Evangelical Beliefs Research Articles

The Reformation between Deconstruction and Reconstruction: Reflections on Recent Writings on the German Reformation

We have come a long way since Thomas Carlyle could declare, ‘The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its rise.’ The days when the sage of Ecclefechan could stylize Luther as the ‘Hero as Priest’ are long gone,1 and accounts of the Reformation which ascribed the victory of Protestantism to manifest destiny, or indeed to the hand of God, have expired and are now unlikely to be resurrected, except by right-wing American fundamentalists. Amongst historians, pluralism, gradualism and uncertainty have become watchwords in interpreting the spread of evangelical beliefs. Yet the cooling of religious ardour in a post-Christian age, when it has become politically incorrect to profess anything other than ecumenical principles, has led to no visible lessening of interest in the Reformation, whatever we understand it to be. A glance over the past fifteen years reveals a profusion of new textbooks with ambitious titles and encompassing agendas: Euan Cameron led the way with The European Reformation, Carter Lindberg followed with The European Reformations; then came James Tracy's Europe's Reformations, 1450–1650, Andrew Pettegree's The Reformation World, Peter Wallace's The Long European Reformation … 1350–1750, Ronnie Hsia's compendium, A Companion to the Reformation World, and most recently Diarmaid MacCulloch’s, Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490–1700, Ulinka Rublack's Reformation Europe and Andrew Pettegree's Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion.2 The use of the plural by Lindberg and Tracy (not to mention the extra-European dimension consciously essayed in Hsia's and MacCulloch's volumes), and the increasingly attenuated chronological span evident in Wallace's and MacCulloch's subtitles, show that the Reformation is now seen not as an event but as a process, whose outcome was neither predictable nor predetermined. This view of the Reformation as a subset of Darwinian evolutionary biology may now be in the ascendant, but it has not been able entirely to submerge the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s, which focused on the Reformation's ‘storm years’ in the German cities, the raging pamphlet wars, and its links to social revolution. This early Reformation has been addressed within the last decade or so only by Andrew Pettegree's The Early Reformation in Europe, by Owen Chadwick's The Early Reformation on the Continent, by the avowedly cultural approach in Rublack's Reformation Europe, and for Germany by the papers edited by Bernd Moeller in Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch (‘The Early Reformation in Germany as Upheaval’).3

PEELING BACK THE EVANGELICAL ONION: WORLDVIEWS AND WORLD AFFAIRS

Trends in evangelical culture can be seen through a case study of evangelical laypersons and missionaries from the Pacific Northwest. While the outward dimension of mission work has changed, including more emphasis on cultural assimilation and a liberalizing view of the role of women, the core object of evangelicals' missions—conversion—remains intact. There are four layers of evangelical missionary belief structures: personal relationship with Jesus Christ, personal morality, economic and political positions, and customs and lifestyles. American evangelical missionaries tend tolaunch a strong moral critique of a society, but a more limited socio-political critique, and often conflate religion with nationalism.

The Healing of Mercy Wheeler: Illness and Miracles among Early American Evangelicals

N January 5, 1744, evangelical minister Nicholas Gilman of Durham, New Hampshire, noted in his diary that he had read the Wonderfull Narrative of Mercy Wheeler her Miraculous recovery-Glory to God. The same day in Westborough, Massachusetts, the Reverend Ebenezer Parkman recorded in his diary that Meeting relating the Story of Mercy Wheeler of Plainfield her wonderful Recovery, Mrs. Whitney Scarcely Contains. The healing of invalid Mercy Wheeler of Plainfield, Connecticut, caused a great stir in the late stages of the Great Awakening and raised questions about the Holy Spirit's work in a postapostolic age. For two centuries Reformed theologians had generally agreed on the doctrine of cessationism, which held that miracles such as instant physical healings had ceased after the apostolic era. There were a few examples of dramatic healings during the Reformation, perhaps the most famous being Philip Melanchthon's deathbed healing by the prayers of Martin Luther. In the 1740s, however, leaders of the evangelical movement placed a new emphasis on the Holy Spirit's workings, and many began to believe that the Spirit's indwelling presence could have powerful bodily effects. A few even thought that the Spirit might instantly heal physical ailments. An examination of Wheeler's healing, and other cases like it, illuminates tensions within the developing evangelical belief in the Holy Spirit's power in the bodies of believers. Radical evangelicals, eager to link their experiences to the wonders of the apostolic era or the glories of the coming millennial age, embraced dramatic bodily effects, including instant healings. Moderates hesitated to call the remarkable miraculous, since to do so deviated from the orthodox Reformed position concerning God's workings in the world and smacked of Catholic superstition (Figure I).1

Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 1921–1998. By Patrick Mitchel. Pp. xii + 362. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. isbn 0 19 925615 2. £60

Patrick Mitchel is Lecturer in Theology at the Irish Bible Institute, and his study of Evangelicalism in Northern Ireland between 1921 and 1998 is as much a contribution to theology as to history. His ultimate aim is to suggest how Christians, and especially Evangelical Christians, should behave in this intensely political situation. At the heart of the book is a protest against the popular identification of Ian Paisley as the representative figure of ‘Evangelicalism’ in Ulster. The Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Mitchel says, has lost its traditional social and religious dominance and faces a daunting challenge in regaining a distinct, independent identity. He admits, with regret, that ‘the evidence suggests that the [Presbyterian] Church has been shaped by the conflict between Unionism and Nationalism more than it has been shaped by an alternative to that conflict’. Twentieth-century Presbyterianism had to struggle against both ‘liberal theology’ and against the political attractiveness of the Orange Order. Mitchel distinguishes between what he calls the ‘closed’, fundamentalist Evangelicalism of Paisley's Democratic Unionism, which is, he says, attracted by the ‘tribal nationalism’ of the Orange Order and willing to legitimize nationalist objectives with its own version of Evangelical belief and imagery, and an ‘open’ style Evangelicalism, less obsessed with fundamentalism and prepared to accept the Good Friday agreement as a positive step towards political and religious peace.

Attempting Valid Assessment of Spiritual Growth: A Survey of Christ-centered Living*

In an effort to document spiritual growth as an aspect of the mission of our university, we sought to implement sound assessment procedures so that students' specific spiritual needs might be identified. First, we evaluated our university's spirituality focus and potential matching assessments. No existing instrument completely fit our needs, so we coordinated in our community to create a survey of Christ-centered living rooted in evangelical beliefs. The assessment of 110 freshmen and 65 seminarians yielded high internal consistency, good test-retest reliability, significant group differences, and concurrent validity. This work is a needed addition to the literature. More importantly, our methods, instrument, and recommendations could empower Christian educators to mentor students with a more precise knowledge of their spiritual needs.

The Moral Minority: Evangelical Protestants in Northern Ireland and Their Political Behaviour

It has long been asserted that strong evangelical religious beliefs underpin strong unionist and loyalist political attitudes in Northern Ireland. Although recent literature has argued for a wide diversity of political attitudes amongst evangelicals, this has not been quantified. Based on analysis of the 1991 Northern Irish Social Attitudes Survey and the 1998 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, this article argues that evangelicals are attitudinally different to other Protestants in Northern Ireland. However, their distinctiveness arises from their conservative moral attitudes and not, as widely claimed, from stronger unionist political values. Indeed, in terms of party identification, in 1991 evangelicals were less likely than other Protestants to support the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). And although there has been a small shift towards the DUP over the course of the 1990s, it is not due to any strengthening of the unionism of evangelicals, but rather the increasing importance of moral conservatism in predicting voters' party choice in Northern Ireland.

Olympia Morata. The Complete Writings of an an Italian Heretic (review)

Reviewed by: Olympia Morata. The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic John Tedeschi Olympia Morata. The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic. Edited and Translated by Holt N. Parker. [The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.] (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xxxiii, 275. $22.50 paperback.) The short life of Olympia Morata, the literary prodigy who died in Heidelberg late in 1555, not yet twenty-nine years of age, far from the court of Ferrara, where she was raised and educated, has never ceased to amaze. It caught the imagination of contemporaries and continues to spark the interest of modern scholars. Olympia, a member of the entourage of the sometime Calvinist Duchess Renée, the French wife of Duke Ercole II Este, became deeply steeped in classical languages and culture thanks to the instruction she received from her father, Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, an admired humanist teacher in Ferrara, Mantua, and Vicenza, and his learned friends, Celio Calcagnini and Celio Secondo Curione, among others. But from her father and from Curione Olympia also imbibed Erasmian ideals and the doctrines of the Reformation. After her marriage to a young medical student at Ferrara, Andreas Grunthler, she returned with him to his native Germany. In Schweinfurt, his hometown, they experienced a siege by imperial forces where the young couple lost all their belongings, including Olympia's few writings, mostly poetry and translations. Olympia died in October, 1555, in Heidelberg, where Grunthler had obtained a post in the university. Curione, who himself had preceded Morata into exile because of his evangelical beliefs and had settled in Basel, where he combined a life of teaching and editing classical and humanist texts with writing tracts against the Church of Rome, set about collecting what literary remains and letters of Olympia's he could retrieve from their mutual friends and admirers. A few verse compositions which Olympia reconstructed from memory on her deathbed were forwarded to Curione by her husband. Curione published what he had managed to gather up in four successive editions of her writings, appearing with slightly differing titles between 1558 and 1570 in Basel through the presses of his friend and fellow exile, Pietro Perna (a letter or two from Morata to Curione had been published by the latter in an edition of his own correspondence appearing two years before her death, in 1553). The volume under review, meticulously edited and beautifully translated into English by a classical scholar whose training is revealed on every page, contains the materials from the Basel editions of Olympia's writings along with complementary pieces gleaned from Lanfranco Caretti's modern Italian, and Rainer Kössling's and Gertrud Weiss-Stählin's German editions of her works, as well as an occasional manuscript discovery. The collection consists of "documents," contemporary or near-contemporary letters serving as testimonies to Olympia's piety and learning; the dedications by Curione to his editions of her Opera;"juvenilia" (poems, orations, dialogues, translations) that she wrote between ages 12 and 14; letters from the Italian and German phases of her life; poetry and psalm translations into classical Greek, concluding with poems, tributes, and [End Page 552] epitaphs by the many men of letters who had admired her, written during her lifetime as well as after her death. The volume closes with a full bibliography of the primary and secondary literature, marred somewhat by several typographical slips. Although most are easily recognizable, the entry for Capori (p. 233) may prevent the reader from identifying the true author of a study on Fulvio Morato, Giuseppe Campori. And, curiously, the name of Olympia's friend and patron, Celio Secondo Curione, here always given in the Latin form, Caelius Secundus Curio, inexplicably turns up as "Caius Secundus Curio" in the entries where Curione appears as editor of Morata's Opera (p. 230). The contribution of the present edition might have been even greater if Morata's life and contributions had been put in a larger context. In her move to northern Europe religionis causa and her cultivation of the muses, she was not an isolated figure but an integral participant in a great scholarly migration. Italian evangelical exiles, many of whom...

Lasting Success for the Christian in Business

In the early 1990s I began interviewing evangelical CEOs for my book Believers in Business (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1994).1 This was the first time I had researched religion and business ethics, and my question then was simple: Is there a connection between evangelical belief and running a for-profit corporation? How does Christian faith influence busi ness leadership? I recall that most academicians thought my question to be either a radical criticism or a totally clueless inquiry, on the identical assumption that the answer was already obvious: not at all. The general thinking was that business had no ethics, or if it did, that modern economic life had secularized all that was once sacred in the business worldview and American culture. The latter view had, of course, been notably articulated by Harvey Cox in his book, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965), an assertion that had caused Time magazine to declare God was dead. In 1967 my colleague Peter Berger made the famous observation that the sacred canopy once protecting and governing American public life had been torn in two. The dominant modern worldview of sheer rationality had led to a disenchantment of the world (The Sacred Canopy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967). Many managers and business professors felt that this was as it should be. Presumably, there would be less possibility of irrationality (read, unprofitability) or intolerance (read, end of Protestant establishment) in decision-making, which would presumably result in better economics and better ethics in business.

The Virgin Mary in the Reign of Mary Tudor

Evidence of devotion to the Virgin Mary in the restored Catholic Church of the reign of Mary Tudor survives in numerous religious texts published from 1553 to 1558. These sermons, catechetical texts, primers, and books of devotion and polemic were written to aid the restoration of early modern Catholicism in England after twenty years of religious tumult. By considering how these texts treat devotion to Mary, it is possible to answer two questions. First, was the cult of the saints in Marian England, particularly that of the Virgin, ‘one of [t]he abiding casualties of the preceding reformations’, as Ronald Hutton has argued from the few gilds and pilgrimage centres restored during this period? Secondly, does devotion to the Virgin present any clues as to the nature of the Marian Church? Did it hark back to the Church of the 1520s? Did it embrace much evangelical belief and eschew much traditional religion, as Lucy Wooding argues in her recent monograph? Or was it akin to the Catholic Reformation in Europe? In order to answer these questions, it would be useful to begin by evaluating two texts that possessed semi-official status in the Marian Church, the use and frequent printing of which were encouraged by the likes of Cardinal Pole: Bishop Edmund Bonner of London’s catechetical work, A Profitable Doctryne, and the Wayland Primer, both printed in 1555.

MISSIO DEI–ITS DEVELOPMENT AND LIMITATIONS IN KOREA

International Review of MissionVolume 92, Issue 367 p. 538-549 MISSIO DEI–ITS DEVELOPMENT AND LIMITATIONS IN KOREA Chai Soo-il, Chai Soo-il Soo-Il Chai is professor for Mission and the Science of Religion at the Korea Theological Institute, Seoul, South Korea.Search for more papers by this author Chai Soo-il, Chai Soo-il Soo-Il Chai is professor for Mission and the Science of Religion at the Korea Theological Institute, Seoul, South Korea.Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 March 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6631.2003.tb00427.x AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume92, Issue367October 2003Pages 538-549 RelatedInformation

From Vision to Testimony: Cranach's Weimar Altarpiece

This article analyzes how the Weimar Altarpiece by Cranach the Elder and Cranach the Younger interprets evangelical (Lutheran) belief and practice. The Weimar Altarpiece redefines the relationships between human and holy, or, more specifically, the pictorial channels through which people approached God. By employing new, evangelical iconography in the format of the traditional retable, the Weimar Altarpiece transformed the function of a familiar pictorial type, adapting it to an evangelical context. The proximity of human and holy figures in the central panel, familiar from earlier religious painting, indicates a freshly defined relationship between viewer and image. The retable demonstrates evangelical salvation as the experience of the donor, viewer, and the artist himself. The Weimar Altarpiece connects the two-dimensional image and the experience of the viewer in radically new ways, marking the convergence of testimony and didacticism which are the defining features of evangelical art.

American Monster: How the Nation's First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity

In 1801, the first complete mastodon skeleton was excavated in the Hudson River Valley, marking the climax of a century-long debate in America and Europe over the identity of a mysterious creature known as the American Incognitum. Long before the dinosaurs were discovered and the notion of geological time acquired currency, many citizens of the new republic believed this mythical beast to be a ferocious carnivore, capable of crushing deer and elk in its monstrous grinders. During the American Revolution, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson avidly collected its bones; for the founding fathers, its massive jaws symbolized the violence of the natural world and the emerging nation's own dreams of conquest. Paul Semonin's lively history of this icon of American nationalism focuses on the link between patriotism and prehistoric nature. From the first fist-sized tooth found in 1705, which Puritan clergyman claimed was evidence of human giants, to the scientific racialism associated with the discovery of extinct species, Semonin traces the evangelical beliefs, Enlightenment thought, and Indian myths which led the founding fathers to view this prehistoric monster as a symbol of nationhood. Semonin also sees the mystery of the mastodon in early America as a cautionary tale about the first flowering of our narcissistic fascination with a prehistoric nature ruled by ferocious carnivores. As such, American Monster offers fresh insights into the genesis of the ongoing fascination with dinosaurs.

Digital Libraries and the Problem of Purpose

L'auteur s'interroge sur le chemin a suivre dans la recherche et le developpement des bibliotheques electroniques aujourd'hui aux Etats-Unis, ce qui revient a poser la question du but reellement poursuivi dans cette entreprise. Il examine la facon dont cette question d'objectif se pose, dans une perspective historique, d'abord dans les bibliotheques publiques, puis dans les bibliotheques d'enseignement superieur et de recherche, avant de se pencher sur le cas des bibliotheques (ou collections) electroniques proprement dites.

Values Affecting Collaboration among Psychologists and Evangelical Clergy

Previous research has shown that shared values are important to both clergy and psychologists when considering the possibility of collaborating with one another, but it is not clear which values must be shared. Eighty-one psychologists and 56 evangelical Protestant clergy were surveyed using a values questionnaire developed by Jensen and Bergin (1988) with some additional items specifically pertaining to evangelical beliefs, revealing differences within value themes between clergy and psychologists. The epistemological foundations of the two professions create obstacles to collaboration, suggesting a need for psychologists to develop trusting relationships with clergy, engage in specialized training, and reevaluate the postmodern distinction between facts in the public domain and privately held values.

Evangelical Christianity, Secular Humanism, and the Genesis of British Social Work

This paper is a reappraisal of the Christian origins of social work and, as such, is a contribution to writing the profession's history. It examines the competing ideological roots of the concept of 'social work' which emerged in late nineteenth-century Britain, and the extent to which they are derived from the Christian charitable tradition or its secular transformation. Two features of early social work are examined in particular depth: its moral purpose in relation to the Evangelical belief in charity as an instrument of spiritual revival; and its rational methods in relation to secular beliefs about the possibility of personal and social change. Much of the paper focuses on the ideological and institutional relationship between the emerging activity of social work and Evangelical revivalism which formed the context for most late nineteenth-century philanthropy. The crisis of faith experienced by Victorian intel lectuals is a significant motif throughout this period. This is not an attempt to rewrite the history of social work, but to re-examine neglected features in its origins: Evangelical Christianity and its secular humanist transformation. In doing so, it is hoped to throw light on the recent revival of interest in the importance of religion to social work.

Defoe: Writer as Agent, and: Defoe and the New Sciences, and: Finance and Fictionality in the Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe, and: Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses

Reviewed by: Defoe: Writer as Agent, and: Defoe and the New Sciences, and: Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe, and: Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses David Blewett Katherine A. Armstrong. Defoe: Writer as Agent. Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies Monograph Series, 1996. Pp. 156. Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi + 196. $54.95 Sandra Sherman. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 222. $54.95. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson, eds. Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses. London: St Martin’s Press, 1996. Pp. xviii + 328. Defoe stocks have been doing exceptionally well in a bullish market. Even the decision by a leading firm of discount brokers to unload nearly 50 percent of their Defoe shares has done nothing to dampen enthusiasm. Three new accounts under review here are demonstrations of this impressive market vitality, while a fourth, the transactions of a conference held in 1993, examines the runaway success story of a single product of a prolific industry giant. The three studies of Defoe’s writings are all strongly historical, albeit in quite different ways. By “Writer as Agent,” Katherine Armstrong refers to Defoe’s role as both a political agent (that is, spy) and, through his writing, a “practical agent of historical change” (27). Rejecting the widely accepted perception of Defoe as “protean,” a view enshrined in John Robert Moore’s biography and bibliography, she argues that “there are no rational grounds for continuing to foster the image of Defoe as a counterfeiting upstart who repeatedly changed sides with an eye to the main chance.” Rather, his political beliefs were consistent, even if the expression of them “was sometimes deliberately equivocal” (14). It is probably the case that Defoe’s deviousness, even though he had that reputation in his own day, has been exaggerated, and that a reading of his novels and other writings from a political standpoint might produce interesting results. Unfortunately, in her introduction Armstrong manages to tie her argument in knots, arguing both that Defoe’s “political beliefs were coherent in themselves” (14) and that they possessed “fundamental contradictions and weaknesses” (27). By doing so, she needlessly hobbles her own argument. The antiformalist premise that “all Defoe’s novels were shaped first and foremost by their political and historical circumstances” (90) drives her consideration of five novels, with predictably mixed results. Exposing the political ideology works best in the Memoirs of a Cavalier, where the Cavalier’s behavior in the Civil War and the Thirty Years’ War uncovers the [End Page 543] motives of the royalists and implicitly justifies the Revolutionary Settlement of 1688; it works somewhat less well in Captain Singleton, where the little world of the pirates may be read as a comment upon the larger world, particularly with regard to such political questions as absolutism, contractual government, and the control of property. It really does not work very well at all in Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Robinson Crusoe. The omission of Roxana, often seen these days as Defoe’s most intriguing novel, is unexplained, and its absence seriously qualifies the book’s thesis. One of Defoe’s reasons for writing Moll Flanders may have been to warn his readers about rising crime, particularly in London, as Armstrong avers, but if so, Moll is scarcely “the Georgian equivalent of the ‘urban guerrilla’ who terrorises twentieth-century cities” (70). And in a commentary so much concerned with crime in the 1720s, it is strange to find no mention of John Beattie, a leading authority in this area. Consideration of Robinson Crusoe is put off to the final chapter, essentially because it does not fit her framework: “Defoe’s political interests . . . cannot account for” Robinson Crusoe; “it is irreducible to anything remotely like a tract or a treatise” (113). Nonetheless, Armstrong tries valiantly to wrench Crusoe into the picture: “Robinson Crusoe was intended first and foremost as an indirect rejoinder to the proposals of the South Sea Company for dealing with the national debt in 1719” (114). Or again, “Everything in Robinson Crusoe . . . derives from Defoe’s evangelical belief in...

The Politics of Black Evangelicals

Despite the fact that African Americans hold evangelical beliefs, belong to evangelical denominations, and show high levels of religiosity, Black Evangelicals do not mobilize with the Christian Right. By evaluating two major theories of evangelical mobilization, the data demonstrate that the major reason for this is not primarily a lack of conservative positions on family values issues but major differences in affect toward highly visible groups that provide much of the content of symbolic political attitudes.

Resurgent Evangelicalism in the United States: Mapping Cultural Change Since 1970

In this look at evangelicalism in the United States, the author contests the widely ascribed southernization of American thesis, or the idea that the recent resurgence of born-again Christianity represents the spread of southern-style religion from the historically conservative, Protestant South to America's mainstream. He argues that even as evangelicalism changes the face of American culture, it is transformed by its encounter with secularism. The price of success for born-again Christianity, according to the author, is cultural accommodation. He contends that evangelicalism forfeits some of its southernness - including its moral strictness - in order to thrive outside the South, and adds that congregations that embrace secular elements of the surrounding culture grow more rapidly than those that hold tightly to traditional evangelical beliefs. Disagreeing with some recent obituaries of the New Christian Right, he suggests that evangelicalism will continue to have a significant effect on American culture in the foreseeable future, but not in the domineering way once feared by the liberal cultural establishment.

Jonathan Belcher, Colonial governor

Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor. By Michael C. Batinski. Lexington, 1996 (University Press of Kentucky, 603 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008). In cloth $29.95. Jonathan Belcher (1683-1757) will be known to most readers of this journal as the Governor of Massachusetts (1730-1741) who played factional politics with a vengeance and was undone by the even greater guile of partisans of his successor, William Shirley, during the Land Bank Crisis. Batinski's achievement, although he does not slight Belcher the politician, is to position him skillfully at the intersection of the history of several colonies and several worlds. The author is thereby able to use Belcher as a representative figure whose varied activities illuminate the nature of provincial America during the early eighteenth century. The son of a self-made, domineering Boston merchant who sent him on a tour of Europe in his early twenties, Belcher obtained a cosmopolitan perspective on his native land and its place in the imperial firmament denied to most of his generation. The experience gave him a keen appreciation of the need to cultivate favor at court -- which he did at times with nauseating obsequiousness -- but also renewed devotion to the piety of his ancestors. Listening from youth to the sermons of Puritan ministers who cast the ideal ruler as a latter-day Nehemiah, symbolically restoring the chosen people to their true origins, Belcher went out of his way to promote Indian missions, check the progress of Anglicanism, support the Quakers (who were instrumental in 1746 in obtaining his appointment as Governor of New Jersey), and further the activities of evangelicals such as Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts and Aaron Burr in New Jersey. The crowning achievement of his life was shepherding through a contentious and divided provincial legislature the charter of the College of New Jersey, which is now known as Princeton University. Batinski tries to make sense of Belcher's multi-faceted and paradoxical if not contradictory life, but one gets the feeling he is attempting a hopeless task. Belcher bullied his own two sons as he had been bullied by his father: they did not marry until they were nearly fifty years old. Despite his evangelical beliefs and devotion to Massachusetts, he spent thousands of pounds supporting Jonathan, Jr. in the British Isles, including a futile bid for a seat in the House of Commons With his own father Andrew he was attacked by Boston mobs for exporting grain during food shortages, a selfish lapse from his professed devotion to his native land. …

Evangelical beliefs, attitudes towards schooling and educational outcomes

Evangelical beliefs, attitudes towards schooling and educational outcomes