Charles Chauncy Research Articles

Printing, Publics, and Pudding: Charles Chauncy's Universal Salvation and the Material Transformation of New England Orthodoxy

AbstractFor over thirty years, eighteenth-century Boston minister Charles Chauncy published his views about universal salvation outside of the printing press. While scholars have argued that he was reluctant to publish because of his heterodox views against a predominantly Calvinist public, the long history of a broadly circulating manuscript complicates any clear intentions toward privacy or secrecy. Instead, Chauncy strategized around the printing press and the pulpit. Using more discreet modes of publication, like manuscript circulation and scribal publication, he gathered a supportive public for universal salvation before his views even reached the printing press. The audience for his work grew even further through intimate conversations and private correspondence between readers of the manuscript and those they wanted to convert. By the time Chauncy decided to print his views, Congregationalist ministers’ hopes for a largely orthodox public sphere had already been compromised through various means of sharing, exchanging, and distributing ideas outside of the printing press. In many ways, it was not strictly the allure of Enlightenment ideas that facilitated the liberalization of New England theology. It was also the ways writers like Chauncy attended to different modes of publications to situate different readers as a captive and receptive audience.

American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism by J. D. Dickey

Reviewed by: American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism by J. D. Dickey Patricia U. Bonomi (bio) American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism By J. D. Dickey. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019. 400 pages, 6" x 9". $29.95 cloth, $29.95 ebook. This is an unusual book. Author J. D. Dickey, an independent writer and historian, clearly became enraptured with the Great Awakening of the 1740s in colonial North America. Finding parallels between the religious heats of the mid-eighteenth century and the volatility of today's state of national affairs, he undertakes to bring the story to a wider reading public. The intense evangelical period of the Great Awakening opened with the arrival in 1739 of English evangelist George Whitefield. While colonials had experienced a number of local revivals and passionate religious controversies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, none ever rose to the fevered and combative heights reached in the Great Awakening. To Dickey, Whitefield's shrewd talent for publicizing his appearances, ability to draw adoring crowds, fierce criticism of orthodox clergy while attracting support from zealous evangelicals, to say nothing of the more than one hundred fractured churches scattered in his wake, carry the scent of demagoguery. Historians who uncovered Whitefield's extraordinary grasp of near-modern marketing skills and attention-getting techniques, and on whose research Dickey depends for his narrative, have never gone so far. Nonetheless Dickey sketches out what he sees as similarities between the eighteenth-century Awakeners and today's partisan tangles, politico-religious trumpery, and such earlier rabble rousers as Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long, and the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings. After setting forth the demagogue theme in his introduction, the author launches into twelve chapters of extended and detailed description of the leading figures and dramatic episodes of the Great Awakening. Whitefield is the star, along with a large cast of American evangelical preachers and their opposers: the initial embrace and later parry of Whitefield by Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert Tennent; the steady support and radicalism of Andrew Croswell; the war between Old Side and New Side clergy; the antics of James Davenport; the passionate and increasingly political sermons of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew; and the fervent defense of tradition and empire by colonial clergy of the mother Church of England. Oddly, regarding the Anglicans, Dickey repeatedly cites New England sources (favored throughout the book), though the main Anglican denouncers of provincial religious and political excess were long centered in New York, which colony here gets short shrift. [End Page 411] These twelve chapters are based largely on the published writings of historians over the past half-dozen or so decades, occasionally supplemented with quotations from sermons and writings by leading eighteenth-century participants. Unquestionably Dickey has read widely in the secondary literature. There are some errors and lapses of context in these chapters, and most of the story will be familiar to students of the period. Nonetheless, Dickey lays out the narrative with verve and flair, and the larger reading public will likely enjoy the ride. Because this review appears in a history journal, however, certain authorial decisions regarding style and the marshaling of evidence bear noting. Sidebar-like chunks of indented and italicized text that interrupt the story are inserted without explanation. Women, after an initial introduction, are called thereafter by their first names (Sarah, Abigail), while men are always addressed by their surnames—with one striking exception, "Jonathan" Mayhew, toward whom the author apparently felt a special kinship. Above all is Dickey's quirky way of citing sources. In place of traditional numbered endnotes, he offers at the conclusion of each chapter a sequence of page numbers from the text, a phrase of Dickey's from such a page within quotation marks, and then the secondary source from which the author drew that thought or paragraph. Other times he quotes directly from a secondary or primary source, which he sets off with single quotation marks within his own quoted phrase. One passage from a minister in Salem has no citation at all. Only after much back-and-forth page-flipping can the reader discover, or...

Conservative Revolutionaries: Transformation and Tradition in the Religious and Political Thought of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew. By John S. Oakes. Foreword by David D. Hall. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016. Pp. xi, 303. $37.00 paper or eBook.)

<i>Conservative Revolutionaries: Transformation and Tradition in the Religious and Political Thought of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew</i>. By John S. Oakes. Foreword by David D. Hall. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016. Pp. xi, 303. $37.00 paper or eBook.)

"What Mischief Would Follow?": The Emersons, Haiti, and Romantic Racialism

"What Mischief Would Follow?"The Emersons, Haiti, and Romantic Racialism Colleen C. O'Brien (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Toussaint Louverture. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-7860. [End Page 218] In a letter dated 17 October 1849, Wendell Phillips thanks Ralph Waldo Emerson for the use of a set of volumes that he describes as a "valuable contribution to the scanty stores of Haytian history."1 Phillips's apparent claim that "Haytian history" exists only in "scanty stores" is interesting, not only because African American newspapers had been publishing stories about Haiti throughout the first half of the nineteenth century but also because Phillips himself would consequently discover and contribute to a broad Haitian archive, lecturing on the heroics of Toussaint Louverture by the beginning of the Civil War.2 The first decade of the twenty-first century is similar: many scholars who were previously unfamiliar with the "scanty stores" of Haitian history have, within ten years, become immersed in studies of the island—beginning with its 1791 insurrections. Even in an archive shaped by Western thought's limited ontological presumptions of racial difference and human freedom, the Haitian Revolution populates the historical landscape with possibilities whose "right to existence," as Michel-Rolph Trouillot puts it, had been silenced within the "field constituted by previously created facts."3 Rewriting the Haitian Revolution provided Ralph Waldo Emerson and his cohorts—especially his brother Charles Chauncy Emerson—with a corrective to the providential narrative of freedom that dominated United States history. [End Page 219] Placing the Anglo-American concept of righteous rebellion in a hemispheric context could amend the patterns of Anglo masculinity that had historically marred the ideal of freedom. This theoretical world, born of an odd combination of love and violent rebellion, presented a new world of racial meaning and masculine power. By amalgamating the histories of Haiti and the United States, mid-nineteenth-century scholars could also envision a reformed masculine world. Similarly, for many twenty-first century scholars, the "differential exercise[s] of power" that amplified the accomplishments of one colony's revolution and suppressed the other's shed light on the United States' exceptional "progress" as a world power.4 As the "other" foundational site of American Revolution, Haiti has become the focal point of contemporary scholarly rebellion. As a corrective to American exceptionalism, Haiti signifies what Nick Nesbitt describes as "the capacity for self-determination that is a universal, immanent potential."5 Haiti was not a nation whose founding fathers condoned what David Brion Davis identifies as the sin of slavery— or what Charles Emerson referred to as "sewing up the body politic . . . in a sack with a living viper."6 The two poles of representation that characterized Haiti in the nineteenth-century United States, however, ranged from Nesbitt's space of immanent potential to something far worse than Charles Emerson's viper-infested sack. In other words, the images of insurgent black power that characterized the first free black nation in the Western Hemisphere frightened many of Emerson's contemporaries more than any representation of slavery. Waldo Emerson's and Phillips's interest in Haiti on the eve of one of the most turbulent decades in United States history reflects their attempt, not only to make sense of conflicting racialized representations of the Haitian past and of people of African descent in general, but also to listen to the silences that reveal how a more perfect union might coalesce in the future. This perfectionist vision, however, frequently came into focus through the lens of romantic racialism. While romantic racialism often endowed people of African descent with a fictional, heightened capacity for love and empathy, [End Page 220] it at the same time depicted Anglo-Saxons as somewhat bereft of those qualities. Abolitionist representations of the Haitian Revolution deify Toussaint in particular on the grounds that he possessed a heightened sense of love, morality, and compassion. If anti-black representations of Haiti focused on violence and cruelty, the rhetoric of Waldo Emerson's English Traits (first published in 1856), which emphasized an Anglo-Saxon propensity for violence, flipped that proverbial script: it turned the most disturbing...

Unless a Seed Falls: Cultivating Liberal Institutions

I have inherited a paradox. As the inaugural holder of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association chair, I am accountable in some sense to a man who once told the graduates of this school to “cast behind [them] all conformity” to what they had learned at school, relying on themselves rather than on the institutions of “historical Christianity.” But I am also accountable to one of those institutions—indeed, to the very denominational tradition that Emerson was leaving behind when he urged our students to “acquaint men at first hand with deity.”1 This level of institutional accountability in a Harvard chair has few precedents. Among my colleagues, only Francis Schussler Fiorenza has the name of a denomination in his title, and while the Charles Chauncy Stillman chair of Roman Catholic studies may contain its own paradoxes, I am guessing that the pope was not as intimately involved in its creation as Unitarian Universalist president Bill Sinkford was in the funding of the Emerson chair.

J. D. Bowers . Joseph Priestley and English Unitarianism in America . University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press . 2007 . Pp. xiv, 282. $50.00.

For generations, historians have insisted that the roots of Unitarianism lie in the liberal wing of late colonial Puritan Congregationalism. In the background are New England pastors such as Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew, while the movement took more formal identity with a well-known sermon preached by New Englander William Ellery Channing in 1819. His “What Is Unitarian Christianity?” gave the movement a name as it claimed a place for this nascent denomination within the Christian family. J. D. Bowers demurs. In this study of the English Unitarian tradition, particularly as expressed by theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, Bowers insists that multiple strands fed into emerging American Unitarianism. Priestley's version is also significant, if not more central, to those developments. When Priestley arrived in the United States in 1794, English Unitarianism had already crafted a place for itself in the dissenting landscape in Britain. Some early English Unitarians communicated with New England liberal Congregationalists. Richard Price, for example, corresponded extensively with Chauncy.

The Emerson brothers: a fraternal biography in letters

The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters is a narrative and epistolary biography based upon the lifelong correspondence exchanged among the four Emerson brothers: Charles Chauncy, Edward Bliss, Ralph Waldo, and William Emerson, as well as Charles' 181 letters to his fiancee Elizabeth Hoar (one of the few extended series of courtship letters surviving from this period) and 86 letters from the brothers to their paternal aunt Mary Moody Emerson in which they discuss their moral and theological upbringing and views. Often composed as round robin exchanges among and between the brothers, the Emerson brothers' correspondence is the last great untapped body of personal writings remaining in manuscript from within the Emerson family. These letters illuminate aspects of Waldo's character and personal and intellectual development that, lacking access to the letters, even his most sympathetic biographers and critics have thus far failed to appreciate fully; reveal that all of the brothers were invigorated by their shared sense of origin as well as by a sense of duty to improve upon their ancestors' literary and intellectual work; shine new light on Waldo's debt to William for his first serious encounters with German Higher Criticism in the mid_1820s; present new evidence about the devastation Waldo felt at the death in 1831 of his first wife, a correction to Waldo's own sometimes under-recorded sense of grief at her passing; demonstrate that Waldo's desire for financial security for himself, his mother, and his brothers was at least as powerful a motivation behind his resignation from Boston's Second Church in 1832 as were Ellen's death and his reservations about the Lord's Supper; and mark Waldo's self-conscious and steady progress away from the forms of institutionalized religion toward the career of lecturer, essayist, poet, and social reformer which earned him his reputation as a principal architect of American culture.

The Correspondence of John Cotton (review)

Reviewed by: The Correspondence of John Cotton Lisa M. Gordis (bio) The Correspondence of John Cotton Edited by Sargent Bush, Jr.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 548 pp. John Cotton (1584–1652), luminary of New England's first generation, was both a clerical polymath and an enigma. Scholars have described Cotton's influence on church polity, his theory of personal religious experience, his role as a leading preacher and practitioner of the plain style, his understanding of typology, and his millennialism. And they have long puzzled over his involvement in several of the important controversies of his day. The letters in Sargent Bush, Jr.'s extraordinary collection help to explain the esteem in which Cotton's contemporaries held him, even as they address some of the questions that have engaged Cotton scholars. In his learned, insightful, and substantial introduction to the volume, Bush traces four phases of Cotton's "epistolary career": Cotton's 21 years as vicar of St. Botolph's in Boston, Lincolnshire; the migration period, from the time Cotton contemplated the possibility of migration through the summer of 1633; the period in which Cotton was engaged in debate with Roger Williams and what became known as the Antinomian controversy; and the period from the late 1640s until Cotton's death in 1652, during which Bush characterizes Cotton's letters as "more miscellaneous than those of the earlier periods" but often concerned with the issue of baptism (24–25). [End Page 182] In Bush's assessment, Cotton was "[n]ot an original theologian"; rather "he was a careful and informed interpreter of a theological tradition that became a powerful factor in the thinking of his friends, neighbors, and descendants" (7). Therefore, Cotton's views are particularly important as articulated to his network of correspondents. These interlocutors are a varied group including notable figures such as Oliver Cromwell, Archbishop James Ussher, Bishop John Williams, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Eliot, John Winthrop, Richard Mather, Peter Bulkeley, Charles Chauncy, John Dod, and Nathaniel Ward, and family members such as his wife, Sarah Hawkred Story Cotton, and his son Seaborn. Bush's collection of 125 letters is wonderfully inclusive: it documents Cotton's career on both sides of the Atlantic in letters dating from 1621 to 1652. It presents all known letters written by Cotton or addressed to him. Moreover, it includes letters in various forms and from a wide range of sources: signed autograph letters, copies in Cotton's hand, copies made by various scribes, and letters existing only in published versions or in fragments in published versions. Of the 125 included letters, more than 50 have not been previously published. The collected letters offer many revelations to their readers. One is the importance of the Puritan pastoral letter as a genre. The letters, together with Bush's analysis, show Cotton's great self-consciousness about letter writing. Cotton saw his correspondence as an epistolary ministry and consciously imitated apostolic models of epistolary composition (33, 26). Bush demonstrates that this represented a substantial portion of Cotton's ministerial labors; indeed, he notes that "a considerable portion of [Cotton's] time was spent at his desk, in written dialogue with his contemporaries, both before and after his migration to New England" (23). The collection reveals a great deal about the circulation of letters in this period as well. For example, on 21 March 1638/9, Thomas Dudley wrote to Cotton, sending his letter in the care of William Denison, who had been expelled from the Roxbury church (288). Dudley asked Cotton to "help" reconcile Denison to the church by counseling him toward orthodox views about the evidence of grace (288–89). Though Dudley suggested that Cotton need not return a written answer ("I shall vnderstand by my Brother Denison at his retourne without your trouble of wrytinge what you say, I therefore forbeare your further trouble"), Cotton replied to Dudley's letter on the verso of the sheet (289–90). Dudley found the four short paragraphs of Cotton's response tough enough going that he sought John Eliot's assistance. Eliot, in turn, made notes on Cotton's response. In his appendix, Bush...

The Devil & Doctor Dwight: Satire & Theology in the Early American Republic. By Colin Wells. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii, 254 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2715-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5383-6.)

In The Devil & Doctor Dwight, Colin Wells offers a bold case for Timothy Dwight's epic poem, “The Triumph of Infidelity” (1788), as “perhaps the preeminent example of American neoclassical or Augustan satire” (p. 3) and as “a unique example of the convergence of literature, religion, and politics at the moment the new American Republic was first being imagined” (p. 16). Wells convincingly argues that, contrary to the claims of many of Dwight's contemporaries and some modern historians, the poem was not an expression of a kind of counter-enlightenment; instead, Wells writes, it was an expression of “Christian empiricism” and a central element of “an ideological struggle over the meaning of intellectual enlightenment itself ” (p. 111). Dwight's “literary warfare against infidelity” (p. 11), Wells explains, was directed not only against Charles Chauncy's Universalist “pudding” but against all manifestations of what he viewed as the era's dangerous misunderstanding of man's flawed nature, a misunderstanding that he believed fueled the French Revolution and Jeffersonianism itself.

Phillis Wheatley's Construction of Otherness and the Rhetoric of Performed Ideology

Sometime in 1772, a young African girl walked demurely into a room in Boston to undergo an oral examination, results of which would determine direction of her life and work. Perhaps she was shocked upon entering appointed room. For there, perhaps gathered in a semicircle, sat eighteen of Boston's most notable citizens. Among them were John Erving, a prominent Boston merchant; Reverend Charles Chauncy, pastor of he Tenth Congregational Church; and John Hancock, who would later gain fame for his signature on Declaration of Independence. At center of this group was His Excellency, Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, with Andrew Oliver, his lieutenant governor, close by his side. Why had this august group been assembled? Why had it seen fit to summon this young African girl, scarcely eighteen years old, before it? This group of the most respectable Characters in Boston, as it would later define itself, had assembled to question closely African adolescent on slender sheaf of poems that she claimed to have by herself. We can only speculate on nature of questions posed to this fledgling poet. ... We do know, however, that African poet's responses were more than sufficient to prompt eighteen august gentlemen to compose, sign, and publish a two-paragraph Attestation, an open letter To Publick that prefaces Phillis Wheatley's book. ... (Gates vii-viii) his forward to The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, In ... Her Own Write, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes scene he imagines having preceded validation of Wheatley's authorship by eighteen prominent Bostonians, during which poet was questioned in order to ascertain her ability to have written works ascribed to her. While there may be no historical evidence to support his recreation, as Kirstin Wilcox asserts (10), Gates does manage to capture some of important elements in Wheatley's life as a poet in his imaginative recreation.(1) particular, scenario Gates recounts indicates an awareness of Wheatley's dominant audience as well as unique historical moment in which she wrote. While Wheatley's was clearly a bifurcated audience, there can be little doubt that eighteen men who signed for her represented a major constituency for her poetry, among those who read broadsides and newspapers in which she published and who had public ear.(2) She knew these men because they had visited Wheatley home, because she had heard them preach, or because they had established public reputations in Boston. These were also men for whom she had actually written poems, either to celebrate personal accomplishment or to mourn passing of a loved one. addition, they were men whose experience would not have included a Phillis Wheatley, and who might well have wondered whether young author was a serious poet or a front for abolitionists. For, as previous critics have pointed out, Wheatley's poetry is not devoid of racial awareness, as had long been suggested. Antonio T. Bly asserts that Wheatley used her poems not simply to denounce hypocrisy practiced by white Christians, but also [to] express a strong sense of black pride to her fellow slaves, who were often read her poetry by slave masters who thought that her writings were harmless (205-06). A number of poems can be seen as direct appeals to her black counterparts to accept Christian God as a means of salvation, if not in this world then certainly in next. However, critics have yet to consider fully possibility that Wheatley might have crafted her poems to work specifically upon white audience that would have constituted her main readership, aside from overt pleas to accept possibility of black Christians. A close examination of two poems in particular, To University of Cambridge, in New-England and On Being Brought from Africa to America, suggests that they were designed to manipulate this audience in very specific ways. …

Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England

Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England. By Charles P. Hanson. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Pp. x, 277. $35.00.) New England's Moral Legislator. Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817. By John Fitzmier. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp. x, 261. $39.95.) The topic of religion during the formative years of the Republic continues to draw the attention of historians. Both books reviewed here constitute efforts to incorporate religious history into the fabric of American history. Charles Hanson's Necessary Virtue evaluates the decline of antiCatholicism in conjunction with the French alliance of the American Revolution. Certainly the French alliance posed significant ideological problems to New Englanders, whose long-standing hostility to France and Catholicism led them to view the Quebec Act as a concession to the Antichrist. Once the Revolution began, however, many New Englanders were willing to dispense with their anti-Catholicism, or at least to modify its vehemence. Participants in the expedition to Quebec responded to the religion of the inhabitants with a mixture of curiosity and tolerance. More tellingly, after France joined the United States, New Englanders found ways to justify this arrangement by imaginative twists of logic to show that Catholicism per se really was not that dangerous. Although Hanson concedes that religious tolerance was not uniform or securely lodged by the close of the eighteenth century, Catholics, especially within the Boston area, could practice their religion without interference. Hanson further suggests that this willingness to relax their anti-Catholicism is evidence of a pragmatism among the revolutionaries that perhaps superceded their religious motivations. The central weakness of this book is that Hanson treats New England Congregational clergy as a unified body, which they most certainly were not. By the revolutionary era, New England Congregationalists were divided into liberals, who were well on the way to Unitarianism, moderate Calvinists, and Edwardsians. Among the Edwardsians, the Hopkinsians (or New Divinity) engaged in their own variations of Calvinist logic. Within these groups clergy were divided into smaller factions, with some people such as Timothy Dwight not fitting in any category. Except for a brief aside on Charles Chauncy's Universalism, Hanson bypasses these disputes, making no effort to place his sources within the context of their specific religious beliefs. Some of his characters, such as Henry Cumings, John Eliot, Jeremy Belknap, or James Dana, were later to emerge as leaning toward Unitarianism. Other men, such as the elder Joseph Buckminster, Samuel Cooper, or David Tappan, were Trinitarian but known for their moderation and toleration. Unfortunately, the Hopkinsian faction is largely excluded from this study; given the fact that Samuel Hopkins's Treatise on the Millennium (1792) argued that the Church of Rome epitomized Antichrist, it would have been interesting to see how these numerically significant ministers responded to the French alliance. Even if they only remained silent, that fact might have been worthy of notice. …

Archetypal Heresy. Arianism through the Centuries (review)

Reviewed by: Archetypal Heresy. Arianism through the Centuries Robert M. Grant Maurice Wiles. Archetypal Heresy. Arianism through the Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1996 Pp. x + 204. $55.00. The veteran theological historian Maurice Wiles begins his contribution on his very first page, when he criticizes church authorities who have called the Nicene Creed “the sufficient statement of the Christian faith” by insisting that “its fulfillment of such a role is inevitably problematic.” After all, it attempts to answer a fourth-century conflict, hard to assess, between Arius and his critics. Originating how? why? using what traditions and interpretations? how conditioned historically? He next provides a thoroughly modern reinterpretation, citing the conservative authority H. M. Gwatkin (9) but refuting him for the next 26 pages. Wiles rejects the picture of Arius and Arians presented by Athanasius and treats them with much more sympathy. Here much has to do with the starting point. If you begin with the fourth century or later you are likely to deny any claim of Arius to “orthodoxy,” whereas if you go from New Testament variety through Origen [End Page 319] you will find him more attractive. (A minor point: Wiles [10] mentions Arius’ “eight attributes” of God and prints seven, but the situation may be more complicated: Athanasius On Synods, c. 16, lists fifteen, including two more “philosophical” and even two [just and good] that are anti-Marcionite.) A brief chapter on “the End of Arianism” inquires into “the Latin West” (see now N. McLynn, “From Palladius to Maximinus: Passing the Arian Torch,” JECS 4 [1996]: 477–93) and “Gothic Christianity,” “clearly a faith of a strongly social character” (47; like its rivals). It seemed to revive in Socinianism, but this was hardly Arian. The heart of Wiles’s book lies in a hundred pages on “the Rise and Fall of British Arianism,” a chapter anticipated by the frontispiece, a portrait of William Whiston’s “lean and angular face” from Clare College, Cambridge. Whiston shared the anti-trinitarian views of John Locke and Isaac Newton, but did not hesitate to state them in public. He was removed from his mathematical professorship at Cambridge in 1710 “and was unable to secure gainful employment again for the remaining forty-two years of his life” (95). Wiles points out that his basic target was simply the so-called Athanasian Creed, which he once described on one occasion as “the most heretical creed now extant in the world.” Only at the age of eighty did he stop receiving the communion from those who “performed this ritual cursing of Christianity” (104). Some American variations to a largely British theme can be supplied. Later Episcopalians were (inadvertently) influenced by Whiston. His volumes on Primitive Christianity Reviv’d (1711) included “the Apostolical Constitutions” and their authenticity, as well as “the primitive faith concerning the Trinity and incarnation.” The Constitutions contained the eucharistic prayers of the apostolic church, and Whiston went on with “the liturgy of the Church of England reduc’d nearer to the primitive standard.” This provoked a reply by Richard Smalbroke, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (1714): The pretended authority of the Clementine constitutions confuted. Nevertheless, when Thomas Rattray, bishop of Brechin in Scotland, prepared his Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem (1744), he “corrected” the Liturgy of St. James by the liturgy of the Constitutions and strongly influenced The Cormmunion-Office for the use of the [Episcopal] Church of Scotland (1764). In turn this influenced early American Episcopalian liturgists (see J. Dowden, The Scottish Communion Office 1764 [Oxford, 1922], 99–105, emphasizing “primitive”). Fruitful errors? Another of Wiles’s characters with an American connection was the scholar and minister Nathaniel Lardner (1684–1768). His major study, The Credibility of the Gospel History, takes up seven volumes in the 1838 edition of his Works. His “large collection of ancient Jewish and heathen testimonies” even presents the fragments of Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian. Lardner, constantly in correspondence with American friends, sent his volumes to Charles Chauncy (1705–87), minister of the First Church in Boston and opponent of revivalism (I once found it in a Boston bookstore). Thus from both Whiston and Lardner we see American emanations not just theological but...

The ‘True Remedy’: Jonathan Edwards' Soteriological Perspective as Observed in his Revival Treatises

The revival treatises represent one of the most fruitful and provocative portions of the Jonathan Edwards corpus. The purpose of the treatises, considered as a whole, was (1) to provide a cogent account of the revivals which cropped up in New England in 1734–35 and agin in 1740–1743; (2) to defend the revivals to those, like Charles Chauncy, who objected to their emotional excesses or were skeptical of their validity; and (3) to encourage to moderation and humility those who were taking part in the revivals. In the course of accomplishing these objectives Edwards presents a morphology of the conversion experience, provides a basic description of his anthropology/psychology and gives an indication of the pneumatological side of his doctrine of God. We will consider each of these streams of thought briefly in terms of how they relate to Edwards' soteriology.

“In Our Nature”: The Kenotic Christology of Charles Chauncy

Charles Chauncy (1705–1787), for more than sixty years the pastor of the influential First (“Old Brick”) Church in Boston, was a leading participant in many of the greatest controversies of his century. Best known for his opposition both to Jonathan Edwards and to what he regarded as the emotional excesses of the Great Awakening, he is also well remembered for his vigorous protest against Anglican efforts to establish bishops in America. He became such an ardent champion of the colonists in their struggle for a free and independent nation that above all others he deserves the title “theologian of the American Revolution.”

The Old or the Unknown Path? A Dilemma in Colonial American Life

Many people are aware of the Great Awakening in eighteenth-century America which pitted against one another adherents of a church easing membership for a wideningly divergent group and those of a church harkening back to supposedly more exacting demands for membership. The revivalism of Jonathan Edwards in 1734 did not end at mid-century or confine itself to New England and did not stay with the Congregationalism that had developed but encompassed the Dutch Reformed and the Presbyterian churches. Soon the split in religious concepts between the more rigidly Calvinist, stressing election, predestination, and humankind's depravity, and the Arminian, opening up salvation to the faithful followers of a merciful God, led to the so-called New Lights outside the Boston area and the so-called Old Lights around the Hub. It is ironic that the New Lights were those following Edwards's ideas and seeking a return to belief in God's absolute justification of condemnation and the Old Lights were those following Charles Chauncy's more newly liberal brand of Arminianism, which led in 1782 to his influential sermon Salvation for All Men. Within the Presbyterian church a similar split led to the New Side and the Old Side. The problem within the church and the path it might take had reared up almost a century before, however, providing a seething disagreement that finally erupted overtly with Edwards's sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, the source, of course, of the name of the opposed groups just mentioned.

Charles Chauncy: A Theology in Two Portraits

Factual and theological riddles continue to cluster around Charles Chauncy (1705–1787), pastor of the First (“Old Brick”) Church in Boston and the one most deserving of the title “theologian of the American Revolution.” No one knows the exact place of his burial. It has not yet been determined whether he wrote several anonymous treatises attributed to him (including the anti-revivalistic tract A Wonderful Narrative), and in many recent publications and index files of major libraries he is still confused with his great-grandfather of the same name, the second president of Harvard University from 1654 to 1671–72.

Reviews

Reviews

The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew. John Corrigan

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew. John Corrigan Peter W. WilliamsPeter W. Williams Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 69, Number 3Jul., 1989 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/488156 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1989 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

John Corrigan. &lt;italic&gt;The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew&lt;/italic&gt;. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. xiv, 161. $29.95

Journal Article John Corrigan. The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. xiv, 161. $29.95 Get access Corrigan John. The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. xiv, 161. $29.95. Charles W. Akers Charles W. Akers Oakland University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 94, Issue 3, June 1989, Pages 846–847, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/94.3.846 Published: 01 June 1989

The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew

The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew