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Sweeney’s Booknotes: Asahel Nettleton and Revivalism

by doug.sweeney | April 1st, 2013

E-A-Johnston_Asahel-Nettleton-Revival-Preacher

E. A. Johnston, Asahel Nettleton: Revival Preacher, A Biography (Ashville, NC: Revival Literature, 2012).

This is a work of hagiography most likely to be read by Reformed evangelicals. Written by an evangelist, prolific Christian author, and conference speaker with Ambassadors For Christ International, its author also serves as a fellow of the Stephen Olford Center for Biblical Preaching.

Johnston’s book is the longest one on Nettleton to date. It is more current than Bennet Tyler’s Memoir of the Life and Character of Asahel Nettleton (1844); more thorough than J. F. Thornbury’s God Sent Revival: The Story of Asahel Nettleton and the Second Great Awakening (1977); and more readable and useful to a wider range of people than the now-dated dissertations written on Nettleton and his work: George Hugh Birney, Jr., “Life and Letters of Asahel Nettleton, 1783-1844” (Hartford Theological Seminary, 1943), and Sherry Pierpont May, “Asahel Nettleton: Nineteenth Century American Revivalist” (Drew University, 1969).

Aimed at kindred spirits seeking revival in the present, it is spiritually edifying but historically inaccurate. It is rather thinly researched, full of massive block quotations from the author’s favorite sources but hardly any interpretation of the subject’s life, work, or even historical location that is informed by recent scholarship or older social histories. It repeats the shop-worn caricatures of Nettleton’s opponents as harmful wolves in sheep’s clothing. (Nathaniel Taylor was as a Pelagian, Charles Finney one of the greatest threats to genuine religion in all of American church history, modern evangelical history a story of declension, etc.) It claims to provide reliable history of the New England Theology, but does so without reference to most of the leading works of scholarship by specialists in the field (Joseph Conforti, Allen Guelzo, David Kling, Mark Valeri, Jack Fitzmier, Mark Noll, Charlie Phillips, Oliver Crisp, et al.)

On the bright side, Johnston has reprinted 40 letters written by Nettleton to colleagues (taken from Birney’s dissertation); first-hand accounts of the revival of 1820, mainly in upstate New York, and Nettleton’s role in leading it; memories of Nettleton’s life by Francis Wayland and others; and large sections of important primary sources.

This is not a book for scholars, or for students of church history. But among modern-day Calvinists who are looking for support as they work to revive the church, it is a book that will be cherished. Evangelical Arminians (and others) will feel attacked. But Nettletonians should find in their eponym great inspiration.

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Sweeney’s Booknotes: A Reinterpretation?

by doug.sweeney | March 13th, 2013

Kyle Strobe: Jonathan Edwards's Theology: A ReinterpretationKyle C. Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation, T & T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Kyle Strobel is quickly becoming one of the most prolific scholars working on Edwards’ thought today. And this revised version of Strobel’s Aberdeen dissertation is his most important work on Edwards to date.

Strobel’s overarching argument is that Edwards worked primarily as a Reformed theologian whose doctrine of God and of the Trinity funded a “theocentric vision of reality,” which, in turn, became the primary force in Edwards’ thought (p. 2). Strobel supports this contention using four key points: “First, Edwards’s theology begins with God, in his eternal life as Trinity, as the ontological principle which grounds his systematic task. Second, Edwards begins ‘from eternity’ and then ‘descends’ to address God’s work in time, or, in other words, God’s economic movement to create and sustain. Third, this work in time is the work of redemption, directing the ‘revolutions in the world’ and guiding it toward resurrection, judgement and consummation. Fourth and finally, Edwards’s theology is a theology of redemptive history, grounded in and formed by the God who is redeeming, or more specifically, the God who redeems in, through and as Christ” (4).

In three main sections, Strobel treats Edwards’ doctrine of the Trinity (section one), Edwards’ view of God’s purpose in the creation of the world (section two), and Edwards’ Trinitarian doctrine of redemption (section three). Along the way, he seeks “to trace the ‘metanarrative’ of Edwards’s theology” (p. 12), a storyline that shaped nearly everything he wrote.

On its surface, Strobel’s argument appears rather commonplace, largely unexceptional to those who know Edwards. But as Strobel makes clear, he has offered it in contradiction to Sang Lee and others (especially McClymond and McDermott) who follow Lee’s view of Edwards’ philosophical theology. Strobel thinks these scholars misconstrue Edwards’ thought by portraying it, not in terms of Trinitarian dogma, but of late modern philosophy. Strobel thinks his synthesis accounts for Edwards better, offering a more comprehensive and coherent view of Edwards’ grand vision of God and the world (p. 232).

I agree that Strobel’s Edwards is more accurate than Lee’s. There is little new here. Strobel rehearses sources and themes treated well by many others. He exaggerates the extent to which his argument is novel. He exaggerates his differences with McClymond, McDermott, and others–seeming to relish his confession that, “in this volume I ‘go after’ almost everyone!” (p. xi). Still, he does provide a fine way of making sense of Edwards’ thought in systematic terms. I cannot think of another text that handles Edwards better in relation to dogmatic debates about the nature of God.

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Sweeney’s Booknotes: The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle

by doug.sweeney | November 28th, 2012

Ava Chamberlain, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards, North American Religions (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

This fascinating revision of the tragic story of Jonathan Edwards’ “crazy grandmother” is one of the most important books in Edwards studies in many years. It chronicles the life and hard times of Elizabeth Tuttle, whom Edwards scholars have long known but never known well.

The daughter of a successful Puritan family in New Haven, Elizabeth married after conceiving her first child out of wedlock. Her husband, Richard Edwards, came from a less prominent family and was two years her junior (only 20 when they married), but was determined by the court to be the father of her child (a daughter, Mary). Richard confessed to having slept with Elizabeth long before their wedding but denied being the father of her baby. He claimed another local man, Joseph Preston, was the father, saying Elizabeth had granted this in private conversation.

Richard never managed to prove this claim in any court of law, but refused to raise the baby as his own. (Elizabeth’s parents raised Mary.) He settled down with Elizabeth for more than 20 years, siring several children with her, including Jonathan Edwards’ father (Timothy Edwards, born in 1669). But eventually, their marriage ended poorly, in disaster, which was aggravated by Richard’s insecure male ego and mental illness in the family leading to brutal, bloody murder.

In 1676, Elizabeth’s brother, Benjamin Tuttle, struck their sister, Sarah Slauson (Jonathan Edwards’ great aunt), in the head, with an ax, in her Stamford home in front of her four children (ages 12, 9, 6 and 4). Though Benjamin had suffered mental illness much of his life, he was executed by hanging for his crime the following year. Most of the family would recover from this tragedy with time, but three Tuttles never did. Sister Mercy spiraled downward into mental illness herself, later murdering her teenage son, Samuel, with an ax (in 1691, in front of Samuel’s brother Francis). She was deemed insane by the court and thus spared the death penalty. David, Mercy’s brother, also suffered from depression and had to be cared for to the end of his life by Thomas, another sibling. And Elizabeth, of course, suffered her own mental illness, which exacerbated the trouble with her husband.

In 1691, after a two-year public battle, Richard finally received a bill of divorce from Elizabeth. He had accused her of “obstinately Refusing Conjugal Communion” with him “for Many years” (120) toward the end of their marriage. Lying atop his other claims to have been cuckolded at the outset of their marriage by Elizabeth, to have been verbally abused (Elizabeth “often Threaten[ed] my Life to Cut my Throat when I was Asleep,” 135), to have been cheated on again after the two of them were married (Richard claimed his wife admitted this but never proved it in court), the charge of sexual abandonment would finally prove persuasive.

Less than six months later, Richard married Mary Talcott, a younger woman with whom he had confessed to having sex during his conjugal abandonment at home. The two had several children together, living a much less scandalous life after the early 1690s. Richard never cared for Mary, though. Nor did he do anything for Elizabeth above the call of duty from the court. In fact, Elizabeth disappears from the record after this–like so many other early American women.

She does not disappear, though, at least not forever, from discussions of Edwards’ family. Jonathan’s first biographers knew almost nothing about her. But in the late nineteenth century eugenics was all the rage. Many regional genealogists, Edward family enthusiasts, and students of eugenics retrieved Elizabeth and used her to interpret Jonathan’s genius, account for the residue of melancholy and sexual immorality in the family (Aaron Burr, Jr., being a customary example of the Edwardses’ sexual sins), and even oppose family planning by contending, for example, that if Elizabeth were sterile we would never have known Jonathan. Winship’s Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity (1900), which compared Edwards’ bloodline rather favorably, no glowingly, to that of a pseudonymous clan of social misfits, ne’er do wells, and hardened criminals, is only the best known of such eugenic encomiums.

Chamberlain has succeeded in writing an outstanding history of Elizabeth and her family–a model microhistory set in colonial New England. In her noble effort to listen to what she calls Elizabeth’s “silence” and allow her, paradoxically, “to speak for herself” (188), she appears a biased champion of her lady’s reputation, defending it against the men who sullied it so long. But this is probably what we need in order to set the record straight, to swing the pendulum of Edwards’ family history back in a sensible direction.

This book is must reading for Edwards scholars, historians of gender, sex, power, and mental illness in America, and anyone else interested in New England cultural history.

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Sweeney’s Booknotes: Puritan Meetinghouses

by doug.sweeney | November 28th, 2012

Peter Benes, puritan architecturePeter Benes, Meetinghouses of Early New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

This book barely mentions Edwards, but demands to be perused by Edwards scholars nonetheless. It offers a detailed history of the architecture, furniture, ornaments, seating, even the painting of New England’s early, storied meeting houses, more than 2,200 in all, from the time of the first pilgrims to about 1830—including Edwards’ own buildings in Northampton and, later, Stockbridge.

These structures were employed, of course, for purposes other than worship. They housed civic meetings, criminal trials, ammunition, wounded soldiers, and served numerous other functions, spiritual and secular. Their religious purposes, though, proved to be the most important to their design and in the lives of most of the people who would use them.

Benes shows us all of this, telling the history of these buildings and explaining the significance of New England’s “vernacular” tradition of architecture.

Those who have read and used Horton Davies, The Worship of the American Puritans, 1629-1730 (1990) will appreciate this volume on the material surroundings and supports of Puritan liturgy–and on the things they tell us about their worshipers’ priorities.

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