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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
In the early nineteenth century, when theological disputes centered on suggestions of a kinder, gentler God, Yale's Nathaniel William Taylor brought to fruition America's “one great contribution to the theological thinking of Christendom,” the New Haven theology. Taylor's theology combined elements of Calvinist and Newtonian worldviews and centered on three critical assumptions: the benevolence of God, his moral government, and human free agency. Thus, Taylor held that God was both a wise and powerful creator and a good and just ruler, whose concern for and involvement with his creation extended into contemporary human affairs. Moreover, he believed that men and women were moral agents whose sinfulness was worthy of divine condemnation as well as empirically inevitable, but that human sin was in no way preordained or necessary to the prevailing System of moral government.
1. Bainton, Roland H, cited in Kelley, Brooks M., Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 152.Google Scholar
2. Miller, Peny, The Life ofthe Mind in America: Front the Revolution to the dvil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1965), 67.Google Scholar Taylor acknowledged to Beecher the unanimity of their goals: we “shall show that good, sound Calvinism, or, if you please, Beecherism and Taylorism, is but another name for the truth and reality of things as they exist in the nature of God and man and the relations arising therefrom.” Charles Beecher, ed., The Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc., of Lyman Beecher, D.D., 2 vols. (New York, 1864), 1:385.
3. Mathews, Donald, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830,” American Quarterly 21 (Spring 1969): 23–43;CrossRefGoogle Scholar McLoughlin, William, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 106-22;Google Scholar Birdsall, Richard, “The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order,” Church History 39 (1970): 345-64;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 17-18,170,222.Google Scholar
4. One analogy identifies New Haven theology as “the offspring of the forced marriage of New England Calvinism with revivalism.” See Mead, Sidney E., Nathaniel William Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), vii.Google Scholar While the familial congeniality of the three is indisputable, the connubial connection needs correction. Both Second Great Awakening revivalism and New Haven theology are more accurately seen as the product of the union of Calvinism and the Enlightenment.
5. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 490;Google Scholar Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 34–35;Google Scholar Hoopes, James, Consciousness in New England (Baltimore: Johns Hop kins University Press, 1989), 87–119;Google Scholar Guelzo, Allen C., Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
6. Cherry, Conrad, “Nahire and the Republic: the New Haven Theology” New England Quarterly 51 (1978): 520-21;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Spears, Timothy B., “Common Observations: Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New York,” American Studies 30 (Spring 1989): 48;Google Scholar Mead, Nathaniel Taylor, 98-99,110,123-24; Heimert, Alan E., Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966);Google Scholar May, Henry F., The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 59;Google Scholar William K. Breitenbach, “New Divinity Theology and the Idea of Moral Accountability” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978), 165-96; Conforti, Joseph, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1981), 176.Google Scholar
7. Nathaniel W. Taylor, quoted in Mead, Nathaniel Taylor, 173; Cherry, Conrad, Nature and Religious Imagination: From Edwards to Bushnell (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 134, 139;Google Scholar May, Enlightenment in America, 57; Ahlstrom, Reli gious History, 487; Hoopes, Consciousness in New England, 162; C. Beecher, ed., Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 1:337; Hatch, Nathan O., “The Christian Move ment and the Demand for a Theology of the People,” Journal of American History 67 (December 1980): 551,566;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hatch, Democratization ofChristianity, 40-43,170-79.
8. The conversation between Calvinism and the Enlightenment was a long one; often ambiguous but usually not confrontational, it permeated the progress of New England theology. Puritans as far back as Cotton Mather had put forth herculean efforts “to reconcile the Calvinist heritage with the realities of… American religious and intellectual life” by, in effect, incorporating Enlighten ment ideals into the prevailing New England orthodoxy. Marsden, George M., The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 6.Google Scholar Older studies of the relationship between American Protestantism and the Enlightenment emphasized the contrast and discontinuity between the two. Gaustad, Edwin S., The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 2–3;Google Scholar Mead, Sidney E., The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 127;Google Scholar Wright, Conrad, The Liberal Christians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 4, 17.Google Scholar More recent historiography, however, has shown the extent to which the scientific and philosophical insights of the Enlightenment had penetrated American Protestantism by the nineteenth Century. See Solberg, Winton U., “Science and Religion in Early America: Cotton Mather's Christian Philosopher” Church History 56 (1987): 73–92;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Fiering, Norman S., Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981);Google Scholar Cherry, Nature and Religious Imagi nation; May, Enlightenment in America; Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977);Google Scholar Hovenkamp, Herbert, Science and Religion in America, 1800-1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Howe, Daniel Walker, “The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England,” Church History 57 (1988): 470-85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. McPherson, Thomas, The Argument from Design (London: Macmillan, 1972), vü, 49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology” Church History 24 (1955): 257;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Noll, Mark A., “Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought” American Quarterly 37 (Summer 1985): 220-24;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cherry, Nature and Religious Imagination, 85-108; Bryson, Gladys, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, Publishers, 1968), 136-37.Google Scholar Benevolent Calvinism and the Moral Government of God 43.
11. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (1736; repr., Philadelphia, 1861), 105-6; Stewart, Dugald, “Of the Speculation Concerning Final Causes,” in The Scottish Moralists, ed. Schneider, Louis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 159.Google Scholar
12. The literature on republicanism in American historiography is as voluminous as the concept in American history was ubiquitous. Robert E. Shalhope Sketches many of the permutations of the ideology in his artides, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Repub licanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29 (1972): 49-80; and “Republicanism and Early American Historiography” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (1982): 334-56. For a discussion of the peculiarly moralistic strain of republicanism prominent in New England, see Kelley, Robert, “Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon,” American Historical Review 82 (1977): 536-37, 544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar An excellent summary of generalized republican ideology is provided by Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 14–15.Google Scholar The most thorough treatment of classical republican ism is Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).Google Scholar The republican demand for arguments with populär appeal is indicated by Taylor's Suggestion that his Edwardsean opponents propose their position “to any common man, who has never before heard of it; explain it at large; and … mark his look of pity, or sneer of contempt, at such Statements.” Taylor, cited in Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 47.
13. Mead, Nathaniel Taylor, 1-37. The first three chapters of this still excellent biography thoroughly cover Taylor's youth and family background. Noah Porter, Introduction to Lectures on the Moral Government of God, 2 vols., by Nathaniel W. Taylor (New York, 1859), l:vi. For contemporaneous descriptions of Taylor's character, see Hatch, Rebecca Taylor, Personal Rjeminiscences and Memorials (New York, 1905);Google Scholar and Dutton, Samuel W. S., “A Sketch of the Life and Character of Rev. Nathaniel W. Taylor, D.D.,” Congregational Quarterly 2 (July 1860): 245-66.Google Scholar
14. Mead, Nathaniel Taylor, 145; Walker, “The Cambridge Platonists,” 478; May, Enlightenment in America, 55-58. These tendencies were summated by Charles Chauncey, a prominent Boston Arminian and sparring partner of Jona than Edwards: “As the First Cause of all things is infinitely benevolent, ‘tis not easy to conceive, that he should bring mankind into existence, unless he intends to make them finally happy. And if this was his intention, it cannot well be supposed, as he is infinitely intelligent and wise, that he should be unable… to carry into execution, a scheme that would be effectual to secure, sooner or later, the certain accomplishment of it.” Chauncey, Charles, The Mystery hidfrom Ages and Generations (London, 1784), 1 Google Scholar, quoted in Haroutunian, Joseph, Piety vs. Moralism (New York: Harper and Row, 1932), 136.Google Scholar
15. May, Enlightenment in America, 59. Samuel Hopkins, for instance, believed that, since true holiness lay in “disinterested love of being in general,” one must be willing and happy to be damned if such a fate were to serve the inscrutable purposes of God. Nathaniel Emmons, perceiving the Arminian version of hell to be so much sentimental swill, insisted that it was the Obligation of the elect “to relish the smoke” rising from below. Ibid., 59-60.
16. Whitacker is quoted in Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 337.
17. Because the nature of the material often necessitates combining several of Taylor's quotations, they will be cited in serial format in the order in which they appear in the text. Taylor, Nathaniel W., “Letter from Rev. Dr. Taylor” The Spirit of the Pilgrims 5 (March 1832): 175;Google Scholar Taylor, Moral Government, 1:382; Taylor, Nathaniel W., “Authority of Reason,” Quarterly Christian Spectator, 3d ser., 9 (March 1837), 151;Google Scholar Taylor, Nathaniel W., Essays, Lectures, etc., upon select Topics in Revealed Theology (New York, 1859), 223.Google Scholar
18. Hatch, Reminiscences, 14; Taylor, Nathaniel W., Practical Sermons (New York, 1858), 279;Google Scholar Taylor, Moral Government, 1:125,1,9.
19. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:129,224.
20. Taylor, Practical Sermons, 216; Taylor, Revealed Theology, 379. From his earliest days as a theological disputant, Taylor had been involved in such efforts. In debating at Yale the proposition, “Can the benevolence of the Deity be proved from the light of nature?” he had argued the affirmative and asserted in his final work that this proof must even supersede evidence from revelation. Taylor defined divine benevolence as “a disposition to secure the highest happiness, and to prevent all misery.” God can be proven to be benevolent, however, only if “he is administering a perfect moral government over men.” Stokes, Anson Phelps, Memorials of Eminent Yale Men, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914), 1:64;Google Scholar Taylor, Moral Government, 1:279.
21. Taylor, Moral Government, 1:135. The centrality of the Opposition to cruelty in Enlightenment thinking is suggested by Frank E. Manuel: “if the diverse branches of the Enlightenment were united in denouncing any Single evil, it was cruelty.” Manuel, Frank E., “Israel and the Enlightenment,” in Douglas, Mary T. and Tipton, Stephen M., eds., Religion and America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 57. Google Scholar Lyman Beecher agreed that this was a genuine concern for revivalists. “The fact is,” he wrote, “the law and doctrines, without any explanation, is a cruel way to get souls into the kingdom,” and he, of course, was more than ready to provide that necessarily meliorated explanation. Cross, Barbara M., ed., The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1961), 1:29.Google Scholar James Turner notes this same phenomenon in his discussion of evangelical humanitarianism. Turner, James, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 142.Google Scholar
22. Taylor, Practical Sermons, 161; Taylor, Moral Government, 1:182-83, 369.
23. Taylor, Practical Sermons, 217; Taylor, Moral Government, 1:269; Taylor, Practical Sermons, 218.
24. Taylor, Moral Government, 1:124; Taylor, Practical Sermons, 205.
25. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 469. “Law is magnified and made honorable,” wrote Taylor. “The pillars of eternal justice stand unshaken, and the splendor of its throne is untarnished, while mercy lavishes all its riches on a guilty world. Thus we see the most impressive spectacle, the highest achievement of infinite goodness and grace, the füllest expression of God in the atonement of Christ.” Ibid., 87.
26. Mead, Nathaniel Taylor, 202-10; Wright, G. Frederick, Charles Grandison Finney (Boston, 1893), 20,69,76;Google Scholar Hatch, Democratization ofChristianity, 196-201.
27. The illusory nature of apparent Calvinist unity is duly noted by Wil liam Breitenbach: “One of the chief similarities between the two orthodox groups was the delight which each seemed to take in abusing the other.” Breitenbach, “New Divinity Theology,” 273.
28. Taylor, Moral Government, 1:344.
29. Chauncey Goodrich, “Review of Bellamy on the Permission of Sin,” Quarterly Christian Spectator 2 (September 1830): 532. Goodrich subsequently remarked in this review (533) that he took his position in this controversy “in common with Dr. Taylor.” See also Pope, Earl, “The Rise of the New Haven Theology,” Journal of Presbyterian History 44 (March 1966): 24.Google Scholar
30. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 381.
31. Ibid., 462-63; Taylor, Moral Government, 1:322; Taylor, Practical Ser mons, 371.
32. Taylor, Nathaniel, “Concio ad Clerum,” in Theology in America, ed. Ahlstrom, Sydney E. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1967), 215,224-25,217.Google Scholar
33. Taylor, Moral Government, 1:307.
34. Taylor, “Letter from Rev. Dr. Taylor,” 175; Mead, Nathaniel Taylor, 220-32; Pope, “Rise of New Haven Theology,” 44.
35. Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 94; Cherry, Nature and Religious Imagination, 68,121.
36. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 378-79,382,463.
37. Breitenbach, “New Divinity Theology,” 309-11,316. The anxiety and release of revivalism came to be seen by the revivalists as just another expression of the laws of nature—similar to the laws of physics and mechanics—to be exploited for the progress of mankind. A revival, in Finne/s famous estimation, was nothing more than “a purely philosophical [i.e., scientific] result of the right use of constituted means.” Finney, Charles G., Lectures on Revivals of Religion (New York, 1835), 13.Google Scholar Beecher was in complete agreement with this understanding. Cross, ed., Lyman Beecher, 1:358.
38. Dwight, Timothy, Theology; Explained and Defended, 4 vols. (New York, 1830), 4:270;Google Scholar Extracts from the Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyte rian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1821), 22; Cuningham, Charles, Timothy Dwight (New York: Maonillan, 1942), 315;Google Scholar Ahlstrom, Sydney E., “From Puritanism to Evangelicalism: A Critical Perspective,” in Wells, David F. and Woodbridge, John D., eds., The Evangelicals (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1975), 272;Google Scholar Scott, Donald M., From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 77–85.Google Scholar
39. This problem existed for American Calvinists as early as the Antinomian Controversy of 1636. In the process of condemning Anne Hutchinson and her followers as antinomians—literally, “against law”—the underlying tension within Puritanism between religious ecstasy and social order was featured. Hall, David, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968).Google Scholar Puritan fear of social radicalism sparked by religious ecstasy continued throughout the colonial period. Gura, Philip, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 4–5,20;Google Scholar Berk, Stephen E., Calvinism versus Democracy: Timothy Dzvight and the Origins of American Evangelical Orthodoxy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Press, 1974), 199.Google Scholar Antinomianism was also the accusation leveled at the Old Calvinists by New Divinity men. Breitenbach, “New Divinity Theology,” v, 292. For an excellent explanation of the personal power released by Puri tan conversion during revivalism (equally applicable to nineteenth-century evangelicals), see Cohen, Charles L., God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Reli gious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3–22.Google Scholar
40. Cross, ed., Lyman Beecher, l:xxvi; Cuningham, Timothy Dzvight, 333; Cross, ed., Lyman Beecher, 1:47. The term “voluntary” meant that activity would stem frorn the will of individuals; it in no way implied that these duties were optional. For an excellent discussion of the process frorn conversion to moralism to reformism, see Rabinowitz, Richard, The Spiritual Seif in Everyday Life: The Trans formation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 79–151.Google Scholar
41. Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 17-21; Mead, Nathaniel Taylor, 206-8; Hatch, Democratization of Christianity, 17-20; Cross, ed., Lyman Beecher, l:xxvi-xxvii. The inclusion, within this voluntaryist reform agenda, of such esoteric entities as the National Truss Society for the Relief of the Ruptured Poor is indicative of the expansive nature of the enterprise—no stone, as it were, was to be left unturned in the effort to fulfill the promise of a perfectible America. Howe, Daniel Walker, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 77 (March 1991): 1222-23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42. Howe, Daniel Walker, “Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North,” in Noll, Mark, ed., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 131.Google Scholar OriginaUy deeply distraught over the fate of the churches, Beecher's antidisestablishmentarian despair was quickly transformed into positive delight by the possibilities of voluntaryism. Beecher, in retrospect, claimed that this process was “the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut” because it forced the churches to rely “wholly on their own resources and God” C. Beecher, ed., Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 1:344.
43. Examples of Beecher's writings include “The Republican Elements of the Old Testament,” “The Bible, a Code of Laws,” “The Government of God Desirable,” and “The Perils of Atheism to Our Nation.”
44. C. Beecher, ed., Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 1:339; Cross, ed., Lyman Beecher, 1:185.
45. Lyman Beecher, “The Perus of Atheism to Our Nation” quoted in Marsden, Evangelical Mind, 21
46. Beecher, Lyman, Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance (Boston, 1828), 7,66.Google Scholar
47. May, Enlightenment in America, xvii, 6,12, xiii, 359.
48. Cross, ed., Lyman Beecher, l:xviii; Taylor, quoted in Stokes, Memorials of Yale Men, 1:67; May, Enlightenment in America, 358; Turner, Without God, Without Creed, xiii. That Taylor suffered no shortage of confidence reflected his faith in the possibilities presented by the Newtonian explanation of the laws of nature. This confidence approximated presumption, however, when Taylor expressed his deep regret at never traveling to Paris, where, he was quite sure, his arguments would have convinced the French infidels of the errors of their ways. Mead, Nathaniel Taylor, 161. “I would rather have ten settled opinions and nine of them wrong,” Taylor daimed, prefiguring the worst of modern fundamentalism, “than to be … with none of the ten settled.” Ibid., 159. This certainty was essential to the empowering of revivals. It was, however, to have pernicious implications for the future of evangelicalism. Turner, Without God, Without Creed, 84.