University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Winter 1997 Preparing the way of the Lord: Three case studies of ministerial preconditioning in congregations before the Great Awakening, 1675-1750 Douglas Kevin Fidler University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation Fidler, Douglas Kevin, "Preparing the way of the Lord: Three case studies of ministerial preconditioning in congregations before the Great Awakening, 1675-1750" (1997). Doctoral Dissertations. 1991. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/1991 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. 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PREPARING THE WAY OF THE LORD: THREE CASE STUDIES OF MINISTERIAL PRECONDITIONING IN CONGREGATIONS BEFORE THE GREAT AWAKENING, 1675-1750 BY DOUGLAS KEVIN FEDLER B.A. University of New Hampshire, 1972 M.S. University of Massachusetts, 1976 A.M. University of Southern California, 1981 M.A. University of New Hampshire, 1992 A.A.S. Community College of the Air Force, 1993 A.A.S. Community College of the Air Force, 1994 DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In History December, 1997 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9819674 UMI Microform 9819674 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. AH rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This dissertation has been examined and approved. Dissertation Director, Charles E. Clark Professor of History and the Humanities ; 4 W V 7. _____________________ David H. Watters, Professor of English s ..i. ax ^ ___________ Marc L. Schwarz, Associate Professcr^ of History J.^illiam Harris, Associate Professor of History 4 / 4/ David Frankfurter, Assistant Professor of History // // 7 / ‘7 1 Date Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION.................................................................................................................. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................. v PREFACE........................................................................................................................ vi LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................................................................... xi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS......................................................................................... xii ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................... xiii CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................ 1 0. “REGULAR COMMUNITIES DULY ESTABLISHED”: JOHN WISE.... 37 AND THE INTELLECTUAL ANTECEDENTS OF THE GREAT AWAKENING m. “THE WHEELS OF PROVIDENCE OYLED BY PRAYER OF FAITH”: .. 94 HUGH ADAMS, NICHOLAS GILMAN, AND THE ROOTS OF ENTHUSIASM IN THE GREAT AWAKENING IV. OLD LIGHT ARCHETYPE ON THE NORTHERN FRONTIER: ................ 175 JOHN ODLIN AND THE SEARCH FOR CONGREGATIONAL PEACE AND ORDER V. CONCLUSION............................................................................................... 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................... 243 FIGURES........................................................................................................................ 261 iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DEDICATION To Susan Gabriel Elizabeth & Mom AMOR OMNIA VINCIT iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincerest thanks to the following people: * To my dissertation committee, Professor Charles E. Clark, Director * To my brothers and sisters at Parkway Christian Fellowship and the Durham New Testament (now Christ the King) Churches * To my friends and colleagues in the Department of History * To my friends and colleagues at the Air National Guard Noncommissioned Officer Academy To Harold Smith, my tenth-grade history teacher To Elizabeth Doran, my twelfth-grade English teacher v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE Mark A. Noll’s lamentation that the “scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind”1 gave me reason to pause to consider my own faith, my reasons for studying the Great Awakening, and how my faith should shape and inform my conclusions about this revival. A short summary of these considerations may help readers of this study to understand better why I have analyzed the evidence in particular ways and why I have concluded certain things from that evidence. I consider myself an evangelical, if David Bebbington’s list of their four characteristics—adherence to conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism—is accurate.2 As a student of history, I find that my Christian worldview informs my understanding of the historical process without changing time-honored methods of interpreting historical evidence. As a Christian, I have been sensitive to an unwillingness, even resistance, of some members of academia to permit evangelical Christians to allow their beliefs to inform their scholarship and teaching. So long as Christian scholars keep their religious beliefs in the private domain, the campus community seems generally willing to tolerate freedom of conscience. This presents a dilemma to the evangelical, since the desire to express and apply his or her faith in the public domain can be as strong as the desire to express cultural, ethnic, or racial individuality. 1 Mark A. Noll, The Scandal o f the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994). 2 David Bebbington,Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A Historyfrom the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), 2-19. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As Noll has cogently pointed out, however, evangelicals must accept significant culpability for what they sometimes consider exclusion from mainstream academic life. There is a cultural imperative among evangelicals that causes them to oversimplify very complex issues and to exchange critical analysis and profound reflection for enthusiasm and zeal. There is also aninstitutional problem. Because evangelicals are, in Noll’s words, “activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian”, they often value great “doers” above “great thinkers.” Academic life has also suffered from a lost sense of shared intellectual life that comes through interaction among scholars from widely differing academic specialties. Finally, there is atheological problem. Put simply, evangelical culture has permitted a belief in some quarters that equates “bein’ smart with bein’ proud” and has “neglected sober analysis of nature, human society, and the arts.’0 Richard Hofstadter4 has identified evangelicalism as one of a number of sources of anti- intellectualism in American culture and, perhaps justifiably