Abstract
Cotton Mather, Jonathan Dickinson, and Jonathan Edwards kept current with European historical and philological scholarship regarding the Bible to varying degrees. However, interest in the study of biblical Hebrew and Greek declined precipitously among Americans who came after them. Although the first few generations of Puritans in New England honored biblical scholarship, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the study of the biblical languages declined in colleges.1 In contrast, scholars in England were interpreting the Bible by more sophisticated historical methods. For example, Robert Lowth argued that the biblical interpreter must be more sensitive to literary genres and historical contexts. His insights were largely lost on his eighteenth-century American counterparts.2
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Benjamin Foster, “On the Formal Study of Near Eastern Languages in America, 1770–1930,” in U.S.-Middle East Historical Encounters: A Critical Survey, ed. Abbas Amanat and Bernhard Magnusson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). Historian John H. Giltner notes that in the second half of the eighteenth century, serious training in biblical languages had been in decline in America. John H. Giltner, Moses Stuart: The Father of Biblical Science (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988), 6. See also Mary Latimer Gambrell, Ministerial Training in Eighteenth Century New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 81.
The colonies were certainly not devoid of biblical scholarship at this time. In the mid-eighteenth century, Judah Monis taught Hebrew at Harvard and printed the first Hebrew grammar in America (1735). Stephen Sewall succeeded him and became the Hancock Professor of Oriental Languages (1764). However, Benjamin Foster notes that by most accounts, American students and pastors learned very little about ancient languages. Foster, “Near Eastern Languages.”
Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 5.
John Barnard, A Proof of Jesus Christ His Being the Ancient Promised Messiah (Boston: J. Draper, 1756). 5.
Christopher Grasso argues that in the last decades of the century, many Americans feared that deism threatened not only Christianity but the integrity and existence of the new nation. Grasso, “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” The Journal of American History 95, no. 1 (2008): 43–68. Conrad Wright states that the countless pamphlets defending revealed religion and attacking Thomas Paine proliferated and were “uncorrupted by the slightest taint of originality.” Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 246. A perusal of the polemical antideist literature easily confirms this point. A. Owen Aldridge, “Natural Religion and Deism before Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 54, no. 4 (1997): 835–48.
Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King Press, 1955), 243. Deists, who pursued political as well as theological agendas, resented the imposition of civil authority based on appeals to history and particular interpretations of the Bible.
For the rise of deism in America, see Walters, American Deists, 26; Robert E. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 16–22; Gary B. Nash, “The American Clergy and the French Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 22, no. 3 (1965): 391– 412; Bryan Waterman, “The Bavarian Illuminati, the Early American Novel, and Histories of the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 62, no. 1 (2005): 9–30; Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York: Columbia University, 1918), 66–102; Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 244; Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 148; and I. Woodbridge Riley, “The Rise of Deism in Yale College,” American Journal of Theology 9, no. 3 (1905): 474–83.
Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 241–51; Richard Watson, An Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters, Addressed to Thomas Paine ([1796] Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1828).
Kerry S. Walters, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 39–43; Adolph Koch, Religion of the American Enlightenment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968), 239–89.
Walters makes a similar point. Kerry S. Walters, Rational Infidels (Durango, CO: Longwood Academic, 1992), xiv; Walters, American Deists, 34, 36.
Cotton Mather, Reason Satisfied: and Faith Established (Boston: J. Allen, 1712), 31.
Quoted in 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), 170.
John Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy ([1822] Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1912), 2; my emphasis. The lectures were not published until years after his death in 1794.
See John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience ([1947] New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Michael P. Winship, The Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Thomas Barnard Jr., A Discourse on Natural Religion, Delivered in the Chapel of the University in Cambridge (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1795), 9.
See John Barnard, appendix to A Proof of Jesus Chris, which reprints Dudley’s prescription for the lectures. For more information, see Dudleian Lectures at Harvard University, Minutes of Trustees, 1830–1984, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Edward Holyoke, president of the college, delivered the first lecture in 1755.
For more on the Great Awakening, see Edwin Scott Gaustad, The Great Awakening (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957); Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991); and Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 185–202.
Although Edwards by and large agreed with Chauncy that some of the preachers of the Awakening were theologically ignorant and the revivals disorderly, Edwards nonetheless maintained that the revivals were a work of God. The two carried on their debate in a series of publications. Among these, from Edwards, were The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1741), and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1742). From Chauncy were Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1743), and Enthusiasm Defended and Caution’d Against (Boston: J. Draper, 1742).
Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 5.
Gaustad, The Great Awakening, 83.
Jonathan Mayhew, Seven Sermons (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1749), 36, 47, 72. See also Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 138–40, and Holifield, Theology in America, 132.
Holifield, Theology in America, 128. Stout concurs, arguing that that the differences between rationalist and evangelical preaching during the period of the Great Awakening have been exaggerated (New England Soul, 212–32).
Presbyterian churches divided along similar fault lines between 1741 and 1758, with the New Side generally supporting the Awakening and the Old Side opposing it. See Gaustad, The Great Awakening, 83; Mark Noll, “The Irony of the Enlightenment for Presbyterians in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 5, no. 2 (1985): 149–76; and Noll, “Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought,” American Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1985): 216–38.
Noll finds it ironic, and tragic, that the Princetonians relied so heavily on a naturalistic epistemology to defend a system of belief ultimately based on supernatural revelation. See Mark Noll, Princeton and the Republic,1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 292–300.
Joseph Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696–1772 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 234.
See Ellis, New England Mind in Transition, 228, and John C. English, “John Hutchinson’s Critique of Newtonian Heterodoxy,” Church History 68, no. 3 (1999): 581–91.
Edwin Scott Gaustad, “Theological Effects of the Great Awakening in New England,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40, no. 4 (1954): 681–706.
Norman Fiering, “The First American Enlightenment: Tillotson, Leverett, and Philosophical Anglicanism,” New England Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1981): 310; John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholic Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9–31; Corrigan, “Catholick Congregationalist Clergy and Public Piety,” Church History 60, no. 2 (1991): 210–22.
Gerard Reedy, “Interpreting Tillotson,” Harvard Theological Review 86, no. 1 (1993): 81–103; Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 40–45.
David Hume, “Of Miracles,” in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding ([1748] Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 117–41.
Benjamin Stevens, “Mr. Stevens’s Sermon at the Annual Dudleian Lecture, May 13, 1772,” MS, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Hilliard, A Sermon Delivered September 3, 1788, 6–8. A brief biography of Hilliard appears in William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit: Or, Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergymen of Various Denominations, 9 vols., vol. 1 (New York: R. Carter and Brothers, 1857), 660–62.
T. Barnard, The Power of God, 9; Hilliard, A Sermon Delivered September 3, 1788, 4.
Hilliard, A Sermon Delivered September 3, 1788, 28, 29, 30; my emphasis.
See, for example, Nathan Fiske, A Sermon Preached at the Dudleian Lecture in the Chapel of Harvard College September 7, 1796 (Boston: Manning & Loring, 1796).
On the Mathers, see Holifield, Theology in America, 30–33. Benjamin Colman, The Glory of God in the Firmament of His Power (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1743), 2–3, 10, 17; Colman, The Credibility of the Christian Doctrine of the Resurrection (Boston: Thomas Hancock, 1729), 14. Bulkley attended Harvard and was a minister in the small frontier town of Colchester, Connecticut, from 1703 to 1731. For a brief biography, see Miller and Johnson, Puritans: A Source Book, 680, and Clifford K. Shipton, ed., Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 18 vols., vol. 4, 1690–1700 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), 450– 54. Miller and Holifield see Bulkley as representing a growing rationalism in eighteenth-century New England. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 430–32; Holifield, Theology in America, 82.
John Bulkley, The Usefulness of Reveal’d Religion, to Preserve and Improve That Which Is Natural (New London, CT: T. Green, 1730), a sermon delivered in 1729.
John Bulkley, preface to Poetical Meditations Being the Improvement of Some Vacant Hours, by Roger Wolcott (New London, CT: T. Green, 1725). With the exception of philosopher James Tully, scholars have neglected Bulkley’s preface. See James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 166–67, and Tully, “Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights,” in Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context, ed. G. A. J. Rogers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 165–96. The preface was reprinted in part as “An Inquiry into the Rights of the Aboriginal Natives to the Lands in America,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., 4 (Boston: 1795), 159–81.
For prisca theologia see Chapter 1.
Bulkley, preface to Poetical Meditations, ii–iii, iv, v.
Bulkley, Usefulness of Reveal’d Religion, 6, 7, 9, 13, 34.
Thomas Walter, The Scriptures the Only Rule of Faith & Practice (Boston: B. Green, 1723), 28. Fiering discusses at considerable length the varying degrees to which seventeenth-century scholars at Harvard accepted or rejected the ethics of classical thinkers in the Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 11–62.
Bulkley, Usefulness of Reveal’d Religion, 27–28.
See Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–18.
One possible exception is Lemuel Briant’s critique of Calvinism’s doctrine of depravity (The Absurdity and Blasphemy of Deprecating Moral Virtue [Boston: J. Green, 1749]), which incited a minor pamphlet war. He argued that revelation merely reiterates the dictates of nature, but this was a small point in a larger argument.
Edward Holyoke, “The First Sermon for the Dudleian Lecture, 1755,” MS, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 3. Holyoke’s biography is covered briefly in John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, 18 vols., vol. 5, 1701–12 (Cambridge: Charles William Server, 1873), 270.
Ebenezer Gay, Natural Religion as Distinguish’d from Revealed (Boston: John Draper, 1759), 6, 7. On Gay’s biography, see Robert J. Wilson, The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1696– 1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984).
Peter Clark, Man’s Dignity and Duty as a Reasonable Creature; and His Insufficiency as a Fallen Creature (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763), 3, 9, 10.
Gay, Natural Religion as Distinguish’d from Revealed, 19, 23.
Andrew Eliot, A Discourse on Natural Religion (Boston: Daniel Kneeland, 1771), xxxvi.
Samuel Langdon, The Co-Incidence of Natural with Revealed Religion. A Sermon at the Annual Lecture Instituted in Harvard College by the Last Will and Testament of the Honorable Paul Dudley, Esq; Delivered November 1, 1775 (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1776), 22. For Langdon’s biography, see Mark A. Peterson, “Langdon, Samuel,” American National Biography Online at http://www.anb.org.ezp1 .harvard.edu/articles/ 01/01–00492 html.
Wilson, Benevolent Deity, 67.
Gad Hitchcock, Natural Religion Aided by Revelation, and Perfected in Christianity (Boston: T. and J. Fleet, 1779), 23, 24; Langdon, The Co-Incidence of Natural with Revealed Religion, 12, 14. For Hitchcock’s biography, see Sprague, Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit, 29–31.
Langdon, The Co-Incidence of Natural with Revealed Religion, 12, 13.
Hitchcock, Natural Religion Aided by Revelation, 30.
T. Barnard, Discourse on Natural Religion, 5, 21. For a brief biography of Barnard Jr., see Eliot, Heralds of a Liberal Faith, vol. 1, 131–40.
Barnard, Discourse on Natural Religion, 12. Barnard engaged in a bit of anachronistic fancy in his interpretation of the past. He imagined historical figures, who knew something of divine matters, to be of the intellectual elite, as were he and his Harvard peers. Samuel Clarke, and possibly Cicero, certainly occupied the class of intellectual professionals he imagined, but to say that the Apostles did so as well defied the historical knowledge of his own time.
Molly Oshatz, “The Problem of Moral Progress: The Slavery Debate and the Development of Liberal Protestantism in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 2 (2008): 225–50.
Fiske, A Sermon Preached at the Dudleian Lecture, 7, 19.
Eliot, Heralds of a Liberal Faith, vol. 1, 131–33; “Memorial Sermon,” in The First Centenary of the North Church and Society in Salem, Massachusetts (Salem, MA: Printed by the Salem Press for the Society, 1873), 38–39. For the date of gathering and adoption of the covenant, see the introduction, 1.
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Lee, M.J. (2013). The Triumph of Rational Religion in America. In: The Erosion of Biblical Certainty. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299666_5
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