Theology In England Research Articles

"For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart (review)

Reviewed by: "For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart Christopher Jocks (bio) "For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart University of Massachusetts Press, 2020 WILLIAM B. HART has given us a useful, readable, well-researched history of Protestant efforts to convert Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) people to Christian religion and European culture in the eighteenth century. The account skillfully navigates the shifting sets of interests among individual and collective actors in this drama. Motives of Dutch and English participants, as well as French Catholic proselytizers to whom they are often compared, are well documented. Hart's use of performance theory to suggest the motives of Mohawk actors is a smart move but limited by his uncritical acceptance of Jesuit and other external descriptions of Mohawk and Haudenosaunee ontological, epistemological, and axiological foundations. At times the Protestant efforts appear almost comical as they are riven by disputes between adherents of Church of England theology and its English and Dutch dissenters, as they barely conceal their loathing of the very people they seek to win over. Tireless Jesuit efforts, both in the Mohawk Valley and at Kahnawà:ke, serve as an illuminating, though incomplete, contrast. We are led to the conclusion that the existence of Mohawk Protestant communities in the early nineteenth century (and today) can be credited mostly to Mohawk people themselves, as they repeatedly took control of the conversion and education process for their own reasons. The story is presented in six chapters that could remind one of a Ken Burns documentary. This is engaging storytelling, meticulously documented. Mohawk youth today will surely want to read about the heroism and intelligence of Ian, a Mohawk warrior whose English skills and Mohawk literacy, possibly gained in a missionary school, enabled him to derail the intent of an incursion of the Continental Army into Mohawk territory in 1776 (181–84; from the Schuyler Indian Papers in the New York Public Library). The story of Teyorhansere (Little Abraham) is a stark but instructive lesson on the vincibility of peaceable actions in a time of war. It is insightful to frame Mohawk participation in Protestant churches and schools as "performing Christianity," but Hart's suggestions for Mohawk motives suffer in two ways. The first is his uncritical use of English [End Page 164] translations of Jesuit terminology in chapter 1 to portray the starting point of Mohawk actors in this drama. Upstreaming is laborious and demanding work, but too great a gulf exists between external historical accounts and more recent culturally grounded discourse regarding matters such as the narratives of the origin and organization of life on earth, the origin of clans, and the Kaianeren'kó:wa (the "Great Peace" or "Great Law"). Words such as worship, supplication, sacrificial offerings, propitiation, taboos, and talismans can only mislead the reader. They have a long history in European anthropology but completely miss key structures of thought and practice as articulated by Mohawk people themselves, such as teiethinonhwerá:ton, skén:nen, ka'satsténhsera, and karihwi:io. Hart does well to quote Sakokwanionkwas/ Tom Porter on the necessity of well-grounded Mohawk interpreters of Kanien'kéha (Mohawk language) (p. 141). Jesuits and other external scholars offer no substitute. The second limitation concerns the contrast with Kahnawà:ke. (Disclaimer: This reviewer descends from and maintains family ties with that community.) As Daniel Richter documents in The Ordeal of the Longhouse (1992), Kahnawà:ke's relative strength in the eighteenth century can largely be attributed to greater security of land and prevalent (not perfect) sobriety. The consistency of Jesuit preaching and missiology and their performance of regard for Mohawk people and etiquette should be much farther down on the list of factors. Hart discusses Mohawk revitalization in the aftermath of the American Revolution and its dispersal of Mohawk people. He references Deserontyon, Red Jacket, Neolin, and Tecumseh but chooses to completely omit Handsome Lake. The reasons for this omission are not clear, but despite controversy among Mohawks today over some aspects of Handsome Lake's message, it certainly did include an unwavering focus on land and sobriety...

Lived Theology in Early Modern Britain and New England

Lived Theology in Early Modern Britain and New England

Jonathan Edwards Jr.’s Relish for True Religion: The Advance of the New England Theology in the Sermon on the Mount

Jonathan Edwards Jr. is often portrayed as a spiritless preacher who drove away his congregation with metaphysical preaching. This narrative, produced by the early liberalism of the pre-civil war era, has stuck to Edwards Jr. for nearly two hundred years. Accordingly, this narrative typically describes Edwards Jr. and his fellow New Divinity pastor-theologians as distorting the Edwardsean legacy. This essay begins to amend the inherited narrative by showing that between the younger and elder Edwards there can be no line of demarcation. In particular, the younger shares his father’s relish that true religion would flourish in his own congregation through the Holy Spirit’s influences. Since the Sermon on the Mount has been the traditional territory of theological liberalism, this research examines Edwards Jr.’s forty-six manuscripts from the Sermon on the Mount which demonstrate a strong reliance upon Religious Affections.

Theology, Plain and Simple: Biblical Hermeneutics, Language Philosophy, and Trinitarianism in the Seventeenth Century

ABSTRACTThis essay demonstrates how the hermeneutic debates of the sixteenth century continued to thrive well into the seventeenth. In particular, it considers how biblical hermeneutics made their way into perfect or universal language schemes. In a number of texts (from the pamphlets of an eccentric religious radical to the measured treatises of ecclesiastical authorities), authors pushed the early reformers’ interest in plain and simple language into schemes which purported to create a direct relationship of signifier and signified. While perfect/universal language schemes have been studied extensively by historians, the degree to which these texts are situated within long-running exegetical debates of the Reformation has largely been overlooked. Moreover, such language schemes were interlinked with theology – particularly trinitarian theology, as is exemplified in the writings of John Biddle (c. 1615–62). Studying the interconnection of perfect language and trinitarian theology reveals the imbrication of semiotics, epistemology, and theology in seventeenth-century England.

‘Grant me Grace’: Alternative Visions for Vernacular Theology and Lay Devotion in Richard Caister and Nicholas Love

Richard Caister is an important but unstudied example of vernacular theology in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Himself a priest, Caister’s extant work indicates a figure who departed from the conservative instutionalism of Thomas Arundel’s regime on two very important points: the suitability of the vernacular for theological and spiritual discourse and the necessity of auricular confession. The distinctive position Caister takes on these points can be observed best by a comparative analysis to Nicholas Love’s theological work which provided a theological rationale for Arundel’s restrictive legislation, articulating a negative view of the vernacular and of the capacity of the laity which endorsed lay dependence upon their Latinate clergy. This article argues that Caister provides an important alternative vision for vernacular theology and the laity predicated upon a thorough Christocentrism.

Re-Thinking Atonement in Jonathan Edwards and New England Theology

Abstract Jonathan Edwards′ New England theology has a great deal more to say that is of contemporary doctrinal interest than it is often credited with, particularly as it relates to the doctrine of atonement. This article explores several anomalous claims made be this 18th and 19th century tradition, and in this way, challenges the recent and growing consensus that Edwards espoused the penal substitution model and his successors a moral government model. I argue that of all that is yet to be considered about their doctrine of atonement, we ought to begin with those claims made about the nature and demands of divine justice.

After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney

After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology, edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney

Thomas Müntzer (c. 1489-1525)

Thomas Münzter, who died in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1525, was remembered as the revolutionary firebrand of the Reformation. His theology is an important component of early modern theology, with its mix of the mystical and the apocalyptic, prioritising experience of God, and its subordination of Scripture and tradition to that experience. His legacy in terms of intellectual history has been more far-reaching than appears, evincing a pattern of religion which was to have a significant impact, albeit indirectly, on revolutionary theology in England in the seventeenth century and later.

After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology. Edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xviii + 348 pp. $99.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of England . Edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney . York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xviii + 348 pp. $99.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesThis collection of seventeen essays is presented as a corrective to a position first articulated almost a ago by Joseph Haroutunian in Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of England (New York: Henry Holt, 1932), a classic text that contributed in large part to twentieth-century resurgence of interest in academic study of Jonathan Edwards. Taking my copy of this text from shelf, where it had most likely rested unopened since graduate school, I was surprised to discover on flyleaf strong signature of influential Presbyterian theologian himself. I also easily located in its introduction a strong statement of view essays in After Jonathan Edwards aim to counter: seen from perspective of theology of Edwards, writes Haroutunian, the history of England is history of a degradation (xxii).Coined in nineteenth century, term New England Theology refers to a theological tradition whose diverse members promoted a style of evangelical Calvinism that, although doctrinally distinctive, claimed allegiance to thought of Jonathan Edwards. Following Haroutunian, growth of this theological tradition has commonly been framed not as development, but as decline. As collection's editors, Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney, observe, the England theology is a tale of ever more arid and abstruse metaphysical theorizing on basis of an original, and intellectually dynamic, Edwardsian deposit (5). Contrary to this declension narrative, they assert this tradition is the most significant and enduring Christian theological school of thought to have originated in United States (4). The essays in this volume support this contention by considering not only development and importance of England in nineteenth-century America but also international reach of its theological vision.The collection is divided into three sections. The first places intellectual and theological concerns of Edwards's immediate successors, called Divinity, in a larger context. The essays written by Mark Valeri and James P. Byrd draw interesting connections between this theological school and issues of broader historical concern. Valeri shifts attention from doctrine to method by arguing that a distinguishing feature of Edwardsian thought was its promotion of the culture of gentility that defined rules of Anglo-American social discourse during second half of eighteenth century (18). Byrd explores theological roots of Edwardsian anti-slavery activism, which at times placed Divinity in conflict with genteel England society. Crisp's essay, by contrast, stands out for directly challenging a central element of declension thesis, development of a governmental doctrine of atonement, which Haroutunian considered symptomatic of degraded moralism of England theology. To undermine this claim Crisp argues that the seeds of England governmental view of atonement were sown by Edwards himself, and that precedents exist for this view in earlier Reform thought (78).The essays in volume's second section are each devoted to prominent representatives of England Theology, from Samuel Hopkins to Edwards Amasa Park. …

After Jonathan Edwards. The course of the New England theology. Edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. Pp. xvii+339. New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. £22.50 (paper). 978 0 19 975629 2; 978 0 19 975630 8

After Jonathan Edwards. The course of the New England theology. Edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney. Pp. xvii+339. New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. £22.50 (paper). 978 0 19 975629 2; 978 0 19 975630 8 - Volume 65 Issue 1

The Once and Future Herod: Vernacular Typology and the Unfolding of Middle English Cycle Drama

From the writings of early Church Fathers through the twelfth century, Herod the Great was considered an exemplar of arrogance as madness, a role that is expanded in the English cycle plays of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. In the York, Chester, N-Town, Towneley, and Coventry plays, Herod’s keen historical foresight betrays his awareness of the unfolding of Christian eschatology. The predetermined failure of his own actions to prevent the ascendancy of Christ suggest the impotence of a non-Christian future. Herod’s performances align deviance with knowledge, reaffirming faith and humility as the governing ethics of Christian epistemology. As a medium through which playwrights develop a kind of vernacular typology, the dramatic Herod testifies to the vitality of cycle drama within the landscape of fifteenth-century vernacular theology in England.

John Baconthorpe on Soul, Body and Extension

John Baconthorpe (c.1290-1345/8) was the best-known of the Carmelite scholastics in the Middle Ages. This article is a brief study of his solution to the philosophical problem of how the soul may be wholly present in the human body and present whole and undivided in each part. Baconthorpe’s account is of great interest for a number of reasons. He takes issue with one of his fellow Carmelite masters, alerting us to diversity of opinion within that ‘school’. Furthermore, in using terminology and illustrative analogies drawn from terminist logic and the mathematical sciences, Baconthorpe is an important witness to what has been described as the ‘mathematization’ of philosophy and theology in late medieval England. Finally, study of Baconthorpe’s texts provides further evidence of the emergence of the theme of extension in fourteenth-century thought in which we can discern the roots of modern philosophical debate.

"Under Their Captivity & Dispersion": The Story of Boston's First Jewish Business Venture

Fascination with Jews and Jewish history was a mainstay of early New England theology. As the centralizing influence of church orthodoxy waned during the early decades of the eighteenth century, however, the Judaic interests of Bostonians took on an economic rather than a religious cast. In the entrepreneurial and often reckless spirit of the times, in which magnificent opulence and indebtedness appeared to be two sides of the same coin, the activities of Jewish merchants, both within the city's confines and throughout the broader Atlantic, reified Bostonians' multiplying economic misgivings. The activities of Jewish merchants took on a new symbolic importance that matched seventeenth-century New Englanders' fascination with "the rabbins of old." Newspapers carried tidings of Jewish mercantile activity in England, on the Continent, and in the Americas, and these stories often emphasized the enterprising spirit that resulted in Jewish prosperity. Meanwhile, the arrival in Boston, beginning in 1716, of a loosely affiliated group of Sephardic traders represented the formation of that city's first Jewish business community. Though its tenure and overall influence were relatively short-lived, the development of a mercurial Sephardic mercantilism in Massachusetts, coinciding as it did with the chaos and volatility of market conditions in Boston, suggests a new and telling parallel between Jews and New Englanders.

Hanging between heaven and earth. Capital crime, execution preaching, and theology in early New England. By Scott D. Seay. Pp. xi+217. DeKalb, Il: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. $36. 978 0 87580 402 6

Hanging between heaven and earth. Capital crime, execution preaching, and theology in early New England. By Scott D. Seay. Pp. xi+217. DeKalb, Il: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. $36. 978 0 87580 402 6 - Volume 62 Issue 3

Scott D. Seay . Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England . DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 217. $36.00.

This short book effectively blends intellectual and social history in a way that sheds important light on early New England religion, political culture, and the processes of crime and punishment. Examining these topics from the founding of Massachusetts to the early national period, Scott D. Seay surveys what preachers at public executions said about the sources of crime (human sinfulness), the possibility of criminal redemption, and the responsibilities of civil government in the punishment of crime. In a conclusion, the author seeks to identify what can be learned by exploring the questions early Americans asked about these issues and the answers that they gave. Seay begins with an excellent overview of the role that public education and execution sermons played in England and New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He explains the criminal procedure, the sentencing, and the rituals of the execution day and offers a clear analysis of such events as public spectacles that could draw as many as twelve thousand spectators, as was reported to be the case with a 1772 execution in Salem.

Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. By Scott D. Seay. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. xi + 217 pp. $36.00 cloth.

Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. By Scott D. Seay. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. xi + 217 pp. $36.00 cloth.

Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England (review)

Reviewed by: Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England Adrian Weimer Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. By Scott D. Seay. (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 217. $36.00. ISBN 978-0-875-80402-6.) New Englanders witnessed 460 public executions before the early-nineteenth century, when legal theory, theology, and middle-class sensibilities converged to confine the ritual to a private space. In the able hands of Scott D. Seay the sermons accompanying these executions provide fruitful material for understanding changing attitudes toward criminals and sin in early New England. A study rich in its longitudinal scope and detailed analysis, Hanging between Heaven and Earth mines these sermons for insight into crime literature, religious and political thought, and the historical ethics of capital punishment. Protestant ministers knew their execution sermons would reach an enormous audience. Increase Mather’s sermon on the execution of James Morgan [End Page 611] in 1686 packed the large Old North Church so tightly that “the walls of the gallery began to crack under the weight of the audience.” Instead of canceling the event, the crowd, perhaps numbering 5000, moved to Old South Church and its environs to hear the rest of the sermon (pp. 24–25).What were these kinds of crowds hearing? Seay argues that while the basic literary structure of the execution sermons remained constant, the message changed significantly when ministers considered the reasons for crime, the possibility for dramatic conversions, and the purpose of civil government itself. Espousing a strong view of hereditary sin, early New England ministers encouraged “moral identification” between the condemned and onlookers. For example, in 1721 Cotton Mather asked the crowd if the man to be executed was “the only One that may be charged with Murdering his Wife among us.” No, Mather preached, “all husbands who speak harshly to their wives, fail to provide them with sufficient food, or break their hearts . . . are guilty of murdering them” (p. 54). Seay finds that the early preachers saw noncriminals as restrained from literal murder only by God’s grace, not because of any innate moral difference between a person in the crowd and the murderer on the scaffold. Criminals were providentially denied this restraining grace in a slippery slope of small sins leading to larger ones—a progression into which any citizen could slide. In early New England, ministers and magistrates largely agreed on the efficacy of the “gruesome displays” at the scaffold to communicate a moral warning and to cleanse the community of guilt and discord. In the eighteenth century, communities put increasing pressure on the condemned person to experience an emotional repentance. Laypeople and ministers increased their efforts to facilitate his or her conversion through prison visits and communal prayers, and legislated further delay between arrest and execution. In the context of evangelical revivalism “when the condemned failed to achieve repentance or actively refused to strive after it, the ritual virtually was robbed of its significance entirely” (p. 44).When they did convert, however, these redeemed criminals became exemplars, held up for the entire community to emulate. Seay argues convincingly that execution sermons in New England showed marked change in the early national period as ministers absorbed John Locke and John Taylor’s exegetical and philosophical arguments for humans as “independent moral agents” and for guilt as “nontransferable” (p. 62). Many sermons adopted a new view of human sinfulness which saw crime as a result of individual choice rather than inherited human depravity. This emphasis on individual responsibility led to a qualitative difference between capital criminals and ordinary people. Sermons on the executions of blacks, who led in condemnations for rape and arson, intensified this rhetoric of difference. The trope of the morally “peculiar” criminal accompanied calls for renewed efforts in moral education. God’s restraining grace was no longer so mysterious—it worked through “religious education and proper family government” (p. 74). [End Page 612] Pennsylvania reformers, especially Quakers, led the effort to change how criminals were treated, working to establish penitentiaries as well as to limit the scope of capital punishment and to...

James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England - By Alan Ford Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn - Anthony Milton

James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England - By Alan Ford Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn - Anthony Milton

James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England. By ALAN FORD.

James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England. By ALAN FORD.

Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. By Scott D. Seay. (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 217. $36.00.)

Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. By Scott D. Seay. (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 217. $36.00.)