The Dry Bones of Quaker Theology

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-523
Author(s):  
J. William Frost
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Skeletal Remains ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Meaningful Context ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Thought

After having surveyed the barrenness of the valley in which were scattered skeletal remains, the prophet in the book of Ezekiel was asked, “O mortal man, can these bones live?” And his reply was not an optimistic “they will live” but rather “O Lord God, thou knowest.” When the historian begins to discuss the common theological assumptions and issues which perplexed the seventeenth century, he does not know whether they can be put into a meaningful context and is uncertain that these “bones” can be made to live. The recent historian who made a large American audience aware of seventeenth-century thought was the late Perry Miller who summarized the New England strands of thought in an essay entitled “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity.” Miller argued that theology was a part of the essence, the very marrow, of Puritanism to which a copious amount of thought was devoted. The seriousness of the Puritan concern was witnessed by the succession of able theologians from William Ames and Richard Baxter in the seventeenth century, to Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Chauncy in the eighteenth century.

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Research

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture provides a fresh look at the important, burgeoning field of Edwards and the Bible. For too long, Edwards scholars have published new research on Edwards without paying due attention to the work he took most seriously: biblical exegesis. Edwards is recognized as an innovative theologian who wielded tremendous influence on revivalism, evangelicalism, and New England theology, but what is often missed is how much time he devoted to studying and understanding the Bible. He kept voluminous notebooks on Christian Scripture and had plans for major treatises on the Bible before he died. Edwards scholars need to take stock of the place of the Bible in his thought to do justice to his theology and legacy. In fact, more and more experts are recognizing how important this aspect of his life is, and this book brings together the insights of leading Edwards scholars on this topic. This volume seeks to increase our understanding of Edwards’ engagement with Scripture by setting it in the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis and eighteenth-century colonial interpretation. It provides case studies of Edwards’ exegesis in varying genres of the Bible and probes his use of Scripture to develop theology. It also sets his biblical interpretation in perspective by comparing it with that of other exegetes. This book advances our understanding of the nature and significance of Edwards’ work with Scripture and opens new lines of inquiry for students of early modern Western history.

Common Law Constitutionalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Law System ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Law System

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.

Building Bensalem at Massachusetts Bay: Francis Bacon and the Wisdom of Eden in Early Modern New England

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-606
Author(s):  
Zachary Mcleod Hutchins
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Religious Leaders

Francis Bacon's influence on seventeenth-century New England has long passed unnoticed, but his plan for the restoration of prelapsarian intellectual perfections guided John Winthrop's initial colonization efforts, shaped New England's educational policies, and had an impact on civic and religious leaders from John Cotton to Jonathan Edwards.

The Authority of the Administration

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-66
Author(s):  
Janet McLean
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Public Trust ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
The Common ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

The authority claims of the administration have undergone radical change with consequences for the shape and content of administrative law. In the seventeenth century, authority was claimed in office, as a means to limit the imposition of the King’s will and to secure the independence of officials, especially the judges. In the eighteenth century, virtue, property, and independence became the basis for office, and the common law sought to enhance such authority through notions of public trust. After the nineteenth-century transition to more centralised and bureaucratic hierarchy, democracy became the new source of authority for the administration, reinforced by the ultra vires doctrine. In each era, the authority claims of the administration have been reflected in the frameworks for judicial supervision. In this way the common law has simultaneously constituted and controlled authority. In the present day we are in the process of rethinking whence administrators derive their legitimate authority and the theoretical foundations of judicial review. Beginning with the authority claims of the administration and framing a juridical response which reflects and tests such claims would be a good place to start.

2. Empires and enclaves

2014 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Stephen Aron
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
New England ◽  
American Indians ◽  
North American ◽  
Population Declines ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
North American Indians ◽  
Alternative Approaches

Columbus discovered an Old World in 1492. Steep population declines reduced Indian numbers by more than 90 percent in the following four centuries. European maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed to have carved up most of North America, but ‘Empires and enclaves’ shows that control over North American lands remained hotly contested during this time. Well into the eighteenth century, the vast majority of North American Indians had not become the subordinates of European colonizers and in most places there were no European settlements yet. The first contacts between European and Indians are described along with seventeenth-century English settlements in New England, the Spanish conquest in New Mexico, and the alternative approaches of the French.

The Puritan Notion of the Covenant in Jonathan Edwards' Doctrine of Faith

1965 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Conrad Cherry
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
And Function

The immense importance of the idea of the covenant for the Puritans of England and New England has been thrown into sharp relief by recent Puritan studies. Many problems regarding the origin and function of the Puritan covenant-idea still await the careful attention of the student of Puritanism, but this much is clear: the notion of the covenant was decidedly a pervasive idea in Puritan theology, and the idea was developed in a rather elaborate scheme by a host of Puritan theologians. As Leonard J. Trinterud has discerned, the idea of the covenant so permeated the thinking of the Puritans that in “the first decades of the seventeenth century … scarcely a single important figure was not a covenant theologian” among “the Presbyterian and Independent Puritans.”1

MUSIC, MORALITY AND SYMPATHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH SERMON

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-35
Author(s):  
JONATHAN RHODES LEE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Religious Writing ◽  
Aesthetic Concepts ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

ABSTRACTWhile the furrows of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious writing on music have been deeply ploughed, eighteenth-century English sermons about music have received relatively slight scholarly attention. This article demonstrates that the ideas of sympathy and sensibility characteristic of so much eighteenth-century thought are vital to understanding these sermons. There is an evolution in this literature of the notion of sympathy and its link to musical morality, a development in the attitude towards music among clergy, with this art of sympathetic vibrations receiving ever higher approbation during the century's middle decades. By the time that Adam Smith was articulating his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Handel's oratorios stood as a fixture of English musical life, religious thinkers had cast off old concerns about music's sensuality. They came to embrace a philosophy that accepted music as moral simply because it made humankind feel, and in turn accepted feeling as the root of all sociable experience. This understanding places the music sermon of the eighteenth century within the context of some of the most discussed philosophical, social, literary, musical and moral-aesthetic concepts of the time.

The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Radical Republicanism

This edition of all of Catharine Macaulay’s known correspondence includes an introduction to the life, works, and influence of this celebrated, eighteenth-century, republican historian. Through her letters and those of her correspondents it offers a unique glimpse of the connections between radical republicanism and dissent in London, and throws light on the origins of parliamentary reform in Great Britain. Macaulay’s correspondents include many individuals who were active in the lead-up to the American and French Revolutions, others who became involved in the antislavery movement, and yet others who were central to the development of feminism. These letters demonstrate how Macaulay’s history of the seventeenth-century republican period in Great Britain, which she published between 1763 and 1783, encouraged her readers to represent themselves as the heirs of those earlier struggles and to lavish praise on the author as an important defender of their liberties and of the universal rights of mankind. It shows Macaulay and her friends to have been inspired by positive notions of liberty and by ideals of democratic republicanism, thought of as systems of equal government committed to universal benevolence, in which the common good would become the common care.

Inward Baptism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baird Tipson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Evangelical Christian ◽  
New Birth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
George Whitefield

Inward Baptism describes theological developments leading up to the great evangelical revivals in the mid-eighteenth century. It argues that Martin Luther’s insistence that a participant’s faith was essential to a sacrament’s efficacy would inevitably lead to the insistence on an immediate, perceptible communication from the Holy Spirit, which evangelicals continue to call the “new birth.” A description of “conversion” through the sacrament of penance in late-medieval Western Christianity leads to an exploration of Luther’s critique of that system, to the willingness of Reformed theologians to follow Luther’s logic, to an emphasis on “inward” rather than “outward” baptism, to William Perkins’s development of a conscience religion, to late-seventeenth-century efforts to understand religion chiefly as morality, and finally to the theological rationale for the new birth from George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards. If the average Christian around the year 1500 encountered God primarily through sacraments presided over by priests, an evangelical Christian around 1750 received God directly into his or her heart without the need for clerical mediation, and he or she would be conscious of God’s presence there.

Sir John Davies on Custom and the Common Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-458
Author(s):  
Eugene Heath
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Social Benefit ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

AbstractSeventeenth-century English common lawyer Sir John Davies sets forth, in his Irish Reports, a provocative and interesting argument on the nature of custom and its relation to the common law. This relatively unexplored argument shows how actions may emerge from conditions of liberty and slowly acquire qualities of social benefit and agreeability that are essential if the common law is to be identified with custom. Davies not only provides a coherent account of how custom might possess some reasonability, but he also seems to suggest that custom is unintended, thereby anticipating a theme found in eighteenth-century thinkers such as Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, and Burke. In addition, Davies's account has important implications for political theory: the priority of the social over the political and a notion of political consent that arises via custom itself.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document