The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-819 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
New Divinity

The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the modern American Protestant missionary spirit to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his self-appointed heirs, those Congregational ministers who came to be called New Divinity men. Edwards proposed a theology of cosmic redemption and supplied the exemplary missionary model in Life of Brainerd (1749), his most popular and most frequently reprinted work. Samuel Hopkins then furnished a theological rationale for missions by revising Edwards' aesthetic concept of “disinterested benevolence” into a practical one of self-denial for the greater glory of God's kingdom and the betterment of humankind.

Abandoned Quarries

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early National ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Period

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.

The New Divinity and Williams College, 1793-1836*

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
Religious Faith ◽  
Narrative Text ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Formal Organization ◽  
Williams College ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Missionary Movement

The story is a familiar one, found in nearly every narrative text of American religious history In the summer of 1806, five Williams College students met in a grove of trees to pray for divine guidance and to discuss their religious faith and calling. While seeking refuge from a summer rainstorm under a haystack, Samuel J. Mills, Jr., and the other four students consecrated their lives to overseas missions. This incident, later publicized as the Haystack Prayer Meeting, became the pivotal event in the launching of American Protestantism's foreign missionary movement. Mills and several comrades carried their vision from Williams to Andover Theological Seminary, where they created a more formal organization that eventually led to the establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810. In the hagiography of missions, Mills is revered as the “father” of American foreign missions and Williams as the birthplace. Subsequently, Mills's “sons”—the alumni of Williams—followed precedent: from 1810 to 1840, Williams provided more missionaries to the ABCFM than any other American College.

scholarly journals Continuing Revelation and Institutionalization: Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charismatic Leadership in Antebellum America

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 233-253
Author(s):  
Claudia Jetter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Continuing Revelation

Nineteenth-century North American religious history is filled with divinely inspired people who received and recorded new revelations. This article presents Joseph Smith Jr and Ralph Waldo Emerson as charismatic prophets who promoted the idea of continuing revelation. Drawing on Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority, it will contrast their forms of new sacred writing with one another to show how both had experienced encounters with the divine. The second part will then explore how different conceptualizations of revelation led to opposing concepts of religious authority, with consequences for the possibility of institution-building processes. While Smith would reify revelation in hierarchy, Emerson eventually promoted extreme spiritual individualization by rejecting the idea of an exclusive institution as the centre of revelatory authority.

The Distinctiveness of American Denominationalism: A Case Study of the 1846 Evangelical Alliance

1976 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest R. Sandeen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
European History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Characteristic Shape ◽  
American Protestantism

The Chicago school in American religious historiography, especially its two most distinguished representatives, W. W. Sweet and Sidney E. Mead, has emphasized the growth of religious liberty as a crucial factor in accounting for the characteristic shape of American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. The effect of this interpretative hypothesis has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of American religious history while focusing attention so intensely upon American phenomena that evidence from European history which might have served to qualify that hypothesis has not yet received adequate attention.

Adventists Discover the Seventh-Day Sabbath: How to Deal with the ‘Jewish Problem’

1992 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 373-378
Author(s):  
Keith A. Francis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Seventh Day Adventist ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Protestant Denomination

In 1831 William Miller, a farmer from Low Hampton, New York, began to preach that the Second Advent would occur ‘about the year 1843’. From this rather inauspicious beginning the number of people who agreed with Miller’s prediction grew, so that by 1844 they probably numbered more than 50,000 according to some estimates. This phenomenon would be of little historical interest—except, perhaps, to historians studying nineteenth-century American religious history—had it not been for the fact that one legacy of Millerism is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which has over six million members world-wide and can claim, for example, one of the largest educational systems run by a Protestant denomination.

The Women of the ABCFM Oregon Mission and the Conflicted Language of Calvinism

1995 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve McCoy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
Free Grace

Among the books Oregon missionaries Elkanah and Mary Walker kept in their mission home at Tshimakain was a Bible in which was written a quotation attributed to Martin Luther: “Men are never more unfit for the sacrament, than when they think themselves most fit—and never more fit and prepared for duty than when most humbld ‘sic’ and ashamed in a sense of their own unfitness.” Fitness founded in unfitness, ability based on inability, and autonomy grounded in dependence were qualities that the Walker' sponsor, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), encouraged in its emissaries. The country's first foreign missionary program was established in 1810 by a small group of New Divinity ministers. Dominating the rural pulpits in New England and New York during the Second Great Awakening, New Divinity preachers aimed to legitimate their conception of revival and conversion by appealing to the earlier revival theology of Jonathan Edwards. In the process, they insisted that predestination and free grace did not violate human free will and moral responsibility. Based on these convictions antebellum ABCFM missionaries, including the Oregon group, learned to assess their own spiritual condition and calling. However, the internal conflicts prompted by New Divinity understandings of the conversion experience alternatively produced debilitating and vitalizing effects that continued to trouble these women and men throughout their missionary careers. In effect, the vocation of the missionaries of the Whitman-Spalding mission proceeded from an uncommonly heroic effort to achieve a salvation that could not be guaranteed by their own theology. Moreover, contemporary clashing views regarding the nature and social role of women became intertwined with this disabling discourse. This, in turn, limited the Oregon women's conception of themselves and their capacities as missionaries.

The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714–1796)

1992 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American People ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
Biographical Dictionary ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Spiritual Pilgrimage

Sarah Osborn does not appear in the definitive biographical dictionary, Notable American Women. She is not in the pages of Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People, nor of any more recent standard American religious history text. She failed to catch the attention of the editors and authors of the recent Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience or Dictionary of Christianity in America. The great New Divinity pastor-theologian Samuel Hopkins in some measure owed his career to Sarah Osborn, but studies of him mention her only in passing or not at all. Scholars have learned of her through the work of Mary Beth Norton and in the documentary history, Women and Religion in America, but the Sarah Osborn most often mentioned in connection with early New England is the one accused as a witch at Salem who died in Boston prison 10 May 1692.

Bunyan and America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel D.S. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Key Features

This chapter surveys the reception and appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684) in American religious history and literary culture, arguing that, through a series of politically, theologically, and artistically motivated realignments, American adaptations of John Bunyan’s classic shaped key features of American Protestantism and of a distinctively American literary tradition. In the eighteenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress was evoked to reconceive ‘progress’ along lines more commercial and technological than spiritual. In the nineteenth century, modernized spin-offs became important touchstones in the hotly contested debates over theological liberalism and conservatism. In the increasingly secular twentieth century, it was often either ‘emptied of religion’ and recast as ‘road literature’, or appropriated dialectically as a means for coming to terms with the perceived absurdity of the human condition. In sum, to quote Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress tells us a good bit about the American story’.

Introduction

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Wacker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

From the early nineteenth century through the middle twentieth century, foreign and domestic missionaries ranked among the most conspicuous figures of American religious history. In many quarters they still do. “Don't apologize,” one academic quipped at a conference in India. “All Americans are missionaries.”

The Welsh Evangelical Community and ‘Finney's Revival’

1978 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Carwardine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
High Pressure ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Public Commitment ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
Spiritual State

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in American Calvinist churches of a new brand of religious revivalism. Energetic evangelicals successfully challenged the authority of a Calvinist theology which had seemed to emphasise the exclusiveness of the elect, and man's helplessness and inability to act in securing his own conversion. These evangelicals adopted a revivalism which, in contrast, reminded man of his responsibility and power, and which experimented with means to win converts that conservative evangelicals thought an affront to the operations of the Holy Spirit. The ‘new measures’, as they were called, included more direct preaching, often by revivalists who itinerated solely to stir churches and win converts, the ‘protracting’ of services over several days or weeks, and the ‘anxious seat’—the use of a special pew at the front of the congregation where those concerned for their spiritual state could go to be exhorted and prayed for, and where a public commitment might be expected. These measures—and the ‘New Divinity’ which gave them theological justification—became increasingly widespread during the 1820s and 1830s, the climax of the ‘Second Great Awakening’. In large part the impetus for change had come from the rapidly-growing Methodists, Arminian in theology and determined exponents of a high-pressure revivalism; but within the Calvinist churches the single most influential agent of change was the ‘high priest’ of revivalism, Charles Grandison Finney.

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