Biblical Interpretation in Eighteenth-Century America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Stievermann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Right

Although the Bible in many ways continued to reign supreme in American culture through the American Revolution, there were changes at work that rendered its status and meaning much more equivocal by the end of the eighteenth century. New intellectual challenges arose to the authority of scripture, and its reach over the increasingly differentiated spheres of society diminished. Also, biblical interpretation (and the right to engage therein) became deeply contested as colonial religion was transformed by the Enlightenment and the evangelical revivals. Moreover, its entanglement with the discourses of British imperialism and later Whig republicanism had ambiguous effects on the traditional biblicism.

Ecumenical Church and Religious Conversion

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-201
Author(s):  
Lalsangkima Pachuau
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Indian Constitution ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right

AbstractIn this article, Lalsangkima Pachuau responds to contemporary accusations in India that Christian missionaries are forcing conversions, and thereby turning Indians away from their culture. While the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to "propagate" religion, and therefore to accept the movement from one religion (e.g. Hinduism) to another (e.g. Christianity), what is important to understand that "conversion" is not primarily a call to move from one religion to another--much less to abandon one's culture--but is a movement away from self and the "world" toward God. Conversion understood as "changing religions" is much more the product of seventeenth and eighteenth century evangelicalism than it is a true understanding of the Bible. Mission is always about conversion, and entails the invitation to enter the Christian community; such invitation, however, should always be distinguished from a proselytism that only focuses on a change of religious allegiance.

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Research

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture provides a fresh look at the important, burgeoning field of Edwards and the Bible. For too long, Edwards scholars have published new research on Edwards without paying due attention to the work he took most seriously: biblical exegesis. Edwards is recognized as an innovative theologian who wielded tremendous influence on revivalism, evangelicalism, and New England theology, but what is often missed is how much time he devoted to studying and understanding the Bible. He kept voluminous notebooks on Christian Scripture and had plans for major treatises on the Bible before he died. Edwards scholars need to take stock of the place of the Bible in his thought to do justice to his theology and legacy. In fact, more and more experts are recognizing how important this aspect of his life is, and this book brings together the insights of leading Edwards scholars on this topic. This volume seeks to increase our understanding of Edwards’ engagement with Scripture by setting it in the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis and eighteenth-century colonial interpretation. It provides case studies of Edwards’ exegesis in varying genres of the Bible and probes his use of Scripture to develop theology. It also sets his biblical interpretation in perspective by comparing it with that of other exegetes. This book advances our understanding of the nature and significance of Edwards’ work with Scripture and opens new lines of inquiry for students of early modern Western history.

ALEXANDER GEDDES AT THE LIMITS OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
The Revolution ◽  
Episcopal Authority

ABSTRACTIn the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

Time Reinvented

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-65
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daily Living ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Individual Life ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
French Nation

This chapter examines how time was understood during the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century opened with many ordinary people as well as the highly educated believing that human time and the age of the earth coincided. The key to finding the hidden meaning of human time lay largely in the prophetic books of the Bible. In just a hundred years, three generations of eighteenth-century Euro-Americans questioned all inherited orthodoxies, and they did so within the framework of putting in place a new, secular understanding of time. They moved from Christian to modern time as it is known today. For twelve years from 1793 onward, the French nation abided by a new calendar that erased Christian time entirely. By 1800, time became an entirely human invention without end, open to the narratives of every individual life. Just as time expanded conceptually, technology in the form of clocks and pocket watches brought it into daily living.

Foucault

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Core Identity ◽  
The Right

This chapter examines how Michel Foucault reformulated the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment by moving from a deliberate rereading of the Hegelian Centaur to an advocacy of the “death of man”—the extinction of a rational platform of knowledge along the lines developed by Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. It considers Foucault's genealogical historiography, a new and original tool for the analysis of history, and his arguments against the idea of a necessary and defining connection between knowledge and virtue, which had been the core identity of the Enlightenment, the link between power and knowledge, and the rise of disciplinary violence in the history of the Western world. Finally, it explores Foucault's view that “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its exercise of power, and to question power on its discourses of truth.”

What Reason Wrought

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-156
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
New Nation

This chapter recognizes scholarly debates about the Enlightenment; some indict the movement for failing to live up to its ideals. Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers were traditionally understood to have been shaped by Enlightenment values. These curricula reject that understanding. They repudiate Enlightenment values, including secularism, tolerance, the social sciences, social reform, internationalism, and those values’ possible influence on the new nation. The curricula instead indict the Enlightenment as godless and reject its appreciation of reason and science as threats to the authority of the Bible. The genuine eighteenth-century Enlightenment is, for these curricula, the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. These textbooks also assert that France’s commitment to humanism warranted divine punishment in the French Revolution, and that its reprehensible politics differentiate it from American virtues. This chapter concludes with some implications of what rejecting the Enlightenment entails for modern America culture.

A Loyalist Who Loved His Country too Much: Thomas Hutchinson, Historian of Colonial Massachusetts

2017 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-384
Author(s):  
Liam Riordan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American Culture ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
British Atlantic World

A history of the book approach to Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts Bay (published 1764-1828) recovers his commitment to preserve facts and his place in eighteenth-century historiography. Hutchinson's vilification by patriots still obscures our understanding of his loyalism. The article reassesses late colonial society, the American Revolution, and Anglo-American culture in the British Atlantic World.

Scripture and Biblical Interpretation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Second Generation ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Christina Rossetti ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Commentaries ◽  
The Right ◽  
Charlotte Yonge ◽  
Patristic Exegesis

The Tractarians were deeply committed to Scripture. They insisted that every doctrine had to be proved from the Bible. Writing biblical commentaries were among their main literary projects (this is true even for laywomen such as Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Yonge). In contrast to the surrounding Protestantism, however, the Tractarians denied the right of private judgement, insisting that patristic exegesis should be the authoritative guide. The Tractarians were emphatically opposed to the non-traditional conclusions of modern biblical criticism and unabashedly in favour of retaining allegorical readings. This chapter describes these commitments while also observing how they changed in the second generation of the movement.

APPLYING THE RIGHT MEASURE: ARCHITECTURE AND PHILOLOGY IN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE DUTCH EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-985 ◽  
Author(s):  
JETZE TOUBER
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Proper Method ◽  
Skilled Professional ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

AbstractThe article reconstructs the seventeenth-century Dutch debate about the proper method to reconstruct the biblical temples of Jerusalem. It examines the involvement of Willem Goeree (1635–1711), an expert in architectural theory, in this debate which was dominated by philologically trained scholars. The article suggests that the clash between professional exegetes and a lay theologian like Goeree allows us to see hermeneutical debates of the early Enlightenment in a new light. While the skilled professional aspired to make arcane Temple scholarship accessible to a wider lay audience, theologians denied him the competence to do so, insisting on the primacy of sacred philology in interpreting the Bible. This case thus moves outside of the dogma vs reason dichotomy which dominates historiography concerning early modern biblical interpretation.

Theology and the Bible

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Trinity

When tracing the history of Dissenting religious thought it is important to remember the fluidity of denominational labels and the difficulties of tracing influence and reconstructing traditions. The sola scriptura principle remained important for many Dissenters but in an age in which print was expanding and consensus difficult to achieve, there was considerable room for debate about the meaning of Scripture. Biblical interpretation was, therefore, important for Dissenters but, equally, there were increasingly vigorous assertions of the right of private judgement. Alongside biblical exegesis, the importance of the sacraments was an area of lively debate, particularly for Baptists. At various times questions about orthodoxy and its limits became entangled in debates about the scriptural justifications for the incarnation or the Trinity. Likewise, concerns about Calvinism and whether it needed to be moderated or reinforced also loomed large.

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