‘If thou reckon right’: Angels from John Calvin to Jonathan Edwards via John Milton

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was part of a neo-Calvinist heritage, but he did not claim to be a disciple of the Genevan Reformer. One area of divergence in interpretation was their teachings about angels. Calvin lessened the roles of angels, ascribing to them certain mysteries beyond human comprehension, while Edwards explored angelic nature and history, initially seeing analogies between angels and humans, and then as part of his grand project, A History of the Work of Redemption. In the process, he was shaped by authors in his New England past, including Increase and Cotton Mather, who intently explored the supernatural realm. He also drew on a variety of religious poets within Anglo-American Protestant religious culture that included John Milton, whose influential depiction of the angelic and human fall in Paradise Lost provided inspiration for Edwards’ own redemptive narrative.

The Church of America and the Heresy of Peace

America, said G. K. Chesterton, is a nation with the soul of a church. It is a sacred community commanding sacrificial loyalty. It is also a violent and weapon-loving civilization, in which force is tethered to patriotism and national identity. American culture is at once militarist and theological, Christian and violent. How can this paradox be explained? This article discusses the role of New England puritanism in establishing a providentialist nationalism that would define war as a theological prerogative and non-violence as heresy. It shows how theologians such as Cotton Mather identified the emerging nation of America with the sacred vessel of the Christian church to the point that ‘chosenness’ or divine election represented a blank cheque for military adventure. It also shows how theologies of peace and restraint were anathematized as not merely heretical but a form of spiritual violence against the American project. In this sense, American nationhood functions as a controlling consideration akin to an institution, and Christian pacifism serves as a charismatic critique – or inspiration. To what extent were attitudes to violence framed by models of salvation? How did identity or chosenness trump ethics or the duty of love in the puritan imagination? The article concludes with more recent observations about the relationship of the ‘institution’ of nationhood to the troublesome, fissiparous energies of peace.

Offshoring the invisible world? American ghosts, witches, and demons in the early enlightenment

The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment.

Razão e afeto nos Pia Desideria: inspiração para uma linguagem interconfessional contemporânea

Interconfessionalidade e interculturalidade se (des)articulam por linguagens textuais, metafóricas e visuais compartilhadas, mediante de hibridizações, mestiçagens, resgates, aniquilações e inversões. O diálogo da inter-relacionalidade requer uma linguagem, no mínimo, parcialmente compatível, mutuamente acessível ou até comumente tecida. O artigo explora como exemplo, nessa perspectiva, primeiro, o significado original da metáfora pia desideria e seus apelos tanto racionais como afetivos e, segundo, usos confessionais em três obras do mesmo título, do católico Herman Hugo (1624) de Bruxelas, do pietista luterano Philipp Jacob Spener (1676) de Frankfurt, e do puritano Cotton Mather (1722) da Filadelfia. A partir dessa análise defende-se que, por um lado, certas interpretações e aplicações compartilhadas pelos autores representam um tipo indireto de interconfessionalidade e, segundo, que a metáfora dos pia desideria, justamente pelo seu significado original mais abrangente, e pelo seu amplo uso confessional pode servir como exemplo de uma linguagem religiosa capaz de sustentar e promover debates interconfessionais. Em relação às respectivas contribuições parciais, pode iluminar a discussão contemporânea, inclusive, sobre os papeis importantes tanto da razão como do afeto na vida geral e na vida religiosa hoje e a necessidade de uma linguagem religiosa capaz de articulá-la.

A “Syncretism of Piety”: Imagining Global Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston, Tranquebar, and Halle

This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

Admired Adversary: Wrestling with Grotius the Exegete in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (1693–1728)

This essay examines the reception of Grotius’s pioneering Annotata ad Vetus Testamentum (1644) in the ‘Biblia Americana’ (1693–1728), a scriptural commentary written by the New England theologian Cotton Mather (1663–1728). Mather engaged with Grotius on issues of translation, biblical authorship, inspiration, the canon, and the legitimate forms of interpreting the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture. While frequently relying on the Dutch Arminian humanist in discussing philological problems or contextual questions, Mather (as a self-declared defender of Reformed orthodoxy) in many cases rejected, ignored, or significantly modified Grotius’s farther-reaching conclusions on dogmatically sensitive topics. This strategy marks Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana’ as an exemple of a highly sophisticated but ultimately apologetic type of biblical criticism in the context of the early Enlightenment in British North America.