Abstract
In the early eighteenth century, the American Puritan Cotton Mather (1663–1728) looked toward Europe from his side of the Atlantic and saw dangerous storms rumbling over the horizon. European skeptics and deists were questioning the unique status of the Bible as divinely inspired revelation. Until the late eighteenth century, deism was primarily a European matter.1 However, Cotton Mather, one of the most erudite and prolific American Puritans, kept abreast of the intellectual developments in Europe. He feared that before long, the European contagion would infect American souls. Well before most of his American contemporaries fully assessed the situation, Mather believed that the Bible needed to be defended. To this end, he marshaled new tools of analysis that would have been foreign and possibly even disturbing to his eminent Puritan grandfathers and father. By the last decades of his life, he selectively appropriated for the defense of the Bible methods and conclusions that had been associated with its heretical enemies. For example, Mather interpreted some of the miracles recorded in the Bible in light of the so-called new learning in such a way that potentially challenged their supernatural character. When considering the authorship of the Old Testament books, Mather even utilized some of the interpretive tools associated with Benedict Spinoza (1632–77) and concluded that Moses did not author some parts of the Pentateuch.
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A. Owen Aldridge, “Natural Religion and Deism in America before Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 54, no. 4 (1997): 836; Kerry S. Walters, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); and Walters, Rational Infidels: The American Deists (Durango, CO: Longwood Academic, 1992).
Cotton Mather began taking notes daily on the Bible for a future project after he was ordained in 1685. In 1693, he began formally to work on the “Biblia.” Though he claimed to be done in 1706, he continued to add to it for much of the remainder of his life. Winton U. Solberg, introduction to The Christian Philosopher, ed. Winton U. Solberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), xxxvi.
E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 5. Winton U. Solberg, “Science and Religion in Early America: Cotton Mather’s ‘Christian Philosopher,’ ” Church History 56, no. 1 (1987): 74; Frederick Ferré, “Design Argument,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, 5 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973–74), 670–77; Thomas McPherson, The Argument from Design (London: Macmillan, 1972); Clement C. J. Webb, Studies in the History of Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915).
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960 [1560]), 1: vii, 1, 4. Citations to the Institutes are to book, chapter, and section.
Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 55; Hans-Joachim Kraus, “Calvin’s Exegetical Principles,” Interpretation 31, no. 1 (1977): 8–18.
Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 30–33; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 422; Theodore Hornberger, “Benjamin Colman and the Enlightenment,” The New England Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1939): 417; and John Corrigan, Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002 [1995]), 23.
The literature on Reformed and Puritan biblical hermeneutics is too vast to list here, but one could begin with Donald K. McKim, ed., Calvin and the Bible (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1947]); Lisa Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Michael P. Winship, The Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 9. Quoted from Harry Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 34–35.
Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 1–61; Gordis, Opening Scripture; and Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636– 1641 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Gordis, Opening Scripture, 114–15. See also Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, 56–65; John K. Louma, “Restitution or Reformation? Cartwright and Hooker on the Elizabethan Church,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 46 (1977): 85–106; and Louma, “Who Owns the Fathers? Hooker and Cartwright on the Authority of the Primitive Church,” Sixteenth Century Journal 8, no. 3 (1977): 45–60. For Puritan uses of reason, see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939), 181–206 and John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 41–78.
See the prologue for Hobbes, Spinoza, La Peyrère, Simon, and the deists.
Diego Lucci, Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-- Century British Deists (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 10.
Cotton Mather, Reasonable Religion or, The Truth of the Christian Religion, Demonstrated. The Wisdom of Its Precepts Justified: and the Folly of Sinning against Those Precepts, Reprehended. With Incontestable Proofs, That Men, Who Would Act Reasonably, Must Live Religiously (Boston: T. Green, 1700); Cotton Mather, A Man of Reason (Boston: John Edwards, 1718); and Cotton Mather, Reason Satisfied: and Faith Established (Boston: J. Allen, 1712). According to Perry Miller, Cotton Mather composed A Man of Reason in 1709. However, it was lost on its way to France. It was not recovered and published until 1718. Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 426.
For example, see Raymond F. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois,1970); Michael P. Winship, “Prodigies, Puritanism, and the Perils of Natural Philosophy: The Example of Cotton Mather,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 51, no. 1 (1994): 92–105; Jeffery Jeske, “Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 4 (1986): 583–94; Otho T. Beall Jr., “Cotton Mather’s Early ‘Curiosa Americana’ and the Boston Philosophical Society of 1683,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 18, no. 3 (1961): 372; and Dagobert De Levie, “Cotton Mather, Theologian and Scientist,” American Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1951): 362–65.
Mason I. Lowance, “Typology and the New England Way: Cotton Mather and the Exegesis of Biblical Types,” Early American Literature 4, no. 1 (1970): 15– 37; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 72–135.
Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Winship, The Seers of God, 77–79; Jeske, “Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian.”
Solomon Stoddard, The Efficacy of Fear of Hell to Restrain Men from Sin (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1713).
Increase Mather, A Discourse Proving That the Christian Religion Is the Only True Religion: Wherein the Necessity of Divine Revelation Is Evinced, in Several Sermons (Boston: T. Green, 1702). Holifield notes that this work was one of the earliest American treatises directed solely against deists. Holifield, Theology in America, 70.
Cotton Mather, The Everlasting Gospel. The Gospel of Justification by the Righteousness of God (Boston: B. Green, and J. Allen, 1700), 17.
Miller observes that Increase Mather pushed the boundaries of the Puritan use of reason. However, Cotton Mather was even more at ease relying on reason than his father. Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 421.
Gustaaf Van Cromphout, “Manuductio ad Ministerium: Cotton Mather as Neoclassicist,” American Literature 53, no. 3 (1981): 361–79.
Mather, Manuductio, 50; Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 435–36.
Mather, Manuductio, 51. Jeske argues that Mather was following the model of John Ray’s Wisdom of God. However, unlike Ray, who eliminated the providence of God, Mather still referred to God’s occasional intervention. Jeske, “Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian.”
Jeske, “Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian,” 585–86, 592.
Mather’s shift from a Cartesian to a Newtonian or evidentialist mode of thought was consistent with similar trends occurring in England. Leslie Stephen notes that in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the terms of the debate between the deists and Christian apologists changed from “internal” to “external” evidence. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (London: Harbinger Books, 1962 [1876]), 143.
Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also George Marsden, “The Bible, Science, and Authority,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 80.
Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, 405; Winship, “Prodigies, Puritanism, and the Perils of Natural Philosophy”; Jeske, “Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian”; Beall, “Cotton Mather’s Early ‘Curiosa Americana,’ ” 372; and Dagobert De Levie, “Cotton Mather, Theologian and Scientist,” American Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1951): 362–65.
Pershing Vartanian, “Cotton Mather and the Puritan Transition into the Enlightenment,” Early American Literature 7, no. 3 (1973): 217; Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 440; Middlekauff, The Mathers, 279–304; Jeske, “Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian”; John E. Van De Wetering, “God, Science, and the Puritan Dilemma,” The New England Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1965): 494–507; Winship, “Prodigies, Puritanism, and the Perils of Natural Philosophy”; Van Cromphout, “Mather as Neoclassicist.”
Solberg, “Introduction,” xxi, xxxvi.
Winton U. Solberg, ed., Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994 [1721]), 7, 17.
Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 441; Otho T. Beall Jr. and Richard Shryock, Cotton Mather: First Significant Figure in American Medicine (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954), 50. Solberg, “Introduction,” xxxvi. George Lyman Kittredge, “Cotton Mather’s Scientific Communications to the Royal Society,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 26 (1916): 18–57. See also David Levin, “Giants in the Earth: Science and the Occult in Cotton Mather’s Letters to the Royal Society,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 45, no. 4 (1988): 751–70; Theodore Hornberger, “The Date, the Source, the Significance of Cotton Mather’s Interest in Science,” American Literature 6, no. 4 (1935): 413–20.
Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather 1681–1708 (Boston: The Society, 1911), 169–70.
Mather promoted his “Biblia” in his Magnalia Christi Americana, Bonifacius, and A New Offer to the Lovers of Religion and Learning. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England, From Its First Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698 (London, England: T. Parkhurst, 1702); Cotton Mather, Bonifacius, An Essay upon the Good (Boston: B. Green, 1710); and Cotton Mather, A New Offer to the Lovers of Religion and Learning (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1714).
Solberg, “Introduction,” xxxix.
Samuel Mather, The Life of the Very Reverend and Learned Cotton Mather, D.D. & F.R.S. Late Pastor of the North Church in Boston. Who Died, Feb. 13. 1727 (Boston: Samuel Gerrish, 1729), 74. See Solberg, “Introduction,” xxxvii. For a history of the manuscript, see Reiner Smolinski, “How to Go to Heaven, or How Heaven Goes? Natural Science and Interpretation in Cotton Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana’ (1693–1728),” New England Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2008): 278–84. I am indebted to Reiner Smolinski’s scholarship on the “Biblia” in the following section.
John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of Joshua, trans. H. Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 152–55. Smolinski, “How to Go to Heaven,” 325–26.
Cotton Mather, “Biblia Americana,” MS, The Cotton Mather Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Reel 10, vol. 2, 283. For recent scholarship on the “Biblia,” see Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann, ed., Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana—America’s First Bible Commentary, Essays in Reappraisals (Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, 280. Robert Jenkins, The Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., vol. 2 (London: Richard Sare, 1708), 211–12. See Smolinski, “How to Go to Heaven,” 327.
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 2, 283.
For example, William Whiston, the successor to Newton in the Lucasian Chair, in his New Theory of the Earth attempted to reconcile the biblical account of creation with natural philosophy. He did so by departing from a more literal interpretation. William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth (London, England: J. Whiston and B. White, 1755 [1696]).
R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 114–19, 132, 137, 143.
Mather, Man of Reason, 34.
On prisca theologia, see Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 93–109; Daniel Pickering Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972).
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 97. Regarding prisca theologia in America, see Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 14–15.
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 97. See also Cotton Mather, Biblia Americana, America’s First Bible Commentary, A Synoptic Commentary on the Old and New Testaments: Genesis, ed. Reiner Smolinski 10 vols., vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academics, 2010), 414–15
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 786. Anthony Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 145–61.
A century later, F. C. Baur (1792–1860) of the Tübingen school would compare Israel with its neighbors and come to more radical conclusions. See also Paula Findlen, Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 91–92.
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 644. For Witsius’s debates with Spencer, see William Henry Green, The Hebrew Feasts in Their Relation to Recent Critical Hypotheses Concerning the Pentateuch (New York: Robert Carter,1885), 57–58; Brevard S. Childs, Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 494; Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13, no. 3 (1950): 309; and Guy G. Stroumsa, “John Spencer and the Roots of Idolatry,” History of Religions 41, no. 1 (2001): 1–23. Witsius, Aegyptiaca (Basle, Switzerland: Herbornæ Nassaviorum, Sumptibus Joannis Nicolai Andreæ 1717, [1683]), l8, 47, 87, 145.
Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17.
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 47. Mather, Biblia, 277. William Whiston, A Short View of the Chronology of the Old Testament, and of the Harmony of the Four Evangelists (Cambridge: University Press, 1702).
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 47; Mather, Biblia, 278. See John Marsham, Chronicus Canon Ægyptiacus Ebraicus Græcus 8 vols., vol. 4. (London, England: Thomas Roycroft, 1672), 473–76; Anthony Grafton, “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline,” History and Theory 14, no. 2 (1975): 156–85.
Arthur McCalla, The Creationist Debate: The Encounter between the Bible and the Historical Mind (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 36–39.
D. E. Mungello, “European Philosophical Responses to Non-European Culture: China,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 87–102; Edwin J. Van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,” The American Historical Review 76, no. 2 (1971): 358–85.
In the late seventeenth century, John Webb advanced the thesis that Noah landed in China. Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), 64; Mather, “Biblia Americana,” Reel 10, vol. 1, 48. Mather, Biblia, 279, 281; Maureen Farrell, William Whiston (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 296. See Van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China.”
Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 271–72.
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 50; Mather, Biblia, 285; Whiston, Short View, 73–74. The Latin citation translates “without any particular reference of time,” and it is taken from James Ussher, Chronologia Sacra (Oxford, England: W. Hall, impensis Joh: Forrest, 1660), 160–62, 186.
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 52. Mather, Biblia, 296. Mather paraphrased the section about Ahaz from Whiston, Short View, 92–93.
Mather drew upon a long history of environmental explanations for physical and cultural differences among various groups of people. Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 61, 62.
Reiner Smolinski, “Authority and Interpretation: Cotton Mather’s Response to the European Spinozists,” in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection, ed. Arthur Williamson and Allan MacInnes (Leyden, Netherlands: Brill, 2006), 182–83.
See the prologue. Robert E. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 116; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: Towards an Evaluation of the Rogers and McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982); Woodbridge, “German Responses to the Biblical Critic Richard Simon: From Leibniz to J. S. Semler,” in Historische Kritik und biblischer Kanon in der deutschen Aufklärung, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1988), 65–88.
Mather, “Biblia Americana,” The Cotton Mather Papers, Reel 10, vol. 1, 60.
Quoted from Smolinsiki, “Authority and Interpretation,” 185–86, 189, 190.
Quoted from Smolinski, “Authority and Interpretation,” 191.
Calvin, Institutes, 1: vii, 1; Frei, Eclipse, 80.
Mather, Icono-Clastes, 18.
Gordon Stein, Free Thought in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 4.
Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), 104; Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God.
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Dover Publications, 1996 [1791]), 43.
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Lee, M.J. (2013). American Puritans, Rationalism, and Revelation. In: The Erosion of Biblical Certainty. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299666_3
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