Notes Introduction 1. For the European Enlightenment and skepticism, see Peter Gay, The Enlight- enment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1995 [1966]); Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Gerard Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth- Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Roy S. Porter and Mikulás Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670– 1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nine- teenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); and Israel, Radical Enlightenment; Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985); Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002 [1995]); and Paul Hazard, The European Mind (New York: The World Publishing Com- pany, 1967 [1935]). 2. Robert E. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 2002), xvi. See also Frei, Eclipse, 1– 16, 49– 50. 3. The Society of Biblical Literature published several biographies of American biblical scholars. All deal with nineteenth- and twentieth- century figures. Mark Noll’s Between Faith and Criticism also focuses on the era after the Civil War. Mark Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986). 4. There are a few exceptions. In The Bible in America, a collection of essays, Harry Stout deals with the use of the Bible in the eighteenth century. In the same book, Noll discusses the uses of the Bible in the period between the Revolution- ary War and the Civil War. In Opening Scripture literary scholar Lisa Gordis examines American Puritan hermeneutics. These works do not deal with the challenges of skepticism. Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969); Mark Noll, Between Faith and Criticism; Harry Stout, “The Word and Order in 186 Notes Colonial New England,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 19– 38; Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776– 1865,” ibid., 41; and Lisa M. Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3. 5. For example, see Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of New England Theology (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1932); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953); Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976); James Jones, The Shattered Synthesis: New England Puritanism before the Great Awakening (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); and Mark Noll, Princeton and the Republic,1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 6. Similar to Winship, Robert Middlekauff observes that Cotton Mather placed greater emphasis on an understanding of the Newtonian natural world than his father and grandfather. Doing so challenged some of his traditional Puritan certainties. Michael P. Winship, The Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596– 1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). See also Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Boze- man, “Biblical Primitivism: An Approach to New England Puritanism,” in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: Uni- versity of Illinois Press, 1988), 19– 32; and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 7. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. 8. Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 9. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 6– 7. 10. Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Disci- pline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 300. For Common Sense philosophy, see Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 93– 113. See also Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church History 24, no. 3 (1955): 257– 72. 11. Christopher Grasso, “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” The Journal of American History 95, no. 1 (2008): 67– 68. Notes 187 Prologue 1. For accounts of skepticism, see for example Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: Harbinger Books, 1962 [1876]); Paul Hazard, The European Mind (New York: The World Pub- lishing Company, 1967 [1935]); Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 2. Diego Lucci, Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth- Century British Deists (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 13, 44– 52. See also Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and E. Graham Waring, Deism and Natural Religion (New York: Fredrick Ungar Publishing Company, 1967). 3. John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xix, 148, 432. See also Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997); and Lucci, Scripture and Deism, 44– 48. 4. Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth- Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); John Locke, “The Reasonableness of Christianity: As Delivered in the Scriptures,” in John Locke: Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2002), 85– 210; Locke, “The Preface: An Essay for the Under- standing of St. Paul’s Epistles by Consulting St. Paul Himself,” in John Locke: Writings on Religion, 51–66; Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, ed. John W. Yolton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603– 1714 (New York: Norton, 1961), 252. 5. See Lucci, Scripture and Deism, 44– 48. 6. For a discussion of the mutual intellectual influence between Locke and New- ton, see James L. Axtell, “Locke, Newton, and the Elements of Natural Philoso- phy,” Paedagogica Europaea 1 (1965): 235– 45; Axtell, “Locke’s Review of the ‘Principia,’ ” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 20, no. 2 (1965): 152– 61; Margaret J. Osler, “John Locke and the Changing Ideal of Scientific Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 1 (1970): 3– 16; G. A. J. Rogers, “Locke, Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas,” Jour- nal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 2 (1979): 191– 205; and Rogers, “Locke’s Essay and Newton’s Principia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 2 (1978): 217– 32. 7. Winton U. Solberg, “Science and Religion in Early America: Cotton Mather’s ‘Christian Philosopher,’ ” Church History 56, no. 1 (1987), 77; Solberg, intro- duction to The Christian Philosopher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 188 Notes 1994), xliv, lv, xxxvi. For the related issue of Natural Theology, see Charles E. Raven, Organic Design: A Study of Scientific Thought from Ray to Paley (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 9– 15. For the Christian examination of nature in this period, see also James L. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 83, 193, 198; Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1998), 168– 69, 264; and David S. Katz, God’s Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 100. 8. Hans Frei argues that the historical credibility of the miracle accounts became particularly important in the eighteenth century. This move rose in response to the critiques by