Recent research has considerably increased our understanding of the factors associated with the American epidemiological transition in the late nineteenth century. However, uncertainty remains regarding the impact on mortality of specific changes ancillary to urbanization and industrialization in American cities and towns. The broad objective of the Connecticut Valley Historical Demography Project is to examine changing relationships between socioeconomic status, the rise of new urban-industrial communities, and cause-specific mortality trends during the rapid development of New England manufacturing. To address these issues, the present analysis examines two emergent urban centers in Massachusetts, adopting a micro-demographic approach to explore late-nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century determinants of mortality.

Bank Mergers in Late Nineteenth-Century New England: The Contingent Nature of Structural Change

1991 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi R. Lamoreaux
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
New England ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Economic Environment ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bank Mergers ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Although New England's unit banking system was declining in profitability during the late nineteenth century, the existing competitive environment prevented large institutions from outperforming their smaller rivals. As a result, there was little change in the structure of the banking system during this period. At the turn of the century, however, a wave of mergers radically transformed the banking sectors of Boston and Providence. Although the greater profitability of the mergers indicates they were a better fit to the economic environment than their smaller predecessors, their creation was only made possible by a special combination of historical circumstances.

The Geography of Mormon Apocalyptic

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-129
Author(s):  
Christopher James Blythe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American West ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter documents how Latter-day Saints in the late 1840s and 1850s deployed the faith’s apocalyptic master narrative to make sense of the lands they colonized in the American West. Drawing on the apocalyptic geography of the Bible, Mormons came to believe they resided in the “wilderness” of the Book of Revelation where they would be protected from persecution. They recognized the region’s peaks as the mountain setting for Isaiah’s prophecies of a last days temple and an ensign to the nations. This chapter also examines how in the late nineteenth century Canada and Mexico would also be incorporated into the era’s apocalyptic geography.

scholarly journals The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism

Prospects ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 409-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Buell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
American Intellectual History

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

scholarly journals Immigration, Occupation, and Inequality in Emergent Nineteenth-Century New England Cities

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-671 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Hautaniemi Leonard ◽  
Christopher Robinson ◽  
Douglas L. Anderton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Occupational Groups ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The Social

This article explores the social interactions of immigration, occupation, and wealth in two urban industrial cities of nineteenth-century New England that were largely built upon, and shaped by, immigration: the very rapidly growing factory town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, and a more mixed-market and steadily growing nearby community of Northampton, Massachusetts. Both communities were emergent, rapidly industrializing, inland cities, providing a quite distinct immigration context than large established cities of the East Coast. Both were destinations for the same general ethnic immigration waves over the late nineteenth century, but with very different, and differently impacted, social spaces into which immigrants arrived. Contrasting and considering both these emergent cities allows us to ascertain the extent to which the occupational distribution and accumulation of wealth by immigrant groups supports the broad pattern of nineteenth-century assimilation, and reveals ways in which other migration processes may have been at odds, or intertwined, with the long-term historical assimilation of immigrants in such communities. Our findings support a traditional assimilationist perspective in emergent urban-industrial centers. However, they also reveal the role of universal immiseration in an industrial city dual-labor market in facilitating or forcing assimilation, the temporal advantages for ethnic groups of arriving early in growing settlements, and the more individualistic nature of economic enclaves in gaining advantages over time that did not manifest across broad immigrant or occupational groups.

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL PROGRESS: THE SLAVERY DEBATES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM IN THE UNITED STATES

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
MOLLY OSHATZ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Liberal Protestantism ◽  
Horace Bushnell ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Slavery Debates

The slavery debates in the antebellum United States sparked a turning point in American theology. They forced moderately antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, and Horace Bushnell, to reconcile their contradictory loyalties to the Bible and to antislavery reform. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to make a scriptural case against slavery in itself, the moderates argued that although slavery had been acceptable in biblical times, it had become a sin. Antislavery Protestantism required a theory of moral progress, a deeply unorthodox idea that became fundamental to the development of late nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The antislavery argument from moral progress, along with the moral progress represented by abolition, established a progressive conception of revelation that would be further developed by late nineteenth-century liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Lyman Abbott, and Theodore Munger.

Before Hinduism: Missionaries, Unitarians, and Hindoos in Nineteenth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-295
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Interest

AbstractAmerican interest in and knowledge of religion in India began before Americans imagined Hinduism as a coherent world religion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Americans used a variety of terms to describe, represent, and imagine the religious culture of India: Gentoos, Hindoos, religion of the Hindoos, Hindoo religion, Brahmanism, heathenism, and paganism. Each term meant different things to different writers at different times. But there was no Hinduism, a world religion originating in India and comparable to others, in America prior to the late nineteenth century. Americans read and wrote about “Hindoos” and “Hindoo religion,” something altogether different from Hindus and Hinduism. This article analyzes two examples of American representations of Hindoo religion before Hinduism. First, it examines American missionary reports about “Hindoo heathenism” written by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionaries and published in American missionary journals in the early nineteenth century. Second, it examines the Unitarian interest in Rammohun Roy and his growing popularity in New England during the 1820s and 1830s. Unitarian interest in Roy and ABCFM missionary reports exemplify the ways Protestant questions and interests shaped the American understanding of religions and the eventual construction of “world religions” such as Hinduism to suit American Protestant concerns.

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