Abstract
Cotton Mather was one of the first Americans to recognize the threat of deism and skepticism. He attempted to defend the Bible’s authenticity by drawing upon recent European discussions of geography, history, chronology, philology, and natural philosophy. Others in America also felt compelled to defend revelation in subsequent years. Jonathan Dickinson (1688–1747) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), 25 and 40 years younger than Mather respectively, selectively appropriated empirical and rational arguments for their cause against the deists. Both began to utilize newly developing notions of epistemology and verifiability, characteristic of their Anglican latitudinarian contemporaries across the ocean.
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Notes
Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth Century England: A Study of the Relationship between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 4, 17, 271; Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). See also Gerard Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 17–18, 31, 24–29, 52; and Henry G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought: 1630–1690 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).
George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 480.
Quoted from Edwin F. Hatfield, History of Elizabeth, New Jersey (New York: Carlton and Lanahan, 1868), 352, and Bryan F. Le Beau, Jonathan Dickinson and the Formative Years of American Presbyterianism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 1. For more on Dickinson, see David C. Harlan, “The Travails of Religious Moderation: Jonathan Dickinson and the Great Awakening,” Journal of Presbyterian History 61, no. 4 (1983): 411–26; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Jonathan Dickinson and the Making of the Moderate Awakening,” American Presbyterians 63, no. 4 (1985): 341–53; and Leslie W. Sloat, “Jonathan Dickinson and the Problem of Synodical Authority,” Westminster Theological Journal 8, no. 2 (1946): 149–65.
Jonathan Dickinson, The Reasonableness of Christianity in Four Sermons (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, Cornhill, 1732), 83.
Le Beau, Jonathan Dickinson, 85–103.
Jonathan Dickinson, Familiar Letters to a Gentleman, upon a Variety of Seasonable and Important Subjects in Religion (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1745).
Dickinson’s understanding of the categories of certainty and probability differed from the commonly held beliefs of his Anglican counterparts described by Shapiro. They held that all evidence, except for self-evident principles, was probabilistic rather than certain.
Grotius, quoted from William Lane Craig, The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus during the Deist Controversy (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985), 672; Jan Paul Heering, “De Veritate Religionis Christianae,” in Hugo Grotius, Theologian: Essays in Honour of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, edited by Edwin Rabbie and Henk J. M. Nellen (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1994), 46–48. See also Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion, trans. Simon Patrick (London: Rich. Royston, 1680 [1632]).
William Chillingworth: Religion of Protestants (London: E. Coates, 1664 [1638]), 31–32, 33–34, 38; Robert R. Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); see also Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, 15–32; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 81; Reedy, The Bible and Reason, 31.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1689]), 525–38.
Locke, Essay, 655–56.
See Locke, Essay, 525, 530–34, 536–39, 654–55, 667–68, 690–91, 694; Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Locke’s Philosophy of Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chapell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 175–77, 190–91; Paul Helm, “Locke on Faith and Knowledge,” Philosophical Quarterly 23, no. 90 (1973), 52–57; S. G. Hefelbower, The Relation of John Locke to English Deism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918), 71–73; David Laurence, “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” Early American Literature 15, no. 2 (1980): 109–10.
Le Beau, Jonathan Dickinson, 87.
Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); John Toland, John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious: Texts, Associated Works, and Critical Essays (Dublin, Ireland: The Lilliput Press, 1997 [1696]); Anthony Collins, Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (London: [n.p.], 1724); Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation (Newburgh, NY: David Denniston, 1798 [1730]). See Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harbinger Books, 1962), 1: 78–136, 170–83.
John Corrigan includes Thomas Foxcroft, pastor of Boston’s First Church, in what he identifies as the liberal or “Catholick” Congregationalists of the early eighteenth century. See John Corrigan, “Catholick Congregational Clergy and Public Piety,” Church History 60, no. 2 (1991): 210–22; Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Dickinson, The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1, 41, 42. My emphasis.
Jonathan Dickinson, Witness of the Spirit (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1740), 5.
Robert E. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 219; Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George M. Giger (Phillipsburg: P & R Publishing, 1997). See vol. 1, Topic 2, Question 6, 89–91, and Topic 2, Question 4, 195–96.
Christians attempted to find evidences to defend the uniqueness of the Scriptures as early as the second century, but the use of external evidence rose to unprecedented heights by the eighteenth century. 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, 6, 32, 70; Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics (New York: Corpus, 1971), 99–101, 113–30.
Charles Leslie, The Truth of Christianity Demonstrated: With a Dissertation Concerning Private Judgment and Authority: To Which Is Prefixed a Vindication of a Short Method with the Deists, in The Theological Works of the Reverend Mr. Charles Leslie: In Two Volumes, vol. 1(London: W. Bowyer, 1721), 227. See also Stephen, English Thought, vol. 1, 166.
John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (London: R. Harbin, 1717 [1691]); John Locke, “The Reasonableness of Christianity: As Delivered in the Scriptures,” in John Locke: Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 85–210; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 92; Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 101–2, 305–6.
Dickinson’s writing indicates that he was familiar with at least some of the work of Samuel Clarke, Henry Dodwell, and Anthony Collins.
Arnaldo Momigliano, “Gibbon’s Contributions to Historical Method,” in Studies in Historiography (New York: Garland Pubs., 1985 [1966]), 40–55.
Momigliano, “Gibbon’s Contributions,” 40–55; Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Levine, The Autonomy of History: Truth and Method from Erasmus to Gibbon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 171–72.
For philosophic history, see Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 217– 49. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” in Studies in Historiography (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1985), 6; George H. Nadel, “Philosophy of History before Historicism,” History and Theory 3, no. 3 (1964): 291–315; Anthony Grafton, What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–20; James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2014), chapter 4.
Seth Ward, A Philosophical Essay on the Being and Attributes of God, Immorality, and Scripture, 4th ed., 8 vols., vol. 1 (Oxford: Lichfield, 1667 [1652]), 84–85, 87–88, 90, 99–102; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 156–57.
Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion, 21, 55–56; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 94.
On the quality of historical reports and witnesses, see John Locke, Essay, 660– 68. Giovanni Gentile, “Eighteenth-Century Historical Methodology: De Soria’s Institutiones,” History and Theory 4, no. 3 (1965): 315–27; and Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 119–62; Jean Bodin, A Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945 [1566]); Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy, A New Method of Studying History (London: W. Burton, 1728); Benjamin Bennet, The Truth, Inspiration, and Usefulness of the Scripture Ascertained and Proved (London: J. Grey, 1730); Jean Le Clerc, Parrhasiana or Thoughts upon Several Subjects as Criticism History, Morality, and Politics (London: A. and J. Churchil, 1700); Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Historical Writings, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972);
Dickinson, The Reasonableness of Christianity, 139, 140, 146.
Ibid., 69; For Dickinson on rebirth, see Jonathan Dickinson, Nature and Necessity of Regeneration (New York: James Parker, 1743).
Dickinson also briefly noted that the “light of nature” and “common sense” could distinguish Christians from heretics. Jonathan Dickinson, A Sermon, Preached at the Opening of the Synod at Philadelphia, September 19, 1722. Whererein Is Considered the Character of the Man of God, and His Furniture for the Exercise Both of Doctrine and Discipline, with the True Boundaries of the Churches Power (Boston: T. Fleet, 1723), 13, 18–21. See also Jonathan Dickinson, Remarks upon a Discourse Intitled an Overture Presented to the Reverend Synod of Dissenting Ministers Sitting in Philadelphia, in the Month of September 1728 (New York: J. Peter Zenger, 1729). On the subscription controversy, see Le Beau, Jonathan Dickinson, 27–44, and Michael Bauman, “Jonathan Dickinson and the Subscription Controversy,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 41, no. 2 (1998): 455–67.
Quoted in Reedy, The Bible and Reason, 52–55.
Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 281.
Solomon Stoddard, The Efficacy of Fear of Hell to Restrain Men from Sin (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1713), 5.
Solomon Stoddard, The Defects of Preachers Reproved: In a Sermon Preached at Northampton, May 19th 1723 (New-London, CT: T. Green, 1724), 18–19.
Solomon Stoddard, The Safety of Appearing at the Day of Judgment, in the Righteousness of Christ: Opened and Applied (Boston: Samuel Green, 1687), 126, 115–16.
Solomon Stoddard, A Guide to Christ or, the Way of Directing Souls That Are under the Work of Conversion: Compiled for the Help of Young Ministers and May Be Serviceable to Private Christians, Who Are Enquiring the Way to Zion (Boston: J. Draper, 1735), 48–49; and Stoddard, Fear of Hell, 5.
Gerald R. McDermott, Michael J. McClymond, and Robert E. Brown argue that scholarship has not sufficiently appreciated the degree to which Edwards’s apologetics engaged the modern critics of the Bible on their empirical and rational terms. Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Michael J. McClymond, Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998), 7, 80–106; and Brown, Edwards and the Bible.
Quoted from McClymond, Encounters with God, 93–94.
Conrad Cherry, Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 [1966]), 12–43.
A full treatment of Jonathan Edwards’s views on and interpretation of the Bible would entail the work of several books. This discussion is limited primarily to how Edwards responded to deist challenges and his attempts to defend the Bible, particularly on his use of reason, evidence, and especially history. Edwards’s response to the challenges of deism is of course only a fragment of Edwards’s biblical interpretation.
Stephen Stein, “The Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards,” Harvard Theological Review 70, no. 1/2 (1977): 99– 113; Stein, “The Spirit and the Word: Jonathan Edwards and Scriptural Exegesis,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 118–30; and Stein, “Jonathan Edwards and the Rainbow: Biblical Exegesis and Poetic Imagination,” New England Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1974): 440–56.
The exact nature of Edwards’s “new sense” has been a matter of some debate. See Michael J. McClymond, “Spiritual Perception in Jonathan Edwards,” Journal of Religion 77, no. 2 (1997): 195–216; Perry Miller, “Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart,” Harvard Theological Review 41, no. 2 (1948):123–45; Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards; Paul Helm, “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1969): 51–61; James Hoopes, “Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Psychology,” Journal of American History 69, no. 4 (1983): 849–65; and William J. Wainwright, “Jonathan Edwards and the Sense of the Heart,” Faith and Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1990): 43–92.
Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 45, 42.
Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” in Selected Writings of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Harold P. Simonson (New York: Ungar, 1970), 72, 77.
Jonathan Edwards, “Miscellany” (no. 248), The “Miscellanies,” ed. Thomas A. Schafer, vol. 13, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 361; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 480–81; Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 38–39, 44.
Stein, “Quest for the Spiritual Sense,” 102–3; McClymond, Encounters with God, 95; Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 43, 50; Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 44–55.
Quoted from Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 50.
Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 474; Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 51.
Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith, vol. 2, Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 305–7.
Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 481.
Quoted from Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 476.
Edwards addressed the problems raised by Tindal in his “Miscellanies,” (no. 583), (no. 1340), and in an entry in his “Book of Controversies” titled “The Importance of Doctrines and of Mysteries in Religion.” See Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 65, 66.
Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 72; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 477.
Edwards writes this in “Miscellanies,” (no. 1340). Quoted from Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 67. Locke made a similar point about trusting witnesses. Locke, Essay, 662.
Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 70.
See Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 116. For a survey of the debates regarding Mosaic authorship, see John D. 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: Harrassowitz, 1988), 65–87.
Locke, Essay, 663–64.
Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 115; Thomas Paine, Age of Reason (Boston: Thomas Hall, 1794), 114.
Jonathan Edwards, Notes on Scripture (no. 416), ed. Stephen Stein, vol. 15, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 423–69.
Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 118; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 480; Stein, introduction to Notes on Scripture, 14–15; and Stein, “Edwards as a Biblical Exegete,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen Stein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 186–87.
Edwards, Notes on Scripture, (no. 416), 440.
Ibid., 416, 425, 432. My emphasis. Edwards likely drew on latitudinarian sources. Reedy, Bible and Reason, 48–52.
Edwards, Notes on Scripture, (no. 416), 441.
For Astruc, see Emil Kraeling, The Old Testament since the Reformation (New York: Harper, 1955), 55.
For wisdom of the Egyptians, see Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Anthony Grafton, “Protestant Versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes
Trismegistus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 78–93.
Edwards discusses Moses’s qualifications as a historian in his commentary on Acts 7:22 in The “Blank Bible,” ed. Stephen Stein, vol. 24, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 771; Brown, Edwards and the Bible, 245.
Ibid., 456. Edwards references Bedford, Scripture Chronology, 92–100, 512–13, as the source.
Edwards, Notes on Scripture, (no. 401), 400–5; (no. 408), 415–16. Edwards, The “Blank Bible,” 206. Edwards also discusses pagan confirmations of Moses in his “Miscellanies,” (no. 983), 302–3 and (no. 1015), 347–48 in Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. 833– 1152), ed. Amy Plantinga Pauw, vol. 20, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
Notes on Scripture, (no. 432), 511–14.
Ibid. Edwards cited Humphrey Prideaux’s The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews and Neighboring Nations. For Edwards on Zoroaster, see “Whether the PENTATEUCH Was Written by Moses,” (no. 416), 464; Edwards, Notes on Scripture in entry (no. 416) and (no. 464); (no. 432); and Edwards, “Miscellanies,” (no. 969), 251–52.
Edwards’s references to pagan confirmation of the biblical account are numerous throughout the Notes on Scripture. For example, see also (no. 409), (no. 410), (no. 417), (no. 424), (no. 429), and (no. 431). Edwards, Notes on Scripture.
McDermott, “The Deist Connection,” 44.
Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Other Unfinished ‘Great Work,’ ” in Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Stephen Stein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 52–65.
Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 487.
Minkema, “The Other Unfinished ‘Great Work,’ ” 53.
Minkema “The Other Unfinished ‘Great Work,’ ” 58–59.
Quoted from Minkema, “The Other Unfinished ‘Great Work,’ ” 59. See Edwards, Works, vol. 11, 202. Edwards’s most sustained reflections on typology appeared in the “Miscellanies” in an essay titled “Types of Messiah.” This essay fills more than seventy manuscript pages, written in the mid- to late 1740s. His Notes on Scripture also functions as a collection point for his interpretation of biblical types. The essay “Types of Messiah” appears in the “Miscellanies,” (no. 1069) Works, vol. 11, 187–382. Stein, introduction to Notes on Scripture, 10–11.
Stein, introduction to Notes on Scripture, 11; (no. 6), 50, (no. 503), 601–5. Edwards, The “Blank Bible,” 206.
Minkema, “The Other Unfinished ‘Great Work,’ ” 62.
Quoted from Minkema, “The Other Unfinished ‘Great Work,’ ” 55.
Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 480.
For Edwards’s view of history, see Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 104– 17; John Wilson, “Jonathan Edwards as Historian,” Church History 46, no. 1 (1977): 10, 12; Wilson, “History,” in The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Sang Hyun Lee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 210–25; Avihu Zakai, “The Age of Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Stephen Stein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 88–91; Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History; and McClymond, Encounters with God, 65–79
See Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 55–90.
See Chapter 5 for Michaelis.
Edwards, Religious Affections, 303–4; quoted from Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 481;
Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 480; Stein, introduction to Notes on Scripture, 15.
Edwards, Religious Affections, 303.
McDermott, “The Deist Connection,” 45.
Thomas Pender, The Divinity of the Scriptures, from Reason and External Circumstances (New York: William Bradford, 1728), 5.
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Lee, M.J. (2013). Defending the Bible and Unintended Consequences. In: The Erosion of Biblical Certainty. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299666_4
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