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.

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.

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.

Indian Slaveholders and Presbyterian Missionaries, 1837–1861

1973 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
William G. McLoughlin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New England ◽  
York City ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
New School ◽  
Mission Work ◽  
Foreign Mission Board ◽  
Foreign Mission ◽  
The Difference

Founded in 1837 to provide a denohinational foreign mission board for the Old School Presbyterians, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (PBFM) had from the outset a very different outlook toward mission work among slave-holding Indians than did its closest rival, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which served the New School Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. The difference increased until 1859 when the latter organization, unable to reconcile its antislavery conviction with the determined proslavery position of the southern Indians, withdrew from that field. The PBFM, headquartered in New York City, thereupon took under its patronage most of those ABCFM missionaries who had been abandoned by their Boston-based board for refusing to expound and practice an antislavery position among the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles and Creeks.

Review Article: “American Religious Thought of the 18th and 19th Centuries”

1989 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-217
Author(s):  
Mark A. Noll
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
College Library ◽  
Garland Publishing

Perry Miller, with characteristic lése majesté, told readers of his New England Mind that, if they wanted to see his footnotes, they would have to make a pilgrimage to the Harvard College Library (The Seventeenth Century [New York, 1939], p. ix). Times have changed, and at least some scholars have become more accommodating. Bruce Kuklick, for example, not only provided notes for his “New England Mind”—the superb recent study Churchmen and Philosophers from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, 1985)—but now, through the good offices of Garland Publishing, has made available many of the sources to which those notes refer in American Religious Thought of the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Thirty-two Volume Set Reprinting the Works of Leading American Theologians from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey and including Recent Dissertations (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), $2,290. Kuklick and Garland deserve highest commendation for rescuing from unwarranted obscurity the authors and works reprinted here. The set's title may be inaccurate, and one may quibble about the exact lineup of books and articles included, but these volumes remain a magnificent achievement.

The Great Awakening as Artifact. George Whitefield and the Construction of Intercolonial Revival, 1739–1745

1991 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Lambert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Staten Island ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
New Birth ◽  
Connecticut Valley ◽  
George Whitefield

Throughout the 1720s and 1730s evangelical preachers sparked revivals from New England to New Jersey. In his long pastorate at Northampton, Massachusetts, Solomon Stoddard reported five “harvests” of souls in the Connecticut Valley. His grandson Jonathan Edwards succeeded him and led a spiritual awakening in 1734 and 1735 resulting in the “Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton and Neighboring Towns and Villages.” In the late 1720s the pietist minister Jacob Frelinghuysen inspired a renewal of piety among the Dutch Reformed in New York. At the same time the Presbyterian evangelists William and Gilbert Tennent reported revivals in the churches they had established between New Brunswick, New Jersey and Staten Island, New York.1 While sharing a common message, these evangelical revivals remained local, private affairs, contained within specific geographic and denominational boundaries. Although each proclaimed the necessity of a spiritual new birth and the primacy of divine grace in salvation, theawakenings did not expand into a larger, united movement.

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