Abstract
AbstractThis essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.
Highlights
Between 1716 and his death, the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather (1663–1728) maintained an intermittent but remarkable correspondence halfway across the globe, exchanging letters, literature, and even donations with Hallesponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar (Tharangambadi), southern India
This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter’s associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar
Though grossly distorted into various forms of idolatry, “Indians” in the East and West did have recognizable religious beliefs that made them susceptible to the truth of the Bible. This points to the above-mentioned context for the Puritan-Pietist attempt to define an unadulterated biblical Protestantism as the essence of the Christian religion: the rise of a comparative approach to “religion” and the encounter with diverse native beliefs and practices that, partly in response to new Enlightenment theories, were conceptualized as other “religions.” In many ways, Mather and his correspondents were still beholden to the traditional scheme of a fourfold division used by many Renaissance scholars to organize human religions
Summary
It is widely recognized that the concept of “religion” as we understand it today is of fairly recent origin. The Unexplained Subject Matter of Religious Studies,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 26 (2014): 246–286 It was only around the turn of the eighteenth century that new theological and philosophical trends began to challenge these deeply entrenched confessional boundaries and prepare the way for the use of Protestanten or protestantisch as positive terms. Recent scholarship highlights the centrality of networks between diverse groups of “awakened Christians” for the emergence of an imperial British pan-Protestantism.17 Struggling to define their place in the British Empire, the eighteenth-century heirs of New England Puritanism—and none more than Cotton Mather—were especially eager, as Thomas Kidd has demonstrated, to reinvent themselves as quintessential representatives of this common “Protestant interest,” which occasionally involved a symbolic identification with “an international Protestant community” of true Christians locked in battle with “Popery.” Overall, Anglo-American scholarship sees these connections as marginal. Even before the generation of the Great Awakening, Pietist and evangelical theologians conceptualized and propagated their own versions of the “Protestant religion.”
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