A Genetic History of New England Theology (Routledge Revivals)

Frank Hugh Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317599067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

First published in 1907, this text provides a scientific treatment of New England theology and American dogmatic history. Frank Hugh Foster analyses the eighteenth-century rise of the school of New England theology, which became the dominant school of thought in New England congregationalism and, as argued by Foster, a 'world phenomenon'. The chapters arise from readings of the various distinguished views of such contemporaries as Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, placing them within the historical and theological context in which they developed. A fascinating and detailed title, this reissue will be of value to students of theology and Church history with a particular interest in the development of American religious thought.

THE RIPENED PRODUCT

CHAPTER XIII

NATHANIEL W. TAYLOR

This great thinker has already been brought before the reader in connection with the discussions upon the will and with the Unitarian controversy. It may be said that the latter controversy determined his whole theological career for it was his purpose to refute the Unitarian reasoning thoroughly, and for this end to explore completely the whole subject of anthropology, that led him to the theological positions which he took and which have received the name of Taylorism. Yet it was his fate to wage his controversies with his brethren rather than with the common adversary; for he assumed the aspect to many of them of the theological innovator, and they felt called upon to oppose him in the interests of the very orthodoxy which he was trying to defend in a more fundamental and conclusive way. It is not the first example in the history of theology of men’s confounding defending a doctrine in a new way with subverting that doctrine.

What has been already said of Taylor’s doctrine of the will must therefore be constantly kept in mind in our further studies. And it must also be noticed that the full measure of his departure from Edwards remained concealed from Taylor himself. Neither his opponents nor he had a fine historical sense, nor perceived that they were in the midst of a great theological development, and themselves the actors in it. To agree with Edwards was still the high ambition of them all; and when they consciously disagreed, as did Taylor, they thought they were only expressing better Edwards’ true meaning.

The great controversies of Taylor began with a sermon delivered in New Haven, in 1828, upon moral depravity, the famous Concio ad Clerum. The proposition maintained in this sermon was “that the entire moral depravity of mankind is by nature.” In it Taylor successively maintained, among others, the positions that moral depravity is sinfulness; that this is not created in man, nor does it consist in acting Adam’s act; that it is not a disposition or tendency to sin which is the cause of all sin; that it is “man’s own act, consisting in a free choice of some object rather than God, as his chief good;—or a free preference of the world and of worldly good, to the will and glory of God.”¹ He then advances to the proposition that this depravity is by nature. He defines it: “that such is their [men’s] nature that they will sin and only sin in all the appropriate circumstances of their being.”² Men’s nature is not itself sinful, nor is it the physical or efficient cause of their sinning, but it is the occasion of their sinning. In the applicatory “remarks” of the sermon he said again that “guilt pertains exclusively to voluntary action.”³

In these positions, while supposing himself to hold the essence of the doctrine of his predecessors, Taylor had consciously modified its form. He had, in fact, only brought out more clearly than they the positions toward which Hopkins, Emmons, and Dwight were historically tending. But the full meaning of his teaching depended upon his new conception of the will, upon the new and real freedom which he had at last succeeded in giving it. This constituted the strange element, and was the true occasion of the opposition which he aroused.

This opposition was, however, more directly excited by a position taken in the sermon quite incidentally to its main purpose. Taylor suggested a new idea upon the prevention of sin. In defending the proposition that universal moral depravity was not inconsistent with the moral perfections of God (thus intentionally meeting the grand objection of Channing and other Unitarians), he opposed the doctrine which, under the influence of Bellamy, had been prevalent in New England, that sin was the necessary means of the greatest good, and sought to substitute for it the supposition (for it was not presented as a matter susceptible of exact proof) that, owing to the nature of moral agency, God could not prevent sin, or at least the present degree of sin, in a moral system.

It is exceedingly important for a comprehension of the following discussions that Taylor’s meaning be fully understood. He took the words of the old proposition in their obvious meaning. By “necessary” he understood indispensable; and by “means,” that directly employed to effect a given purpose. The only means of good to Taylor was good itself; and since the greatest good, which is the permanent prevalence of the highest holiness, might be procured by the unvarying holy choices of all moral agents, if they only would thus choose, he could not call evil “necessary” to that good. He believed that God gave man free agency because he could thereby make him a being capable of holiness, which consists in free choices. He gave it to him for this positive purpose only. Incidentally, it involved the possibility of sin, which actually followed in the history of the human race. Perhaps God, having given, and maintaining free agency among men, could not prevent all sin. But he chose, not the sin, in any sense, but holiness, and free agency as the condition thereof; neither did he prefer sin even, in the words of some, “all things considered,” or that degree of sin actually existing, but always holiness. He did prefer moral agency, though it would involve sin; and hence he never preferred or decreed sin directly. It is involved in his decrees, but not as itself a thing decreed.

To let Taylor speak for himself:

Is it more honorable to God to suppose that such is the nature of sin that he could not accomplish the highest good without it, than to suppose that such is the nature of free agency that God could not wholly prevent its perversion?.… The prevention of sin by any influence that destroys the power to sin destroys moral agency. Moral agents must then possess the power to sin. Who then can prove a priori, or from the nature of the subject, that a being who can sin will not sin? How can it be proved a priori, or from the nature of the subject, that a thing will not be, when for aught that appears it may be?⁴

It will be noted here that the fundamental thought underlying all the discussion is the new idea of freedom. God has given man the power of acting as a true first cause, and has thus placed him beyond the reach of true power, even the divine power, as a determining cause of his volitions.

Three controversies followed the appearance of this sermon, of which two sprang directly and solely from it, the third partially.

I. THE CONTROVERSY WITH HARVEY

The year following (1829), Joseph Harvey, pastor of the church at Westchester, Conn., reviewed Taylor’s sermon in a pamphlet of forty pages. The review begins with discussing the proposition that moral depravity is man’s own act. As soon as he has finished his review of Taylor’s citations of authorities, he affirms that the theory is “irrational and unbiblical. It alleges an effect without a cause.”⁵ He thus shows at the outset that he has not followed Taylor in the adoption of the new position as to the will, and cannot conceive of the cause of any volition lying entirely in the causing agent. He is still upon the old Edwardean basis. Such criticism is not likely to help. Hence he goes on to maintain, by a variety of arguments, that the corrupt nature of man is itself sinful, though even Edwards had taught that all sin was voluntary. The great proof is that God regards and treats infants as sinners. The fundamental objection to Taylor he states in these words:

If then Dr. Taylor means, as he says he does, that nature is not the efficient cause of sin, but the occasion or reason of it, he relinquishes the certainty of effect and admits that its actual occurrence depends upon circumstances. And this, according to his own definition, is Arminianism.⁶

In other words, Harvey cannot understand the new theory of the will.

The last division of the criticism considers Taylor’s views upon the permission of sin. Harvey begins with a complete misunderstanding of Taylor. He summarizes his opponent thus: “Sin is on the whole an evil in the government of God which he did not choose to permit, but which he could not prevent.” Nothing is clearer than that Taylor taught that God did, on the whole, “choose to permit” sin. He said in the Concio “that the providential purposes or decrees of God extend to all actual events, sin not excepted.”⁷ God ordained “the system” with a full knowledge of what it involved, and therefore he, on the whole, chose to permit what was involved. Harvey, in reply to what he has stated as Taylor’s position, maintains that God can prevent sin, and cites the angels as a proof of this fact; but he does not touch Taylor’s argument by this objection, since Taylor would include the angels in the system in which we are, would also cite the fallen angels, and even now had in mind a thought, which he brought out more clearly later, that God was limited by the best good of all considered, or could not consistently prevent sin in a moral system. So completely had he failed to understand Taylor. The idea of any self-limitation upon the part of the Deity was thoroughly abhorrent to his thinking.

The following June (1829) both these pamphlets, the Concio and Harvey’s Review, were discussed in the Quarterly Christian Spectator, published in New Haven, and serving as the medium for the extension of the influence of the Divinity School and its leading professor. The position of Mr. Harvey, as lingering upon the untenable ground of Edwards, where he had remained after rejecting imputation, by an “utter confusion of personal identity,”⁸ is exhibited, and it is declared necessary either to go back to imputation or forward to the position that all sin is actual. Harvey’s argument from sin to a sinful cause is shown to rest upon the groundless supposition that “the cause of a given effort must have the same properties or attributes as the effect itself.”⁹ The defects of his theory of the will are reduced to his failure to distinguish between the three faculties of the mind.¹⁰ A discussion of efficient and occasional causes is added, in which the former kind of cause is reserved for the acting agent. Pains are also taken in this review to present again Dr. Taylor’s theories as to the prevention of sin, and to show how the theory that sin is the necessary means of the greatest good was, in Taylor’s mind, an excess of speculation from which he desired to recall theology. The reviewer strikes again the keynote of the discussion in the following words:

The moral government of God, in distinction from his providential dominion, has been a subject of but little discussion. The views of men concerning it are apt to be loose and indefinite. Almost everything pertaining to the government of God has been referred to his physical agency. Hence it has been inferred from his omnipotence, as a kind of axiom, that God could, in a moral system, have prevented all sin. This has been supposed to result so directly from his power that a doubt respecting it has seemed to involve a question respecting his perfection. Yet it is not a limitation of his power to say that what in the nature of the case is impossible, could not have been done. And do we know that, in the nature of the case, all sin, or the present amount of sin, could have been prevented and yet a moral government have existed at all? Plain it is that, if sin be prevented, this must be done not by force alone but by a moral influence exerted upon created minds. Moral beings are voluntary beings. They act under the influence of motives. If they are kept from sinning, it is not because they cannot sin, but because obedience is their choice.¹¹

Mr. Harvey himself (it would seem) replied to this review in an Examination (1829).¹² He tries, with little success, to turn the objections which had been made to his positions. For instance, he tries to modify the position that a cause must have the attributes and properties of the effect; but he ends by saying that “in the case supposed.… they are in respect to each other invariably the same, like a stream to a fountain.”¹³ He puts the question in dispute in this form: “Are men sinners from their birth?”¹⁴ Harvey answers this question in the affirmative because he does not acknowledge that the knowledge of law is necessary to sin.¹⁵ He thinks that there may be moral action, which is sinful, from birth, even before knowledge of law can be had, and this condition of sinful moral action is what he means by nature when he says that man is a sinner by nature.

Ineffective as all this was, Harvey nevertheless rendered some service in the dispute by pressing Taylor upon points which he had scarcely considered sufficiently. Thus he demands to know how Dr. Taylor accounts for the certainty of sin and for its certain universality upon his theory of freedom.¹⁶ Taylor had been quite indistinct as to this crucial point, and needed to be sharply called to a definite answer. But no such answer was forthcoming. And then Taylor had propounded an explanation of the way that sin rises historically in the developing life of an infant. He had said:

A child enters the world with a variety of appetites and desires which are generally acknowledged to be neither sinful nor holy. Committed in a state of utter helplessness to the assiduity of parental fondness, it commences existence the object of unceasing care, watchfulness, and concession, to those around it. Under such circumstances it is that the natural appetites are first developed; and each advancing month brings them new objects of gratification. The obvious consequence is that self-indulgence becomes the master principle in the soul of every child long before it can understand that this self-indulgence will ever interfere with the rights, or entrench on the happiness, of others. Thus by repetition is the force of constitutional propensities accumulating a bias towards self-gratification, which becomes incredibly strong before a knowledge of duty or a sense of right and wrong can possibly have entered the mind. That moment—the commencement of moral agency, at length arrives. Does the child now come in a state of perfect neutrality to the question whether it will obey or disobey the command which cuts it off from some favorite gratification? If the temptation presented to constitutional propensities could be so strong in the case of Adam, as to overpower the force of established habits of virtue in the maturity of his reason, how absolute is the certainty that every child will yield to the urgency of those propensities under the redoubled impulse of long cherished self-gratification and in the dawn of intellectual existence! Could the uniform certainty of this event be greater if the hand of Omnipotence were laid upon the child to secure the result?¹⁷

Evidently, this is an explanation of the case by “circumstances,” as Harvey points out, and by circumstances which differ greatly in different cases. And though Harvey does not avoid forms of expression that lay him open to a sharp verbal reply, he is right in urging the necessity of explaining how universal sin results from such a condition of things as is here presented. “The consent or choice of the will is, then, after all, the turning point in the existence of sin. The reviewers have told us how the natural propensities are excited and increased, but they have not told us how they res...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table Of Contents
• The Historical Background
• Introduction
• Jonathan Edwards
• Edwards’ Contemporaries and Colaborers
• The Developing School
• The Great Controversies
• The Ripened Product
• Conclusion
• Index