Conclusion

Abstract

From the early-eighteenth-century Puritan Cotton Mather to the early-nineteenth-century Unitarian Andrews Norton, scholarly Americans increasingly subjected their sacred revelation to rational, empirical, and universally accessible examination. They did so in part to answer the challenges that skeptics launched against the Bible. Skeptics, deists, and German critics, in various ways, questioned the factual accuracy, historicity, and authority of their Scriptures. The American apologists all defended the conception of the Bible as sacred revelation. However, in light of the ever-increasing attacks and the changing standards that constituted legitimate knowledge, they felt pressured to do so on evidentiary grounds. They believed that they could no longer take for granted that everyone assumed that the Bible’s truth and status were self-authenticating and self-evident. The Holy Spirit’s testimony in the heart of the believer no longer functioned as convincing evidence. The pious apologists, like their skeptical enemies, subjected the Bible to examination by a variety of disciplines. Both sides believed that evidence of the Scripture’s authenticity needed to be accessible to any intelligent and unprejudiced mind. However, these apologists tacitly conceded some of the argument to their enemies: the authenticity and authority of the Bible could no longer be based primarily on dogmatic authority, tradition, or spiritual intuition.