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The Substance of Doctrine: New England Calvinism and the Problem of Orthodoxy

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The Substance of Doctrine: New England Calvinism and the Problem of Orthodoxy ✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦ The Substance of Doctrine: New England Calvinism and the Problem of Orthodoxy andrew macdonald Introduction ETERMINED to develop a rationalized defense of core D Calvinist doctrines of natural depravity, regeneration, and perseverance of the saints, nineteenth-century Calvinist schools waged an internal polemical civil war across the pages of their respective periodicals. Despite the subtlety and techni- cal nature of these debates, underlying their disagreement lay a methodological divergence in how each school defined or- thodoxy. Rejecting Old Light theologians, the heirs of Jonathan Edwards crafted an identity as New Light Calvinists, built on his thought to show the rational and systematic consistency of Calvinism. By the end of the eighteenth century, the hyper- Calvinist branch of the New Lights coalesced around the teach- ings of Samuel Hopkins and the institution of Yale to form the New Divinity. At the same time, confessional Calvinists, less inclined to rational synthesizing, broke from the New Divin- ity and united around Princeton to form Old School Calvinism. Over the nineteenth century, the New Divinity would split be- tween New Haven and East Windsor. Under the direction of Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology (also called Taylorism) aimed at softening traditional Calvinist language around con- version away from its perceived fatalism. East Windsor The- ology (also called Tylerism due to its leader Bennet Tyler) attempted to walk the line between holding to traditional Calvinism’s emphasis upon salvation as completely an act of The New England Quarterly, vol. XCI, no. 3 (September 2018). C 2018 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00685. 418 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00685 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE SUBSTANCE OF DOCTRINE 419 God while rejecting its potential fatalistic implications. While these categories are not exhaustive of American Calvinism, this paper will deal primarily with these last two groups.1 Most New Divinity Calvinists agreed that theological inno- vation was possible but strictly within the bounds of historic confessional language. This presumption was soon challenged, primarily through the rise of the New Haven Theology out of Yale. Claiming continuity within an Edwardsean tradition that valued rational consistency above dogma, New Haven theolo- gians shifted the definition of orthodoxy away from confessional language and towards a core system of principles reinterpreted and reformatted by each successive generation. Thus, even as New England Calvinists fought over slight variations in their doctrines, underlying these differences was a fundamental epis- temological disagreement on the nature and authority of the historic witness. Underlying mid nineteenth-century Calvinist schisms was a divergence of epistemologies of authority that evolved out of earlier polemics against Unitarians in the 1820s. Although the threat of Unitarianism initially united Calvinists, a notable group of theologians in New Haven began subtly to shift their definition of Calvinism away from confessional language inre- sponse to Unitarian criticism. Unnoticed at the time, this diver- gence had significant consequences once the Unitarian threat dissipated. Focused primarily on how differing views of historic authority functioned in defining Calvinist orthodoxy, whether it depended upon the literalness of Saybrook or an appeal to its essential substance of doctrine, this paper consists of two parts, each centered on the leading New Haven Calvinist, Nathaniel William Taylor. First, in refuting the charges of Unitarianism, Taylor made two crucial concessions respecting his definition of Calvinism that contradicted many of his allies. Second, while this remained largely unnoticed at the time, Taylor’s underlying 1Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins & The New Divinity Movement (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1981) 5. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 264. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00685 by guest on 26 September 2021 420 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY epistemology rather than the content of his theology informed the fragmentation of New England Calvinism.2 Taylor and Norton When Nathaniel William Taylor was appointed Professor of Didactic Theology at Yale in 1822, the most pressing threat to Calvinism in America was Unitarianism. The appointment of Unitarian Henry Ware to the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard in 1805 followed by his perceived victory in a highly publicized debate with Calvinist Leonard Woods precipitated a major shift of New England Congregationalism. This transition was solidified by a series of legal rulings governing the conver- sion of New England congregations to Unitarianism.3 However, not all was lost; the emergence of Unitarianism as a popular and intellectual force compelled Calvinists to close ranks, result- ing first in the establishment of Andover Seminary in 1808and subsequently in an outpouring of Calvinist periodicals aimed at discrediting Unitarian theology.4 Frustrated by Woods’ earlier 2For treatments on the theology of these debates, see Douglas Sweeney, “Nathaniel William Taylor and the Edwardsean Tradition: Evolution and Continuity in the Cul- ture of the New England Theology” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1995), 155–205, and Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Ox- ford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003); Oliver Crisp and Douglas A. Sweeney, After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2012), 130–96. For a discussion of the polity behind these debates, see George Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience; A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 46–75. 3The most important of these legal victories was the Dedham Ruling of 1818 allowing Congregationalist churches to convert to Unitarianism with a vote of the congregation as opposed to the church membership. Conrad Wright, The Unitarian Controversy: Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1994), 14–16. 4Bennet Tyler, Letters on the Origin and Progress of the New Haven Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Ezra Collier, 1837) (hereafter cited as Letters on the New Haven Theology); D. G. Hart and John R. Muether. Seeking a Better Country: 300 Years of American Presbyterianism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Pub., 2007), 106; Noll, America’s God, 254; Sidney Earl Mead, Nathaniel William Taylor, 1786–1858; A Con- necticut Liberal (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967), 175; Lyman Beecher and Charles Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc., of Lyman Beecher, D.D., 2vols.,ed. Charles Beecher (New York: Harper, 1864–66), 1:439–42, 542 (hereafter referred to as Beecher, Autobiography). As Marsden points out, the threat of the Unitarians in this period is underscored by the ability of Calvinists to settle old and new differences. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00685 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE SUBSTANCE OF DOCTRINE 421 failure, a collection of Calvinists including Taylor argued that it was time to “take hold of the Unitarian controversy by the horns.” The result was a flurry of polemical articles beginning in 1821, highlighted by Taylor’s own attack upon the “Unitarian Pope,” Andrews Norton.5 Less known today than his contemporaries Ware or William Ellery Channing, Andrews Norton was one of the leading in- tellectuals of American Unitarianism. An irascible and caustic personality even to his Unitarian allies, Norton was nonethe- less recognized as a leading biblical scholar and polemicist who published three major treatises on the failures of Calvinism be- tween 1812 to 1822. Central to Norton’s critique was his belief that Calvinism’s depiction of God as the originator of sin ran contrary to the moral intuition of man. Religion as expressed in the historic confessions of Calvinist orthodoxy was rather an invention of “unholy men” to affect worldly and criminal am- bitions. In contrast, he held, true religion emphasized man’s moral intuition through its priority upon character and Christ- likeness.6 In this respect, Norton’s contention echoed other The potential for conflict emerged in 1811 with Ezra Stiles Ely’s denunciation ofNew Calvinists in Calvinism and Hopkinsianism (New York: S. Whiting and Co., 1811), but Presbyterian moderates prevailed in defeating a motion requiring strict adherence to the Westminster Confession. Princeton’s Archibald Alexander pronounced that there were more pressing threats to Calvinism than “to consider every man a heretic who differs in some few points with us.” Alexander q.v. in Marsden, The Evangelical Mind, 40–43. 5In addition to rhetoric which claimed Calvinism was fatalistic, veiled Popery, and blasphemous, an example of this caricature is the way Unitarians referred to New Calvinist theology as “Calvinistic metaphysics” to associate their work in the minds of the public with secular philosophy rather than traditional exegesis. The effect, argued Lyman Beecher, was to produce in the minds of the public a conception of Calvinism in terrorem. See, “Doctrines of Christianity” in The Christian Disciple and Review, (1821), 60–64; William Ellery Channing, et al. eds., Correspondence of
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