Beyond Reason and Revelation: Perspectives on the Puritan Enlightenment

Abstract

Beyond Reason and Revelation: Perspectives on the Puritan Enlightenment BRUCE TUCKER Despite the immense literature on the religious history of New England, the relationship between Puritanism and the Enlighten­ ment has largely remained unexplored.1 The reason for this gap in the literature is that historians have found nothing particularly prob­ lematic to explain. For although scholars have agreed that ministers "liberalized" Puritanism during the first half of the eighteenth cen­ tury, they have not perceived the kind of intellectual tension in the thinking of these ministers which might encourage further investi­ gation. Since seventeenth-century Puritans had incorporated science, nature, and reason into their theology, it is argued, their descendants in the eighteenth century welcomed the ideas of the Enlightenment simply as further proof of the validity of their tradition. This process did not involve a rigorous intellectual exercise, moreover, because it took place during a period of "declension" in New England's reli­ gious life. During the provincial era ministers and laity struggled un­ successfully to maintain the high standards of piety set by the found­ ing generation. Because New Englanders were increasingly absorbed in commerce and the task of establishing a permanent society in the New World, the argument runs, they gradually abandoned the zeal for religious purity of earlier generations.2 Unimaginative and spirit­ ually lax, therefore, the eighteenth-century descendants of the first Puritans accepted the ideas of the Enlightenment without intellectual dislocation. 165 166 / TUCKER Henry May provided early American intellectual historians with the first effective study of the relationship between Puritanism and the Enlightenment in his book, The Enlightenment in America (1976). May resolved the problem of conceptualization by addressing pri­ marily the development of Enlightenment ideas and by subordinat­ ing the Puritan tradition to the status of a "matrix" in which the process of liberalization was accomplished.3 He argued that New England ministers adapted natural religion to the language of their own theology, creating a powerful rational Calvinism which balanced reason with revelation, and piety with intellect. Although Boston lib­ erals and ultra-evangelicals assaulted this moderate Calvinism, he continued, their criticisms merely "served to keep the powerful cen­ ter properly in balance."4 Thus in May's history, the ministers en­ gaged in the ancient struggle between reason and revelation and pre­ sided over the emergence of a Moderate Enlightenment which prevailed until the radical ideas of Paine and Godwin brought the compromises of the provincial period crashing down.5 By portraying the provincial ministers as moderate imitators, how­ ever, May avoided the dialectical nature of the process in which neoPuritans with only limited interpretive options struggled to make sense of their world. Consequently, historians still lack a sense of the intellectual choices available to eighteenth-century ministers and of how they came to integrate Enlightenment ideas with their own leg­ acy. For what purpose and with what level of consciousness did these ministers appropriate and use the ideas of a non-Calvinist alternative that was emerging in England? To answer these questions about the Puritan Enlightenment, historians will have to be sensitive to two problems. First, they will have to understand the political context in which eighteenth-century ministers remoulded their tradition. Sec­ ondly, they will have to ask how the Puritan tradition kept function­ ing, limiting the alternatives of its exponents, despite the circumstan­ ces which were pulling it in new directions. In contrast to May, who began with a description of the different schools of Enlightenment thought, I suggest that the point of depar­ ture must be with the peculiar dilemma of the inheritors of the Puri­ tan tradition. It is the nature of this dilemma, and the attempts of two ministers, Thomas Prince and John Barnard, to resolve it that I wish to explain in this paper.6 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, third-generation min­ isters were confronting a crisis of self-identification. The founding generation had removed to New England in the 1630's to secure God's true church from Laudian corruptions, but its leaders had Puritan Enlightenment / 167 never considered themselves as a people set apart from England. The second generation, overwhelmed by its isolation from the mother country, had...