Reforming Church and Nation

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.

North America

This chapter assesses the main strands of Edwards’s reception in North America from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Most Americans did not know much, if anything, about Edwards until decades after his death, when various—often conflicting—views of Edwards appeared. New Divinity ministers expanded his theological vison while revivalists, including Charles G. Finney, enlisted Edwards’s legacy for their purposes, and thousands of evangelicals embraced Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd. Edwards intrigued (and offended) writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his condemnation of sin caught the interest of antislavery advocates in the Civil War. His legacy helped to shape the rise of American literature as a discipline, leading to the widespread academic study of Edwards that exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with over 5000 books, dissertations, articles, and theses published on Edwards.

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

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.

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

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.

The Revolutionary Lens

Part of the intriguing power of Edwards’s mentoring is the legacy he creates during and after the American Revolution. He trains his mentees to be not mere mimics but rather leaders who can reason from first principles and adapt their proclamation to the particular social context of their ministry. Edwards spawns a school of ministry known subsequently as the New Divinity, which institutionalizes Edwards’s revivalist impulses in founding Andover Seminary in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1808. Their successes in New England in local church settings and their influence on debates of the early republic are dramatic, evidenced in federalist political philosophy as well as the cause of abolition. Edwards takes traditional mentoring practices and retools them to operate in a modern and democratic world.

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

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.

Radical Orthodoxy: William Goodell and the Abolition of American Slavery

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.