My Book Review Featured in Academic Journal

I'm finishing up a fairly busy week here in the Northern Plains.  The weather was great this week, but some cooler weather is on the way. 

Today, I got word that the latest edition of American Theological Inquiry has published.  This particular journal is readily available online, as well as in print.  As such, it is what scholars refer to as an open-access journal.  It is still peer-reviewed, however.  American Theological Inquiry includes articles and book reviews of a theological, cultural, and historical nature from Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian traditions.  It does not publish material from those who fall outside the realm of general orthodoxy.

I have not gotten a chance to read the articles included in this edition of the journal, but it does include a book review that I submitted on Douglas Sweeney's Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word.  The link above should allow access to this site, which includes all of the articles and book reviews. 

What I'm Reading--Errand into the Wilderness

My current class on the British Empire requires a series of book reviews and a historiographical paper on some aspect of the British Empire from the 15th century to about 1800.  In an attempt to tie this assignment to my interests, I am reading and writing on the Puritans.  The Puritans, although mostly recognized in their American context, had English origins.  Therefore, the group relates to the mother country and the colonies.  The first book that I chose to review is Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness, first published in 1956.  Here is my preliminary review of the book:

Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University

Press, 1956.

One of the most studied and perhaps most misunderstood groups in American religious history are the Puritans.  The history of the Puritans (defined broadly) reaches back into sixteenth-century England, and the persecution of this group led large numbers to emigrate to the New World beginning in the 1630s.  Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness, first published in 1956, is not a traditional historical monograph, but rather a collection of essays that “add up to a rank of spotlights on the massive narrative of the movement of European culture into the vacant wilderness of America.”[1]  While twenty-first century historians would question the characterization of America as a vacant wilderness, Miller used the understanding that the earliest European immigrants to North America would have had.  They considered land that no one owned personally as empty. 

These essays appeared in various formats during the 1930s to 1950s, a tumultuous period in American history bookended by the Great Depression and the early Cold War, with World War II taking up the middle of the period.  Miller was primarily an intellectual historian.  Some have argued that his work attempted to counter a reductionist view that relied on a strictly economic determinist understanding of the world, such as that championed by Charles Beard.  Although Miller was an atheist, it is evident that he attempted to understand the Puritans on their own terms by arguing that their worldview impacted the way activities that they behaved.  In speaking of his method, Miller wrote:

The beginning I sought was inevitably—being located in the seventeenth century—theological.  This was not a fact of my choosing: had the origin been purely economic or imperial, I should have been no less committed to reporting. Since the first articulate body of expression upon which I could get a leverage happened to be a body of Protestant doctrine, I set myself to explore that doctrine in its own terms.

This stance brought him not only into conflict with those who followed Beard, but also those who had an interest in the historical understanding of Sigmund Freud.[2]    

            Errand into the Wilderness took its name from an election sermon preached by Samuel Danforth in 1670.  The title refers not only to the book, but also the first essay, which Miller insisted has no connection to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis.[3]  As a collection of essays written over a relatively long period of time, the book as a whole did not have a central defining thesis as would a traditional historical monograph.  The essays do have the common thread of intellectual history, which Miller attempted to tie through New England from the earliest Puritan settlers to the Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century by utilizing a variety of primary sources appropriate to his study, such as colonial records, sermons, and theological works.

            The title essay emphasized the idea of the word “errand,” which in the Puritan era had two meanings—a journey of which a superior sends an inferior to take care of some business, or “the actual business on which the actor goes, the purpose itself, the conscious intention in his mind.”  Miller argued that the Puritan settlers came on an errand of the second type, “on [their] own business.”  They came to set up the perfect Christian commonwealth, the proverbial city on a hill that would show Europeans what such a community looked like.  The decline of morality and fights against Indians such as King Philip’s War caused the Massachusetts Puritans to question their standing.  They viewed themselves as a “sink of iniquity” that had failed in the first meaning of the errand and were left with the second.[4]

            One important theme that Miller frequently emphasized in the essays dealing with the Puritans and their immediate descendants like Jonathan Edwards was the lack of a democratic impulse in New England Puritan society.  In “Errand into the Wilderness” one of the big complaints in ministerial jeremiads were the “insubordination of inferiors toward superiors, particularly of those inferiors who had, unaccountably, acquired more wealth than their betters, and, astonishingly, a shocking extravagance in attire, especially on the part of the meaner sort, who persisted in dressing beyond their means.” In the essay “Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut,” the author argued that a desire for greater democracy was not really the reason for the emigration of Hooker and his cohort to the Connecticut Valley.  Rather, a lack of land was the main reason.  The later correspondence of Hooker and John Winthrop indicates a nearly complete agreement on all matters of doctrine and practice between the two.  Winthrop is not exactly remembered as a great democrat.  Hooker even sat on a Synod with John Cotton that denounced Presbyterianism.  Miller argued that even the Fundamental Orders generally resembled a church covenant that would be common in Massachusetts.  Furthermore, he emphasized the Puritan fusing of church and state by the idea of “a uniform church supported by civil society,” which differs greatly from current American ideology. [5]

            In looking at early American history, it is generally argued that the Jamestown colony was an economic endeavor.  While this is to some degree an accurate statement, Miller was able to show through examples of recruitment literature that a major impetus of colonization was evangelism.  Commerce and evangelism were not were not necessarily mutually exclusive to the seventeenth century English mind.  Miller took the literature to mean what it said and argued that it “exhibited a set of principles for guiding…a medieval pilgrimage.”[6]  While the Anglican Church controlled Virginia, the rhetoric of this colony largely mirrored that of its more puritanical neighbor to the north. 

            Miller dedicated much of this work to the thought of Jonathan Edwards.  Errand into the Wilderness disagreed with some common understandings of Edwards in arguing that he was actually somewhat of a radical.  In one way he was traditionalist in turning from Puritan covenant theology to an older Calvinistic view that emphasized God’s infinite transcendence against a view in which God promised to act in a sort of quid pro quo covenant.  In the Great Awakening, however, Miller argued that Edwards and his fellow revivalists differed from his forbears in arguing for a government based upon its utility to the community, rather than on absolutism.  While these arguments were plausible as presented, Miller made a bit of a stretch in postulating that in some ways Edwards’ thought was an intellectual step toward the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  While Emerson viewed Nature in pantheistic terms, Edwards viewed nature as merely revealing God to the world.  The wilderness, nonetheless figured in the thought of both men.

            The final essay on “The End of the World” was curious, not because of Miller’s analysis, but because of the questions that theologians had.  The theologians attempted to reconcile Newtonian physics and eschatological doctrine.  This was interesting, because theologians, including Edwards, believed in an all-powerful God.  The very idea of omnipotence should have precluded concern over the breaking of the laws of motion required for a final judgment.  The author pointed out that something very similar to the explosion that these divines expected occurred in August 1945 with the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. “Not for this was the errand run into a wilderness, and not for this will it be run. Catastrophe…is not enough.”[7]

           

---

[1]Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956), vii.

[2] Murray G. Murphey, “Perry Miller and American Studies,” American Studies 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 5-18; Miller, ix.

[3] Miller, 1-2.  

[4] Miller, 3, 5-6, 15.

[5] Miller, 8, 29, 148.

[6] Miller, 101.

[7] Miller, 239.

270 Years Ago Today

On July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached what is probably the most famous sermon in American history.  Edwards preached his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" not at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts, but rather as he visited Enfield, Connecticut.  Generations have studied the text of this sermon, and many are now appalled, or at least disturbed, at its very descriptive imagery (although I would not include myself in that number).  Edwards based his entire sermon on a short passage from Deuteronomy 32, "Their feet shall slide in due time."

Regardless of a person's theological bent, it is hard to argue against the significance of the sermon. First, it was the occasion of a great revival during the Great Awakening, one of the first truly "national" movements.  There are accounts of people moaning as Edwards preached, holding on to whatever they could find to keep from falling into Hell at that very moment, and asking what they must do to be saved.  Secondly, the sermon is a good example of New England Puritan orthodoxy.  Edwards was a staunch Calvinist, and Reformed belief is quite evident in the sermon.  However, while the sermon is meant as a warning to wayward sinners, it does indicate that there is hope for the sinner in Christ.

It is somewhat ironic that the greatest theologian and the greatest sermon in American history burst onto the scene before America even existed as a separate nation.  Regardless, 270 years ago, Jonathan Edwards, that theologian preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," that sermon.  It is likely that students of American religion and the Puritans will continue to read and study Edwards and his famous sermon for many years to come.  You can, as well, at the link to Yale University's Jonathan Edwards site.

Church Music in the Eighteenth Century

To many Christians today, one of the more controversial topics of discussion can be what type of music gets sung in church on Sunday.  Some act like this is a new controversy that just began in the last thirty to forty years with the advent of "Christian Rock".  However, this is definitely not the case.  The type of music sung in church has been a controversial subject for at least the last 300 years.  This may seem confusing to some readers because they think only hymns were in existence at this early date.  Actually, the controversy involved hymns.

In the last few years, I have read two scholarly biographies on Jonathan Edwards, who is far from being considered one of the most liberal theologians in American history.  In both of these biographies, one by George M. Marsden, titled Jonathan Edwards: A Life, and another that I recently reviewed on this page titled Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word, written by Douglas A. Sweeney (http://americanchurchhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-im-reading-jonathan-edwards-and.html), a topic that both writers discussed was the relationship of music to the church.

Most Puritans in Edwards' day believed that parishioners should only sing Psalms in church.  These very conservative Puritans considered the singing of any music other than Psalms (yes, they would announce the 23rd Psalm as the day's selection) a very controversial and almost scandalous act.  Edwards received quite the reputation among many old-line ministers for singing Isaac Watts hymns in church.  For those who may be unfamiliar with the name of Isaac Watts, Watts was a hymn writer who wrote and published such hymns as "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" and "Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed" (without the 'At the cross, At the cross, where I first saw the light...' refrain, which was added nearly 200 years later).  Few Christians of any denomination would have a problem singing these songs in church today, but in the eighteenth century, they were considered inappropriate for worship.  The focus of the service, even the music focused on the Word, hence the singing of Psalms. 

I personally find this a very interesting topic.  I know of some Christians who believe that only hymns should be sung in church, but very few who want to sing the Psalms.  I also know of many who sing songs that are more contemporary.  This evidence from the 1700s almost makes one wonder what songs people will argue about in another 300 years if Jesus hasn't returned by that point.

What I'm Reading--Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word

I recently finished reading (again) a short work on the Northampton minister of Great Awakening fame, Jonathan Edwards.  Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word is a good introductory biography of this famous minister.  In writing it, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professor Douglas A. Sweeney attempted to provide an accessible biography that focused upon the importance of the Bible in the life of Edwards.  In general, he succeeded on both accounts.

Sweeney's work definitely emphasizes the importance of the written word, in general, and the Bible, in particular, on Puritan life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The author began this work with a background of New England society and how it differs from our modern twenty-first century world.  Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word generally followed a narrative structure and traced the important events in the life of Edwards from his birth to his death.  The Congregational divine has often been called the greatest theologian in American history, and Sweeney focused a chapter on four works that Edwards wrote after his dismissal from his pastorate in Northampton, Massachusetts.  This chapter was a bit awkward as to its position in the book, serving as a bit of a parenthesis between the Northampton and Stockbridge chapters of Edwards' life.  Some of the theological issues dealt with in this chapter, titled "With All Thy Mind", could be somewhat tough sledding to those uninitiated to theological terminology. 

Sweeney pointed out a glaring weakness in Edwards' life--his racial understanding of the world.  The minister owned several slaves during his life, and Sweeney referred to Edwards as "something of a racist" (180) in his dealings with Indians as a cross-cultural missionary.  The author did not attempt to minimize these character flaws, but used them to point out the sinfulness of humanity. 

This work could have been slightly better with a greater explanation of the Half-way Covenant as background for the ouster of Edwards in Northampton.  It is easy to view the issue over communion as a local issue without more background information.  Rather, this controversy enveloped much of New England around the time of the Great Awakening.  Sweeney utilized published primary sources on the life of Edwards in the compilation of his text.  His work is a very good introduction to the life of Edwards, one of the more influential Christian thinkers in American history.